Timing

Day 36

Hangul Lesson 2. Double consonants.
When did I mail a letter? I mailed a letter sometime. When will it
get there? Too soon? Late late? Time. Time and timing. Good Grief.

Day 37

Will this week never END!?!?!
I find it hilariously irritating that I am learning today, day two of Parent Day presentations, that I am the only teacher who will actually be TEACHING for every Parent Day.

Day 38

8:20 am, I promptly walk up to the hagwon. Today is "Workshop Day". Actually, it's Teacher Field-trip Day. We load the bus and begin the 2 hour drive.
We reach Hwawangsan and my gaze floats over 4 large coach buses. And the four coach-bus sized crowds. Persimmon sellers, onion stores...the area is known for the sweetness of these things.
Hike. A HIKE I say! Ropes, trembling muscles, rosy cheeks and all. The end is near.
Breath is coming fast but all is forgotten at the sight of fields of silver eulalias.


We spend time walking among the grasses and waiting for our colleagues. Finally together, we select a mat among the grasses and sit down to trays of food. The October sun is shining, but breezes keep us cool. Rice wine and water, odeng, the bus driver's wife has prepared side dishes for all, and there are food carts atop the mountain with an ajuma who serves us hot pa-jun and odeng.

An alternate route to the bottom consists of stairs and stairs. Rocks and stairs and rocks, ending in an adult-sized playground. Mrs. Lee races to beat us to the playground and instructs us through "today's course" as we reach the bottom. Monkey bar races, a wall climb, a battering-ram-like swing.

Finally back at the bus, we sit in the parking lot and play BINGO. It is an exercise in numbers. It is practice for next Friday's "Market Play". I lose my W1,000, but the excitement of parking lot BINGO is worth it.

We pile back into the bus and are taken into the streets of Daegu. We twist and turn through the city to end up in the center of a traditional market. It is enormous. I would love to get lost here for a day. However, we are under time constraints and, I discover, on a mission. Next Friday the hagwon will transform into a market. We are buying items to sell with "Prime Dollars" at "Market Play". Two hours later, we are at dinner, pleasantly exhausted and ready to go home.

Day 39

Sleeping sleeping sooooo tired. Why? Yesterday's activities, I assume. Putter, putter, clean. 5 pm rolls around and I catch a taxi downtown. I meet a friend and we go to Gumi for dinner and a visit to a foreigner bar. Thus far, I've been silently, but staunchly opposed. I'm cracking a little. We have dinner, which consists of more wheat than I've had in the past month and a half. After dinner, we stick around for drinks.
Korean drinking game.
Luckily I don't lose. Loser buys a pitcher. The game consists of standing around a tree-stump and pounding nails into it with the wrong side of the hammer. Each person gets one try per turn, women get two. I am the second out.
Nore-bang. I have done Karaoke twice in my life. I hate it. This is a little different. A little. It is after 3am, for one, and the only person I know in the room is a flamboyant man from New Orleans. The rest are British and Canadian teachers from Gumi. He shoves the microphone in my face and I join him in the chorus of one, two, three songs, more...We met in Gumi before Anglea left. At her goodbye dinner, actually. Oh, Nore-Bang. I am done for the evening.

Day 40

Train back to Gimcheon 2pm, meeting the Bety(sic) Girls (the store we met in is called Bety, the icon is Betty Boop.) I am late, hung over, and hungry. Where is my coffee?

They are also late, it's okay.
The romantic hopeful of one of the girls is driving us to Jikji-sa.Im You Hee, the youngest of us, is my primary company. She speaks English best, and on the way to the park, we dance in the backseat to music from her cell phone.
We stroll along, stopping to drink spring water and stare at the statues of guardians at the entrance to the temple area. They are beautiful. The painting on them and on the ceilings and walls of all of the temple buildings are amazing. Gold? Is the iris of his eye gold? My questions and their commentary are kept to a relative minimum, as the language barrier between us is great. I see 1,000 Buddhas, I see 1,000 paper lotus flowers hanging from the ceiling, I see sincerity and curiosity in the eyes of old women and children with their parents coming to see the perhaps oldest temple in South Korea. Im You Hee takes my arm and Lee Kyeong Eun walks next to "the Hulk" in her 12 cm heels, which make me only a head taller than her.
"You like tea?"
"Come, we get daechu tea. Traditional Korean Cafe."
The server, who knows my friends, brings us 3 hot cups of tea, one iced. The tea is thick, more like a sweet soup. It is opaque and in it float sunflower seeds and dried bits of daechu, which has no English equivalent. The closest I've heard is "jujube". In the bottom of the cup are ground peanuts. We split go-gu-ma (sweet potato) and drink our tea. Lee Kyeong Eun looks up phrases in "the Hulk's" phone and speaks in English through its techno voice. She is telling jokes and our shoulders shake with hushed laughter.
The wind blows leaves in swirls outside. Finally it is getting cold.
We head down to Jikji Park, and go for Stroll Part II. Statues and fountains, cell phone photo ops and a trip to the "rainbow toilet". The building is decorated with rainbows, that's all. Nothing mind blowing. They tell me of a light show at the fountains at 7pm. It is cold and I need to get something done this evening. We leave the park and make pseudo plans for next time.

Day 41

What? What happened? Another day where I wake up later than anticipated, work seems to start too soon, and I lose the night in a maze of trivial information.

DAY 42

Another Parent's Day at the hagwon. Another hour of undue stress and tension so thick it felt like I was speaking into a wall of wet cement. Blank stares as response when I ask the students a question that's not pre-written in their notebooks.

Somehow my count is off. I am positive that I am due for a writing date with myself tonight. It is tonight, the writing date. I look at the calendar and discover that I stood myself up two nights ago. Thinking about it now, I knew it then, but got wrapped up in going to bed early or not...and magically settled on tonight as the raincheck.

cold remedy:

TEA: ginger, daechu, pear.
a far cry from my former ginger, garlic, cider vinegar, lemon, honey, cayenne concoction as far as common palatability is concerned.

Vitamin C: orange juice, kiwi fruit

Sleep...uhh...somewhere between 5-8 hours, right?

SOUP: Kimchi jjigae, daejeon jjigae, the Korean version of miso. Mashisayo.