The day of the week I suspected would be least dramatic. And yet. Something truly akin to a 90s romcom transpired. After exiting the gym, and running into a whole slew of boys from school and encouraging them to do jump tricks on their bike, I wandered around the school side of town to look for Christmas gifts and I happened upon an advertisement for a used bookstore. There was a moment of hesitation but I took the plunge down an LED lit set of stairs to the basement of a building through a set of industrial metal doors and into a large room with stacks upon stacks upon shelves…

An observation, a mistake, and a development. G: “you always look more tired on Mondays. Your face is smaller.” Part of my exhaustion was staying up late last night attempting to understand Korean credit card online payments and part was due to my terrible miscalculation of eating fire chicken whose ill effects are still plaguing me today. Life ran on, oblivious to my collapsing gastrointestinal system. The first grade 4 class of the day was loud and obnoxious during the game so I made them all sit back down with their heads on their desks (part of the plan anyway to select “zombies”) and told them “Do we speak Korean…

As of today I lost five pounds, and as of this afternoon, nearly all the rest of it in an embarrassing gym accident. Sometimes machines are not intuitively obvious and I had to call out “excuse me” in increasingly louder desperation until an older man replacing his weights nearby could save me. (The squat machine had a catch that released but halfway through the set I realized I didn’t know how to lock it back in place. “Oh no. Will I have to hold up this weight until someone sees me?”) Later in the evening a friend and I attended a rice wine making class and met two interesting men…

This morning after a restless night and sudden back crick I threw on my giant puffer jacket and face mask and boarded the bus. A young man with a neck tattoo and cheekbones kept glancing at me from two seats away then waved in the corner of my eye. I turned slightly and did a small head bow then went back to blinking away my sleep deprivation. He typed away on his phone in what I like to assume was an English dictionary. Casually he “dropped” a business card on the seat between us which I initially ignored but then thought, let’s see where this takes us. I pointed and…

After too long away, I finally made it back to the rink. I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed it and I’m happy to report no loss of skills (but also no magical accumulation of new skills). But after I arrived, something strange happened that I didn’t catalog as out of the ordinary until later. As I put on my skates, kids in speed skates and parents were rushing all around and I wondered if I might see any of my own students there. Once on the ice, there was a small group of foreign students. And then I realized, the last time I came to the rink, over three…

A day of accomplishments: -As I have neither a scale nor a full length mirror, I measure my body composition change in terms of clothing looseness. Happy to report that Korean food, city living, and gym (probably least of all) have contributed to lost inches. I think. -A 6-3 girl who is very quiet in class asked me after “teacher do you know SuperM?” At which I nearly lost it:“Of course I know them! Who’s your favorite? Mine is Lucas. Hey where are you going—“(She likes Baekhyun and EXO, the classics, excellent taste) -The subject teachers had another tea time after which I ended up with pizza, chocolate truffles, croissants,…

I was mobbed by the fourth graders; or more accurately, I walked into the mob and was absorbed as one of them. From the school exit I could see a larger than normal group hanging around the ddeokbokki stand comprised of mostly fourth graders and one sixth grade bystander. The mob surrounded me to say they were meeting to go to coin karaoke and we had a lot of nonsensical conversation thereafter; our conversations take place somewhere between the amount of Korean I know which is not much, and the amount of English they know which is even less. But we manage. Joongki, a sass monger, recounted the time in…