More of the Same in Naju, Korea

guess I don’t like to blog anymore

2007-09-30T03:31:00.000-07:00

It’s been another long break since the last blog entry I’ve written. A few things have happened, but most wasn’t enough to get me to sit down and write about it. I’ve also been more bitter and jaded than usual and I haven’t felt like venting bitterness in my writing because I can’t imagine anyone would want to read it. It’s coming up on October and we’ve only got three weeks left here, so most of my time has been spent counting down the days. We’ve mostly kept quiet and tried to save more of our money by doing less, as the reality of no longer receiving a paycheck starts to feel more imminent. I’ll talk about a few of the things that have happened in the last couple months.

It was an excruciatingly hot and humid summer, with weeks at a time of conditions that can realistically be described as living in a sauna. We stayed inside and didn’t do much socially, because going anywhere meant hanging out drenched in sweat and smelling like it. When the weather broke, we decided we were long overdue for a visit to our Filipino friends. It had been since that random trip across the country since we had visited KP Mart, which is the local Filipino store that they congregate for socializing on weekends. When we first walked in, they asked us how our vacation had been and assumed that we had gone back to Canada (without notice) and were only now returning. We had to explain that aside from a week-long trip to Japan, we had been in Naju the whole time but had just been anti-social. Considering we generally spend little to no money hanging out with our Filipino friends, it was impossible to explain away our absence and the atmosphere quickly became tense. We spent an hour or two saying almost nothing as the few people present lounged around or kept busy preparing dinner.

I was beginning to think that we had lost our friends from apathetic negligence when somebody we hadn’t met arrived with her child and started talking to us. She taught at a high school in Naju and knew the Filipino teacher who works at our academy. We got talking and soon enough they invited us to stay for the meal they were preparing. It was the dish ‘bangus’ which is something that was recommended for me to try before visiting the Philippines, but I’d never gotten the chance. It was delicious and I ate a lot of it. This tends to be my strongest point when making friends with people from other cultures, as I enjoy eating almost anything from any culture when it is cooked well. This turned the situation around onto its head and they invited is straight away to a gathering they were going to later, which would be a “going away” party for one of the men who had finished his contract and was heading home. They had purchased a goat from an acquaintance and had slaughtered and butchered it and had spent all day preparing different recipes.

Leta and I both agreed to go and we taxied thirty minutes out of town to an industrial park on the edge of Naju where we learned that most of our friends worked. There we met up with a dozen or more of our buddies and had to start trying to explain our absence once again. Explaining our long absence was made more difficult by the fact that they are all very proud to have American/Canadian friends and it is deeply engrained in their mindset that they are somehow intrinsically inferior to westerners. I tried my best to explain that we had been overwhelmed by the weather and staying at home feeling sorry for ourselves. Once they brought out the karaoke machine and we all started singing, things loosened up a lot and people got into the spirit of the evening. They kept bringing dishes out prepared with different parts of the goat in traditional style and each of them was very good. I wasn’t a huge fan of the recipes using the skin or the intestines, but I ate a lot of all of them. Eventually I got talking with one of the guys that I hadn’t met before about our lives before coming to Korea. He had been a tour guide before coming to Korea and that I had changed jobs a lot but that none made any use of my university degree before this one.

The conversation quickly diverted to the disparity in opportunities between people from our two countries and why I thought this was outrageous. I often get into this conversation with my friends from the Philippines, most of which are thirty years old or older; many of which were teachers or had other more specialized careers before they came here to work monotonous “fast work” (as it translates) jobs. These jobs are often dangerous and many times they are treated as lesser human beings by their employers. Even the process by which they come to Korea as foreign workers is rife with exploitation. Their only chance to secure a job like this is to go through an ‘agency’ that puts you in line with other people seeking these types of positions until your time comes. They offer some basic language training and operate as their liaison between the workers and the Korean Ministry of Labor. For this service, the workers are to pay anywhere from 2-4 million won ($2200-4400 Canadian and around the same American these days) from the money they will earn here. Considering their salaries, even working 12 hours a day 6 days a week hard industrial labor, this easily amounts to a quarter to two-fifths of their total income here before taxes. Essentially, their potential wages which seem relatively low to begin with are gouged and then taxed by their own government, leaving them with a lot less than you might think from hearing their income. And these positions are coveted by most Filipinos, who put their careers on hold to be able to feed their families. These are also one-time opportunities and once they finish these contracts, they are no longer eligible to return. You can probably see how the more that I flesh out the details of these situations, the more I get angry about it. So I got into a discussion about how it is foolish to hold on to a sense of nationalism, to be “proud of your nationality”, to put faith in your nation to provide for you and others. Nationality in this sense only divides people who would otherwise recognize their common interests and also creates the illusion that our interests are tied more closely to the rich and privileged in our own society than is the case. This only becomes more acute as the world becomes more globalized and less regionalized; in other words, the less that peoples interests intrinsically depend upon the communities in which they live. Great night, but I had some gastrointestinal trauma the next day from the abundance of goat I had consumed. It was worth it and a good reminder that we have faithful friends here that make great company.

We had heard a long time ago that some other students from SSU were planning to come to Korea soon, but only recently did we find out that some of our friends had moved to Busan. The one time we had visited Busan in June had been so much fun, so we decided to go for the weekend before Chuseok. We learned from the satellite TV on the bus there that there was to be a typhoon that would hit Korea that weekend, but that Busan was going to be near the fringes of it. The weekend was fun, but it rained the entire time and most of the walking around we did was with soaked shoes. Mostly it was just great to get together with Chris Seto and Becky Garrett and actually have a few decent conversations. It helped us realize how socially deprived our lives are here. While there we ate twice at the great Turkish restaurant we tried last time we were there and the food was extremely good as always. We also went to an underground aquarium near the beach which was pretty impressive, but not in a way that makes me want to talk about it.

We had a five-day weekend without work for Chuseok, which is the Korean version of Thanksgiving or the harvest moon or something. We were both really worn out from the week and I started the first two days of the weekend off with a migraine so the whole vacation was more or less sedentary. It was strange for Christmas and other holidays to have passed with barely any recognition from the world around us here, but it was even more depressing in a way to go through the biggest holiday of the year here without any way to celebrate it. We spent most of our time poking holes of doubt in our plans for traveling in Southeast Asia after our contract, worrying about how our money is going to end up getting spent and going stir-crazy from spending too much time indoors. The other teachers had gone away for Chuseok and so had our Filipino friends, so mostly we ended up wandering around Naju for something to do. We went into Gwangju to watch the Bourne Ultimatum, which was okay but nothing special, then checked at the foreigner bar we normally go to and didn’t recognize any of the few people who were there. The only redeeming thing about Chuseok was it helped me realize that there isn’t going to be much I miss about Korea besides the kimchi.

We enjoyed Busan so much that we decided to go again this weekend for Thanksgiving. It was good fun as usual, with a lot of hanging around preparing food interspersing conversations with watching TV. Just like last time, Becky was kind enough to let us stay at her apartment without even having to ask her. When the event dispersed and the leftovers were packed up, Leta and I decided we wanted to take a walk. We noticed there was this ‘river walkway’ type area (kind of a glorified ditch for grey water) that followed underneath the subway tracks in the direction we wanted to head towards. It seemed at first like the type of shady shadowy place that you don’t normally ever want to walk, but as we went on we noticed that quite a lot of families and average looking people were using the area to take walks or bike around. There were also tennis court, basketball and exercise areas interspersed along the walkway, as well as some really impressive graffiti in the tunnels that passed underneath roads or parking lots. So that night was a lot of fun and very memorable.

The next morning started off worse than any morning I can think of. We woke up to a call from our boss frantically talking about some “big water problem” in our apartment asking where we were. We told her we were in Busan and she asked why and then asked where our key was. She was distraught when we reminded her that Busan was five hours away and that we had no idea that we were the only ones with a key to this place. I asked her if we should come home right away and she just gasped and hung up saying “I’m not know what to do.” Naturally we had no idea what to do either. Leta went to grab coffee and I waited for another phone call that we would hopefully be getting. I got thinking that regardless of how this situation was to work itself out, we would need to go home early, so I called my friends and let them know. Our boss called us back and told us that we had “left our water filter on” and that it had flooded our apartment and had seeped down into our neighbors apartment and ruined all their wall(and ceiling)paper. As far as we understood, our water filter does not ‘turn off’ and you don’t turn it off any more than you turn off your refrigerator. She complained that all of this as well as the water costs were “very expensive” and hung up leaving us with NO idea what had happened. We packed up, took the subway to the bus terminal and headed back home. This was more than six hours of wondering whether our cat was okay, whether the people who had gotten into our apartment somehow had let her out, whether they were going to be distraught at the state of the apartment or what we were going to be coming home to. The bus ride was wonderful, with plenty of time to think about all the possible situations, not having a clue about what had happened or knowing whether to be angry or sorry. We got home to an apartment with the windows wide and screens all wide open and our furniture all moved out of the way from the location of the water filter, with all our bath towels on the ground having soaked up the extra water. Nobody was here, but our cat came out of hiding right as we were walking in the door and we have yet to receive a call from our boss about anything. I’m not looking forward to dealing with the whole situation and whatever costs were incurred, but thankful at this point that the cat was alright. The whole ordeal put a frantic tone on the weekend and I don’t look forward to going to work tomorrow, but I guess I never look forward to work so maybe it won’t be much different than usual.

23 more days.

it's been awhile

2007-08-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since my last entry. I've mostly retreated into a world of computer games, music and daily monotony while counting down the weeks left on my contract (10 more now). It's amazing just how much has changed while I've been living in this hibernation state. A teacher has come and left on a short term contract, my boss' two children have returned home and another of the teachers has finished up her contract and left. The boss' son, who is in charge of recruitment for the school, held a meeting where we were invited to talk about our problems with the school. This was a stressful ordeal, but after some drama and a second meeting a lot of our concerns were addressed and we were able to successfully communicate about some of the issues that have been making things difficult for too long now. We've also gone through the rainy season (June-July) and the hottest month (July-August) now, which has been the muggiest weather I've ever experienced. It wouldn't be half as bad except that we have no air conditioner in our apartment and our building is between two other buildings that cut off most of the air flow that we might get by leaving our windows and door open. In fact, it's been so hot and humid here that my hair has actually gone curly. It's weird and everybody assumes that I went and got a perm (which guys actually do here) and I hope that as the weather dries out it goes back to normal.

We're happy that we've managed to survive through the worst of the weather and we just returned from a week of vacation in Japan. Our trip started on Saturday night, as we dropped Sophie off with Leta's tutoring student Jungja's family in Gwangju. We bussed up to Seoul that night and stayed overnight. We took a plane from the regional airport Gimpo to Tokyo's regional airport Haneda and went into the outskirts of Tokyo for dinner. Then we flew to Aomori airport and Leta's father picked us up and brought us back to Ajigasawa. We spent a night there and in the morning took a train up to Hakodate to see Leta's sister Anna, who had just given birth. We spent two days there and then went back to Ajigasawa for a night before we headed off again to the annual English camp that Leta's parents organize just outside Aomori City. We thought that we were going to have to fly out on Friday, but thankfully things worked out that we were able to stay until Saturday. We flew back on Saturday and were able to get back to Naju before midnight. It ate up at least a month's worth of savings, but the trip was worth it as we got to see both of our nieces. Leta's sister had her baby (Erin) and got out of the hospital just as we were arriving and her brother's child (Emma Grace) is more than a year old now, but it was our first time seeing her. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see Leta's sisters Sarah or Mary because they were down at the family's beach cottage in Takayama. Leta hadn't been back to her family home in Ajigasawa in almost as long as me, though, so it was a good chance to talk with her parents and see things. We got a chance to swim in the ocean while there, which was great since it's been about a year since I got a chance to swim even tho I got sunburnt badly with blistered nose and scaly back and the works. I also got a chance to meet the two short-term workers that are staying with the Elliots right now, which is always fun. One of them who I got to know the best was from Northern Ireland and had a lot of the same interests in music and games, so we ended up talking til really last most nights I was there. We argued about the morality of downloading music without paying for it and he explained to me the social dynamics of Catholic and Protestant cultural interaction in N. Ireland. The friendship was pretty much instantaneous and the lack of social interaction in my life kept the conversation going pretty steady the whole time we were there. Leta's brother Luke also brought the board game Axis and Allies, which provided a good chance for heated competition. We played it in most every spare minute while there. One of the nights that we were at the camp we went into the city for the famous annual festival called Nabuta. It turned out to be more a parade than a festival, with nonstop flute and drum music that repeated the same beat and tune on a six second loop for over two hours. It was exciting at first, but got really repetative about an hour into the thing and disturbing by the end. The floats in the parade were pretty amazing and all the people seemed to be having a good enough time, but after awhile it was all the same and standing in one spot got tiresome. It would have been fine except for these dirty sickly looking clowns dressed in drag that walked alongside the parade harassing children. Some of them wore skanky bras and fake bare butts on the outside of their costumes. Clowns are disturbing enough when they're clean and smiley, but these abominations walking along forceably kissing up to kids' faces were enough to infect the dreams of even the most fearless. So yeah, the parade wasn't that great, but it was definitely worth seeing once. I understood why Leta's dad waited in the car and napped rather than go see it.

