Day: July 3, 2012

Scene 1 from day 2 of The Merger.

Under the new schedule, I've been required to give up my little-ones – the first and second graders in my Phonics classes. Those kids are so difficult to teach, but I truly love them, too. Today, after their class was finishing with their new teacher, I saw little Yedam in the hall. A tiny girl, very cute, charming personality, but amazingly difficult to teach, as she has so far utterly failed to wrap her mind around the concept of "chair." (She doesn't know how to sit down.)

"예담아," I motioned for her to come over to where I was coming out of another classroom. "Clark-셈, 어떼요?" She had been panicked earlier, at the idea of changing teachers. She is the girl who used to cry whenever we had a vocabulary quiz. I expected the worst.

But she surprised me. She smiled shyly and held up forefinger joined to thumb, in the "OK" sign. "응… 좋아. Bye teacher." She ran away down the stairs. I felt happy and relieved.

Scene 2 from day 2 of The Merger.

We were sitting around in the cramped, over-crowded, not yet properly configured staff room. The middle schooler teachers mostly off doing the test-prep stuff, we mostly elementary teachers not having much to do, but Curt had had a tantrum yesterday about teachers leaving earlier than 10 pm when things still weren't settled (10 pm is the official end time).

It's weird, for me, because all of a sudden I have a bunch of colleagues who are fluent English speakers – Karma only had me and Grace, and Grace was part-time, but now there's a group of 4 of us. Frank was reading something online about a zombie attack (a la the recent weird news from Miami), but now in China. Differentiated, apparently, by the fact that this zombie attack in China didn't involve drugs, as the Miami event had. Some guy had tried to eat the face of some other guy. Ken said something about oh, how strange, there's maybe a real zombie virus out there. But then Frank said, very funny, "Yeah, but those Chinese, they will eat anything."

Um. Get it? I thought it was funny at the time.

Scene 3 from day 2 of The Merger.

Actually, a scene unrelated to The Merger. I was walking home. I saw one of those motorcycles that looks like a prop from a Mad Max movie – beaten up and dirty, and saddlebags and boxes duct taped onto the back in a big pile, some guy who looks like he lives on his motorcycle, with a cool windshield-type-contraption on the front, made out of plastic and duct tape and cardboard (and how does he see through it?). The man wearing a bandana and no helmet. He looked like post-apocalyptic Korean pirate. But his motorcyle had a GPS taped onto the handlebars. And he was talking on an iPhone. And running a red light. This is Korea.

[Daily log: walking, 4 km]