Engrish!

I mentioned before that I was going to eventually do a post on Engrish, and here it is.

To refresh your memory (we'll pretend you've read everything I've ever written religiously, of course), it is rather cool here, Japan, and probably other Asian countries to have things written in English. Think of the prevelence of kanji tattoos that people have in the US - same kind of thing. However, being that a vast majority of the population can't read what it says, it tends to not make much sense. This is known as Engrish.

(As an aside I read an article once on how a Japanese tattoo artist in the US was tattooing the wrong thing on people. On a girl's stomach he tattooed "Insert General Tso's chicken here" and on a big burly guy that wanted strength or some other macho man thing on his arm, he tattooed I like to wear women's underwear or something like that. Kind of funny, if you think about it. Internet people, internet. If you must follow this trend, find what you want it to say on several different sites, then take it to someone who knows the language and ask them what it says without telling them to make sure you've got it right. Geez.)

So I bring you my Engrish collection thus far. Some are better than others, and they're not all strictly Engrish - I added ones of signs and stuff that I thought were just written interestingly which could be Engrish or could be cultural. Oh, and the best Engrish of all time is at the end, so keep reading. I've retyped what things say in case it's not easy to tell from the smaller pictures - all quotes are, of course, exactly what the original says. ;)

First, we have a full wall sign outside a bar:

Can one ever remember love..It's like trying to summom up the smell of rose in acellar. tou might see arose, but never the perfume.

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but look together in the same direction.

In the alley by my apartments:

After Childbirth & Fatness Clinic

I don't know if it's Engrish, or if they're just blunt like that.

On a shirt:

Celebrate Space will have opportunity talk with international

Yes, talk with international badly though. :)

The trashcan in my bathroom:

I was so happy when I knew that friend is very valuable mean.

Yes, and it makes me feel better everyday to throw my garbage into it.

Not really Engrish at all:

The n just wore off...but I thought the fact that something said "ew heaven" funny.

A pencil sharpener/eraser combo (that refused to take a decent picture):

I'm a good Magicion! I Can Make Happy Everyone~!! Like That~!!

In my subway station:

Warning: Steps Ahead

Not Engrish per se, but notice the location of the sign...I think at that point I'm well aware that there are steps ahead.

On a hoodie (taken with my camera phone. Must remember to always have camera when I go shopping here):

naughty Beagle

That naughty boy will be punished because he keeps camping about to people

Is there a beagle camping version of Mario I don't know about? Did I ever mention how copyright infringement really doesn't seem to exist here?

On a store window (also taken with my camera phone, which really doesn't help trying to read it):

BANC is producted in the early 2000. It is a fruit, which was made by the home playlists and from United states of Kingdom. and guarenteed by huge numbers of mania. and entertain cutter sense and a lovely colorful logo.

On the subway:

Seats for the handicapped, old, weak, pregnant woman, or accompanied with baby

Another probably not Engrish, but I like how they say those seats are reserved for the weak. Also, notice the really deformed shape of the pregnant woman's stomach. She should get an ultrasound.

And the best Engrish of all time, on a t-shirt someone bought (I would have bought one myself):

call-to-arms for all chunkily-penised boys to do her right and do her good - still mattered.

I think the pink ballet slippers really help to get that message across as well.

So that's what I have so far. Hope you have enjoyed. :)

Being 28 and 26 at the same time - Happy New Year!

Today (Monday) is the Lunar New Year...ah, four day weekend. :)

It's a big holiday here, and everything today is dead and probably closed. Being it is a big holiday, every teacher at my job got a nice gift from the school.

Isn't it pretty? I was excited to open it and see what was inside...

...and was surprised to see four cans of tuna fish and six cans of spam. Control your jealousy!

Did you know spam came in a blue and a black version? Perhaps it's a Korean thing. While my dad is a fond consumer of spam, in my impoverished little life I have managed to never have to eat it. Part of me thinks I should try it for the cultural experience - it's a common house warming gift here and I am curious as to what makes the black container different from the standard blue container. But...it's spam.

I'm also a little worried about the tuna. You would think it would be normal tuna, but it makes an impressive sloshing sound when you shake it and I looked and it doesn't expire until the end of 2013. That seems a little long for tuna, or any food really. It expires after the spam even. I may end up leaving the whole thing as a welcome gift to the next person who moves into my apartment.

Anyway, with today being New Years I figure it would be a good time to bring up Korean age. By legal standards, today I turned 28. Twenty-two days after I return to the US, I legally turn 27. Makes perfect sense, right?

