석가탄신일 (Buddha's Birthday)

Lanterns decorating Jogyesa Temple in Seoul on Buddha's Birthday, May 21st.
Happy Birthday, Buddha! Glad to see you made it another year. Thank you for the day off and I had a great time at the party. It was the sort of day that left me with a pleasant buzz of happiness in the pit of my stomach and good will towards mankind, which is probably a fitting way to celebrate the birth of The Enlightened One. Granted my dinner of sausage/mashed potatoes/beer wasn't typical Buddhist fare, but it was delicious.

PS. Loved the decorations!

#%$@* Sink-Shower

So, I read this delightful webcomic called ROKetship which cheerfully pokes fun at expat life here in Korea and it's uncanny just how well the artist captures my experience here. I can pick a comic at random and, nine times out of ten, something similar has happened to me in the past few days. I saw this comic this morning and just, this? THIS IS MY LIFE! This is my TODAY! TWICE!


This is my (newly renovated!) bathroom. Please note the hose running from the shower head to my sink. To turn on the shower, I turn on the sink and pull out the button on the faucet and - presto! - it's a sink. The logical thing to do would be to, after a shower, push the button back in, turning my sink-shower back into a sink, but the chances of me being coherent enough to do that first thing in the morning are non-existent. I try to remember and check the button when I go to use my sink, but sometimes I forget, and so I live a life of occasionally getting sprayed in the face with cold water when I go to wash my hands or accidentally drenching my left side when I go to brush my teeth, usually on the days when I'm running late and it's most inconvenient to suddenly need to change clothes.

Effin' sink shower!

On the plus side, though, sink-shower makes it very easy to clean the bathroom.

Children's Day!

Wednesday was Children's Day. I spent last week telling my students how in America, we don't have Children's Day. At first, they were pretty horrified, but then they started thinking of things America DOES have (a list that included Halloween, hamburgers and no hagwons) and I lost all the sympathy I had garnered.

The best moment came courtesy of a group of particularly vocal sixth grade girls. I stopped at their table during class to check on their progress and the boldest of them said, "Teacher, give me vitamin!" (We occasionally give out vitamin C tablets as prizes, which I think is hilarious, since that WOULD NOT FLY back home.)

"I don't have a vitamin," I told her, pulling out my pockets to demonstrate that I had no vitamins.

"Then give me candy, Teacher."

"No."

"Teacher, pleeeeeeeease give me candy!" she begged.

"I don't have any candy," I told her.

"But Teacher, we want caaaaaaaandy!"

"Why should I give you candy?" I finally asked.

The girls thought this over and finally said, "Teacher. Next week Children's Day. Give me Children's Day present!"

I thought it over and decided that was a pretty valid reason for wanting candy, with bonus points for actually vocalizing their reasoning in English. "In two weeks," I told them, "it is Teacher's Day. Will you give me a Teacher's Day present?"

"Oh yes, Teacher!" my students chorused.

"Okay," I said. "Come to my office tomorrow and I will give you a Children's Day present."

They came by my office the next day, almost giddy with excitement, and I gave them each a fun sized Twix bar, which was like hitting the jackpot. They thanked me profusely and promised me lots and lots of flowers on Teacher's Day. I grinned for the rest of the day.

Since Children's Day is a national holiday and Tuesday was my school's anniversary, I had a five day weekend, which was AWESOME! I had originally planned to do some traveling, but ultimately, in a very this-is-why-you-can't-have-nice-things sort of way, I stayed home so I could finish unpacking and clean my apartment. BEING A GROWN UP IS SOMETIMES NOT FUN!

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Monica dropped off the seven or eight boxes she'd been storing for me while I was home. I immediately rooted through them, looking for my school shoes and gazing lovingly at all my books, and then left everything sitting in a heap the middle of my apartment, just to make things a little more interesting when trying to navigate my way to the bathroom first thing in the morning. This weekend, I *finally* unpacked the boxes, reorganized my wardrobe, yarn stash (no more yarn in the kitchen!) and kitchen; cleaned up the mess that sprung up around the boxes; and cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom. Not as much fun as jetting about the Korean countryside, but looking at my apartment no longer makes me want to weep and/or claw my eyes out, which is a good thing.

In, On, Under, Over, In Front, Behind

My 5th graders are studying prepositions of location and to help them remember the meanings and to liven up class a bit, we sang the Preposition Song. Guys, this is a creepy song. It's sung in this weird robotic voice with no proper tonal inflection and the video starts and ends with what is suppose to be the giggle of happy children learning English but sounds to me like the maniacal giggles of children being terrorized by a creepy singing robot clown. Despite how disturbing I personally find it though, it's a great song for teaching prepositions. It super simple (the lyrics consist of six basic prepositions - in, on, under, over, in front, behind) and there are hand motions to go with each of the prepositions.

First I taught the kids the hand motions and then we the song four or five times, until my brain was bleeding from the those creepy giggles and the kids were reasonable comfortable with the hand motions. They really liked when the song got too fast for them to keep up and they got to wave their hands about in the air. They really really liked when the song got to fast for me to keep up and I threw my hands in the air dramatically. After we sang, I showed the students some pictures and had them write sentences describing the situations. The rabbit is in the box, the pig is on the table - that sort of thing. As I walked around the classroom, I watched at least half my kids start to mouth the words to the song while doing the hand motions until they reached the right preposition.

I watched the look of comprehension that dawned on their faces as they realized that, hey, they could do this and remembered that, right, this is why I love teaching.

Konglish Signs in Gangnam

One of the unexpected pluses to living in Korea is the Konglish. From the completely nonsensical to the funny to the just plain unfortunate, it's always fun to walk around around a corner or read someone's shirt and go, "... what?" (My favorite sign *ever* will always be this one in Itaewon, but I don't have my own picture of it. But no seriously, follow that link. IT IS WORTH IT!)


Look closely at the name of the waffle set. I would not eat that waffle set.
This is the terrible unfortunate sign advertising Espresso Public, the cafe where the Sunday Gangnam SnB meets. I'm pretty sure this one isn't actually a Konglish mistake since, if you look closely, you can see there's a space for an 'l' between the 'b' and the 'i'. Most likely some (drunk) foreigner stumbled upon the sign and couldn't help himself. It's been like this for weeks and all anyone has done about it is take a bunch of photos and laugh a lot.


Butterfinger Pancakes is not the TARDIS. This door only travels through space and NOT time.
We tried to go to Butterfinger Pancakes after SnB, but the powers of 소녀시대 (a super popular Kpop girl group; the link goes to a YouTube video of their latest single, which I can not stop listening to. Don't judge me, I use to have both taste in music and a sense of shame, I swear) who was possible waiting in a van outside the restaurant next door caused a rift in the space-time continuum and Butterfingers was temporally closed. Instead we ate at California Pizza Kitchen.


On the walk back to the subway, we passed the Joo Bar. The general consensus was that this is pronounced Jew Bar, which reminds me of my students last year. There is no 'z' sound in Korean, so my students when confronted with the word zoo, told me they wanted to go to the Jew to see the lions.