Anyways, more has happened since my last entry, like finding out that our insurance had been canceled after traveling for hours to see the doctor and other such hilarity, but nothing much worth going into detail over. I'm excited about the day as I'm going to get to meet two new teachers that have just arrived and start work today. It's going to mean a change around here, which I can only hope will be for the better. I will end with talking about two of the students that I tutor right now and a couple of the stories that they told me before I went on break. One is a second grade middle school student (8th grade) named John who as far as I could tell spent all his time studying. Lately, though, he's opened up to me more and revealed some of his hidden rebelliousness. He told me about how he was deathly shy growing up and that throughout most of elementary school he would shed tears whenever the teacher would call on him in class, but that in middle school he has learned to fight and use bad words. He also revealed to me very cautiously that he has been to the PCbang (internet cafe) a total of ten times in his life, which he truly believes that his mother would disown him and kick him out of the house if she knew. His parents believe that computer games infect your mind and coerce your will into abandoning all interest in studying. He told me that the hardest part about concealing trips to the PCbang is that the smoke-saturated atmosphere makes your shirt smell. He recalled that the first time his mother had smelled the smoke on his shirt, she had asked him where he'd been and confronted him about going to the PCbang, but that he'd managed to explain it away as some strangers smoking in the elevator. It was funny how closely his stories resembled somebody on the other side of the ocean trying to cover up going to the bar. My other tutoring student is a man named Mr. Jin who teaches gym at an elementary school in Naju. He told me about how he had spent several years teaching on the islands near Mokpo, traveling for hours every day by car and boat to get to work. He said that the big school had had 75 students, but the smaller one had only 6. He said that this job made him sad because more than half of the students that he taught were very poor and lived with their grandparents without parents. He went on to explain that these were not orphans exactly, but that they were the children of divorced parents that had moved away to the cities and started new families. Apparently, it is very common here when two people with children divorce that neither parent takes the children because those children would have no established role within the new family. They would be the oldest, but they would not share the blood of both parents and so they would be of a lower status than the true children and apparently such a contradiction is important enough that parents actually abandon their kids over it. It's hard to believe that this type of attitude can exist without breeding crime and sociopathy.

It's time to go meet the new teachers now, though. I look forward to this last stretch of the contract more than I thought I was going to, as more SSUers are coming to teach in Korea and these new teachers come to our school. Here's hoping that everything changes for the better.

accidental filipino road trip

2007-05-20T18:18:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting day yesterday. I was prepared to go play basketball for the morning and I ended up traveling across Korea in a 13-hour trek that left me sunburnt and exhausted. I'll start from the beginning. I was sitting at home on Saturday resting, playing video games and still recovering from bronchitis when Leta she was sick of sitting around and decided to go for a walk. We agreed I should order some Chinese food because neither of us wanted to cook. It came before she got back and while I was eating my share I got a phone call from Leta that would change my weekend. She had stopped at the Filipino store to pick up some miscellaneous groceries and it was late enough on Saturday that some of our friends were there intending to hang out all night. In case I didn't make it clear in earlier posts, on Saturday nights this place turns into a magnet for (mostly) Filipinos living in Korea. Most of the men work for factories in the area and most of the women have gotten married to Korean men one way or another. Lately we found out that most of them had their marriages arranged through the Unification Church (the Moonies). Anyways, the place is always interesting and so the phone call got me off my butt despite feeling sick and soon enough I was at the store.

I met a few new people when I got there and the night was going smoothly. Two men from Pakistan who had never been there before dropped by and talking to them was very interesting. They were in similar situations to the workers from the Philippines. These guys seem to be professional migrant workers and like to discuss salaries and which countries other people can get Visas to and the things that make it hard to do so. They're world travelers, but in the least recreational sense imaginable. Very interesting people. At some point in the night, while discussing the basketball game next weekend, Leta and I were invited to join them tomorrow. We both simultaneously misunderstood this invitation as an opportunity to play basketball with them as they normally have invited us to do on weekends before. So as the night faded away and we went home, we had the contact information of one guy who was going to help me get there the next day.

I woke up at 8am after not much sleep, being still sick and Leta's cough having kept her up most of the night. Needless to say, she didn't feel like going to watch me play basketball and so she pulled the sick card and sent me on my way with our new cellphone and an address to tell a cab driver. It took awhile to find a cab (in Korea you don't call them, you find them driving around) and once I did, we were unclear if there was an understanding about which address I wanted to go to. Now I know '4th street' is 'sa-ban', as i might have guessed, but it took a phone call to my friend to explain exactly where I wanted to go. He called while I was on my way and asked if I was almost there, as they were waiting to go... and of course I had no idea, since I was in a cab having no idea where I was or where I was going. I got there a minute before the two busses full of people waiting would leave. The cab driver ripped me off for $25, which was almost half the money I had brought to "play basketball." So I hop on this bus and inside all the walls, curtains and frills are decorated in red and yellow patterns like something from Mexico or the 70s. I sat near my friend and he told me it was going to be a long bus ride. I worried at this point that they were bringing me to play in some tournament.

The bus was playing CSI episodes on the satellite TV at the front. My seat was cramped and it wasn't long before I started feeling pretty sick. Hours went by and this feeling only got worse as the fans bombarded me with cold smelly wind and we got to the mountain range on the eastern side of the country. It was typical mountain driving, zigzagging up and down cliff faces, but as usual the bus driver was driving to optimize time. I had to hold my breath and dig my face into the seat in front of me for most of the last hour to stop from losing the banana I'd eaten that morning. Finally, three and a half hours later, we arrived at a beautiful beach town and parked with a dozen other busses all packed with Filipinos. I was glad for Leta that she had decided not to come on whatever this trip was going to become, as she definitely would not have managed to hold stomach when I only barely did. I was still recovering from the ride when everyone started lining up for lunch. I sat with my friends who were feeling similar from the ride and waited for the line to wind down. They were serving the food from big vats in rubber-gloved fistfulls onto little plastic plates. I didn't feel that I could choke anything down, but thankfully whoever had cooked it knew what they were doing and so it tasted good enough to eat about a quarter of before I was done.

It was around this time that I managed to piece together through questions and common sense exactly what this day was all about. It was a yearly trip for Filipinos working throughout Korea organized by the Catholic church, which usually entailed going to a beach for the day and playing games. Thankfully, this event kept in mind that most of the people there had jobs with very demanding schedules and the whole show was going to get me back to Gwangju by 9pm before the last bus, so I would be able to get home. I called Leta and let her know what this day was really all about and we arranged to meet in Gwangju. I was sad once I realized that I had come to a beach with warm water without bringing anything to swim. I had worn a t-shirt and shorts and brought nothing but my wallet and cellphone, so after awhile the relentless wind from the ocean made it too cold to stay in the shade. We walked out on a manmade peninsula of boulders and some of the Filipinos stripped down to their boxers and swam. I knew that I would regret if I got any of the clothes I was wearing wet, probably in the form of getting much more sick than I already was, so I didn't swim. I just lie on the rocks in the sun trying to keep warm.

After an hour or so, people began to gather up on the beach for games and so we went up. The first game was tug-of-war. I've actually never played this game before as an adult, but the guys who I'd come with insisted I come with them. This is the point at which my nickname 'import' began to stick. They had joked that if I went to play basketball with them, the other teams would accuse them of getting an import (because i'm tall, none of them have actually seen me play). So we played and won, but it's funny how a couple minutes of pulling on a huge rope can drain you of all energy. I got hit double when I realized I was starting to feel the impact of the sun, but the shade was still too cold from the wind to stay in for long. When they called our team up for a second round, I didn't want to do it. They kept at me, though, and so feeling kind of spun out I went for a second round of things I gave it my best and we won again. I then went directly to the bathroom and puked my guts out. Thankfully I found a water cooler that they had brought and that helped me regain my head. Some Canadians from up the beach decided they wanted to challenge the Filipinos to a match and people called for me to join again, but I just shook my head and thankfully nobody pressed it. The Canadians lost the first time and then got really serious about it and won the second. They wanted a tiebreaker but it was time for sack races. I wasn't up for participating in any more games, but they were all really fun to watch. After that, they played a game where people had to take off clothes and stretch the furthest out toward the water on the beach. One of the teams was all guys and one had half girls and the guys lost everything down to the pants, but the girls team managed to win easily without losing any modesty. I was impressed that not even one of the guys lost their pants in an attempt to win.

The last game was going to be a beer drinking contest. There were many points during this day that I wished I had brought my camera, but watching the nun carry up 24-packs and pass out beers along the long line of competitors was one of those things you regret not catching on film for the rest of your life. Anyways, people had to lean over, open and drink their beer the fastest to win. Apparently they all knew what to do because most when finished their beer dumped the foam in their hair as if that was what one had to do. Seemed pretty disgusting to me, knowing what stale beer smells like and knowing we had hours of a bus ride to get home, but it did make the whole event that much more impressive. After the beer-drinking contest, they held mass. I was happy to hear this, since it'd been a long time since I'd been to a service and much longer since I'd been to a Catholic one. The priest performing the mass was an Indonesian missionary and the speakers were cutting out for most of the service, but I was happy to realize that I knew most of the words since they're roughly the same as in the Anglican service. I was surprised when Communion came along that more people didn't go up for it, indicating to me at least that most of the people there weren't Catholic. Those I'd come with also knew that I wasn't, so I abstained to avoid offending them or whatever. After the mass, they handed out prizes for the games earlier. I won a dollar store hot pad holder for my role in the tug-of-war.

After a long day, we were finally heading home. I felt bad as I realized that my surprise, sickness and unpreparedness for the day might have at times made me seem like I wasn't enjoying myself, but I assured everyone that asked that I was. I didn't know it at the time, but my face and arms had lit up like a lobster, so I'm sure they knew by looking at me that I was just tired. For awhile on the bus ride home, I thought I'd have to endure some idiotic movie called 'the Void' on low volume, but just when I was starting to get sick from the mountain bends again somebody got up and turned on the karaoke machine. I shouldn't have been surprised that my day was not yet finished, but I could not have expected that I would spend these next 3 hours in a mobile norebang. Some guy got up and started dancing around to the music and pulled out a bottle of soju and a dixie cup. He danced up to the front of the bus and started pouring people shots as he went along. I didn't know the Aerosmith song 'Angel' before this bus ride, but I knew all the words by the end of it as it was the most frequently played song on the trip.. maybe 8 plays in total. Some songs called 'Evergreen' and 'Beautiful Sunday' were among the other top ones played. I sang Take it Easy, The Boxer and One More Cup of Coffee as some of the only songs on the list that I could manage with the energy I had. The soju faerie did quite a few rounds of the bus and I seemed to have a neverending supply in his bag, but I kept passing because the sun at this point had completely done me in.

