Intrepid Girl Reporter

A good rule of thumb for shopping in Korea is, “Did I own this in 1993?” If the answer is “yes,” which it often is, the clothes are best left in the store and on Shannon Doherty in “Mallrats.” This is apparently a rule I did  not regard once this entire year, as I discovered to my chagrin during my packing, when I pulled out item after item that was either a) consigned to a box for the after-school program or b) donated to HM. HM has never seen “Mallrats,” which is probably for the best.

Such packing is part of how I would like to account for my lengthy blog absence. I also spent a good deal of the time fielding letters from my students (to be reproduced here later) and receiving a touching and bizarre array of gifts. These included:

• a Rubik’s cube
• five different cell phone charms (a lollipop, a rabbit in a hanbok, half a fake stone heart, and two that said “Love,” once of which came from PopSongBoy#1)
• a bag of junk food from Family Mart
• a snow globe with a teddy bear wearing a crown that says “King of King”
• cross-stitched models of kids wearing traditional Korean clothing
• a $65 purse from Fila (!!!)
• a planner that says “I <3 NY,” followed by the subtitle “It’s clean, and it’s easy to find everything”
• some beautiful photos of Jeju that I think my student actually took
• perfume from a boys’ class that is borderline unwearable
• multiple packs of gum

I also, of course, spent a lot of time saying goodbye, which is something at which I’m pretty good by now, having had lots of experience. HS cried when I left. HB disappeared, so I didn’t actually say goodbye to him, but I’m scheduled to call home on Friday night, so I should be able to figure it out then. HM kept looking up words that translated to things like “among the missing” and “lost in a sea of doubts.” Perhaps I should have studied my Korean a bit harder.

Now, of course, I am home. The Program, instead of routing me through Seoul to Atlanta and Johnson City, sent me from Seoul to Narita to Detroit to Johnson City, which makes a lot more sense, obviously. I was concerned about culture shock, but fortunately for me I spent FIVE HOURS in the Detroit airport, which - although it almost gave me a seizure - accelerated my culture shock and helped me get over it pretty quickly. Like shock therapy. I forgot how fat we are in America.

Also, I would like to offer a hearty non-recommendation to Northwest Airlines, which made me yearn for the halcyon days when I spoke broken Korean to the understanding clerks at KoreanAir. I tried to ask them to help me get my backpack, which I couldn’t reach, from the overhead compartment and they told me to get the guy next to me to help. For a moment, I wondered if I had made the wrong decision in coming home.

PS. I would like to plug my favorite two stores in all of Seoul, if I may, one of which I visited on Sunday in an attempt to assuage my loneliness (no, really). A-Land does not seem to have a website, even though I know perfectly well that it must, but it’s like a discounted and expanded Anthropologie, with more recycled products and stationery. I’m no design expert, but I do enjoy a good one, and the products they carry never cease to amaze me. It’s near American Apparel in Myeongdong.

My second favorite store in Seoul is mmmg (millimeter milligram), which makes the most brilliant paper products in Korea, bar none. Bizarre usage of English has its place, of course, but mmmg’s stuff is genuinely cool, fun and innovative. I have spent a lot of money there. Their products are available in the store below the Kyobo Bookstore in Daegu, and there are several stores in Seoul as well; there’s one n Myeongdong that I can never find, and an easier one to locate next to the Anguk subway stop, on the edge of Insadong. There’s a list of locales if you can go to their website, which used to work for me and does not anymore.

Actually, what I dreamt was a lot more mundane: that I had curly hair. And that I finished a poem.

