OK, so I haven't posted in kind of a while, due mainly to the fact that I STILL CAN"T CONNECT MY COMPUTER TO THE INTERNET. Argh, I’m still on a crusade to get internet in my room. I asked my host family, and they said it would be no problem. But last Friday the technician came out and spent about an hour on his cell phone with his supervisor shouting “Macintoshee! Macintoshee!” The end result: no internet until I buy a “device.” Fresa keeps saying, “No problem, tomorrow we will buy the device.” What device, I’m not sure, but here’s hoping.
OK, but I HAVE been keeping track of things. So anyway, I just want to mention it cause I think there'e lots of times where I say "yesterday" when I'm actually talking about two weeks ago...

There’s no door-to-door garbage service in Gumi. Every evening Fresa walks the small amount of garbage and compostable food waste that’s accumulated over the course of the day to the big pile of garbage about four blocks away. I’m not sure if this is an officially designated garbage pile or if the location is just sort of communally agreed upon or what. I pass at least two other similar piles on my walk to school. As far as I can tell, no one has ever come by to actually collect any of this garbage...I’ll keep you updated if the piles start to grow uncontrollably, mutate, acquire intelligence and so on. (“And so on” happens to be one of my students’ favorite phrases. They’ll write things like, “the most important things in my life are my family, my friends and so on.” Is that really allowed? Another frequently heard phrase: “frankly speaking.” I think this must be some relic from whatever English textbook they use at Gumi HS, but it’s still a bit odd to have people tell me that “frankly speaking, class is over at four o’clock.”) Anyway, today’s walk to the dump was particularly thrilling. Fresa, Marina, White Star (dog) and I all made the trek. On the way back we were approached by a friendly-looking but somewhat mangy husky-type dog...one of the many, many stray dogs that loiter around my neighborhood. First of all, this was intimidating to Fresa and Marina because they are in constant fear that White Star, who is a rather small mutt appearing to be mainly Chihuahua in origin, will be attacked and eaten by other, slightly larger dogs. OK, but even after I swept White Star up in my arms, the stray dog KEPT FOLLOWING US, which really freaked Marina and Fresa out. At one point when they thought he wasn’t looking, the two of them just took off running around a corner. Of course, they were chased. When I made it around the corner, still clutching White Star, the stray was about halfway down the street but Fresa and Marina were nowhere to be found. I eventually found them standing stick still and silent in the doorway of an apartment building...I had to promise them that the dog was very far away and facing in the other direction before they would sneak out toward home or let me put White Star down.

OK, just a quick aside about White Star. This evening she got a little sock happy and distributed all the socks that Fresa had hung out to dry around the courtyard. I heard Marina yell this to her mom, who banged inside and grabbed...a long, flat piece of wood hanging on the shoe rack. I was seriously worried that White Star was gonna really get it, but when I got outside Fresa was bent over her just sort of firmly tapping with the stick...but she was really hollering. Fresa had propped White Star up on her hind legs and leaned her against the wall; Marina told me that she would stay in the position until someone took her down, and the worse her crime the longer she had to stay like that. White Star did look really put out. This was all pre-husky though...after White Star’s life had been threatened all was forgiven and much solicitous affection was showered on her.

Yesterday I had class all the way up to eight period...right before the students eat dinner (that’s right, dinner in the cafeteria). Anyway, that meant that I was leaving school just as the final bell rang. I swear, it was an experience right out of Dead Poet’s Society. Doors flew open, grinning boys streamed out, leapt down stairs, slid down banisters...I think I even saw some ecstatic twirling jumps. Me, I got thrown against the wall and had to wait until the hooting stampede had passed before I could make it down the stairs.

Hm...every day there’s this woman who circulates around the teacher’s office passing out drinks. These drinks are really, really vile. They come in bendy packaging like Capri-Sun and they taste like the fluoride rinse I had to use in the third grade. (Actually, that’s a weird memory...having to stand at the front of the class with the few other kids who had been signed up for fluoride and have to swish away for a minute and a half while everyone else stayed in their seats and just stared at us.) But she’s very sweet and always tells me so gently in Korean what she’s giving me, so when she rips one open, sticks in a straw and hands it to me I just can’t tell her I don’t want it. Anyway, for the past two weeks I’ve been absently propping these up inside my top desk drawer. So of course today when I went in search of paper clips what did I find? Twelve opened containers of juice that was gross to begin with and probably should have been refrigerated in order to stay even mildly tolerable. Ew. Why am I so stupid about stuff like that? It took me ten minutes to clean it all up, and now all of my pens are, I think irreversibly, sticky and a little foul smelling.

OK, so I just watched part of a Korean drama series with Fresa. This particular show stars a singer named Rain who people keep telling me is really famous in the US. (Anyone? Rain?) So Rain’s girlfriend in the show starts getting interested in this other guy, and in order to make her jealous, Rain MARRIES a different girl. Um....I guess I’ll keep watching to see how THAT works out.


