Adventures in the 4077th

You encounter: yet another lady at the jjimjilbang!

2012-01-28T16:32:00.003+09:00

This one, unlike my other two, was much shorter. I was staying at a jjimjilbang with a friend who was leaving Seoul this past Friday night. While I was sitting in the hot tub, feeling kind of glum and melancholy about his imminent return to Busan, I suddenly felt a tapping on my shoulder.

It was one of a crowd of ajummas who had been sitting in the Really Quite Hot tub. She held an ice cube between her fingers and, in the manner of a doctor with a young patient, said simply, "Ahhhh."

Even though I knew exactly what was going on, I was still surprised to find the ice cube in my open mouth. I made a noise of surprise, mostly garbled around the ice cube that prevented me from saying a proper thank you, and the ajumma laughed and smiled and went back to her friends.

Happy Lunar New Year!

2012-01-23T14:38:00.001+09:00

In keeping with the spirit of Multimedia Monday, a nice (if couple years old) video about Seollal and Seollal traditions.

It's the year of the water Dragon this year. Anyone turning 12, 24, 36, etc, should have a good year, but it should be especially auspicious for everyone turning 60 (more or less).

Bonus, enjoy this Etsy treasury I made for the occasion.

'Lunar New Year!' by Kokoba

SnappingDragon $195.00	JessicaRoseFas... $147.00
qipapers $30.00	EurekaEureka $191.50
Lirola $65.00	KiraFerrer $112.00
JBMDesigns $28.00	prototypedesig... $35.00
TaylorsType $20.00	vintagebellabr... $125.00
VeraCreations $7.50	BettysWorld $30.00
yuyuart $256.00	TheFoxandTheTe... $10.00
StaticMovement $25.00	GreekArt $6.20

Treasury tool by Red Row Studio.

Enjoy your ddeok guk, everybody!

Student Profile: Alex

2012-01-20T12:03:00.002+09:00

Alex runs on rocket fuel, in a nutshell. He is loud, forever wandering out of his seat, a champion nose-picker, and seems to lack a filter between his brain and the rest of his body. I spend a lot of time tying his shoes because he doesn't seem to have mastered that life skill yet. His English is also incredibly uneven: he can recall pretty advanced words and idiomatic expressions from the movies we watch much better than most of his peers, but when it comes to spontaneous communication with me, Alex defaults either to Korean or extremely fragmented English.

Alex is the one in the red, grey, and black striped sweater, along with the huge grin.

Despite all of this, I like him a lot. He does mean well (unlike another Alex I had, who also ran on rocket fuel, who seemed to delight in the discomfort and rage of his peers) and he's surprisingly affectionate. The best part, though, is that he's just so happy. Alex always has a big cheerful smile on his face and he always looks happy to see me. It's like everything around him is just so awesome.

Multimedia Monday: Cat Stevens

2012-01-17T00:47:00.000+09:00

Another lesson courtesy of Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium. One scene features this song by Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens), and I decided it would be a good change of pace to do a listening activity.

The lyrics are very straightforward, with relatively simple language. I had my students work on a fill-in-the-blank activity with the lyrics beforehand, then we watched/listened to see if they got it correct. I imagine you could easily play a memory game or have a writing activity after the video, as it has a rather cohesive narrative. For my students, though, it would have been redundant.

The song went over surprisingly well with the younger intensive course. I wasn't really expecting Yusuf Islam's mellow acoustic stylings to be at all popular, but we ended up listening to this song three times in class. By the third time, they had the song pretty much figured out, and cheerfully sang along.

Again, if you ever want to use this or other videos on YouTube in an Internet-less classroom, YouTube Downloader HD always works very nicely for me. Other videos and activities I've used can be found via the Multimedia Monday tag.

I React to Western Adults Reacting to Western Kids Reacting to K-pop

2012-01-13T11:21:00.001+09:00

I don't know about elsewhere on the Internet, but LiveJournal's "Oh No They Didn't" community, at least, is having a massive hatefest over "Kids React to K-pop." My reactions are entirely based on how the K-pop fans at ONTD are taking it, but if Roboseyo is to be believed (which I think he is), the entire K-pop army has similarly imploded at the sight of it.

Here's the video, it's gone down periodically but hopefully now it's up for good:

If it goes down again, the Cliff's Notes version is: comedians show kids videos of things, film their reactions, edit them together, and put it on the Internet. This particular instance was kids reacting to K-pop: Girls' Generation, Super Junior, and 2NE1 in particular. And at first blush, I thought it was funny. Shit, I still DO think it's funny (sometimes the kids are a little too performative, but hey, they're kids).