MONDAY, 31 MARCH 2008

1G - The Price is Right

• introduced clap thing to control loud classes (i.e. I clap in a pattern and they clap back - much like Summerbridge)
• did it work? or did it work for girls?
• stop same kids from answering

1A - The Price is Right

• one girl way ahead of everyone else (understood me when I said they would make me go deaf)
• did clap thing

1-3 - The Price is Right

• ril low…some didn’t even remember me
• did clap thing
• did NOT make anyone cry this week

1I - The Price is Right

• not so hot…ACT punished them, didn’t get to game
• did clap thing but then they mimicked it (uh oh)

The copy shop people at my school live in this bizarre alternate universe. Whenever I go to the shop, the door is always closed (”to keep in the heat”), so I have to knock -

This kid who is - I don’t think he’s special ed, exactly, because he’s in my class, but he’s allowed to wander at will and no one seems to question his total absence of work - anyway, he just came into the teacher’s office and tried to take the Punisher’s cell phone. When I attempted to get it back, he tried to play keepaway.

Anyway. So in the copy shop, they have a television and an armchair, and whenever I go in there I’m interrupting either a soap opera or some sort of game show, and they’re always just sort of sitting there, chilling out and smoking. Sometimes they will do whatever job you need. Other times they’ll show the teachers how to do it and go back to socializing and TV watching. There are three people who work there, and I never see them anywhere else. They might live there.

Saturday I went to see KES’ concert, and he was mortified to find that I had brought him flowers, as, it turns out, he was not actually playing in the concert, although he does live at the orphanage. Actually, orphanage isn’t exactly the right term, because a lot of these kids have families who are still alive, but for whatever reason they’re wards of the state. Which, as you might imagine, carries a much greater stigma than having parents who are dead. Anyway, there were a number of my students performing, including a few students whom I didn’t even realize were my students, but I didn’t have enough flowers to give all of them one, so I let KES keep them, even though he tried to give them back.

Apparently a lot of the kids at the Child Welfare Center (which is what the orphanage is officially called) go to my school, because the center is maybe ten minutes away. Sweater Girl lives at the orphanage. So does this kid whose English is pretty good, but who is not particularly well behaved. I think to myself that I wouldn’t have guessed - but what am I expecting, smudges of soot?

This particular center is rather well appointed, I think - I visited the babies there once with Host Sister, and the older kids were rollerblading around, and the people seemed nice and the grounds looked pretty, etc., and at the concert on Saturday they had soloists who appeared to be from the Jeju Orchestra or similar. Of course, it probably still wasn’t the kids’ first choice. Still, though, I’m starting to reconceptualize my notion of orphanages. The foster care system is so flawed in so many ways. We have this very “Little Orphan Annie” idea of these places in America, but are they so much worse than being shuttled from family to family?

Another surprise from the weekend: I had always assumed that Host Sister wasn’t a particularly good English writer, given her extreme reluctance to do so. But I proofed a report she wrote yesterday, one that included words like “attractive” and “consistent” and referenced the phrase “the clothes make the man.” I feel like I don’t even know her.

The first thing I should establish here is that I’m not going to grad school next year.

To be fair, Columbia’s rejection letter was really nice - they think my academic credentials are stellar, they encourage less than 5% of their applicants to reapply but they really want to see me again, I just need to get some more work experience, blah blah blah. And as Miguk Oma says, they certainly didn’t have to write all of that.

I found all this out yesterday morning, before I had my laptop back, i.e. sitting in the freezing living room squinting at the stupid host family computer. I was not initially fazed. I found out on Tuesday that I got an interview for the AIF fellowship, which is promising. And I’m reasonably sure that if I apply again, I not only have a good chance of getting in, but I might actually get some money to fund my poor educational dreams.

Subconsciously, however, this information started to stress me out. Basically, yesterday just sort of spun out into this sort of nunchi nightmare. Nunchi, for those of you who are not schooled in Korean culture, is the ability to sort of suss out a situation, to avoid making the sort of social miscues that Korean society abhors. I guess the news that my future is a lot less certain than I was hoping sort of dulled my nunchi, because I kept upsetting the kibun everywhere I went, including but not limited to: overextending myself at the inconvenience of other people, accidentally making Omma take me and some other teacher she knew to a really expensive eel restaurant near the Jeju Student Culture Center, accidentally sitting in the wrong seat on the bus, etc. I think the low point of my day was when I went to both E AND Lotte Marts to find some trail mix and I just couldn’t find any and I almost started crying in the store. I knew perfectly well that Korean stores do sell trail mix, but apparently none of those stores are in SinJeju, so I ended up having to buy separate trail mix components, which, for the record, are really expensive.

