Into the Blue Again

Three months down and I'm already skipping the country, if only for a week. I've decided to go to Thailand after all. I'll spend most of my time on the small island of Koh Phangan, famous worldwide for its full moon parties. I leave Sunday and come back early the next Monday morning (which means I'll be there for the full moon party on Saturday - fuck yeah).

Of course, this week and the trip that'll consume it marks another first in that Mike, one of the two close friends I've met here will be leaving Korea for international travel and then back to Canada. He'll likely come back next year, though. I had a long drunk talk with Adrian this weekend about the cruel nature that we're all so transient here, and that the friends you make here will inevitably leave and you'll leave them. But that's all far too emokid to bother bringing up here.

Speaking of talking shit and being drunk this weekend, there was a party on the roof of Mike and Ben's apartment building to commemorate Mike's departure. It was a fine time, not in spite of, but moreso due to the fact that there wasn't a huge crowd there.

There was a reasonable collection of strangers and seldom seems to start with, but a lot of them petered away and left just a handful of us on the roof to drink too much. Music for the soiree was supplied by my far too loud white tube boombox, and food was supplied by a clever little portable barbecue. Got got his earful of complaints and financial doo-dickary from the party fallout, which puts a pretty bittersweet tone to the whole thing in retrospect. Basically, his landlord is trying to dick him out of three grand because he says a barbeque on the (solid concrete) roof will cause leaks.

But that's all moot, and far too negative to bring up on the eve of adventure. And not everything about Mike's departure is terrible news, as he practically left me his whole apartment. I'm now the proud owner of his Xbox, coffee maker, toaster, rice cooker, and potentially cursed portable barbecue (at least until he comes back).

By the way, Ben and Mike are English teachers here too, so of course they've got blogs, too.

http://benfraser.blogspot.com/

http://www.mickileepaul.com/blog/

Mike's (non-blog) website is worth a visit too, his pictures are generally far better than mine.

Speaking of pictures, I went apeshit with the camera the other day as my Kindergarten kids were playing in the playroom. I'm so attached to this class now. I teach another bunch of smarter, better behaved kids twice a week, and I can't see ever forming the same attachment to them. They just don't have the same character. I was talking to Ally at work, and I was telling her how when I'm actually dealing with my class, they often frustrate me to no end, that I spend half the class doing that pinch-the-bridge-of-your-nose-and-close-your-eyes thing that people do on headache commercials. But then I proceeded to tell her how I miss them terribly overnight, that I'm overjoyed to see them in the morning.

Ally answered "Hmm, sounds like motherhood to me." She's got a really fucking good point. There's something interesting to note from the pictures here. Of the two most photographed kids, one is easily my favourite, and the other is the kid who is most often the cause of my melodramatically frustrated facial expressions.

That's largely it for this week, and possibly for next week, too. Given that I'll be on a relatively remote island, I won't be able to post my typical Thursday blog. However, I'll likely have some sort of 'I'm still alive, shit is crazy' post somewhere from the road, so keep an eye out.

In this week's edition of Unintentionally Hilarious T-shirts (UHT), see this clearly Korean guy I spotted on the subway, with a that shirt I really wanted to steal.