+ I saw Choi Hyun Moon for the first time in nearly a year! We just happened to choose the same dolsotbap restaurant in Gyeryeong on Thursday night. I’d actually been thinking about him quite a bit lately…I really miss him! No one just chats to me like he used to. I met his daughter for the first time ever and she was cute but very shy around the foreigner. I thought she was going to cry when I reached out to touch her. Hopefully we will rekindle our friendship before I leave. This seems to be a good start.
+ Dinner out with my co-teacher and Kwon Suk Ja. They are two of my favorite teachers—both so nice and interesting (plus, they have the best English of just about anyone). We had a fabulous meal, too—dolsotbap, which may be my favorite of all time (dolsotbap is a rice/bean mixture served in a hot stone pot, generally with a raw egg to mix with the hot rice and loads of vegetable side dishes). This particular restarant served at least 15 different side dishes and two soups. It was a great way to start a weekend and certainly a vast improvement over what I’d planned for myself—probably an apple and rice cakes on the train.
- Forgetting my passport. Well, not even thinking of it in the first place, until we were over an hour away from Hongsan. It never even occurred to me to pack it and since I no longer take my wallet around, I had no ID for my flight except my international youth travel card, which is not official in any way. I was really afraid I wouldn’t be allowed to board. Luckily, Susie had a copy of my passport and that was enough to get me on. Actually, no one batted an eye at my poorly photocopied ID on either leg of the journey. Security here is ridiculous. As Janaki said, no Korean would ever be allowed to fly from, say, Washington to Chicago with only a photocopied passport. Here…no big deal!
+ Photo shoots. The fun started Thursday night, when Janaki, Susie, and I took a ton of silly pictures in Susie’s apartment with various accessories. The next day was, unfortunately, spent traveling and workshopping, but we picked up the camera again on Saturday while on the sightseeing tour. We visited some gorgeous places—first the Jeju folk village, which really was just a great photo backdrop (I didn’t get anything cultural out of it, I admit), and then Sunrise Peak, a stunning seaside crater. Unfortunately, I don’t have the pictures yet—I was a lazy photographer and left it up to everyone else all weekend.
+ Poetry. I composed a poem on my way to school Thursday. A bad poem, but I wrote it in my journal, anyway. It is a list of my favorite things and goes as follows:
Flowers blooming
Mountains looming
Fragrant brewing
We came across it while thumbing through my journal in boredom on the bus ride back to dinner Saturday afternoon. Initially it was scorned, but in the end it inspired a massive poetry composition session among we extendees. I have three pages of little verses written in my journal. Some of them are really funny and creative. I’m surrounded by some amazing people! And it was interesting, too, to hear a bit more about other people’s experiences in Korea. Different things arise in poetry than in typical casual conversation.
+ Good food. And plenty of it. I ate SOOO much this weekend, and a good portion of it was absolute crap—brownies and oreos and ddeok and sugar sugar sugar. Ugh. It’s disgusting to think of it. But I come across this kind of food so infrequently—a little indulgence didn’t seem entirely out of order. But I think this contributed to my general feeling of being out-of-sorts. I really thought I wouldn’t be hungry for DAYS, but then I burned it all on Hallasan and now I feel much better.
- General feeling of yuckiness. My sickness re-emerged…I wasn’t really able to sleep well all weekend. The first night I was too anxious about my passport dilemma, and then the second night I had bad dreams, the third night I was just anxious in general, as I have been lately, and last night I had to wake up so early to catch the first bus back to Buyeo. I am going to be a mess this week.
+ Good times with good friends. I’ve had much better conference experiences this year than last year. With a much smaller pool of friends, I don’t feel as much pressure to socialize with everyone. Before, there were so many people I wanted to talk to and not nearly enough time to do it. Now, I just hang with Janaki and Colleen and Susie and occasionally other extendees and it’s just a good reunion. I’ve actually seen quite a bit of them lately—that weekend in Seoul, and then Jeju, and this weekend North Korea. Brushing up on social skills is always good. I’ve managed to not make a single friend among this year’s ETAs, but that’s okay…I’m not lonely.