Rainy Days

Woke up this morning to the sound of the rain thundering down on the tarp covering the veggie garden in front of my apartment...made me think of home, and I was a little homesick but filled with a warm feeling...until i realised I had to go out into the cold and wetness to get to Hakha. Then the warm feeling was suddenly replaced with slight feelings of dread :( But life does go on, and now I am sitting here at my desk, classes finished and 2 and 1/2 hours to kill...

Thought I would recount a few interesting happenings over the last week or so:

1. Escaping Convicts??

I was on the bus, just chilling, listening to some cool tunes and trying to learn my new set of Korean vocab (yes i do speak out loud and yes i do get a few strange stares, but more often than not I get people smiling at me, most probably thinking to themselve that they could score some free English lessons by teaching me Korean~i think not!)when my eyes locked onto this old Korean man. Now nothing of this would have been alarming, but he was donned in a gown, slippers, and had a wild and crazy look in his eyes~AN ESCAPPEE!!! Close on his heels another 2 inmates! Whats going on!? I was most definately freaked out, until I looked to the left and saw the reason for the strange sight before me...the "inmates" were having their daily stroll before having to take their meds and such at the local Hospital. I kid you not, the old man was studying the bus timetable, and the 2 ladies were merley doing a touch of window shopping with their backless gowns and IV strollers struggling to keep up with them (ok FarmBoy, they wern't really wearing backless gowns and carrying their IV's, but they might as well have been, they had all the rest of the usual hospital attire!).
This is a common occurance here in Korea, a bit strange I thought at first, but now I am slowly becoming adjusted to these interesting sights :)

2. Pyromaniac?

Staying with the alarming sights, I had a rather scary experience at school the other day during out National fire/earthquake drill in the playground. So there we all were, all the grade 5's and grade 6's (about 100 of us) sitting on the ground waiting for something to happen, while wathcing the nerdy computer technitian putting together 2 small piles of sticks and newspaper, and tenderly lighting a match to get the fire started when out of the no-where, the school's wild haired Music Teacher pops out from behind the shed with a very large cannister of gasoline/petrol. A few "oohhhhh's" and "Ahhhh" could be heard, but this was nothing compared with what was to come......... Said Music teacher proceeded to douse the flames with the petrol, all fine and dandy until the flames decided to fight back and cover him fire! It was the scariest/funniest moment I have ever experienced. He was covered in flames for about 2 seconds, before dropping the canister and running around for a little while the flames died down~not one scratch on him! Now you can imagine the hype happening behind me, the kids were going crazy, and in the mean time, the student president and one of the other teachers had run off to fetch 2 tiny fire extinguishers and had begun to spray tiny droplets of foam into the flames. All in all a very exciting morning for the kids! I wish this week had been this exciting....