Here's how it works. In Korea, China, Vietnam, and potentially all Asian countries (I haven't looked), you are born at one year old instead of zero, like we are. Then everyone in the entire country becomes legally one year older on the New Year. This is where I think the main problem lies - you turn a year older regardless of when you were born.

Let's take the screaming baby I live next to. (I think it must be teething or has colic, because it has been hollering non-stop for the last week). The baby was born not long after I got here, around three or four months ago. Today it turned 2. So after being alive for three months, s/he is two years old. However, a baby born today is one, and will turn two next year on the New Year. So we'll have a 1 year old that is two and a 1 year, 3 month old that is three.

I had this in my kindergarten class. It was a class of six year olds...which really meant five year olds. One of the kids was one of the late year births though, so he was really only four. He was expected and taught at the same level as the other kids, because they are all seen as six. He, understandably, had the worst handwriting of them all, since he didn't have as much motor skills as they did.

It's odd, and I don't quite understand why they do it, but another reason why the holiday is such a big deal.

So today I'm 28, and in two months I'll be 27. Now there's something I wasn't planning on experiencing in my life. ;)

Holy frozen hair follicles, Batman!

Normally I take a shower at night and sleep on my hair wet. It takes the least amount of effort, and I'm not big on wasting valuable sleep time with personal grooming in the morning.

However, I didn't take a shower last night and so had to take one this morning. It happens. I walked to school with my wet hair, since it's a five minute walk, no big deal.

Well, I'm right at the building and I go to tuck my hair behind my ears, and it is crunchy and feels like I put a bunch of gel and/or hairspray in it.

My hair froze!

I didn't think hair could freeze, but it was a toasty 19-20˚ on my way there, so it makes logical sense, but still. I tried to take a picture of it standing straight out when I lifted it at the base, but it defrosted before I could get a good one. It only took about a minute to defrost at least. :)

Almost being deported, Round 2

One of those days became one of those weeks. I give you the aftermath:

Ramen and chocolate. Gets me every time. Considering I told my coworkers Friday I wish I drank because I would have me a stiff drink after work, this isn't that bad. Both of those piles are from more than one sitting, so not bad at all. :)

.

Okay, story time.

.

I told my boss Tuesday that I was planning on leaving at six months, since it seemed relevant since they could be potentially firing me and all and I figured it would be pretty bitchy to spring it on them in a month after all of this.

So they said that I could maybe go home February. That's the end of the school year here and parents expect new teachers in March, so it works out better for them. They said I wouldn't have to pay back my plane ticket here, which is the only reason why I was saying March myself. I'm not complaining.

Well, Thursday I get a call from Mr. Park, the hubby of the lady I worked for. He said that immigration would like to talk to him and all the foreign teachers at 10. This really confused me because he had woken me up and it was 10:15, but it turns out he meant the next day, on Friday. He asked if I would come and I said I had to ask my boss, and he just said okay. The whole thing seemed like an optional request.

I told my boss about it when I got in to work and she said I didn't have to go. At the end of work she told me I did have to go and to meet her at 9 the next morning. -sigh-

I hear from my American boss that night that Tina (my Korean boss) told her that not only was it not optional, but if I didn't go I would be arrested. If I went without Tina, I would be deported, as it shows the school doesn't want me anymore, so I should grovel a bit the next day. (Why are they giving her more details than me, is what I want to know.)

I leave my apartment and get a call from Tina that she's having car issues and will pick me up at 9:30, so I got to kill a half hour at school. We get to immigration at 10:15 and this time got to go to the adjudication unit. There's one other foreign guy in the waiting room, and so we wait. (As a side note, I would expect to see a lot more foreigners in the immigration building. I see more when I go to Itaewon, but then again there could be foreigners from other Asian countries I suppose and I wouldn't know the difference in passing. They don't quite have the beacon the rest of us do.)

The guy goes back first, and it's in this cubicle so I can overhear a good amount of what is being said. He was alone, and I heard him tell them that he didn't have a job right now. He also worked for them a month or longer - I couldn't quite make out how long but much longer than me. I then hear them talking about his exit order and how he has to leave within a week. They call us back while he is getting his stuff together and the guy hands him his penalty fee, that he has to pay today before he can leave the building, of which he said he didn't have the money for. I'm not sure what's going to happen to him, but his total punishment? Deportment and a ₩2.4 million fine. (Current exchange rate has that at $1,783, but to give you an idea my original monthly salary was ₩2.1 million, and is currently ₩1.4 million. After all the bills and stuff are taken out, I get almost exactly ₩1 million a month. Which is about $750. Sadness).

