Getting On With It: How it Goes

I have a lot to put up here in the next few days.  I just posted to DagSign as did Praise.  By the Way, Praise will be posting often to DagSign and to DagSeoul, I imagine.   I like collaboration and I like her.  A Lot.  Call it Love.  Just don't think of that Alain de Botton novel.  Get used to her.  I had to.  (sarcasm.)

Uhm, so: photos of local love motels, students, classrooms; stories about riding buses, trains, Korean "mountains", food, local folks I love, local folks I don't get, and language.  And don't get me started about education and the Korean Government's habit of arresting journalists who write negative things about it and the economy.  That's the forecast.  I am full with words; thoughts falling all over the place, tinkling shiny metalic baubles, littering my path, enticing you to follow.

Yesterday, for example, I was up at 6AM.  By 8.20 I was teaching my first of four classes, visiting 35 of 150 students I will see every Tuesday until late June.  We worked on minimal pairs, -s ending sounds, and discussing "interests"/making "plans".  I ate something--I really don't know what it is called and neither do my colleagues--for lunch around Noon and chatted with Praise whenever I had a break.  We wrote about dinner with her Cousin at 8PM, which quickly followed the first meeting of my new students at Seoul National University student union from 4:30 till 6PM.  The walk from school to Seouldae campus was wonderful but quick as I left my classroom at Samseong High School around 4.10.  Dinner with Praise's relative was wonderful as was my meeting with my new students, soon to be friends I hope, as was the walk to Seouldae with many of my highschool students lagging behind and shouting at me, as was my day at school, as was my morning walk to campus.

I got home.  I laid down.  I fell asleep.  Turn the page and it's already 2.40PM the next day, near 120 more students seen, and I am preparing to see off my good friend Jan as he leaves Seoul, I hope not but perhaps for good.  But before that happens I have to teach my weekly Faculty English class from 4-5pm.  We will discuss our families tonight.  I'll get home around 5.45 and leave by 6.15 for Sinchon and dinner.  And goodbyes.  I hope I get drunk.

I miss nothing of the United States and this has me feeling down.  Vacant.  I do miss my family very much.  But the being there that I thought I would miss has been replaced with a being here that I much more interested in.  Do you understand what I mean?  I don't know if I do fully.  I am trying to wrap my mind around it.

Somehow, I am finding time to write, play soccer, cultivate a healthy relationship, and learn a new language.