Sweat, etc.

It's back, and in full force. Today, the high was 30C (~87*F), plus a balmy 80% humidity and sunlight the brightness of which could definitely burn through any sunblock you dared to set up against it. The heat. It's here.

And it's not come alone: it's brought its faithful companion, sweat. What joy is ours.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. We don't get a lot of days above the 80s (F) there, and no one really talks about humidity because there's never enough of it to matter. As a result, sweat was a pretty foreign concept to me before I came here. Sure, people sweat, but usually just a little, and usually just when they've been working out or something.

Not so here. It took less than a month here for me to buy a little washrag to take with me everywhere; a little more than a month to realize wearing makeup was a futile waste of money. Then the heat waned; Kaohsiung's pleasant Fall and Winter approached, and I even had to don a coat a few times. But no more. Now the heat's returned, and, with it, the sweat.

Why am I writing about sweat? It's simple, really: it's the closest thing I have to a uniting force of my day today. It was certainly ever-present, anyway.

This morning, I arrived at school with my hair in low pigtails--a response to its newly cropped length which doesn't allow for any other sort of hairstyle that would simultaneously fit under my helmet and keep my hair off my neck. I didn't want to sweat. But what had I unfortunately forgotten as I styled my hair? Oh yeah: the interview.

Today, my LETs applied for the Fulbright program for next year. Seeing as how the interview fell in the middle of a school day, and involved all of the people that I usually share classes with, Hanmin asked if I would accompany them to the interview. Which I did--IN PIGTAILS. So much for professionalism.

The interview went fine--I mostly just sat there as moral support, though I did manage to throw in a quick plug for my schools right before we left--and then we went out to lunch at a local duck noodle shop. There, I had a bit of a problem with my chopsticks--they were slipping out of my fingers. No, not because I don't know how to use chopsticks--believe me, it's second nature at this point--it was because of sweat. And that's when I realized: it's back!

Thankfully, my heat annoyance was soon relieved by a SCRUMPTIOUS visit to a shave ice place with Hanmin's principal, academic director, and Maggie (a visit which meant we were 20 minutes late to our next class, but hey! We had the principal's and the academic director's explicit permission!)

The heat continued to plague my day in various forms which, thankfully, had less to do with sweat. My shoes began to fall apart and blister my feet, which sucked, and I got really thirsty, which also sucked.

It also impacted my favorite moment of the day: the moment a gaggle of 6th grade girls stretched my birthday into a second week, crowding my desk and handing me notes written on paper shaped like Facebook "like"s, a box of cute chocolate (like what Analicia got me!), some almond cookies, and a big ol' chocolate bar. It was so nice of them, and they were so wonderful, yet what was I worried about? The heat. And the chocolate.

Thanks for the likes, Mandy, Anna, Lillian, Natasha, and Cindy!

Favorite parts: "Fo" Bekah Teacher and the squares bottom left--each with a different design and different type of chocolate inside!

All I can say is "Thank goodness for refrigerators!"...And AC. It's the one surefire way to get out of the heat, and so to avoid melting--whether chocolate or self.