So then it is my turn. Tina has to fill out a statement saying that the school still wants to keep me as a teacher, which I believe is the only thing that kept them from deporting my ass. My penalty is much smaller, since I worked a whopping six hours. My fine? ₩1 million. Yup, a month pay for my ₩200,000 I earned.

Same deal as the other guy - I have to pay before I can leave the building. After I do though, the whole thing is done with and it is expunged from my record. I asked my boss if I could get an advance on my paycheck, which we were getting paid the next day (or maybe Monday because it's a weekend, but close enough) since I took all my cash out of my bank account Monday in case Immigration decided to seize all my assets. She called her boss to see if they could, and then gave me an odd answer.

She pointed out that I was leaving in February (of which I had to provide a letter to the school that morning saying I would be leaving then and I'm wondering if they would have hung me out to dry if I hadn't planned on leaving soon, since she asked me if I had the letter when she was writing out her statement). The penalty is a whole paycheck, and then I wouldn't really have any money left and I have to pay my flight home. Yes Tina, I know and doesn't my life suck? Then she told me that I had an option of not paying the penalty and instead choosing to be deported, in which I would only have to pay my airfare. I would not be able to leave the building and she would have to go home and pack my stuff for me, but that was an option.

Which required pondering. The plane ticket is a paycheck unto itself (why are one-way flights nearly the same as a round trip???) so the difference of staying and working the extra two months would be one additional pitiful paycheck. I called my American boss and my mom (can't wait to see that phone bill this month from that). The thing that bothered me the most was that I wouldn't be able to pack my own stuff, and the fact that my money was very well hidden in my apartment...and Tina's English is not the best in the world.

Obviously, I decided to stay, but there was a few moments of serious debate. It probably didn't help that I was low on sleep and then after all this still had to go teach for six hours. :)

So that's it. The fine is paid, I'm not getting a paycheck, or at least nothing worth noting, this month, and Immigration and I should be over and done with.

On a plus side, my mom spent her panicking hours waiting for me to get home from work and give her a call looking for plane tickets, and found me ones cheaper than I had found myself. Congratulations Mom, you have now officially become a full internet user. May I recommend CheapAir.com, where I have booked a ticket home for the grand total of $409. (My best previous was over $900). That helps a lot.

So I officially leave on March 1st. The really funny part? I leave at 6:45pm and get in at 9:15pm, with two layovers. Gotta love the time difference. :)

Sadly, this officially means no Japan though - that was going to be a whole paycheck at least. Actually, the yen is over the dollar right now so closer to two paychecks. Which is probably a good thing because I really want to see Japan, so I'll go when I can really see it instead of a week of an uber-budget trip. I do still get to do my overnight stay at a Buddhist temple, so that's cool. Plus with not budgeting for Japan means I don't have to live like a pauper for the next month and a half...and get to buy cool souvenirs too. :)

So, there is my interesting experience. I've now worked in a foreign country, been questioned by Immigration in a set-up similar to a bad cop movie, and almost been deported two times in a week. It may not have been exactly what I was expecting, but coming to work here has definitely been an experience.

:)

Dogs and Deportation

Monday marked the end of my week of vacation and the return to work. Blech. It also turned into one of those days.

Just before I left for work I got a call from my mom - her dog got hit by a car and died. She lives alone and is on disability, so it's not just a dog, it's a full on member of the family. I'll miss him, he was cute, if a little "special" at times. Bye, Chance.

Then I get to work and find out I might be getting deported. Yup.

Here's what happened: I went looking for additional employment, because with the decrease pay from not wanting to teach five year olds and the exchange rate dropping like mad, I'm pulling in at most $1000 a month before bills. Sucky. So I have been told that while private lessons are always illegal, you can work a second job if your first job says it is okay.

I found a job online, sent my resume, and they called and set up an interview for that night. I went and they asked me to work the next day. I did for a couple of hours and then again the next day tutoring some kids in math who want to study in the States. I was supposed to work two days later, on Sunday, editing and helping a kid with college admission essays, but emailed them and told them I couldn't work for them anymore. The place felt really sketchy and didn't sit well with my instincts, as well as it took me an hour and a half to get there and the woman was a really demanding shrew.

I get a call from the company on Sunday out of nowhere - I worked for them mid-December - and they tell me that immigration came when they weren't there and took a bunch of documents, including the one I had filled out. They told immigration I had never worked for them, just came to see it and left, and to tell them the same or I would be deported. So when I got to work the next morning and my Korean boss told me immigration called and asked me if I've ever worked for this place and I said no. I talked to my American boss soon after that and she agreed to keep denying it since the company lied to immigration and I was paid in cash and all.

