I have never been to Kansas, but suffice to say I am certainly not there any more

Out with the old in with the Daegu. 

With the purchase of one crisp blue shirt (size 100), one fashionable sparkly blue zip-up tie and a four hour bus ride, I was ready for the first blind date of my life.  Hello Mrs. Khang, my name is Kyle and I'll be your boy for the next year.

My co-teacher and her administrative assistant arrived in a flood with everyone else's Korean counterparts.  They waded through the crowded lobby of the Educational Institute with my name on a sign.  They'd been waiting for me, they said.  Like man and bear, we were both terrified of each other.  Only one of us could rend the other limb from limb if cornered though.  But who?

There is a dance you do when you're in a hurry in a crowded mall, a manner of darting through the shifting holes between the people.  Your bulk crowds make no sudden movements, and you take the initiative to aggresively cut through them.  This is a poor analogy as it holds only half true for the back alley driving that takes place in Daegu.  Everyone is the hurried one in the mall.  They accelerate at each other, they brush unpeturbed pedestrians.  The stop, back up, and park whever ever they want.  I complimented Mrs. Khang on her driving but she didn't think it was so good.  Seen from the sky though, I suspect it is art.

My Vice Principal is a very nice man.  He majored in English and as such he speaks it quite well, as does Mrs. Khang for that matter.  Dinner was in the mall - Bulgogi Brothers.  I took their advice and got the bim beem bop.  It is delcious and I tell them as much.  The Vice Principal has a touching concern for me.  He worried that the food would be too spicy, that I would not be able to handle chop sticks and that I will be very cold because my gas won't be turned on untill tomorrow.  They talk amongst themselves in Korean a lot.  At one point they talk for several minutes and then the Vice Principal turns to me.  "Tomorrow Mrs. Khang would like to come to your house at 10 take you to a spaghetti restaurant."  He means 10 in the morning.  Mrs. Khang has already spent three hours with me shopping.  It is clearly much less a case of Mrs. Khang wanting to than of the Vice Principal telling her he wants her to.  He is my superior and to try and get Mrs. Khang out of her duties would be disrespectful.  I can not even tell them that spaghetti is not something we eat for breakfast in the west.  So I have a date tomorrow morning.  We're doing Italian.