still thinking

I haven't posted in over a month because it never felt as if there were any new developments or exciting things to talk about. It's been a long month. My boss returned from her trip to America and found that there were changes underway in the school and that her control had been usurped by her husband and the secretary. We were instructed to write up weekly lesson plans now instead of daily and through many gruelling sessions of attempting to communicate, they're going to shuffle students up and down according to their skill levels. The boss is also pretty sick and with the medication she's taking she looks like she should be in a hospital bed. Instead, she barely if ever talks with us and gets in some pretty heated arguments with her husband and the secretary. So there's that.

I had been planning an experiment since I got here and during my first three months in Korea I made no attempt to learn the alphabet. I did this because I wanted to wait until immersion had done its work familiarizing me with the phonetics and the structure of the language. I had tried learning Japanese during both of my month-long visits and nothing of what I learned has stuck. So, after being in Korea for three months, I decided it was time for me to learn to read. We picked up some menus from restaurants that deliver in town, brought them home, and over the course of a Saturday I translated them phonetically into English syllables. At school, I got in the practice of asking the students to write the Korean translation next to every word being learned as part of the lesson. Gradually, I've gotten to the point where I can write the words that are spoken to me. I'd always heard that the Korean language was very logical in its structure, especially compared to other Asian languages, but I never would have imagined from looking at it that it would be so simple to learn. Each character is one syllable, whether a word or part of a word, that is formed of smaller letters that each represent sounds. The combination of these letters read from top to bottom, left to right. In most langauges, learning a new alphabet is frustrated by the fact that you still can't understand what you're reading. Fortunately, Korean adapted many of its words from English, especially when it comes to food, and this makes reading things like menus a lot like that game where you read the words aloud and try to figure out the phrase hidden in the phonetics. So there's that.

It's been awhile since I got my ipod and the thing is pretty much full by this point. I've done a lot of experimenting with new music and have found a lot of bands that I have idea how I've managed to miss for all these years. Well, that sucks, I just dropped one of my earbuds into a bowl of chicken soup. Oh well, still works. Anyways, I've finished a lecture series on an overview of Russian history by a speaker who had been a foreign student studying in the Soviet Union during the 1980s. That was really interesting, and I'm going to post my thoughts on that in a different post so people can ignore it if they don't care to read these unrelated ideas. Here's something I wrote about how Communism failed socialism and some stuff about leadership in the context of Old Testament expectations and New Testament realization.

Uhh.. so, that's pretty much it. I went to the doctors and got prescribed a mild anti-anxiety because I decided I'd had enough of feeling on edge all the time. I'm not sure at this point whether I'm going to continue on them, so not much to say there. It's the last day of the lunar new year, a holiday they called 'Solla' here, so we went into Gwangju last night and had a really great time. The girls shopped for a couple hours, we saw the new Rocky Balboa movie which was utter trash, and afterward went to a foreigner bar that was practically empty. We played some cards, and then some darts and got to know some of the regulars. It eventually became obvious that this was the kind of bar where everyone who goes there is a regular and so over the course of the night I talked to a dozen people and got to know them. There was a guy from Britain with working class roots who I talked to about Lord of the Rings for awhile, and how much he hated what they did with Star Wars with the whole messed up chronology thing. We also talked about how badly the Communists had soiled the nobility of socialism. We talked about the importance of unions, even with their excesses, and he told me a story about working as an electrician back in South Hampton, near London. He said that his employer told him that he was needed to work Saturday and Sunday, but that he wasn't going to get time-and-a-half because the money wasn't there for it. He agreed, because he needed the money, and later this old guy came up to him with a hammer and chewed him out for agreeing. He said that 20 years ago, he had gone without pay and his family without food for 12 weeks for those workers rights that he was willing to forfeit. The guy had lived in Korea for 5 years, had a wife from Canada and two kids and said he wanted to go back to England some day but that cost of living there made it seem impossible. So after he went home, I talked to the Irish guy. He thought that the Republicans were going to win the next presidential election and we argued about that a lot. He told me that the difference between an American and an Irishman is that an American looks up at the big house on top of the hill and says "Some day I'll be that man," but when an Irishman looks up at that house he says "Some day I'll get that man." I told him I felt much more like the latter. Then some guy put a Blind Melon song on and that got me excited, so I went over to talk to him and it turned out he was from Minneapolis. He told me that he lived nearby and that his job was interesting, in that his youngest student was 21 years old. Most of the people that he teaches are older, more than half with greying hair. He says he loves the job and that it's really laid back and he's lucky to have happened upon it. As the bar closed, we followed everybody to another place. There, I talked to that Minnesotan guy's Korean girlfriend about Myanmar and how the ethnic Burmese in control were engaged in an active campaign of exterminating the people of other ethnicity in the east and south. Then she told me she was going to visit Angkor Wat in a couple weeks, so I got talking about how Cambodian jungles were full of land mines left over from the whole Communist struggle attached to the Pol Pot ordeal. She tried to teach me the way that Korean numbers work, but I still haven't figured it out. I could go on, but suffice it to say after all this that it was great to be able to meet new people. I felt like I'd been abducted by aliens and kept in a nice little holding cell along with 30 other random English-speakers from around the world.