Wednesday, October 8, 2008

PICTURES!

PICTURES! Boring pictures! You can see how tiny my apartment is, my sink on the floor and other such mundane things.







Why does the entrance to my building have Chinese writing? I have no idea. The only people who have seen my building only read Korean. Maybe it's my address or something poetic--or maybe it says: tiny apartments here!

Okay, and now time to view the broken sink:
Notice how the only thing actually holding it to the wall was a thin strip of silicone glue. Seriously. And they tried to tell me it was my fault it fell off of the wall. My supervisor is a glorious person for arguing with them that no, the sink was just moronically glued to the wall and they should fix it at their own cost. Her stubbornness was probably due to the fact that the school would have to pay for the repair if the landlord didn't since they are responsible for my housing but still, I appreciated her effort, whatever the motive.

And now random images of my Chusok presents and the utterly odd English slogans that Koreans are obsessed with plastering all over their t-shirts and hand bags. It's even weirder when you see 60 year old women with sexually provocative slogans who are completely unaware of their meaning.





Lastly, pictures from one of my first days wandering around Seoul. They are mainly from Insadong, a touristy area and a pagoda park near by.






Anyone know what those pretty flowers are? Also, did you notice all of the pink in my bedroom? My apartment came with pink. In Korea, if you are a girl they assume you want everything in pink. Sales clerks looked at me very strangely for only buying blue things (the primary alternative to pink) at the store last weekend. Though they might have also been giving me strange looks because I tended to pace up and down the aisles countless times trying to figure out what to buy. Just maybe. Though it is silly to replace my pink sheets since they are new looking and work fine they drive me insane. The biggest thing in my apartment is my ugly pink bed and it makes me deeply annoyed everyday. The under sheet is peptobismal pink with FLOWERS. FLOWERS. Even as a little girl I had cars on my sheets (hand me downs from my big brother) or plain white sheets and colorful pillows. I think I may give in and buy new sheets next month if looking at my bed still makes me want to vomit. It will be worth preserving my mental health.
Voila pictures. It only took me a month to get them on the net, not too bad. If I remember to bring my camera this weekend you will get lots of rock climbing pictures next week.

I got a funny letter from a Republican candidate running for congress from Shirley, Long Island. I guess registering for an absentee ballot gave them my address in Korea. The Republicans sent me stuff in France too. What I want to know is why don't the Democrats ever send me stuff? I'd actually be interested in reading it. I love getting snail mail here, mainly because I get so very little of it. My favorite things are actually the menus restaurants put in with magnets on the back. I have 7 of them on my fridge, 2 of which are booklets with lots of restaurants inside. I've only managed to find one of them because I can't read the address on the advertisements but the pictures are fun to look at and practice my shoddy pronunciation on.

Speaking of shoddy pronunciation:
I confiscated a note in class today from one of my students. It was written in Korean so I held it up and said class what does this say? They dutifully replied: 'pabo.' Pabo is actually one of the first Korean words I ever learned in high school and it means stupid. I told them: no stupid. We do not use Korean in English class and we certainly do not say stupid. They were stupefied that I knew what the word was (since it's pretty obvious I don't speak Korean) and they all behaved much better for the rest of class. My fellow expat teachers are right: learning insults in Korean is the way to go for your first vocabulary words. When I went to the bathroom later in the day I sounded out the characters so now I know how to say and spell pabo in Korean!

Stay tuned for updates.

9 comments:

Josh said...

YAY!!!!!!! PICTURES!!!!!!! And they are small, like you!

:-p

Alex said...

The pictures are small eh? Or the people? Everything is small like me here! Except that by Korean standards I'm not so small, so there! In fact my kids think I'm tall and old!

Unknown said...

Yay pictures Looking forward to more. If I'm alive by the end of the weekend. Tall and old huh? hehe that's a first. If your old then I guess I'm an antique.

Alex said...

You nit, aren't we the same age?!

Anonymous said...

*on republicans* the BBC had an interesting report that our generation, when registering to vote, is registering overwhelmingly as democrats. I think it might be the republican party trying to get you to "switch".

yay pictures!

Nancy K said...

Good post. Your sink is pretty funny. Did you get it fixed yet? You'll never hear the end of it if you don't take your camera rock climbing!

Unknown said...

Yes we are the same age and no we're not. I'm about 6 months older then you :-P. So there!

Alex said...

They did fix my sink. The best bit about it is the new grout where the sink meets the wall.

I need to scan the letter this stupid candidate sent me. If I need more reasons to never vote republican that letter was it. It was like an educated version of Palin--I'm a small town person raising my kids but I'm also a Republican idiot who believes that taxes are too high and then complain that the roof on her kid's school is leaking. You can't have it both ways. ...I'm done ranting now.

Nancy K said...

Waiting for an update and pictures of your weekend hike.
Hope that you are feeling better.