Summer has come and passed / The innocent can never last / Wake me up when September ends
I suppose in a place like Gwangju - or Korea, more generally - as long as the system of cycling foreign teachers persists, saying goodbye over and over again becomes a way of life. I never wondered why the long-term expats were so much harder to get to know; it always seemed fairly obvious that the normal, mature caution exercised by adults when approaching new relationships might come off as a bit distant compared to the unnerving openness of newly-arrived teachers. I knew that was why the men and women with stable jobs and families weren't as freakishly friendly as the still-jet-lagged hagwon recruits, and why the old-timers joked about the new EPIK class with gentle disdain, and why our Korean colleagues were politely distant and approached us all with caution.
Despite knowing all this, it still feels odd to be on the other end of it.
Like my fathers come to pass / Seven years has gone so fast / Wake me up when September ends
Joel and I have been here for a full 15 months now. With five months to go, we have again found ourselves at the entrance to the maze of getting to know the incoming teachers as we say goodbye to the outgoing ones. To be fair, six/five/four months is not an insignificant amount of time to spend with someone, and we enjoyed the (even shorter) time that we got to know the teachers that were leaving as we arrived...but our minds have already begun to wander in the direction of leaving, and I worry that my efforts to get to know the new recruits will just look perfunctory and shallow.
The couple that arrived at the beginning of August has already lived and taught here for a year, so they are probably already too cool for me anyway. :-D We just welcomed a couple from Canada that is totally new to Korea (today is their first day on the job - good luck, guys!). We had them over for dinner last night, since we couldn't go out to eat as a group on Thursday last week. As soon as I found out they were ethnically Dutch, I immediately thought of one of my bridesmaids who married a man from a Dutch community in Iowa - it was nice to meet someone new and remember home (and not feel like a tool, since I already know so little about Canada).
Here comes the rain again / Falling from the stars / Drenched in my pain again / Becoming who we are
And so we begin September, and the fall - it looks like the horrific Texas-style heat wave that plagued us has finally passed, as the weather has been deliciously cool for the last few days. At this point we have said goodbye to all of the teachers that arrived after us, and at the end of this month, the last two teachers that were here when we arrived - the current senior-most teachers - will go home, and we will be kings of the mountain (or something). One or the other of us may be made Foreign Head Teacher (I personally am not sure they will continue the position). Meanwhile, pop culture back home is still reeling from this year's MTV VMAs, two of our friends from Austin just got married (Mazel tov!), and our best man is getting hitched in October. We have one more vacation this year (coming up in about two weeks, actually).
Oh, and we are apparently gearing up for war in Syria - because the last time we jumped into a conflict in the Middle East, it worked out really well.
As my memory rests / But never forgets what I lost / Wake me up when September ends
