I am writing this down before I forget that it happened: The 8 Hour Field Trip.
So, today was our 8 hour field trip. I had no idea what to expect as it was described to me thus: 'Tommorrow, we will go to museum, leave at 2, maybe get back at 10". WHich, I don't know about you, but 8 hours at a museum is a lot in a country where you can read the placards, let alone one where they use a MOON ALPHABET. But I'm tryin to be a good sport and so I say: 'Sign me up'.
Fast forward to today- Black Friday, somewhere on the globe. We got drunk last night because we were all sad and not at home and so I was nursing a nasty little hangover. I wander into school regular time, about 8:30, and my class is already full of kids. As it turns out, our little field trip has warped the schedule- Classes start 30 minutes early and there's no gap between them, AKA I;m going to be busy for the next 240 minutes. Whatever, eveyrthing goes well, but I am still kind of homesick and nostalgia-addled and I spend most of the day scheming up ways to get out of the 8 Hour Mystery Tour. A few teachers bail and I'm heartened that I am not alone in my break out ambitions, but when the time comes I get on the bus like everyone else. It's about 2 PM.
They sit me next to the office assistant who, like everyone else in Korea, attends 'English Academy'. Adult English Academies are hilarious- He doesn't know what day of the week it is or how to answer, 'Where is ___?', but he knows the meaning of the words 'avaricious' and asked me is I was 'somulent'. They basically load them up with these bizzaro world vocabulary lists and tell them to meet ENglish speakers to learn the conversation portion. ANyway, he's a nice enough guy and he nods off pretty quickly which is great because I am also knodding off (I am, after all, somulent.).
Sometimes around 3:30 the bus stops and drops us off in a place that can charitably be decribed as nowhere. It turns out we're going to the education museum! Which is a one room school house in the middle of nowhere with giant piles of junk and rotting museum cases in the spare room. The ticket-taking woman is also the presenter woman and she gives us a presentation in the unheated one room school house and it is fucking freezing and I am dying and doing that thing where I smile for no reason. Every few minutes the presenter lady makes a joke about me and 60 Korean people turn around and laugh. Later, she slips back behind the ticket taking desk and sings Kareoke while we view the dilapadated exhibits. Literally, some rooms and just piles of stuff. There's a whole case full of old pencils. Anyway, it's over soon enough and when we leave they tell me: 'Now we walk maybe two miles to bus'.
I'll spare you the filthy spray of mental expletives- We head up the hill, maybe a mile and a half, and we're at some place where the Koreans built a fortress to fight off the Americans in 1871. Awkward! They all want to take a picture with me, either as a peace & love thing or as an ABu Grahib thing, I'm not sure which. I abide and about an hour later we're back on the bus and it's warm and I'm complaint free, aside from the fact that it's around 4:30 and I'm still lonely and I want to go home. But, we're going to dinner. Which is where things start to get hilarious.