On the one hand, I try to think about stuff like this. And certainly, upon reflection, I realized that a bunch of white kids mugging up their incomprehension at Korean pop music for the camera is kind of...unfortunate. But they're kids, and they're being cajoled into being funny because presumably they know this is going on a video for YouTube for millions of people to watch. Everyone is an attention whore at some level, but especially little kids.

Instead, as only one commentor on ONTD (in ten pages of comments) pointed out, we should really be thinking about the adults who picked the videos: if they picked certain videos hoping for a specific effect, if they goaded the kids off-camera, and so forth. They're the ones creating and perpetuating the white hegemony, and so on. But no, everyone on ONTD immediately goes on their "herp this is why I'm child-free" rants because they enjoy having the license to be bitter about kids, instead of taking a moment to consider the man behind the curtain (or video camera, as it were).

And finally, I love all the butthurt from the K-pop fans about how "the music's really good they don't know what they're missing waaaaaaaah" Seriously? Seriously? There are great Korean musicians and talents, but trying to argue that they're coming out of the child abuse factory that is JYP (or whatever other company) is so ridiculous I don't know where to begin. If anything, talent emerges in spite of it, not because of it.

And child abuse isn't an exaggeration, either. Limiting teenage (read as: still growing) girls who do intense bouts of cardio every day to just 1200 calories? Abusive and potentially metabolically damaging. Bear in mind, K-pop groups train for years before they ever even drop a single, and so many debut when they're just sixteen or seventeen years old, or younger. That means training at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Shit like that can fuck up your body for life. Not to mention the long and exploitative contracts, exhaustive touring schedules, and so forth. But K-pop fans like to conveniently ignore that and just continue to squeal about how CL is just so ~fierce~. DANCE MONKEY DANCE. ENTERTAIN ME.

Embracing K-pop but rejecting American pop just because the latter is ~Korean~ and therefore ~exotic~ is nothing more than a bunch of bullshit exoticizing/eroticizing the Other. Liking something just because it's Korean isn't really a whole lot better than disliking something because it's Korean. And guess what? If you haven't seen it before, K-pop is going to look really fucking bizarre. It still looks bizarre to me (even if I get the larger cultural framework in which it fits), because I didn't grow up with it for twenty-odd years, but I get where it fits in the scheme of things.

What I also notice about Koreaboos/weeaboos is that there's a certain segment (not all of them, by any stretch) that only catches the stuff that floats the top—in other words, the bands and songs the industries really push to make internationally. It's like they're only interested in a shallow, surface-level interaction with another culture; it never occurs to them that Korea or Japan would be capable of producing any kind of indie music scene. I'm not trying to play the hipster card, here ("I like Neon Bunny, but you've probably never heard of her.") but rather pointing out that it takes a minimal amount of digging to find some really great treasures (thanks, IndiefulROK!). Like me saying, "Oh, I really like Korean movies!" having only seen Oldboy and The Host. "The Housemaid? No, never heard of it."

I bet if you had kids react to this video from Linus' Blanket, there'd be a lot less cultural befuddlement and all of the bullshit Koreaboos wouldn't know what the hell this was. Here, have a palate cleanser.

Multimedia Monday: Kermit the Frog

2012-01-09T23:06:00.003+09:00

Right now my intensive classes are watching Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, which has a brief cameo from Kermit the Frog.

One of my questions was: "What's Kermit doing?"

"Kermit...?"

"The frog. What is the frog doing?"

And I realized that duh, these girls didn't grow up watching Sesame Street or The Muppet Show. I found these two clips from Sesame Street and showed them the next day. They went over well in both of my classes, both the high level and the lower level.

They liked the second one a little bit better, mostly because Elmo acts like such a weirdo. "IDEEEEEEEEEA?" But both videos got laughs and, more importantly, comprehension.

If you want to watch these or any other videos in your classroom, but you don't have Internet, I again recommend YouTube Downloader HD. For other supplemental/time-filler ideas (as if you couldn't use YouTube yourself, I know), check out the Multimedia Monday tag.

You Encounter: Another Lady at the Jjimjilbang!

