Goodbye Wizville

If my biological clock ever kicks in, would you all remind me not to get knocked up? Like, ever? I don't think I'm cut out to do the kid thing, whether that means teaching preschool or spawning one of the little buggers myself. My policy is that I love playing with kids as long as they're not total brats, and as long as I can give them back to their parents any time I want. I think I'd make a better "Cool Aunt" than a mom. 

Okay, okay, I'm not a complete Scrooge. Most of the kids are really sweet. And even though I was only there for four days, they made me a goodbye card that everyone signed. They also gave me cookies, and even though they all had nuts in them, it was the thought that counted. I went away glowing.

I gave the cookies to Harmuni and Eun-hyuk. The kid was ecstatic. I think he's figuring out my "no touching" rule. Today he sat down to watch me type, and after I gave him a few pointed glares he kept his hands to himself. He also went away pretty quickly; I think it takes all the fun out of it if he's not allowed to bang on the keyboard and piss me off.

I'm trying to resist re-watching Queer as Folk immediately after I finished it for the first time (it was that good). To distract myself, I'm watching Aliens and reminding myself why it's one of my favorite movies of all time. As my Dad has heard me rant before, I love Ellen Ripley and I love Vasquez (even if she did start the trope of the butch Latina who dies in every action movie). I think I'll get "El Riesgo Siempre Vive" tattooed on myself. It's a little punchier than my other favorite line:

Hudson: Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?
Vasquez: No. Have you?

Sad Day for Soccer

I went and watched the match against Uruguay, not at City Hall but at a place nearer to home. I figured it would save me a long subway ride back in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the Coex Mall venue was a lot less fun than the City Hall one. At that first game, everyone had been on their feet, jostling for position and cheering wildly. This game was far more... civilized, which is not a good thing for a screening of an international sporting event. I mean, obviously no one wants riots in the streets, but the spectators there might as well have been at a picnic.

Wizville

Ugh to getting up at 7AM to go to work. How did I ever used to do this when I was in school? I even have to go to bed at a halfway-decent hour, and I've started drinking coffee in the mornings (Starbucks coffee full of chocolate and milk with whipped cream on top, but still).

I've been to Wizville Preschool for two days now. Doug left me a fantastic lesson plan and schedule, so I have instructions for everything I need to do. It was very helpful, but I was still nervous about teaching, especially since the kids are a little bit insane. My main class is Sinsaimdang, which consists of twelve kids who are all five or six years old. Some, like Shirley, are adorable. Others are driving me insane. But I can keep them under control more or less, and Doug's partner Monica is there to help me when things get out of hand.

China

I tried, I really tried to keep a detailed diary of my trip to China. But Kayli had so much for me to do that I never seemed to have time to sit down and write. Once I had fallen about four days behind, I realized that I probably wasn't going to catch up. So this will be the abbreviated version of Christina's nine days in Beijing. 

Dae-han-min-guk

I would love to make this a long post, but it's midnight-thirty and I have to get up in six hours to catch a flight, so I'll give you the abbreviated version.

Sam arrived on Friday very jetlagged but very excited. It was so nice to see her, a total blast from the past. When I was waiting for her at the gate, I kept worrying that I'd let her go by already because we hadn't recognized each other. But then I saw her, and I knew her right away. She conked out as soon as we got back, but she got up early today to spend the morning in Seoul with me.

Of course, after weeks and weeks of sweltering heat, today it decides to pour down rain all day long. We walked around, did some last-minute shopping for Sam, saw some old Korean palaces (pictured), and generally got soaked.

I saw Sam off and headed to City Hall to watch the Reds play Greece in the World Cup. I got myself a nice jersey-style team shirt and someone gave me a big inflatable hand for free! I elbowed my way up near the front, watched the game on the big screen, screamed and sang, and drank beer with a group of Americans that I met. Koreans have a little more freedom than most in making up cheers, because there are so many permutations of the country's name that you can fit it into any tune. In different songs we used "Korea," "Hanguk," and "Daehanminguk," and some songs used more than one.

Oh yeah, and it was still pouring. Everyone got soaked, our team won, and someone handed me a free can of Coke as I was staggering back to the subway station. A good night.

I probably won't have time to post anything tomorrow, which means this will be my last post until the 22nd! Damn China and their hatred of Google. I'll keep a diary and do a massive catchup post when I return. Until then!

Class

Yesterday I slept in to recover from my little excursion, and when I woke up I figured I would soon go out and continue exploring Seoul. Yeah, that didn't happen so much. First thing that happened was I caught Mom on Skype. She had to go to work, but soon after we hung up my Dad logged on. We talked for a while, but then he had to get back to work.

As soon as I finished with him, Stellar came online. We chatted for a long time about our travel plans and gushed about graduation and next year's grad school.

Then she had to go to bed, but as soon as she did so, Mimi was there. We talked and laughed about the state of young adult literature these days and pined for the eras of CS Lewis, Brian Jacques, and Garth Nix. When reminiscing about our favorite books to read as middle schoolers, Mimi brought up Laurens Van Der Post's "A Story Like the Wind" and "From a Far Off Place," which are violent and philosophical epics about a French boy, a Portugese girl, their dog, and their bushmen friends growing up in the depths of Africa and surviving in the desert for years while fleeing assassins who want them dead due to various political intrigues. I told her that her definition of "young adult literature" does not resemble our Earth definition.

