And so it ends...

And so this chapter is finished. I will not lie; when my girls teared-up my eyes watered some. As much trouble as I would have with some of those kids…I loved my kindergarteners and respected my elementary students.

Brandon was “easing my mind” last night. He told me that though there had been problems what redeemed me was the love and devotion I showed to the students; mine and others. Very few of the teachers would go down and use their free time to play with the kids. It was nice to hear that something seemed to make a difference.

Graduation was chaos, but no more than it could have been. Johns Hopkins and MIT’s Korean dance was fabulous; though with fog, lasers and a snow machine how could it not have been. For my Animal House the kids didn’t put on their best performance, but the energy and fun was apparent which is what truly matters; and the parents were happy. I received quite a few flowers afterwards and many compliments overall which is what you want to hear: that people who spent thousands of dollars on their child to learn English are happy with LCI and their children’s accomplishments. All the teachers were able to say nothing but good things about how the kids did. And then we were done…

Of course, much like last year we had a restaurant to ourselves nearly for all the LCI employees to eat and drink and cause chaos of our own. Maneerat-Teacher gave us a long speech that even her husband was commenting on it being too long (though most of it was telling people to shut up, but when you work with kindergarteners it is hard to keep our attention for more than five seconds at a time…) Any way during this speech to get our attention she would hit a spoon against a bottle and then she broke the bottle while holding it…It was awesome…bridges were burned and goodbyes were said.

We went downtown. Kidnapping Maneerat and Won Jon Nihm. At some point, much like a year ago this time, I fell asleep on the bar at Soul Train, towards the end of the evening I learned that I left my jacket at the place we had eaten and Won Jon Nihm gave me his…then he took it back and held onto my arm and told me it was time to go home and flagged me a cab and put me in it with some others people who he also felt were done for the night…This is a man that I have amazing respect for:

He takes care of two schools and his family. He has seen me in the hospital numerous times. He has the driest humor and wit. He bawled over the death of the former president of South Korea last May. He gets happy and drunk and shy and loves what he does. His family welcomed me into their home at Chuseok and would have again for Solnal (which I really should have done to find out how much money I would have received). Though there are cultural differences and problems he tries to help.

I am going to do some photo editing. Graduation and post graduation and my last week with the kids of LCI. Then I will go to a coffee shop and post this and, hopefully, post pictures. Then I will be preparing to leave Korea and see my family back home.