Humidity and fan death

I've just got to get this out of the way. If I had to share one negative thing about my time so far in Korea, it's this: humidity. Oh, I complain regularly about the humid summers back in Nebraska, but that state's got nothing on Jeollanamdo, South Korea. The humidity is so thick, you could cut it like a knife going through a block of tofu. It hides the mountains in the mornings and evenings. My face has worn a perpetual sheen since I got off the plane in Incheon. I've given up on wearing makeup. I'm surprised that I haven't lost 20 lbs. already with the amount of sweat I've produced. My clothes always feel damp and every sheet of paper in my dorm room feels limp and soggy.

Okay, now that I've vented, I do have to say that "air con" as Koreans refer to it, is available in our classrooms and teachers lounge. Not in our camp dorm rooms, although each room is equipped with two oscillating fans mounted opposite one another near the ceiling. That's almost preferable to our situation at the Gwangju orientation center, where the dorm room air conditioners automatically turned off every morning at about 5 a.m. and didn't come back on until 8 p.m. This may have something to do with the collective Korean belief about fan death. Apparently it's true that Koreans believe one should never go to sleep with a fan running and windows closed or the sleeper will never wake up. One of our American orientation teachers explained that fan death serves as a cover-up for deaths by suicide or domestic abuse. Remaining family members will not be shamed, since fan death victims are not autopsied. So when your Korean hosts are simply watching out for you when they may sure you don't have air con or fans running at night.

In addition to the humidity hanging in the air, it's monsoon season here in South Korea. While still in Gwangju, we were warned that a typhoon was expected to hit our province, though we were quite a bit inland, so probably no danger. We've experienced a couple of rainy days and today was a whopper. Camp students and teachers were awakened at 5 a.m. with a torrential downpour, thunder and lightning. A good illustration for the Weather section teacher, but the rest of us were tired and grumpy this morning due to sleep deprivation. But at least the temperature outside dropped a few degrees!