essay highlights

for the speaking contest, the students also have to write an essay, which i grade. this month's topic: christmas. here are some of the highlights:

"christmas is a very very happy peace day."
"hello my name is jack. i hate the christmas because, santa is doesn't live in the world in the earth in the space but i can play on christmas."
"i want to the present. i want dog, dog, dog please."
"i like christmas, but i am not like noisy."
"i have a banality dinner."
"i study hard because too soon exam...i pray good lucky!"
"christmas is gob's bornedday."

i love speaking test days.

once a month, we have a speaking contest at my school. the students memorize short passages from the books they are reading to recite to the korean teachers. they have a 3-minute interview with me. i get to see all of my students and ask them fun questions, like, "what do you want for christmas?" in my book, today's winner is jane, an eight-year-old girl, who answered, "teacher, i want a fireman."

sometimes i just have to wonder

fashion is a fickle beast, especially when it comes to athletic wear...

there are always interesting ensembles at my gym here. there is a constant assortment of neon spandex. women dress very sexy for dance class (do they realize our teacher is far from interested in women? probably not.). today, i saw the best and possibly most uncomfortable outfit ever. the woman in dance class next to me had on her normal blue spandex pants, but on top, she was wearing a rashguard. now, there are no surfboards in my gym, only yoga mats, but this tiny woman was wearing a 3-milimeter, long-sleeved hot pink maui built rashie. how she didn't die of heat stroke after spinning and dance, i have no idea. here's to you, crazy lady.

a charlie brown thanksgiving, year number two

not only a time to give thanks, thanksgiving is also a time to let our sense of nostalgia for a part-fictional past momentarily take over. in most minds, there is an image of a perfectly happy family sitting around a table smiling and eating.

i'll take my somewhat messy past over the american holiday dream anyday. my family is anything but boring, although i told my mother that we were sometime in elementary school, when i was too consumed in my own little world to realize anything going on around me. my favorite thanksgivings are the ones that have been completely chaotic...

1. thanksgiving 2008. i was in bangkok during all of the protests, so my planned trip to chiang mai to have thanksgiving with friends there was not a possibility. instead, i had thanksgiving on my street corner with a boy named matt, the other american teacher in my town, and nan, my fruit lady/thai mommy. matt never talked much, so nan and i carelessly chatted away. we had pad thai and tons of papaya and pineapple. she wanted me to feel at home there and did everything to help make my stay there a good time, even showing my mom around when she came to visit. we had drinks on the street that night too. while i was there, i didn't quite understand why it was called "soi dee" ("the good road" in thai), but now i know it's because of the sweet people who live there. i spent a lot of great nights sitting on the street corner, especially when one of the local college kids would haul out a guitar and pick away at attempted english songs.

2. thanksgiving 2007. my mom and i signed up to run the tallahassee turkey trot and trained for it, but when we woke up to rain, nothing could be further from our minds than running. instead, we made a light breakfast and watched a bunch of "friends." then we went to chez pierre, just the two of us, for our own perfect thanksgiving.

3. thanksgivings growing up. they were always a zoo of family members, friends, and food...


oh, time leave school. happy thanksgiving, charlie brown.

still waiting on a "wow!" (the remix)

i have been in korea for nearly six weeks now, and i am still waiting on a "wow!" day, when i am excited about my life and everything going on in it. i have had a lot of those days over the past year and a half, as i've traveled to a lot of interesting places.

i have been in korea for nearly six weeks now, and i still haven't had one. i have had some good days, some solid-effort days, and the occasional bad ones. i don't expect everyday to be a "wow!" day, except for when i was in bali, but i do like to have one every now and again. if i'm not truly excited by anything going on around me, what's the point of travel? i suppose i am not traveling for the time being though; i live and work here, just as the other 5 billion people in the world live and work in their cities.

