Long Story. Amazing Results.

I've been looking forward to writing this all week.  Here it goes:

I woke up Monday morning at two thirty in the AM.  I'm wide awake cursing the jet lag as I look around my foreign apartment.  Nothing is unpacked because the former teacher is still in town.  MJ, my Korean boss, told me I would be staying in a motel Monday and Tuesday night, but more on that later.  It's freezing outside but my room has heated floors which is nice because the no shoes policy inside the home is pretty serious and when in Rome do as the non-shoe do...Anyways, I played on the computer for awhile and tried to watch the NFL playoffs, remember its Monday here/Sunday there, but the website was not working quite right.  So I had to close the browser and open it again every time I thought the score might be different.  A miserable way to watch a football game as I imagined my friends and family enjoying their television screens and English commentary.

When I decided to take a shower, I stepped foot in the coldest bathroom known to man.  The bathroom and kitchen might as well be outside with a privacy fence and an awning to cover your head as they are separate from the bedroom with exterior walls that do not deserve the name "wall."  You dread to even touch the toilet seat as you may be frozen to it for quite some time.  As I attempted to turn on the shower that is in the middle of the bathroom and a drain on the floor, the dreaded thing happened: NOTHING.  No water my friends.  First day to make my impression at school and the crusties in my eyes were to stay.  But no fear, I had a bottle of drinking water.  So, aforementioned closet of ice and a bottle of water poured over my head BAM!  crusties lose.  A few choice words enters the mind but I laugh at myself trying to conserve a bottle of water in hopes of rinsing my shampooed head.

I got dressed and realized my hair was still a mess so I threw some hair product in my hands and styled my mop.  But wait, the last of the water was still pooled on my bathroom floor and sink from the head rinse.  A towel simply does not cut it with sticky paste.  So I am now leaning over the drain trying not to ruin my dress pants in an attempt to wash my hands off.  Quite the proud moment as I rinse with drops of already soapy water in a toxic drain that has never seen a scrub brush or any device remotely sanitary.

I knew I needed to leave early because getting lost on the way to school was inevitable.  So I wandered around thinking I knew where I was for about three minutes.  Then the sign I knew I would use as a marker kept showing up in different places.  Again, I kept my cool and even my sense of humor as I passed the same man in the same window four times.  He continued to smoke his cigarette and waved at me each time with a smile that understood my pain but was enjoying it entirely too much.  Finally, after about thirty minutes of walking around Kimhae in 0 degree Celsius (that's the point of freezing for you non-Metric types and 273.15 kelvin for the rest of you), I spotted a Paris bakery that looked very familiar.  I thought it would be a good time to celebrate and stopped in to grab something to eat.  But wait, automatic doors are not entirely automatic so I planted my face in the glass to set the tone for my Korean friends.  Abounding giggles and pointing at the tall white man that was probably red from the cold and a but disheveled from the bottled water shower was my greeting.  I grabbed the first thing that looked close to bread and a bottle of juice and got the heck out of Dodge.  I knew now where I was and I sauntered off to the building.

I stopped outside the classroom around 12:30 p.m. because no one was there yet.  I dropped my bags, remember I'm staying at the motel so I looked like I was climbing Everest during this entire debacle, and reached for my juice.  But wait, Eric......Why is the bottle glass?  Why does your juice suddenly begin to look a little more like fermented juice?  Did you buy wine Eric?  Are you drinking wine in front of your new job which happens to be teaching elementary students?  Folks, when presented with a moment of such gravity, I believe the only course of action is to unscrew the lid and pray that there must be some limit, some cap to the amount of suffering and pain one could feel in a matter of a morning.  It was juice.  Fizzy juice, but juice.  I think...

Tomorrow's topic will be the definition and experience of a Korean Love Motel...