"Everyone Smiles in Wonderland"

Feeling slightly guilty about having sent my entire family a fake email about me eloping to Taiwan with a 35 year old divorced Korean man, I feel compelled to give a real update as to the drama that has ensued since my last entry. Although it may seem unlikely that any more drama could have developed after having my house broken into, I invite you to read on and take a big whiff of the shit that has relentlessly rained down on me these last few weeks.

According to the last update my apartment was broken into while my visiting college roommate and I slumbered peacefully on the floor. That incident happened on Monday morning. The rest of the week I spent most of my out of class time fighting with my employers to put bars on my windows. Insisting that they were having trouble finding a company willing to secure such large windows, I find myself nearing the end of the week with zero progress having been made. Because my apartment has no airconditioning it is beyond the bounds of reality to expect us to survive a night with all of the windows closed. Because of this we opted to keep the window of prior entry closed and locked but kept the large sliding window in the laundry room open for absolute necessary ventilation. Having inspected the piping on that side of the building and feeling reassured by my supervisor's insistance that the perpetrator would not come back, we felt rather comfortable.

On Friday morning I once again found myself inexplicably awakened. I rolled over on my bed to notice the legs of a figure standing not two feet away from my head in my laundry room. Again I found myself uncertain as to whether or not it was Lauren sleep walking. This time however I was a little less pleasant with my query when I said "what the fuck..." The real Lauren, hearing this shop bolt upright in her bed nest to me. Instantly realizing that the nearby legs did not in fact belong to her I leapt into action. I rushed at the figure with no other weapon than my fits and started pummeling on his back and neck. Lauren, barely being awake before all of this took place, was under the impression that the figure was attacking me and immediately sprung for the lights and any pan-like device with a hard bottom and a handle. By the time she had the lights on the man was scurrying down the pipe from whence he came and both of us were screaming bloody murder at the top of our lungs.

Admittedly my Korean is bad. I know a few words and key phrases at the most, certainly not enough to be able to communicate with the police over the phone where the help of hand gestures are out of the question. Like last time I called my supervisor who did no more than murmur in her sleepy broken English, "oh shit". The next day Lauren and I met with tow policemen at school. The meeting was totally useless seeing as it consisted of about 10 to 15 minutes of Korean back and forth with no more than five questions being translated and directed towards us. The questions were all useless seeing as they all had to do with the description of the person. All I saw was that he was suffering from male pattern baldness and a serious case of footprint minisculus. The meeting ended without any hope of resolution. I had a number of meetings that day with my supervisor and the owner of my school. Basically the meetings involved me saying that I wanted to get the hell out of here and them saying no. My contract is due to end at the end of the month anyway but they told me that if I tried to leave any sooner that it would be a breach of the contract and I would be forfeiting my rights to receive my severence pay as well as the finder's fee for the new teacher. Unwilling to accept this after a year of slaving away on their behalf I insisted this was unacceptable and due to these exceptional circumstances some allowances needed to be made. After some more meetings, some strong words, some tears and some slammed doors they are allowing me to leave on the 22nd of July, as opposed to the 28th, and I will be getting my full severence. I'll let you know how that all pans out in a couple of weeks.

Lauren and I have been staying in a seedy love motel since Friday a week ago. Lauren, having had her fill of fun in Korea decided to go home. She sensed a bad feeling for our travels to come and lost much of her travel confidence due to her experiences here. Yesterday, I made my final move out of the hotel and my old apartment and into my new apartment located in the same building as the school. I have less than two weeks left but I am happy to spend them away from the animalesque sounds of the love motel and the creepy towns folk of Haengsin-dong, the location of my first apartment. This apartment is nice complete with two refrigerators, an 8th floor view, airconditioning and a blue and white polka dotted toilet seat.

I am mentally checked out of this job and this place. I can't wait to start my travels in Southeast Asia in 12 days. I'm sad that Lauren won't be with me but she has tentative plans to meet us in Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam. I will be meeting Ray in Hanoi on the 22nd and we'll take it from there. I already have my backpack and my malaria pills so I'm pretty much ready to go.

This weekend the girls and I are going to the mud festival. Stay tuned for updates and pictures from that.