Holidays and Heaters

Hello all!

LET IT BE KNOWN THROUGH ALL THE LAND AND TIMEZONES THAT MY MOTHER, MARIA, SENDS THE BEST CARE PACKAGES.

Advent calendar. Aww yiss. 

She got us fun stuff but also sent fleece lined leggings and heat tech stuff! THANK YOU MOM SERIOUSLY

I was not in a good place to blog yesterday, so I put it off until I was feeling better. The Christmas season is in full swing here, and I find myself missing home and my family a lot.

This song is awesome.

One of the things that is getting me through some rough days is this drama, Pinocchio. It's about a girl named In Ha  (Park Shin Hye) who hiccups when she lies (Pinocchio syndrome) and her dream of becoming a reporter. Alongside this storyline is that of the main male lead (Lee Jong Suk), who is trying to deal with the fact that reporters basically ruined his life. But he mostly grew up with In Ha and loves her, so he decides to becomes a reporter too and work towards getting back at the people who wronged him. It's fantastic. And features one of the Korean loves of my life.

Lee Jong Suk. Look at him all sweet and cute.

DAYUM.

Seen here with another love of mine (and my coteacher), Kim Woo Bin.

Anyway, he's an incredible actor, and Park Shin Hye is awesome too. Last drama I watched with her mostly featured her character being poor and crying all the time as her major characteristics, so this one gives her more to do.

Alas, I am really feeling the holiday blues along with the fact that we have had such a long stretch of school without a break. My students are going crazy. I'm going crazy. I'm finally down to 9 lessons to plan a week versus 10 since my 5th graders missed a day for some reason so they are almost all back on the same lesson. This week I get even more of a break! I don't have 5th or 6th grade on Thursday or Friday, so that means I only have 5 lessons to plan this week! Yay!!! But it's crunch time so everyone is busy.

The weekend was awesome as usual. Tina and I went shopping for things! None of these things pictured are things I bought on this particular shopping trip, but I also had to get more stuff for winter so I did.

The only gloves you will ever need.

Plaid is rad. 

So rad I had to get both colors.

earphone muffs! They are a bit temperamental 

This is a dress, but in true Korean "Free Size" fashion, it is now a shirt.

A sweater that I am currently wearing.

I ordered a warmer coat. Not to brag but it was 179,000 won and I got it for like 45,000 and it's hella warm,

We got some new accessories for our hair and such and I got warm slippers for school. Slowly but surely I am getting ready for winter!

We chilled and watched dramas on Friday night, and I got to experience the joys of a space heater and an electric blanket (oh how I've missed you!) since Tina's apartment is cold. Mine is getting there now, but it stays at about 64 degrees overnight while Tina's is about 60 during the day even. It's allegedly the coldest December Seoul has seen in a while. Of course.

Anyway, on Saturday we headed across town to the European Christmas Market. We actually spen more time on the subway and in Holly's Coffee drinking red velvet hot chocolates than we did at the festival. They had tents of foods from around the world. Lauren, Tina, and I fought through the ridiculous crowds to get food from Spain, France, and Italy before we looked at decorations and saw a performance by some very cold Koreans.

You can really feel the Christmas spirit here...

It's beginning to look a lot (a little tiny bit maybe) like Christmas!

After our jaunt out to the festival. Tina and I headed to Gangnam for a cultural performance. My coworker (she's the Art teacher, not one of the English people I work with) Hosun, invited me to see her perform some traditional dances. She speaks really good English and always invites me to things or informs me of traditional Korean performances, but I am usually busy when they occur on like Thursdays. This weekend I had no plans, so I brought Tina along as a show of good faith and also because I like cultural things.

It was so great! I had no idea what the dances meant, but I love the hanboks and it's really cool to see. Korean music doesn't really have a super dancey beat, so it's interesting to think about how they can remember the moves and stuff for traditional dances.

Hosun was beautiful! She had a lot of family and fans there, but she still made a big excited wave when she saw me! She was very happy that I came, and that Tina did too.

Hosun is in the back. It was really hard to get pictures with the lighting.

Dance dance dance

So pretty! I love their traditional clothes.

It was awesome. Hosun was surprised that my sister looks so similar to me. Today she was like "Your sister is very beautiful too! Same face, just different hair!" Yes. That is how twins work haha. It was awesome.

Speaking of hair, Tina's caught the attention of friend - Young Ah! Tina's coteacher was working the sound booth. She came down to the stage and said hello, so we all had an interesting exchange. Literally Tina's hair was the thing that Young Ah noticed. When discussing this with Hosun, she said "Seoul is a small city, I guess!" I guess so too!

Tina and I slept in on Sunday, then it was time for me to pack up the million things I bought and head home. I was in quite a terrible mood all evening, culminating in some terrible frustration with my Korean homework.

I'm in my second month of Korean class, and I am struggling a bit. I was sick for a few weeks and I was busy on the weekends, plus I am lazy and I don't study as much as I should. But learning Korean is freaking hard.

I get really down on myself for not being good enough at stuff, and I also have a lot of trouble when I put in a lot of effort for things and don't see the result I expect, or don't see immediate returns (thanks, residual issues the were amplified from Grad school). So when I can't do my Korean work without help or I still have trouble forming the basic sentences we learned, I get really mad at myself. I'm really unfair to myself about where I should be. I do study and I do try, and I ask Tina and my coworkers for help, and I am way better than I was before the class. I know this, and yet when I mess up something in my workbook I can't help but go straight back to “you're still not doing good enough.”

A lot of this emotional business came to a head when my apartment finally got cold enough for me to want to turn on my ondol, which is the floor heating system Korean apartments have. I can't figure it out. There are all sorts of settings and I don't know how it works. Now, I am studying Korean, but I can't read any of the settings (why should I be able to? How would heater settings make it into the first unit of a language?) and everyone has different systems so it's hard for us to help each other out. Now, in my head, I see the fact that I am learning Korean yet STILL cannot perform such simple tasks as ordering things correctly or turning on my heating system to the right setting as personal shortcomings. No matter how many times I remind myself that this is only the start of month 5 for me and that I have been doing well adjusting to an entirely different culture and language, I still get really frustrated that I can't do better.  

This mood passed as I went to sleep. but sometimes I still wonder what I got myself into here. It's overall a rewarding and wonderful experience, and some days my heart melts when my kids do something cute or So Jung freaks out because I read something in Korean or she sees my Korean writing (So CUTE!! She always says) or whatever. I think a lot of issues are just coming together in this week and it's hard to keep my head up when there is so much school left, camp, and a lot more Korean to learn. 

Still, today I made and awesome honey mustard chicken mushroom melt and got to plan most of my lessons for the week. Things will be okay. I'm doing better at forgiving myself, if only slightly. So now it's off to study Korean and hope my heating works! 

Until next week, here's some fun stuff:

This is Heechul from Super Junior and his cat Heebum (aka literally the chillest cat ever).

And here is Super Junior's performance from Beijing, where Heechul just does Heechul.

He doesn't get on the platform and the reactions are flawless.

And last but not least, G Dragon and Taeyang SLAYING at the Mama awards:

G Dragon's hair is normal so he had to wear something weird. Taeyang is bae. And Fantastic Baby came out in 2012 and has been performed at 3 consecutive Mama awards. Still no comeback from Big Bang. I swear it will be 2050 and they will still be a group like "Anyway here's Fantastic Baby."

Anyway, here's Fantastic Baby. Look for my comeback next week!