Sunday, November 19, 2006

NO FTA!

I've put a few of the pictures from what I saw
of the anti-FTA rally throughout this entry, like
the one below...

Since arriving in Korea, I've seen flags and banners everywhere denouncing the FTA. I didn't know at first what these were about, since the letters 'FTA' - and occasionally 'NO' - are the only english letters on them. I guessed at first that they might stand for 'Free The Army' from the American movement against the war in Vietnam, but that didn't make much sense. After seeing some signs with NO-FTA next to an enraged looking bull, I figured this was probably against the Free Trade Agreement and the importing of foreign foods. After my experience with the riot police yesterday, I spent some time this morning researching the issue. I found that the U.S. and South Korea are close to signing a Free Trade Agreement that would drop tarriffs between the two countries.


There were five days of talks last week that ended without moving forward in any significant way, but such an agreement has been in the making for three years and the two countries are beyond many of the disagreements that have held them at a standstill thus far. The main issue at hand is Korea's reluctance to drop its agricultural tariffs on rice, beef and oranges. It has agreed to drop all other tariffs, but America insists that the agreement include these products as well. Korea stands to benefit most from America agreeing to drop tariffs on all industrial goods, including most notably automobiles, textiles and electronics. This would give Korean electronics even more of an edge on a market in which they already have a good foothold. On the other hand, Korean farmers who currently enjoy the protection of heavy tariffs on foreign imported foods would face competition from cheaper imported produce.



While America and the major media presents this agreement as an opportunity to provide a more healthy free market environment, there are some alarming issues at stake here. The farmers are not worried about protecting a margin of their profits, but about defending their livelihood as they know it. Little more than a hundred years ago, Korea was an agrarian society with little to speak of larger industry. After World War 2, the dictatorship government put into place a program to rapidly industrialize and urbanize the country. Korea has come a long way from its cultural roots tied strongly to agriculture, but farmers still comprise a large portion of Korean society. These farmers sell their produce in venues ranging from stalls on the street to local grocery stores to fresh produce wagons that drive around advertising on loudspeakers to, I can only imagine, exporting them to the cities. There is plenty of competition between these local vendors and the system seems to work fine and prices for produce is fair. What these farmers fear is that this system will be uprooted by the new opportunity of importing fruit and vegetables from other countries; whose unbalanced and undeveloped economies make it possible for them to offer goods at much lower prices. Koreans who criticize the proposed FTA believe that the media is pushing only the positive benefits of the agreement; claiming that "the government is attributing farmers’ objection to FTA to group egoism, arguing farmers must tolerate losses for national benefit." Anyone who looks clearly at the agricultural industries in North America can see what happens when the government fails to protect them from these dangers. The government ends up subsidizing lost crops and paying farmers to plough under fields in order to keep these farmers from starving and being forced into another business. These subsidies discourage and dishearten those people who work very hard to provide the most essential service to our society. The dignity of Korean farmers has so far been protected from this "freedom of industry" and do not want to be pushed into a position of relying on welfare from the state.


As I see it, there is another issue involved here that isn't receiving direct focus. The farms that exist here are not the larger corporate farms that have gradually been getting the upper hand in places like North America, but small family-owned businesses. In fact, from my limited experiences so far, it seems that the local economies in general are still based on such a small business model rather than the 'superstore' model that I've grown accustomed to. The largest grocery store that I know of in Naju is smaller than any I can think of in the city of equal population where my family lives in Canada. People here shop at many smaller stores rather than a few big ones for everything from food to clothes to anything else. Fresh produce can be bought at any number of the few dozen stores that are within a half-mile of my apartment. If imported foods could be sold at a lower price than these domestic products, it would not be an advantage accessible to these smaller stores but to larger ones that could more easily manage the importing of products in bulk.

So the debate is about the dangers of big business and in this case the threat posed by transnational corporations to Korean agricultural stability. As we have seen happen in North America, the companies that can afford to buy in larger scale tend to be able to undercut smaller businesses by selling at lower prices. The more that importing and exporting becomes a part of this picture, the more true that this becomes. Smaller companies cannot afford the costs or manage the difficulties of shipping goods from overseas with the same ease as can larger companies. Bigger companies can create branches in both countries that better regulate those imports, keeping supplies steady and costs managable in a way that smaller companies cannot hope to achieve. South Korea has its fair share of these transnational corporations - LG, Samsung, Hyundai, etc - and so its government is probably correct in suggesting that the nation's economy would benefit overall from a Free Trade Agreement. The real question is whether the increased profit margins of these companies is worth exposing the farmers to market instability and possible destruction of their livelihoods.