So then it turns out I had to go to immigration that day and could get deported. I went with my Korean boss, who didn't speak to me at all for the half hour drive nor for the twenty minutes we were waiting for a parking spot. Then we go in and the floor we got off on says "Investigation Unit." They lead us to this room that has a heavy metal door with a bar across it that can bolt me in, bars on the windows, and the overhead lights aren't on. (There was enough light from the windows to see, but the atmosphere was a nice set up). The translator they gave me has English about as good as my boss at best, which is not much better than my Japanese...that I studied for two years about eleven years ago. This helps the situation, of course.

They ask if I recognize the picture of the lady, and they were shifting through an inch thick pile of papers off all these other foreign teacher's paperwork. Then they asked if I had taught mathematics, and I said they wanted me to but I didn't. (Technically, true). Then I'm told that if I'm lying I will face confinement (I assumed prison) and deportation, and that the lady told them I worked for them on these two days for two hours each day. So I told them that they called me on Sunday and told me to lie to them about if I had worked for them or not and then came clean. I then had to write out a statement and was told that I would not have to leave the country but would have to pay a penalty and could not leave the country until I paid it and the investigation was over. Now, this other guy talked in Korean for a good half hour and that was the extent of what I was told, so who knows what the hell is going on. I asked my boss when we got back in the car if that meant I wasn't getting deported and she said she didn't know, and then didn't talk to me again. It would have been nice for her to tell me what was going on.

On the plus side I made my decision a week or two ago that I'm coming home early, so getting deported didn't worry me as much as it might have other people. I really hate teaching and loathe going to work everyday, and this has been a very long three months. I think I would suffer through it if I was making more, but I made more than this while a student and working part time, which is not worth staying in a job I hate. I was planning to come back at the end of March at six months, but now who knows if it'll be even sooner.

It's been an interesting experience at least, right? I'll keep you guys posted.

Korean Folk Village

Greetings to anyone who's stumbled here via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. By far my favorite blog - glad to know I'm not the only person who loves me some trashy romance novels, and the cover snark makes me bust a gut every time. (And I won a book this week, so bonus.)

Anyway, today I went to the Korean Folk Village. Sorry, probably not as entertaining as Penis Park, but hey, there's not much of that around here.

The Folk village wasn't too far a way - six subway stops and then a free shuttle bus to the park with a paid ticket. A frickin' plush shuttle bus, I must say, as you can see to your right. (More pictures and videos over on Flickr).

The village itself is set up just like an old village, with not an excessive amount of order to it - life-size replicas of houses with other replicas or demonstrations inside them. A good portion of the signs were in Korean, English, and Japanese though, so that was nice. Most of the rooms in the houses were blocked off, so you looked in but didn't go in. Some of them you could go in and they had people in them, such as a woman spinning thread. The thing that really surprised me though was that we had to take our shoes off to go in the replica houses! I get taking them off in houses and restaurants, but these aren't even real houses. There were also some gazebos and platforms you could climb ladders onto and they had signs that told you to take your shoes off as well. The fact that it was probably at most 30˚F all day made the shoe removal seem even more illogical.

(Yes, I am frozen. I felt like I did when I went and played in the snow the first time last year - numb yet painful all at the same time).

There were also shows. First was a Farmer's music and dance, which included drums and guys with ribbon hats. The farmers seem to have been pretty spry in the day, and the whole thing was pretty cool.

Then there was a seesaw performance, where these two girls jumped on either end of a seesaw and propelled each other a good ten feet in the air. This was followed by a tightrope guy, who seems to have been very funny as everyone kept laughing. It also means he talked a lot which made it kind of boring, but he would walk and then jump down and bounce off the rope on his butt and stand up again, kind of like you would do on a trampoline. He was also probably at least fifty, so pretty impressive.

Next were the equestrian feats. Now, as someone who has fallen off a horse every time but once she's ridden one, I found these quite impressive. They were bouncing off the ground and back onto the saddle, they were flipping upside down, they were getting off, running alongside like the horse was getting away, and hop back on.

Typically after that there would be a traditional wedding, but it is only done March through November, so no such luck. It would be interesting to see the place during March, when I'm not getting frostbite and everything isn't dead and the streams aren't frozen. It was cool, but it made life back then seem a lot more depressing than it probably normally would. There was a lot of the park that I didn't see, so I might go again when things are alive.

