Rainy Season

It is hot, and without air conditioning there is no escaping the heat and humidity. We tell ourselves that A/C is bad for the environment, and that it would be too expensive. Most likely, we are probably just too lazy to ask our teachers for help in renting a unit and setting it up. With a 17 day vacation home looming less than a week away, it would make little sense to spring for one now. Plus, you know, the environment.

When I come home from English camp at around 12:30 every day, I strip down to nothing but basketball shorts and roll up the waistband. Sami says it looks like I am wearing a diaper. At night, I take a cold bath and then attempt to fall asleep by rotating bags of ice under my knees, behind my neck, clamped to my armpits or resting on my crotch.

A week from Tuesday marked the official start of "rainy season," and the combination of hot, falling water and the sticky, breezeless air is nearly unbearable. Worse yet, there is no way to tell when a downpour will occur. I find myself walking to the gym in shorts, a tank top and flip flops while clutching an umbrella.

As much as I despise the summer weather in Korea, I would happily roll around in a snowsuit outside all day in exchange for a cicada mass exodus. The females are like constant rattlesnakes threatened in the trees and the male mating call has all the elegance of the back end of a dentist's electric polisher vibrating against a central incisor.

The other day, I found a male screeching and clinging to the outside window screen. I snuck up and whacked at it with the remote control, but succeeded only in puncturing the the screen. In my moment of rage I completely neglected the can of Raid we use to ward off mosquitoes. The next day I saw two of my students, each pinching cicadas between their thumbs and forefingers. They gave the hideous looking bugs (kind of like a cross between a giant cockroach and a moth) a little squeeze to make them chirp more vigorously.

Koreans seem just as adept at handling the weather as they are with cicadas. In fact, they celebrate the first day of rainy season, called Cho-pok, by (of course) eating hot, ginseng chicken soup called samgetang. The theory is that the hot soup will make their body temperatures hotter, and thus able to adapt to the weather more easily. I don't get it.

I went out with my teachers to eat samgetang on Cho-pok and was quickly scolded when I attempted to add salt to the soup. Apparently, you are supposed to dip a piece of the chicken into the bowl of salt. I did this, but it made the chicken too salty. I was feeling a little down after this and began to think that I was never going to be able to fully adjust to Korean culture or climate. However, I felt a little better knowing that the restaurant was heavily air conditioned. Maybe they can't stand the heat after all! Or maybe, they just don't care as much about the environment as I do.