We got to Gwangju later than I'd arranged to meet Leta and so my friends helped me find a taxi to take downtown. I thanked them for the fun adventure and left with only a few goodbyes. After this cab ride, I'd spent about 35 bucks on cabs for the day and maybe 3 dollars more on water and had paid nothing for my trip across the country to a beach I'm not sure I ever knew the name of. I met up with Leta and she'd bought plenty of dollar store stuff to organize the house as I'd expected. As I ate supper, my first real meal of the day, I began to crash. Taking the subway and then bus home seemed like it might not happen. Listening to Jon Stewart's Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction sustained me until I fell into bed.

So that was yesterday. This is next morning and writing this is all I've got. I'm going back to bed.

seoul for a second time

2007-05-01T21:44:00.000-07:00

A couple weekends ago we went to Seoul for our second time, but I never had much time to blog about it. It was an interesting weekend and we spent lots of money on clothes, but there was nothing about it that was inspiring enough to prompt a blog entry til now. Most of what we did besides buy clothes was to go see cultural stuff and since we remembered our camera, I'll put lots of pictures.

I have to start out with a picture of our cat in one of its typical ploys for attention. Leta has taken hundreds of such pictures and I couldn't make a photo entry without including one.

This is outside a reggae bar where we ate dinner in Itaewon. Itaewon is a district of Seoul known for attracting lots of foreigners, because of its proximity to a US military base and its stores that cater to western sizes and styles, etc. We spent too much money here. This is the only picture that we took on our first day in Seoul.
This is the first of many pictures on our second day in Seoul, as we visited one of the royal palaces in the north of the city. We got up relatively early to see it before we had to checkout of our hotel, so we managed to see the changing of the guard ceremony.

There were dozens of gates and buildings for different purposes, all unconnected littered throughout many courtyards. This is the typical style in which their walls were decorated.

This was a ceiling in one of the rooms for sitting and having tea.

There were a lot of places where the roove of different buildings seemed to be purposely set at different heights and angles for artistic effect.

I was surprised that you could see beautiful mountain ranges from so many different places in Seoul.

Most of these buildings were apparently destroyed by the Japanese during their reign of tyranny, but some of the structures that did survive were brick chimneys made to vent the smoke from fires that were used to heat the floors. Koreans still heat their houses through heated floors.

This is some some of the original ceiling work that hadn't been restored.

These were some of the traditional Korean idols, stone mounds and totem poles, which were placed outside villages and prayed to as people left and returned home.

This was the culture museum near the palace.

I took a lot of pictures of the cooler exhibits as an experiment of which camera settings worked best inside with dim lighting.

These pictures are from one of the bigger rooms devoted entirely to the traditional steps taken in the preparation of kimchi.

This box, a little less than a meter tall, was used to transport the bride to her wedding ceremony.

We left the palace and museum, checked out of our motel and went to see the South Gate of Seoul before we left. There we met this guy who volunteered his time as a tourist guide and he told us about the importance of the city gates and how the terrible Japanese had all but destroyed the other ones and kept this one to run a streetcar through. Most of the time he spent talking to us he was getting us to memorize the Confucian principles that gave significance to gates like this:
East: benevolence, blue, wood, spring, dragon
South: courtesy, red, fire, summer, phoenix
West: righteousness, white, steel, fall, tiger
North: wisdom, black, water, winter, turtle
Center: trust, earth, yellow

This was the ceiling of the gate.

Near the South Gate was the most well-known open market in Seoul. Some of my most vivid and valued memories of traveling in Asia are of marketplaces like this one. There is something about the way that these places are overcrowded and assault your senses that can't be replicated by any other type of experience.

The subway stop where we left this part of town was across the street from City Hall. The building is dwarfed by surrounding commercial offices and its fountain is puny. We didn't even cross the street to get a closer look before heading home.

So that was Seoul. It was worth visiting a second time and I enjoyed the cultural tourism much more than the shopping the day before (especially since it cost almost nothing in comparison). I was astonished at how much money we spent on this weekend as I did the math on the bus ride home. It's way too easy to spend money when you hardly ever do anything, make tons of money and don't have bills to pay.

what i know of english teaching opportunities in korea

2007-04-25T23:20:00.000-07:00

There seem to be four different general options available for teaching English here:Hagwon (after-school academy), Public school, University and Business-related.

I know the most about Hagwon, since that's the stream that we ended up in. Hagwons tend to vary most in job quality as they are privately owned businesses that set their own standards for teaching requirements and practices. Generally these academies will pay 2,000,000 won ($2450 canadian) per month for 12 month contracts, pay for arriving/returning airfare and give one month's severence at the end of contract. Our employer negotiated to pay all bills, taxes, utilities and health care in exchange for not receiving the last month's severence pay. There have been some problems with poor employer/employee communication and getting used to the teaching styles expected here, but from what I've heard from others our situation seems to be the average hagwon experience. Schedules fluctuate and I have worked from 1:40-8:45 at times with an hour break in the middle and right now I work 3:40-9:55 with only the fifteen minute breaks between classes. You write/mark tests and plan lessons on your own time. Some hagwon jobs seem to have lighter loads (4 hours is the lightest ive heard) and in others the financial instability of the business can make it a nightmare trying to get paid. Most hogwan jobs are somewhere inbetween these extremes. The worst part of hogwan jobs is the lack of significant vacation time. We've got what seems to be the average minimum vacation time in these places at a week-long vacation in both the winter and the summer.

Public schools have been suggested to us as a much better job opportunity than hagwons by those people teaching in them. Everyone that I've met in these situations have come through an employment agency known as "Canadian Connections" (dont have their contact info). These jobs are from as early as 8:00am until as late as 5:00, but generally a lot of this time isn't spent teaching classes and you tend to have more stability and are not expected to be as flexible in these positions. The pay in general seems to be equivalent with hagwon jobs, but the biggest benefits are the 2-3 months of vacation that you get throughout the year. Working in the morning as opposed to the evening, you also have your nights free to eat at restaurants and maintain some sort of social life; whereas with hagwons you tend to stay up late after you get off work and then wake up in the afternoon and spend your time preparing for work.

I don't know as much about working for a university or a business. I know that people generally try to land university jobs because of the substantial pay increase, but I don't think there are standard schedules for these types of jobs. Some people that I've talked to work normal school hours and others work longer hours 4 random days of the week with three days off sporadically. I don't know what if any extra qualifications are necessary above the bachelors (or 4 year) degree required by the government for getting a Visa as an English teacher. I know even less about those people who work for big businesses like Samsung, LG, etc, giving English lessons to businessmen. I don't know what level of salary they get or what types of schedules are normal for them, only that this is part of the market for English teachers.

In general, there are as many jobs as there are English teachers available to fill them here. This might not be true with a specific school, but in general one can expect that most hagwons will be actively pursuing the employment of new teachers for the near future. I ended up working in a small town about an hour outside the nearest large city and 3-4 hours away from Seoul. This has meant that I don't have as active of a social life, which has made things more boring in general but has made it very easy to save money. In larger cities, generally people say that it is harder to save as much money because they find more ways that they want to spend it. Also, all sorts of public transportation such as busses, trains and taxis in Korea are much cheaper (by 4-8x) than in North America and run on much more convenient schedules. I think there are benefits and costs to any situation as an English teacher in Korea, but my biggest area of dissatisfaction with my position is having no significant vacation time. If you come to teach English in Korea with the expectation of doing any traveling in the rest of Asia, you might want to consider taking a job with a public school or another institution that will provide you at 3-4 week period(s) during which you will be able to do this. You generally don't have the money to travel beforehand and if you try to travel afterward you will be dragged down by a year's worth of accumulated stuff and a desire to just get home.

I have acquired some contact information for various different opportunities, mostly around the Gwangju area but some that span throughout Korea. If you are interested in any specific information, drop a comment or e-mail me at popelithium@gmail.com

you can bowl in naju!

2007-04-14T23:20:00.000-07:00

I haven’t written much of an entry about my life lately, mostly because I haven’t been inspired about my life here. In fact, Leta and I have been discussing the idea of leaving before our contract was finished possibly as early as late May. This is mostly because for awhile the weeks seemed only to get longer and longer and the weekends more and more pointless and dissatisfying. Life became boring and I became increasingly anxious about the idea that we’re only just approaching the halfway point in the contract. So at some point last week, my boss asked me to stay after work because she had something to talk to me about. She told me that two of my coworkers had made it known to her that we were considering leaving before our contract was up. Immediately the fighter pilots scrambled in my brain as I prepared myself for a difficult conversation. Thankfully, it was by far the most professional and productive conversations I’ve ever had with my boss. She told me that they had said I was frustrated with her always yelling and being angry and the kids being hard to control. She explained that this was part of Korean style of teaching and that fear of her wrath was the way that Korean kids were kept in line in the classroom; that this was simply how the trade worked here. I told her that it was true that the yelling has made me nervous and that the job is overwhelming at times because I don’t know how to interpret her anger. She also explained that the academy was not her business, but the church members’, and that the effect of us leaving at any time before replacement teachers could be found would be disastrous for the academy. I told her that there were many personal factors behind the consideration to leave, but that we had by no means decided that we wanted to leave yet. I also assured her that we had never considered the option of walking away from the job without giving necessary notice. The terms that we had come to were that, if we decided to leave before our contract was up, we could work together with our boss in an amicable arrangement that accommodated everybody’s interests. Sweet.

At this point and especially afterwards, things seemed to start getting better. At least, my perception of my life seemed to change for the better. My boss started being noticeably more reassuring towards me. I started tutoring her two nights a week at 9-10pm and we’ve been working on her subject/object pronouns and possessive adjectives; I, mine, my kinda stuff. She decided she likes my “style” and has started coming into classes and saying things like “you are good teacher.” More importantly, she’s (mostly) stopped swooping into the room on huge tirades that she leaves before I get any explanation of what transpired. So that’s cool. One day as I randomly decided to take out the food garbage before my shower, I ran into a foreigner who happened to be walking past at the exact same moment. I’ve only ever accidentally met another foreigner in Naju twice before this incident and never so close to home. I approached him and he introduced himself as Scott Williams from New Hampshire. He is one of seven new foreign teachers to move to Naju working for Dongshin University as part of a new program teaching English. He looked like he was in his late 30s-early 40s and said he used to work for some branch of the Canadian government and was stationed in Prague. He also said that none of these seven new teachers knew anybody else around or anything about the area and I gave him my contact information. So, Naju now has almost twice as many foreigners and I have a possible connection to the university. I started realizing that, although this job/life makes me feel trapped at times, it’s not all that different from most other circumstances that I will likely find myself in, except that it pays well enough that the money is there to escape it. So, I started hoping again that the weekends might possibly hold new and exciting opportunities.

