MAIL!!!
More letters! One from Junebug and another large envelope from Wendy, which I have not yet had a chance to look through. Hurrah!

SNOW!!!
Yes, I finally saw some snow falling today. It was the "Quick! Turn into slush before someone notices!" kind of snow, but it was unmistakably flakes, not drops.

FLU!!!
Yes, I finally got sick yesterday, after feeling all healthy and superior as my classmates and teachers dropped like flies. I reckon I shouldn't have concluded the three-hour long hike with my dad on Sunday with a foot-dunking in the icy cold mountain water. It seemed like a good idea at the time...
When I woke up yesterday, I felt a little odd, but well enough to go to school. As class progressed, though, I felt increasingly exhausted, as well as strangely nauseous. So at noon, I packed it in and went home.
Tried to sleep, but sleep is hard to come by when ten thousand microscopic gnomes with pick axes are hammering away at your joints and muscles. So at 4:30 I gave up my short-lived attempt at stoicism and called my dad, who went to the pharmacy, got some western meds and some horrible Korean herbal stuff, and drove over to my house to drop them off. What love, eh?
Moreover, as the pharmacist had said that the herbal stuff should be taken with something sweet, like chocolate, my dad went out again and returned with about 20 kinds of chocolate, plus 10 mandarin oranges. Aw.
The herbal stuff is the same stuff that my mom used to force down my throat during my last year of high school, in order to strengthen my constitution before college. Except in those days, they didn't make the 4 gram packets of dried stuff, they sold the ingredients separately, and you had to boil them all together, strain them, and then force them down your daughter's throat. So my mom would make a batch of dark brown, evil-smelling liquid from the herbs, deer antlers, and, like, grass and stuff, and wake me up at 7 to make me drink it. And then give me a strawberry drop to take the taste away.
Aw. What love, eh?
I slept more or less straight from about 7 pm to about 2:30 am, when hunger woke me, and I stayed up for two hours reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets while eating mandarin oranges and chocolate. Sometimes it's nice to be sick.
Skipped class this morning to read more Harry Potter and sleep longer, then forced myself to get to work, where I am writing this. I only have 12 off days per year -- this includes sick days. Sick days, unlike in the States, are considered personal time, and are not accrued separately from vacation days. After the luxury of American sick time policy, this seems totally absurd to me. There is absolutely no incentive to stay home when sick, and every incentive to come to work and infect everyone else.
Another thing I don't understand about my work place: why can't one leave by oneself? Numerous times now, someone has hailed me, "Helen! Time to go. Let's go."
I try to demur by saying I have a lot of work, or that I'm not ready to leave yet, which works on the guy who says this the most, but does not work on another coworker, who says, "How long are you staying? I'll wait for you." This is both very nice and very annoying. Sometimes I need to do homework on the train. Other times I just don't feel like interacting after work, you know?
My dad thinks no one wants to leave first because they don't want it to look like they're doing less work than someone else. I can understand that, since no one has their own office here -- even the team leader only has a cube to differentiate his position. But I think it's partly a cultural thing too -- we have to do things together, because we're a team. The other day, someone here emailed me to ask if I'd be going to a coworker's wedding. I said probably not, since I don't know the guy very well. He replied that he didn't either, since the guy had started working in his team four months ago, but since they were on the same team, of course he would be going to the wedding.
I don't think I like this forced closeness. But I am American, after all.

Doggie note of the day:
While hiking Gwakaksan on Sunday, we saw a little dog wearing a camouflage outfit and a tiny pink backpack.