Recognition

You may not have visited our blog in a while. We haven’t visited it for a week. We can post things, but we can't see our posts. In Korea, Blogger is down due to posts regarding the upcoming election. I don’t even know whether I should be posting this…

I’m freezing cold at the moment. Koreans believe in sauna-like temperatures for their houses, but they also believe in ‘fresh air.’ In summer, my school had the air conditioning on and the windows open; in winter, we have the heat on with the windows open. In both cases, they were wasting electricity. I haven’t been this cold at school since I was at Beaver Local.

I spent Saturday sick in bed. Paul, on the other hand, had an adventure in Seoul. He returned with a Costco card, cheese and oatmeal, a Brita filter, and a much better understanding of the bus and subway system. Sunday afternoon, we ventured up the mountain to wander around a Buddhist shrine. It’s kind of a neat idea: they’ve placed statues, ponds, and walkways up the side of a mountain; people are free to roam about as they wish – worshipping or not worshipping as they like. Paul, of course, had out his camera to catch some of the last of the fall colors. It was a beautiful day. I spent some time wondering about what it would look like if more churches would put together worship-park like-things…

And, as I was thinking, I heard something like what my students call me, but not quite: “weggy.” It’s the short, cutesy form of the Korean word for ‘foreigner’. They were pointing at me and calling me ‘foreigner.’ They were not the only ones to give us funny looks… Of course, people often stare at us, whether we’re at a shrine or at the grocery store.

I came in to work this morning to find the contents of my class folder on my desk. When I opened the folder, I found a new class list inside. A few hours later, one of the other teachers came to my desk and started rifling through the folder, without acknowledging me at all. You would think there would be a happy medium between being over-recognized and under-recognized.