Dinner with the board, and bus chiropractors

Last night, we all got varying degrees of gussied up and hopped on our trusty yellow APIS bus for a meet-and-greet dinner with the APIS Board of Directors at the Seoul Club. (Hah! See me vanquish the challenge of inserting hyperlinks!) The Seoul Club is a lot like a country club, with a pool and squash courts and a restaurant with really, really good steak. The view is also quite spectacular. As we've mentioned, it's still monsoon season here, which means low-hanging cloudcover and rather poor distance visibility for most of our stay thus far, but the weather kindly gave us a break last night so we could enjoy a lovely view of the mountains and looking down over the city. It's hard to get a feeling for how big Seoul is when you can't see very far in it (when the clouds aren't obstructing your view, the buildings are) but last night I started to figure it out.

Justin and I were seated with fellow teacher and fellow Yalie Sara at what proved to be a stacked table - everyone was either a former Yale undergrad or grad student. Another table was the Dartmouth table. Dr. Kim is organized like that.

In any case, it was a very interesting evening. We enjoyed talking to the board members about how they got involved in APIS (pretty much the same answer as we gave - Dr. Kim is very, very hard to say no to!) and what they do in their non-APIS lives. The Yalies promised to help us get in touch with the Yale Club here, which is evidently very active in spite of having precisely no Internet presence. So we're looking forward to that.

I would give the evening an A except for the part where I got wretchedly, wretchedly bus-sick on the way home. See, drivers here seem to believe that if you have ten feet between you and the car in front of you, which is at a dead stop, the correct protocol is not to calmly close the gap but rather to attain the maximum possible speed over eight of those feet before slamming on the brakes. Maybe it's because if you don't seize the moment, the ten feet of gap will rapidly turn into somebody's Hyundai, and you'll never get anywhere. But there must be a part on the Korean bus driving exam about this, because everybody does it (cars and taxis do it too, but not with quite so much gusto).

Once the bus gets off the main thoroughfares and onto the little one-way one-lane windy market roads, you'd think that this problem would go away, since nobody can cut in front of you anymore. You would be correct, but in its place, we substitute the new problem of giant speed bumps. Once again, the correct protocol is not to maintain a slow, steady pace, but rather to accelerate as much as possible in the space separating the bumps (usually only about twenty feet), slam on the brakes, and zip away again once you're over the bump. And please note that "you're over the bump" means "the driver," not "the bus." As soon as the front wheels of the bus hit level pavement, it's damn the rear axle and full speed ahead.

Justin and I have this attraction to look forward to every day, twice a day, on our commute to school. Sitting directly over the rear wheels, I've sometimes gotten as much as a full inch between my butt and the chair. I think I get off the bus a half-inch shorter due to spinal compression. We've since given up sitting for standing, which gives us an excellent workout clinging madly and comically to bus poles. I mean, we're so hairy. We looked like monkeys before. Did we really have to add the pole-dangling?