Me, Malnourished? Really?

It's obviously been a while since I posted last, so I do apologize to the 2 or 3 of you out there that actually care even the slightest about what I do with my time here in Hanguk (Korean for Korea). I was at an English speaker conference/lock up all of last week and I couldn't really get internet. I'll post soon on the goings on at that little shindig soon, I promise, but for the time being I need to discuss more about the god damn kid gloves they are handling me with over here. Most of this deals with the cold I developed last week Monday and is still lingering to this day, which prompted me to lose my voice during the workshops last week. Kinda hard to meet and chat with english speakers when you can't actually talk. Anyways, on my first day back, as luck would have it, I had one of my freak nosebleeds and the gym teacher saw that and freaked out. When I got to school that was all the news and I actually was pulled aside by the gym teacher so he could diagnose me. He thinks I'm suffering from a combo of malnourishment, too much exercise and not enough sleep. The malnourishment one is particularly funny as they have all seen how much bloody food I shove down my gullet and if I am in fact malnourished then that is the directly the fault of this country and its food. Course, after my 3 nosebleed in 2 days this evening, the discussions and prescriptions aren't gonna stop anytime soon. I'm thinking that it's a combination of the really dry air here, the really shitty quality of said air, the amount of cigarette smoke I'm forced to breathe in on a daily basis, and the massive lack of accessible water. That's one thing that has really bugged me about Korea. I'm used to having meals with a water glass that I refill 3 to 4 times a meal...I need alot of H20 to stay hydrated. Here most meals have no water at all, and if they do it's a tiny little glass the size of a double shot glass. As much as the Korean food burns/stings going down, its insane to think they don't have water handy. And since my teachers think I'm dying they aren't gonna let me play soccer and I really don't feel like trying to argue with these people...it just doesn't work.
My other issue that has come to the forefront is that of "downtime". I think it came about when over the weekend the gym teacher asked if I ever get homesick. I obviously said yes, and he was genuinely shocked and responded that if I ever get homesick again, I should just call him and do stuff with him. Now that he knows I get homesick, I don't think he's gonna allow me a moment to myself in which to possibly become homesick. Now the easy answer would be to simply tell him I don't wanna do stuff with him on such and such occasion because I want some alone time but the problem with this is two fold in my mind: 1) I don't possess enough Korean or he enough English for me to accurately explain the idea of downtime/breathing room without offending him (I'm trying not to burn too many bridges, as I need them to get around) 2) The Korean cultural mindset may not be able to grasp the idea of "alone time". The second problem is the big one, as from what I've seen, there really is no where you can be alone here. There are just simply way too many people in too small a space. Take the national treasure mountains I visited last weekend for example. Moving around the trails in the middle of the freaking woods felt like an amusement park line as you can only move as fast as the person in front of you and so on. You were almost always bumping into and getting into the way of some other traveler. Now the gym teacher is a nice guy, make that incredibly nice guy, but I'm quickly realizing that he isn't any genius or remarkable conversationalist. Apparently gym teachers aren't too different wherever you go. I don't mean to demean gym teachers but you simply don't see Rhodes Scholars or Genius Grant winners teaching kids how to bump and set properly. Even if my Korean got good enough to converse with him on a fluent level, I'm sure the conversation would still be sadly lacking, as he doesn't realize what level of banter and such I had the privilege of enjoying back in the states. Regardless, he seems determined to fill whatever void I have in my life, as I spent a total of 7 hours in the last two days at his house after school. Now our arrangements began as helping each other with Korean and English respectively on the way to and from school, then it evolved to tutoring each other for 30 minutes each after school. That was all good, but now it is getting a bit out of hand. Now I'm honored that they want me to come over for dinner every once in a while, but from what he said today it sounds like he expects me to eat with them every day. Which means that after being at school from 8:30 to 5:30, I'll be at his house from 5:30 to 9:30pm, which is simply too late to finally get home. In the meantime while we wait for dinner to finish cooking we tutor each other, but now he's having his 7 year old tutor me in Hangul and vice versa. This is fine in principle, but poor Jaehan just wants to play. Dude's 7 years old and he's already spending his free time outside of school practicing learning English? Just let the kid be a kid. If he wants to tutor me fine, it works for the first hour or so. After that he just gets grumpy and cranky the more teaching he has forced down his throat, and then it's no good for anyone. If a 7 year old doesn't wanna be taught, there is no power in the 'verse that can change that. Fuck, even I don't really wanna study after my day. I really just wanna play with the kids, but I can't. Boo. I know everyone over here really just wants to learn English, but they gotta understand that at some point I get sick of teaching English. You don't wanna bring your work home and I'd prefer if I didn't either. I'm sure this message came off really meandering and rambling and probably pretty trivial to your ears, but its a tricky situation. Overall, everything is really wonderful, but this little stuff is gonna fester and grow if I let it and I'm really struggling to find a solution to it, as no one over here speaks English well enough to understand the nuanced stuff in which I spend so much of my time.