ryan and christie

my brother and sister-in-law are visiting. aren't they cute?

it's beginning to look a lot like christmas!

megs rocks my world, and my room, by sending me christmas decorations! thanks megs!
now it looks rather festive around my apartment. i had a wonderful evening last week putting up the decorations, listening to christmas music, and eating peanut butter.







a close up of the christmas tree. i made this myself in a little tiny chair at a little tiny desk with a huge glue stick and blunt scissors. but it does the job i think. :)

satan santa

it's something about the red reindeer antlers that really kills the feeling for me.

the first snow

can you see it? can you?

the great thing about snow here in daegu is that it snows at night, it's beautiful, light, and fluffy, and then it all melts away the next day. this way we get the warm fuzzy feeling of the first snow every few days, but we don't ever have to walk in it. :)
however, i would like it to stick around a little for christmas. we'll see if that happens.

fun with reading

the youngest class i teach is 5 year olds. this class is composed of the "i'm dumb" kids as well as kevin lee, who you may remember from the "my favorite!" posting. anyway. i like to read simple books to these guys and have them repeat back to me what i read to them, good practice with pronunciation, memorization of sentence structure, etc. the past few weeks we've been working on the present progressive, sentences like:

i'm drinking
i'm walking
i'm singing

i found this great book in the school library entitled
"hi! what are you doing!"
every other page is like this one here:


hi! what are you doing? and then a sort of onomatopoeia spelling of the action that will be revealed under the onomatopoeia flap. the book is filled with banal actions like:

i'm playing the drums
i'm writing a letter
i'm walking in the grass

as well as the following:


the kids love this book! i love it, too.
i have incorporated this book into every lesson plan i have devised for this class for the past month.

the best, though, is when i pass the toilets in the afternoon, where all the kids take a big group bathroom break, doors wide open, and i hear them talking to each other . . .

sally: hi jason! what are you doing?
jason: i'm peeing!

oh the satisfaction of a lesson well taught.
teaching is so rewarding. :) :) :)

thanks

sue says that this book is about me. thanks sue.

wedding schwedding

the "little genius" english academy

setting: tuesday morning. math day.

erin: okay, so the answer is 18 + 18. so what is 18 + 18?

tiffany: 11!

erin: no.

kayla: 19!

erin: no.

peter: 26!

erin: wow peter. that's close, but no.

matt: 27!

erin: no matt, not close like that.

marie: (screams) no! it's 116!




erin: thank you marie. now i have something new to put in my blog.

and believe it or not, marie is one of the smartest cookies in the box.
which is really the funniest part of the story. but none of you would know that.
i really do love teaching!

i'm a low back vowel

i go 'aaahhh' and express myself on occasion.
shout out to all the other low back vowels out there!

Low back vowel 100% Alveolar 100% Click 92% Implosive 58% High Front Vowel 50% Fricative 50% Bilabial 33% Nasal 17% Ejective 8% Rhotic 0% What's your Underlying Representation? created with QuizFarm.com

cough cough hack hack

blech! i got sick this weekend! it was terrible! friday to tuesday i was laid out hacking and drooling on my (wonderfully, i must say) heated floor. i missed out on about 5 awesome things, including a visit from a friend from montreal's husband!!! aw, hamburgers!! the worst part of all was that by the time i decided i needed medicine, it was sunday and the medical stations were closed. i was in a miserable bind: i couldn't sleep, i couldn't walk, i could hardly move and i had already consumed my entire tylenol stash. so i did what any girl in my situation would have done. i made my own nyquil.

1 part soju + 2 parts ginger tea = erin's emergency elixir
(soju is kind of like vodka)




after that i finally got some sleep! and what a lovely sleep it was!
then on monday i dragged myself to school for a ride to see a doctor . . . who spoke english! yay! now, i've been to see the korean doctor once before for a wee stomach thing, and not because i wanted to. that time was at the insistance of my nervous-mother korean boss-lady. so i went to make her happy and i ended up being asked to get neked in front of my slightly creepy male boss (which i refused) and getting an unidentified shot against my will. then it was off to the pharmacy where i received 15 bags of 7 unidentified/unlabeled pills each, one bagful of which i was to take three times a day. since i hadn't asked to go to the doctor in the first place and no one would explain to me what was going on, those pills took a nice whirly trip down my toilet. i didn't mind, they cost about $1 total.

i was actually sick this weekend and wanting drugs, so i intend to make use of the drugs i got this time around. i asked my boss-lady not to send me to the doctor with my man-boss this time, pleading to please let any of the other female coworkers come with me. but in the end, it was me and mr. man again, and i think that she told him i didn't want to go with him, because he made me go to the pharmacy by myself. thanks buddy, the one place where i really could have used the translation. in the end, the pharmacist and i hand-signaled it out okay. so i get to take one of these bagfuls of pills three times a day, which isn't too bad since i can read that 1.5 of them are tylenol.




and i also got this, which i think is cough syrup. and, as you can see, it comes in this handy dandy little pre-measured bottle, so i just suck out 10cc when i need it. super.




and in a related note, an interesting fact about korean floors. koreans heat their floors. that's how they heat their homes. this is left over from old korean days when they would build fires under their houses to heat them in the winter. don't ask me why the didn't burn down. i don't know. now that they have electric heat, i suppose it just made sense to heat from the floor up. and i guess it does make sense. your feet are always, always warm and that's pretty nice. and guests sleeping on your floor are also warm. yay for ryan and christie coming in 12 days! and old korean ladies say that if you are sick, you should lie down on the hot floor. it worked for me. kind of a neat idea and something i'll be sad to leave behind.

not everything is brack or white

this is beautiful and you all must read it.
ryan west's take on racial identity in korea today.