Day 80: Fungi, Madam

So I'm reading this book called Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux. I mostly like it so far, haven't decided yet. It's a collection of short travel essays that he compiled over the years. The stories are interesting, but the author himself seems a bit smug. Anyway, there's a part where he's taking about the act of "travel writing" itself. He quotes Nabokov who is quoting another unnamed writer. So here goes a writer (can I call myself that?) quoting a writer quoting a writer quoting yet another writer:

"....the fellow who writes: 'Before turning in I put out my wet boots to dry and in the morning I found that a thick blue forest had grown on them ("Fungi, madam," he explained)...' and at once India becomes alive for me." 

His point (or rather, Nabokov's) was that telling the truth about the everyday ups and downs of living abroad in one's travel writing makes it much easier for the reader to visualize what it's truly like to be in that country. That's not really the reason I'm writing all of this, though. I'm focusing on the fungi. I just have to rant a little bit about how frustrating it is that we had to spend all morning scrubbing down all our walls and the whole bathroom, scraping all the tacky texture off the wallpaper, to attempt to get rid of the nasty gray-green forest of mold that seems to grow absolutely everywhere in our apartment! If you want to get a good idea of a Korean apartment, just imagine very thin, poorly insulated walls where the condensation is so constant that pools of water form in the corners of our living room and we have to keep towels in the corners all the time so that it doesn't spread to the rest of the floor. It's a losing battle that we're forced to fight daily, but we won't succumb to the fuzzy armies advancing down the wallpaper! Also my flats grew a thick layer of mold just sitting in our shoe cupboard. Ahhh.

Sorry about that, just trying to make Korea come alive for you! It's really not too terrible, we manage just fine. It will be better when it warms up a bit, too.

On a more exciting note! I'm pretty convinced I saw my spirit animal today. We were running in the mountains and on the way back down, up on a rock near the top of one of the bigger peaks, there was this little black goat! It was definitely not a mountain goat, just a little farm goat that must have been yearning for adventure. She got herself lost in the mountains and decided it was a nice place and she would just stay up there. We definitely had a connection for a second.

We had a really good week here, I'd say. I'm having so much fun with my students. The more I get to know them, the more I really love being their teacher. On Thursday we got to take some of them on an "outing." We went to the movie theater and watched Kung Fu Panda 3 (in English with Korean subtitles). It was a lot of fun to see them outside of a classroom setting. Speaking of outside the classroom, I was out and about with my friend, Brittany, today and I saw two of my students - a boy and a girl. The girl was very happy to see me. The boy was with his friends and was super embarrassed and obviously way too cool to talk to me.

Brittany and I also went to a dog cafe today. It's basically a spacious cafe, like an indoor dog park in a way, where people can bring their dogs (there are also some dogs who live there), sip their coffee, and watch them play. People without dogs go there to get their dog fix and their caffeine fix at the same time. Brittany and I were those people. It was so much fun.