Life Has Been Good

I love writing negative things about South Korea. Okay, that's a bit of a stretch, but in my first year here, I regularly vented my frustrations and came off like a whiny baby who needed a diaper change.

But thanks to my current school and co-teacher -- Hambak Elementary School and Ridia, respectively -- this year has been pretty much wonderful. So here's a recap on recent events taking place. This is basically everything that's been going on since we headed to Jeju Island. It's been busy, but fun.

The first thing to get out there is that I've signed on again with my current school. This is a great place to work. The teachers and administrators are all very friendly, and Ridia has put together a great program which has skyrocketed in popularity. It's a very low-stress environment, and the head of our English dept. and I even had a little talk and worked out our differences. It feels great.

My eye seems to be all healed up. I went through a pretty terrible time with the eye cut and subsequent use of glasses for the next 6 weeks. That was no fun. But everything feels okay now and I'm back to wearing contacts. Of course, that's right in time for my winter allergies to start kicking in. So now I'm concerned of hurting my eye(s) again. Let's just hope that's not the case.

All is going very well with Jeong Mi and me. We both are still on our 'time off' from Bamboo Dance Academy, but that only applies to classes. We've become regulars at the Saturday open dance now that we don't go to classes during the week. I want to learn some new moves, but I'm really starting to enjoy open dance now that I don't practice all week.

Halloween is right around the corner. This will be my third Halloween here. Even though I basically avoid partying in Seoul at all costs, one tradition will hold true. We will, once again, go to Hongdae to celebrate Halloween. This will be Jeong Mi's first official Halloween. We're both really excited. All our friends are, too. Only going to Hongdae once a year actually makes it fun.

Back to Hambak, I started going to the cafeteria again for lunch. I took about 8 months off and that was pretty awesome. But I was forced to withstand a barrage of questions from a lot of teachers about why they never saw me at lunch. I figured that since I'm getting a raise this year, I can handle the cafeteria food. The good news is that the school switched to a new food company this semester. I've only gone one day where I only ate rice and salad, because the food has been pretty decent so far.

Our students have been practicing for a singing competition in November for about 6 weeks now. We're singing 'Sweet Caroline' and 'Summer Nights.' Of course, the kids are getting pretty sick of the songs, haha. But they're doing a good job with it. The competition is right around the corner, and I'm excited for the students.

We don't really have a break here for awhile. Thanks to Christmas falling on a weekend this year, we'll get no days off for that. I don't think we get any time off until the lunar new year celebration in February. That's a long time with no extra days for rest. But we don't have a ton of planning to do right now, so it's not too bad. We have some extra stuff to do for government inspectors, but we can handle it. Ridia is really busy as usual, but we're doing our best to help her out as much as we can.

That's all there is for now. As always, people are leaving and new people are coming in. Some of that is good and some is bad. But that's life.

And right now, life is good. Let's hope this feeling continues.