Yesterday we went into Gwangju to celebrate one of the other teacher’s birthdays. I wasn’t necessarily expecting an exciting time, as Gwangju seems more or less tapped for ‘new things to do’ in the same old places. We were meeting with a friend from the city and going for dinner at TGIFridays. I was a little worried that things would be tense between us, as I had openly confronted the two teachers who ratted us out to the boss about not coming to me first about telling the boss about our plans. Thankfully, things were just fine. As we waited for the friend outside the restaurant, this guy in his early 40s also sitting there holding a book introduced himself. He told me my eyes were beautiful and that I looked the same as Tom Cruise. He told me he loved Jesus forever and that he also loved the author of this book he was holding. It was one of those sketchy conversations that you only keep going with because you don’t want the person to try to talk to any of your friends. After some small talk and a few more unreciprocated comments about my beauty, the friend arrived and we went inside. The friend had come with Korean friend and we were introduced. The guy, whose business card I just remembered was in my shirt pocket, is a mechanical engineer for Samsung named Hee Jong Park. He told us he was most recently working in Dubai in conjunction with a Belgian and Arab company to build the largest tower in the world, which he assured us would be one kilometer tall. He quizzed us about who had made the two existing tallest structures in the world, the twin towers in Kuala Lumpur and some tower in Taiwan, and looked dramatically distressed when we didn’t know that it was Samsung. The guy would turn out to be a really dramatic guy and it was never clear what was intended as humor and what could be written off as quirkiness. He asked us whether we knew how to get an elephant into a fridge in only three steps and when we guessed immediately, he was shocked and insisted we must have ‘heard that one before.’ So the menus came and he immediately told us that the Korean menus sported all sorts of promotional offers that the English menus did not. We all ordered and when his food came, he let out a distressing groan of disapproval. He opened the menu, which had pictures of every meal, pointed at his picture and dramatically conveyed his disappointment to the waitress. When she left, he explained that his dish didn’t look ANYTHING like the picture and he was appalled and unhappy. Now, I wondered how it was that anyone would expect their food to look like it did in the picture, but when we looked at the menu it appeared that his plate looked almost exactly like the picture in the menu. The only difference was that there were carrots and string beans as the vegetable instead of broccoli. He complained again when the waitress returned and eventually the manager came out to hear his complaints. The friend he had come with insisted that his plate looked exactly like the menu and he was being a big baby. At this point, though, they started to offer us free drinks, free extra bread and completely overlooked the fact that we were thoroughly abusing the all-you-can-eat salad bar. We got free coffee/tea after the meal and they sent us home with a big oatmeal roll each on our way out.

So during the three hours that we ended up staying at the restaurant talking, I got into a discussion with the Korean whose nickname he said was Hee-boy. We laughed and he wanted to know whether it was bad funny or good funny. We told him it sounded like he was son of He-Man and that it was a cool nickname. Anyways Heeboy wanted to know how I’d come to Korea, so I explained the whole escape from Calgary situation. He was surprised to hear that the job market in Canada as a whole wasn’t all that good. He asked about my major and what I wanted to do with my life and after some talk about how I didn’t know, I mentioned NGOs. He got really excited about this and explained that he had done some work organizing university students in conjunction with NGOs to educate people about tsunami awareness and community preparation after the disaster several years back. I got the familiar feeling of the conversation inevitably tilting towards socioeconomics. I started explaining that I didn’t know what kind of NGO work I would consider getting into, but that I thought maybe I would eventually like to get a job with the UN. He got really excited about this, too. He asked me if I knew the three stages of revolution. I told him to enlighten me and he told me that, 1) people start connecting internationally, 2) people start investing internationally, and 3) people start moving and living internationally. I think he meant globalization rather than revolution, but it was enough food for thought to stoke my mind and to explain “my philosophy” (as he later called it). I felt that people connecting internationally was an important step that had not fully happened, or perhaps happened at all, before international investment began to occur.

I felt that in the framework of this 3-step ‘revolution’, the class structure became extremely important. The rich, or those people referred to by the Communists as ‘the bourgeoisie’, had been connecting and investing internationally to some extent since long before there was any international connection to speak of between the average worker. In order for this ‘revolution’ to occur in a truly meaningful and productive way, workers and the average person needed to connect internationally and recognize common interests. I realize that this is the same sort of language that fueled International Communism, but the message itself wasn’t the evil in that situation it was the organization exploiting it. I talked about how workers from Korea, China, America and all around the world had more in common with one another than they did with the rich from their own cities and their neighbors on the other side of the train tracks. This becomes even more true as the investment market globalizes and investors’ economic interests spread further and further from home. The investing classes have already realized this commonality and that is what facilitates international investment and trade, but workers and the common people by and large do not recognize this commonality of interests. There is in general a pervasive sense of xenophobia between people of different nationalities. Educating people to recognize the interests that they share with people from other nationalities and areas of the world is the next important step in globalization. In some ways it seems unrealistic, but it is an essential development which will prevent wars and combat economic exploitation. Increasing access to open networks of communication (the internet, etc.) and the creation of public communities of information such as Wikipedia are the types of developments that set the basis for international cooperation at the public level. We ended this conversation with him commenting about wanting to become more of a ‘world citizen’ and talking about the concept of the ‘digital nomad’ (which, by digital I think he meant modern) and of living and working outside national boundaries without feeling the pull back towards some ‘true home’. We realized it had gotten dark outside and everyone sort of collectively decided it was time to leave.

We all walked towards the subway terminal and Heeboy explained to us why mechanical engineers were needed at construction sites: for VHAC. He looked dramatically distressed when we couldn’t guess that this stood for Ventilation, Heating and Air Conditioning. We got talking about salaries and after some whispers and looks of shock we determined he only made 1.5x as much as we did. He’s also a mechanical engineer who works 6 days a week, usually at least 12 hours every day from 6am until after dark. He expressed that we were truly lucky and made a lot of whispered comments about how compared to most Koreans we had it really good. He actually wouldn’t let up about this until I had assured him that I truly understood him. At this point he parted ways with us and we all told him genuinely that it had been nice to meet him. We took a subway downtown to get some coffee and go to some board game place, but as we suspected it had closed down. They went shopping for a bit and I went to see if anybody I knew was at the bar. There wasn’t, so after standing around at a few different places wondering what to do we headed back to Naju.

The birthday teacher had wanted from the beginning to find somewhere to bowl, but nobody we had met along the way knew of anywhere to do so. I had known there was a place to bowl in Naju for a long time, but nobody ever expressed any interest in going there with me so we’d never checked it out. Sure enough, even as we rolled into Naju at 11:30 at night the place was open for business. As we walked in, we all realized how idiotic we had been not to have explored this place before. The place had eighteen lanes, shoes that fit us and balls that fit our hand and finger size (tho my thumb is bruised and swollen today). It was also no-smoking and didn’t serve alcohol, so you didn’t see the normal crowd of seedy old men around as you do anywhere else around town that boasts its “Hof & Soju”. Everyone had a great time, nobody fought and we all agreed that we should make bowling something of a weekly event. Bottom line, we found something fun to do in Naju besides go to a karaoke room or go out to eat. I guess it isn’t that the situation has suddenly changed for the better, but the combination of a few minor turns for the better and the more positive attitude that this has inspired has got me feeling okay about our life here. Knowing that there would be a possibility of negotiating our way out of the contract early with the understanding of our boss helps us feel less trapped and will make life easier to deal with. Now I need to go, because the boss found out about my hurt back and insisted I meet with her brother-in-law today because he’s some sort of physiotherapist or something. This post is long enough anyways.

birthday

2007-04-01T07:44:00.000-07:00

My birthday will be over by the time I'm done writing this post and I couldn't have expected a better one. I wasn't even expecting a good one, since it seemed that we had run out of new and fun things to do quite awhile ago. Last week was a hard one (they just seem to keep getting harder) and I wasn't looking forward to a birthday weekend that had no foreseeable chance of being special. Saturday started out as nothing special, with a few hours of playing Starcraft and a strong cup of coffee. Another teacher came over with some mix for carrot cake and we watched a movie, which ended up sucking. By the time I was blowing out my candles, I was full-blown depressed. Then I got the idea to see if the Filipino store in town was open. Leta was convinced it wouldn't be, so it turned into one of those "Who's gonna be right?" things. We got there and not only was it open but it was crowded with people. Before we knew it, we were drawn into a conversation about the usual at first (where are we from, where do we work, how long are we here for, etc). We sat down, I accepted a drink and thus begun many new friendships. We got talking about everything from the inadequacy of Korean-style learning of English through simplified rote learning to the price of a head of cattle in America to how I needed to play basketball for their team. Hanging out turned into eating supper with all of them and proceeded late into the night. It was really refreshing to hang out with new people who spoke perfect English and I had been really missing the Philippines lately, going through my Asia pictures and seeing the kids that I grew so close to in only 2 weeks...

So anyways, there were kids running around and playing the whole while we were at the store. One of the little girls warmed up to Leta. After dinner, we went to a norebong (karaoke room) and they sang country music and Leta danced with the little girl and the whole thing was just tons and tons of fun. I had mentioned to the teacher we were hanging out with that I was indecisive about making birthday plans because I was dreading the idea of a birthday that was nothing special. This was what I needed and now, I've got some people to play basketball with on the weekends who speak English and all seem to be really laid back and cool.

My actual birthday, today, started out pretty crappy. I fell down in the tub and expertly bruised the base of my spine pretty badly. It doesnt feel like it's injured any more than just a bruise, because the pain is localized there, but it keeps me from exercising and makes leaning over extremely painful. Besides that, it was what I had pretty much expected: went into Gwangju, ate dinner at a nice restaurant, went out afterward and played Rummikub in a cafe. After the excitement of the night before, it was all the fun I needed. On the way home, I even met some exchange students from China and found out they were from Harbin, where I've been planning to visit at some point while I'm here. They went to university here in Naju learning Korean and turned out to be cool. They gave us these steamed things that are like... pancakes with syrup and walnuts cooked into them. And now my birthday is over and I'm looking ahead to another week of the same. At least the back injury will provide some variation.

randomly exegeting stuff

2007-03-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

I haven't been posting much about everyday life. Things just don't seem as interesting or inspiring lately, even tho they're as bizarre as ever. We found a random Filipino store in town with baked beans, canned tomatoes and the nice short bottles of San Miguel. It's nice to have a little variety from the normal grocer's selection. I ended up getting locked out last week while Leta was out shopping and I realized that I don't very often go walking around town without her when I was bombarded endlessly by Korean teens saying "hello, hi, nice to meet you, whats your name, how are you today, you're beautiful, i love you..." Leta had a birthday and we went to TGIFridays and she blew a hundred bux on clothes, I found out roses are pretty inexpensive even out of season. I'm getting sick of my job and some days I feel like the next big disappointment is gonna set me off to packing my bags and heading for the next ship off this peninsula. I've had every one of my favorite classes stripped from my schedule and with what I've been left with, my least favorite class is now one of my best. Been listening to a lot of Mason Jennings, Cake, White Stripes, Pedro the Lion and Shins lately and have given the lectures a break. When I realized I'd gained 20 pounds since arriving in Korea, I went out and bought a weight and a yoga mat and have been doing crunches and lifts. I've also stop having my staple omelette rice fried pork lunch delivered cuz obviously it's more unhealthy than I'd realized. One of the other teachers' boyfriend visited for a couple weeks and it was nice, if relatively uneventful, to have a new english-speaking-face around while he was. I've been downloading dozens of movies to simulate having an English movie rental place nearby. Generally discouraged about why I'm in Korea and what stage this is supposed to be in the disjointed progression of my life. It seems so meaningless compared to other travel experiences that I've had, though I'm making good money here and I had to pay for those trips. I got nostalgic and put some of the pics I have from my trip to Southeast Asia onto a blog that I might end up using to type up my journal or write reflections or something: http://thaimalayphil.blogspot.com. I was listening to some NPR podcasted debates regarding religiousity lately and today decided randomly to try to come up with a decent argument why I'm not biblically obliged to support the government. Nothing else to state about my life for the record, so here it is:

I have long been interested in the idea of whether Christians have a duty to support their governing authorities and by association their commands and decisions, short (of course) of compromising the fundamentals of one’s faith. This issue is important to me because it seems to be a case in which my feelings differ from those of traditional biblical interpretation. During the height of its power, the institutional Church in Europe supported the idea of "the divine right of kings". The divine right of kings was the view that rulers were appointed to their positions of authority by God and thus that it was according to and by his will that every ruler came to power. This mandate seems to have biblical support in some places, most notably in Romans 13:1-7 which represents one extreme view in favor of standing unanimously behind all governing authorities:

"(1) Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. (2) Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. (3) For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. (4) For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. (5) Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. (6) This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. (7) Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor." (Romans 13:1-7)

At first glance, seems to be a very clear mandate to follow government because all authorities are good and operate according to upright standards of justice. You will notice, though, that the "governing authorities" which are referred to in the passage seem to be described as unilaterally possessing good intentions and reasonable standards of justice. It does not say "submit yourself to all authorities” REGARDLESS of whether they "bears the sword for nothing." It simply says that they Christians must follow them because they are good. At the same time, it still does not imply that if the government does not live up to these standards one ought not to comply with it.

