Monsooner or Later…

It’s been awhile but you knew I’d be back monsooner or later, readers!

Forgive the terrible pun but the past two-going-on-three weeks without sunshine is affecting my brain.  To say I’ve been entirely without sunshine is slightly untrue as there was one freak sunny day earlier this week but it was raining again by evening.

When I came to Korea at the end of last August, it was the tail end of monsoon season followed by one of the rainiest Septembers on record, according to my co-workers.  This year the monsoon came six weeks early so it’s an inaccurate marker of the passage of time for me (10 months and counting since that Korean Air flight left Dulles).  I wasn’t hurrying time along to the rainy season and was hoping there would be a good full year between my first and my second one, but Mother Earth had different ideas.

Monsoons aren’t really what I expected them to be.  I was envisioning weeks upon weeks of constant downpour.  There are some very heavy rains and bone rattling thunderstorms, but it’s more of a humid mist with intermittent showers.  Reflecting on my original expectation, I realize how unreasonable that would be–where would all of that water even come from!?  The Pacific would be drained each summer if that’s how monsoons really worked.

So how have I been occupying myself these past rainy weeks?

I’ve read A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Marakami, The Korean War by Bruce Cummings, re-read A.J. Liebling’s collection Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, watched Word Wars: Tiles and Tribulations on the Scrabble Game Circuit, re-potted my bamboo plant, looked at job boards in far off destinations for fun, cleaned my apartment about umpteen times, drank a lot of coffee, watched the season premieres of True Blood and Weeds, listened to a lot of music, attempted to learn how to french braid my own hair, gone to yoga 4-5 times a week, thought a lot about how I should be updating my blog but then just read someone else’s, tried to learn some new Korean phrases that I forgot every time I actually needed to use them…..

Yep.  Time for the rain to end.

Although it’s Saturday afternoon, I actually need to go into work in about two hours.  We’re physically merging the assets from the two schools so all teachers have to go push around desks and haul books and put up new student name tags, etc etc.  Right now I’m waiting on David and Tyler and a moving van because they’re consolidating furniture from the apartments that the two schools own.  Teachers are moving around a bit to be closer to the school or move in with their significant others and it worked out great for me–I get a double bed!  No more sleeping in a single with David on weekends or needing to sleep on the floor when my mom comes to visit in September.  Yesssss!

Until they come though, I’m going to kickback with my newest reading endeavor Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi and continue drinking my Black Sesame Green Tea Frappucino.  You know those little sesame buns you sometimes get at Chinese restaurants?  Imagine the sweetness of that mixed with green tea and if you choose (I didn’t), top it with whipped cream.

Unique?  You bet.