Korea-Palsan

They wanted to know everything.

How many siblings do you have? Why aren't you married? What is it like where you lived before? How long will you be here?

Free talk time was otherwise known as question and answer for the teacher.

Finally, I decided to grow my family to have more to talk about as there was only my mother and sister. It wasn't enough. So there was John in Chicago, my best friend. He became my older brother. The psychiatrist turned electrician. He wires people's houses instead of their heads. There was Steve in the Mohave Desert who tested and made bombs. My younger brother. His work was top secret, so we talked about his weekends. And after too much grilling, I made up a husband too. He was a botanist studying plants in Sumatra. I was bored of the jungle, so I came to Korea to teach. Odd, but...yes I was allergic to the mosquitoes. 

I lived in an old fashioned hotel with paper sliding doors and ondol floors. We shared a kitchen. Korean men woke us up in the morning with their horrific throat clearing and spitting. After some time at the hotel, a student asked me if I'd move in with them. She wanted me to live with her family and teach her kids a little on the side. It was a good exchange. Her husband was a VP at Korean Air. For Christmas, they gave me a ticket to Indonesia to visit my husband. I made a stop over in Manilla as there was a lot of fighting in Jdakarta at the time. I had two months to kill. Two month's paid vacation in winter and two more in the summer. It made for a lot of beach time.