Ghost Stories and Random Things of Note

• I was a venerable American ghost for one full evening. My bank called me to let me know that I needed to physically go back to the bank and pay my transmittance fee for my recent transfer of funds to the States. They couldn’t just take it out of my account? Anyway. I get to the bank and try to the use the ATM. 1st machine didn’t work. Move on to the next. Same thing. Move on to the next. Same thing. A Korean teller comes out and tries her hand….voila—Korean magic strikes again! Confused, she takes my hand and physically puts it on the touchscreen. Nothing. She uses her Korean fingers again. It works. She feels my fingertips and loudly stammers, “You have no fingerprints.”
  Coming home from Christmas gimbap night in Seoul, I take the bus from Sadang that drops me off right in front of my school (which is great, since my apartment is only a 5 min. walk from there) – I try to be polite and let an old man walk in front of me to exit the bus first. He stops to press the red button again, realizing the next stop is his. I move past him toward the exit when the bus driver, looking right at me, closes the door. I yell “Yogi! Yogi!” – (here, here), not knowing what else to say, but he continues on in his Korean-bus-driver-robotic way until the next stop where I make sure to be first in line. It sucks being an American ghost.
• To all my Jewish friends: get ready to laugh. At my last English teacher class, we got on the subject of relationships (this comes up a lot). When I told them that I used to date a Jewish guy and that I have a special Yiddish name: shikse (non-Jewish woman), they looked at me and laughed saying, “You were his meal?” Shikse (shik-suh) is the exact same word for ‘meal’ in Korean. How bout that.
• Christmas Eve. I generally greet the students with the usual “good morning/afternoon, how are you?” and scold them if they say “fine and YOU?” or “so-so”, telling them they sound like textbook robots or applauding their use of correct normal, everyday English responses. But today, several students have responded saying “sad, teacher.” Why sad? It’s Christmas Eve! “Stay til 10pm, teacher.” Oh. So I’ve been hauling out even more candy than usual, hoping to lift their spirits with momentary distractions of sweetness.
  It’s still sad though.
• I’ve officially booked my tickets for Vietnam! Stopover in Hong Kong there and back, 10 days alone in this beautiful country. Much research and visa-getting to do, but for the moment, I’m dreaming of Saigon and Halong Bay.
  

It’s perhaps unnecessary to write here, but despite my Saigon dreams and lost in translation distractions, I’d still give anything to be in Chicago, Ann Arbor and NYC for the holidays. Alas.

Merry Christmas everyone!