The Little Things

It's been busy this last week, as Christmas is getting close and Shannon and I have been doing a smattering of Christmas-related task, mostly involving present-buying and mailing home. As such, this weeks blog will feature mostly a mish-mash of stories and happenings, a collection I guess of little tidbits of information that wouldn't get put into their own entry, but are still worth remembering and sharing.

To this point in time, my efforts to buy clothing have been entirely fruitless. This country seems to have a one-size-fits-Korea thing going, which is about 4 sizes too small for me, and unless I take a 5 hour trip to Seoul, I don't know where I'll ever find clothes. So, when taking a shower the other day I finally realized how odd the settings in the shower are - aiming slightly over my head, or aiming way over my head. How a 5'5" Korean would manage is beyond me.

I think I'm finally starting to become climatized to the moderately cold weather here, and I'm finding myself feeling nastily cold on days that barely reach 0 degrees. I've got my heater cranked at school, which has spawned two types of whiny kids - the early morning kids, who are cold because the heater isn't hot enough yet; and the afternoon kids, who are hot because they refuse to take off their coats.

"Teacher! My hot!" they cry.

"Take off your coat," I tell them. The only answer they've given me so far is "Teacher, no!"

Shannon's school has an even stranger heating situation. In fact, her school is just riddled with weirdness. They bring a dentist into school twice a week, which I guess it great for the kids (though it makes for a creepy Principal's Office, what with the dentist chair sitting in it), but they were finding that the dentist needs a lot of power, so on Tuesday and Thursday no one gets to use the heaters in the classroom. I suppose cold rooms is better than losing power halfway through a root canal, but it's still a funny and unfortunate situation.

Shannon was also had her cell phone stolen by a student recently. It was a pretty crappy situation, as getting a cell phone in this country is hard for us foreigners, and replacing one can be even worse. She managed to get it back, but now there's the uncomforableness of having to work with the student who stole it. They caught the girl who did it, but she's shown no remorse at all, and still asks Shannon for candy everyday.

My school has just finished construction of a new "English Village", making us the provincial hub for English instruction now. There's only three of these villages in the country, and every week 120 new kids will come into our school to learn English in "real life" situations. I don't have anything to do with it, and the only reason I'm even excited about it is the 6 new foreigners who are coming to work here. A few have arrived already, and while one of them seems he's living the world-travelling-dream he had during a 1970's acid-inspired moment of clarity, the others seem pretty cool. Hmmm, I hope the hippie dude doesn't go googling my blog anytime soon...

While I'm on the subject of it, this town (and I guess the lifestyle here) oozes with transition, as teachers are coming and going all the time. With only 50-100 people in town that you can share a language with, it means a pretty steady stream of fresh faces to get together with. Every week is a going-away and welcome-aboard party for someone, and there always seems to be another person who's been in town for a few months and will suddenly just show up out of nowhere. Some of these "hidden" people can go days, weeks, or even months before they finally find another English speaker in town, so they're first run-in with another "waygook" can be quite comical, and Shannon and I have had a few conversations with people where they seem reluctant to let us go for fear of not seeing another foreigner for quite some time.

I've almost reached the point now of being able to recite "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" from start to finish. It's the last week of school before the holidays, so I've been showing the video to all my kids, and I've watched it 8 times already this week. You know that guy wrote in anapestic tetrameter? Maybe I'll teach my kids to speak that way -

"My good Teacher, how are you it's such a nice day
to perhaps go outside for a fun soccer game.
We would like not to study our English today,
We would rather be outside so we could go play."

"Well of course my dear children, I think I'll come too,
and then I'll play on your team and maybe hers too.
But then please little children, don't gang up on me
and pull out my arm hair and bite with your teeth."

Kay, that's as poetic as I'm going to get for today. Thanks for reading, I'll be back again next week!