Vacation has finally started. I'm trying to relax. Last year, as soon as I started to relax, the vacation was over.

We had been practicing and practicing for the Christmas pageant like mad. By we, I mean the kids and myself. Except for one small "Star Light, Star Bright" poem done by one of the classes, I was in charge of or involved with everything. Back in November, I was exhausted from orchestrating the whole Halloween affair. Then we brought up Christmas, and I ended up writing a little school play. We changed the schedule so that the children could practice every day, and I got stuck directing it while the other teachers got an extra break.

But it was my fault. I rarely asked for help. One of the teachers did help do choreography in the morning and worked on the songs. Towards the end, though, I was getting very tired and cranky.

We were lucky to have students who learn things quickly. They had memorized the script after only one week. They had dances, script changes, hand bell performances, and tons of songs to learn in a foreign language. I even attempted to teach them "Adeste Fidelis" just to hear Korean children sing in Latin.

We decided to end the whole show by getting the children and audience to sing "Silent Night" while holding lit candles. So one afternoon, I sat down with the children and taught them the words, bit by bit.

At one point, one of the curious precocious students asked, "Mr. Joe, what's a virgin?"

"Oh… uh… hmm… It's, uh, yeah, it means 'pure.' Like extra virgin olive oil. Yes, that's it."

Last Friday, I went up to Songtan, near the U.S. Air Force base in Osan, with Glen and Christina for a get together of posters and former posters to Dave's ESL Café. Glen and Christina were good friends with most all of them, and one had traveled all the way from Tampa, Florida, for the get together. Well, actually, he arranged it.

Christina and I met Glen at his workplace in Bundang. It was in the parking garage that I saw something cool and new. Space was very limited, so cars drove onto a turntable, which turned them around to the right way. Each time a car went on there, I announced, "You've won – A NEW CAR!"

Songtan is like walking back into an American village, albeit an American military village. Almost everything was in English, there were many more Americans than Koreans walking about, and prices were in American dollars. It sort of felt like being home but in the same way that Wal-Mart feels like home. It's not an aspect of home that is dear to my heart.

My hotel room was very nice. For only $45 I got a large double room with

jet stream Jacuzzi,

sports shower with six nozzles in different places,

a high tech bidet,

and a sink with a friendly warning on it.

I had a great time meeting these people. They had been around here a long time, and almost everyone was married to a Korean.

Saturday morning, we had to get ready for a mutual friend's wedding to a Korean woman back in Seoul. We left two hours early for a one hour trip, but traffic was so bad that we still missed the wedding. Even the best man missed it.

He was still happy to see us (dressed in traditional Korean hanbok) when we arrived in time for the reception, and the food was great. It was fine Korean beef rib soup with great side dishes, half of them in raw form, like oysters on a half shell and a great minced raw beef dish with Asian pear that kicks the ass of any French steak tartare.

Glen, Christina, and I had to forego the after-wedding party at a brewpub so we could get all the particulars ready for their two-week trip to the Philippines the next day.

I volunteered to watch their parrot.

So now I have a house with two cats and a bird. The cats are still confined to my back room, and they're starting to get antsy to get out. It doesn't help that they can hear and smell bird. They were nice for a while, but I've decided that I'm never going to own a cat myself again. These cats are feral. Thank goodness they're neutered. But they scratch up anything within sight. All my clothes have been evacuated from the room, and I basically live in my living room. The cats are going to be picked up any day now, though.

On Sunday, I made a batch of spiked egg nog and roasted (burned) some peanuts and met Brant, Derek, and Brent (confused?) for a hockey game next to my place. This time, the Anyang Halla won. They beat a Japanese team, which was a big deal. I don't remember whether they did it at the last game, but whenever the Japanese scored a goal, no buzzer or anything went off. At least everyone turned and posed for my picture.

The Christmas play I had been working so hard on took a surreal turn when the front desk lady suggested that the kids pick their own costumes for it. Now, I wrote the play with the thoughtful idea that few costumes were needed, thus saving money and trouble. But this is Korea. I may be wrong, but Injoo said that, to his memory, Koreans have only been seriously celebrating Christmas for fifteen years. So Christmas is younger than Kwanzaa.

This explains why we had Batman and Spiderman building a snowman and visiting Santa.