while most of my life has been a steady curve of highs and lows, with a few plateaus (bali) and a few flat valleys (first semester of senior year at vassar), good things usually come along soon enough. i feel like my time in korea has been a bit of a downhill slide, albeit a slow one, from a very high peak. i came here after a month at home and a brilliant time in phi phi, so i didn't expect to stay that content forever. things started out so well here. i loved everything with my school and the promise of new friendships. now, my school is giving me a headache. i'm expecting my first pay day this weekend, and they seem to be skirting around the issue. today, they just canceled my winter holiday. i will be at school until the usual 9 pm on new years eve. i'm only off for christmas day and for new year's day. i love teaching, but i'm starting to feel like all i ever do is work. when i was working 24-7 in thailand, i was diving my heart out and playing on the beach. my two lives seem worlds apart, a la wallace steven's professional life in connecticut and his fanciful one in key west.

i miss my thai life, not just my diving one but the teaching one as well. i miss my christmas and new years parties with the girls in thailand. there was this amazing moment on new years eve last year. we felt crowded at the central world countdown (the thai version of the new york times square party). we jumped on the skytrain at 11:30, went a few stops down sukhumvit, and ran out to a bar just in time to have champagne in hand at 12:00. cheers to those girls.

the way a new year starts says so much about the year to come. what if this one is alone and lame?

the remix: two little things that made me happy this evening.
1. i got out of school early because i'm sick.
2. mr. joon gave me a free red bean carp bread to thanks me for treating my kiddos yesterday.

carp bread! carp bread! carp bread!

my kids love the "carp bread," which is their english translation of the "bo-bang" sold outside of our building. rest assured, "carp bread" contains no actual fish. they are little fish-shaped grilled pastries stuffed with either sweet cream, spicy rice, or red beans.

i took one of my classes out for them after we finished our book today. this class actually did all of the work and turned in their homework on time (something almost unheard of in this school!). i told them i would last week, so i had to fulfill my promise. i'm a bit afraid that every class will expect it. uh-oh.


[photos to come soon.]

a great little cafe called art bar

my friends and i stumbled upon this charming little bar thanks to some street musicians. it's called art cafe, and i adore it (sangria, mojitos, and free cheesecake, oh my!).

much better

the rest of school today was much better after the fantasy class. some days, they are fantastic, but others they are little brats.

after teaching in bangkok, i thought that i loved teaching the babies, but i actually prefer my older students now. i can have real conversations with them. i never have to resort to my little bit of korean vocabulary--"sit down," "stand up," "shut up". these are three phrases that any english as a second language teacher needs to learn). i love that my principal walked in my office one day when i was practicing with a korean co-teacher. we were chanting in korean. sit down! stand up! shut up!

i'm usually nice in class, but sometimes, especially on mondays, i have to break. at least i know the basics. accidentally, i do give them commands in thai from time to time. i hope that's not a problem.

i guess there's one great thing about teaching, or any job really: tomorrow is a new day.

welcome to monday

my little ones were terrors today, and i now have a headache the size of a small country. when did it become ok to throw things at your teacher? i don't care if you hug me afterward, but launching a marker across the room is not acceptable! i think it's one of those days of really hating a place. wherever you travel for an extended period of time, it's bound to happen. it catches you by surprise but leaves you wanting to scream.

although hospitality is highly valued in korean culture, people here are also extraordinarily xenophobic and aggressive. i'm tired of being pushed all the time! one of these days, i might just have to push back. as for now, i just have two relatively easy classes standing between me and a night of doing nothing.

what i'm working on...

i'm writing a little article for a backpacker's magazine about lingering travelers. here's a draft of what i have so far. thoughts or comments??

Mmm Mmm, I want to Linger…Mmm Mmm, a Little Longer, a Little Longer Here with You

"One more week," I told my dive shop manager on Monday mornings to make sure I would be on the boat for the week. Along with the rest of my friends on the island, she thought I would never leave Phi Phi. We all knew that I just had to linger around for a while longer, diving everyday and playing on the beach every night.

