For me, it’s four or five people max.  These gatherings with my young classmates have a way of growing beyond cozy and I hate it.  (It was a welcome party hosted by our recruiter – funny, am I the only one who realizes this was really a damage control exercise?)  Granted, I like a few of them and want to get to know them better, but there’s no way with their focus on maximizing every experience.  (It’s really too bad I didn’t have one really tight bonding experience like classmates Lenn and Clara did.  It’s really too bad I got the one roommate in Thailand who was never there.)  Nor do I believe that the next new person is somehow going to open up new worlds for me, so I’m less interested in the next new shiny thing/person. I’m more for quality over quantity, and besides, each time I’ve gone participating depletes my funds for the remainder of the month, and I realize I just can’t afford to go out AT ALL for the next few months.  I should have ordered internet instead.  I spend three hours for every half hour on-line, just trying to find a connection, and my lesson planning is dependent on it.

And I don’t quite understand why I am always the only older person doing these things.  I mean, where is everyone else?  Is everyone my age gardening in their backyards with 1.5 kids, a mortgage and two cars?

Sometimes I feel like Charlie Brown…

And who turned the damned heat up?  I’m sweating everywhere I go.  I think it’s early on-set menopause.

So I got the volunteer to help with the grocery shopping.  But It was like pulling teeth getting her to teach me anything.  When life is obvious and familiar to you, it’s hard to comprehend being an alien or what an alien needs.  That’s why I loved Mi Young so much.  She just had a continuous steady stream of unsolicited helpful advice, anticipating anything and everything that might seem strange for a newcomer to Korea.  She would have been LEADING ME and explaining away every strange vegetable and what they do with it, how to save a buck, where else to go, along with background information on everything.  Yes.  I must find Mi Young and ask to go live with her.   Don’t get me wrong, the volunteer was very nice and she also took having a second adoptee very gracefully (I’d invited a friend to come along so she could help get him a cell phone)  but she was no Mi Young.

My language exchange for today fell through, but no matter, because six others are interested.  How does one choose?  They all sounds the same…there are two that have done this before, taught a foreigner beginning Korean, so I think I will go with one of them.  I just don’t want it to turn into another exploitation like in the nurse’s office.  I want/need to learn some Korean, and  I’m just not going to learn any at my work.

Must get back to the lesson plan.  I don’t know how I’m going to make brilliant lesson plans enough to fill up an entire year.  But I’ve got to try.  And then I will be able to use them again for the next year.