My next specific cultural outing probably won't come until February, when I'll be doing an overnight stay in a Buddhist Temple. I'm really excited about that one...well, minus the 3-4:30am dawn devotional chanting. Is 3am dawn anywhere? Crazy monks.

:)

Haesindang Park...aka Penis Park

When I was in high school I asked my Biology II AP teacher if the plural of penis was penises or peni. He was a cool guy who was pushing 70 if not already there, and so let us get away with a lot because he was past the retirement age, and thus didn't seem to care so much. He told me, after a little smile, that it was penises because the word is Latin, not Greek. I'm still disappointed because I think peni is much more fun to say, but alas, not proper English.

Yesterday I went on a journey to Heasindang Park. Now, first let me note that Korean culture is very conservative. Couples don't do any more than hold hands, and that's been a development in the last few of years. Women just started wearing tank tops last year, and those are more like shirts without sleeves - no spaghetti straps or anything. (Although the booty short is apparently okay for some reason...perhaps the knee high boots counters it?) That makes this park so much more interesting.

Legend has it (paraphrased from the handout I got at the park) that there was this beautiful virgin girl that liked to gather seaweed on a rock called Aebawi in the sea. One day her fiance took her out to the rock so she could collect some seaweed, and came back to the village. When he went to get her later, a storm had come and he couldn't get out to sea, and she drowned (statue of him calling to her and her on the faraway rock on the right). After that, the village couldn't fish worth a damn and blamed it on the lady being (justifiably) pissed, so they had a bright idea to appease her spirit by erecting -snicker- wooden phalluses to console her bitter soul. After they did, viola, the fishing became good again, and so they continue, to this day, to offer phalluses on the first full moon of the lunar year.

And thus we have a park full of wooden penises. In the middle of Korea, of all places.

So there are a lot more pictures, which you can look at over at Flickr. They're pretty interesting. It ended up being an all day adventure to get there though. Cheri, Sarah, her two friends visiting from the States, and I met up at 7am to get on the subway, arriving at the bus terminal a little after 8. Then we hopped on the bus to Samcheok and three hours later got off...at the wrong stop. It was supposed to be an express bus, meaning it didn't stop anywhere else, and everyone else got off there too. So we waited for an hour and got on the next bus for the 20 minutes to the right place (picture of us leaving the wrong station on the left). Then we opted to pay for a taxi instead of wait the hour for the city bus to the park...Sarah sat on my lap and the taxi driver pointed out several times that there isn't supposed to be five people in a taxi (it was a $25 fare, we weren't taking 2 taxis), arriving at the park at 2pm. Then after we saw the sights we froze to death at the bus stop for about ten minutes. The bus must have been running really late, because it came an hour earlier than it should have. This got us back in town with ten minutes to spare for the next bus to Seoul, and we then caught the subway home and got back to Sanbon at about 10:30pm.

It was a bit long of a trip for what it was, but it was fun and now I've seen the Sea of Japan (or the East Sea, according to Koreans. They don't like Japan so much). I'm saddest at the fact that the gift shop isn't open in the winter, because you all would be getting penis souvenirs.

Today we're taking a break to recuperate, but tomorrow we're going to the folk village. It won't be as visually entertaining as the pictures from this trip, but it looks like it's a pretty good cultural learning experience, and we all know how big of a nerd I am. :)

Dr. Fish

Here is something I did back in the first couple of weeks I was here, but haven't posted it yet. Dr. Fish is a place in town where you can go and get coffee and such, as well as gelato. Then, with the purchase of something, you can pay a couple bucks extra for the Dr. Fish experience (I think it was $3 each). After enjoying our gelato, Gayle, Heather, and I had our experience.

First you wash your feet, as the lovely Heather is demonstrating.

Then you put them in here.

That's right, with a bunch of little fishes.

Then the little fishes eat the dead skin off of your feet. (Note my feet are the only ones that don't hit the bottom. Yeah, go ahead, laugh. Alas, I have found that Koreans aren't as short as you would think.)

See my cool, calm, smile? Not how I looked through most of it.

Not only am I not a big feet person, but it tickled like you wouldn't believe, not to mention feeling really bizarre. That, and the fish really liked my feet, so I got nibbled on more than everyone else. My non-arches were especially popular.