Despite my own discomfort, however, I want to take note of a recent source of pride: Host Sister has refused to go to hagwon anymore. Not even joking. I can’t even come up with an analogy that will make the significance of this apparent to my American readers - all I can say is that Korean students go to hagwon. They just do. To give you an idea of why, here is the Korean life plan:

1. To be happy, you need to have lived a good life.
2. To live a good life, you must be successful.
3. To be successful, you should probably have gone to a good university, preferably a SKY (Seoul, Korea, or Yonsei) school.
4. To get into a good university, you have to have done well on the admissions tests.
5. To do well on admissions tests, you should have gone to a good high school.
6. To get into a good high school, you have to have done well on the high school admissions tests.
7. To do well on the high school admissions tests, you need to study all the time.
8. To study all the time, you need to go to hagwon.

I partially credit this decision to her time in America and the fact that she saw that her life as a ninth grader does not have to be perpetually miserable. She told Host Mom that she can study just fine on her own, which is true, since she has been known to skip major family holidays in favor of studying. “Every day,” she told me, “I think about hagwon, do I go or not go. Every day.” Also in America: she got really good at SkipBo. But I played her yesterday and I still won.

Anyway, moments like this sweet SkipBo victory remind me not to feel too sorry for myself, even though maybe I will spend another whole year abroad and if I don’t who knows if I’ll get a good enough job to get me into grad school? Maybe I should see if they have hagwons in America.

HB is acting out in the way that only a sixth-grader can, standing in my room and declaring that he will “never not talk to me,” then staring in my mirror and refusing to leave. His ire is understandable in a sense; he’s mad because I’m spending time with HS that HS never had before. On the other hand, I offered earlier to play with him and he said he wanted to wait until after I was done with HS, and now we’re out of time. What he’s also been doing is waiting until it is obviously inconvenient to play (ex. HS says she’ll be ready in five minutes, HB wants to take that time) and then getting angry when I can’t do it. I suspect that Oma and Apa have already talked to him about not being jealous, so he’s drawing attention to his concerns in the only way he knows how - making it look like I’m not paying attention to him. Also, by making fun of my Korean, which he has never done before. Understanding is exhausting sometimes.

In the meantime, I’m writing my CV, and at this point I’m starting to wonder if I can include things like “crochet” under my skills category.

So I downloaded The Snowman, which is only THE BEST CHRISTMAS MOVIE OF ALL TIME*, for use in my classroom, during these last two useless weeks after exams. Playing it, I noticed that this version featured a live action introduction with a narrator who looked oddly familiar. Google reveals that this mysterious fellow is, in fact, DAVID FUCKING BOWIE. Perhaps more importantly, his presence does not improve the movie at all, aside from the fact that you get to see David Bowie.

Moral of the story: The Snowman > David Bowie > the rest of us

I’ve had the past three days off, effectively creating a five-day weekend, which was nice to say the least. “Nice” might not even be the best word for Saturday, where Aewol’s co-teacher’s boyfriend proceeded, at noraebang, to rap along with popular artist G-Dragon, as well as 2Pac. Also, his name was Steve Son. As in, “My name is Steve, son.”

Of course, five free days without drama is an impossibility for the Jeju Crew and for my host family too, I think. We can’t help it, really; being thrown into this immediate closeness, spending so much time together, it’s almost inevitable that we’re going to make mistakes sometimes. When you finally start to know people, it’s so much easier for you to hurt each other. I got in a massive fight with HB; I got into another fight, not as large but just as difficult, with Scooter. I didn’t want either of them to happen. But these things, they feel like fires: you can avoid them, yes, but the brush collects and blazes later. And I’d much rather burn them out now.