Can the profits of large companies ever be measured on the same level as the subsistence of people and families? This leads me to an issue that I have been passionate about since I started studying the nature of economic changes in the Philippines over the last century or so; through the Spanish-American war, the subjugation of the Filipino economy to American economic interests and through to the Marcos regime that ruled in the middle of the century. Throughout this time, extremely influential families held monopolies over various Filipino industries in ways that can be compared to big businesses. Without going into too much detail, what I noticed was that the greater the wealth that these families held, the more that their investments and interests went away from the regional economies. These families often had property and investments in America and were willing to restructure their local economies in ways that would benefit Americans rather than the Filipinos who were their countrymen. The problem with this, as I saw it, lie in the fact that their interests were moving away from regional interests the more that wealth gave them access to global markets. The same can be seen in the Banana Republics and many other 'third world' countries, where the people who do the work see little of those profits funneled back into local economies.

Transnational companies do not owe their allegiance to any one region, but to the interests of their shareholders. Those interests are unfailingly to maximize profits. When problems arise and these companies are forced to adapt to more competitive markets, local economies can be all but abandoned and people left to rot. I see the costs of this manifest in places like Michigan (etc), with crises in the automotive industry leading to extremely high unemployment in certain areas that relied too heavily on these transnational companies. Individual people and communities in general are not always saved by measures taken to restabilize the GDP. The increased profits of companies like LG, Samsung, Hyundai, etc, will not help in any practical way to support the farmers who would bear the costs, or even their local economies. These corporations would not even be obliged to put these increased profits back into the Korean economy.

From my perspective, the agricultural industry seems to work well the way it is right now here in Korea. The sale of produce is competitive in ways that are unparalleled anywhere that I have lived before. I don't think that any person would trade the health and stability of this system for cheaper bananas and shame on the media for keeping the people from hearing such a perspective.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

another bizarre day trip to Gwangju

I woke up today feeling very sick. After spending the morning lying around on the couch, I decided that I didn't want to regret a day wasted sitting around the house. We had plans to go to the Gwangju Kimchi Festival with the other teachers and I had a feeling that I would regret missing it. The festival is a five day annual event celebrating kimchi, the most traditional of Korean foods. Kimchi is a spicy fermented dish made from different vegetables, usually some type of cabbage, onion or pepper, and a mixture of garlic, chili peppers and ginger. Kimchi is served with every meal at any restaurant that serves Korean food, whether you want it or not. Apparently, this festival is famous and draws a crowd from around the world, but I hadn't heard of it before I arrived in Korea. It was important enough, though, to be the featured attraction mentioned next to Gwangju on the "Travel Korea" map hanging in our kitchen. I doubted that we would get another chance to see the festival, as tommorow is our first wedding anniversary and I doubted that we would choose to spend it trying to figure out how to get to navigate Gwangju by ourselves.



I spent the hour-long bus ride into the city focused on not throwing up, as the ride was characteristically bumpy and jerky. Busses here regularly cut off, and are cut off by, other vehicles as they swerve through three lanes of traffic and slam on the breaks to pick up passengers. I was glad when I set foot on solid ground again, but it took awhile before I felt alright. After a few minutes of walking around, we came to the conclusion that we didn't know where we were going, so we hailed a taxi. Saying "kimchi festival" got us a nod and within a few minutes we were there, and the ride cost us less than a couple dollars. The festival was within sight of the World Cup stadium that had hosted the competition in 2002. Our first stop at the festival was the information desk, where we were given pamphlets in english highlighting the different areas. After a minute or so of standing around, we were approached by a man who introduced himself as a volunteer translator that was going to guide us around the festival for free. We were hungry, but we couldn't convey that before he suggested that our first stop be a nearby tent where we would play a game. In that tent, people were gathered around a table competing in teams to finish the puzzle fastest. At the end, everyone clapped and both the winners and losers received the prize of a six-piece tupperware set.



The next tents that we visited sold foods of all different types and each of them offered free samples. The first was selling different baked and fried breads. A girl yelled loudly and emphatically encouraged me to try these deep-fried balls of pounded rice filled with sweet red bean paste. They were delicious, so I bought a few and not long after eating them I was starting to feel a lot less sick. The other tents were selling things like fruit wine, specially-prepared seaweed, flat cakes of dried fish, ginseng candies and all sorts of weird baked desserts and other things that I had no way of recognizing. I sampled most of the things, but none were as good as the pounded rice balls.

