Man I’m pissed. In addition to being sick, I had just typed what was probably the longest, most in depth journal ever written by anyone on one week’s events while living in Korea and not being a Korean, and for some reason this stupid webpage decides to go look at an old journal entry. Since the actual content of this webpage comes up in a pop-up there was no back feature so I was totally fucked. Looks like this is gonna be a hella short entry, since I’d been typing for an hour and don’t have time to do that again. So pretty much this week I became and still am sick, administered some end of semester tests, had way too many craptastic conversations with random Koreans in broken English (a longer entry on this phenomenum will come…probably tomorrow), and had an air raid drill.
To begin with I got a cold or flu or plague or something, which pretty much sucks when you are in a foreign country where medicine tastes like medicine as opposed to candy. Anytime I have to drink some black liquid that smells like ass and tastes like the seat of subway in New York in order to “get better,” I’m gonna take my chances with “walking it off.”
To further annoy me, this week and next week are end of semester tests for my students. These tests are designed to see if the students successfully learned everything that they were supposed to during the semester, or as I like to see it, did I teach them everything I was supposed to during the semester. So, because all of my students are dumb bastards some of my students have some difficultly learning English, this week we’ve been playing the “Let’s take your test over and over again in the hopes that some of you will just memorize the answers and spew them back during you actual test,” game. The kids don’t like it as much as “Memory Game,” or “Hangman,” so I think they’ll be glad when after Monday they are finished with their tests, and so will I.
So Thursday, I’m chillin’ in the office, eating my lunch, when suddenly some sirens go off. These are not police sirens or anything like that. I learn that these are air raid sirens, and that it was an air raid drill. Similar to the “duck and cover” drills of my childhood, we were suppose to get under our desks, until the all clear sounded. Only unlike my duck and cover drills at Forts Ferry Elementary, this drill included the entire town, and people were suppose to get off the streets and hide under desks I suppose. I’m not really sure. After the drill, I learned just how close I work to the “Axis of Evil.” Goyang-dong is located a whopping 15 to 20 minutes by car from the North Korean border. So in the amount of time it took to get from my house to the means streets of Small-bany, I can get from my place of employment to “a threat the the entire free world!”