To further examine the meaning of this passage, one must step away from these words as literal commandments of God and consider them within the context of their author and intended audience: Paul the apostle to the Christian communities of first-century Rome. These Christians were vulnerable to the suspicion of dominant Pagan society, as they were seen as a group that set themselves apart antisocially by declined to participate in pagan civic lifestyle. There was paranoia among some that the Christians posed some threat to the Roman Empire and this paranoia would have been especially potent in Rome as it was the center of the empire. This paranoia would later result in the victimization and persecution of the early church throughout the reigns of many emperors.

It is plausible then to imagine that Paul would have written this passage in order to give the clear message that Christian principles advocate adherence to all standards of government, stated in such a way as to praise of the fairness and just nature of Roman leadership as a means of dispelling this paranoia.

If you look at the message in the previous chapter, it seems to lend credibility to this perspective. Paul in Romans 12:2 suggests that promoted "not conform[ing] any longer to the pattern of this world, but be[ing] transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Such a message does not directly advocate dissention, but it does encourage what could (rightfully) be interpreted as antisocial behavior. The leaders of the time regarded antisocial tendencies a serious threat to the cohesion of society in an empire who was constantly faced with the challenge of maintaining unity in the face of diversity. New sources of diversity that would keep people from participating in social events and accepting the values of social religion were seen as degenerate. Thus, by following this chapter with a mandate of submission to government, Paul clearly hoped to alleviate suspicion.

If you look at the message directly following Romans 13:1-7, you see that it suggests that the end times were believed to be even sooner at hand than had been previously understood. It advocates that the most important endeavor is to focus on refining ones own character through a holy life free of immorality. This seems to suggest that submission to governing authorities is done because the more important issue is personal preparation for salvation and because any rebellion would be a misappropriation of energy.

It does not seem that many governments, if any, live up to the standards declared in this passage. It is indisputably inaccurate that “rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong.” It seems likely, then, that Paul was appeasing the leaders of Rome and recommending that the Christian church do so as well. It seems likely that he is declaring the importance of submitting to government under ideal conditions, but his words do not seem to reveal anything of how we should deal with governmental injustice in our current times.

the bane of my life

2007-03-09T02:52:00.001-08:00

There's a certain individual in my life, who'll remain anonymous, that causes me more grief and frustration than I can remember anybody having accomplished in the past. She lacks communication skills to such an extent that it's almost hard to imagine that it isn't an elaborate act. She is the sole vanguard of a cultural gap that she works relentlessly to keep from being bridged. You never know when she's going to try to be friendly and chat or when she's going to be grumpy and give unconstructive criticism of a problem she has with you that seems by all reason to be her own. She'll walk into a classroom full of kids participating enthusiastically in a lesson and fly into a tyrade about the importance of quiet and study. She'll walk into a quiet classroom full of kids studying for a test screaming at the top of her lungs at a crying toddler who hadn't made it to class on time. She'll continue screaming for a full minute about something unrelated to anyone in that studious class without so much as acknowledging how disruptive she is being. Her presence keeps you on edge at all times, because it is impossible to predict when some unreasonable demand or expectation will be poorly expressed in your direction. You will be told within the same day that you need to give more tests, but that too many tests uses too much paper which is unacceptable. She will suddenly thrust into your face problems that you have unsuccessfully been trying to have addressed for as long as you can remember, as if she had stumbled upon them herself long after you should have made them apparent. You will be trying to find the words to reply to these absurd accusations when she will get distracted and her blind wrath will be diverted to somebody or something else. You will not get a chance to reply or retort, and if you try to express one anyway you will be hastily told "just moment" (or with some equivalent sound) and she will not remember to return her attention to you. She will communicate just enough to make you feel inadequate, but not enough to inspire any change. It is as if you are a beast of burden and she is the taskmaster who speaks only with the whip. All of this is a ministry. I think I've vented as much as I need to to go teach my last class before the weekend.

can't sleep

2007-03-05T12:16:00.001-08:00

As I get more and more frustrated with the monotony of life, my dreams seem to compensate by getting more and more complex and exciting. Sleeping has become by far the most entertaining activity in my life, fueled by details from shows like Lost and Prison Break with their addictive plot lines and reorganized into bizarre experiences that can't fit themselves into memories. The bad part about this is that on the more interesting nights, I end up staying in bed until responsibilities make it absolutely necessary to get up. This in turn leaves me wide awake at 5:22am on an expired Monday night. I've always hated lying in bed for longer than an hour without successfully falling asleep because after that point no position is comfortable and my brain starts to protest. At one point I thought I was going to be able to drift off when out of nowhere some rogue conclusion occurred to me about how Buddhism is opposite to Christianity. My mind probably got on the theme of Buddhism as it occurred to me how much the desire to sleep was causing me to suffer. Anyways about an hour ago I decisively got out of bed and wrote down the thought. Here it is:

"Many people have proposed that religions are all similar in goal and message. They see Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and most other religions as a general attempt to promote the values of love and harmonious coexistence over interpersonal conflict and hate. On the other hand, most religions with any sense of orthodoxy would claim that its principles and essence in practice are mutually exclusive to the practice of other religions. This lays the framework for two sides of an argument: "Are religions united by the same goal or do they lead individuals in fundamentally different directions?"

While my mind was refusing to let me drift off to sleep, something occurred to me about Christianity. Being a Christian isn't about becoming happy, because it's about accepting that we are sinners. To accept oneself as a sinner is to decide not to excuse any action as acceptable, even when one does not or cannot stop from doing it. In other words, Christianity is more about staring your sin in the face and acknowledging it for what it is than about becoming sinless. As a natural result of this, we suffer as we desire to eliminate our sinful habits and actions. It is not comfortable to yearn for this purity that we will never accomplish.

This then led me to think about the main idea behind Buddhism: that all suffering is caused by our desires and that the path to fulfillment lies in the cessation of desire. Now, Buddhism in practice involves a great deal of focus, effort and daily devotion to the disciplines taught in the Eightfold Path. That said, however, it is an essential part of Buddhism that one does not yearn for the completion of this path but instead accepts the place that their soul is at in the long journey that stretches through many lifetimes. After all, to be filled with desire to one day rid oneself of desires would be counterproductive.

Here, then, is a major dichotomy between Buddist and Christian life. A Buddhist learns not to attach themselves to the desire for change; especially not change so impossible as to live in moral and spiritual purity. Christians must forever endure the cycle of focusing on this need for change without ever attaining it in the process of "spiritual growth." Desire is as central to Christian life as it is antipathetic to Buddhist life. The pain is a necessary element of growth as one comes to understand not timeless truths and abandonment of reality, but ways to help one another and learn to live with an honest and open spirit. Buddhism as a diverse tradition is engrained in many cultures and there is much wisdom to learn from them, as God created all men with gifts. This does not however change the fact that at the center of this religious pursuit is self-centered isolation rather than empathy towards all others, a dependence on fellowship and a relentless pursuit of God."

I started this train of thought over a year ago during my trip to Southeast Asia and the train hasn't by any means reached any conclusive destination, so feel free to argue or disagree in a comment. I'm gonna try to sleep again.

still thinking

2007-02-19T03:19:00.000-08:00

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.

Nathan

2007-01-13T23:06:00.000-08:00

A friend from my university community committed suicide last week. It caught me off-guard in almost every way. Work was very difficult as I tried to sort out my feelings and thoughts on the matter and I found it impossible to concentrate or devote any time to planning lessons. I know that nobody ever really expects these things, but in this case it was much more than a surprise. It has shattered even my most skeptical views of the whys and hows. I thought that I had come to terms with death and tragedy, understanding that terrible things happen to random people in this life and that it's just how the world is. There were even a number of times growing up when I was forced to confront the reality of suicide. None of these thoughts and justifications prepared me for this. He was strong and warm and was a source of wisdom and comfort even for his casual acquaintances. He was intelligent and driven to discover and expose injustice. He made me feel welcome from the first time we met and it took me a long time to feel worthy even to be his friend. He was a model for behavior, for success, for attitude, for hospitality, for love and for friendship.

The question ‘why?’, then, goes far deeper than ‘why, when there are so many other options?’… I very rarely experience something that I cannot find an explanation for. I can’t even remember if I’ve ever felt this confused and bewildered by something that has happened. The injustice of it is more complex than my thoughts can discern and I am humbled into silence whenever I try to form an opinion. At one moment I’m stricken with grief at the thought of his hidden sadness and the next my head spins with rage at the potential and beauty that is lost. I recall different situations where he was around and how in every one of them he held everyone's respect. I think of that potential for good that could have changed the world if anything could have inverted as a shockwave that will penetrate the hearts of thousands and force so many to reexamine so much of themselves. It is a crisis as much as it is a tragedy, but what is there to do? Nothing can change what has been done, but things cannot go on until it is determined what can be learned from this. I don’t hope to understand it, but I must still somehow understand what I think and feel about it. If I cannot, then how will I know when to fear for my friends and when to trust that things are alright? How am I to accept that He will not put us through more than we can bear?

This experience has yanked me out of feeling like life is a changeless unreality by confronting me with something that is unbearable not because it is boring or monotonous, but because it is incomprehensible. An unforeseen danger has robbed so many of a friend and the world of one of the brightest hopes for our generation. This danger is a sickness that we can no longer confine to the chemically imbalanced few, but must admit is a part of us all. If there is anything that I have been able to understand from this so far, it is the importance of sharing our weaknesses and struggles with others. It is obvious now that even the strongest and the best must do this or they risk losing everything. I will miss him and grieve for the promising life that was lost so needlessly.

bronchitis vacation

2007-01-05T16:31:00.000-08:00

We had plans to go to Japan for our winter vacation, but after Leta got sick over christmas in Seoul she never seemed to get better. Later in the week, I seemed to catch her cough and we decided to go to the Ear-Nose-and-Throat doctor. This was an interesting experience in itself, but I was discouraged when he diagnosed both Leta and I with bronchitis. So instead of traveling across the length of Japan by train and spending New Years with Leta's family, it was looking like we were going to have to stay home and rest. At first this seemed like a terrifying prospect, as we aren't going to get another vacation for months. It's still a little disappointing, but we've managed to stay occupied by taking day trips. Here are a few of the different things that have made this vacation time worthwhile.

I'll start with my first experience at the Korean doctors office. It was below freezing as we made our way to the doctor's about 15 minutes walk away. My bronchitis was mostly characterized by serious chest pain that got worse with every cough or with heavy breathing, especially out in the cold. We didn't have to wait long once we got there and it wasn't a problem that we couldn't communicate with the administrative staff. The doctor sat us down in an examination chair and asked us a bunch of questions in broken but pretty decent english. He did all the normal stuff, listening to breathing with a stethoscope and making you say 'ahhhh' with a tongue depressor, but he also used some weird thing to spray up my nose. At the end of the visit, he had us breathe mist from this face mask thing and gave us both an intermuscular shot in the butt. On our way out, I was happy to learn that we've got great health care as we paid our 3 dollars each for the visit and picked up our prescription.

