Vacation on Horizon

Good news (for me, not you)! I get 4 weeks paid vacation in July and August!! Awesome. I was under the impression the school year ended in the summer (like in the U.S.). That's really just the end of the semester, and the school year actually begins in March.

So there's summer break from July 22 to the end of August, and in that time I only have to run a short summer program for six days. The rest of the time I'm off, and I get paid my monthly salary same as usual.

I may go to Jeju island during the break. Jeju is an island a little bigger than Oahu off the south of Korea. It's where Koreans go for vacation and honeymoon. When I was planning my move to Korea I considered living there. I was advised that it's more of a visiting place than a living place, so I ended up close to Seoul with the people and places I know. I still want to see Jeju though. If I end up doing more than one year teaching in Korea I might break away from the megalopolis. Right now I'm good with it. Right now I like the energy, the corpuscular flow of pedestrian, bicycle, bus, taxi, and psychotic scooter rider. Who knows how I'll feel about it next year?

Every day I get office messages from my co-workers in Korean that I immediately translate into English with the Google translator. It usually creates gibberish English. What I like to do is take a passage I've written and then translate it, then translate that into another language, then translate that into another language etc until I finally translate it back into English. The final product is often quite mystifying. For example:

When I met her in front of my eyes, my butterflies to dance on the blood vessels, such as the vibrations of power. The sad history of life is now nothing left to lose is not expected to trust him.

My thoughts precisely.

I see that relations with North Korea are relatively cool right now, for which I'm thankful. Today they blew up a cooling tower at a nuclear power plant which demonstrates their commitment to blowing things up. I give less of the credit to Bush than to the desperate situation of North Korea. But whoever gets the credit - Bush, Condi Rice, Kim Jong Crackhead - I pray for peace and less posturing.