Amanda Takes Off...

I am on Korean drugs.

Free Korean drugs.

I have been getting a cold since before I left the States. A weird one where the left half of my tongue will hurt, then the right side. Right now the back of my tongue and throat feel swollen, and today one of my student's parents, a doctor, diagnosed me (over the phone) of having a cold and prescribed me some medicine.

So the shuttle bus driver drove down a narrow alleyway, jumped out of the shuttle, grabbed my drugs, and hopped back in the shuttle. Somehow he got across that I should take this drug cocktail three times a day with food for four days.

In other news, Ali and I taught ourselves the Sino-Korean numbers on the way to work. Tonight at the market we used those numbers to buy potatoes, onions, scallions, dates, and garlic. The first place we went to, we paid twice what we should have because we didn't understand that the price was for the whole basket of potatoes. The women were having fun with us knowing our numbers and a crowd of other ladies formed around us. As Jan Haag says in her essay, Terror, "Good judgment comes from experience. And experience? Well, that comes from poor judgment." Hence when it came time to buy the dates, we knew that was the price for everything.

We also ran by the thousand Won store, where I bought some bath products in a package that claims "Clean Skin. Protect skin. Healthy Skin. New century Sanitarian thing." (Punctuation exactly as such.)

We ran to another market to buy ice cream and a man speaking into a mic saw us and said "hi" and when we left he waved at us and said, "bye."

I also bought a calendar, though it seems I didn't pronounce it correctly and I had to just show the shopkeeper the word from the dictionary. Sigh. Oh well. Starting Saturday I'm going to be taking 90 min Korean classes once a week (Saturday afternoons). Korea is an all-or-barely place. You either find 4 hr classes, five days a week, or 90 min short courses once a week. But anything is better than what level I've got now. It was nice to understand the numbers today! That's multitudes better than yesterday! Speaking of "multitude," the Korean word for that sounds like "cookie." Now, "cookie," that's a useful word...

Speaking of all-or-barely, I have tae kwon do again tomorrow and I am barely ready for it again...