I had always heard stories, from Leta and others, about the 'asian way' of doing medicine being frustrating to someone who wants to know what they're taking, but somehow I expected to overcome this process. I was wrong. The pharmacist gave us little wax packets full of 4 pills that she told us to take 3 times a day after meals as well as these little packets of what we later found out were herbal cough syrup. I spent hours at home trying to figure out what these pills were by their markings, but didn't have any luck. I still had two days of work left before vacation and these were very difficult, as it's hard to maintain order in a classroom without heavy breathing. By Saturday, I decided to go back and see the doctor because the medicine he'd given me didn't have enough painkillers in them. This time the office was more crowded and I was more sick, but after a bit of explaining, some more time on the ventilator and another shot in the butt, I had another prescription for whatever it was that he decided would help. Leta and I both went back to see the doctor on Tuesday, as he had only given us medication for that long. The visit was the same procedure, except this time he checked my ears for some reason. Much to my surprise, he told me that there was a big wax build-up in my right ear and pulled out this big plug of hair and wax a little over a centimeter long and the size of a pencil eraser. He told me I would hear better, which I guess I have, even though I hadn't noticed any problem before. At this point the bronchitis is in its last stages and the chest pain is getting better.

One of the teachers, Ivory, had also stayed in Naju rather than going somewhere for her vacation time. The three of us went into Gwangju on Tuesday to see a movie. We decided to see the new 007 movie Casino Royale, even though I didn't have much hope for it with its new Bond actor and seemingly played out premise. I was very much surprised and the movie absolutely rocked, as one of the best action movies I've ever seen. Unfortunately, it was also a longer movie than we'd counted on and by the time we got out we had missed the last bus home. The last busses run sometime around 11pm, so I hadn't yet had a chance to experience the late-night life of Gwangju. Since we were going to have to drop thirty bucks on a 45-minute cab ride regardless of when we left, we took this as an opportunity to stay late. We tried a couple of the foreigner bars, but nobody was out on a Tuesday night. We decided to stay at this German bar anyways and the weizen beer was *fantastic*. Apparently the guy had studied beer-making in Germany and the draft tasted so fresh that it brought back memories of beer gardens in Munich. After awhile we decided to go to a karaoke room and try to sing as best as we could with our injured lungs. It was a good time and we didn't end up leaving for home until 2:30am. The cabby was cool and he drove safely as there was a thick fog.

The next day we decided that we were going to go to Costco in Daejon. This entailed a three hour train ride more than halfway across the country, but it still seemed like a good idea. I grabbed an empty suitcase, we picked up some tuna sushi at the grocery store and caught a bus to the train station in a part of town that I didn't even know existed. I hadn't experienced the train system in Korea yet, so that was something new and exciting. They were cheap, as I expected, with our tickets costing about $12 each way. I had forgotten how much more enjoyable it is to travel by train than by bus, with no traffic, bumps, swerves or turns. It was a good opportunity to see farmland and traditional houses. The chairs also turned around and so for the first half of the trip Ivory taught me how to play two-player Spades. When we got there, there was a little bit of drama as we discovered that we could either stay 2.5 or 6 hours because of how the trains were running. I didn't think only staying the two and a half hours would be enough time to see the Costco and eat dinner, but Leta didn't want to leave for home as late as midnight. She got her way.

The Costco was only a couple minutes walk from the station, so getting there was easy. Right by the entrance was the display of digital cameras and mp3 players; two items that Leta and I had both agreed we didn't want to go any longer without. I had bought a 1gb mp3 player, but it soon became obvious that this wasn't holding enough music and I wanted something bigger. Leta thought that it was big enough for her music needs and I had been looking at the prices of iPods, so when I discovered that I could get one for only a little more than they were selling for in the U.S. I got one right away. We also picked up a Sony camera with decent enough specs for us for about $150. So, about twenty steps into Costco, we had already spent over 400 bucks. After this we decided it might be best to skip the electronics floor of Costco and we went downstairs to the food area. As the conveyor-belt escalator brought us in view of the food, it was like my heart lit up. I felt like somebody from Soviet Russia experiencing all of the wholesome warmth of idealistic capitalism all at once as I gazed over aisles and aisles of familiar foods in bulk. Right away, I started grabbing things like real coffee, blocks of cheddar cheese, jumbo packs of those sweet-and-salty granola bars and big fat jars of peanut butter and jugs of sour cream. It was beautiful.

It somehow only took us an hour to pore over every shelf in every aisle of the food section, but our cart was full so we checked out. In check-out we found out that we weren't going to be able to use our Mastercard (only Samsung cards were accepted), so I went to use the ATM. To my dismay, there was no english option. I tried punching buttons anyway, but to no avail. Intermittent messages like "card not accepted" and "not supported" got me sweating, as Leta waited at the end of the check-out. I decided to ask the woman at the customer service counter to come help me figure out the ATM. Even though she spoke no english, a few hand gestures and nods had her punching in the necessary buttons. I watched how she did it and repeated the process a couple more times, as the maximum withdrawal was $200. In the end, our bill came to $606, which is by far the most I've ever spent shopping, but I was just relieved that the ATM hadn't screwed us over. We had dinner at the Costco cafeteria, eating familiar food like seafood chowder, 'chicken bakes' and chicken caesar salad. Between the three of us, we had about 3x as much as the suitcase would hold and in twice as many boxes as we could manage to carry. Outside the Costco, we managed to get everything into a form that we could just barely drag to the train station a block away. Once there, we bought some big reusable shopping bags and managed to fit everything in those except for one box of lighter food and the 24-pack of Doctor Pepper. The train ride home went much faster. The taxi driver flagged us down before we even managed to get past the turnstyles. As we were loading up the trunk, he kept saying 'ahh american??' and pointing at all the food. We kept telling him 'no, Daejon. Costco.' but he didn't get it. He asked if he could have a Doctor Pepper and Ivory gave him one, but then he wanted one of her two big bags of tortilla chips too. He was pushy about it, and sort of started to pout when she just opened the bag and gave him some. It was pretty hilarious.

I spent the rest of the night taming my iPod, which seemed like a daunting task at first. I'm going to have to pause my week and talk about my new toy for a bit. I had heard that the way iPods worked was that you had to use iTunes and that the program would automatically 'sync' the library of the player and the computer to be the same; whether that meant deleting songs or not. I wanted to get past this however I could, as my whole rationale for buying an iPod had been to get my music library away from the computer. Plus, I've only got about 5 gigs to work with on this hard drive and the movies and music that occupy this space are always changing as they are burnt to CD to make room for new stuff. So, the idea of only being able to have the same library on my 30gb iPod as on my computer is not what I wanted. Eventually, I set the thing up so that it didn't do anything 'automatically' as far as transfering files or 'sync'ing. I found a barebones tool that would load the iPod's library every time it was plugged into the computer, allowed you to add files to that library and then to load those files into the iPod's system. See, most mp3 players are just removable hard disks that will play any compatible music files stored on them. iPods don't work like that, and they need you to go through a special (and long) process of putting the music into its systems. So, that's what I've been doing with all my spare time since. I've got things down pretty well and I don't even have iTunes installed on my computer anymore, but I've all but given up on being able to put video on the thing.

Anyways. On Thursday, we decided we were going to take one last trip of the vacation to a city an hour away called Mokpo. We took the train again and this time it cost us three bucks. At this point, I've just got to say that transporation in Korea is so inexpensive that it continues to amaze me every time I decide to travel; whether bus, train or taxi. We got to Mokpo without really having anything planned, so when Ivory suggested we go on a ferry ride nobody had any objections. We walked through side streets and putrid fish markets (very much regret not taking a picture) on our way to the docks. There were some big fish, but far more weird different sea creature things. There were a lot of these manta-ray-type things called 'skate' that they're famous for. There were also octopi, shrimp, all kinds of mollusks, and these weird little things that looked like long chubby fingers. Apparently, they eat these while they're still a little bit alive and they cling to your chop sticks.. but that sounded really disgusting to me.

We got to the docks, but the building that Ivory had remembered the ferry being in had been demolished. After going into a couple of buildings that weren't the right ones, we found the counter we were looking for and barely managed to get on the ferry before it left. The ride was beautiful and halfway through I started noticing little flashes of grey in the water that turned out to be dolphins! By the end of the ferry ride I had seen more than a dozen of these little buddies hopping along on the top of the water, which was a first for me outside a zoo. After the ferry, we went to a restaurant where we all got some kind of seafood noodle surprise that we didn't mean to order. I ate all of Leta's little octopus legs and slimy little things that tasted like the bottom of a lake. We were tired and we hadn't managed to figure out what to do next, so we just went home. The dolphins had made the whole thing worth it.

So that's been my week. I've got my iPod more than half full at this point, which has taken dozens of hours of diligent organization and attention to detail. I'll end with a list of the music that I've got on it so far, which is coming close to the limits of my collection. The Beatles, Ben Folds Five, Blind Melon, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Broken Social Scene, Cat Stevens, Counting Crows, Death Cab for Cutie, dj GT, Dropkick Murphys, Feist, Flogging Molly, Foo Fighters, Hillsongs, Ja Rule, Jars of Clay, Johnny Cash, Kanye West, Manu Chao, Neutral Milk Hotel, No Use for a Name, NOFX, Oasis, Pearl Jam, Phish, Pink Floyd, John Prine, Propagandhi, Queen, R.E.M., Radiohead, Rise Against, Ry Parish-Siggelkow, Santana, Seu Jorge, Slowdive, Smashing Pumpkins, the Trainspotting and Buena Vista Social Club soundtracks, Sufjan Stevens, System of a Down, Talking Heads, The Cure, The Decemberists, The Killers, The Offspring, The Pogues, The Postal Service, The Shins, The Verves, The Wailers, Third Eye Blind, Tom Waits, Tori Amos, Ween, and Wilco. I've also got some podcasts from the Atlantic Free Press Journalist and Democracy Now!, Jon Stewart's "America - A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction," some Korean traditional stories and some TTC lectures: Ideas in Politics, Argumentation, History of Russia, Machiavelli in Context, Popes and the Papacy: A History, and Interpreting the 20th Century.

Christmas in Seoul

2006-12-25T06:10:00.000-08:00

I had to work extra hours in the stressful week leading up to Christmas. The boss was hurrying to make the necessary changes to our schedules before she leaves for America on Boxing Day and won’t return until February. I was dreading the weekend in a way, because the other teachers had plans to go to Seoul and we hadn’t made plans to do anything. I felt that I would probably have some kind of personal crisis if Leta and I tried to spend the holiday weekend in the same way as we’ve been spending every other weekend since we got here. With that in mind, I finished work too overwhelmed to speak and headed home with no idea what to expect of myself or of the weekend. After awhile, Leta and I came to the conclusion that we should join the other teachers in their plans to visit Seoul over the weekend. In the seven hours we would have before we were to leave, we cleaned the house, packed, put out enough food and water for the cat, and got a few hours sleep. The trip was much shorter than I expected and soon after finishing five lectures on mp3, we arrived in a large bus terminal.

We were supposed to meet up with a friend of the other teachers, but it took an hour of confusion and phone tag before that was accomplished. In that time, there were the first conflicts between us as we tried to figure out how and which and by whom the decisions were going to be made. We were hungry, but we couldn’t decide on a place to eat and so eventually, with some of us not speaking to others, we decided first to make our way to an area of Seoul that we would try to find a hotel. The subway system reminded me of experiences in Tokyo, with its many crowded levels of tunnels and escalators and the vast map of intersecting subway lines. After a couple transfers and a dozen flights of stairs, we got where we were trying to go. We chose a restaurant that didn’t look too fancy and ordered what we thought looked like a good deal. The food was reasonable, but once the bill came we realized we’d been scammed for four times what we had intended to order. They pretended not to understand our protests, so we just accepted our loss and decided to find a place to drop our bags to avoid being taken again as stupid tourists.