Gayle freaked out the longest, for a good 12 of the 15 minutes...and I caught it on video, of course! I've tried flipping them over but it's not working, so tilt your head sideways. This was after we had already been doing this for ten minutes - I only freaked out for the first two minutes or so, and not nearly so bad. Impressed? If you notice she barely has any fish around her feet either because she was next to the filter, whereas I was the fish buffet main course. In the second video, Heather is counting to five for Gayle to keep her feet still...and my laughter can be heard in both. I'm a good, compassionate friend. :)

My feet didn't end up feeling too different after the fact, but all in all it wasn't bad after the first couple of minutes.

Keep on the lookout for more updates this week - I have a week of vacation and am planning to see a couple of sights, including a really interesting one that you aren't expecting!

Freezing and Korean Medicine

I know I talked about freezing to death once already, with lovely pictures of snow. Truth is that was a cold spell and it's been warm in the 40s. (I just wrote warm and 40s in the same sentence, and I'm not referring to Celsius...gods help me...)

Well, friendly supervisor texted to let us know that the next two days are supposed to be among the coldest of the winter and to bundle up. Excellent timing and all, since I'm sick.

Alas, it's true. I didn't fight it off, I got sick. I think it's a cold, though I have no snot in my nose whatsoever (bonus) but I do have a lovely cough. It's been a week and my voice is still funny. I have yet to return to man-voice, but have been pretty consistent in the hoarse voice I have right now. Some say it's sexy, though one of my coworkers said I sound like a 45 year old chain-smoker. Actually, it seems to be females think sexy and men and children think horrid, which works out pretty well for me.

I haven't gone to a doctor and I doubt I will - the medical profession here frightens me a bit. For one, all of the other foreign teachers have been to the doctor (as we've all gotten sick), and whenever they come back they end up with 5 prescriptions. Ted has had bronchitis for a month and they just keep giving him sets of five pills.

As you might already know, I'm not a big fan of medicine. We over-medicate like crazy and it's creating the mutant antibiotic resistant little bugs we now have today. I only take the medications that I think are absolutely necessary, and things like pain killers are not among them (one of Ted's five pills).

The other thing is that here you don't get your prescription in individual bottles with a nice list of side effects and warnings. Nope, the pharmacist puts the pills you need to take at one time in a nice little parchment pouch and you get them that way. While this is convenient, you have no idea what the pills are, what weird side effect you may have, nor have they been checked against any other meds you might be on. Being I've had a prescription once that had a listed side effect of turning your urine orange or red, sometimes those are important. (It did too - bright Kool-aid orange. Imagine waking up to that one morning if you didn't know it was possible as a side effect).

On another note, I'm not impressed with their medical ideas in other areas. In order to get your Alien card you have to do a medical exam that includes a blood test, hearing test, chest x-ray for TB, blood pressure, and a pee test. First was the blood test, where the woman didn't wear gloves! That's right, no gloves, nor handwashing before me or between me and the person afterwards (I at least got a new needle). The lady who serves me free samples at Emart wears gloves, but not the lady taking your blood. Then there was peeing in the cup. Now I've peed in many cups in my day, and they are lovely plastic things that are sealed and sterile, come with a screw on lid, and usually have some discreet way for you to move it from one place to another. The cup they gave me could have been a drinking cup - hence I took the picture of it. That and you walk down the hallway to the bathroom and back with it, out and uncovered like that.

So, anyway, I won't be going to a doctor unless I have to. The fact that it'd be all translated through my not-quite-fluent-in-English boss probably doesn't help either. She mistranslated to my supervisor that she had blood in her urine when she really needed to do a urine test. Oops.

Well, that was a nice tangent/rant thing. Back to my original complaining on dying, yet again- here is my forecast for the next two days:

Friday:
Windy
High: 24˚F
Low: 13˚F

Saturday:
Mostly Sunny
High: 28˚F
Low: 14˚F

!!!!

Do you see the part where it says High, and then were the number begins with a 2? A 2! And the low, that number begins with a 1, but it's not 3 digits like it's supposed to be. It's also nice enough to tell me that tomorrow at 12pm, when it is 22˚F, it's going to feel like 8˚F. That's a single digit...temperatures aren't supposed to come in single digits. :(

This may be the last you hear from me, as I may end up frozen to my doorknob when I leave the house tomorrow.

(I hear you laughing, and it isn't nice. You be good or I'll drag you to Vegas in the middle of August and see how you do in 122˚.)

Random Hodgepodge

Well, the non-existent Thanksgiving is over so it is now Christmas season. Emart (the Korean version of Walmart that actually pushed Walmart out of Korea) had their Christmas stuff up the night of Thanksgiving. Crazy it wasn't up in August, huh? :)

I spent $15 on a 4' Christmas tree, which I set up today. I had some Christmas lights in my closet when I moved in, which saved me a good $10. $7 for some tinsel and a star for the top and viola! I have Christmas in my apartment. Money well spent.

