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November is slipping by, largely unnoticed, and I'm happy to see it go. This is a dead time - a pitiless stretch - with no public holidays or reprieve in sight until Christmas. Ho ho ho, teaching all the way.

It's getting colder here in Korea, although I've been assured that it will come nowhere close to the blustery snow-walls that most Canucks are used to. The heating in our building has been sketchy to the max: the hobbled superintendent who runs the show has ultimate control of the furnace and has taken to running it by some sort of drunken lottery. On Monday we got heat from 9 pm till 1 am, on Tuesday it was 7:30 till midnight and God knows when it was on Wednesday - I missed the boat and was left freezing and shivering in my bed all night long.

The actual heating system is a set of water pipes under the floorboards, and you have to pull a little lever in the bathroom to get it going. If you have been so lucky as to operate the mechanism within the superintendent's maniacal schedule, a tiny wheel will spin cheerily and within forty minutes you're sweating in your very own Korean love sauna. If the wheel doesn't spin, you're fucked and you'd better sleep in your jacket or something.

It's a helpless feeling, a novel feeling, to have your entire well-being in the icy clutches of a dour Korean cripple. He's mad at us too, by the way, because Korean kids sometimes come up to our lounge to smoke and get drunk and they always trash the place: peeing and burning and spitting. So we chase them off (sometimes I talk to them and they tell me how many girls they've deflowered or which of their friends has the biggest penis... wow that was a weird icebreaker).

But nonetheless, we are foreigners and as foreigners we are naturally corrupt and dirty and awful in the eyes of the Korean elder generation and we certainly don't deserve to have heated homes. I don't blame these old bags and hags, really, not when you see how Westernized the new breed of Korean youth has become.

Anyways, I ventured onto MSN the other day while I was trying to stay warm and realized that the homesickness is slipping away. MSN still feels like a big-time wormhole into the sordid past, but I feel comfortable and settled enough here that I don't linger on what I'm missing back home anymore. I suppose I've come to grips with the fact that Things Change and People Leave and have thrown myself upon the fickle mercies of fate, hoping that I'll still have something waiting for me when I get back home. (If)

Posted by Chris at 12:16 AM >> Commentations (3)