2012-01-06T23:07:00.000+09:00

I patronize one of the local jjimjilbangs more often than any real Korean ever would (probably). My apartment has a tiny water heater and I am a lazy and indolent piece of crap. I like lazing about in my bathing and enjoying myself, rather than a panicked flight to wash as much of myself as quickly as possible before the hot water runs out. Thus, I allow myself a seven thousand won indulgence a few days a week to have a really nice shower, with bonus sauna and gym/"health room" time (if that seems ridiculous, it's honestly cheaper than any gym prices I've seen, plus if I don't go on any given day, then at least I'm not wasting money on a gym membership).

Most of the time I pad around in the sauna/bathing area without having to deal with anyone or anything. Once in a great, great while, I get someone having a conversation with me. It's always really interesting and I kind of wish it happened more often.

Last week, for example, I had a lovely chat with a woman who called herself Mrs. Hong, conducted in equal parts Korean and English. Mrs. Hong had lived in Germany for some number of years, and she remarked that people in Germany were so much friendlier and happier than Koreans. "I was walking, and people said, 'Hello!' Korean people...do not."

Unfortunately, I didn't learn why or for how long she had lived in Germany. I never to think to ask these questions in the moment because I'm too busy panicking about what I'm going to say (in English or in Korean) and making sure I don't look pissed off. I kind of suffer from Chronic Bitchface:

Fortunately Mrs. Hong was cheery and energetic enough to keep the conversation going. She asked me if I liked Korea (of course!), what I liked about Korea (the food, the culture, the people), and if we have saunas in America (not like it is here). She even asked about the bum ankle I was stretching (too much soju in the noraebang) and offered to scrub down/dry off my back when we were finished in the bath. Unfortunately, Mrs. Hong had found me right when I was winding down my visit; I had already been thinking about leaving before our conversation even started, because I needed to catch the bus to work. I explained that I had to leave and apologized.

If this were anywhere else in Korea—the subway, for example, or waiting for a bus—this would have been a moment of exchanging business cards, possibly cell phone numbers. When you're naked in a 40* C hot tub, however, that's understandably not going to happen. Kind of a bummer, because I would have loved to talk to Mrs. Hong some more. So I simply introduced myself, shook hands, and wished her a nice day (and apologized profusely about having to leave).

One of a myriad of sentences you could use to describe teaching in Korea: "You will have conversations with naked strangers, and it won't be weird at all."

Multimedia Monday: Viral Marketing and Mummers

2012-01-02T11:15:00.000+09:00

This edition of Multimedia Monday is brought to you by the first installment of my advanced students' new textbook: "Viral Marketing." Great opportunity to bring in some real life examples.

(For other videos, you can find all of the Multimedia Monday posts at this link. As always, I recommend using YouTube Downloader HD to save these and other videos if your classroom doesn't have Internet.)

After some beginning of class chit-chat ("How was your New Year? What did you do?"), I played this clip for my kids. Before I hit play, I asked them to think about what the ad was trying to sell.

They were pretty much horrified; at thirty-five seconds in they started really losing their shit. If you're going to do this, please find a discreet way to take pictures of your students' faces because seriously, the reactions are priceless. After it finished, I asked them a quick follow-up question.

"What is this commercial for?"

"iPad?"

"Mm, not quite. Here's one more."

"Teacher, why he smile?"

"He really likes his blender."

I asked them again what the commercial was selling, and one of the more vocal students sussed on it right away this time. "Ah! Mixer."

"Do you like these commercials?"

"Yes!"

"Why?"

I put some of their answers on the board, because in the book they have a mind map on the topic (eg, viral marketing) to fill out and they always like to do that part together. I got responses like "funny," "unique," and "surprising." We also talked about whether or not they're popular commercials, why they're popular, where we would see them, if they would show a video like this to their friends, and so forth.

I'm sure you could expand on it from here (have students write [and film?] their own "Will It Blend?" or other ad, eliciting Korean examples of viral marketing), but after this I just worked through the requisite pages in their textbook. We also watched some more "Will It Blend?" videos. All of these got really popular responses:

The iPad was the most popular one, but this was a pretty close second.

Also very well-received, plus it has brand recognition (SPAM) and gross-out factor. This, the glow sticks, and the two I mentioned earlier were the most popular ones. (I actually let them watch the iPad one again during a break.)

This is pretty talk-y in the middle, as he reads excerpts from Justin Bieber's autobiography. Lower-level students might tune out, but intermediate and advanced students shouldn't have a problem. The presenter has good enunciation and let's face it, it's Justin Bieber's autobiography. We're not talking about Ulysses, here. You'll want a camera for their reactions at 1:36 or thereabouts.