In fact, I started lingering around Southeast Asia long before I ever became a divemaster. At the end of the summer of 2008, I went to Thailand to be a kindergarten teacher. Hooked on the mai pen rai lifestyle, I went to Bali to do a divemaster internship in the spring of 2009. Upon completing the course and wanting a change of waters, my heart brought me back to Thailand. This summer and fall, I found myself on Koh Phi Phi, diving, flyering, and never wanting to leave. I knew I would be diving everyday when I arrived on the island, but I had never even considered flyering for a bar until one night, parked in my usual spot at the Dojo with a vodka tonic in hand, my friend made a suggestion. Everyone on both sides of the bar agreed, and I started the next night. I have always been a person who plans ahead and likes to know her next step, but those Andaman breezes flung open the windows so I could throw caution out and let in a whole lot of love.

During my several months there, I met dozens of like-minded travelers, but it is the flyer people of Phi Phi who kept me lingering just a little longer. Like the people I met at summer camp as a girl, we became fast friends for a few days or weeks and then parted for the next adventure. These people, however, are the ones who made my traveling experience fabulous and will always make me want to linger…

HOLLY AND ALICIA They were the two regular flyer girls at the Dojo; they were there every night—smiling, chatting, and having a good time. Meeting Holly and Alicia convinced me to flyer, and they became two of my good friends on the island and the throwers of the world’s best going-away party. Holly is the definition of the lingering traveler: she came to Phi Phi, fell in love with it, and plans to stay for a full year. Alicia went back to Phi Phi for her sixth time on the island and recently left to go to nearby Phuket with her boyfriend. The Thai islands are always in their hearts, so regardless of how much they may or may not try to leave the them, these girls will always be held captive.


LAURA I met Laura on my first night as a flyer girl. We became fast friends and staked out the bar’s best corner with a shiny silver bucket in hand. As we made our way through the pink jungle juice, we started dancing outside, trading travel stories, and bringing people into the bar. That night, we may or may not have flyered Leonardo DiCaprio; we know he was on the island that night, and we certainly tried to talk to a heart-stopping beautiful man with dreadlocks that passed by with equally attractive friends. We had a perfect night flyering, so it must have been him. Leo or no Leo, Laura and I kept flyering together for nearly a week, when she left the island to continue her round-the-world journey.


MOLEY I met Moley on the same night I met Laura. I had seen him around the island for a few days; flyering on a busy corner did have its advantages for scoping out who was in town. He was the guy who was always dancing in front of the Irish bar down the street, bucket (or two) in hand. He was on the island for a week, flyering because he always found himself at the bar anyways, until he left with a group of new friends to go to the Full Moon Party on the other side of Thailand. While backpacking in September, I saw him behind a bar in Laos. He's in Australia now, but he gets my Southeast Asia wild-roving bar-guy award.


MIKE While sitting in the dive shop, I said hello to nearly everyone on the island, and I'm pretty sure I tried to convince him to go for a dive about 5,000 times. Even though he never went diving with me, he did eventually stop by to chat. I saw him out later on that night in town and on the beach. One night of buckets and the beach turned into many, and after a quick ten days, he left the island. He came back in August, about two months later. he planned to spend a couple of weeks there before moving on to continue traveling to Indonesia and Laos, but on his first night back, he came to the bar where I flyered. By midnight, he was flyering for Tiger Bar, across the street. This Tiger Boy outlasted me on the island and plans to be there until February.


EMILY AND LUCIE These two were an all-star team in front of the Dojo, and when I asked them about their time on Phi Phi, Emily was quick to gush: “We never expected to go traveling round Thailand’s islands and actually spend some of our time working! But when we came to a place that we loved so much we never wanted to leave, all we wanted was to feel like a part of the community there. Going out every night with all the people who’d just arrived made us feel like such tourists. So we set about finding ways to make the island our home.