We hailed a few cabs and read them the name of a decently priced hotel from our guidebook before we realized that we were going to have to change our strategy. Then, out of nowhere, a stranger approached us and asked if we needed any help. We told him we were looking for a cheap place to stay and he offered to take us to one. I was skeptical, but the guy turned out to be an English grammar teacher and the place he found us was a nice, clean motel with rooms for $40/night (“Sam-O Motel”, 46-10 Susong-dong, Jongro-gu, Seoul, Korea: Tel #: 02-739-0606). I started feeling better about having been taken for our lunch money. From our motel window we had a beautiful view of a large Buddhist temple, which apparently is “one of the largest single story buildings in Korea.” We went shopping in the ‘Ilsadong’ district near our hotel, which was one of those pedestrian streets with shops selling little things that only tourists buy and stalls all selling the same cheap souvenirs. The street was pretty interesting, with tourists from all around the world, an open-air Andy Warhol exhibit, and some church kids scattered individually along the streets holding signs that offered free hugs as some sort of Christmas thing. I bought a couple of Japanese one yen coins the size of silver dollars from 1872, left over from their occupation of Korea in the early twentieth century. Leta bought some nice, cheap pashmina scarves.

The teachers had planned to go for dinner in Itaewon, an area of Seoul famous for having a lot of foreigners. We found a Mexican restaurant that served what actually tasted like Mexican food, which was a first for everyone present since arriving in Korea. One of the teachers had really wanted to go to a hip hop club, so we started looking for one. The first couple we tried, people on their way out warned us that it wasn’t worth the cover charge, but the third one was good enough that we stayed and danced until we went home. There were a lot of people there with buzz-cuts, so I’m pretty sure it was near a U.S. military base. Everyone had a pretty good time and nobody was harassed by anyone sleazy, so it felt like a successful first night in Seoul.

We had gotten home pretty late, especially after waking up before dawn the day before, but some of the other teachers still wanted to get going early the next day and so left before any of the rest of us woke up. When we did wake up, it was to the chanting of Buddhist worshipers in some kind of service that would last all day. We had planned to go to an amusement park called Everland, but Leta woke up with a stomach ache and a temperature. She insisted that I still go, since she wasn’t planning on getting out of bed much anyways. I went with the other teachers who hadn’t woken up early and took the subway to meet up with those who had, but by the time we could coordinate people were feeling like we had missed our chance for a full day at the park. There was some drama and one of the teachers parted ways at this point, but the rest of us decided we would go to Seoul Tower instead.

We taxied there and spent hours waiting in line after line for what ended up being a view mostly obscured by smog, but it was a lot of fun anyways. I felt guilty that I’d left Leta to spend Christmas Eve alone, but didn’t think she’d be too disappointed to have missed it. We taxied back to where we thought was the subway, but we ended up walking in and out of underground shopping malls for half an hour before we finally saw sign of the line we were looking for. We must have hit the ‘rush hour’ of some kind of Christmas Eve boom because the tunnels were packed from wall to wall with crowds. I stood about a foot taller than most people, so I could see across the sea of black hair so thick that at many points nobody could move in either direction. Two hours after leaving Seoul Tower, we got back to our motel. Leta was still sick with the flu and said she was glad not to have gone.

The experience was enough that even after a few hours of recuperation, nobody was interested in any idea that would require taking the subway. A couple teachers took a cab back to the club that we’d gone to the night before, but the rest of us (still minus sick Leta) decided to eat some place close to the motel. We didn’t want to risk getting ripped off for weird food again, so we had Christmas Eve dinner at Burger King. We all commiserated about how inadequate it was to spend Christmas Eve like this, how it didn’t feel like Christmas, how we missed our family or loved ones, how it was strange not to see decorations or have people wish you Merry Christmas, etc. Back at the hotel, I talked with one of the other teachers about the shortcomings of our democratic systems of government and the necessity for a greater shift towards more active citizenship until late at night. I only remembered it was Christmas hours after midnight as I was falling asleep.

Leta and I had arranged to leave Seoul earlier than the other teachers, so that we could get home and relax and eat some kind of a Christmas dinner before another week of work. The other teachers decided they were going to go to Everland. They had left before we’d woken up, but we somehow still managed to meet up with them in the subway. We were given one last strange experience before we were to leave Seoul, as some guy with cucumber and potato slices on his face got on our subway car pushing a cart. He gave an convincing demonstration in Korean about the ease of using cucumbers and potatoes for this purpose and afterward went around selling people the grater-slicer he’d used to do it for a dollar. I couldn’t believe how many older ladies bought them.

We ate Christmas breakfast at McDonalds in the bus terminal, which regrettably didn’t have the breakfast menu. We had trouble finding our gate at first, but some random stranger and his wife went ten minutes out of their way to help bring us to the right bus. The trip home was unbelievably quick, even having to arrange and catch a second bus from Gwangju to Naju, and four hours after stepping onto our bus in Seoul we stepped off at home. We arrived at our apartment to found that our cat had knocked everything possible down onto the ground off of our shelves and tables and dressers. I had tried to leave my entire playlist of music running for her on the computer, but our stupid alarm clock had gone off when it shouldn’t have and the same short Ween song had been looping the whole time. She wouldn’t stop meowing at us for the first few hours, but after some chicken and squid and attention she’s finally back to normal. I am glad to have spent Christmas doing something memorable, but the bizarre experiences and warm weather have made it hard to recognize it as the same holiday.

life is settling down

2006-12-16T08:43:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted an entry in awhile, mostly because there isn't much new to post about. I've gone into Gwangju several more times and have realized that the chaotic circus is always the same and far from being a vast expanse of lights and streets full of people, it's only half a dozen blocks. The teaching side of my job has become a lot easier and routine, leaving only the challenges of a work environment where disorienting personal relations and management problems are a daily occurrence. There are a few new things to talk about, though.

Apparently the anti-FTA rallies have continued under heavy repression from the government, which declared the strikes illegal and suppressed them with road blocks and the mobilization of twice as many riot police as protestors, etc. The news, of course, says nothing about these rallies and I rely on internet sources and blogs to get an idea of what's going on. The government's rationale for this censorship probably has to do with maintaining the illusion of democracy when they are making top-heavy decisions that disregard the apparent will of the people. As far as I can tell, this FTA has more to do with 'national security concerns' than with the general health of the Korean economy. I try to bring up the topic in my last class of the day, where the middle school students are able to produce some basic commentary on the whole situation. What they have expressed to me is that they don't feel the farmers have much choice but to protest the situation, because it threatens to destroy their way of life and that the police can "do no wrong" in their suppression of the protests.

I bought an mp3 player last weekend so that I can get some peace at work in the midst of rowdy children, the crowded teachers office and my perpetually screaming boss. I've been thinking a lot lately about how I want to go back to school for a masters degree once I'm finished my year in Korea. It occurred to me that I don't really need the supervision of a class environment to learn, though, and so I've started using my mp3 player to listen to lectures series that I've downloaded. I'm halfway through a 45-lecture series on "Interpreting the 20th Century," which so far has been very interesting. The lecturer has a strong bias supporting the universality of American values, but it's easy enough to weed through it. I've found the lectures really useful for contextualizing Western disillusionment in the period between World War One and Two, including a lot of stuff about the Great Depression that I wasn't aware of. I've also found it useful for filling in some gaps about the Russian Revolution, the Nazi and Stalinist states, and most recently the Chinese history surrounding the Opium Wars, the Unequal Treaties and how these led to the establishment of the Communist Revolution under Mao Zedong. I've found that all these things help me transcend the repetition and monotony of my daily routine. I'm hoping that by listening to some other lecture series, I'll be able to get any idea of the specific field that I'd like to pursue further education in.

One of the other teachers arranged for us to meet up with four other foreigners from Naju last Wednesday after work. It was refreshing to know that there are other people around here whose jobs are mostly boring, but who find exciting things to do on the weekends. We were supposed to go somewhere an hour away by bus and climb a mountain this morning, but it was rainy and only a little above freezing and under those conditions I couldn't pull myself out of bed at 8:30 in the morning. I was disappointed with myself once I finally got up a couple hours later, so I spent most of the day playing Super Nintendo on my computer. We went into Gwangju later in the evening as some excuse to get out of the house, and while we were there we decided to do the "rent a karaoke room" thing. I was skeptical at first, but it was a lot more fun than I expected and I sang out some stress until my throat was hoarse. It's on these type of trips that I listen to the lectures, so it gives me something to think about and keeps me from getting bored. I don't feel like there's much else I can say about my life at this point, so this is where the entry will end.

NO FTA!

2006-11-19T05:17:00.000-08:00

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.

another bizarre day trip to Gwangju

2006-11-18T05:45:00.000-08:00

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.

the city where we live

2006-11-16T18:09:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-16T16:55:00.000-08:00

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.

trying to work off a chest cold

2006-11-09T06:30:00.000-08:00

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.

a week of confusion

2006-10-29T17:30:00.000-08:00

I'm about to start my second week of teaching english classes to children who so far as I can tell are between the ages of 7 and 12. Even with a full week of classes being only thirty 45-minute sessions, it felt like an incalculably long time. Every day I came home too overwhelmed even to sit and use my computer. This was a combination of the fact that I've never been a teacher of any sort before and that my boss speaks very little english but still shifts and changes things so that I never know what to expect. I took over five classes from a Filipino teacher named Evelyn who I did not speak to or even meet. I was told which books to use and to check the children's books to find out where they were at in the class. The books that I'm teaching from are also often part of a larger cirriculum set that the school hasn't purchased, leaving me to figure out for myself how I'm going to supplement or ignore sections that rely on audio resources, etc. To make things more interesting, my boss left to manage their boarding school in the Philippines for a couple weeks. She left me with the rough advice that I was to 'finish up the books' for a few of my classes and ease them into another. I am left to fill in the blanks with details like how to test a class, what to do when there are students of vastly different language skill, how to assign work when half the class is finished their books and the other don't have any, etc..

I have found that as I am finding ways to teach, it is rehashing a lot of old feelings that I have about the education system. I tutor a 12 year old boy on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9-10pm. He goes to school from 8am-4pm and from after-school academy from 4pm-8:30pm. Then, he drives half an hour to be tutored by me in english. He is a very smart kid, but from what I can tell his schedule is fairly common. I teach the same classes comprised of the same kids every day of the week. This means that all the kids (except the youngest) that I teach go to some type of school at least 12 hours every weekday. I don't think that this is fair and it still bewildurs me how the kids manage to stay childlike or even to have a childhood. This makes it extra difficult for me to accept when I feel like what I am trying to teach them is too repetetive or boring -- especially when they look frustrated and bored. There are more kids than I would expect that seem eager to learn new english and hone their grammar and such, but there are also plenty of those that aren't. They cheat on tests and they only ever mimic other students' answers or wait until another student answers for them. They draw and write notes to each other in Korean. I am supposed to make them pay attention, and I try, but how can I get angry and punish them for this? It's my job to try to make them pay attention, but I can't make them be interested. A teacher who can communicate with their students always has the opportunity to try to connect with them or relate with them... but I cannot communicate with my students in any meaningful way. I can't answer any of their casual questions and all but the most persistent students have given up trying to ask a question that a text book hasn't taught them to ask. (Do you like strawberries? How many apples are there?) I don't see how they even have a chance to become interested when faced with a teacher who is clumsily trying to convey the meaning of some simple phrase. Most of the time 'teaching' boils down to me yelling a phrase and the class yelling it back at me. Even the more advanced learning only involves getting them to yell back the proper response. It's easy for me to sort of break down and slip into delusion where I imagine that I am a revolutionary stirring up the masses for their final stand against tyranny. The kids don't know what they're saying and so I find myself hoping that the emotion behind my firm declarations of A! B! C! is instilling something in them more valuable than basic english speaking skills.

