Rain, rain, go away...
Rain, rain, go away
come again another day
I want to go out and play,
and have a yarn crawl tomorrow.
to be perfectly honest, I'm surprised that I'm not napping right now. I felt tired enough for it - today was a long day. Today was field trip day.
It almost wasn't - the idea was that if it was raining when we came to school, we would cancel the field trip to the camp and just have classes. Well, the morning was gray and hazy (and so was the afternoon...) but it didn't start until we were on our way. It drizzled on and off the whole day, and wasn't really pouring until we got back. Now it's very loud, occasionally thundering and flashing outside my window, so I have both my glass doors closed.
It's not really a camp - we went to a place called Kanghwado, an island out near Gimpo. We ended up at this place called Oktokki Space Center, and it was cute. It's a huge building with a large garden out back that had statues of dinosaurs, and inside it's an astronomy and rocketry museum. It was really interesting, and I'd like to go back there sometime. I had an idea - I'd like to do a bike trip that way. You can get there via bus, but if I was on a bus, I couldn't stop to take pictures and explore like I want to... It was beautiful, in it's own way - there were muddy tidal flats like at home, next to rice fields that extended back to the mountains that were obscured by fog, and the same skyscraper apartments that define Korea stuck in the middle. There were even the same white egrets as home, poking about in the paddies for bugs and such. Whenever I travel, I'm always struck by how different so many places are from each other, but mostly by how much the same everything is. The trees here look like the ones at home - we passed a field surrounded by a wall of trees covered with kudzu that almost made me laugh. The tide was out, as were the shallow boats.
I've been struck a lot recently with the desire to learn more Korean - to be able to communicate with the people here, moreso than the broken fragments of preschool commands, and perhaps be less alone. That's not accurate, I suppose. I tell myself that it was my choice to be alone, and it's true; but it's also true that I am in a place where it is very easy for me to be alone, where I am alone by default, and it's not a choice at all. I feel like there is a difference in nuance there, but I am not sure how to describe it.
I took pictures at the space center, and I want to edit them before I put them up - I'd like to get some of that done during my break. I think the ones that I want to edit, but don't have the skills for yet, I will put in an Endnote notebook with my thoughts for fixing them, and go back to them later.
When I came home, I finished reading a book I've been working on for a while, Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Robin gave it to me a bit ago - it's the first of Gaiman's novels that I've ever read, though I have read some of his short stories. It was wonderful and tricky and full of the kinds of allusions to other things that I love. When I first started it, I wasn't sure that I was going to like it, but I got sucked into it. I definitely need to read more of his work now. He's an author that I have always been interested in, but had only just gotten around to reading.
An amazing book is one you know that you will *have* to reread again, before you have finished it through once. This is an amazing book.
I learned some new words today, too, at the museum.
taeyang = Sun. The sun is also called hae-nim, which is interesting. I'm not sure exactly what the nuance of the first part is - I think the common word for the sun, as opposed to taeyang, the scientific word. But the -nim ending is what you use when you are referring to a person, kind of like the japanese -san. I guess it's kind of like saying "Mr. Sun" in English.
eoknyeon = light year. I learned this from reading an exhibit about how far away things were from us.
chigu = Earth.
uju = space, as in, outer space.
sajajari = Leo, the constellation, or the zodiac sign. there was an activity the kids did where they made necklaces with each of their signs, and I got one. You got a little picture with a diagram of your constellation on it, and put dots of glow-in-the-dark glue on the dots marking the stars, and then put it in a little plastic case on a string. They let us teachers do it too.
Now, to get ready for the yarn crawl tomorrow, and also do some emails and budgeting and cleaning up. Oh, and figuring out what I am giving to my swap partner. I have a list of ideas, and a $25 budget.
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