Well, SJ officially broke up with me this weekend. The relationship was getting too stressful with the job and everything, which I understand. She nonetheless scheduled a lunch for us for Sunday.The weekend itself was ho-hum, which is how I wanted it. I was so exhausted, I thought I was anemic this weekend. I couldn’t wake up, and I couldn’t go to sleep. Besides, whenever I slept, it was filled with nightmares involving me having to fix some situation. So I’d go to sleep late and wake up at 5:45 on Saturday morning. Yes, I woke up that early when I coulda slept in. Coffee didn’t help. Tea didn’t do anything. I was dazed tooling with the computer.
I did end up getting off my butt and made a decent dinner. SJ had given me some plums. I improvised and made a pretty darn good plum sauce, which I tossed with some beer tempura pork. I made my entire building smell like great Chinese cooking.
After doing laundry and doing a much needed clean up of my place, I met SJ in Beomgye for lunch Sunday. I ended up wearing something too warm for this weather. It was humid and hot, and even turned into rain. I was wearing a white button down with a black t-shirt underneath, topped with a sports coat. While we sat at the BBQ chicken place, SJ suggested I get more casual. So I took everything off the top of my body and put the white shirt on by itself. Right in the middle of the restaurant.
We went to a bookstore so she could find an English coursebook for her son. While there, we ran into a friend of hers and her daughter. I went through the English TOEIC section, looking for interesting English teaching books. I came across one called F*cking Spoken English, which was great. It was a series of slang-ridden lines from movies, TV shows, and plays such as “Sex and the City”, “The Matrix”, and “The Vagina Monologues,” explaining what the colloquialisms meant in Korean. SJ ended up buying another one of my recommendations: two books from the Captain Underpants series.
We actually had a nice time. It was admittedly difficult. While we stood saying our goodbyes in the rain, she gave me the hand signal meaning, “Call me.”
We then went our separate ways.
I entered the train in Beomgye, hoping to wallow in my loneliness, but ended up right next to a white family. They ended up not being American or European but Russian. That was fine. I didn’t have to make fake small talk with some people while I was in a down mode. We did sort of communicate with our eyes, the way that foreigners do with each other when surrounded by natives. After the Russians left the train, some people entered from either the Middle East or India. They definitely weren’t Korean. And there was a little bond between us there, too. Strange how the international community comes together when they’re all in a foreign country. That explains more about how immigrants behave in the U.S.
Brant took me out for more drinks and some spring rolls at Yuppy Bar when I came back. The rain continued to pour, and we again were the only patrons of the restaurant, listening to Eminem piped into the stereo system.
Tomorrow morning we have open classes for the kindies. I’m not as nervous about this as I was with the elementary classes. I have more daily interaction with these kids than the other ones. I guess it’s just more of a pain in the ondongi (butt) that we have to perform again in front of parents. But we have met these parents before at the Sports Day event, and generally, I hear that the kids give me great reviews. So it shouldn’t be bad. I’m actually looking forward to seeing some of the parents again (especially Crystal’s mom).