Back and raring to go.

I'm back. Not going to really write too much about the trip, probably, because I never do. Because that bores me. And if something about myself bores me, I have no doubt that it will definitely bore everyone else. And I do have some social graces.

I am in that awkward re-adjusting period that always happens when you come back to Korea from some time in the English-speaking world where, even if you are actually properly a 'foreigner', you're not really, and you've been around people who've known you for years (decades), rather than months and you stay in your apartment all weekend trying to kick jet-lag's ass and unpack and get yourself in a state fit to attend work on Monday morning and you start to feel the way you did sometimes in the first year, where you were a bit lonely and acutely aware of being in a foreign place. But I expect that will subside the moment I walk into the school building. Where people have known me for years, and where I'm not as foreign as I am on the street. Also, have come back to a lovely set of people on the ground here who feel much more like proper friends than most of the people I was dealing with this time last year. It helps a lot.

Anyway. I can already feel that another cycle has ended, and I'm going to go back to being a proper homebody for the spring. Vacation's over. And it's time to settle in and focus on working hard to improve life here, and myself as a teacher, for another seven months until it's time to take off for a while again. Lots of reading and writing, I expect, both in this blog and outside of it. I hope, anyway.

At any rate, I'm not going to waste too much time dwelling on the 'why do I stay here away from my friends and family and the world that is familiar and easy when I could be outside building a "normal" life, while I'm young and still capable of it' portion of the re-entry period. Because I've been through this nearly a dozen times now, already, and I already know the answers to all of those questions. Time to just get back to living them, with little fanfare, or rather internal drama and carrying-on.

Off to work. Off to see the coworkers and the boys and remember, properly, why I'm here. One little vacation photo for you all. We ended up visiting Florence, as well as Bologna and Venice, because it turns out Bologna is kind of shit. You can rest assured that we made all the necessary puns with the city name while we were present and experiencing them, and as Joffocakes (been a long time since I used that pseudonym....) pointed out, yes, they were all basically the same joke. And only funny because everyone involved already knew they were shit.


The Stepholiz, happy and full in a pizza shop in Florence across from the Duomo. This was after (I think) two pastries and coffees and a sandwich, before gelato, red wine, more coffees and pasta. Haha. What else is there to do in Italy in the winter?