English Teacher on Vacation…. Subtitles make me feel like I’ve accomplished more that just watching 16 hours of T.V.

I know you all think that English teachers sit around reading all summer long. Indulging in Tolstoy, Dickens, and when we are feeling wild we pull out our copy of “Gang Days in L.A.” by Rodriguez. ButI will be the first to tell you that you my dear friends are wrong. READING! Ha! Forget that crap, I am glued to my computer watching Korean dramas. They are tela novelas to the hundredth power. Every stinking one is the same story retold with a different actors (but amazingly using the same movie set). There is always a love triangle. There is always a mid drama hairdo change for the main cast. There is always at least 2 episodes where a character nearly kills themselves because they have been rejected by someone that they will of course marry in another 2 episodes. But there is the ultimate Korean drama… the… historical drama. No other drama can truly compare to these. They are full of great Korean heroes, passionate love stories and of course they end so happily. Okay, so maybe I lied a little about the last part… they don’t really end happily. In truth everyone dies that the end. You know this from the beginning, all Korean historical dramas end like the Titanic, death! And yet, we still watch them, hoping that just once, the characters that we have spent so much time (in some cases 70 or more hours) loving will survive. But the answer is always no. It is like no one in Korea lived anything but a tragedy 500 years ago. Give me a break! Every single person that lived was sucked into some horrible love triangle, while running for their life because their brother (who they don’t even know is their brother) is trying to keep them from being able to stake a claim on the thrown they don’t even know they are somehow the 12^th person in line for. But you can’t stop watching… your not even Korean, but you are sucked into a story that you know will end bad and you still can’t walk away from it…