It was time to go and see another friend from Korea. Sharon is a friend that I met in the hiking club in Korea. We got along famously. She is just as bitter and twisted about life as I am, more probably. We had great fun hiking together somewhere in the pack of people on the mountain and in the club, and cutting them down. About 2 and a half years ago, Sharon left Korea and came to Australia to do a master's degree in education so that she could be a real educator. This, of course, means that she studied really hard to earn a degree so that she could go into a school in New South Wales and “educate” students. Now since she is a new teacher, she couldn't get her pick of schools and with so much competition with many new teachers, she had to get a job way out of Sydney in areas where sane people would rarely go into schools that are generously called troubled with many delinquents and children who abuse teachers in a variety of ways. As a result, “teaching” in such schools means classroom management and trying to cram what can be mashed into unreceptive minds in the hopes that they might not become something a bit more than juvenile delinquents and, later on, criminals of various sorts. This is as opposed to “teaching” English in Korea, where students come to class and actually learn something. But anyone will tell you that that is not real teaching and we were not “real” teachers while we were there.
In any case, Sharon currently lives a 9 or 10 hour train ride out to the northwest of Sydney. And I hopped a train to go and see her. On the train, I saw a really nice sunset, this being the remnants after I got access to the window after the previous occupants left the train. The sky was completely clear and this band of cloud caught the fading sun as it sank below the horizon.
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