the little things...

...are really what make a difference these days. I've had a really good weekend, but I didn't do anything exciting. I guess I'm just pretty relieved to be over being sick, and feeling like I'm in a good place in general. Yesterday I did a lot of nothing during the day, then went with my host mother and sister to the public bath, or 목욕탕 (mokyoktang), which was the closest I came to adventure this weekend...a bunch of naked Korean women. I was scared, but I knew i wanted to at least try it, so I took a deep breath, stripped off my clothes, and followed my host sister in, but not before joking with her about how nervous I was by hiding behind my pants. It was steamy. There were lots of naked people because this particular bath just opened 2 days ago and is popular. And in case you were wondering, being naked doesn't really change the Korean perception of "personal space." It's still not important. Women sit around and scrub their skin EVERYWHERE with these abrasive cloths, trying desperately to remove every last dead skin cell (I know, I know, all skin is dead- but I wouldn't be surprised if the ultimate goal was to get rid of skin entirely, the process seems so violent). I went in the sauna for a few minutes and my host mother splashed me with a bucket full of cold water. I sat in a pool and watched Korean TV with little children and fat halmonis alike. My host mom gave me honey for my face, then salt for my face, then pumice for scrubbing my feet, and then continued to encourage me to scrub my body until my skin peeled off before taking matters into her own hands and scrubbing my back herself. I thought I had done a pretty thorough job, but my host mother took about an hour and a half to go over her entire body, and I was waiting around for a while for her to finish. Clearly I'm a novice.
I was surprisingly okay with all of this. I guess once I got my clothes off and realized that everyone else was doing the same thing, I got over my cold feet.
When I talked to my mother later, I found out that I have, in fact, been to one of these public baths before, when I was very young. Maybe that's why the whole scene was more comfortable than I expected? I'm not sure. But at any rate, I do plan to go back. It was a pretty refreshing experience.

So today my big project was to get my room put back together. I let it get very messy during my little stint of wallowing in sickness and homesickness. So I cleaned up my clothes, exchanged some winter clothes from my suitcase for summer ones, tidied up the desk area, vacuumed, made my bed and VOILA~! suddenly everything was in order. I feel so much better now! And on top of that:



Here is the little "bulletin board" I bought myself on our trip to HomePlus today (a store like E-Mart, but Gyeongju has no E-Mart....sad). It's actually a magnet board, which is better because I don't put holes in my pictures. This might seem a trivial detail, but I feel like it better marks the room as my own. Before all these pictures were sitting in a pile on my desk and now they make sense :)

My next creation: an earring rack! At home, I have a great earring rack that I made out of a box of "traditional Korean Liquors." I've been needing a way to organize the earrings I brought. So I found this pencil cup at HomePlus, and voila! earring organization.

I apologize if this is really, really boring to you. But I really can't express just how much better I've been feeling these past few days. Better than I've been the whole time I've been in Gyeongju. Fitter, happier, more productive, a pig in a cage on antibiotics. The whole deal (sorry if you don't get the reference).


Hyeonhee and I show just how large the teddybear actually is. I also found out that the reason they have this thing is because Jeonghee won it in a hula hoop contest! Or was it jumping rope...They do this at school. Cute

These next ones are from a school assembly that we had a few days ago. I decided that I need some more photos of students, since I am kind of jealous of their uniforms. This first one is at the beginning of the meeting, where the girls stood up and sat down about 5 times before the principal finally decided that they should remain standing through the whole thing.




Anyway, that's about all, except that we ran into Mr. Park, my co-teacher who "isn't Korean" at HomePlus today. I didn't recognize him because he looked like a college student. I forget how much younger he is than the other teachers. We talked about DVDs and videogames for a while. He has a Wii! If only it wouldn't be completely gossip-worthy and inappropriate for me to go to his house...I want to play guitar hero A LOT...But I'll make up for it when I go home...which is in less than 2 months!! Dec 22, here I come! Time is really flying....