Weather Change = Spring?

This past week we have had three nights of rain in this eastern coastal area of Korea. The temperatures have also risen a bit--the other day it was around 14C/55F degrees, and when I asked my students how the weather was (I always have them record the date and the weather in their notebooks), they told me it was warm. I knew that was coming. I laughingly told them that it was not warm, it just wasn't cold, that in August they would never call 14C "warm" (it would be "very, very, very cold!"). So we settled for "cool", a word they all know but usually skip over.

We did have a freezing night or two last week, though now morning seems to be dawning around 6C/40F.

The seasonal change in weather has brought on some minor but annoying allergy symptoms: sore throat, runny nose, irritated eyes. I have woken up several times over the past few nights to let off a sneeze. That worries me enough that I'm going to check the apartment over this morning for more of the mold that I have been combatting (a typical problem in apts. here as there is usually no insulation and so condensation blots the windows, wallpapered corners, etc.

That aside, it's nice to think about the arrival of spring. Living in a southern coastal city has produced, as expected, the mildest winter I have lived through in a long time, though that's not to say we haven't had our frigid times (just no blizzards or even snow on the ground).