happy birthday, big guy

Tomorrow is the Buddha's birthday. Rachel is coming down this afternoon and should get here within the next couple hours. We're going to head to Songwangsa, which is the same temple where we met the nice monk who accompanied us on our hike to Seonamsa. I'm looking forward to seeing the temple again, because it's a uniquely beautiful one, and I'd like to see what it looks like in the springtime. I think I've finally gotten over how green everything has turned around here. Anyway, I don't know what sort of event occurs on the Buddha's birthday, but my host mother thinks that there's some kind of evening ceremony the night before. In any case it will be nice to hang around for the drumming that happens every day at sundown for a change. Even though every town has lanterns hung and some other kind of decoration in commemoration (there's a huge inflated cartoon child buddha in the rotary near my school), the only mention of the holiday in today's newspaper was in an article about how 31 corrupt business men are going to be granted amnesty tomorrow. They were all convicted of giving bribes to politicians. I think some of them have served prision time. The government seems to think that pardoning them will help the economy.

The week went pretty smoothly at school (how else can it go when you're just showing a movie), and I finished Middlemarch, and actually wished that gigantic book would go on longer. I found out I won't be teaching the Thursday evening class of first graders anymore, which is a little sad because I enjoyed teaching them not to mention the extra income, but it'll be nice to have a little more free time. This week I finally attended the Friday afternoon club class that Ms. Hwang runs, and she was ecstatic, so I'll probably end up doing that every week unless I have some reason to leave town early on a Friday. Last night I went out to Elvis and had a good time. I met a Puerto Rican guy who travels around the world to work on ships--but no, he doesn't actually travel on the ship, apparently they fly him everywhere. He's only in town until Monday, when he'll fly off somewhere else. He spoke very good English, though he was bashful about it and tried to speak with me in Spanish. When he asked, "Como te llamas?" I literally almost responded, "Tamara imnida." Then I refused to try to speak any more Spanish with him. Oh, and something else about last night...I'll just say, what do you think about the probability of me getting a Korean boyfriend, 9 weeks before I leave the country for good, no less? You can e-mail me if you want to know more. I don't really intend to elaborate on it here.