"I'm looking outside and I can’t see anything but eluminated white."
This is the scene I have had in my one office for a few days now.
I have three places in school where I work. The first is my desk in the Teachers Room where my laptop is plugged in and where I can use my Instant Messaging programs. The second is the English Lab which is basically my classroom. Here I have a nice computer with sound, but no MSN or YM. I can also save bookmarks there, though.
Lastly I have the English Cafe. This is a room set up with computers with the aim of being an English Environment, I guess. To bad the computers are allowed to display Korean. I sit here often and also do interview with student here. The interviews are for English practice, basically.
This last room is where I'm finding myself at this moment, and looking out the windows I see nothing but bright white. It gets a bit strange as it feels like I am in a science fiction film. It’s like one of those scenes where reality is suspended and you are caught between worlds or universes and have no way of getting out. Very, very creepy, I must say.
What on earth am I talking about? Now that winter is almost upon us and it is getting cold, we are getting fog in the mornings. Just like fog every where it takes a few hours to clear, if at all. The sun, however, does not stop shining and it lights up the fog to a bright white colour and this is what I am looking at outside.
The fact that this might this is the quietest of my places aw well as that I normally sit here all alone doesn’t help to displace that felling of being in a near dream world.On a more realistic note, I saw the school’s thermometer dip below 10 degrees for the first time today. I am expecting this to me coldest winter ever and I cant wait.
Wasps are really mean little creatures and deceptively so. While walking home the other day I noticed a little wasp eating another insect. This is not one of those big wasps that make nests in the corners of buildings and attack as a group when they see you. Nope, this is one of those cute yellow ones that I think burrows in the ground.
I have started referring to this wasp as
Anyway,
The really funny part was that the "face" of the insect was lying about one centimeter away from the body. With face I mean the eyes and antennae. It made me think of Silence of the Lambs, that part when he take one guy's face of and puts it on his own. I can only marvel at how quickly this wasp must have taken that face off and started eating on the rest of the body, because the antennae were still moving.
Just try and imagine the scene. Two insect eyes and antennae not connected to anything, but still moving. It look like someone buried too the head in the sand at the beach wearing a pair of those stupid big fly looking round sunglasses and a set of Halloween antennae.
As I am writing this I thinking that the little yellow wasp will be my new favourite insect.
The little Lees go to school:
For the teachers who might read this, I am not sure how many of you have noticed that children who don’t know you tend to "run away". This happens often with me because the Primary School in my area doesn’t have a foreign teacher. Having said that, I would like to relate to you the story of little Lee Kim Bab and her brother Lee So Ju
A few days back I was walking to school. It was normal time, around 08:10 in the morning. I noticed little Lee Kim Bab and her younger Brother Lee So Ju walking in front of me. They were clearly in no hurry because they were happily talking and looking at things next to the road or pushing each other.
Through all this I suddenly noticed from their reactions that they had noticed me behind them. Because this is a dangerous situation for them (everyone knows foreigners eat your Koreans) they made the logical decision to stop playing and start walking faster. Not being one to back down from a challenge, or a chance to torture the innocent by doing nothing wrong, I increased my speed as well. When they noticed this they replied in the expected fashion of increasing speed again
Do take note that little Kim Bab is only about 8 years old and little So Ju is only about 6 (Western Age), so their legs barely reach the ground.
It didn’t take long then for them to have to start running, or at least So Ju was running and his sister was walking VERY fast
Also take note that the two schools are right next to each other and on top of the mountain, so I was going to follow them all the way there, All the way up the mountain.
Considering all this you would think that Kim Bab would have a bit of sympathy for her little brother and slow down. OK, she did turn around to encourage him a few times, but that was all. No slowing down and pretending that the big bad man is just a human. By the time we reached the top of the mountain, just in front of the school, little So Ju was wheezing and coughing and had to stop completely to take a breather.
I can only imagine what he would have felt like, because I feel something like that when I start training after a long time of laziness. You have a headache, your tongue is burning and you want to throw up. It was definitely one of the funniest things I have seen in a while.
I know it is really mean, but come on. I didn’t really do anything wrong.
I am sure this will happen again soon to someone else and I can’t wait.
*By the time this Blog post is out you would have received four batches of photos in the email. I hope you enjoyed it and what you were looking at made sense.
