This was going to be a really happy blog post

This was going to be a really happy blog post.... until I went to take my laundry out of the washing machine. I put it in before I went to the gym and I came back to find it sopping wet, and sitting in a shallow pool of rinse water. Awesome. This isn't the first time I'm come to blows with the washing machines here, nearly every time I go to wash my clothes something craps out or screws up. I had to wring all of my dripping wet clothes out over the drain in the floor before I could attempt to dry them. Korea has these pre-drier spinner dealies- they spin most of the water out of your laundry. If you've ever been to a pool with a swimsuit centrifuge you'll know what I'm talking about. Interestingly enough, Koreans don't use driers. They just hang their clothes up. How we're supposed to do this with 41 square feet of floor space each, I don't know. Each dorm has only one dryer, even Dorm 2 which is something like 500 students. I-house, which is only half Korean, still only gets one dryer. Everyone is always fighting for some dryer time. I'm waiting for it to free up even this minute.
Anyway, the spinner dealie on my floor stopped working 2 minutes into the first of 8 spin cycles(takes 1/4 of a load, must be cycled twice to be effective). So I have to cart all my damp clothes downstairs and spin them there. That's where the dryer is, so I would have had to taken my clothes there eventually anyway. Each cycle takes 5 minutes, so I wasted spent one hour walking back and forth between Young's office while I waited for the spinner to be done so I could set it going again. It hops and crawls around the room as it spins. This might be entertaining if it didn't drain to the floor, and this activity didn't cause the entire floor to be covered in a slurry of spilled laundry detergent and water, just waiting for an errant garment to be dropped and instantly gross-ified.

Anyway, enough about laundry. I got my second test back for statics, it was an 80%. Yay! A vast improvement over my first test, on which I received a 13%. Dr. Henk the Merciful is going to let me retake that one in light of my recent improvement. I'm confident I'll make the grade now. What was the other thing I was happy about? I got so ticked off about the laundry issues here that I forgot. Let's see. I'm going to the gym more or less every day. I'm floating around 122kg, which is rather unsettling after becoming accustomed to rapid weight loss. I'm fairly sure it's because of the additional muscle I'm gaining(which unfortunately is still concealed by subcutaneous lipids).

Hrm... I finished Without Remorse for the second time and I am again more than contented with Clancy's authorial proficiency. Honestly, I wasn't sure that authorial was a real word until spellcheck accepted it. What is our world coming to? Spellcheck is going to run the world someday.

Also, I'm now responsible for selling 20 Handong shirts. International Student Union got some shirts printed up and nobody voted for the design I liked. I pestered Young about it enough(and walked into his office right as he was ordering) so I was able to get 20 of them printed even though only 3 people voted for them from Ihouse. I was happy 'cause I'd get my cool-design shirt and all would be well. They decided later that since I pushed for them to be printed that I'd be responsible for making sure they sell. Fair enough. Normally I'd be a bit irked at having the task thrust upon me without consent, but I'm not really worried about being able to sell 20 shirts on a campus of 3000. Also, I get to keep any profit from the deal. Works for me. (Shirts are cheap here, I'll probably be able to sell them for around 5 kilowon each, which is a steal compared to US shirt prices. No, I don't have a link to the design. Just imagine that Samsung owns Korea and has their logo plastered everywhere. Then imagine that Young changes their logo to say Handong instead. Ta-da!

I'm also happy because I've also come to terms with not doing certain things that I felt obliged to before but in reality are pretty dumb. That is: wearing indoor slippers on certain surfaces indoors(Koreans hate going barefoot.. I don't.) and attending pointless team meetings. LU has an orientation class for the first half of everyone's first semester. Great. Handong does the same thing, only it's everyone, every semester, compulsory attendance. Fortunately as exchange students we're not bound by this rule, so about half of us skip. I'd go if it wasn't stupid and didn't involve public humiliation. I'd feel bad about this if every upperclassman/Handong vet didn't agree with me. Also: eating Korean food.

So all in all, things are going well, save for laundry annoyances. In four weeks I'll be glad to get back to the States and its familiarity, but I'll miss certain things about Handong also.