Hot and Sour Soup

I've sat here before--about fourteen months ago, on my way home from my first stint in Korea. I'm at a lounge in the Singapore airport, once again drinking hot and sour soup and, this time, writing TOEFL listening questions. (Dean Webb wrote the lectures and conversations on which they're based, which means the depicted professors and students are clever, and a little sassy.)

On that last visit, I had just spent an entire night first wandering downtown Singapore overeating (to recover from three weeks of Korean dorm food) and then catnapping in a public lounge facility. I recorded a "farewell" to my "1% camp" students using a webcam I purchased downstairs--but I have no memory of what I said to them. I probably aimed for profound and achieved melodramatic--or aimed for funny and achieved confused.

Speaking of drama and humor in combination, I've now seen two Korean romantic comedies, When Romance Meets Destiny and Two Hundred Pound Beauty, and I liked both a lot. These Korean films seem to combine the funny and the melancholy in just the right blend to suit me. Maybe that's how I perceive the story of my own life... or maybe they're just good entertainment. It's also true that the subtitles force me to focus on them. I can't multitask, as I do even while watching 24.

Tonight, I'm on my way from Seoul to Bangalore. Earlier I stopped in Bangkok, which had a beautiful and almost empty new airport. I never imagined my first visit to India would be for a three day teaching conference--let alone one that DemiDec is helping to sponsor. I'll be presenting to about two hundred teachers on the Scholar's Cup, which is our new academic competition for Asia that is off to a tough but promising start. I'm hoping that some of them will want to be coaches this coming year.

Meanwhile, next week is the Korean national competition. It remains to be seen how many teams show up.

Leaving Korea on that first occasion last January, I had no idea that I would be back over a dozen times in the little over a year since. I lost track at my fifteenth trip or so. Sooner or later, I'll have visited it more often than my family's home country of Chile.

This latest visit (from Monday until this morning, and resuming next Monday) has been a little harder than most. For one, I'm still, as Tom put it, traveling on "a bad wheel." Healing from knee surgery turns out to be a little more challenging than I imagined. Every so often the knee gives out, or I slip in the rain and yelp. The hardest part is sleeping, because the bruised area contacts the mattress. (In the end, I gave in to an opiate after all.) Second worst is getting out of taxis. Nonetheless, I'm better by the day, and expect to be running through airport terminals again soon. But another reason the trip has been harder is that our first Korean curriculum projects are due next week--and it's always hard to pull together good work in time for a deadline, especially in a whole new field. (In addition to the Scholar's Cup, DemiDec is delving into producing curriculum materials for the TOEFL and other ESL-related areas.)

Nothing has gone exactly as expected since then, from Seoul to Evanston, which may be why I find a familiar (if lukewarm) bowl of hot and sour soup in Changi International Airport kind of comforting. At least it's better than its equivalent at the Kong.