Pictures.

Well, I hit a Korean tourist festival thing today. It was pretty boring, but I decided to take a few pictures of the city while I was at it. Enjoy!

R

Me in front of a huge glowing mask made out of paper. 

The mask alone. 

Fish. 

Lotus. 

Fish. 

People showing off some Korean style drums. 

Tomato truck. 

Truck full of strawberries. It's odd that this has gotten commonplace to me. 

Regular street. You can kind of see the old women on the right selling fruit and veggies. That's really common here. 

Woman selling fish. 

Street 

Street. 

Alley. 

Magnolia tree. 

This one's for Damian. He wanted to see the cherry blossoms, well here they are. 

And an up close shot. 

Busan. 

More Busan. 

Busan. 

The smallest banana ever. That coin in the picture is about the size of a quater. What's crazy is that it was a tiny banana right in the middle of a bunch of regular sized bananas, and it never turned yellow. It was like the banana of perpetual youth or something. 

Desensitization

I haven't posted for a while, so I thought I'd mention why:

I think I've been totally desensitized to Korea.

Everything that was originally weird is not commonplace to me. The students are commonplace. The food is commonplace. The language barrier is commonplace. I don't even notice the stuff anymore.

But even then, sometimes things jar you back into perspective. Today, I was teaching. Teaching a college class. At a national university. On the fourth floor. And, get this, a dog ran into my classroom. Korea has a lot of homeless dogs, more than you'd expect for some reason. This one was a nice little mangy one. White turned brown from dirt, but friendly none the less. It just wandered in all tongue and wagging, then ran to the back of the room and laid down. In my classroom. On the fourth floor. I had to get a student to re-liberate him.

And earlier this week, I got some practice in keeping a straight face. I was lecturing and I noticed a student chewing on his pen. I actually saw the pen break right in his mouth and the ink spill out onto his chin. I saw the look of shock on his face as he scrambled to keep his dignity. I saw him wipe away the blue to make a long purple smear across his chin. And the whole time, I continued lecturing. I did my best to keep my smiles down.

It was almost as bad as the time I was talking to a student and a booger flew out his nose. When that happens, you really find out how adult you can be.

R