Well, here I am, not in Busan but in Jeonju, my new town. Tomorrow I start school, and I am appropriately nervous, despite the fact that this is my second year and I’m supposed to be used to being a teacher by now.

My new homestay family is very, very different from the Lees. Well, actually, that may not be true. They just don’t speak much English. For all I know, despite that one small difference they might share all the same dreams and passions as my previous host family. The apartment we live in is NICE. The real estate in my bedroom alone feels like about the same size as my house last year. My host dad runs the little supermarket attached to the apartment complex, and from what I can tell it is perhaps the most lucrative business in Korea. We’re in a ground-floor suite with it’s own separate entrance (very James Bond with the key coded entrance, except I am very Inspector Clouseau and can’t figure out how it works), and the apartment itself is huge—all shiny surfaces and hard edges and a FOUNTAIN next to the TV. I take it back. The Lees and the Chae’s are totally different. The strawberry phone and Lego castle that graced the Lee’s living room would be totally ostracized by the mahogany coffee table and flat-screen TV here at the Chae’s….they wouldn’t last a day.

OK, so last year I was a little worried about my privacy because there was a sliding window at the back of my room that opened onto the laundry room, where Fresa occassionally hung out doing laundry or organizing plastic shopping bags into categories. In my new room, though, the entire back wall is made up of sliding glass doors, which open onto the atrium-like hallway that runs along the back of the house, which itself opens up onto the quad made up of the four buildings in our apartment complex. So now I am separated by a mere TWO PANES OF GLASS and EMPTY AIR from an entire apartment complex full of people who occassionally hang out parking their cars, walking from one place to another and looking out windows directly facing my room. Eek! I might have to resurrect from my teenage years the practice of getting dressed while still under the covers.

So far the first few days at my homestay have gone pretty well. My host siblings are very sweet. My host brother is a second grader in middle school and my host sister is a second grader at my school. Today we went on an excursion to downtown Jeonju and she brought along her English notes. Very cute. Hm, I brought my host mom hibiscus tea from the Hyundai department store in Seoul and tried to pass it off as American-bought tea (which it very well could have been if I had had more room in my luggage…or had remembered to buy gifts….or weren’t such a delinquent). Anyway, it caused a great deal of puzzlement when it was first unwrapped….I was overwhelmingly reminded of those first long minutes of 2001: A Space Oddyssey. That is to say, my gift might as well have been a huge black slab for all of the sense it was making to my host mom. I eventually pointed out that it was tea, which relieved the confusion a little, but not entirely. She did finally open it up and add hot water, but after a few sips abandoned the whole thing. Actually, it’s really my fault. I meant to get the chamomile, but the department store was closing and I guess I grabbed the wrong one in the rush. Who drinks hibiscus tea?