Perhaps.

Holy smoked salmon puffs batman! It's the 4th of July and I completely forgot! It wasn't until I was walking to my school this morning that I realized what day it was. And I love the 4th of July, and everything about it. I guess it's easy to forget about when you're in Korea and it's not really mentioned by anyone. None of my other American friends remembered either. I tried explaining it to some of my kids. A few understood. I drew a picture on the white board, of fireworks, and myself waving a flag. And a grill in the background. (See where six years of art school gets a girl these days.)

Although I did eat watermelon this morning, which is the one fruit I always associate with the 4th of July. But I also eat it just about every day here. It's my favorite. I never get sick of eating it. And my favorite part is buying one here. I walk down to the street market on Saturday mornings. There are lots of people selling them, but I always buy them from the same girl. She always smiles at me, and usually knows what I'm there for. I smile back and say "han-nah," which is one in Korean. (And for anyone who knows Korean, knows that there are two different sets of numbers, which always confuse me.) But it helps to hold up my fingers while I say the number. I always walk back with the watermelon against my stomach, embracing it with both arms, like carrying a baby. If I'm holding other bags, I'm sure I look like a mad woman trying to make it 10 blocks without dropping anything. But I refuse to take a cab, unless absolutely necessary. Even in the rain. Cabbies are fearless here, and red lights don't really mean stop. And it's always a crazy experience. I either get hit on, yelled at, or completely ignored. The last cabbie I rode with was on the phone, watching the baseball game, and still pulled over to pick me up. He went about five blocks (in the wrong direction) before even hanging up the phone to ask me where I was going. So yeah, needless to say, I threw him a couple bucks and got out.

I have a few vacation days coming up at the end of July that I'm really excited about. Teaching is exhausting, and I have so much more respect for teachers. I'm hoping to take a bus to Busan, and then catch a ferry to Japan and stay there for a few days. I'm dying for some amazing sushi. I went to a sushi place here in Gwangju a few weeks ago, and ate a vegetarian roll with American processed cheese on top. Definitely not what I had in mind.

The summers are pretty hot here. A lot like the southern east coast back in the states. Hot and humid, bad mosquitoes. I can deal with it, but I definitely don't like it. I miss Alaska whether. Perhaps not the extreme -70 degrees that I experienced in Bethel, but I do miss the milder temps, and the snow. I hear we don't get too much snow here, but who knows.

I officially dropped from my Korean class. My school started offering them in June, and I went for two weeks. I learned the alphabet, numbers and a lot of helpful words and phrases. And I wish I had the motivation to continue on and see how fluent I can become in the next ten months, but I'm exhausted. At the end of a long day teaching, the last thing I want to do is study for a test late at night, and then wake up for class early the next morning. I try and justify my withdrawal by saying that I'll study on my own. But I won't. I'll go to a restaurant and order something that I didn't want, because I thought it said something else. And then I'll be reminded that perhaps I should have stuck it out a bit longer.