“Flyering for the bar was perfect – an excuse to chat to everyone who walked past you on the street, we made great friends with all the tourists and the locals. Not to mention the free drinks all night, and a (tiny) bit of cash at the end of our shift, at which point we all staggered drunkenly down to the beach where the real partying started. Some nights the flyering wasn’t really very important, and we just danced inside the bar, or sat around drinking and looking pretty to make the place look cool, or led group drinking games. It was by far the best job I’ve ever had.

“Thailand was the last stop on my six-month round-the-world trip. I won’t lie – I was sincerely tempted to stay there and never go home. I’m sure it won’t be long until I run away again back to the carefree traveler’s lifestyle!”

dance class

i love taking dance classes in foreign languages. true, they're much easier in english, and i make a lot less mistakes. there is just something incredibly beautiful about a big group of people seamlessly dancing together, even though they cannot actually communicate. i love my jazz class on wednesdays and fridays. my instructor is a 30-something russian guy who speaks a bit of italian and french, and the class is all korean. then there's me, in the middle of the room and at least six inches taller than everyone else. it's fabulous.

saturday: flippy cup, elevator, and snow

i went back to college on saturday night. although i didn't go back to poughkeepsie to stomp around vassar, i had a typical college night out; i could very well have been back in the living room of b8. for the first time since i left, i played flippy cup. ah, what a useful skill it is to be able to turn over an empty plastic cup with two fingers. needless to say, i have lost that skill as the cocktail glass (and occassional sand pail) has completely replaced the solo cup in my book. like bowling, flippy cup is a game you should not be good at.

several games later, i left the crowded apartment with friends to go to a club down the street. we divided between the hallway's two elevators. apparently, i chose the wrong one. junior jumped, and our elevator stopped in between the fifth and sixth floors. i am terrified of small spaces, especially those that can plummet eight stories down a shaft. after some patient waiting, also known as sitting in the corner with eyes closed, we escaped.

we walked out of the building and into the first snow of the season. for five minutes, i was excited about korea again.

it all starts with caterpillars...

...or at least last night did. every couple of weeks, the principal here takes us out. the first night out with the jung chul crew was my first night here. the next morning was my first expeience of the dreadful soju headache. warning to future visitors: just because your korean friends are force-feeding you surprisingly decent-tasting shots of beer, cola, and soju, doesn't make it the best idea for you. i remembered that tidbit last night and negotiated my way into a harmless couple of cocktails.

around the same time as round one, our table received our soup. while i had figured out that they were talking about t.v. shows like fear factor and survivor moments before, i didn't realize that we were about to have such a challenge at our table. the soup arrived and everyone dug in. they said it was vegetarian, so i stuck my spoon in too. what i lifted out of the communal pot was something startlingly familiar and certainly not vegetarian. "caterpillar baby!" my boss smiled. too bad i already had the spoon hovering over the table. i had to give it a go. i ate a few odd things in thai markets, but crispy-fried-whatever in no way compares to a steaming mouthful of "caterpillar baby." thank god the salad arrived just a few seconds later.

as dinner became more normal (salmon salad, fruits of the sea plate, and spicy mussel soup), my co-workers became less normal, pushing through a few bottles of soju. then they decided we needed to go to a "western style" bar. we went to bar indiana. i think the barman just picked a random state as the namesake, since it was decorated with any and all sorts of american kitsch, including a giant cigar store indian chief statue and budweiser banners. "just like america, right?" "i guess it depends where you go..." in an american bar i probably wouldn't be frowned upon for eating the apple slices from the fruit plate ("very bad for health at night"). hell, there probably wouldn't even be a fruit plate! korean bar snacks absolutely trump their american counterparts. we played darts there; my team finished second.

i thought the night was slowing down at this point, especially considering we had a seven-month pregnant woman in the group. no no, she was worried that i would be tired at school the next day. i told them i would be fine. what 23-year-old will ever be the one to end the party?

