The Crescendo

The school year escalated to its height this past week with our performance on Tuesday. It was an interesting six very LONG hours. First we had a dress rehearsal, then we shoved all of the children into two tiny rooms with ten already very stressed out teachers, and expected the kids to be quietly amused whilst awaiting their turn on stage. We spent four awful hours in those cramped quarters, with only a short respite to go out on stage and let the kids make fools of themselves in front of their parents. The whole day was like slow semi-organized torture for both the kids and the teachers. I don’t see how it could possible have been enjoyable for the parents either. They had to sit through three hours of kids who were so petrified that they couldn’t talk loud enough to be heard even with the aid of a microphone.

After the performance had finally ended, all of the exhausted staff filed out of the performance hall after handing the children over to their parents. Then instead of getting to go home for a nice rest, we all had to go out for a staff dinner. Which means I spent the evening eating meat and watching my co-workers get progressively more and more drunk, until about 11p.m. when I could stand it no more, and left. I then had to sleep because the next morning I had to wake up at 6:45a.m. in order to go take the analytical writing section of the GRE. I took the test. I don’t think I did very well. I kind of choked on the first essay. I think I did a lot better on the second one. I haven’t written an English essay in years. Now I have four months to study for the other two sections of the GRE, then a terrific graduate school essay to write, and letters of recommendation to find. It’s going to be a long year.

Yesterday I babysat for some really cute kids. They go to church with me. Their mom is Korean and their Dad is American. It was interesting to see how the two cultures mix in a household, and in the kids themselves. The oldest girl was 5 years old, there was a three year old boy and a one year old boy. The 5 year old seems pretty well balanced. She can speak both Korean and English fluently. She speaks English to adults, and Korean to her siblings. The three year old was my favorite. He is very linguistically confused at the moment. He can’t quite tell which language to speak . Luckily I could understand his mix of English and Korean, and he understood my mix of English and Korean. It was a lot of fun being able to speak Korean to the kids. I like speaking to the three year old crowd. That’s about my speaking level, so I didn’t feel like he was judging me.

I also saw an interesting movie yesterday. It’s called Late Autumn or 만추, it’s a Korean film, but it takes place in America and the stars are Korean and Chinese, so they communicate with each other in English. However, the girl talks to her family in Chinese…I don’t speak Chinese, and all of the subtitles were in Korean. I could get the gist of it, but the subtitles were going too fast for me to read them all. But I gleaned enough to understand the film. I don’t think the director meant it to be as funny as we found it, but the English dialogue was definitely funny. I highly recommend it.

Ringing in the Year of the Rabbit with a Rather Painful Bang

About three weeks ago, I woke up at 4am with a terrible itch on the side of my head. That itch turned into pain, and soon I realized that I could no longer hear in my left ear. I took some ibuprofen, waited for it to kick in and went back to bed. When I woke up for work my ear still hurt ridiculously badly. I told myself I could make it through the workday, then I would go to the doctor after work. I started teaching, informing the students that my ear was really sick, so they had to be very quiet. About an hour into class, I was checking a student’s workbook, when all of the sudden I felt this excruciating pain in my ear, it started making these frightening popping noises, and when I reached up to touch my ear there was reddish goo oozing from it. I dropped everything and ran out of the classroom. I sent my co-teacher to watch the students, then I went to the bathroom and cried for about five minutes, not because of the pain, but because it’s scary to have blood suddenly start oozing out of the side of your head.

Once I had managed to compose myself, I went back to the teachers room, and asked someone to take me to the hospital. When we got to the doctor’s office, he stuck a camera in my ear and said, “aigoo!” a Korean expression of shock and dismay. He then proceeded to suck the fluid out of my ear and poke my already sore ear with sharp metal instruments. As I got up to leave the office, my ear started to ooze yet again. So he suctioned it out again, to no avail, three minutes later it was oozing again. I got a fun pack of medication at the pharmacy (six different pills…no labels) and went back to the school to get my stuff to go home. As I was telling my supervisor that I was going to go home and rest, I was clutching an already bloody Kleenex to the side of my head. I still had tearstains on my face, and she said “go have a good rest, try to come back for your class at 2.” I didn’t go back at two. My ear didn’t stop oozing until Thursday morning.

I did go back to work on Tuesday because I felt obligated. It was our lunar new year event which means we all had to dress up in traditional Korean garb and play Korean games. The kids were really cute, and I didn’t really have to do too much, so it wasn’t too bad of a day, despite having to constantly wipe the blood/pus mixture from the side of my face. After work on Tuesday I went back to the doctor’s office to get more drugs. In Korea they only give you enough drugs to last until they think you need to come back for a check-up. So I went back and he poked me in the ear again, and it hurt. He told me my hearing would come back “soon” (I have yet to see this “soon”). He gave me a prescription for 6 whole days worth of drugs because the doctor’s office would be closed for the Lunar New Year holiday. So I went and got more medical fun packs, and went to my Korean class.

I had two doctors visits, and two trips to the pharmacy in a two day period (aren’t you proud I actually went to a doctor). I came away with clean ears and 6 different kinds of medications, all for the low, low price of 13,000 won. Which is about $12. Nice.

Wed-Fri I didn’t have to work because of Lunar New Year. It was really nice. On Wednesday I stayed in my apartment all day and “rested.” I realized I’m not very good at resting, so I cleaned my porch because I was really bored, and did laundry. Thursday I went to Gyeongju with some friends from church. Gyeongju was the capitol of Korea during the Silla Dynasty (57 BC-935 AD). So it’s a really old city with lots of tombs of ancient Korean kings. Everywhere we went there was another burial mound, it was like Starbucks in Seattle. All of the buildings had the old Asian style roofs. It was a really neat city, it’s what I always thought Asia would look like. It was also nice to be out of Seoul for a few days. There were no skyscrapers or high rise apartments. We walked around looked at old stuff, went to a Buddhist temple, ate southern food (Korean style). Thursday was actual lunar new year, so everything was closed. For dinner we called the McDonalds delivery people (Yes, they deliver McDonalds in Korea). It was a fun low key trip.