My cold got worse last night and I kept waking up. Don’t you hate it when one of your nostrils is stopped up and the other one is flowing freely? I do. I just wish my damn nose would make up its mind. Well, I only got two hours of sleep and when it was time to go to school I was kind of dreading it. I took some cold medicine, ate a bagel and drove to school, as I would have been late if I had walked. Today was the first day of full, registered classes; last week was an adjustment period and no one really did anything more than basic introductions. As usual, nothing went smoothly in regards to administration, but I have come to expect that at this school. My schedule changed three times today alone! But none of that is really what has me excited.

    I attended my Aesthetics class today and had a great time. I had a few hours of free time today after I had finished teaching and did the reading. At first I was underlining almost every other word to look up in the Korean-English dictionary, but as the paragraphs continued on the same words kept popping up and I didn’t have to refer back as much. The class itself wasn’t really related to the reading at all, which dealt with introducing new media into the various traditional art-making methods. Instead we covered a basic art history course from the prehistoric cave paintings in Lasceaux followed by Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Middle Age, Renaissance, Mannerism, and we got all the way to Rococco before our three hours had expired.

    While I had a much more comprehensive art history course for an entire semester during college, this was a good opportunity to refresh what I had learned from that time, as well as to hear it in Korean.

    On an unrelated note, the image above is a very unfortunately named bag of snack chips I saw at Home Plus yesterday. It doesn’t sound bad in Korean, but when translated into English becomes all sorts of suggestive. Korean marketers seem to think that English writing is exotic-looking and indicative of wealth, resulting in almost every product being smeared with English text, most of which makes sense. But when it doesn’t, I will find it.