Friday, August 29, 2008

Here stands the ancient tortoise guarding the shores of Daejung-eup, where I teach.
Oh wait he's sideways oh well.
Below is a sign indicating the room where the man goes. The picture after that reveals the room itself.

This beach is a popular loitering spot for litter. I rode up to it on my scooter after I dropped by my school today.
As I start teaching from 3:30 to 9:30 on Monday, today marked the last weekday I would get to enjoy the Jeju sunset on this littery beach. As soon as I sat down on the dirty sand facing the dull azure ocean shore, I felt almost as pacified as I do while riding my moped. I immediately decided that for some reason I love this view.

As well as this one.
And this one.

This one too of course.
And now I leave you with the four attempts it took me to photograph myself flashing the west-side symbol palm facing out. Jeff tells me it's the cool thing to do on this island right now.
-Big Wilkinson
Posted by Will Wilkinson at 4:08 AM 2 comments
Thursday, August 28, 2008

Teaching
I realize I didn't get around to talking about the beach last time, so I'll kick this one off with a quick note on that. But first of all, I should finish up my perfunctory living accommodations report by explaining the social life here. I actually kind of live in the country. My immediate neighborhood consists of three houses, red, blue, and yellow, respectively (I'm in the middle), and several surrounding fields of ambiguous crops. During the day, seventy year-old women work the fields by hand, their bodies completely covered by thin cloth and straw hats half a meter in diameter. There are many more houses lining narrow, winding streets just a "block" north of us. My roommate Jeff told me he likes to get lost in that area late at night, where he sometimes meets up with a man who in one way or another identifies himself with Okinawa and sells him monster oranges. Jeff said their conversation is always the same. The man says, "Washington D.C. Good!" Jeff replies, "Yeah!" And the man says, "Verrrrry good!"
I do indeed have a roommate named Jeff, an early 30-something dude from Virginia Beach (not D.C., by the way) who spent a few lucrative years selling mortgage plans until he got sick of it. He is the only other white person I know here, but he's sociable enough to make up for it. Since being hired five months or so ago, Jeff probably hasn't saved as much money from the job as he could because he is too busy buying people treats all the time. He buys his co-teachers ice cream because, as he tells me, "They love that stuff," and then he laughs. I'm lucky to have such a genuinely good-natured guy living with me. Right now we're bonding through Bob Dylan.
OK that's all you get.
-Big Wilkinson

No comments: