Technically I’m on vacation now but I’m sitting at my school desk copying all my lesson files and folders onto my external harddrive and trying to figure out how I’m going to ship 200+ ESL/EFL books to China and my literature and literary theory library of books . . .

Julianne dropped by the post office to ask about box prices and shipping rates and was quoted 174,000won per box—uhm, no, dat ain’t gonna fly.

We also asked at a nearby FEDEX and the price and shipping rate for one box (about the size of an A4 paper box) was around 130,000won–again, nope.

Some friends on facebook have been saying they shipped stuff home for 40,000-50,000won per box, but that just won’t work for the number of boxes of books I want to ship.

It’s amazing how much stuff you can accumulate over the course of five years and change while living and teaching in Korea–especially if you love books.  I’m trying to scan the key books I have so that I can put them on my external hard drive and then they’ll be very mobile . . . but the time it takes to scan a book can be huge depending on the book size, etc, and while I know I’ll be able to get the key EFL/ESL books done that I want to use while teaching university/adults there will still be far too many books that I can’t get done . . .

I’m going to look into slow shipping to China and see what kind of rates they have cause I’ve heard of people shipping their entire apartments from home to Korea, or vice versa, and you’d THINK that Korea to China wouldn’t be that pricey.  I’ll post what I find out and end up doing once I know and do it.

I’m also going to post the link to my new China blog soon.  I’ve already written a couple of preliminary posts on it, and it’s up and running, but I want to finish the write up I’m doing about the nightmare I went through trying to get the Z Work Visa inside Korea, and give some tips for native teachers in Korea who might go to China next . . . I’ll probably get that done in the next few days.

Ugh . . . I just noticed that there are tonnes of double copies, and for some files triples, that I’m moving onto my hard drive of lessons and pics, etc.  I’m gonna have to find a program a friend gave to me that searches through files for doubles and lets you delete the extra copies . . . boo.  I have a tendency to not worry too much about keeping my lesson and handout files too organized during a school year cause I’ve found when I try to be my normal fastidious and organized self I start getting stressed out and frustrated by the general chaos and anarchy that surrounds me while I’m working in a public school in Korea–I try as much as I can to just go with the flow and do things as they appear cause to try and attempt to do things in a coherent and organized manner just ends up driving me nutbar.

Alright, nuff about that . . . time to get out of here and run some errands.

Ohhhh, the freaking humidity and heat today are really bad.  There was a rain shower this morning and now with the sun it’s a jimjilbang (public bathhouse/sauna) outside . . . yuck!  At least my apartment air conditioner is working really well–I’ve read some bloggers that say they’re having problems with theirs . . . knock on wood for mine.

Oh yeah, anyone else having problems with mosquitoes in their apartments?  I’ve killed two in the last 24 hours . . . unfortunately for Julianne they seem to prefer her blood type, lol.

Anyways, time to brave the heat…

J