After this, we went into a building with our tour guide. In there, we saw a bunch of display cases featuring different types of kimchi; complete with a photo of the chef and some sort of explanation written in Korean. Our guide couldn't speak english that well, so the explanations we got were pretty basic until Leta struck up a conversation with an old lady that was volunteering at the festival as a Japanese translator. We found out which ones were more spicy and which were more sour and which were the cheapest to make and which were rarely eaten because the ingredients were too expensive. They invited us to watch some type of show or presentation, but we declined as we were getting hungry.



Next we visited the main pavillion, where kimchi of all types was being made, sampled and sold in all of the hundred-odd stalls. Leta and I were the only ones interested in sampling the kimchi, as apparently it was too spicy for the other teachers. I couldn't tell the difference between most of the different types of kimchi, except that some types tasted fresher than others. The others were waiting for us outside and I left regretting that I hadn't bought some to bring home. Our next stop was the area with tents selling souvenirs. I looked around a bit and decided impulsively to buy this cool little hand-painted figurine of a little Korean boy dressed in the traditional costume of a king. On our way out of the festival, I bought some more of those pounded rice balls for the road. I was struck at this point by how bizarre our experience of the festival had been. The whole thing had been a disjointed array of eclectic situations that only seemed to fit together by the fact that they were all somewhere between disorienting, fascinating and pointless. It was definitely a good time.

Our tour guide let us know that there were no restaurants near the festival and that we would have to go downtown if we wanted to find some dinner. As we left, it dawned on me how strange we all must look: five foreigners lugging around identical large boxes of 6-piece tupperware sets. At this point, the other teachers had all broken the handles on their boxes and so they had to carry them in both arms as they clumsily tried to balance the bags of other things they had bought. We caught a bus and after a pretty long ride got off at our usual stop near the Provincial Office. Soon after getting off the bus, we noticed that there were hundreds of police lining the sides of the streets dressed in full riot gear. The others felt intimidated and alarmed as we tried for awhile to figure out what was going on. Eventually, they decided to ask one of the officers not in riot gear standing away from the long lines of police. He told us not to worry and that they were there to make sure that an anti-FTA (Free Trade Agreement) rally that was to happen later didn't get out of control.

We continued on and went for dinner at a favorite restaurant of one of the other teachers. The place had very bright lights and obnoxiously vivid colored walls. The food was easy to order as there were pictures on the menu. It was all weird, as expected. I ordered the battered and fried pork patty called 'Donkkas' filled with mozarella cheese and covered in gravy. It tasted sort of like something between chicken cordon bleu and a hot meat sandwich. On the side were a couple mini jam sandwiches, some cold chewy noodles with a spicy sauce and the standard salad of shredded cabbage covered in ketchup. I couldn't finish my meal, but not because I was full. We left, and I stood around while the girls shopped in a few different stores. I had a real cup of coffee for the first time since having arrived in Korea and enjoyed it thoroughly.

On the way back to our bus stop, when we got near where the police had been, we found that the anti-FTA rally had started. It was not what I had expected. People were sitting down on the road (trafficked mostly by pedestrians) singing peaceful songs, holding candles and anti-FTA signs, and wearing Santa Claus hats. They looked to me more like carolers or evangelists than troublemakers that would make so many riot police necessary. Nonetheless, the hundreds of police were standing in ranks a dozen deep with the front lines keeping a solid barrier with their shields. While we were standing there enjoying this spectacle, the protestors stood up and started pressing closer to the wall of shields and shouting things in Korean. I took a few pictures with one of the other teacher's camera and we decided to continue on. Our bus stop was on the other side of the road and while we were waiting for the 555 bus, we saw the rally on the other side of the road start to get violent. People had started throwing trash at the police and one man was using an empty plastic bottle as a weapon against the police. There was shouting and the police started using their shields to beat back the crowd. At that point, our bus came.

The day had seemed really long and everyone was tired, despite the fact that the whole trip from the time we left Naju until we got back had only been six hours; with almost half of that spent on busses. For some reason, the absurdity of it all had made the experience sort of timeless the way that vivid memories become after a year or two. It's these kinds of experiences that help make the monotony my identical workdays more palatable.