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(It keeps not inserting lines where I put them near pictures, giving me scary paragraphs. The stars are me trying to cheat the system).

In other news, I woke up with man-voice on Friday. Wasn't sick, just woke up with man-voice. Or as my lovely mother put it, sounding like I was in the middle of hormone treatment for a sex change. Thanks, mom. Anyway, six hours of teaching and I migrated to sexy raspy (well, according to the teachers - the kids were kind of scared of me sounding so incredibly different). Today it's more froggish and going in and out more. My throat doesn't hurt and I don't feel sick although I have a tiny bit of a cough today, but nothing like what you would think with my voice sounding the way it does.

I refuse to get sick - I'm the last foreign teacher to have not gotten sick. I refuse, I tell you! I actually had a recording of my man-voice on my computer (I wanted to hear if I sounded as weird as I did in my head), so it's down below for your viewing pleasure. You have to turn the volume all the way up to hear it though. And since I wasn't planning on sharing my random talking to myself with the world, a clip of the song I'm singing so you don't think I'm crazy. It's from the musical episode of Daria. (Make sure you turn the volume back down in between.)

On another unrelated thing, you may notice a new picture on the left side. On the night of the 25th, I officially won NaNoWriMo by totalling 50,048 words! I haven't written a word since then, but hey, I did it. :) Statistics wise, I wrote approximately 28 hours, going anywhere from 1,264 words per hour to 2,609. When I wrote at home, by myself, I usually averaged about 2,100 an hour. I wrote 21 days, averaging 2,383 words and an hour twenty of writing for the days I wrote. And all this without any caffeine whatsoever.

Here's the spiffy message you get when you win, complete with new web badges:

Through storm and sun, you traversed the noveling seas. Pitted against a merciless deadline and fighting hordes of distractions, you persevered. You launched yourself bravely into Week One, sailed through the churning waters of Week Two, skirted the mutinous shoals of Weeks Three and Four, and now have landed, victorious, in a place that few adventurers ever see.

We congratulate you on your hard work, salute your discipline and follow-through, and celebrate your imagination.

You did something amazing this month, novelist. We couldn't be prouder.

Tee hee. Novelist. My book is crap - I think it's written okay but the story concept was much better in my head than what it was on paper. Eh, now on to bigger and better ideas that kept tempting me during the month. I may like to read romance, but writing it was pretty boring for me. Crappy relationship developing.

I'm going to die.

I am.

It is so cold here right now, that even if I survive all of the body parts I'm going to lose from frostbite, the hypothermia will get me.

Now, I know you're probably thinking, hey Anica, you are such a cold wimp. True. I am, and I readily admit that I am a desert rat. However, this is what greeted me when I left for work this afternoon:

Yeah, that's snow. In November. That was about as much sticking that it did and it all melted right away, but still. You know, that song I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas might actually make sense now - and here I thought those things only happened in movies.

Oddly enough, it's a lot warmer tonight, in the 30s. Last night, it was 22˚! And that's in Fahrenheit; it's a much more scary sounding -5.5˚C. Yup, going to die.

In a cultural tidbit for you, I present with you how Koreans keep warm. They don't seem to be big in the scarf thing, but instead wear these masks that look like medical masks to keep your face warm. They're less than a buck, so I got one just because I could:

However, two main problems. One, it fogs up my glasses, just like a scarf does. I'm currently debating which risk is greater: losing the nose to frostbite by not wearing one, or breaking and deforming the nose by biffing it since I won't be able to see where I'm going. Your thoughts?

The second problem, which you can kind of tell, is that I think my head is too small. It doesn't look like that on the Koreans, anyway. So, I solved my problem, tee-hee, tee-hee. I bought a smaller one (which was twice as much money), for my little head. I give you the really cute kid version:

(It says "I'm Happy!") I wore it for about two minutes...it fogs the glasses as well.

I've seen some of my kids in their cold weather gear, and I may have to go shopping again. For my warmth, of course! Beanies that look like an animal head with sides hanging down that can be used as a scarf or are mittens seem to be really popular. That's certainly better than just buying earmuffs. :)

NaNoWriMo and my first jimjilbang

So I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month this month, or NaNoWriMo. It's become an international event and is in its 10th year. The idea is that you write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Why? To prove you can do it. Being I can't remember the last time I wrote anything that wasn't school related, let alone fiction, I thought it would be a good thing to try. It turns out there are a bunch of foreigners here that are doing it, so I've been able to make some new friends as well. You can view my progress with the little meter on the left side - at the time of this writing I'm doing good at 31,969 words, though I really hate my novel at the moment and have gone a few days without writing. Oops.

