Murphy's Law

Some people collect bottlecaps. Others collect stamps. I, on the other hand, have a collection of bandaids from almost every country I have been in. I now have some from Korea. It occurred in our room last weekend at Daecheon and ended with all the skin gone from my knuckle to my nail of my finger. I won't go into details but for two days I thought I was going to die. Then I shocked the same hand trying to plug something into an outlet. I hope I can survive Korea. [Fortunately, my finger is healing well... I still can't bend it yet but it is looking good.]

I've found Koreans are very funny when it comes to health. Little things like unsafe wiring and fireworks don't phase them, but if it rains look out... you're going to die. This week I heard of three common causes of death/serious injury here.

1. Fan Death- if you leave a fan on a room with the doors and windows closed, it will suck all the oxygen out of the air and you will die.
2. Rain on the Head- if it starts to rain and head gets wet, all your hair will fall out.
3. Red Pens- if someone writes your name in red pen, you are either dead or they are wishing you dead. Fortunately I was told that before I went and did it on some poor kid's paper.

It is kind of surprising to me how strongly our students believe these things here in a country that is so modernized. Granted, in Spain people think you'll get sick if you walk barefoot on the floor, but the floors are really cold in the winter so it at least makes a little sense.

This week wasn't too bad, but it was definitely characterized by Murphy's Law (if anything can go wrong, it will). Some parents called a PTA meeting at 4:00 Friday afternoon to talk about why the school raised tuition this year and why the school can't order all new textbooks every year (yeah, you could make a lot of comments about that combination but somehow we refrained.) I did discover in one of my classes that most my teacher's books aren't the same edition as the student's books, a little fact that we won't share at the next meeting.

The outlets in my room didn't have covers on them (they weren't the ones I got shocked on) and evidently our water was leaking into the first floor, so one evening 5 Koreans paraded in and out of my apartment. They kept jabbering away so all I did was sit crosslegged on the floor with the landlady and watch them. I wanted them to put covers on the outlets and make them so they don't spark, but they saw my appliances like my hair straightener and battery charger (that have american plugs but work on 220 power) so they thought the problem was that I was trying to plug things into the wrong voltage. I figured out they must be using numbers in the conversation but I don't even know the numbers... they kept saying "i bai ship" in their sentences. I just sat there thinking that I could explain things perfectly in Spanish and English and even get my point across in Mandarin Chinese, but couldn't say anything in Korean. Hello, thank you, I am happy, goodbye. But I came up with a pretty sweet plan to learn a little Korean... for my Jr/Sr class, all the kids have to do a service project. So I told them they could do their project to teach me some Korean, and one girl is going to do it. She's not all that great at explaining things, but she's fluent in Korean and it will give me a chance to figure the language out a little.

Murphy struck again on Saturday when my washing machine broke, and when I tried to wash things in the sink, the sink got stuck with water in it and the plug in. I ended up going to the director's house and doing my laundry there, where we all laughed hysterically. It worked out pretty well though since they have a dryer and they gave me dinner too. Okay... that's it for now. If I don't update again soon, I've been deported... :^)