Ach! Germs!

There's plenty of cultural differences you hear about in Korea that never really seem real until you go through them. The difference in perception of germs and contagious diseases was something I've heard about, and I've seen people take minimal care to avoid coughing or sneezing on others, but last week was the first time I really had something unexpected happen to me.

My grade 3 class came in, and their teacher was looking rather ill. In fact, she looked extremely ill, and I was surprised she had even come to school. I asked if she was OK, and she gave a hoarse response that she was, and we talked for a moment longer at which point she began coughing all over me. I was so surprised, I did a big learing slide backward and gave her a wide-eyed "what the heck are you doing lady?" look. She hardly seemed to notice anything was wrong other than our conversation had ended, and turned away from me casually, still coughing.

So now I'm sick, and I'm convinced it's her fault. I'm going to have to ask a few Koreans to get their thoughts on communicable diseases and whether they feel something like my experience is not a good way for people to stay healthy.

In other news, I've taken on the position of person most likely to have their bike stolen in Korea, if not the world. I write this only because, after having three bicycles stolen from me in the past 12 months, all of them locked up, I see no reason why a 4th or 5th won't also take place - unless of course I stop buying new bicycles. Two were taken from my school when left over-night (both locked and slightly hidden from view) and one was taken from outside my apartment building, locked again but it a less than desireable spot due to a flat tire and a big hill in front of me. Add this to the very expensive bike I had stolen from me while in Calgary (that one was not locked up and was just me being careless), and I'm starting to think that bicycles and I were just not meant to be together.

This is a big "ranting" day it seems, cause my last topic of discussion is also to complain, though like everything it's all in good humour and never actually upsetting (well, stolen bikes and the loss of money is kind of upsetting). So last week I wrote about the disorganization of the voice recording Shannon and I were doing. Well, here we were, a week later, the day it needed to be sent in, and word finally trickled down that we needed to do the entire project over again. As far as I can tell it was a culmination of a lazy recording technician who couldn't be bothered to sort out what English was correctly recorded and what was incorrect, as well as no one telling Shannon or I what we should be reading and what we should be leaving out. And so, we read the whole book again from start to finish, recording it in a single shot. The guy played the necessary music in between chapters, we couldn't cough or talk between sections, it was ridiculous. There were a few mistakes we made which he seemed the tech guy seemed to think he could patch up, but otherwise it was the most ludicrous recording session you could have done.

To make things go more smoothly, we had to drop all the grammatical changes we made to the book. See, this textbook we were reading was full of errors and just strange sentence formations, which we had edited to sound more appropriate. But we didn't have the edited copy, and fixing it on the fly meant lots of mistakes. So instead, we just read silly paragraphs like:

"Shinan is a place of many bridges. The bridges connect the islands to the islands. Especially Jeungdo is the beautiful island. Photographers may like to come here and take nude photos."

I am a little embarrassed at having my name attached to the project. Oh, and I had this goofy cold that was given to me as well, so I sound sick for the text book too. Oh geez, it's too funny.

Anyway, thanks for sticking around through my fun complaining session. I'm off to Jeju, the hawaii of Korea, this weekend for some ultimate. Lots of pics and fun stories to tell I'm sure, so take care until then!