Anyway, on Saturday, which was the midpoint, we had a writer's retreat at a jimjilbang (sounds like jim-juh-bong). It's a sauna type substance that is pretty popular over here. We went to the Dragon Hill Spa, which is seven floors and kind of crazy.

You pay to get in ($10 for the time I got there), and they give you clothed and this bracelet with a key and barcode on it. You then take your shoes off and lock them in a locker with your key number right by the entrance, and then go to your gender's locker room - the women were on the third floor, the men on the fifth. You then see a lot of naked Asian women. A lot. And not all 90 year old women like when you go to the gym. (Or maybe I was just always that lucky?) Anyway, then you have a locker where you change into the t-shirt and shorts they gave you, or in my case, go back and exchange them because the waist of the shorts, while it stretches, is as wide as the length of my foot. I'm not exaggerating - I should have taken a picture. Anyway, then you roam about.

We wrote for a while in the cafeteria area on the first floor, then I ate dinner and tried some of the co-ed stuff on that floor - a rock salt sauna, a wood-fired kiln. The rock salt sauna was 55˚C (131˚F), which felt like a hot day in August to me (on right - not my picture). The kiln ones didn't have temperatures, but I wished they did. They had a low, medium, and hot kiln, and by hot they mean the surface of the sun. I was barley glistening in the first sauna, but the hot sauna it was pouring off of me. Inside the floor was wood and there were wooden blocks to sit in, and I still had to sit on my towel on the wooden block before I didn't feel like my butt was burning. Actually, I have a little burn on my knee from where I knelt on the floor for 15 seconds to reach for a wooden block someone had just gotten up from in hopes it would be cooler. The first time I think we lasted two minutes, and I went in a second time, since the other saunas really didn't do anything for me after that, and I think I lasted a whole four minutes. When I pushed my glasses up it felt like the metal burned my nose, and as you may recall, I have a lot of pieces of metal attached to my body. My entire body was also red for a while after that. It was interesting.

I also tried the ice room, which was 10˚C (50˚F), which surprisingly felt really good. This was after the uber hot sauna - well, after adjusting to what felt like an icy temperature of the general room for a couple minutes, and then going into the ice room.

Then I checked out the women's only sections. I didn't have a lot of time for this, as I didn't find out until 8:30 that they charge the overnight rate of another $12 at 9pm, so I was trying to get out before that. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention - you can sleep in them. There are lots of open spaces and people just pass out all over the floor. It's an odd experience.

As for the women only section, which was a little bit of the rest of the third floor and the entire second floor, there was a lot of nakedness. Actually, I didn't see a stitch of clothing on the second floor at all - there may have been signs saying as much for all I know. Luckily, I am surprisingly comfortable being naked when other people I don't know are naked, and I think me walking around was educational for the toothpick Korean women, especially since tattoos are illegal to get here. ;)

There were open shower stalls, or sit down versions with handheld shower heads, all over the place. There were pools of varying temperatures, some with salt water (on left, also not my picture). There was a nice jacuzzi pool as well with jet streams. I didn't see the whole thing, but I believe there are saunas down there too, and there was also supposedly an outdoor women's only pool...which I would assume would also be naked. I may have to try that at some point.

There were also additional services you could pay for - for anything you did extra, you just swiped your bracelet and paid the balance on the way out. Even the restaurants and vending machines worked that way, which was cool. Anyway, they had massages available (I wish I had had the time!), some scary thing called string hair removal, and body scrubbing. I saw some of the body scrubbing, and it consisted of a woman scrubbing down your entire body while you were on a massage table, using a loofah and some kind of scrub. The women scrubbing you were not naked, of course. They are at work, after all. No, they were wearing black bra and underwear! They were all probably in their 40s, but still.

So yes, I've decided that a gay heaven probably includes a jimjilbang. The funny thing is that a lot of Koreans go with friends. I don't know how I'd feel walking around and doing a bunch of stuff naked with my friends. I guess it happened with showering at the gym and all, but this would be hours of hanging out together, naked. What do you think?

Anyway, so that was my cultural experience this weekend. I'll have to try again when I'm not worrying about the time. That's a pretty good deal for $10, although I hear most of them are only $5 but are also a lot smaller.