Bizarrely, I am at the moment surrounded by people muttering to themselves in English. I seem to have sat myself down among an army of English-learners. The woman to my left (quite fashionable in all black and a shocking orange silk scarf) is writing out long sentences in very beautiful, loopy script, while the two men to my right are involved in a near-violent argument over what seems to be the sentence, “This is the thing I bought yesterday,” both wielding expensive pens and occasionally jabbing pointedly at the tree-like diagram drawn on the paper in front of them. It's taken me about 10 minutes to buy my coffee, take off my gloves, open my laptop, etc. and still no resolution. I always feel a little awkward in these situations. Do I lean over and help them? No, they're probably arguing about some complex grammatical rule that I've never even heard of. Of which I've never even heard, that is. (I remember last year playing MadLibs with my students, a game that I thought would be pretty easy for them that turned into a nightmare both for them and for me. I guess the distinction between verbs and adjectives is a little tough for a lot of Korean students, given that in Korean they basically amount to the same thing. Everything's a verb. The woman is not beautiful. She beautifuls. The camera expensives. Got it? Yeah, me neither. Anyway, that made things tough to start with, but since instinct wasn't kicking in for the boys when it came to adjective/verb distinctions, they turned instead to book smarts, leading to questions like, “Can I use an instransitively passive helping verb here? What about defibrillated conjunctive inverse adjectives?” To which I would reply in a very teacherly way, “What?”)

The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (kind of an awkwardly long name, right?) where all this learning is taking place is mere steps away from the Ewha Subway station, the gateway to Ewha Women's University. It's a very hip, happening part of town...and it's my neighborhood while I stay in Seoul over winter break. I was actually a little shocked when the cab pulled up to my front door; I had been expecting the usual thing to happen, where you drive through some awesome-looking area and get all excited and then the taxi/car/bus/whatever keeps driving for 20 more minutes until you arrive at the boring, desolate place you'll actually be staying. Not so this time—I'm right in the middle. In the three-block radius around my place there are, I'd say, at least eight coffee shops. I'm in heaven. (Beyond the Starbucks, though, few of them are open before nine or ten o'clock. The coffee shop on the second floor of my building advertises a 30% early-morning discount...from 9am-12pm. Minjin tells me that this is because to Koreans coffee is a special-occasion kind of thing, not a life-giving daily elixir like it is in the States. You'll often see bars and restaurants advertising “coffee and hof” (the “hof” being beer as in hops, a very strange translation given that Koreans pronounce their f's like p's as it is) (and now I realize that I've used two sets of parentheses and it might take a Herculean effort to follow my train of thought), since coffee and beer are both considered to be social, once-in-a-while beverages. You might go to a cafe and half of your friends would have a beer (just one! drunkenness is reserved for real bars) and the other half would have a cappuccino. Maybe this confluence is the reason that on my 9am walks to school last year I would pass pairs of old men sitting in front of the GS Mart, an already half-empty liter of Hite beer between them. We're the same, these men and I of the daily morning double latté.) How can I afford to stay in such a great location? The answer is size, size, size. I'm in a go-shi-won, a hotel designed for that special breed of Korean student that does absolutely nothing except eat, sleep and study (i.e. all of them). When I first opened the door to my room I felt as though I had walked into a wall; the rooms are tiny. As tiny as you can imagine when you think about tiny. There's space in my room for a bed and a desk, but only if the foot of the bed is pushed under the desk; I can reach out and lay my hands flat against the side walls. There's a mini-fridge (which despite being set to level one has turned all of my yogurt into frozen yogurt), and a few shelves for my clothes and so forth. I love it! Actually, now that I've been there for a week it feels like plenty of room...as a kid I preferred sleeping in closets to sleeping in bedrooms, so this is like the realization of a lifelong dream. Susie and I went to Costco on Monday and I bought some kashi, tuna and yogurt—monthlong supplies of each. The go-shi-won provides rice and kimchee for free, so if I eat nothing but tuna and kimchee soup for the next five weeks I should save a ton of money. (Recipe: put some tuna and kimchee in a pot. Add some water. Boil for a while. Eat with rice. A few Korean cooking lessons with Minjin have completely disproved my notion that all Korean food is difficult to cook.) Of course, the American-style tuna I bought (never have Kirkland Signature products seemed like such a luxury) doesn't have a pop top, and there's no can opener in the communal kitchen, so I've been reduced to forcing the cans open by stabbing them with scissors. I try to do this when no one else is around. My only problem in my new place, really, is the rule of silence. I'm not allowed to have friends over or play music, or do anything that would distract the other girls in the go-shi-won from “only studying day and night.” That's no problem during the day, aside from the acute guilt I feel when I shift slightly on my bed and knock over my desk chair, or when I crinkle plastic wrap while trying to get at my new toothbrush; it's nighttime that I worry about. I have a habit of shocking people who sleep in the same room as me, waking them up in the middle of the night with declarations of “I'm OK! We're OK!” or “Those pants are hideous!” (that one got me in trouble). It's somewhat embarrassing, but what can I do? I talk in my sleep. So what's the good of tiptoeing every time I walk to the bathroom if I spend all night declaiming? Everyone must know it's me, too...who besides the foreigner would spend all night shouting in English? I have to stop writing about this, it's too terrible.

I'm horrified to note that high-heel, low-top leather booties have come into style among Korean girls my age.

Next week I start Korean classes at Ewha (four hours every morning, five days a week...I've bought three pristine new notebooks and a mechanical pencil in preparation). In the afternoons, I've been going to the Korea National Museum, where the head of the publications department (it is my impression somewhat reluctantly) agreed to take me on as an intern. Ah, I love working in big buildings, especially when I wear shoes that click when I walk. Nothing like tapping your way across a flagstone square toward your big shiny office building, feeling like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl after Sigourney Weaver breaks her leg (the only danger being that you will catch your reflection in one of those shiny glass panels and realize that you look more like Mrs. Whatsit, totally ensconced as you are in a lumpy hat and scarf and other sensible winter clothing). The offices are attached to the rear of the museum, which is itself absolutely monumental and gorgeous...though once you get past all of the lobby photographs and ficus trees and well-turned out security guards and through into the actual working part of the building everything turns from marble expanses to crumbly beige drywall and cubicles. My boss wears tortoise-shell spectacles and the day I met him had on a red plaid shirt, a corduroy jacket with red leather elbow patches and a green silk scarf tied niftily around his neck. He doesn't speak any English, so our entire first meeting was carried out in Korean (mostly him talking and me saying “OK”), but fortunately one of the other women in the office is fluent in English (and speaks in a beautiful British accent, AND gave museum tours to Kofi Annan, Barbara Bush and Princess Di) so I have someone who can answer my questions. (I love listening to Korean people who have learned British English. Last year I went to the Kyobo bookstore in Daegu all the time; the man there in charge of buying foreign books had studied in London and his conversation was peppered with “Brilliant!”s and “Ah, indeed!”s.) My “mission” is two-fold...I have to go over the English version of the website and make sure everything makes sense and all the English is right (a job that is made a lot longer by the “100 Highlights” section, which gives little descriptions of 100 of the most notable things in the museum), and also to help edit the English version of the new catalog. So it's art history and copy-editing and a little writing...I feel really lucky, this job is perfect for me. Yessss.