The Sun Will Never Shine Again

*This was originally posted on Thursday September 6, 2007. Immediately following this post, the sun did in fact finally show itself on Friday, Saturday AND Sunday. It's amazing how a little sun can make a place seem 10x better. **See Picture Below

Well I officially hit week two in South Korea, and the sun has yet to show itself.

It was last seen in North America, at roughly 7:30am, with a brief sighting again somewhere over the international dateline before my brief stopover in Toyko. Ya know, I vaguely remember in my traveling haze noticing that while it was 5pm at the Toyko airport two Thursdays ago, it looked very cloudly and serene, as if the sun were rising but not just quite there yet. Maybe because my body thought it was really 4am, but I really thought that everything looked like very early morning, especially because there were no people around.

Regardless of all of that, my first 4-5 days here weather wise were odd. It was a different type of humidity than I had ever experienced. For anyone that is from or ever been to New York, imagine what the middle of August feels like when you're standing on the subway platform at rush hour waiting endlessly for a train to come. It was THAT kind of humidity, only so thick that I almost felt like I was taking a sip from a glass of water everytime I took a breath. It was so humid and hot that I was falling asleep standing up b/c I couldn't really function properly. We were easily reaching temperatures in the 90s, with around 85-95% humidity, and most places have minimal air conditioning.

However all of that feels like it was ages ago, because this week it has done nothing but rain. It became an immediate fall, but instead of really pretty color changing trees & leaves, its just grey. Everything is grey. And this is in no way me saying that things are depressing or not, just merely observing the color of the place. One of the korean teachers on my staff assured me that at some point soon we should be seeing blue skies, but I believe this to be a complete fabrication as the Korean Sky is most surely continuously grey. They were giving me false hope.

Not only do I need to see the sun for my own happiness, I need it to happy purely at an educational standpoint. When I walk into my class in the morning, and ask my students to tell me what the weather is like, I need to be able to teach them more phrases other than "cloudy" "rainy" "cold".


^A grey cloudy sky on the way back from Seoul to Suji


^The view from my balcony on a sunny, blue sky day