But later HB told me that he likes me, although he doesn’t love me, which someone told me means that he does, really. And Scooter and I went suit shopping on Tuesday and had just a good friend day - we ate pizza, and Christmas shopped, and made fun of the guy at Zini’s (who is now - if you are interested - featured on the poster outside the cafe. He is reading earnestly), and split a chestnut 빙수 (sundae). Then today I had lunch with Oregon and Transy, and went to the five day market with HM, and she told me to sleep in the car as the Weepies played in the background. Then we went out for 갈비 and 냉면 to celebrate HS’s finish with finals, and I know it’s such a tired theme, how lucky I am. What should I compare this to, my favorite pair of shoes?

Speaking of shoes: I went into Athlete’s Foot this morning to try to get a pair - I currently have NO shoes that protect me from the rain - and I asked the guy if he had my size in these shoes, and he was like, “Yes.” Silence. After an uncomfortable pause, one that went on far too long, I was like, “…Can I try them on?” Then he seemed to take it as a personal affront when they were too big. As it turns out, they’re for men. Who knew? (Not Korea. Take that, gender stereotypes!)

Now I have a personal statement to finish - I have, rather suddenly, decided to apply to what the Koreans call 대학윈 now that TFANY is out of the picture. I’m applying to Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), which is quite a long shot, but it’s also the only program I’m pretty sure I’d attend sight unseen. I don’t know if I’ll get in this year or not - if I don’t, I’ll just apply next year, although getting in this year would be pretty much unbelievable. It’s so terrifying to think that This Is What You’re Going To Do With Your Life, but as Miguk Oma (in her infinite wisdom) pointed out, one has to make some sort of choice at some point. And as the life of Miguk Apa has proven, you don’t have to stick with it.

In two weeks I’ll be home. But the days here feel so bright sometimes.

Finally, someone found my blog by searching for “burnt toast poem,” and I feel obliged to provide.

Eating burnt toast or kimchi -

The decision seems easy to me.

Beautiful it is not,

But toast don’t smell like rot.

I sure hope that this breakfast is free.

I’ll be here all week, kids.

Today IGR Recommends: The Snowman, and concurrently, bittorrenting. I cannot actually share a copy due to filesize, but I can direct you to Azureus, and from there recommend that you Google “the snowman” + torrent. And realize just what has been missing in your life all these years.

*I do not make such statements lightly.

1L (boys) - fun vs. funny

• I mean they just keep getting better and better
  • except for that kid with the X-Acto knife
• got to board races and everything
• also taught Tall Jeong difference between fun and funny (who knew?)

2F (girls) - movie reviews intro

• reasonably smart but really, really annoying
  • STOP SCREAMING
• I think girl in back is maybe class scapegoat? watch
• good participation/less hostility from 80s Ricki Lake (is girl who sits next to her class captain?)
• WotD: “cinema”

When I was in high school, one of my favorite books to not buy at Barnes&Noble was this name book, which I found to be terribly fascinating and hip with its snide commentary on naming connotations. Admittedly, it’s a little forced and dated now, but I still find myself wishing I had a copy now that I’ve been charged with helping HS rename herself.

IGR: You have an email, right? So when you make friends in America, you can give them your email address and keep in touch when you leave.

HS: I want an American name.

IGR: Oh.

I’m never entirely sure if HS is losing a little bit of nuance in her translations or if she’s just really blunt.

As an ESL teacher, as an American, and as a person, I’ve found the politics of naming to be more than a little dangerous. The problem with renaming people according to one’s own culture is that one risks charges (and cases) of cultural imperialism, especially when the person in question comes from (ahem) the most dominant country in the world. The unspoken corollary is that Your Korean Name is Not Okay, But This American One Is. It’s kind of a problem, especially because America - while its politics are not hugely popular - remains this sort of glamorized dreamland. Even among my savviest kids, there’s no sense of any “Well, I’d really rather go to Sydney or London because it’s a little more diverse and less explored, you know, a little more fashionable” sentiment. I’ve taken an informal straw poll of a lot of them, and when I ask them if they want to go to America they look at me like I’ve asked them if they like breathing.

