Now I Know I Have a Heart...

Because it's breaking...


Tomorrow starts the last week of school, so I'm feeling all sorts of messed up. I'm really happy and excited to go home, but first I have to get through this whole wall of sadness surrounding my goodbyes at school.

Wow. I already teared up thinking about how I have to say goodbye to all my students this week (save those coming to camp, but camp is blahhh) and it's not even time to say goodbye yet. I suspect I will be a puddle most days.

Sigh.


The humidity makes my hair crazy, so the top layer is always unmanageable. Lately I pin it back:

A-like so.

The undercurls dry super curly and cute!

Random other happenings this week:

Cornflakes on my chicken...?

I love the hidden socks but we couldn't tell the difference in some we ordered so we just ordered both. 

Trying to pack boxes to send home so it's easier to pack things in my suitcases when I go home.

 I met a friend at school!

AKA I found a cat

He ran away. 

I went to the hospital for hopefully the last time in Korea. No arthritis or whatever, but the doctor suspects that when I had my allergy attack my body freaked out and attacked my joints. I should be all fixed up now. 

School has been weird and crazy lately since it's the end of the semester and everyone is running around like crazy finishing things. 

Thursday, Seunghee came in near the end of the day and told me we had to switch my Monday 3rd grade class to Tuesday, which is not unusual. 

But then Friday was terrible. Apparently some shit went down Thursday that we didn't know about. One of the 3rd grade teachers had an incident with a student. He pushed some other kid down and hurt him, so the teacher knocked him on the head and told him to not do that. But then his dad came in and things got really dicey. I don't get all the details filtered down to me, but it was bad. She took some sick leave on Friday and Monday, hence our schedule switch. 

That's not all. Apparently the VP called like 40 different subs to try and get someone in, but no one could. So Seunghee ran into my classroom at 8:45 and told me we had to have my Tuesday 3rd grade class FIRST PERIOD. So she had to have that class for 2 hours of English, I had to move my 5th grade class (With So Jung, who was furious at the switch) to 5th period, and the 3rd graders and the art schedule got switched. A grand total of 7 teachers had to switch around their schedules. 

Then the kids were crazy and stuff kept going wrong all day. I was so frustrated with all the changes and leaving and despite my best efforts to leave a good situation for my coteachers and the new native teacher, it seems everything is for nothing. 

Lastly, I normally have janggu class on Fridays but I figured this week was our last one since we don't have classes next Friday, just have to be at school for some amount of time. As it would be our last class, I bought some macarons from the delicious store near me to share with everyone. 

I took pics so I could remember the flavors.

So Jung took a picture. Isn't it lovely?

Unfortunately with all the drama and nonsense at school, class got cancelled and I had 21 macarons just chilling. So we texted everyone to come eat them and for the afternoon we had lots of guests. Most of them expressed great sadness at me leaving and lots of "What a shame" and "I hope So Jung doesn't get a shitty native teacher like the previous one" and "You only learned 2 of the 4 drums in class... how sad" and other things that make me feel like my heart is being ripped out of my chest. I really, really love so many people and things here that even at this moment I wonder if I'm making the right choice. Aish...

One highlight: I got to teach my coteachers perhaps the funniest mistranslation mistake of Korean to English. 

힘들어요 = him-deu-reo-yo means like.. It's hard, or it's tiring. Like friday was 힘들어요. And you just kind of say it like ahhhhh 힘들어요. Today is hard. This is hard. 

But one of my students, after a difficult class, told So Jung, "Oh teacher you look very hard today." This is still the same translation of 힘들어요. But where they mean "it's hard on you" or "it's hard on me" it often doesn't come out right. I told So Jung that that word gives people problems, and she was like why?

Because if you use "I" as the subject for 힘들어요, it comes out as "I'm hard." Now, all English speakers will know the implications of such a statement, especially coming from a male. From my female coworkers it will still definitely get a sideye, but it's a really really funny mistake. I know exactly the reasons why it's happening, but it has happened before with some of our guy friends and it is hilariously embarrassing. 

I explained all of this to So Jung, and when Seunghee came in we told her, and I think they were both in tears from laughing so hard. It was awesome.

You know what else is awesome? Being twins with your coteacher:

We accidentally dressed the same. 

We really are in sync haha.

God I love So Jung. Please, universe, God, powers that be, or anything that has a force in the world, please let her get a good coteacher after me. I couldn't bear it if something bad came to her. She deserves the world, and she already had the worst native teacher I've ever heard of before me. I could only give her two years of my time, and it became really comfortable and I know she will have a hard transition anyway. So please, let the next native teacher be a good one. Just a kind, open-minded and open-hearted someone. So Jung is an angel among people, I swear. 

Okay. Enough gushing about So Jung because the thought of leaving her is one that makes my heart hurt more than almost anything else. 

Thursday all the young teachers want to take me out to dinner one last time. If I'm already crying now, how am I going to make it through this week?

Sigh.

Anyway, after a really emotional Friday, something good happened. 

I asked Moon Jung about secondhand ticket websites in a last-ditch effort to get Grace and her BF tickets to see Show Me the Money concert. She showed me a reliable Korean site, and tickets were only like 130,000 won in comparison to the $250 ones I was finding on the English sites. I had to be careful since there was a concert in Busan on the 13th.So I was skimming through to sort tickets to find adjacent ones so they could sit together at the Seoul concert.

I check the original page like every day but no tickets popped up. I was sad that they would have to pay more, so it was stressing me out. Finding tickets together would make me feel less guilty, I thought. 

But then something curious happened... 

The concert was August 20th...  I had a ticket for August 20th... But on this secondhand site all of the sudden, after 5 PM when I came home from work, tickets were popping up on August 19th. I was like "where are they having one on the 19th??" 

SURPRISE!! They added a concert. At about 6, all of the sudden a bunch more tickets popped up!

And I am a ninja and I got them for all of us! We are going August 19th!! Wooooooo

Our seats are the cheapest but I'm pretty happy!

After, I went over to Grace's to watch the finale of SMTM, where the two rappers were from the teams I like, Zion T and Gray's teams. The guy I liked from my fave team (Simon Dominc and GRAY!) was the winner!

Usually Gray produces the songs for his team but for the final BewhY produced his own songs! Awesome!

Rap still isn't suuuuuuuuuper popular here as its own genre (which is weird since like every kpop group has a rapper????) but it's getting there. I love it.

Coming for you, Gray. You too, Zion T

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh I get to see them live~~~

Saturday I had a lazy day finally watching some of Orange is the New Black until we met up with Grace and Jonghyuk to watch "The Shallows"

It was pretty entertaining, if a bit on the "okay that's not science... that's not how sharks work" side and a lot of jump scares and good music score. It went by so fast! I liked it a lot. My expectations were met because I love giant animal movies that don't make actual sense.

Sunday we headed to a very small dance class of Girls' Generation's "Oh!"

So cute. So fun.

Since there were only 3 of us, we each did it solo.

A video of all of use coming soon I hope!

Currently Tina is helping me have things to say to my kidlets so I can have a script since I am certain as soon as I open my mouth sobs will come out.

Really feeling this these days. 

Wish me luck this week.