Many of you probably are aware of the following: I am not a very clean person. I rarely (i.e. never) wash my hands before meals. I do not make showering a completely daily activity. My version of washing dishes tends more towards removing any immediately visible residue than actually cleaning. I don’t put Neosporin on my cuts. And I eat food off the floor. Even of disgusting, cheap restaurants. Even, on occasion, off the street (sorry, Caroline, I ate it while you weren’t looking...). It was these qualities that I believe once drove my mom to ask me, “Where did I go wrong raising you?” Ouch. Anyway, this is all just prelude to the fact that I have entered possibly the CLEANEST HOUSEHOLD IN THE ENTIRE WORLD...and I think I can lay claim to the global perspective, here. I mean, we’re talking DAILY household vacuuming—every morning at 9 am, regardless of whether or not I’m in bed, my host dad roars into my room with the vacuum cleaner, does a quick once over, and roars back out. We’re talking BOILING UNDERWEAR before laundering it in order to ensure 100% sanitization. Last night Fresa cornered me into a very lengthy discussion about the difference between sanitizing and disinfecting. After I brush my teeth, I hang my toothbrush in the family’s toothbrush box, which when closed emits an ultraviolet light and heats up in order to kill toothbrush bacteria. And yesterday Fresa gently suggested that when I come home I wash my feet and put on a new pair of socks in order to prevent athlete’s foot (which FOR THE RECORD I have never had). I’m just saying that it was a daily effort for me to meet the hygienic standards in the US, let alone the Lee household....if they ship me home, you’ll know why.

Last weekend Robin and I went to Daegu, the third largest city in Korea—and only half an hour from Gumi. It’s a tough reality, but one I have to face: Gumi is not much of a city. I mean, as last year’s ETA at my school pointed out, there’s a rice paddy in the middle of town. Also, probably a much higher corn and pumpkin garden to business ratio than you’re likely to find in, say, Seoul. Daegu, on the other hand, has got it all. Robin and I spent most of our time in the main shopping area, three streets that, as far as we could gather, are referred to as “Female Fox Road.” Anyway, right around there is a Kyobo bookstore (lots of English books, and not just Harry Potter and harlequin romances) and...A STARBUCKS. Over the course of one and a half days, I went four times. Oh man. Also, a movie theater showing a couple of American movies; we saw “The Lake House.” I’m sure that it’s incredibly cheesy, and I’m sure that Keanu Reeves was a total dork, but in my American-movie-deprived state, I rated it as just about the best movie of all time. It literally gave me chills. So, Daegu gets a big thumbs up. (Even counting the fact that the city is in all likelihood cursed. Both Robin and I lost our cell phones there...though both were recovered after returning to Gumi.)

Today Fresa and I went downtown to get lunch. Usually we walk, but today we took her little purple car because Fresa had to bring her soup pot. Why her soup pot? Well, Yong Ju has a tough week ahead of him, so Fresa wanted to make him a sustaining eel soup. After we ate lunch we went and got the pot, which we then took to the fish lady in the traditional Korean market that dominates a good part of downtown Gumi. (OK, so Fresa’s car is really tiny, so usually she’s able to call just about any place a parking spot. In Korea, if you want to park in a particular area, it’s totally cool to drive right up onto the sidewalk and hop on out; usually when we go anywhere she just wedges her car right up by the front door. Today, though, there were no spots in the little parking lot she uses downtown. Her solution? Park right behind someone else, but leave the car in neutral so that they can push her out of the way if they come back first. She said that she does this all the time, and she usually comes back to find her car on the opposite side of the lot from where she left it.) So Fresa asked the fish lady for two eels. The lady scooped about ten out of the tank, then weeded them down to the biggest two (about 16 inches long and probably four or five inches around). She then took them, writhing and gasping, into a dingy, low-ceilinged back room; Fresa and I followed her with the pot. After hosing them off, the woman grabbed one thrashing eel with each hand and threw them into the pot. One made a valiant escape effort, and got all the way onto the table, down to a chair and to the floor before the fish lady got a handle on it. Once the eels were in the pot, the fish lady doused them in sesame oil, added some water, clamped the lid shut and threw them on the stove. Omigod. For the first few minutes she had to use all of her strength to keep the lid down as the eels threw themselves around inside that pot. AHHHH. Anyway, once they calmed down/died, she left them to simmer and went to fill someone else’s order, which involved skinning and flaying a couple of live fish and leaving them bloody and gasping right in front of me. Then she gave me a pear and insisted that I eat it right there, while the fish were still staring at me and flapping their gills. Yum. Once the eels were done, she roped down the lid on the pot and we carried our purchase back to the car. Actually, they made the car smell pretty good.

On Thursday I met with all the first and second grade English teachers at school for our weekly discussion (they so use me for my native accent). Anyway, Mr. Kim had printed out a discussion topic for everyone, all about the rising divorce rate in Korea. So, we talked about that for approximately four seconds before he turned to me and asked, “So, why are there so many gays and lesbians in America?” Apparently Mr. Kim had been told that in some parts of the US, more than 50% of the population was gay or lesbian. So why, he wanted to know, is America so much gayer than Korea? Ummmmmm. So that was an interesting hour, if a little awkward. Things like, “In Korea, if people find out someone is gay, they always evade him.” On the other hand, it’s not like any of the teachers had actually evaded someone, because not a single one of them had met a gay person, ever. Sorry, I don’t want to sound like all Koreans hate gay people. In fact, the English teachers didn’t seem to at all. The entire hour, though, I continually had to stop myself from saying, “Yeah, people in America USED to think that...before they knew better.” Also, when I went to “The Lake House” I saw an add for some stupid bunch-of-nerdy-looking-fat-kids-defy-expectations-and-win-wrestling-tournament slapstick teenager comedy kind of movie. Anyway, today in the Korea Herald I read a synopsis, and it turns out that while it IS a stupid teenager comedy, the protagonist is a kid who desperately wants to be a woman, and turns to wrestling in order to make enough money for his sex change operation.