That's enough for now.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

the city where we live

We live in a complex of eleven identical apartment buildings in a relatively small city of 100,000 called Naju.


It is effectively a suburb of Gwangju, but there are a number of things that make it very unlike suburbs proper. For one, it has its own unique history as a town. There are a dozen historical buildings and structures throughout the city that are maintained as heritage sites for tourist purposes. It is also very unlike a suburb in its density. The downtown is like any big city's downtown, only smaller. The streets are narrow and the buildings tall, with separate offices and stores on all floors. The people drive like lunatics and you take your mortality in your own hands when crossing any street. As far as I can tell, most of the population of Naju lives in the few large complexes of apartments like the one where I live. There are parts of town, though, where all the buildings are traditional Korean houses. Looking at those houses, though, it isn't obvious whether those with their own houses are richer or the ones who live in apartments are better off. As far as I can tell, all the homes here are traditional and have belonged to those families for generations. But what do I know?

Here's a map of a number of places that we go in the normal course of our lives. When you find something that actually works here, you stick with it, so I'm sure these place will remain fundamentals in our lives until we leave in eleven months.

(click image for larger version)


1) The building that we call home, distinguishable from the other buildings around it only by a thirty foot tall number on the side.

2) The academy where I go five days a week for almost every one of my waking hours.

3) The corner store that's open past midnight every night of the week and the stationary store where we can buy pens, stickers, binders and all that other crap that teachers need to replace on a weekly basis.

4) The apartment where the other english teachers live, who happen to also be the only people we know who speak our language.

5) Haneramart, the grocery store where it is surprisingly easy to shop and find what you're looking by the pictures on packages, even without understanding a single written or spoken word.

6) Lambada house, the first restaurant where we ate in Naju. It is easy to get food there and the food is predictably normal relative to other places that you can go.

7) "Mexican" chicken restaurant, the place that we ate a couple nights ago. There is nothing mexican about this place besides maybe the cream colored textured walls (and that takes imagination). It only serves fried chicken, but it's better fried chicken than you can get at KFC and so I'm sure we'll be going back to this place often. Only downside is that it takes about an hour to get served.

8) The bus stop where we catch our bus to Gwangju. Incidentally, it's right across the road from the school.

9) The "south gate" of the city, supposedly one of the historical sites of the city, is important in my life only because when I see it I know that I need to get off the bus at the next stop.

10) This is Naju's town square. It was at the heart of the festival that was going on the weekend we arrived; complete with a stage with live music, a laser light show and fireworks display.

11) This is the $5-all-you-can-cook restaurant where you can help yourself to as much beef as you want without even getting death stares from the proprietors.

This isn't an exciting map, but it gives you a sense of how contained the course of our lives are. Lambada House is probably less than a mile from our house. I hope to get to the point soon where I can get comfortable with exploring beyond my self-constrained mini-world, but at this point I can barely recognize the things I see around me when I'm on my beaten path. I guess it's because most buildings look similar and I ignore all the signs that I can't read anyway.

last week belated

My schedule got shifted around a lot this week, so writing another blog entry got put off for the sake of planning lessons and marking tests. Last weekend I started missing some of the normalities from home. Saturday night, Burger King made its way into all of my dreams. I'm not normally much of a fan, but the next day those dreams made the two whoppers I had for lunch taste all that much better. I even bought an extra whopper Jr. to put in my pocket and eat a few hours later on the bus ride back home. I had gone into the city to check out an english church service and also with the hope that I might go grocery-store-hopping looking for normal foods that I can't get here in Naju. Lucky for me, one of the teachers agreed to bring us around to the bigger places that she'd found. Those places turned out to be gigantic grocery stores with the smallest spice racks in the 'international food' sections. For spices, I managed to get basil, thyme, "Mexican" oregano, bay leaves, and paprika. In the end I also found some worchester sauce, real peanut butter, tomato paste, baked beans, normal mustard, good ketchup, caesar dressing and some soy sauce that doesn't smell like rancid-flavored hard liquor. I still couldn't find vanilla extract anywhere. You never realize how much it limits the food that you can make when you can't get things like basic spices, unless you're a fan of bland vegetable stew. When I got home, I went straight to cooking up a wicked good tomato sauce to eat with the spaghetti you can buy pretty much anywhere (..??). I've been having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast all week.

