These Days
Jin and I got smartphones. There’s the first picture.
Look! It’s Pohang!
This is the end point of the harbor where it becomes a stagnant canal. If you walk straight across the water (what? You can’t?) you’ll pass the fishing fleet on your left, and the ship repair dry docks on your right, then you’ll come upon a few scrap heaps, and the ferry boat landing before passing the lighthouse and going out into the Sea of Japan East Sea.
Lovely, no? The plan’s to extend this canal down to the river. So they’re bulldozing the entire neighborhood behind me, which coincidentally is where I teach.
Speaking of teaching, the semester starts again tomorrow. This year I’ll be teaching 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades. It should be… interesting. Of course, I’m not teaching any of the students I taught last year, which, you know, would have made sense. But because of the internal rift between the English teachers at my school I get to start with all new students. Don’t ask. Or do, but don’t suspect an answer other than a shrug and a “I don’t make the schedule.” I don’t quite get it myself. Basically the two English teachers at my school don’t get along, and it’s tiresome.
Still, new students, and they want be all jaded like my 6th graders were. No more listening to poorly executed swears like “Pak you! Shut up your mouse!”
Shut up your mouse. Adorable.
Quotidian Pohang – Three Day Weekend Edition
Stuff done this weekend:
Ate noodles and hotteok, not together but on the same day. While eating noodles the restaurant owner gave me some tips on how to hold my chopsticks. Hotteok remains delicious if not nutritious.
Printed out Clusterfuck, the Novel (it’ll either be called The Crooked Ones or Castle Junction depending on which pile of story-corpses wins the fistfight). This necessitated purchasing a printer and three printer cartridges to print the whole thing.
A new coffee shop opened up near us. It’s next to one of the faux-French bakeries. Drank lots of coffee. Also lots of green tea. Jin and I had a conversation about the difference between “being lucky” and “being fortunate”. We decided it came down to degrees of randomness and one’s response to that randomness, with “being lucky” being more random than “being fortunate”.
Would you agree or disagree?
Back to work tomorrow…
Quotidian Pohang
The momentary thrill of drinking can end your happiness forever.
Quotidian Pohang
Since I’m posting everyday pictures here it only makes sense to put up one of my classroom. There you go.
Quotidian Pohang
Blue skies from school’s back window.
The Eye’s a Filter For You to See
Jin and I went to the beach to eat at one of our favorite restaurants. I’ll probably write about the place one day, but if you’re ever in Pohang it’s behind Tilt, the foreigner bar, maybe about a block or so in.
Afterwards we wandered around a nearby neighborhood where I snapped the above picture. Posting it here has started me thinking how the city must look to people only reading about it on this blog. There’s certainly a trend in my pictures that runs counter to the actual. For one thing the city has people in it, and most of it doesn’t look like the weird, dirty, and empty parts I post pictures of.
This coming week I’ll post more mundane pictures. Maybe the quotidian will be as strange.
Yesterweird 