For the sake of your attention span and my carpal tunnel, I'll use that structure for this big-news-updatey post.
Here's the biggie: Miss H has a job. Her recruiter contacted her last Thursday, and arranged an interview last Friday. It was a whirlwind. By Monday she had the job, and her first day was yesterday. It's a kindergarten-age academy, basically glorified babysitting. The schedule is long, but the pay is incredible: 2.3 million baseline salary, plus a 400,000 housing allowance stipulated in the contract. That puts her base pay at 2.7 million. Think of the savings!
She's quite nervous, but like me, it's good for her to be free of that suffocating desert purgatory. She's glad to be out on her own, with gainful employment and an apartment that she can call home. Our days up to now have been filled with the purchasing of proper foodstuffs (apparently I was living a more bacheloresque lifestyle than I'd admitted to myself) and various furnishings and fitments for the apartment. That will change now that we're on different schedules. (She's 9-6 and I'm 2-10.) But we'll be staying close on the weekends. We've already made several exciting trips into Seoul. A while back we went to Yeongdeung-po (and the Costco located there) to bulk up on cheese, oatmeal, sour cream, tortillas, and other hard-to-find necessities. The Saturday after that we went to Yongsan and explored the electronics shopping mall, supposedly the largest in Asia. Not content with that, we went to Jamsil that Sunday (remember Jamsil?) and I returned, after an absence of three years, to the largest underground mall in Asia, COEX.
The two of us are just like peas and carrots again, as the man said. The pain and torment of our long separation have melted away like sugar cubes in an old-fashioned. We've resumed our lives together with hardly a ripple. We've attended several functions and get-togethers, and it's been a sight better going as a twosome than alone. We went to see some stand-up comedy at the Park (that pub I keep mentioning, which someday I shall take some pictures of and do a proper travel article on) two weekends ago, and had some godawful tiny hamburgers which cost 8,500 won apiece. The weekend after we attended a delightful rooftop Cinco de Mayo party hosted by Smithy. I was riding quite high that night, feeling more laid-back and relaxed than I had in months. I had a tin cup that I'd bought for less than a dollar at Daiso, a small general store a block from the apartment complex. I filled it with gin and tonic and cut loose. There were lots of familiar faces—all the foreigners from two different academies, plus some newcomers and even a few of our Korean coworkers. It was marvelous. We started with homemade Mexican food in Smithy's apartment, a sumptuous feast; and then moved to the breezy rooftop where we watched the sun set over the city.
...and on Monday it was back to work for tests, comments, assessments, and a lot of end-of-semester randomness. It's run me ragged. The new semester begins next Friday and I can't friggin' wait. There'll be a lot more vacation time, and the naeshin and holding periods are coming up mighty quick.
Okay, update completed. I would like to inform you that I'm starting a new writing project (labeled Project 25 for no apparent reason). I'm not writing a new piece of work; I'm merely collating all the hundreds upon hundreds of notes, both digital and physical, that I have lying around and compiling them in a blank notebook. Hopefully that notebook will become my master blueprint to completing this here novel series, and not just an untidy jumble of scribble. Time will tell.
Postie out.
P.S. Miss H and I made nachos for dinner a few weeks ago. Don't they look scrumptious? Thank gosh for Costco!
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