It's the little things

I wish I had something adventurous to write about, but even life in a far-off foreign land can quickly become pretty routine. My days are filled with teaching, grading, and class prep, meeting friends, reading - not all that different from what I would be doing back in the United States. What I love about ex-pat life, though, is that my daily routine is peppered with new experiences: trying a different food, learning (or re-learning, as the case may be) a new word, or receiving an unusual gift from a student (today, a large rainbow-colored lollipop shaped like foot).

It's the little things - like the fact that when I had dinner with my friend Sun Young and her family the other night, her 4-year old was eating with chopsticks. She was a bit clumsy, holding them wrapped in the palm of her hand, but it worked!

And e-mail from students; even from non-native speakers that I taught in the States, I rarely had such complimentary or entertaining messages. I asked students in my three intermediate classes to send me e-mail messages introducing themselves. They did, and often added comments about how they "thanks God" for a beautiful English teacher, or how pleasing my lectures are. One even added a parenthetical note: this is not a joke or flattery. A couple of students, male and female, told me that they hope to be intimate with me; I'm pretty sure that's a poor choice of words rather than a suggestion of an inappropriate teacher-student relationship. (And now a parenthetical note of my own: I find their small mistakes amusing, but I should say that as a whole, my students speak good English; some of them are outstanding, and all of them are certainly more competent than the average American college student is in any foreign language.)

So no live octopus for dinner (oh - I did try cow stomach the other night!) or bungee jumping or anything like that to tell you about this week. But I'm happy to report that though I've settled into a routine, I'm taking pleasure in the little things that make everyday life here a bit of an adventure.