field trip!

the last time i took a field trip, i believe that i was in 8th grade.  and frankly, i had forgotten how wonderful they are!  today was the last meeting of my monday/wednesday class, and as it is two hours, i opted to take advantage of the length and take my class out for an adventure.  the students decided that they wanted to go to a traditional dumpling place in insadong.  i love going out with real korean people because they speak korean and, therefore, i do not have to do anything.  after dumplings (and free korean wine, because the owner of the restaurant was a former classmate of one of my students...and because he thought her teacher was just beautiful), we made our way to a tea room.  i had a delicious cup of sweet citron tea, along with more laughs than one could have anticipated.  my students always come up with something new to make me laugh.  my stomach felt as thought i had done 100 crunches, i was laughing so hard.  and once you get the giggles, it is hard to stop.

i ended up being out with my students for 3 1/2 hours.  it was incredibly fun and i hope to see them again soon.  they are a great bunch of people and i will miss being their teacher.  

i made my way back to school to finish some things up, and then off to lotte mart i went.  after picking up lots of fruits and vegetables, i came home to find my landlord in my apartment.  before i left for work this morning, i left a note on his door.  my heat and water heater are in one unit.  you have to push a button in order to turn on the heat and the hot water.  every time i turned this button on last night, it sounded like niagara falls was in my kitchen.  i opted to not sleep with heat last night, preferring to actually sleep than feel like i was drowning.  i also wrote on my note that my the blinds covering my living room window was falling down and that i hoped it could be fixed.  

the heater thing was fixed and the overhead light in the living room was fixed (even though i had not requested this repair, nor did i know it needed to be accomplished).  the window shade, now that was another story.  good lord.  it is good to know that men are incredibly stubborn when it comes to home improvement, regardless of where they are geographically in the world.  my short little korean landlord began jacking around with this window shade around 5 pm.  jacking around continued until 6 pm.  in the meantime, he managed to knock things over, make loud noises (which i constantly feared were my computer being shattered), and break the front part of my exercise bike.  he switched from jacking around with the window shade to jacking around with the exercise bike, trying to repair what he had, er, jacked up.  he got out his roll of black electricians tape, repaired the bike, and then told me his daughter would come down around 8.  and sure enough, around 8, daughter and father came back to jack around with window shade.  

i was somewhat interrogated by daughter while father was jacking around with a piece of metal outside my apartment.  i would estimate that he made about six solid attempts to get this window shade working, but every time, i heard a loud clunk, followed by my seeing this piece of metal on the floor.  i began pacing and started to get really annoyed, just wanting to take a shower and go to bed.  daughter works at 1:30 pm.  kendra works at 7 am, getting up before 5 am.  she is tired now and wants to be alone.

father finally gave up after another hour of jacking around.  i told the girl several times that i really did not care about the window shade and that i just didn't want the bloody thing hanging halfway down the window.  it looked tacky and i didn't use it anyway.  get rid of the damn thing.  i do hope this saga has come to an end.