apparently, 3 am is the perfect time to go to a noribong, a korean karaoke room. we spent an hour in the cute room on the third floor of my school building singing the world's most random mix of music. i'm glad to know my co-workers and i share a passion for enrique iglesias and savage garden, not to mention a common knowledge of super junior's dance moves ("sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, kalinka kalinka"). too bad there are only five of us. if we can find nine more, we can be the next super junior!

glue

my little terrors covered me in glue today. needless to say, i choose the wrong day to wear a silk shirt.

even though it's eleven months away

even though i am starting to feel settled teaching here in korea and it will be about eleven months until i'm a travel bum again, warren and i have already started planning our pre-grad school lovers' adventure, covering three continents (where i am now, where he is now/from, and where i am from). although it's a short list at the moment to be added onto until we actually settle down and start school, i still love the satisfaction of making a list.

1. vietnam
2. everest base camp trek in nepal
3. return to laos for a bit of tubin' and a bit of culture
4. great wall of china
5. volunteer in india
6. south africa
7. mozambique to namibia
8. madagascar
9. the great american south-land (a super-sized version of helen's trip)


just a few ideas...who knows what will happen between now and then?

finally

i taught my crazy little ones today, and while they weren't exactly well-behaved, they did not make me want to jump out of the window! i think i may just be getting somewhere. we'll see if it holds out. hopefully tomorrow will be equally mediocre. they are actually getting through all of the work in the lesson plan, so piles of cut-up paper on the floor (we do a lot of cut-and-paste projects) or no, i'm a little bit happier on this monday.

bali moments

camilla made a collage of some of our favorite moments and places in bali. i miss the colors there; i have to say, they are much better than the urban gray.

it's the faces, not the places

i like to think that i have traveled quite a bit for a girl of twenty-three. i've had some amazing experiences, above water and below, in the sun and in the snow. the thing that stands out in my mind about a place, however, isn't how beautiful a sunset or a temple or a painting was. the images that come to my mind from traveling are the faces of the friends i have made along the way.

i think of my summers in hawaii, and i think of brandy and keely. wherever we were, we were laughing together. we took too many photos. we spent too much time in the sun (yes, i do have sunspots already). we got on the bus without having a destination, just stopping when we saw a nice beach, waterfall, or something interesting on the side of the road.

i think of my junior year in italy, and i think of patrick, sara, and jacqueline. we may have complained about our program, but we had far more fun than anyone else. we spent hours in coffee shops, museums, and piazzas. we were always dancing. or cooking. we cooked a lot.

i think of my time teaching in thailand, and i think of leslie, grat, and katherine--the yellow spotted boxfish of love. we met in chiang mai and became life-long friends. we spent every weekend together tearing it up in bangkok's clubs, lounging on the beach, talking about our schools, and, let us not forget, getting terrible haircuts and funny henna tattoos.

i think of bali, and i think of camilla and warren. camilla and i are quite possibly the world's best divemaster team. we come from two very different places, and yet we think so similarly. and then there's warren, the love of my life. i'm so glad the three of us decided to go surfing on sunday mornings.

i think of koh phi phi, and i think of my dive girls. sure there were lots of interesting boys on the island, but they came and left. the dive girls made everyday in "the office" fun and every night an adventure. i'll never forget my going away party...completely covered in fluoro paint, we danced on the rooftop of the banana bar to "sex is on fire."

i'm so much happier in korea now that i have a group of friends here. amanda, gina, and karla, those will be the faces that will come to mind with this place.

halloween in seoul

ok, you know about halloween now, so go take a picture with your teacher

it doesn't really look like anyone is having fun on halloween here. obviously, they had not eaten 5 kilos of candy yet.

top 10 sounds of korea

while people watching in la festa tonight, a friend and i started talking about the unusual and unforgettable sounds in korea. my top ten:


1. men hacking
2. slurping noodle soup
3. smacking when eating
4. the man on the intercom on saturday mornings who sells refrigerators, fruit, etc.
5. the rice cake man on his bicycle ("suck my toooooeeeee")
6. whiny women
7. children shouting "TEACHER!"
8. squishy food being cut by scissors
9. loud english
10. the card clicker on the bus

which one?

i am so many people at one time. maybe that's why i love traveling; it helps me sort through these many mirrors and ideas of myself. traveling also adds more of these reflections. i am sitting at my teacher's desk, smiling and chatting with all of the kids who pass by during my free period, but my mind is on the island. i think of a beautiful photo that warren took of me in bali. in the first photo he took, i am perfectly posed and smiling, but this second photo is much better. i am looking down at the water and stepping out of a space between two rocks. what you don't see is the cut on my foot, caused by a misplaced step. even though i'm not smiling in the photo, happiness radiates out of it--the happiness of a perfect day on the beach with a true friend and the love of my life. i am also thinking about diving and the person i am on a boat and underwater. there's also the girl hanging by her knees on a rope swing in laos, body covered in paint and mud. i'm also the girl at vassar, sipping a coffee and debating an italian phrase out of james joyce's ulysses while the snow thunders down out the window. when will i figure out which girl is really me, or is it better to accept being the ubiquitous answer (e), all of the above?

oh, i'm just blogging so much today, aren't i?

thanks to swine flu, i have a lot more free time today than i normally do on tuesdays. my private lesson/make-up class students didn't come to school today, so i don't have class with them. instead, i just have my four normal classes. the first class on tuesday is the same group of kids that i teach second period on mondays. they drive me insane! there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to do with them, even according to their korean teacher. in bangkok, i taught 40 7-year-olds in a class and had very few problems. i could separate the kids who were causing problems because they only made up 10 percent of class. now, i have 5 little terrors and one amazing little girl. i'm doing everything i know to do but still feel like nothing is working. help, please!

as for the swine flu here in korea, it's incredibly widespread. some of my friends have already had their schools shut down. i may have a long weekend this weekend. we'll see what happens. as long as i'm still at school, i'm required to wear a mask while i'm teaching. if you have ever attended a class taught in a foreign language, you understand why it doesn't work out. it doesn't work out at all! while i was studying in siena and bologna, i used to constantly watch my teachers' lips. looking back on it, i may have freaked out the occassional art history professor...

j.g.

i still love the painting by john gallery that i tote around with me when i travel. i hung it in my rooms in bangkok, bali, koh phi phi, and now here in korea. i still always think about the painter and my conversations with him whenever i have been in chiang mai.



not all who wander are lost.

so true, so true.

my first winter in a long time

on sunday morning, winter rolled into korean. it is cold. it is windy. i do not want to be outside.

i didn't expect winter to arrive so swiftly. going out for halloween on saturday night was very pleasant, but i woke up on sunday to the complete opposite.

this is my second halloween in asia, and yet again, i could not quite figure out the whole costume thing. i tried to go shopping on satuday morning but quickly grew tired of walking around in the rain. i did find some great leggings, which i paired with a fuschia top and a sparkly mask. it wasn't exactly the best costume of the evening, but it was a little something. i went out in itaewan, one of the foreigner areas of seoul. itaewan reminds me of a cleaner version of khao sarn road. unfortunately, it is not filled with street carts full of tropical fruit and lousy pad thai (a result of the climate, i'm guessing...who would want to stand outside in the cold and rain selling kimchi? better yet, why would you want to eat just kimchi on the street?).

maybe it's because i came here in the fall or maybe it's because i really fell in love with the island, but i can't help but miss thailand. i miss the life i had there. i never thought i would say this, but life here is too easy. there's no constant battle to figure things out or to not be taken advantage of.i miss the simplicity of life there--living in tree house, for example.

perhaps it's just the beginning of winter blues. there's only one solution to that in korea: work and more work.