Saturday, May 9, 2009

Market Day!

Well, it's Saturday, and it's beautiful outside. I've just been doing my chores around the house, but now it's time to hit the gym and then the market on the way back. Need to pick up some fresh veggies, eggs, anything else I can find that looks interesting.

So, I guess there are a lot of pine trees in the surrounding area here. Like, all the little mountains, which pretty much crisscross all over Korea (and completely encircle our little farming valley) are covered in them. And I figure I've never really been around enough of them to notice how absolutely pervasive and annoying their pollen (is that what you call it? ha, botany. right...) is. I vacuumed our classroom out on Wednesday, right? Then, it was so nice out, we opened up the windows on Thursday during class, and after a couple hours the floor was coated in this thin dusting of yellow pine-tree mess. So, apparently opening up the windows in springtime isn't such a good idea?

Well, naturally i'd forgotten all about this by this morning when I went to hang up a load of laundry out on my terrace... window's open, sun's shining in, clothes are hanging up -- sounds like a happy and effective set of circumstances right? Well, that would be true, and gloriously so, if it weren't for the stupid pine-smegma floating all over the place, so now my freshly-cleaned clothes all have weird little patterns of yellow-stripes where they were hanging or pelted by wind gusts or whatever. Oops. I mean, it's not a huge deal. I'll just wait for them to dry and ya know, brush them off... it's just kind of a pain in the ass.

Brief nightlife recap: Wednesday night I went out with Brigitte, who found me via (google => this blog! awesome) the internet in janghowon. We met up after she got done at the hogwon, or private school, and had a few beers. It was fun yo -- let's do it again soon! Thursday night my coteacher took me out for a traditional Korean meal. I'm blanking on the name (it was pretty long), but roughly translated it comes out to "spicy little octopus grilled on a flat metal tray." With veggies of course -- onions, spinach (or more probably some sort of seaweed), garlic, and the leaves from some sort of daisy which get tossed on after everything else is mostly cooked and add a nice fresh herby bitterness to all the spice. It was really yummy actually, the grilled octopus has that chewy consistency but tastes amazing. I'd definitely go back. Oh, and of course we had soju with the meal and went out for a couple beers afterwards! Ended up talking about a lot of linguistics and educational theories and whatnot, but that was cool because I'm a huge nerd who likes that kinda shit. Shocking, right? Ha...

Last night I stayed in and finished reading Ken Follett's sequel to "Pillars of the Earth" (which is one of my very few favorite books... top 3, at least), "World Without End." I'd always felt a little sceptical about wanting to read a sequel. Well, it's complicated -- the first was so amazing that even though I've managed to lose myself in that world several times, I kinda just thought there'd be no way he could create something worthy of that book. It seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of epic creation. I'm happy (or thrilled... no -- ecstatic) to say I was wrong. Freaking awesome. Stop-what-you're-doing-and-go-buy-it-right-now kind of awesome. Anyway, that was me last night. And I've already told you about today, so I guess we're caught up.

Now, in future news, we don't have any classes coming to the Global Center for the next couple of weeks! Which means I'll have lots of time to ... um, knit, or something. I mean, no, certainly not that, but I should find something more productive to do than screw around online all day. We'll see. Monday I still have classes at the elementary school, and Tuesday I have the after school classes. But Wed-Thur nothing, and Friday is sports day (Again?! Didn't we just do that? Anyway) and apparently I'm playing soccer and volleyball with the teachers. Or something. I'll have to check and get back to ya.

Finally, in more distant future news, the Cubs make the playoffs again but somehow manage to get swept out of the best-of-5 opening round series in only 2 games, setting a new standard in playoff ineptitude and all-around chokiness.

Wow, cheap shot to end it? Really Sean?

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