HOMELY PLANET

Courtesy of cattleskin



Am I evil for putting it up? I found the whole thing wonderfully absurd, myself.

I've been in my current apartment for two and half years now. It's a one-room affair with wooden floors and a bed built for a Korean midget. The one good thing about the place is that it's located right next to the University... that I no longer work at.

I originally had ambitious moving plans. I was saving money for a big deposit to put down on a big place (Korean apartments require massive cash deposits called "key money" which you get back when you move out), but then I was called to the US to bury my father, which was no cheap endeavor.

But I still have a bit left, and I'm back at work, picking up loads of extra classes and overtime to guarantee a rising stack. So for the last couple of weeks I've been looking for places, and it looks like I've finally settled on one. It's just down the street from my school and is very centrally located for other things in the city. It's also a loft-style place, in that my bed is located on an upper level which is accessable by a steep staircase - a definite drinking hazard (I don't want to fall down it and break my neck and end up twitching and moaning in spoken word videos about werewolves) - but it beats having my bedroom in my kitchen.

The strangest thing about all of this is that, while I have had some assistance from my very cool native-speaker girlfriend, I've done much of it on my own - and all in Korean. It's been pretty difficult, but I've managed to set up meetings, talk about dates and times and money and everything, much of it over the phone, no less.. My current and past studies are beginning to pay off, despite the fact that in Korean class tonight I felt like an idiot, surely how many of the deer-in-the-headlights students I teach daily must feel. My tongue couldn't wrap itself around any of the words, and my mind couldn't recoginze what my tongue couldn't say. They should require every English teacher here to take at least three months of Korean class, if only to give them a bit of empathy for the people they teach, as well as a dose of humility that goes with trying to learn a new language and inevitably sounding like a moron. The guy who just said "uhhhhhhhhh..." for thirty seconds before sputtering out a badly pronounced answer in a class I taught yesterday? Well, I was that guy today. I feel his pain.

I will press on, though. And I will rule.

진짜 할수 있어요. 화이팅!!!