The Four Seasons

There's a running gag here in Korea about Korea's four distinct seasons. It's not so much that there's anything funny about the actual seasons here, but that Korean's are always so surprised to hear that other countries also have four distinct seasons. I haven't been able to figure out what's so surprising about this - whether they think it's always winter in Canada, or that maybe other countries skip spring and autumn and just hop straight from summer to winter - but I've been told many times now about the four seasons Korea has, and then been given a look of surprise when I mention that Canada also has four seasons too.

I think yesterday was the official start of fall here. The Koreans seem to go on weather more than the calendar dates when it comes to changing seasons, and right now it seems to make sense. Autumn came down like a hammer this week, dropping leaves on the trees, bringing in that crisp morning air, and over the span of 72 hours it's gone from t-shirt weather to jackets. Obviously it's not the magical weather pixies of Korea sitting in the sky saying "BAM! It's autumn today!" but I'm curious to see if there will be much of a temperature bounce back over the next few days and weeks.

My classes have all been canceled for the next two days, so there'll be lots of computer sitting and Korean studying for a while. I've instituted a new discipline measure in my class lately, the "three stars" method. It works great for well behaved classes and OK for the wild kids. Basically when they do something that's too much for me to handle, I take down a star. Lose all three stars, and it's garbage cleaning and sitting quietly time. Keep all three, and after X weeks, you get a movie day. Well, my one nasty class lost all their stars within 10 minutes. No problem, I figure, we'll just sit quietly for the last 2 minutes of class. That's it, just two minutes they have to be quiet for. Of course, they were completely incapable of it, and we spent 27 minutes together over lunch while I waited for them to calm down. There's not much else I can do to them in terms of discipline, but there homeroom teacher sure was able to whip them into shape for missing lunch. They're slightly better now.

The round the world trip is coming together nicely right now. I've found a great website for planning trips like this. Check out http://www.airtreks.com/index.html and look at the trip planner. Right now we're looking at a trip that goes

Calgary - London - Stockholm - Moscow or Frankfurt - Johannesburg or Nairobi-Cairo - Bombay - Kuala Lumpur - Jakarta-Bangkok - Lima - Calgary. We can't book for another few months, so it may change. Still, all this comes it at under $5000 since we're traveling during non-peak periods.

All right, I should get going. I've got nothing to do for the next 6 hours, so I think I'll try and study some Korea. Annyonghi Kaseyo (go well)!