This one is also pretty talk-y, so lower-level students might disengage while the salesman is yammering on about the Fiesta. But they thought the green-screened projections and final shot were pretty funny.

BONUS CULTURE POINTS FOLLOW-UP

(maybe not relevant if you're not from [near] Philadelphia)

Of course, not all of my students are in the advanced class with the textbook. Since today was kind of a lost day (I can't really review anything on the first day of a new movie), I also had a Mummers Parade lesson.

I drew a grid on the board. On the left hand side I put: "EAT," "DO," and "WEAR" each in their own row. On the top I put "U.S." and "SOUTH KOREA" in their own column.

If there had been more time for me to prep, I would have made up one of those "mix and mingle" worksheets, where each group has a select few pieces of information in a grid and they have to talk to everyone to fill out the whole thing. Instead, we just talked it out: what does each country eat, do, and wear for New Year's? (You'll probably also want pictures of funny hats, the ball in Times Square, noisemakers, and so forth.) (I'll probably do all of these things tomorrow, assuming I have time to prep some things before I leave for work.)

This was a good opportunity to introduce myself, actually, since in my first two classes today I had a few completely new students who only knew my name. I had them guess where I was from, and then explained that this is a New Year's tradition in my home (or "home") town: people dress up in fancy costumes, play music, dance, and have a big parade in the city. (I skirted the fact that many of them are probably still wasted from New Year's Eve.) I found this clip after a bit of digging (many of the other ones online are people's home videos so the quality isn't so great; this is an excerpt from the news coverage so there's very little ambient noise and the announcers are thankfully silent throughout).

I asked them basic "what" questions throughout to keep them from zoning out (while this was popular in some classes, it wasn't as popular as "Will It Blend?"): "What is his job?" and "What is that?" and "What animal is that?" and so forth. I taught every single class today the words "mermaid" and "merman," productive! I don't think I'll be teaching them to strut, but maybe we'll sing "Golden Slippers." ;)

The Mummers Parade is one of those things I don't realize I miss until it rolls around and I realize I can't just veg out in front of the TV on January first to watch it. Of course, when I'm home, I don't park myself on the couch for the whole thing, but it's nice to be able to drift in and out of it. So I do the next best thing I can: find clips from last year's parade online.

Happy New Year!
새해 복 많이 받으세!

Christmas Song Festival

2011-12-24T14:44:00.001+09:00

My school just finished up the much-anticipated Christmas Song Festival, which was heartwarming in all the ways that seven-year-olds singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" can possibly be (and more). Behold, the festival program! (Warning: there is loads of YouTube embedded in here, apologies in advance if it chokes your computer.)

"Happy!" by Mocca

This one was performed by two classes.

First, my youngest and lowest-level class (except the girl in the back, Pisa, who is an English genius and also Travis' best friend at this school).

And from the second round of the older elementary school kids (who ended up winning their "division"). At the line about "life is a bowl of cherries," they actually threw cherry candy into the audience. A cute idea, but also a potentially deadly one.

"Santa Claus is Coming to Town," by Mariah Carey or Justin Bieber

The version performed depended on the class, two of them used Mariah Carey's version but one class used (grudgingly) Justin Bieber's version.

For the full creepy effect, here's the Mariah Carey video they used (they set up a laptop with a projector to display the video and lyrics for the students to sing along to). I apologize in advance for the nightmares this is about to fuel.

One of my younger advanced classes, they're all adorable students and very chatty. They won their "division" on the first day of the festival. One of the girls (not pictured) also sang Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You." Alas, I don't have a picture of it.

One of my "intermediate" (the school calls it "Step 2") classes. They also won their division, for which I am thankful, because I think Travis (all the way on the left) may have had a meltdown otherwise. He came close to one after a very awkward solo and a cappella performance of "Sorry Sorry" (individual students could also opt to perform as a sort of talent show, if they wanted). From left to right: Travis, Sophia, Jasmine, Timmy, Diane, Cindy, Lina.

But look how happy Travis is during it all! And he's a pretty good little dancer. Just not a very good singer. Plus contemporary K-pop doesn't sound all that good without synths and such.

The other boy in that class, Timmy, also did a solo a cappella performance, which was much less awkward. I think it was my favorite piece of the entire day, because Timmy is a consummate performer. Bonus points: one of the slightly incomprehensible quotes that are showcased all over the building: "After death, to call the doctor."

