::A Geek in Korea::

I went to work today after buying the airport express bus ticket for my upcoming trip. We’re leaving in the afternoon tomorrow, so I won’t be going to work for a change. This had me in a cheerful mood even as I walked from the bus stop all the way to work. This is the first real vacation I’ve taken since last summer when I went to the United States with my wife to visit my relatives.

I had started packing my bags earlier in the day, which my wife said made me “excited like a little child.” While I can’t fold clothes or actually fit anything in my suitcase as well as my wife. Regardless, I get a lot of satisfaction in packing and preparing for a trip. I’ll get out a suitcase extra early and simply ponder about all the things I want to bring with me as it sits in the corner.

I walked to work with the ticket sitting in my pocket, which made the trip more of a reality.  I got to work early enough that I could write down three days of guidelines for teachings covering my classes. This isn’t a huge deal since we have a lot of teachers and most of them have breaks in their schedule that would let them take a class a day.

I knew the easiest way to get everyone on the same page would be just to write down everything in my schedule as if I would teach it. Before the other teachers had even returned from their classes they were teaching when I had arrived, I had finished my list. I imagine someone will screw up and finish a book I’ve been trying to go slowly on, but I’ll worry about that later.

Since I had already taken care of the schedule, there wasn’t anything more to do than sit through my three classes for the day and do my standard lessons. I had a fairly high tolerance for some of the idiots in my class today, because I knew I wasn’t going to be seeing them the rest of the week.

One student told me his dream was, “To start World War III by dropping nuclear weapons everywhere.” He then proceeded to draw pictures of people stabbed with a knife through their head.

I smiled and thought to myself, “There is a student I don’t need to worry about any more this week.” What a great feeling that is to know you’ll be able to break out of a rut that is slowly wearing you down. I’ll worry about the psychopath later, because frankly, I’ve earned this time off.

I haven’t had a single weekday off since the first of March. Even that was a Thursday, meaning we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything special. Even the longer Lunar New Year holiday this year fell on a weekend, shortening our vacation and leaving us at home for the day. This nearly week long trip was a vacation a long time in the making. We’ve been attempting to visit Angkor Wat for nearly an entire year, but got shut out because of tours, lack of tickets, and excessive prices during holiday peek travel times. We got lucky even getting the tickets after putting in reservations a month in advance.
Now that we are going I’m relieved because it acts as a break for me to recharge and refocus my energies on teaching and the future. The long time between holidays will get better in the coming months. There are weekday holidays in each of the following six months that mean I get time off work to relax much more often.