The first eye-needle has been done.  The whole procedure only takes about ten minutes (and this time it may have been more like five), but it's a fairly awful ten minutes.  They wash out the eye with a lot of stuff that really stings, while shining a very bright light into it, and I think all of this is worse than the actual needle which I can neither see nor feel.  So there's all this unpleasant stuff to which the eye's natural response is to close, so it's desperately trying to close, but it can't because it's clamped open.  Knowing this, I had resolved to mentally transport myself elsewhere during the surgery and just imagine my wedding, but the doctor wanted me to look this way and that at various points, so it proved impossible to think about anything other than the all-too-vivid present.  Well, it's done now.  I'm not thrilled about it being a regular feature of the rest of my life, but if that's the price I have to pay to be able to see, so be it.

I'm teaching colours to the grade two students this week.  As part of this, I ask them to look around the classroom and find things that are each colour.  It's a nice idea, but always drives them wild, more so than just about any other activity.  Yesterday, after I asked for red and was busy acknowledging responses, I turned around to find one half-barefoot boy holding up his sock and pointing to the little red logo on it.  That's not... okay, well, congratulations on going the distance, I guess.  I hope you apply this much zeal to all your education.

I also had to judge a district-wide English speech contest yesterday; I didn't mind, since it got me out of my atrocious after-school class, but it was the usual kind of farce.  I was the only foreigner there, and literally the entire thing, with the exception of the speeches themselves and my own closing words, was conducted in Korean.  The first-place winner spoke like the host of a children's show.  Where she learned this, I have no idea.  The other teachers mentioned that they have heard of hagwons teaching "presentation skills" to children, in Gangnam of course, and I trust that by this point all my readers are aware of what Gangnam means.  Thank you, Psy.

That's a huge deal over here, by the way.  A friend who works for the Ministry of Culture has to proofread several different articles about Psy per day.  Korea, and the K-pop industry, have been trying to break into the overseas market for years with limited success and now that it happened without their intervention they're all rushing to claim credit.

Back to the contest.  One of the second-place winners was fairly good.  The other did a good speech with suspiciously high-level vocabulary which you'd be hard-pressed to find in any writing below college-level in North America.  I tried to mention this, but no one seemed to care.  Really, I just would have liked five minutes with the kid to ask him to explain the meaning of "catastrophe" and "seeps into" and "excluded" and so on.  If he could do it, he deserved to win.  If not...

This weekend is Chuseok, one of the bigger holidays here, so Chris and I both have five-day weekends.  Travelling is kind of impossible since that's what all the Koreans do and it can take literally three or four times as long to get somewhere.  So we'll stay in Seoul and do stuff... what stuff, we haven't figured out yet...