Despite my complaints about being exhausted, I intentionally tried to keep myself busy. Christmas starting hitting me Thursday. I'm one of those people who loves being around family at Christmas. This will be the second year that I won't be with my own children or family. Again, it hit me hard on Thursday, and I got thoroughly depressed, angry, short-tempered. Why was I working so hard to make Christmas memorable for other people's kids?

The Christmas pageant turned out to be a success – I think. I was too busy organizing and trying to communicate with Koreans who were busy dressing Spiderman when he was supposed to be on stage doing something else. Lars and Julia were occupied at the beginning trying to salvage his flight to Hawaii, which had been cancelled. The part we were most nervous about was the handbell performance. Lars and I were the low and high Cs for this, and we knew how bad it was in rehearsal. But the kids pulled off a miracle. There were a few screw ups, but they were cute screw ups. One of the kids, in my uninformed observations, has to be both ADHD and obsessive-compulsive. He can't concentrate more than five seconds on anything. So he always missed his cues. But what made it cute was that when he found out he missed, he tried really hard to make up for it by ringing his bells extra hard. The audience whistled and cheered at the end of that one.

We had one student miss the whole thing because her grandmother died. So we had to find other kids to take over her roles – of which there were many. I didn't see much of the play itself, but I did hear the audience laugh when our little Santa Claus made his entrance. That was a proud moment.

We passed out the lit candles to the audience at the end for "Silent Night." Injoo, dressed in a clown suit, mistakenly gave candles to the kids too. It went without a hitch, but at the end, one of the kids got hot wax on her hand and cried.

The whole thing was over.

Or so I thought.

When I started to breathe a sigh of relief, Injoo said I needed to go up front and help Ashley (Leia's real name from earlier posts – that whole controversy where I needed to hide people's names is long over) with an angry mother.

This mother was upset that during my class's reading of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," her daughter was only mouthing the words and not reading. She thought I neglected her and didn't care about her reading.

Quite the opposite was true. I spent extra time with her and neglected the rest of the class. The trouble was that this girl faked a headache whenever I wanted her to speak English. The final week of practice, we tried hard to get her to read, and she broke out crying.

So what could I do?

I couldn't force her to speak and make her cry. Yet if she didn't speak, it was still my fault.

Amid Ashley's cajoling and doing her routine that made her look even more fake and disingenuine, I told the mother the truth. She seemed okay with my explanation about the headaches and not wanting to force her and make her cry. Nonetheless, I don't think she'll be staying at the school much longer.

The afternoon elementary classes had a Christmas party. Each class sang a Christmas carol they had been practicing. We then had a small Christmas quiz, and Santa Injoo gave them gifts.

It was finally over.

Yet it was Injoo's last day at the school.

He and Ashley had been having a conflict over money she owed him. Injoo was also planning to leave to study in Canada. So they both agreed that he quit at the end of the month.

Now, here's the irony. This whole thing started as a pay dispute. Ashley's final act before Injoo left was give him not only the disputed money but an extra 100,000 won.

Lars, Injoo, his girlfriend Hye-seon, her friend Yu Jin, and I went out for dinner in Beomgye. We had samgyeopsal at a new place, and I took them to the bar ResFoon, where we had nachos and this great tempura shrimp fried with the shells on. The shells are somehow edible, and leaving them on makes the shrimp taste more, um, shrimpy.

SJ introduced me to ResFoon back when we were dating. I like this place because it has an interesting menu. It's also unapologetic about its bastardization of English. For one thing, I always wondered what the word "ResFoon" comes from. I then discovered what it was when I looked at the bill. It comes from "Let's Fun," which itself is bad English. It's then translated into Korean script (랫분 "Raes Pun") and back into Roman script as ResFoon."

The menu also has some great zingers. My favorite was their "Mango Crap Salad."

We said goodbye to Injoo. I said goodbye to Lars before he headed off to Hawaii. Now I'm here alone with a bird and two cats and a hankerin' for egg nog.

I found out yesterday that Eun Jeong was able to get Christmas day off so that we could spend it together. I'm thankful for that. We haven't seen each other for two weeks. She's been working with no days off. But this is so that we can go to a ski lodge next weekend. That should be fun.