Student: *pointing at the drawing of the smiley face on the board* Teacher, if long face means sad, then happy, short face?
Me: *trying not to laugh* No, it doesn't.
Student: I know teacher. It was just my gag.

***

During a class about similies
Me to a student: *looking for examples* What is pretty?
Student: *blank look*
Me: Okay, who is the prettiest in the class?
Student: *a minute of silence*
Co-teacher: *overhearing* She thinks she is the prettiest.
Me: Ah! That's okay. *Writing the example on the board* She is as pretty as me.
Student: *nods enthusiastically*

***

Me: *pointing at the sentence "I eat dinner with my friends" on the board* What is the past tense of eat?
Student: Ate.
Me: Good.
Student: *after a conversation with my co-teacher in Korean* What did you eat?
Me: Steak.
Students: *awwwwwww chorus*
Student: Ooh! Teacher! Next time you me call. *cue imaginary conversation with me on the phone*

***

Me: *walks into the classroom*
Students: *Ooooohhh chorus*
One student: Teacher! Delicious
Me: *confused look*
Student: Hair! *motions to show a fringe with her own hair and then gives a thumbs up*
Me: Thanks.
Another student: Teacher! *Something Korean*
Me: *confused look again*
Three girls in the front row: *Motion pulling on the handles of a motorcycle and make the movements followed by much giggling as they point at my leather jacket.*
Me: Okay... Can everyone turn to page 128.
Students: *More giggling*

***

Sitting in my staffroom, one of my favourite students comes up to me surrounded by his friends.
Ryu Seok Ryong: Teacher, do you remember I saw you on Sunday?
Me: *Blushes remembering that I was about to go out and was not particularly appropriately dressed for seeing my students* Saturday.
Ryu Seok Ryong: Okay.
Me: Why?
Ryu Seok Ryong: I just wanted to check it was you.

When I first arrived here, I marvelled at how fast I was losing weight - ten kilograms in two months! A real achievement for me! Yesterday I weighed myself for the first time in a while and was sad to discover that almost five of those ten kilos have returned. There was no need to marvel. I know exactly where the weight has come from.

Grant's visit brought with it a month of indulging and his leaving brought on the comfort eating that always seems to come with my depression. In addition to eating all the wrong kinds of foods, I have lost my thyroid medication and haven't had time to go and refill it yet. I have still been walking, possibly more than I was before with all of my photography walks - I even choose to walk rather than taxi to Jess's place 90% of the time which I never used to do - but I don't think that it is enough to boost my metabolism into the hyper-drive that it needs.

So what is my plan of action?
No more junk food for a start! No more of the Pringles and sweeties that have been gracing my room with their presence over the last month or so. No more unhealthy take out! Part of the problem with this is that I cannot bring myself to cook in my kitchen - something about the preparing, cooking, cleaning and storing for a future meal that I never eat is not appealing to me and just the thought of cooking for myself is enough to make me want to sleep. In addition, cooking for one here is expensive, especially when I hardly ever eat the leftovers on time. What do I plan to do about this? Well, I am not planning on cutting eating out from my diet completely, but I am planning on cutting out the unhealthy stuff - the Western food, the carbs. I will flood my system with Korean foods (hopefully the healthier kinds) like plain gimbap and the occasional kalmegi. When I am not eating out, I plan to keep some raw foods in the house - carrots, cucumbers, celery (if I can find it), tuna - things that do not need too much cooking and can just be cut up and eaten in a fix.

I am going to try and get to the chemist today to get more of my thyroid meds and hopefully my medical aid will cover them else I am going to be looking at a huge bill. I am not sure whether the medical aid will cover them because they already covered the last bottle that I got just over a month ago, which was supposed to last for three months. If I could find the little pill bag, it would be helpful, but it has disappeared into the world of lost socks, never to be found again it would seem.

