The surprises just keep coming.

A couple weeks ago, I woke up, rolled over, and looked at the clock. It was a little after 2pm on a Monday. I turned off the heated blanket, straightened up the covers on the bed, stepped into my slippers and stood.

"Ahh! Oh, hello Shelby." One of the 5th graders jumped when my head popped up over the chest-high wall. Even after more than a semester, when I catch them off guard, some students still get startled by the whole "white person" thing I've got going on with my face.

"Calling in sick" isn't really a thing that happens in Korea. From what I've heard, you need to be the equivalent of chained to a hospital bed to cash in a sick day. Once you make it to work however, sleeping through the day is completely acceptable, if the illness warrants it. Last week, I wasn't that bad, but bad enough to find myself escorted to one of several beds in the nurse's office with the strict order not to get up for at least an hour. Yeah, that's right. There are actual beds to sleep in if you need to take a nap.

It all started the weekend before with some bad kimchi fries. They were good on the way down, but Sunday morning, on the way back up, they were nothing short of miserable. After spending the day doing what felt like dying, by Monday morning I was able to rejoin the human race.

I made it through the day pretty normally, but by lunch time, food still didn't sound at all appealing. Even after only scooping the tiniest bit of each thing onto my plate, I still left most of it untouched. They noticed. I'm the outsider so nothing I do goes unnoticed. HyeSeon, one of the Korean English teachers I have classes with, knew I didn't feel well.

"Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, Shelby blah blah," she said to the entire table. I don't speak Korean, but often times it's not hard to guess the general subject matter being discussed. Whatever she said, I'm sure it was at least minimally embellished. I'm sick, that's why I'm not eating. They got the idea.

I looked over at the vice principal. She was holding out her palm and pressing her opposite index finger repeatedly where the hand meets the wrist and smiling a huge, gigantic, not-common-for-Koreans smile. I'm talking the open-teeth kind. Without asking, she was asking if I needed another visit to the principal's office, which reminded me of the only other time in Korea I've had a mysterious illness...

It was last October when I ate a bad chicken sandwich. I don't actually know that the chicken sandwich caused it, but I've stuck to that story for so long, I now accept it as fact.

I hadn't eaten much for a couple of days at lunch and, of course, everyone noticed.  HyeSeon does a pretty solid job at translating things and keeping me in the loop. However, while translations are usually correct, they are not always complete. I was pretty confused when post-lunch plans to get some pills from the nurse landed me in the principal's office with HyeSeon.

So I sat on a comfortable couch near his desk and waited. They talked back and forth and I tried to follow along by watching their motions as they discussed my symptoms. He pulled out a book from his desk and flipped through the pages. She joined me in the seating area.

Eventually the principal came walking over and unrolled his fist. A row needles lined his palm.

Nope.

He is very interested in Chinese medicine.

Nope.

He reached down, grabbed my arm and started feeling around on my wrist.

"NOPE."

I attempted to jump over the back of the couch, but was held down by a hand firmly on my shoulder. Needles don't bother me at all. Having them stuck into me by basically a stranger who I don't share a common language with was a little more bothersome. But really, I just hate having my wrists touched and the idea of something poking into one of them makes me squirm.

The first needle went in and I survived it. Then the second in my hand. Then the third near my elbow. It didn't hurt. Everything happening was just so weird. It was hard to even grasp the situation. Then he reached for my leg.

Nop...you know, whatever.

After sticking the last of the needles from knee to my ankle, I waited. But I didn't wait long. He was back with a stack of chalky ceramic plates with a wire mesh in the middle. After putting them in my non-needled hand, he sat a clump of some mysterious dirt on top. Okay?

Before I knew it, in what felt like the blink of an eye, he was holding a lit match. In another blink of an eye, that lit match was being used to light the clump of dirt in my hand on fire. Half my body had needles in it, the other half was holding fire. He looked at the clock. 

"*Korean words*," he said. Blank stare from me.

"Thirty minutes!" said HyeSeon. 

