To Escape a Blackhole, You Must Travel Faster Than the Speed of Rice

Cousin Brad in his place of employment--i forgot the name, but it is a cute little cafe that sells vegetarian and vegean cusine, Carbondale, IL, USA

myself on the Tancheon which means valley or something, along the river trail. it leads from Bundang into Seoul. Bundang, South Korea. {this is supporting evidence to many of my students as to why i am an grandma--grandmas ride bikes like these. grandmas also wear hiking t shirts with skirts and dorky tennis shoes, much like me. and they wear backpacks. the only people that have backpacks here are older people who hike!]


and lastly this is a photo of my friend kelley. she is not always making that face, only when she is hanging out with alligators. i just wanted to put some photos of friends and family from the states to show that i am thinking of you. all of you are in my heart even though i am far away. miss you lots!


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Faster than the speed of rice. This nicely sums up the ability of a certain foreigner, more specifically my next door neighbor, to round up a Korean girlfriend.

A few weeks after he arrived, he purchased a used cell phone and then got a phone call from a woman asking to speak to some Korean dude. He said he wasn't the dude, obviously, and then somehow they got to talking. He said he was from America blah blah and then somehow finagled a date or a meeting out of her. She spent the night and the rest is history. Now, I am getting reports of him talking to her while at work (I do not work with this gentleman) and him saying on the phone, "Baby, you don't need to be doing my dishes! Baby, I love you too honey sugar..." Mind you, this is all within a week of meeting her.

What!?
So, this all happened faster than the speed of rice.


This quote happened today while one of my 11 year old students (13 years old in Korean age) was giving a speech about blackholes. He said that blackholes and whiteholes are connected. And in order to escape a blackhole, you need to travel faster than the speed of light. But it sounded like, the speed of rice. I think this is mostly because Korean kids pronounce 'r's like 'l's and so when he said 'light' it sounded like 'right' in my head, but then he kind of mumbled the word so 'light' sounded more like 'lice' and when they say 'lice' they are trying to say 'rice.' So that is how we got to the title of this blog entry and therefore, the new code name for my neighbor.

Other presentation topics for kids in my class included Is eating dog ethical?, the Israel conflict, Blue Antelope from the Ice Age existing in South Africa, Why learning english as a second language is important, Inventions, a science experiment involving putting gold fish in cups with varying amounts of nicotine in the water, and a presentation on how north and south korea should unite.

Furthermore, one of my classes made up a nickname for me besides "Jennipoh" which is my korean-ized name... it is "E.T" which is short for English Teacher. How clever!

Things here have been settling more into 'real life' or something like it. The daily routine and such even though we just switched our schedule from working 10am-6 or 8pm to 3-10pm. I like working later in the day b/c this means my first classes don't have to deal with me being a complete and utter bitch because i have not woken up yet. I think that working for a public school out here may be interesting because you get all the national holidays off plus 3 months vacation, about. But on the other hand, it is by grade so you have all this kids from the basic level to intermediate english in one class. this could be distressing. this is one good thing about avalon school. i was talking to one of the head guys at avalon and he said they are opening two new branches in the next year. avalon is, from what i hear, quite a prestigious institution. we have the kids writing essays at age 8-11 in a second language. this is outstanding because i never did something like this until i was a junior in high school. at this point it was my fifth year of a foreign language.

what is even more crazy is the pressure these kids are under. not only do they go to school every other saturday, but they attend many academies at night after school. one of my students is a speed ice skater and i believe she trains most days. some of my other kids go to math academies at night on top of 3 hours of english (and often an extra hour and a half of detention) and school. sometimes they also do sports and practice musical instruments. they are going to take over the world soon. the size of the county will not matter, it will just have the most driven, hardworking and genuis people in it.

ok, other news in my life. i have been biking on my lean mean green machine practically every day 5-10 miles. sam and i recently found a FREE outdoor fabricated climbing wall which has been great. we have been 4 times in the last week! we also hiked up to this hill/mountain and found a cemetary with the korean burial mounds. they are like half-spheres covered with grass. it is a pretty unusual sight for westerns. i will conclude with this tonite.