I've Got Visas on my Mind

So, I'm currently in the throws of trying to figure out exactly what I want to do next year. I know I want to be in Korea learning Korean, but I'm not quite sure how I want to go about it. I've done hours worth of online research/phone calls. (If you should know anything about me, it's that I abhor talking on the phone to someone that I don't know. Especially when they don't necessarily speak English...) So if I'm making phone calls about it, you know I'm pretty serious about it. I recently found out about a visa that will allow me to be in the country for 6 months without working. I'm currently in the process of trying to communicate that to the Korean language school and figuring out if they will still let me apply with that visa. All this to say, if everything works out the way I want it to, I will be home for the entire month of December. If everything doesn't work out the way I want it to . . . I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. The moral of the story is this: visas are a pain.

I finally got to play something other than goalie today in soccer. It was really nice... for the warm-up, and then I started running. I played for most of the game, and I think I did OK. As a result of "accidentally" tripping a guy, I too went sprawling on the astro turf which left a few skinned places on my elbows and knees. Towards the end of the game, I subbed myself out to go lick my battle wounds. There was a 7 year old American boy who was watching the game with our team. He came up to me and asked if it hurt. I said, "No" to which he replied, "How come adults never say that anything hurts?" I kind of thought about it a minute, and then decided that telling him that my endorphins were pumping through my blood dulling the pain was too complicated a task. He went on to say, "I sure hope I never get any scrapes like that." Now on this one, I was happy to burst his bubble.

Teaching is getting easier and easier. I recently was given a temporary class with pretty much all of the troublemaker kids in it. A worthy opponent. At the very beginning, I sent a student out for playing with his erasers. (I'm not as bad as it seems. He really wasn't paying attention. I stopped class, walked in front of him, and stood there for a solid minute before he realized something had changed.) After that, everyone was on their best behavior. As with so many other things, once you've convinced someone that you're really serious, they tend not to get in your way. It also helps that Korean mothers are the KGB and Nazi Gestapo combined into a fearsome entity that holds the power of life and death in the palm of their hands. Similar to the KGB, if you follow the rules, get good grades, become a model citizen and do everything to the best of your ability, you still aren't safe. I kid you not, I've heard first hand accounts of a student being grounded all summer long with no AC just because he was dating a girl right before his English proficiency test, and so didn't study to his optimal level. I think I'll take the wet towels being wrapped around me, or waterboarding.

I went to a fortress in a nearby city with some friends on Saturday. I'm putting some of the pictures up here. I'm sure they'll come up on facebook when I have the resolve to click "upload" if ever. All of the leaves are beginning to change color/fall here now. There were a lot of really cool colors. Now, I'm sure that it's been done before, "Joe, didn't you know this?" blah blah blah, but I think the whole wall around the gate thing you see in these pictures is just genius. There, I said it. Now you all can educate me on European architecture for about 15 comments. Or skype, it's a little bit faster.