15 and Really Counting

I bought my plane ticket home last night! I feel excited, like I should do something to mark the occasion, and yet, unlike my vacation visit, this has been on the calendar all along, so there's not a whole lot to do about it. I arrive in Seattle the night of August 23, and what I anticipate now is spending a couple of days there to get my feet under me (and maybe see Vancouver?), then road tripping home. I want to go to North Dakota, since I haven't before; want to spend nights in Spokane and Helena because I liked them when I passed through last August; want to walk through the rumored-to-be-lovely old neighborhoods of St. Paul; and my target date for returning to Rochester is September 2. We'll see what happens when Great Big Sea's tour schedule comes out.

I've been a bit of a deadbeat blogger again lately... Partly life has been rather busy, and partly I've been in a royal funk and uninspired to write, and partly the longer I'm here, the less I come across that's new and noteworthy (although that last one is a small part--I've hit on the major cultural curiosities, but my pocket notebook will attest that there is still much to comment about). My latest musing is why Korean blind people keep their eyes closed. When a cartoon in my 4th-grade reader depicted Helen Keller with her eyes closed, I figured the illustrators must be stupid. Perhaps they were instead Korean, having no reason to suspect that blind people ever open their eyes.

School has been stressful and discouraging of late. We had exams last week, and, having grown accustomed to teachers cancelling my classes in the days before and after, I planned accordingly; ie general games to play with the kids, so I don't spend hours prepping a lesson I use twice, and so I don't have all my classes in different places in the 'curriculum' (I use the term very loosely). The round-robin story writing I'd intended to use all week was a dismal disaster (the kids do NOT understand the concept of creative writing no matter how you couch it), and the verb soccer game I'd assembled in its place just didn't feel like it was ready for prime time. In desperation at the last minute, I pulled out an old standby game, one that always seemed like barely controlled chaos last year...and it worked beautifully! The kids did great with it, they seemed to like it, and one of the co-teachers said it was fun. I feel a bit better now, but add all this to a recalcitrant lesson the prior week plus EEP last Saturday, and I've had 3 solid weeks of daily writing and rewriting during what was supposed to be my down time.

Next week, I teach Monday, then the kids go on field trips for 4 days in a row. After that, we have a 6-week push and then finals. I plan to show some kind of video for the leftover weeks in July, so while my head is spinning with plans and the agony of producing them, there really isn't much left at all.

I have a boy who's taken to talking to me for extended stretches of time. He's a really nice kid, quiet and long-suffering--I'm not sure how much of a social life he has; I never see him roughhousing or teasing with the other kids. His English is really limited--in the course of a conversation, he'll go to the other teachers multiple times to ask how to phrase something. I hope they're not too exasperated...Ms. Jeon kicked him out after he'd been talking to me for 45 minutes. He left without saying another word to me--I don't know what she said to him; hopefully it wasn't too harsh. He told me he's making me a birthday present. I hope it's on the order of a card. I told him he didn't have to do that, etc, but I'm afraid if I get really vehement about it, he'll think I'm angry at him.

It's 6:30 as I write this...the time I should be making dinner and usually take a nap instead. So, sleepy and hungry, I'm trying to remember what else I wanted to mention.

Wednesday was Children's Day. No school! Diana & I wandered around downtown, taking in several "trick" fountains--I love watching them as much as the kids love standing in them--and discovering that the ice rink has moved out of Gwanghwamun Square in favor of grass!! Real grass that you're allowed to sit on! Last year, it was a sea of flowers, but now there are just enough beds to make the place fragrant. We'd been headed for Insadong and the Cheonggye Cheon, but once we parked on that grass, that was it for the afternoon.

We did meet up with Sarah and a friend from home later to get Mexican food in Itaewon. Itaewon would make a great model for an economic textbook (or a marketing one)...deprive people of tasty, diverse food, and they will be willing to pay any outlandish price (plus tax) for crummy service and minuscule portions. I thought the US was overboard with the a la carte trend, but in Itaewon, you'd better be prepared to fork over some more if you want rice with your curry or pitas with your hummus.