As for the exercise, I am starting a Taekwondo class tonight - an hour a night, five nights a week. Hopefully this will kick my ass into gear and get me losing weight once again. Here's holding thumbs :)

Everyday I log onto blogspot and a sense of guilt passes over me as I realise just how long it has been since I last posted here. It isn't that things haven't been happening. Things have been moving on quite well here as I spend most of my nights going out with friends and taking my mind off the lonliness that I still feel whenever I am left alone in my apartment for too long. I have been making sure to take daily walks in order to get out of my apartment and stop myself from taking my daily photos in the comfort of my own home. The photos themselves are coming along nicely and I am learning all sorts of nifty tricks and techniques and getting used to using my new toy. But aside from that, there has not been too much to tell. Life goes on as it always has.

One of the things that has been filling my mind recently has been the thought of what will happen when I go back home. When I arrived here with my 30kg bag, I thought that I had erred on the side of caution, had overpacked ever so slightly and put in some things that I wouldn't need. After unpacking everything into my apartment, however, it still felt bare. After almost 7 months of living here, I can certainly say that the apartment doesn't feel bare anymore. It is filled with pieces of me that I do not want to leave behind, forgotten in Korea. Should I leave behind the books that I scoured from What the Book, many of which I have yet to read? Should I sell the guitar that has been my silent companion over the last few weeks? Most importantly, should I abandon the clothes that I arrived here with in favour of the ones that I have bought? Even if that were the case, I think I would still be severely over, especially after today.

After a night of girly fun, Jess and I woke up at Maria's house this morning and after a delicious breakfast of leftover samosas and french toast, Maria started scouring through her cupboard for something to wear.
"I have too many clothes," Maria said jokingly as Jess and I watched on and tried to advise her on an outfit for the day. Too many clothes isn't her only problem, we quickly figured out. She also has a shoe cupboard about three times the size of mine, filled to capacity. She tried to pawn off a pair of bright red "hooker" heels on us, but sadly Maria has tiny feet and neither of us could fit into them. The disappointment at not being able to fit into the shoes didn't last for long though.
"I hate this dress," Maria announced, dragging out a grey Jacobs dress from the depth of her wardrobe. "Who wants it?"
Jess and I looked at each other, both thinking the same thing - I wonder if it would fit. Realising that it would probably be too small, Jess encouraged me to try it, and joy of all joys, it fit like a glove. I walked out and did a little turn, only to be handed another pile of clothes. And another. And another. On each exit the pile grew until eventually I left with eight of Maria's discarded dresses, three skirts, a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.
Slumming it, some might say and look down on me. I see it as an opportunity that I just couldn't pass up.
I arrived home and carefully placed each item into my wardrobe, taking some things down to make space for the others until I can buy more hangers. I took a step back and looked at my wardrobe, and a realisation suddenly came over me. In June, I wrote a blog about shopping here and how addictive it is. I also admitted to being a bit of a jean-a-holic, wanting to wear jeans with everything. While this has certainly changed over the last seven months to accommodate skirts and other, thinner, shorter pants during the summer in particular, I never realised until today how much of a backseat jeans had taken. I counted them up - a grand total of three pairs of jeans, maybe ten t-shirts, three pairs of shorts, one pair of capris, five skirts, a couple of black trousers, one charcoal pair, two pairs of cargos - one beige, one olive. None of this particularly surprised me. My wardrobe had advanced from the jeans-and-t-shirt self of the last few years. And then I counted my dresses and was shocked. Eighteen. While the eight dresses from today certainly contribute towards this collection, it still astounds me. I have eighteen dresses. And these are not fancy dresses that I wear once a year to some cocktail party or other. These are dresses that I can and do wear on a regular basis, dresses that I have carefully selected because they fit me, suit me, make me a happier, lighter person when I am wearing them.

Jess says that I should leave my clothes behind, that I should sell them off piece by piece to save weight. At this stage, I think selling off my dresses would be losing a part of the self that I have grown to be. Selling the first capris that I ever owned would be tantamount to selling that memory, selling the shorts that I have worn to death during the summer would be like losing that summer completely. No, I have decided. I cannot sell the clothes that I have bought here, nor can I abandon the ones that I came with. It may sound materialistic, but the clothes that I have acquired are a part of me, reflect my personality at every stage of my growth. While I may not wear my jeans as often as I used to, each time I put them on, I remember the last time as clearly as though it was yesterday and a smile comes to my face. As long as I can fit into them, I am keeping them.

