For my "mental health"

Happy Weekend!

First of all, Happy 90th birthday Grandma!  I know I'm a day late, but I hope you had a great weekend full of festivities.  Please send a picture of your birthday party!  

This past week was very low key for me.  Monday was part of my 4 day holiday, and the rest of the week just seemed to breeze right by me.  I went out for a wonderful Italian dinner on Tuesday with two good friends, spent a lot of time at the gym, and went jogging in Olympic Park with a friend on Thursday.  I escaped this week with almost no ridiculous incidents at school; however, Friday afternoon was my first day attending the newly implemented and weekly "school sports day" at Gil-Dong Elementary.  All teachers must join one of four clubs - badminton, table tennis, hiking, or yoga.  Once a week, your club spends an hour and a half doing the activity.  Because I'm embarrassingly bad at badminton and table tennis and I don't want to hike because it's only done by the men in school who speak no English, I joined the yoga club.  I did some yoga classes at my gym at school during spring semester, and although I'm not terrible at it, I am of the mindset that it's, for lack of a better term, a load of crap.  I usually want to giggle through most of the classes, and I think it's kind of a bad excuse for exercise.  Anyway, I digress.  

Friday afternoon, I got my yoga clothes on and got ready for the "class."  I entered the gymnasium where there was a huge projector with a yoga video on it.  The entire thing was in Korean and it only had badly translated English subtitles sometimes.  The name of the video was  "Diet Yoga."  Anyway, we did poses such as "The Awkward Pose," "The Pose that Twists Your Spine," and "The Baby Pose."  None of the poses were anything I had ever seen before- most of the time we just contorted our bodies into the most awkward positions possible and had to hold it for minutes at a time.  At one point I just started giggling.  Luckily, I survived "diet yoga" and made it to the gym Friday afternoon for some real exercise.  

The weekend was fun, but it was also kind of hard.  Saturday was Homecoming at Wake, and I knew that was going to be harder to miss than anything this year.  All week I got emails on the listserve I'm on with all my friends talking about flights into school and I watched as hundreds of facebook statuses changed into something like "Heading to the Dash" or "It's like Christmas!"  I'm definitely happy here, but I would have given anything to be in Winston-Salem for the weekend.  I almost cried a few times on Saturday, but I went shopping all weekend instead to console myself.

Shopping in Korea is amazing.  There are shoe stores and little boutiques everywhere.   As in, there are actually alleys that only have shoe vendors selling anything you could ever want on your feet. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have a terrible shopping problem (Dad I'm going to have to start sending you excel spreadsheets of every penny I spend again since I'm not mature enough to budget myself).  I've gotten into the bad habit of telling myself that what I buy is "for my mental health."  I always think, Oh, I'm far from home! This will make me happy! This is just what I need to stay sane!  For example, today I went all the way to Itaewon to an English bookstore and paid an absolutely obscene amount for a stack of English books and magazines.  I also broke down and bought two avocados that I found today.  So no one goes into shock I won't tell you how much they were, but, obviously, I needed them.  For my mental health.  I decided I'm going to have to start trying to stay sane in other ways.  Shopping here is going to be my downfall.

Anyway, I miss you all.  I hope everyone who spent the weekend at Wake had a great trip.  I want to hear about it!

Go Deacs,

Andie