Spring has sprung and gone.

 

Spring has sprung!  The sap is rising, the weather is getting warmer and yours truly, dear readers, is high on life!

I'm also running around the place as busy as a blue-arsed fly - as we so eloquently put it back in the Auld Sod!
So while I have enough witty remarks and profound insights to fill six blog posts, God alone knows when I'll find the time to sit and type it.

So this following offering will be short, but hopefully sweet?

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What fascinates and delights me about the change in the seasons is that the transistion happens so quickly and decisively.  As if even Mother Nature follows the Korean mantra of 'Bali, bali!!' (Quickly, quickly!)
You can almost.........almost set your watch by it.
Four weeks ago it was still cold enough that going anywhere without gloves was the height of folly.
Two days ago Ms.Amused came over to my place brandishing THREE mosquito bites.
(It's a little bit insane how irresistible they find her.)

This is an unending source of wonder to a girl from a country whose seasons bleed into each other like a red sock in a white wash!

It's very bemusing to us foreigners that one of the first topics of conversation with many Koreans is:
 "Korea has four seasons. Does your country have four seasons?"

Like most other mysteries we stumble across over here, once you start to scratch the surface, you quickly find the internal logic.

• Unlike us Westerners, Korea is neighbourly with several countries which DON'T have four seasons. 
• The change of seasons is still marked by large, important festivals here in Korea - in much the same way that the Celtic fire festivals of Lughnasa, Samhain and Bealtaine used to mark the seasons for us in Ireland.
•  Most Koreans learn this phrase as a rote piece in English class.

And while I mention the rote learning - it may seem a tad random, but it's a damn sight more useful than some of the stuff I learnt in French class!
Exhibit A: "The hat of my aunt is on the table."

Now, I have an above average number of aunts, but this is still not a sentence I'mma gonna need a whole lot!!

And you know something else?

After being here for a full cycle of seasons, I'm getting pretty psyched about it myself.

Last Fall was the most perfect I have ever experienced anywhere - a textbook autumn it was- with crisp fresh mornings and warm sunny days filled with a glorious palette of colour.

Now we've just had our 'blink and you miss it' Spring. 
This is a season which I particularly adore because my earliest images of Asia came from novels and movies set in Japan - so naturally enough, cherry blossoms falling like snow flash me right back to my adolesence and my plans to conquer the world - only to snap back to reality and find, yep, I'm actually in Asia!

Tis heady stuff, I tell ya!!

So here we are, a scant few weeks later and already heading into summer.  The winter clothes have been packed away in vaccuum packed bags.  (This is essential, not just for saving space but to protect them from the killer humidity we're going to get in a few months.)
I have dug up the air con remote control and any day now I'll be buying my first watermelon popsicle!


This of course, is why Spring is such a cherished season here in Korea.  It is an astonishingly beautiful and gentle season, which doesn't last long, so it never gets taken for granted.

Spring is in the air

After the coldest winter in over fifty years, (boy do I pick my times to emigrate!) we're finally getting some signs of spring here in Bonny Scotland!

We are getting lovely blue patches of sky between rain showers, and I have actually been known to leave the house without a hat over the last week. The most satisfying for me was being able to hang a wash out on the line for the first time in five months. Which is great timing as Best Friend and I will be doing a stock take and laundering of baby clothes this week, getting another important job done before the immanent arrival.

I said in my first post that I intended learning German this year. This plan took a big step backwards last week when I showed up for class to discover it had been cancelled due to lack of interest. I was offered Creative Writing or Polish instead. I politely declined but inside I was whining: "No, no, no, you don't understand - I have a Swiss wedding to go to!"
So it's back to studying away myself on my online lessons and I will search my library - with a bit of luck I might get a Michel Thomas German course. That would be great because those things cost about eighty quid to buy.

Nothing to report on the job hunting front. It's a case of trusting God to move the mountain, but in the meantime I'll keep digging. While I was signing on last Thursday, I saw a pamphlet offering courses on setting up your own business. I can't imagine a worse time to start a business - I had planned to start one in October '08 before all hell broke loose, economically speaking. But while I'm on Jobseeker's Allowance I can do the course for free, and who am I to turn down a freebie?!
I duly made an appointment and I meet with the consultant tomorrow afternoon. I'll let you know how it goes.

Last Friday I did something else which I've been meaning to do for an age and a half, I went into the Edinburgh Volunteer Centre to see what I could give back to the community. I really want to do TEFL volunteering, for three quite selfish reasons:

1. It will look impressive on my CV and give me a valuable edge in the job market.
2. It will get me out of the house and doing something rewarding and productive, thereby saving my sanity.
3. Due to a bizarre string of colds in October, sweet things have been anathema to me since October 18th, therefore, this Lent I won't be able to do my usual 'Mortification of the Flesh' and give up my favourite foods. So I'm going to be creative and take up something instead.

I found and applied for three TEFL oriented, volunteering posts, so we'll see how that goes.

Now I'm off to put another wash on the line. Huzzah!