Update

I feel like I've had things I wanted to write about this week, but Blogger has been down lately, so I wasn't able to post.

I can't think of what I wanted to write about now. I'm sick at the moment, so I feel really tired and would rather be sleeping, but I have to stay at school for a class I have in a couple hours.

I went on a trip with my host family last weekend. We went to Maisan Provincial Park. Rachel met up with us, and I went back to Rachel's Saturday night to spend the night there, which was fun despite the fact that I was just beginning to get sick and so was feeling pretty low. Maisan was nice. The weather was pretty good, and the park is really unique. It has all these stone towers that were built by a monk in the early 1900s. The scenery consisted of peaks made from huge boulders.

As we were leaving the park my host sister told me that they (the kids) had decided that the group of high school students walking ahead of us were Japanese. Seo Young said this with her characteristic 'hmph' and grumble (Tokdo and all that). We asked her why she said so, and she said because one of the girls was wearing an extremely short skirt. True, this is a little unusual for Korea but Rachel and I had both seen high school girls dressed this way, so it didn't quite convince us. It turned out my host sisters were right. The small group of students were visiting from Japan for a debate tournament with a Korean high school. They were actually there to debate Tokdo, and meanwhile were taking in some sights along with their Korean counterparts. I thought it was cool that they were using the controversy as a vehicle for cultural exchange instead of more animosity. When one boy, trying to fool us into thinking he was Korean, turned around while eating his cotton candy and said, "Mmm, mashoseumnida," (butchering "Delicious") I cracked up. Seo Young of course wasn't very amused. The Japanese kids were funny, though. The boys especially. When they found out Rachel and I were from the States, one started singing a Green Day song very loudly, flubbing the words of course.

I'm heading to Jeju tomorrow for our second and final Fulbright ETA conference. I've been trying to get lots of sleep so I won't be so sick there, but it's hard since I'm so busy and my host family goes to bed late and gets up early, and don't have any qualms about yelling across the apartment to each other. Nonetheless, it should be a good time.

I discovered recently that my friends Elliot and Vince who I met in Japan last month are now, along with another friend Eli, doing volunteer work on Ko Phi Phi, which was badly damaged by the tsunami in December. I'm pretty impressed. You can read about what they're doing at www.elliotlevin.com.