And, as always, personal - and hardly rational - experiences shape my own views on the subject. I posted about this on the blog I’m not allowed to connect to here, the one that makes my name and identity really obvious, but my own history makes it difficult for me to look objectively at the subject. Since childhood, I’ve been obsessed with names, their sounds and connotations; they’re the only thing I really collect, and I have a running list of my favorites (all of which have earned their place for widely varying reasons). My family doesn’t even really have a name; my father’s original family name (another convoluted story, for another post) was lost when his first stepfather adopted him and his siblings, and as a result the name I carry has no real resonance. I sort of picked it up by accident, it seems. But to lose it - and its Caucasian identity - in favor of something more closely tied to my own ethnic heritage would be, in a way, to distance myself from my Caucasian mother, to tell her that her culture is not good enough for me.  Is it any wonder that I have the urge to name my child something ludicrous, just because I can?

So HS is convinced that her name is too hard for Americans (it’s not really, although it’s not easy). Ergo, I find myself browsing these baby name sites, all of which are laden with popups and unimpressive design. Even the promisingly named urbanbaby.com has nothing real to offer me - no insight on the added layers that come with all names, no suggestions on whether Jane is plain or chic. I just want to make sure that she doesn’t, like a girl I knew at Orientation, rename herself Eddie. And to fight that temptation - the temptation to tell her that yes, all the girls in America are named Hortense. I’d just show her the Top 20 Names List from the US Census, but I can’t let her name herself Makayla or Nevaeh. America. I’m ashamed.

IGR: When you go to America, we will have a party for you, too.

HB: Yes. All of America.

IGR: All of America will have a party?

HB: Yes.

IGR: Like a holiday?

HB: Yes. When I come, it will be a national day.

1G (boys) - fun vs. funny

• had to cut some material to keep their interest
• probably best behaved ever but still kind of noisy
  • good behavior probably due to the presence of Scooter in the back of the room after I had told him how horrifying my students can be
    • way to make me look bad, kids
• WotD: “hilarious”/quiz: “What holiday was last week?”
• no worksheets - printer issues

1H (boys) - fun vs. funny

• tolerable
• same work as 1G
• no worksheets

1F (girls) - fun vs. funny

• surprisingly bad (My Best Student told Visiting Co-Teacher that they had been rough all day)
• didn’t get to scared vs. scary but did hand out worksheets for the first time
• TBB did some work again, which was good

1E (girls) - fun vs. funny

• okay
• got to scared vs. scary but not to board races

2D (girls) - movie reviews intro

• probably the best I’ve seen them in a while
• lots of mid-level girls in low-level class (like that girl with the angular face in the back)
• dialogue with Short Jeong went surprisingly well; he is unexpectedly expressive and the girls ate it up

Today I got up early to go see Scooter’s advanced morning class at his school; his boys were adorable, even though they had no desire to talk about the given topic, only about me. Which was fine, as they were much nicer to me than my own students tend to be. Both at his school and at mine, of course, I had to go through the “NOT my son, NOT my boyfriend, like my brother” spiel, which they seemed to accept (which was good, because I wasn’t inclined to share any further information). How they would ever get the idea that we were parents of each other is completely beyond me. As he left, one of my students came up to me and told me to tell my father that he was very handsome.

The most exciting news about today, however, is that Host Sister is FOR SURE coming to America - she passed her visa interview. !!!!!

Today, IGR Recommends: getting your visa.

A series of stories.

A

Halloween

I didn’t intend to see a horror movie simply because it was close to Halloween. Things just worked out that way. It was my sweet, gentle Oma who chose the movie (more on Oma’s likes and dislikes in a minute). It was entirely in Korean, of course, but you know the old adage: sadistic torture knows no language. There was something about an ugly necklace, some sort of supernatural hand that appeared periodically, and some women in court clothes who kept pulling all sorts of medieval/Guantanamo-style treatments on each other (or maybe just on one woman. I don’t really know). I fell asleep for part of it. Oma kept her hands over her face the entire time. Fun night!