At the end of the 30 minutes, only one thin piece of mesh stood between my palm and the fire. The needles were removed and the fire was put out. I went back to my desk and returned to regularly scheduled business for the rest of the day, like nothing out-of-the-ordinary had happened.

The million-dollar question: did it work?

Honestly... I don't know. By the time the school day ended I felt pretty good, and the next day, completely back to normal. But I wasn't really that sick to begin with, so it could have coincidentally worn off naturally.

Being sick in the USA meant everyone telling me to stay at home and away from them until I'm not sick anymore. It was a lot of just being left alone to recover. Being sick in Korea means, just like everything else here, the surprises just keep coming.

The only person who looks way too excited...

"How long? Korea?" I looked at the two students in front of me, at the clock on my computer, and back at their grinning faces once more. They were smiling at me, which doesn't always happen, so I didn't let that pass me by. You know that thing where when you smile at someone, even a stranger on the street, and their initial reaction tends to be to smile back? A smile is contagious? Not here. Nope. Even when I put on my happiest, toothiest grin and look directly into the eyes of my students, I'm usually met with a blank stare. It's not that they hate me. Some of them probably do, but even the ones who openly really, really like me don't seem to understand why I'm smiling at them. Smiling back doesn't even cross their mind. It's a cultural difference. One in a sequence of many. I have thin, wavy hair. Big eyes. A "high" nose. A "small face" (whatever that means). I'm white. I live in South Korea. My life is a cultural difference. 

The two inquisitive girls just graduated the sixth grade at the elementary school where I am an English teacher. For a lot of reasons, the main one probably being a very large language barrier, we didn't know all that much about each other. I knew how long I've been in Korea, but for some reason I still turned to the clock. It was 3:56pm on February 26th. Two things ran through my head. First, it was four minutes to four, four being the time my flight into Korea had landed many months earlier. Second, it was the 26th, the day of the month when my "official" contract begins and ends. Six months later would be the end.

"Six months," I said. They knew what I said, but still looked at each other for confirmation. I had been in Korea for six months. It was actually longer, more like six and a half, but no need for specifics. The first couple of weeks hardly count, anyway, as orientation was more of a purgatory than reality. Looking back, it seems like it was a dream. I was so scared, so confused, so excited. So everything at once. I had never been to Asia, didn't know anyone that was surrounding me, and had failed to research the city in which I would be living. I'm still confused and excited and many other things at almost all times, but I'm rarely ever scared, so at least some progress has been made.

I had never had this much personal interaction with either of the girls, and I was pleasantly surprised by their ability to hold a conversation in English about everyday things. Most of the kids know the textbook well, but when I try to go off the grid and speak with them human to human, that's where the struggle begins. But we talked about all kinds of topics - our siblings, pets, movies, music, TV shows - all of the key topics to discuss with people whose personal lives you know nothing about. They also took on the role of being my Korean teachers, teaching me helpful phrases I definitely should have already learned in the past six months.

"Uhhh yearbook? Your picture," one of them said, while motioning to her mouth with a huge smile. Okay, so maybe my standards for "able to hold a conversation" aren't exactly the highest. But really, we kept the conversation flowing. I laughed because I knew what she was getting at, without her forming a complete sentence.

"Yeah, I was the only person who smiled," I said. And I was. Cultural differences. Shortly after arriving in Korea, we had picture day. Nobody let me in on the not-so-secret secret that no one else would be smiling in their photos. The mugshot look is really in here, I guess. So not only was I the only wavy-haired, big-eyed, high-nosed white girl in the yearbook, but also the only person who looks way too excited to be at work that day. 

Six months in Korea. I'm starting to understand basic Korean language and I still get overwhelming rushes of anxiety when I set foot in a grocery store. I don't know my home address, but I can tell a taxi driver how to get there in Korean. I still smile at everyone and feel a hint of victory and triumph when I get them to smile back. Why would I stop? It's so nice to have a reason to smile.