The Beginning of the End

The blog posts are sure to be few and far between for the next few weeks. I need to write about my most recent trip to Jeju, but other than that I don't know if there will be a chance to write down everything that I want to. Which is a shame because there's so many things about Korea that I want to share with everyone and remember for myself, too. I'll do my best but I don't think I'll be taking a breath between now and October, much less doing a lot of blogging.

This coming week is the last week of the semester! I'll have some first- and second-graders in my summer camp and summer classes, but there are so many students I'll never see again after next week! And one of my co-teachers is leaving on the 17th for some training in San Diego, and I won't see her again at all before I leave Korea. So depressing.

Another reason to be upset over the end of the semester: I'll be doing summer camp and classes for the next four weeks straight, with no more breaks until I leave Korea (which I can't complain about, because my school has been more than generous with my vacation). However, these classes will require...drumroll please...69 LESSON PLANS AND 159 WORKSHEETS. All made from SCRATCH. Starting in 8 days. And on top of that I'll be planning a major backpacking adventure, emptying / cleaning my apartment, stopping utilities, transferring money, looking for a job at home, saying goodbye to friends and the place that has been my home for the last year, etc.

I feel like I'm in college again and it's finals week; but in college I was always dying to get off campus, and now I tear up everytime I consider that I have to leave this place in five weeks. I STILL don't know whether leaving Korea now was the right decision or not. Everybody here is just so good to me. The English department from Jeil had dinner together the other night, and I got these gifts - the tea set is from my co-teachers (I had mentioned to Carrie that I wanted a Korean tea set as a souveneir) and the mirror is from my principal. And that same night Hyun Ju gave me a book that she had specially ordered for me, just because she thought I would enjoy it.

I must be an idiot to leave a place where I'm showered with gifts and free time off on a regular basis.

On a more cheerful note, I realized just in time that the U.S. government is jacking up the price to add extra pages to your passport. The service has always been free and I decided that it would be a good idea for my up-coming trip. I probably could have made it with the pages I had except for stupid Malaysia: some provinces there are semi-autonomous, which means they stamp your passport each time you exit or enter a new province! There's a crazy story in my guidebook about traveling overland from one Malaysian state to another through the country Brunei, and this half-day trip will add 10 stamps to your passport!

When I checked the Seoul embassy's website, I discovered that the price is jumping from $0 to $82 on Tuesday! $82 just to staple in some empty pages! I bundled off my passport to Seoul with a courier service and they added the FREE new pages overnight. Pretty ridiculous...if I have to get extra pages added AGAIN before my passport expires and pay for them I will not be happy.