I just walked arm-in-arm back to my apartment with two Korean guys. I don't know how this kind of stuff happens sometimes. Then I went into McDonalds and the cashier spoke fluent English and was a U.S. citizen. No offense to any Korean readers, but if you have U.S. citizenship, there's no good reason to be in Korea unless you are an English teacher or you really love kimchi. Cashier at McDonalds? No, definitely not a good reason.

I had my first crier in class yesterday that wasn't the direct result of me yelling at a kid. We do these word tests where the kids have about 10 words in Korean and all they have to do is write what those words means in English. Pretty straightforward. So this entire class did bad on their word tests. Obviously, I really didn't care. But then a couple minutes later, Jacob starts bawling. I asked him why he was crying and the other kids in the class said it was because his father was going to hit him because he did poorly on the word test. I think Jacob denied this, but either way, since I just wanted him to stop crying, I told the class they didn't have to get the test signed by their parents. In fact. I just told them they could rip up the test. I was not saying this literally, but I should have known better than to say this to eight Korean children. Needless to say, there was bits of paper everywhere.

Once I convinced Jacob that he wasn't going to get his ass beat that night, I attempted to move on with the lesson, but apparently crying is quite contagious. Because then Bryan started crying. This was because his head hurt. He said the light was hurting his eyes. Alright, so I turned the light off. Now I was teaching in the dark. Doesn't matter, anything to stop the crying. When Bryan stopped being a little bitch, the bug moved to the one girl in the class, Ellie, whose name is pronounced Allie. Right. She was crying because as she put it "all of the boys are crazy." Sometimes Ellie speaks Korean in class and all the boys get all excited and want me to make her write 100x that she won't speak Korean in class. What they fail to understand though is that Ellie is my favorite student at the school and she can do no wrong in my eyes. If she screamed "F--- You" to every other student in the class, I'd probably give her a piece of candy.

Everyone in my office is sick. I feel like I'm working inside a giant bubble of disease and grossness. The problem, of course, is that the words sick and day do not compute in the Korean language. You are simply not allowed to get sick. I asked one of the Korean teachers yesterday if she was sick after I noticed she looked like she had just been tossed down a flight of stairs and she goes "Yes, I have very high fever." That's just great. In America, she'd have been home for a good three days now. I remember Erika told me one time she was so sick that she couldn't move out of bed so she called in sick. The next day, all the Korean teachers tore her apart as if she had called up and said I'm not coming in today, I'm gonna go catch a movie. It's just a bit ridiculous. The problem, at my job at least, is that there are no substitutes. If someone doesn't come to work, it just means everyone else has to cover their classes and since everyone already thinks they teach too many classes, this causes utter chaos.

Bender and I leave for China on Saturday. I really have no idea as to what to expect from this trip. I'm just thrilled to be getting out of Seoul for a few days and getting a chance to see some more weird looking people. The hotel has a huge pool apparently so I might just stay in there all weekend drinking beer while Bender wonders around Shanghai in his pink scarf. I'm not allowed to sleep until 3pm on this trip, Bender said, so that might just ruin the entire vacation. As is the usual custom, I'm fully prepared for my death since I will be using that terrible form of transportation known as the airplane, but as is also a custom, I'm counting on Mr. Xanax to keep me sane. I'm sure I'll have a thousand pictures to post when I get back next week. And I'm sure 998 of them will include Bender. Until then, Merry Christmas!

Photos- A Christmas display in Jongno and the giant statue of the Buddha in Gangnam.