the holidays a la Asia

I'm sitting in my dorm room on a cold December night, looking out on our resident fuselage, listening to some mellow blockbusters on MySpace music, thinking about careers and tomorrow's lesson plans, and trying corn ice cream. It's not as weird as you'd think - kinda like frozen creamed corn.

We've got our first official batch of five-day kids - about 45 from a private school or schools in a more rural region northeast of Daegu. That's 4 or 5 kids per class. Last week it was 18 in each class, and we've had all manner of daycamps, overnights, half-days and three-day sessions, so we've really seen the gamut. They're all awesome, though, and what makes everything worth it. Tensions have been high recently over various things, but these kids are the best part of everything, and what make me thankful every day, if not quite every class (We are considering getting "I Survived Group 12" T-shirts after one particular crew), that I took this job. They're just fun and creative and goofy and crack themselves up with these jokes that aren't even funny, but it totally cracks me up that they find them so hysterical.

The holiday season has fallen here, too, which I'm coming to find means giant anime-style Santas and who knows what other Christmas creations parading the streets, a plethora of cooked-batter streetfoods, and the traditional merchandise explosion you find back home. Oh and the karaoke version of "White Christmas" is about the best thing I've seen yet - one long string of pictures of Korea's verdant hills and Buddhist temples. Not one flake of snow.

Mostly it's been cold and dry and rather sunny, but this weekend was one miserable long drizzle ... the perfect kind for curling up in a downtown coffeehouse with a new book (or three) and watching civilization scuttle by outside, and I definitely indulged. It's strange finding myself reading again - entranced by the bookstore and perpetually in the middle of about six books, just like when I was a kid. I guess that lifestyle of eight-hour days of staring at words is finally relaxing its grip. Now I've just got to figure out what to do with the library I'm amassing.

I get pangs for American holidays and family time every so often - like the other day when I saw pictures of the Iowa Mills' Thanksgiving, or tonight when I told a Korean friend about last year's holiday outing to Kansas City's jazz district. But I'm also looking forward to trying out this whole island holiday thing this year, spending Christmas and New Years on the shores of Bali with good friends from college, now spread around the world.

Oh but I never did quite get my Thanksgiving story put up here ... so the 20 of us Americans at the Village (with the very important help of certain Korean staff) coordinated as traditional a dinner as we could muster the Sunday after the holiday, and I volunteered to do the last-minute shopping, thinking I was being smart to avoid the chaos of climbing over everyone else in the kitchens with all their Korean machinery. Well, the short of it is that I ended up being very much the turkey and having my most fabulous "weird foreigner" moment yet in this country, loaded down with a ridiculous amount of food, answering relentless phone calls and trying to navigate Korean public transportation.

With considerable effort, I had dragged my overladen bags down to the bus stop near the local Costco (a Sam's Club-style warehouse of mostly Western things), but the bus pulled up before I was quite ready with my fare. But I leaped on anyway with all my cargo, much to the amusement of the onlooking passengers and the bemusement of the surly driver. The next bit all sort of happened at once - me fishing for change, one of my bulging bags tumbling down and various Thanksgiving offerings rolling out across the floor of the 739, the bus jolting forward and my shoe sliding off my foot into the stairwell and just barely slipping out the closing door. I don't think anyone else saw the shoe go, and I was quite the wild-haired freakshow there, still digging for a darned 100 won piece and debating the worth of a Size 12 shoe, laden down as I was and sock-footed, two busrides and one walk from home in Asia. To top it all off, my phone started ringing again.

The shoe won out.

Seven blocks later, I had found the coin, collected my things and finally managed to hit the stop button, and all the wide-eyed Korean "aunties" watched me clamber off the bus. I then hobbled back the direction I came, at one particularly poignant moment passing a true bag lady (a rare sight here, but you just can't make up the stuff that happens in real life - no one would believe you). And even in the middle of my "I am ridiculous" haze, I did realize that my lot even at that moment was something to be thankful for, because I was strong enough to huff and puff it back, rich enough to afford a taxi for the last leg of the journey when I had missed the right shuttle, and lucky enough to have an amazing, nostalgic feast waiting for me when I got there.

And I got my shoe, dadgumit.