Gotta catch 'em all!

So, last month I got engaged, and today I'm off to Japan for the next week to meet the family for the first time. I'm pretty nervous of course, and not really sure how to come to terms with meeting her parents now, then not seeing them again until the wedding next summer, and not seeing very much of them at all unless we move to Japan in the future. Nonetheless it's an important trip for me, and since it's my first trip to Japan, it should be a nice one.

After a week in Japan I'll be back in Korea for about a week-and-a-half, then back to the US for three weeks, then back to Korea. Expect lighter posting for a while; I'll blog when I can, though I'm looking forward to the break more than you can imagine. I've post-dated a bunch of stuff for August and September, so keep your eyes open for that. The one for August 5th is kind of neat, there's a nice letter I'm posting on the 23rd, and I'll have some festival stuff coming later.

And with all this running between Japan and the US around I'm a little worried about swine flu. Not worried about actually having the flu, but with people thinking I have it. I'm not exactly sickly, but I tend to catch colds easily. Last summer, for example, I came down with something I couldn't shake, went back home to a doctor---sat in a waiting room for over two hours---was given some medicine that made me sleepy*, and ended up still sick when I came back to Korea three weeks later. Anyway, I don't want to get the sniffles on the way back because I don't really have time to spend a week in quarantine, sitting in a motel eating potato chips and watching TV for a week. 'Cause it's not football season yet.

A few times a year in Korea I hear that I should be careful because "the weather is very changeable." That's true not only when the seasons change or when summer days alternate between rain and shine, but, well, pretty much all the time. Especially at school. My school is shaped like an H, and the English room is in the little bar perpendicular to the two long parallel things. The AC doesn't work and because of the position there's practically no breeze, and with 36 students in summer the room's hotter than it is outside. Step into the hallway it's significantly cooler because of the breeze. In the teacher's office they have the air conditioner set at a frigid 18 degrees Celcius. When it gets too cold they take it up to 24. Then, when it's cleaning time they open the windows. So yeah, the weather is indeed very changeable: in school, on the bus, or shopping around town between the sidewalk and the stores that could double as meat lockers.

I'm not sure if this love affair with climate control is uniquely Korean. In the Dave's post tipping me off to that Washington Post article on Korean consumerism a poster writes:

A Korean sociologist, whose name escapes me, said that "Korea is the land of extremes."

I'm not going to debate the extent that's true, but we certainly see it in the application of the air conditioner or the heater. The line "Korea has four distinct seasons" seems more a cry for help than a source of pride considering how Koreans react to the weather. But, when I was in Hong Kong in July, 2006---great timing, right---I remember reading opinion pieces in the newspapers about how heavily air conditioned the buses were. And remembering how oppressively hot and humid the weather was, I can imagine that an excessively cool bus could be quite dangerous.

In any event, looks like my summer vacation won't really coincide with yours; in July I had a record number of visitors and page views, but seems like most public school teachers were out of town. Hopefully the readers will remember to come back. And hopefully you can tolerate me spending some time away from the computer.

If I were you I wouldn't hold out hope for this kind of post when I get back. Even though my line

I’m always like, “hello! they didn’t have cell phones in geisha times!”

was fucking hilarious. In the mean time, give a listen to the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra.



* I don't understand how doctors, general practitioners, and nurses make it through the day without getting punched. I made an appointment for 3:00 one day and ended up sitting in the waiting room until 5. The doctor barely looks at me and tells me it's an allergy. He can't be sure what it is because, and I quote (as evidenced by the quotation marks), "they live in hovels in Korea." I guess there's a reason people end up practicing in suburban Pittsburgh. I told you before I'm an impatient person and I hate not only lateness but waiting in line, so the next time I have to go to see a general practitioner in the US they'd better have Brett Favre in the waiting room if the staff doesn't want to get punched.