Two of the girls from that class (Cindy and Jasmine) also did a duet of Avril Lavigne's "What The Hell."

"You say I'm messing with your head / Because I was making out with your friend....You say I'm messing with your head / I like messing in your bed" Think about those lyrics, and then go back and look at the picture to see exactly how tiny they are. But Cindy is funny little diva (and English genius to boot), I wish I had a picture of this performance. Another picture I'll have to wait to borrow from the school's website.

This class used Justin Bieber's version of The Worst Christmas Song of All Time, which is basically the same as the Mariah Carey version. They were miserable the entire time, though, so instead I opted for a picture of them during the talent show: recreating a skit from a Korean variety show (in Korean), which they did VERY well. I about peed myself laughing. The smaller girl, Alice, however, is a pretty good little dancer and got a special spirit award for doing such a good job with it during their otherwise lackluster dance routine. I didn't get a picture of that (but I hope to gank one from the school's website some time next week).

"Jingle Bell Rock," Bobby Helms

Two classes chose this song.

And here's the only class who performed it that I actually teach:

From left to right: Albert (who showed off his hula hoop skills), Tom (who gave a solo recorder performance of "Roly Poly" by the K-pop girl group T-ara), Mark (who acted like a crazy banshee the whole time, to the point where the other boys actually took it upon themselves to restrain him), Leo, Paul, Alex (number one nose-picker), Sally, and Amy.

"I Like to Move It," Reel 2 Real

Though the video they used was from Madagascar, the song sounded like the original and not the version from the Madagascar OST so who knows.

One class performed this, and a few of the boys from one of the basic classes (that I don't teach) also did a tae kwon do routine set to this, for which they won first place.

Another intermediate class. The little boy in the big coat in the back is Harry, and his enthusiasm for everything is absolutely uncontainable. His Korean teacher said he got into a fight with one of the other boys the day before because he wasn't being excited enough. He's adorable.

But really, the winner for "most awkward" performance had to go to the only older advanced class to participate. Or rather, "participate": One of the kids actually sung (and rather enthusiastically) while the rest hung back and looked embarrassed. I guess middle school is too old for anglophone pop song talent shows?

Maroon 5, "This Love"

Again, think about the lyrics to this one: "I tried my best to feed her appetite / Keep her coming every night / So hard to keep her satisfied..." and "My pressure on your hips / Sinking my fingertips / Into every inch of you / Cause I know that's what you want me to do..."

And then instead of Adam Levine singing, you have this:

The other teachers and I couldn't contain ourselves. Giggle fits ensued.

And here's what I wish they had sung:

"Father Christmas," The Kinks

John Lennon, "Happy Xmas, War is Over"

(Not the original music video, since that one's kind of NSFW with gory war images and all. You can watch in public at ease.)

The Jackson 5, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town"

(The only version of this song I actually enjoy, because it's funky enough that I can ignore the creepy/emotionally abusive lyrics, though there's no small amount of irony in the fact that it comes from one of the most exploited child stars of all time.)

Now I'm off to LotteMart, as I owe some people my trademark "way too much whisky" whisky chocolate truffles and I need to get cracking.

Merry Christmas!

More winning quotes from Lina

2011-12-22T22:39:00.000+09:00

We've finished their book early (somehow?) so the last few days have been just bullshitting about celebrities and me occasionally blowing their minds. Lina started off ragging on Justin Bieber's fashion sense.

"His pants are terrible! They...you can see his panties!"

And then just him in general.

"I hate Justin Bieber. He's racist!"
"Racist? Why?"
"He loves Japan!"

Lady Gaga is racist, too. But her clothes are better. Also, Lindsay Lohan is a lesbian. And crazy.

We spent a very productive half hour talking about why Japan is horrible. (I am inclined to agree, or at least agree that the Japanese government has not taken the moral high, or even middle, road recently, but played neutral party to carry on the discussion.) I also proceeded to explain the sad state of world (especially non-European) history in many American schools. The fact that we have "AP American History," "AP European History," and then just "AP World History" pretty much says it all: we privilege dead white men.

"Many history classes in America don't talk about Korea until America goes to war in Korea," I explained. Stunned looks all around. It's hard to convey in someone's second language that your country gets glossed over not because it's insignificant, but because our perspective is extremely myopic. (Hopefully that has changed/is changing/will change soon?)

