The Sky Cow

I think India is doing its best to try and deter tourists from crossing it's borders. Before booking our plane tickets I knew India is one of those countries that you need a shiny new visa put in your passport before you're even allowed in the airport, I just didn't know how strenuous of a procedure it would be. And not one of the easy visa-on-arrival deals either where you just show up, pay some money, wait 30 minutes and voila, you have a visa. India, it turns out, requires an obscene amount of redundant paperwork to be completed and sent to the Embassy where it takes like 9 days for them to process it and send your passport back to you. Finally, yesterday, we got it all finished and mailed up to Seoul to start waiting (with some slight panicking). All in all, it was an application asking everything from where your father was born to your religion (about 7 pages filled out online then printed out into two, uh, what?), three other forms asking basically all the same questions, two copies of our passport, one copy of our Korean alien registration card, two passport photos (which I had to trek all the way to Seomyeon to find one of the booths that did the right size), and our passport...all mailed off to Seoul just so India says we're allowed in. I've never even been there and I am already dreading having to fill out all that paperwork if we ever want to go back. Now it's just waiting around for it to return...

This week at school started a new semester for the English after-school program (every two months) and therefore a new influx of books and craziness arrived Monday. They get new books every two months and every four months they take evaluation tests to level up or not, so all the students also move around and the schedule changes. July 1st started the new schedule with the kids all over the place and no one knows where to go and yadda yadda. My highest level class previously had four students but now has five because one, Nicholas, has leveled up. Nicholas is one of my favorite, yet also most hated students. He's absolutely hilarious and usually just strings together whatever English he knows to make conversation, no matter how ridiculous. But when he gets around certain other students from different classes, he turns into a nightmare child who refuses to listen. He's a bit of a nerd so I think he acts like the other kids to try and fit in. Luckily the bad influences (aka the dumb ones who can't level up) have stayed in lower levels while he keeps ascending the Avalon English Ladder. Yesterday in that particular highest level class, because the air con turns off at like 4:30 (don't get me started) all the windows were opened. In the middle of my life-changing lesson, in flies the most giant insect I've ever seen outside of a zoo. I thought it was one of those killer Asian bees the size of my head and was about to run for cover, but I realize it was just some giant...bug. The kids got on their phone and translated it: "beetle". Okay, beetles I can deal with, they won't bother you, but I still couldn't get over how gargantuan this thing was. I didn't even have my phone to take a picture! Nicholas kept saying "sky cow, sky cow..." and I'm like sky cow? Apparently, this particular insect is called a 하늘소, which literally translates to "sky cow". Yes, if that doesn't give you an idea of how impossibly huge this thing was, then I don't know what would. Let's just say I don't want to encounter another one ever again.