In this past week I've had a number of opportunities to go out to eat. Thankfully, most restaurants either have some pictures on their menus or up on their walls. This allows me to point if I see something that I might like. Still, this almost never works out for me. It's almost always a random grab bag of what will be brought to me, even if ten minutes is spent 'clarifying'. I went out for lunch once with my boss's husband, the pastor of the church that our school is a part of, and tried to explain that I wanted these deep-fried pork stick things. After involving two waitresses in our search for the correct menu item, I received seafood fried rice wrapped in an omelette and some cole slaw. Leta and I went to a "Chinese restaurant" and the waitress there seemed to speak some english, but she ended up getting noodles in mushroom sauce (she hates mushrooms) and I got some fried rice with little pieces of shrimp, squid, little crunchy minnows and what I think we decided were sea slugs... with a side of shredded cabbage covered in ketchup. We've even gone to a fried chicken place and gotten deep-fried chicken neck by accident. This is the sort of thing that I fully expected when coming here, so I find it more amusing than frustrating. Still, there are times when I push my plate away and try ordering a second time.

At some point last week, our boss took us into Gwangju to get the immigration paperwork submitted for our alien registration. This was boring, but on the way home we stopped at this huge mall-type complex called Kumhoworld. It was something like 8 floors filled with stalls and booths of people selling any kind of electronics or electronics components imaginable. Most stores were just a desk or display case in front and a shelf in back, with one of each item displayed and a bunch of cardboard boxes full of extras on the ground next to the salespeople. Nothing had prices on it, which indicated that the suggested prices were only the initial offer and that they were open to negotiate for your business. Now some electronics, like cameras, are apparently more expensive here... but computer components, especially anything including memory components, are dirt cheap here. I don't normally like to shop, but I found myself entranced with the place as I tried to organize all the ideas I was having into some kind of plan. I managed to pull myself together enough to buy some blank CDs and a keyboard to replace the one that I ruined by spilling juice on, but decided that I was going to have to do a lot of pricing and at least learn how to say my Korean numbers before I did any serious business there. I don't really have the money to do anything impressive yet anyways.

So last night, Leta and I went with the other three english teachers into Gwangju because it was one of their birthdays. We went to the same Italian place as before, except this time I had much more of an appetite and so enjoyed in that much more. After that, we decided to go to what I thought was a karaoke bar... but it turned out to be a place where you go and play board games and pay by the time you spend in the place. We played five rounds of Clue. Everyone else in the place was playing this game that involved smashing each other with these plastic accordian hammers that squeaked whenever they hit anything. They never seemed to get tired of how funny it was smashing each other on the heads with it. In the end, the five of us paid just as much as it would have cost to buy a Clue game for ourselves, but the oddity of the experience made it well worth it. Sadly, after that we went and had dunken donuts and a baskin robins ice cream cake. It wasn't sad at the time, but both Leta and I are feeling pretty sick this morning and I hold dairy responsible.

That's all for now.

no rest for the sleepless

2006-10-22T03:11:00.000-07:00

Jetlag continues... but as much as I can't sleep at night, my days seem to fill themselves up. Yesterday we went into Gwangju, the nearest big city of about 1.3 million people, with the other english teachers from our school. Nobody knew what we were going to be doing, besides that we were going to get a chance to wear traditional Korean clothing. I did not expect what the next 12 hours would bring.

We took a bus and then the subway into the city and got off at a stop called the 'Provincial Office'. There was a stage set up there and people were rehearsing for a festival that would gear up later. We made our way into a building and up to a room where a few other english teachers had come for whatever it is that we would be doing. Once ready, we followed someone down to the street and into a van, where we were told that we were to visit a famous graveyard. After a long drive into the country, we finally came to a huge memorial site that we would come to know as the National May 18 Cemetery for the Gwangju Democratic Uprising of 1980.

I did not expect the impact that this place was to have on me. This monument was built over a decade after the massacre of hundreds of people, mostly university and high school students, that gathered to demand the democratization of Korea's government after the assassination of it's dictator in 1980. The place they had made their last stand was the 'Provincial Office' where I had gotten off the subway. The people's struggle against the authoritarian regime that ruled over them finally succeeded in establishing a democratic government a decade later. In 1994, the government started working to recover the bodies of the victims from desecrated and unmarked grave sites in the surrounding areas. After the protesters had been dispersed, imprisoned or killed by the military, the government worked for years to erase the event from history through misinformation and suppression of free speech. When this regime finally fell, its leaders were put on trial and convicted for life, but were quietly released months later and those responsible for the massacre were never disclosed. The day of May 18 was chosen as a national holiday to remember this event and what it stands for.

There was something heinously real about this whole experience that struck me more deeply than any commemorated occasion from my own history. It was not a bitter or depressing experience, but a hopeful one. May 18 was not the day that the new government took power from the old, or the day that the forces of good triumphed over those of evil. It was a movement led by people with a conviction that their government should protect them, not hinder or suppress them. It was a movement that was quelled and its participants disgraced. But as the movement died, its purpose gestated in the hearts and minds of Koreans until almost a decade later when its purpose was finally achieved. Throughout the country, the people demanded that those who fought in the days around May 18, 1980 be honored for their role in establishing a government that would truly represent the South Korean people.

Anyways. We were told that there was going to be a concert at this site, and so sat down with several hundred other people to watch a Korean boy-band and a magic show. It was then that we were asked if we would be willing to go on stage and say a little bit about ourselves and our experience in Korea. I still had not slept much at this point, but I felt that I should participate in an experience that had otherwise been without any cost. Leta didn't want to, but I went up with a few other english and japanese speaking people to say "Hello, my name is Adam Smith. I am from America. I just arrived in Korea two days ago. It is an honor to stand at such an important site for the Korean peoples struggle for freedom. I look forward to enjoying more of your beautiful country." Then, they set up microphone stands for all of us and we were told to sing along with a song that none of us had heard before. So I stood there looking like a dufus and before long we left the stage. After us was another band (with more musical talent than the boy-band) that included an electric violinist. I'd never seen one of those before.

So, it was at this point that were finally invited to try on some traditional Korean clothing. Mine was pink. We had our picture taken in this clothing in front of the big monument and put it into a guestbook. Then, we were driven back into the city and dropped off at the Provincial Hall. At this point, the "6th Bienniele Gwangju Festival 2006" was in full swing, and there was a dance-off between two teams of five breakdancers on the main stage. We all decided to go eat dinner and so we plunged into the masses of people that filled the downtown streets to the brim. We ate at an Italian (themed) restaurant that had some pretty fantastic pizza and pasta and stuff, where I ate my first Korean-style communal meal. They threw a bunch of different pizzas, pastas, salads, cakes, etc in front of us until we were stuffed.. and in the end it cost as much as a value meal from A&W.

After we were finished, we plunged back into the crowds. We stopped for awhile at a soju bar and for the other teachers to shop for make-up and engrish clothes. The streets only got more and more crowded as the night went on and of the million-odd people I saw that night, I was the tallest. Normally, I hate shopping malls full of people milling around... but walking through the packed streets with cars pushing through the crowds at a snails pace was invigorating. It's hard not to understate how exhilirating the whole experience was, as I tried to piece together the day that had been so full of unique experiences. The trip home seemed long, and once there Leta was relieved to find that she HAD actually locked our apartment door and that all the worry had been for nothing. Then I fell asleep.

I want to mention a few more things that have struck me as strange about Korea. First, Koreans count their age different than what I thought was the standard way of doing so. Their age includes time spent in the womb, so once they are born they are almost a year old. Also, everyones age changes on the lunar new year. This way, I suppose, it is easier for people to be friends only with people their own age as is customary here. Second, in Korea there are often dozens of buildings in clusters that are identical. My apartment is one of 16+ identical dozen-story buildings in the same complex. On our trip down from the airport, I saw what seemed to be hundreds of identical buildings in such complexes. You can tell these buildings apart only from the gigantic numbers inscripted on the sides. The reason for this is that construction, like other industries in Korea, is a very corporate business. Companies like LG and Samsung are producers of all types (yes, all) of goods and when they implement a building project, they do so in mass. Third, there are multiple channels on television here devoted entirely to 'gaming'. At any time of day, you can watch people compete in any number of games... the most popular of which is Starcraft (which has got to be at least a decade old by now). Players sit in front of big bulky monitors on two sides of a stage in front of a live audience, and as the players rush each other with their armies, there are often smoke and light effects that crowd the stage. There are also announcers that get really excited when one player manages to kill a strategically important unit. I don't need to understand what anyone is saying to be thoroughly amused by these channels.

Now I've got to prepare for my lessons.

arrived alive

2006-10-20T14:14:00.000-07:00

I don't even know whether I want to keep a blog, but it seems like a good enough way to share my ideas as I try to figure out why I'm here. So here goes, i guess.

The trip was very long. Three flights, one from Ottawa to Chicago, then Chicago to San Fransisco, then San Fransisco to Seoul. After that we pretty much drove the length of the country by bus and were picked up by our employers at the southern most large city in Korea to drive even further south to Naju City. All in all, the trip took something like 32 hours of travel time, which didn't even include any long layovers. Our layover in San Fran was so short that we barely made the plane and they were calling our names on the loudspeakers and such. That's never happened to me before. I also ended up leaving my suit in the coat check of our first flight, and still no idea if I'll get that back. I'm not getting my hopes up, as I've never heard anything good about United Air and the agent at the counter laughed when I asked if she thought they'd find it. Sucks, since that suit is the nicest thing that I own.

We brought our cat on this trip, which seemed like it was gonna be a nightmare. She was good and even pretty quiet, except when she wanted to use her litter box. Leta was taking her in her bag to the bathroom and setting up a makeshift litter box out of a collapsable shoebox and some litter in a ziplock baggy. When we finally got to our apartment, the cat ran around sliding on the linoleum crashing into things. The first chance she got once we left her to her own devices, she searched through our suitcases and found an unopened bag of her treats. Somehow she managed to tear the entire bottom open and eat until I can only guess that she was full. Several hours later when some of the other english teachers here came by, she got all excited and threw up. That was a first for her.

We got to our apartment at around 1AM local time and the next morning we sat through a full day of classes at the academy. We met the other teachers, including some who are going to stop teaching once we start on Monday. Jetlag was kicking my butt, tho, and the whole experience was one delirious blur. It was overwhelming at first, but by the end I realized that it won't be all that difficult once I relearn what a 'past participal' and the other verb tenses mean. The work will be intense, but with only six 45 minute classes a day (max) and our apartment only a couple minutes away, at least it won't eat up all of our time.

We arrived on the weekend of a festival. I'm still not sure how often they have these festivals, or what this means besides that a bunch of people open food stands and apparently give out free stuff. Our employer told us, though, that the food from those vendors is dirty and will probably make us sick... so we didn't do much besides walk through thick crowds of people and say hi to every tenth person or so who managed to notice how tall I am. The festival goes on all weekend, tho, so hopefully tomorrow we'll find something more exciting to do there. Tomorrow, Leta and I and a few other english teachers are going up to the nearest big city, Gwangju, to some 'international center' where foreigners congregate from surrounding cities and there are activites of some kind planned. The 45 minute bus into the city will only cost something like 90 cents, so might as well.

I haven't encountered anything too strange yet since I've been here. The first morning I woke up and went out on the balcony and saw some dad slap his crying toddler across the face in broad daylight surrounded by people... the kind of thing that would have the childrens aid society knocking at your door in the middle of the night in N America.

Okay, just remembered two things that were surprisingly strange to me. First, people here have a 'Korean age' and an 'international age'. In Korean age, when people are born they are 1 years old. Then, at the lunar new year some time early on our calendar year, everyone gets one year older... so somebody born in December could by two years old within a couple months. Second, we were told that people here believe in 'fan death'. Fan death is apparently a danger that comes from being in a room with no open windows or doors, usually while sleeping, with a fan on. Some think that it destroys the air particles in the room eventually asphyxiating you. Others think that the fan doesn't spit out as much air as it sucks in with the same effect. Either way, one of those superstitions that doesnt seem to be phased by a complete lack of scientific evidence to support it.

I'm gonna give it another go at sleeping despite my jetlag, so that's all for now.