Saturday Albuquerque had organized this festival for some little kids at a program at this church that one of her students attended, and most of us had signed on to help, so I found myself hauling thirty small prizes* and a 24-pack of toilet paper across the island.  Oma and Apa were headed to Seogwipo anyway to help with a wedding the next day, so I caught a ride and ate lunch with them and the wedding party, where I received a gift bag containing detergent and brown sugar. I met up with my friends and headed over to the festival site, where we were confronted with an immediate problem: Scooter, in a rare burst of enthusiasm, had invited some of his students, all of whom were at least five years older than our target audience. So we had to make some activities up, most of which consisted of us encouraging them to tell the goriest ghost stories possible (in English, natch). For the little kids, there were mask making, face painting (with poster paint and WATERCOLORS - thanks for not having party supplies, Korea), and various relay race activities. Then we all ate fried chicken and were very happy. Except that, during the haunted house, some of the students spat in Scooter’s face. Oops.

Somehow Hallim (or G) and I ended up back in Jeju-si, running through e-Mart at 9:00 on a frantic search for tofu and bananas and other barbecue supplies, in large part because I am pathologically unable to let anyone do anything for me. After some help from a kindly Anglophone meat clerk (who nonetheless alerted the entire first floor that there were two eccentric foreigners floundering through the groceries), we made it back to my apartment, where we dressed to represent the fair state of Kentucky (I was a cigarette, she was barefoot and pregnant). In retrospect, I should have donned a fat suit and a Philip Morris nametag so I could have been Big Tobacco, but there’s always next year.

We made it out to the pension in Hamdok Beach around 10:00. Here’s where things get - and will stay, for your purposes - a bit blurry. There was fun, and there were adventures; we ate grilled chocolate-stuffed bananas, made friends with a Korean family, watched Africa cook chicken adobo (as Scooter said, “After eating this, I’m gonna wife her”). Oregon had brought a college friend whose name was - and I am not making this up - Ricky Martin. And then there was a campfire, and grass seeds that stuck to our clothes, and an accidental but somehow inevitable discussion with a certain person in my life, one fueled by throwaway comments and cheap Hite beer and weeks and weeks of the unspoken. It happens. We’ll be stronger after this, but it’s going to take a while. To imagine that here I would learn how to depend on others, and at the same time so well how to be alone…well. I didn’t. But now I can, and I count my happiness and my sadness on each hand, and I keep the transcripts to myself.

The next day I woke up on the floor next to Hallim, still wearing a cigarette costume (having forgotten to bring pajamas), still with pampas grass in my hair, and we headed home.

B

feats of strength

If you have never been to a Korean wedding, let me just say this: Imagine the part in the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” where the synthesizer kicks in. Now, instead of recollecting that as music, try to picture that as flashing plastic chandeliers. Add a fog machine. Welcome to the wedding hall.

After we arrived, HS and HB in tow (they had to wake us up, as we’d fallen asleep on the bus), we were immediately escorted to the nook where the bride waited, where we - not my family, just Hallim and me - had our picture taken with her. On the bride’s camera, not ours. Then we were escorted back to our seats, where I was immediately summoned by some of Apa’s many ajushi cousins to sit with them; despite the fact that none of them spoke English, they all managed to ask me to call them “opa” (older brother; yeah okay). They called me by my host fam’s last name, which was cute, and they kept speaking to me in rapid Korean, which was not. Then we saw the wedding, which involved, in addition to the aforementioned elements, bubbles that shot out at random intervals, a troupe of toddlers dressed like Cupid who performed an interpretive dance, and a push-up demonstration by the groom, who was cheered on by an announcer and his bride. I should mention at this point that none of this appeared to have been rehearsed. At all. Then it was picture time; first the bride and the groom were photographed, and then the bride and the groom and their families, and then the bride and the groom and their mothers, and then the bride and the groom and their friends, and then the bride and the groom and everyone on one half of the room. Hallim and I fell into the last category. We were shoved to the front of the wedding pictures. I felt a little like a trophy wife. Trophy foreigner?

