Technical Difficulties

My laptop still won't connect via ethernet cable. Grrrr... I'm really hoping that this is just one of its sporadic hissy fits, and that I haven't actually managed to break the network adapter. Anyway, I decided to give up on the thing for now and just transfer all my pictures over to uncle's desktop so I can write a blog post. Because that's how much I love you.

Hey look! It's the new and fancy apartment!

It comes with wonderful things like a huge kitchen, an actual shower, and...

OMG guys, OMG. These are the best toilets ever. Every once in a while in Korea you'll find a bathroom that has them, and it's like the universe is smiling on you. I know it's weird to get excited about a high-tech toilet, but guys, you don't understand. The seat is heated! It has two different kinds of bidet! I don't even know what three quarters of those buttons do!

In other news, we went grocery shopping and, I swear to God, Koreans have the worst taste in cheese. There are seriously fifteen different varieties of what are basically Kraft Singles.

Today we took the kids from the daycare on a picnic. I'm really getting to know them now, and we have a lot of fun. Eun-mi has even taught me enough Korean so that I can tell them when they're hitting me too hard. We took a long bus ride to a big park, and as we were getting out of the bus and lining up the kids, I realized...

Oh my God! For weeks I've been complaining about all the school groups infesting the parks and attractions, creating a constant carpet of children underfoot. Now I'm a part of one! I have become that which I most fear! I have stared into the abyss and it stared back into me!

But... eventually you have to laugh. It was a beautiful day, so apparently every preschool had the same idea as us. There must have been a dozen different school groups running around, each with three or four classes. The kids are pretty good at following in a line, but when the lines start running into each other the kids get mixed up and it turns into a bunch of harried teachers herding cats.

We wandered around for a while looking for a shady spot, and eventually found these cool little raised gazebos. We had a picnic lunch, and I practiced my Korean with the kids. Since I don't know much Korean, this basically amounted to:

Me: [Tomatoes are good!] *eats a tomato*
Kids: [Tomatoes are not good!]
Me: [Good!]
Kids: [Not good!]
...and so on.

They also practiced their English. "Chase me" is their new favorite phrase. They also started yelling, "I love you!" at me, and when we got to yelling it back and forth I started using a sort of sing-song voice... and suddenly I had to try to keep myself from busting a gut laughing because I realized that I sounded like that thing from Sealab. All I needed to do was toss a few "Bizzarro"s in there, but no one would have gotten the reference. It's times like this that I miss my girls.

I'm finally starting to learn the kids' names, not least because they were wearing nametags for the field trip (this helped immensely). The blonde on the left here is Vika; her family is Russian. And the girl on the right is Yejin, who is the sweetest thing I think I have ever seen. She sits on my lap and talks to me shyly. When the boys are beating on me, she stands in front of me and tries to stop them. And she is so, so cute.

Oh yeah, and the park was gorgeous:

It's 7:00PM now, and we're heading for the beach. Uncle thinks we can beat the crowd by going at night. That works for me; it was too hot during the day anyway. I'll take lots of pictures and get back to you later!