So, today is the last full Friday of this program. Next Friday is the day we all head back out to the airport to take our flights home (except for the people who are continuing on to other adventures, or staying on in Korea to make the most of the flight here). I have to admit, I am looking forward to some of the familiar comforts of home, though I will be sad to leave. Inevitably when I travel, once it's time to return home, I never feel like I've absorbed as much of the country and culture as I should have.
In my last post, I left off with checking on my wash. As a bit of an extension to that, I never really realized what a difference using a dryer can make. Only after two weeks of having only line-dried clothes, and then going back to drier-dried clothes, did I realize how wonderful drier-dried clothes are. Nice and fluffy and flexible and no funky smell. They're also the correct size. (The washer here is a monster that stretches everything out about a size or so, so all my clothes have been baggy since I've washed them, but now they're back down to size after a spin on the drier's hottest setting.)
This morning we had Sports Day, in which everyone in the program was split into two teams, the White against the Blue team, and then we competed against each other in a number of activities. There was a soccer game, a variant of tug-of-war in which the players had to lay on the ground away from the rope and then run to grab the rope before the other team, Korean wrestling, a cheering competition, a game called chicken fight where players hopped on one foot and knocked the other players over, and a mission relay. I ended up not playing anything, I thought I had been signed up to play tug-of-war, but when I checked the list this morning, my name was not to be found, so I was just a member of the supporting crowd. Our team (the White Team) won everything except for the cheering competition and the relay, though we hit a number of unfair roadblocks in the mission relay, and had they not happened, we probably would have won that as well. For instance, one of the missions for our team was to find a certain staff member and give them a piggyback ride, but apparently this certain staff member was not told of the plan, because as soon as she heard what the mission's instructions were read, she ran out of the building and our player had to chase after her. The other team did not face such similar problems. However, given our wins on all the other activities, we won overall for Sports Day, which was a nice little boost.
The afternoon was free, and in the original schedule we were supposed to work on our term papers to get them done before the 5pm today, which is Friday, but since our deadline was extended until 5pm on Sunday, due to network maintenance issues, nearly everyone I know took a nap. Unfortunately this means that the procrastinators among us will be spending their free weekend working on the term paper, but such is life, I suppose. I woke up from my nap with just enough time to spare to get ready for dinner, and then returned to the room until it was time for our group discussion papers.
That's really it for today, though once I got done with my group paper, I came back to the room and helped edit two of my suitemates' papers. It made me realize how lucky I am to know English as my primary language, and it also made me realize what a strange language English is. Coming from the US, I just know instinctively how English works with its articles and prepositions and tenses and whatnot, but as I worked to fix the little glitches in their papers, I discovered that it's hard to come up with rules for how to use the language. It's got a lot of little words that you just need to know how to use, there's no easy way to explain how they work. It seems to be a language of exceptions to the rules, which makes it strange.
It's almost 4am. Now I remember why I don't like to take naps, they totally mess with my body's rhythms Thank goodness this weekend is the free weekend, where we can do whatever we want . . . including sleeping in. I think that's the first item on my agenda.
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