By then it was late over there in the USA, so Mimi logged off. Just then, Kayli came on and we spent a few hours working out the kinks in our plans for when I get to China. When we had finally booked all our hostels and verified all our timelines, I said goodbye to her, ran through my emails, looked at the clock, and saw that it was 8:00PM.

Damyang

I have conducted an inadvertent experiment, and I have discovered that the number of days that I can disappear from Blogger, email, and Skype before my Mom calls Kris to ask if I've died is... 2. Sorry for making you worry, Mom, but I had a good excuse. You see, I've been in Damyang! Where they apparently have no internet! What? I didn't tell you guys that I was going to Damyang and please not to worry if I didn't update?

...Oops.

Well, I'm back. And since I didn't have internet, I wrote out journal entries in Word so I could post them later. Unfortunately for those of you who actually have things to do, writing in Word somehow makes me very verbose. These entries are not so much the picture-and-caption format of my normal posts, but more like long-narrative-with-pictures-added-in-later. You have been warned.

In which I go to a water park, meet Eunmi's friends, and discuss Taylor Swift in more detail than I probably should

There was no wi-fi in the hotel room at Daemyung, so today is a two-day catchup post. Sorry there are no pictures for most of it, but I could hardly carry my camera around at the water park, could I?

The car ride to the resort was only about an hour long, but it still managed to be hellish. It was sweltering hot, and I got carsick in record time. While I sat back, looked out the front window, and tried to dissociate from my nauseous body, I stuck my earbuds in because if I have to listen to Eun-hyuk's English phonics tape one more time I swear I'll stab myself in the face.

When we got to the hotel room, I flopped onto the couch and mumbled to Kris that I would not be moving for the rest of the day. She, having one four-year-old to deal with already, took none of my crap and dragged me out to the water park. Still hot and still uncomfortable, I tried to get in the spirit of things and took a plunge down a huge water slide.

As soon as I hit the water, to quote my favorite WWII history book, "it was as if someone had passed a magic wand over me and said, '[Christina], you feel great.'"

Staircases

I braved the heat today and climbed Namsan.

Remember? The mountain with the tower? I went there once before, at night with Kris and her family. But I wanted to climb it when it was still light out, and take the walking path instead of the bus.

Uuuuugh...

Bluuuurgh...

It's hot and humid out, so much so that I got soaked with sweat just from walking a few blocks down to Gangnam for lunch. Now I'm sitting at home in a thin cotton dress, trying to get cool while I try to figure out the chances of Harmuni walking in on me if I decide to get naked.

On top of that, it seems that I have forgotten to take my allergy meds for a few days, and that's finally caught up with me. I have a roll of tissue next to me and I'm blowing my nose intermittently and sneezing. Luckily it's not too bad yet, and I will definitely go back on the nasal spray tomorrow.

On the bright side, nursing my nose and my heatstroke give me a chance to peruse the archives of several blogs and message boards I have just discovered. I would link some of them, but I have recently been informed that not only do my school friends, my parents, and my Emo have the link to this blog, but so do my Dad's entire family. Eep. I'm imagining getting called out on my profanity and vulgar references at the next family reunion.

Phantom!

I was so excited for today! I love Phantom of the Opera! Even though its leading lady is kind of useless and it glorifies a sociopathic kidnapping murderer... the music is a part of my childhood and I'll always forgive it its faults.

One thing I was asking myself was, what language would it be in? Were all the performers fluent in English? Had they learned the whole play phonetically? Would they do the dialogue in Korean and the songs in English (because obviously it would be way too much work to translate all the songs into Korean, keeping the meaning and syllables and timing intact...)?

Uh, no. I was wrong. The whole thing was in Korean, even the songs, and they sounded great! I was very pleasantly surprised. Good thing I know the play backwards and forwards, so I didn't actually need to be able to understand what they were saying.

The only time the translation got to me was when they sang that refrain: you know, "He's here! The Phaaaantom of the Ooooperaaaa!" This is because they didn't translate the names, including titles, so it came out as, "Yeogi! Duh Paeeentum ob di Oooopeiraaaa!" That made me giggle a bit. The rest was fantastic, and it sucked me right in.

This and That

The problem with blogging is that when you spend a month updating daily, you feel really guilty when you miss a few days in a row. I don't even have any real work to do, and still I manage to slack off!

After Saturday night's outing, I failed to mention that the subways stopped running while I was on my way home. I ended up dumped off at a stop with no connecting lines and with very little idea of where I was. I walked a few blocks looking for a bus stop, but I finally gave up and hailed a cab.

By the way, this is the first time I've ever hailed a cab! I felt pretty proud and worldly until it occurred to me the ridonckulous level of privilege that has allowed me not to have need to hail a cab until the age of twenty-two. Oh, well. I managed to tell the driver how to get where I was going even though I utterly failed to understand anything else he said during the ride.