That’s all for today. More tomorrow. There is more, of course. In the meantime, I’m going to take a bath, revel in my newly purchased Time magazines, and try to forget the fact that I have mosquito bites on my hands.

I don’t know if there are words in English to describe how badly I want candy corn right now. Korea isn’t much for candy eating - they do, but for dessert here I mostly eat yogurt and fruit, which is fine, except for the times when I am craving the sweet salty caramelly sugary chewy crunchiness of candy corn OMGZ. I had one piece - at the conference, one of the girls had some that her mom sent her - and I almost died.

Speaking of food, I’m going to revive the food blog now that I’ve got a steady computer setup. But every day I’ve gotten home at eleven, which is why tonight I am hanging out with HM and HS, except that I have to take a nap because we’re going to the movies and otherwise I’ll fall asleep. I am the biggest loser.

ETA: In an earlier post I mentioned that I didn’t like my student body president because I saw him making fun of the special ed kids. Actually, it turns out that he IS special ed. WHERE AM I?

Oma killed the last of the pesto today - she made almost exactly what I had made, fettuccine with chicken. Granted, it was for breakfast, but it was still very sweet. I was going to offer to cook dinner tonight, but maybe one American meal per day is enough.

I was supposed to go to the Jeju United game today with Soccer - note: I have realized that by calling my friends by their initials, there is bound to be some overlap, so I am giving them nicknames - because her dad works for the team, and it would have been fun; today is a good day to watch 축구. But it’s also a good day to go to some sort of flower festival with my family. I am a festival whore. I haven’t seen them much this weekend, so.

The past few days have been good. Friday I went with the first (seventh) graders at my school to a picnic, which turned out to be a Super Field Trip; we started at the set of this historical TV drama, which they had left up after they were done filming, I guess, and then we went to the 핸여 (Woman Diver) museum, and then to this volcanic beach. I’ve managed to befriend this bully girl - Teddy Bear Barrette - simply by remembering her name, so she kept running up to me and screaming “TEACHER! NAME?” and, when I told her what her name was, giving me a high five and grinning triumphantly at her minions. At the Woman Diver museum, the boys of 1J all bought these toys that looked sort of like inflatable swords with the heads of women divers at the end, and they chased each other around and beat on one another. Then I stole one from one of them and did the same thing. GOD I love 1J.

Friday afternoon Scooter (formerly D) and I went shopping, where we found a sleeveless denim vest that, much to my chagrin, he did not buy. Then Friday night I took HB and HS and Oma over to Soccer’s apartment, where most of the Crew had gathered with their respective host siblings, and we played Apples to Apples while my Oma and Soccer’s Oma had coffee. C (whom I’m going to start calling Africa from now on)’s host brother, who was in third grade, told me that I looked so old that my head should be in a museum. Saturday morning I met Soccer and Curfew (formerly known as E) for shopping (again), where I bought THE BEST COAT EVER.* It is a trench coat and it is silver.** Africa met us for a little bit, and then Soccer and Quagmire and I headed out to Seogwipo for the cast party of the play we all did for the English Festival, and we all sat around my friend Albuquerque’s apartment and drank and talked about the world. And now the weather is beautiful.

My former roommate also sent me this link, which expresses my position in the Land of the Morning Calm perfectly:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/lists/27StuartZehner.html

*In Korea, I have become more cognizant of many of my interests and enthusiasms. See Appendix B.

**This is the most Korean coat in the world. Yes, Miguk Oma, I realize that it breaks the “if it’s shiny, you can’t teach in it” rule, but guess what: I’m not in America anymore.

APPENDIX A

New Pseudonyms, with their old identities

N: Soccer

E: Curfew

D: Scooter

C: Africa

L: Albuquerque

Quagmire: Quagmire

APPENDIX B

Things for which I could safely call myself an “enthusiast”

Lanterns

Yogurt-based foods

Coats

Festivals

Street food

PS: I saw this on AllMusic’s front page the other day and I remembered high school and the whole thing made me laugh.