I think I am going to have to resort to shipping.

Friday came. The day that I had been dreading. I had hoped that it would somehow be skipped in the calendar - that I would wake up and it would be Saturday and we would all be completely confused and baffled, but we would shrug and laugh and continue living our lives. And he would be here. But no. Friday came.

Sitting on the mattress that is my bed last night, I looked around my room and took everything in. I looked past the clothes strewn around the room, proof of a weekend of shopping and debauchery, at the filled bookshelf, the slowly dusting guitar in the corner, the two cameras on my desk and the computer lying on the edge of the bed. It suddenly hit me how many things I have taken up as my own little projects. When I bought my guitar, I justified it saying that I wanted to learn - that it was something to do for my own sake when everything I was doing was for everyone else's sake. Since then, I realised, I have taken up a lot of projects for my own sake. I thought I would pay a small tribute to them here.

Playing guitar. As I said earlier, this was the first thing that I decided to do just for me. I love the guitar and have always wanted to learn how to play it. However, I have become lazy in terms of practicing and need someone or something to motivate me. Wanting to be able to play the songs I like only takes me so far. I need something more - someone to practice with or someone to teach me.

Blogging. When I came to Korea, I started this blog. At first, the blogs were occasional as I was just trying to adjust to the new space I was in, but over the last few months it has become a regular hobby of mine, to the point where I was approached to blog for another website about living in Korea (which I am still considering, since they want me to post 3-4 articles on a weekly basis and I am not sure that I have the time or desire. I want to write when I want to write.) I have also become a bit of a blogaholic, now having three separate blogs - one for Korea, one for my creative writing and one for my photography. But more about those in a minute.

Creative Writing. Last year, I took a course in creative writing, and I loved it. I have always enjoyed writing actually, particularly creatively, and it is what put me on the path towards journalism from an early age. But last year, I started writing creatively in a serious way. Before, I was writing silly short stories, fiction, my imagination flowing over onto the page without a second thought. Last year I started to think about the things that I was writing and channel my creativity and imagination into a specific direction - write about a smell, write a litjourn article, write a poem. Being told what I should be doing was liberating and caging simultaneously - I knew the direction in which my writing should go, but to make it go in that direction was a battle. Then, about a month ago, I started writing again. I have been writing all along, of course - regular e-mails and blogs aplenty - but this time I started writing creatively, taking my feelings, my thoughts, my imaginings and putting them to paper or harddrive as the case often was. I started updating my creative writing blog more regularly. I even went out and bought a book in which I could and would write. While I have been lazy over the last month with Grant here to occupy my mind, I took up my pen once more last night and wrote for a good half an hour. It was a good, releasing feeling and by the end of it the depression that had been threatening to sink in had abaited for a time.

Learning Korean. Grant rekindled this project in me with his sheer enthusiasm for the language, and though (once again) I have been lazy over the last couple of days, the urge to learn has been slowly eating away at me, and soon I won't be able to resist anymore. I am on the fifth chapter of the book, and have found myself remembering more than I thought I would - like phrases keep coming to mind, and though I am not quite comfortable using them yet, the fact that they are there makes me feel that the hours spent learning are not going to waste.

Photography. Unlike my love for guitar and writing, this hobby of mine has not been long in the making. It only came into being last year when I held one of the journalism cameras in my hand and felt the power behind it flowing through me. It started when I learned how to take a camera and bend the world to my will in a small way by capturing a part of it in film. But it slowed a great deal when the camera was taken away from me and I found that my own little point and shoot wasn't nearly as good at capturing the world the way I saw it. It always somehow fell short. Now I have a camera that is capable of doing my bidding and I am slowly learning how to use it - through both study and practice. To see my progress, just check out my 365-day project.

Those are my current projects, but it is possible that one will also come into the works tonight. This weekend, I came across someone in my area who told me about Taekwondo classes for foreigners. I am going to the first class this evening, and I am excited - I love martial arts and want to learn; it is a form of sorely needed exercise; and I am seeing it as a photo opportunity. I will have to see how it goes, but I have the feeling that a new project is on the brink of beginning. It is a good feeling.