One of the bad parts of being in this part of the world is that beef is suddenly too expensive to eat for anything but special occasions or in small quantities. That's why I was overjoyed last week when I found out that there is an all-you-can-eat-for-$5 place right around the corner from where I live that has beef! It's nothing like anything I've seen in North America before, though. You go up to the buffet with trays and plates and get your salad and soup and rice and lots of pieces of marinated raw meat. You have a couple small burners back at your table where you cook the pieces of meat yourself, then cook more as you eat that stuff and repeat that process until it's hard to stand up straight. So, I've found a place where I can go to get my fill of beef whenever I feel that absense in my life. The only sad thing about this place is that it closes before I get off work on most weeknights, so I can only fill my red meat cravings if they fall on the appropriate days.

My mind has been clearing up and staying clear for longer than it has in as long as I can remember. This leaves me with the dilemma of how to use this mental clarity and finding things to think about. Unfortunately, my job doesn't give me a lot of opportunity to use my mind like you would imagine that most teaching jobs would. Any time that I've tried to get creative with a lesson plan, the kids end up giving me blank stares and then quickly becoming disinterested. If I don't stick to the "repeat this sentence back to me" or "memorize this list" structure, they can't follow. So, I've been trying to read up on some of the civil wars and political crises around the world. It's too hard to build a coherent 'bigger picture' of these things without making too many assumptions. Lucky for me, I still have access to online journal resources from a university and this gives me the opportunity to research deeper into whatever topic I see as necessary. When I heard last week that Donald Rumsfeld resigned I was happy for a few moments until I saw that Bush was going to be the one to suggest his replacement. It's pretty difficult to put any hope in his judgment calls. Anyways, a little research on this new guy linked him to the NSA during the Iran-Contra affair that rocked the Reagan administration. I knew very little about this besides that the CIA was using drug money to fund South American terrorists... so I dug deeper into things and went on a researching binge. It felt good.

One of the last things from last week that I wanted to write about was a holiday here called 'Pepero Day' on November 11th (11/11). On this day, teachers and kids bring these little chocolate-coated cookie sticks of all different varieties to school and exchange them with whoever they like... kind of like the kids' version of Valentines Day. The kids insisted that we celebrate it a day earlier, because they don't have academy on Saturdays. The kids that like you the most give you little cardboard gift boxes covered in hearts and smiling anime characters with some stale gritty cookie sticks inside. It wasn't all that exciting for me, but the kids were all pretty pumped about it and at least it was a break from the same-old.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

trying to work off a chest cold

I've almost finished my third week teaching here in Naju. It's getting easier every day as I coming to learn the strengths and weaknesses of each individual student. At the same time, there are greater challenges of the job that are becoming more apparent. Early last week, Leta got a bad cold and as expected a couple days later I caught it as well. I was expecting to get sick any time now, as it's my usual routine when traveling. I also work in a school where everyone uses the same small toilet closet that smells like human waste concentrate; having to touch the same doorknob as everyone else who had no soap to wash their hands. Unfortunately, as sick as I got, visiting a doctor isn't an option for Leta and I since we're still waiting for our immigration paperwork to get to the point where we can get health insurance through work. At first, my sickness seemed like one of the worst colds that I'd ever had. The first day was spent drowsy from dayquil and with a nose that ran constantly, regardless of whether I could keep up with the tissues. It felt a lot like when my allergies are at their worst, complete with swollen sinuses and a swimming headache that keeps me constantly off-balance. The next day my throat got bad and I developed a bad cough, hacking up gummy phlegms in all shades of brown, green, grey and yellow with the occasional clumps of blood. Since then (I'm still sick), I've spent my mornings going into coughing fits as I purge my lungs and throat of an alarming amount of clumpy goop. I don't know why, but trying to be descriptive about my sickness somehow makes me feel better about it.

Being sick is a bummer, but I've never in my life been forced to suck up a serious illness and continue on with my full schedule. Apparently, though, that's how things work here in the Korean culture of busyness. Even when working in close contact with other teachers and a school full of children. Leta and I spent the weekend watching movies and I've been getting about 12 hours sleep minus middle-of-the-night restlessness. Luckily, my boss was out of town in the Philippines all last week until Tuesday this week... so when I was able to prepare handouts and tests to take the pressure off 45-minute intensive lessons on the days that I had problems seeing straight. While my boss was gone, her role was replaced by her sister-in-law who is pregnant, speaks almost no english whatsoever, and was sick with the same thing everyone was getting. She performed the basic duties of corresponding with parents, taking attendance and solving all the various inevitable problems that come with having swarms of kids running around all day (a violent explosion of yogurt, a potted plant worth of dirt suddenly and mysteriously scattered across the floor, a water balloon prematurely activated, to name a few)

