Attack of the yellow dust!!

Friday morning I woke up still feeling a bit sick, but since I didn't have a fever decided it was best to go to work anyway. Before getting dressed I checked the weather on weather.com as I usually do. Something different appeared though, it was weather that I had never seen before. The weather said 75 degrees and 'dusty'. Dusty...I wondered about that for a second, forgot about it and went about my morning routine. When I finally left to walk to work something seemed really weird. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something was weird about the day. When I finally came into a clearing where I can normally see the mountain behind my school I realized there was no mountain there. Then it hit me what was wrong. Everything was tinted light yellow. The air and everything I saw was thickly tinted light yellow. It was like living on some alien planet where stuff is only yellow. Thus weather.com's 'dust' type of weather.

Once at school, the day was pretty normal. It was Friday and I had six classes in a row to teach. By my second class though, I began losing my voice. By my fourth class I had lost it almost completely. I could squeak out a few words but it was painful. Being an English teacher, your most important teaching tool is your voice and without my voice I'm just a funny white mime. The students may enjoy it, but I don't. My last few classes were a challenge to teach that ended up in word search puzzles and uno games. It is currently Sunday evening now and I have some of my voice back, I just hope that I wake up tomorrow with my full voice booming and ready to go!

Because of all this yellow dust I have lost my voice and now gained some allergies. My nose and eyes have been running like crazy this whole weekend. It's been pretty miserable actually. I never get allergies, I never lose my voice, and I never get sick, but now within the last few days I've had all of those things happen to me. So I tried the usual drinking lots of water, getting lost of rest, steamy hot showers and what not, but none of it has really helped. Saturday afternoon I finally ventured out to the pharmacy to find some allergy medicine. I mimed to the lady what was wrong with me and she finally figured it out, got really happy, yelled antihistamines!, threw her hands up in the air and with such a pleased look marched off to fine me some. After taking those I began to feel much better which I was thankful for because Heather and I were off to see a soccer game.

The soccer game was a world cup qualifying match against Korea and Jordan. It was quite the experience too. When we arrived at the stadium it was swarming with red and people wearing devil horns. Heather and I waited in a long line and finally got in with our online tickets. The game had started right about when we found our seats. It was interesting, people didn't stand up for the national anthem. The stadium was packed out and the fans were wild crazy. The game was really interesting but after a while Heather and I began to notice the people around us. Everyone had food, it was like a picnic! There was the normal beer and pizza, but then there were bags of kimchi being passed around families, meat, seafood, hamburgers, chips. All sorts of food everywhere. Then a vendor walked by selling large pieces of dried squid. (bet the ball game vendors in the US would be shocked by that one!) So we decided we had to have food too. After finding some food we were set to join the rest of the Koreans in cheering, watching and eating. Some of the Korean cheers were even pretty sounding, like songs. At one point the whole stadium did the wave and it was the best wave that I have ever experienced in my life. Everyone participated and it continued around the stadium about five times. The game ended 2-2, a tie. It was a great game and an awesome experience to have while living in Seoul.

Tonight we had pot-luck dinner with our New Zealand neighbors, some other foreign friends and a Korean couple. It was fun to have the Korean's join us and I'm sure it was quite the experience for them as well. For pot-luck I baked banana bread in the microwave since none of the Korean apartments have ovens in them. It was completely experimental, but it turned out great. I can't wait to try other baking recipes in the microwave now!

On an ending note, a word from the wise...don't ever take anti-diarrhea medicine unless you don't want to poop for over a week. Uggg, next time I get diarrhea, I will just deal with it...in fact I will welcome it!