Dear Family and Friends,

Autumn in Daegu has been inviting. The lanes beckon with brightly colored foliage and the days are savory. Two Sundays ago, for the first time since my arrival, it rained and simultaneously the season switched from Indian summer to autumn, with its ever-lingering chill.

Yesterday morning, it stormed. Violently. I was on the phone with my mother and unable to note the building storm but I noticed the daylight dimming through my bathroom window, the day turned to dark and there was an ominous stillness before crashing rain. As I strained around the phone cord and excitedly reported the storm to my Mom, it rained so hard that drops were shoved through my bathroom window screen and wetted my toilet seat a good 3 feet away. Lightening kept flashing and there was barely a pause before the thunder. It was hard and furious. Again, I was slightly distracted by my phone conversation but I was able to dash from window to window to enjoy the storm from every angle after it knocked out the connection and ended my call. The storm lasted a half an hour and afterwards, the streets were empty and wet. Yet soon the sun emerged and the streets became populated and dry by the time I walked to the grocery store. I wondered if this storm's ferocity was normal and was told that it is not. One Korean told me that she pulled her car over to wait out the storm and another said that the storm's fury made her feel that she should go to church.

Since yesterday's storm, the weather has shifted to actually chilly, though not yet freezing. This morning, we shivered in my classroom during first period. Today's skies cleared to the appearance of sunny warmth and I twice walked outside and then had to dash back inside for my coat. Lunch talk included confirmation that early Siberian winds have arrived. And this evening, when I returned to the faculty room after class, the wind whipped through my sweater and suddenly even the gold-colored trees couldn't distract me from shivering.

Still shivering a bit, tonight is the first night that I've switched on my "ondol" flooring as soon as I stepped in the door. Apparently nowhere at a similar latitude are winters so cold; apparently the winds of China and Siberia sweep down the Korean peninsula. Ingeniously, ancient Choson Dynasty Koreans came up with a way to alleviate the cold and capitalize on the notion that heat raises and they began heating the floor through the "warm stone " method dubbed ondol. A historic ondol floor was made of 2 inch blocks of stone, supported by columns of stone or brick and the space between the supports provided a path for hot gases that heated the stone floor and heated rooms. Interior room floors were layered with oiled paper on which household members would go about their daily activities including eating and sleeping. Ondol heating was used for centuries until shortages resulting from the Korean War and then the build-up of (my favorite) multi-story housing altered the materials used to create ondol flooring: floors are concrete covered in linoleum and there are pipes underneath the floor to circulate water warmed by an oil or gas boiler.

My boiler is on and while trying to fit together the words to describe the weather around me, I am training myself to sit because sitting on Korean floors for any length of time is not as easy as the Koreans make it look – especially since I have short, plump, unaccustomed legs. So I'm typing at my low-level table and fidgeting between sitting cross-legged and stretching my legs straight. But the warming ondol holds me at ground-level as little else could. How long will it be before I'm sleeping on the floor?

If you pose "ondol flooring" to Google, scarily, several links to studies with titles such as "Buttock responses to contact with finishing materials over the ONDOL floor heating system in Korea" will pop up. They study materials and temperatures to best warm one 's buttocks?!?! Even more scarily, I have a funny feeling I 'll be conducting studies of my own. I 'll advise you all of the results. Next spring.

I understand that autumn has heavily descended on the dear States. Sending my toastiest regards,

Laura