With the return of the boss comes a greater sense of order and a whole new set of problems. From the second she walked into the school, tensions among the teachers shot up very noticably. Far from saying hello and going through the normal motions of returning from travel, she immediately began rushing around busily, yelling at students, and popping into classes to give unclear instructions as to how classes ought to be taught. Apparently her trip to oversee the boarding school was anything but a vacation. While she was gone, a new month of school began and we apparently lost the enrolment of ten students. As is the case in any business, the boss has shifted blame for this down to the teachers, in an effort to try to respond to the problem. As far as we can tell, the boss feels that parents are pulling their kids out of this school in favor of academies with Korean teachers. She says that they feel our western teaching style is too lax and prefer the Korean style of keeping the students in line by screaming in their faces and confiscating anything that isnt a schoolbook or a pencil. Also, our students are apparently doing poorly on their english tests at school... which either means that they aren't learning anything here or that the english they learn at our school isn't transferrable to the english testing in Korean schools. This isn't surprising to me, as building the foundations for skills in a language doesn't help much with being able to memorize and forget a few sentences a week.

Nevertheless, the boss is dissatisfied with our teaching and with the overall direction of the school. This wouldn't be much of a problem, if not for the realities that created this situation in the first place: there is nothing but superficial communication between the teachers and our boss. Desperate to keep students, our boss pops into classes and after a few moments makes general suggestions that can only amount to 'teach better', 'be more strict', or 'make the kids study harder'. Like anybody, the teachers get frustrated by this less-than-constructive criticism and their feelings are hurt. They claim that they shouldn't be expected to adapt independently to these difficult situations as it was clear when they were hired that they were inexperienced. I say 'they' because the other teachers in general get more of this criticism than I do, maybe because I'm the newest and least experienced teacher and maybe because I am a tall male and my female boss finds it easier to speak freely to other females her own height. Regardless, we're all under the mandate that if we don't somehow learn to teach in the Korean style desired from our students' parents, the school "might not need as many teachers as they have right now."

There is no way to adapt the cirriculum of the school when there is no established cirriculum of the school. There is no way to change our style of teaching to some other standard when that standard is unclear and the ways that we need to change are unclear. We were not trained or instructed to begin with. It is understandable that we are expected to learn how to teach independently, as we were hired to be english teachers. We also knew that our boss did not speak functional english, as we had to be screened, hired and briefed through their son in America. Expectations need to be realistic on both sides, but there is little chance of us reaching a satisfactory solution to the problems at hand if we can't understand each other. Another problem that keeps this from being resolved is that the boss was spoiled by having had an english teacher last year with seven years of teaching experience and a military background. He set the standards high, as he was able to operate independently and reach the desired level of discipline and achievement. The boss now tries to correct the other teachers by recommending they "teach more like Eric," which only puts them on the defensive as they are all firmly convinced that they can't live up to his experience or teaching style. This is the drama that is their stress and my angst-filled work environment. Taking offense and making the problem personal isn't going to help us teach better and it isn't going to make it any easier for our boss to manage us. It's too bad that you can't effectively tell people to lighten up and not to get all worked up about the inevitable... especially not a bunch of females.

Ending on another topic altogether, North Americans don't realize how much they take for granted that they don't have to sort their garbage as they throw it away. Washing out bottles and cans for the recycling is nothing compared to the despicable process of throwing our your food garbage separately. Especially when you go to take out your food garbage after almost a week, and you get a bag of fetid rotten meat and vegetable soup leaking out the bottom of the bag onto your front doorstep. This afternoon when I went to bring out the trash before work, I tried to remove the food garbage from its sealed bucket and it dripped everywhere onto my bag of books and the front entryway. I wretched a few times and put it back in the bucket, deciding that it would have to wait until after work to be taken care of. Somewhere in the middle of writing this entry, I put on some plastic gloves and take the bucket and other bags down to the trash. There I had to try to empty the contents of the plastic bag along with the soup in the bucket into one bin and throw the defiled bag into another... without getting anything on me or my clothes. When we got back up here, Leta went to work bleaching the bucket and trying to get the smell out of our entryway. Hopefully it'll be gone by morning, because our whole house stinks like the stuff right now.

That's all. Sorry if the writing took on the character of a sick and exhausted expatriate.