Misc.

Korea 2010

Silence. It's something I've grown accustomed to here in Korea. Silence in the middle of a million jabbering people, their words bouncing off me like tiny pebbles without making a dent of reason. They collect in little piles around my feet building a wall of isolation. To make my days at school a wee bit less lonely I tell myself people's stories to fill in the blanks. The nurse who watches me and laughs a little too loud has always just been a house wife, an identity that has built up over time like folded laundry and piles of dirty socks. And the teacher Jennifer, she's written having a baby into her day planner this week...
Monday
9:15am 5th grade Art Class ✓
11pm 3rd grade Science ✓
5pm Grocery shopping ✓
5:45pm make baby ✓
6pm Cook dinner ✓
It's when these stories begin to fill in the silence for the dialogue of the people around me that things start to get a little janky. Sometimes it's hard to separate what I've been told from what I've told myself and there are not enough words in between to anchor reality. I'm guessing this is a natural product of living in a foreign country where you don't speak their language, but trying to sort through fact from fiction definitely makes teacher dinners far more interesting!

Sabang Market

In search of fresh fruit, avocados and pictures, we headed to the Sabang Market place early one morning where women sat selling bananas and panicky chickens met their untimely demise. As I wandered through the maze of vendors selling everything you could imagine, I came across a group of children who thought I was the funniest looking thing they ever did see. They followed me first shyly, ducking for cover when I turned to look or pointed my camera in their direction. But soon they got braver and all it took was one photograph and a peek at the image on the back of my camera and they were goners! It was like they had discovered a magic box and I was their magician! They became clowns following me around with goofy boxes on their heads as hats and shouting my arrival to everyone near and far "bule, bule!" or foreigner, just in case anyone missed that little fact. Most of the children grew bored with my wandering, but two little boys in particular were tenacious, waiting outside the restaurant for me and peeking in the windows as I ate and finally yelling after me morosely as I drove away.

Sabang, Indo.

On our 4th day on Sabang Island, we met a crazy group of Australian scuba divers with a penchant for fishing. They rented the boat, tracked down fishing line and poles and off we went into the sunset with a determined gleam in our eyes. Our fishing trip was a smashing success! Inge, even though from the South had never gone fishing before, hooked herself within the first 5 seconds of being handed the fishing pole. I hooked the biggest coral reef in the ocean not once, but twice! The Aussies had similar good luck and the only edible thing we managed to snag was a poor little chumi chumi (squid) on a lines we had dangling absent-mindedly behind our boat. Even though the trip wasn't obviously fruitful and our tummies were growling ferociously on our return, Inge's and my first sea fishing experience was definitely memorable!