"I don't think Korean women should marry American men, or Japanese men. Only Korean men."
"But what if the American man is very handsome?"
"No. Handsome is not important."
"Then what is important?"

At this point, a student named Christine interjected: "Money money money." But Lina and the other girl in the class (Rosa) sort of rolled their eyes. They came up with a list:

1. Loyalty
2. Kindness

3. Money
4. Diligence

These were ranked in order of importance. Just for a laugh, I gave them my top four considerations for a man (four traits which my boy possesses in abundance):

1. Kindness
2. Intelligence
3. Sense of humor
4. Personality

"No money? You don't care about money at all?"
"I can make my own money."
"But raising a child! It's expensive."

"Well, maybe I won't have children."

Jaws dropped. I could have told them I was a lesbian, or a space alien, and they could not have been more shocked. Lina could not deal with this.

"Your family! There will be no more!"
"I have a brother. He'll probably have children."

"It's good to have a family, though. It brings happiness."

Sometimes I don't know if she really means the stuff she says, or if she says it just to fool me into thinking that she really thinks it. I can no longer distinguish the difference between earnestness and irony. Her parents also don't believe in eating fast food or (if I understand today's discussion correctly) shopping at LotteMart (it's that Japanese thing again). I'd be curious to meet her mother, I'm sure the two are very similar.

Multimedia Monday (On Tuesday)

2011-12-20T11:02:00.000+09:00

Since I now have a "wired" classroom (meaning: I have a laptop that connects to a sizable flatscreen TV), I can for the first time in my teaching experience SHOW VIDEOS. (There was the one time I brought in a Twilight movie to a class of middle school girls because we were way ahead in the book and they had just had a test, but I had to bring in my laptop to do that.) I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS THAT I WILL SHARE EVERYTHING I USE WITH YOU. Mostly because they make me happy, but also on the off chance that other ESL teachers stumble here.

One of the topics in my advanced students' textbook was about "green profits": businesses switching practices to be more environmentally friendly and marketing new products based on the current trend of YAY SAVE THE PLANET. I found four relevant (and funny) TV commercials. I'm sharing them in order from (what I think) is the easiest for ESL students to understand (and for them to verbalize their comprehension).

If you want to use these videos, but don't have Internet in your classroom (like me), there are plenty of programs available that will rip video off of YouTube. The one I use on my laptop at home is the Google Chrome Youtube Downloader extension; at work, since the extension doesn't work (I don't know why?), I use Youtube Downloader HD.

GE's "Househugger" ad

"The Sky is Falling" PSA about CO2 emissions

Audi's "Green Police" Super Bowl ad (with guest star Cheap Trick!)

Green Planet Network's "Do Time With Green" ad

The kids (and my coworkers) responded the best to the "Green Police" one, but all of them went over pretty well. The animation on the "Househugger" commercial also elicited some "OMG!"/"Aw, cute!" reactions, as well.

Obligatory KJI Post

2011-12-19T17:12:00.000+09:00

Despite knowing fuck-all about international relations, I do have some thoughts on the Kim Jeong-il brouhaha. That's for later. I just thought that where I was and what I was doing when I (and the rest of South Korea) found out was kind of funny:

I go to a jjimjilbang three days a week to use their "health room" (super-small gym) and get the rare hot shower whose length isn't dictated by the size of my water heater. The shower is the bigger attraction than the gym, but I use the gym to justify it financially (7,000 won just for a hot shower seems rather dear, but add in the weight training and cardio and it's cheaper/just about equivalent to a real gym, which may or may not have a sauna). I had finished in the health room (and technically I do it backwards by doing the health room first and THEN the sauna, but I'd rather finish off by relaxing in a hot tub instead of panting on a treadmill) and was getting ready to shower when I noticed there were way more people hanging around the TV in the locker room than normal.

So there I was, naked and glasses-less, squinting at the TV with maybe a dozen other naked Korean women, sweaty from my workout and the heat in the locker room. Before us, a never-ending parade of North Korean footage and propaganda with South Korean commentary on top of it. Periodically it cut back to well-groomed news anchors discussing something. The only Korean in the headline that I could understand was Kim Jeong-il's name. I tried to wrack my brain for the verb for "to die" or "to kill," but came up short. The footage had all the unmistakable tinge of "this person's dead now," and as soon as I saw it, I knew. I posted a question on Facebook to be sure, and I saw a few other women texting furiously or calling people—never mind that some of them were still wet and sweaty from the sauna.

That's a memory I'll probably carry around the rest of my life: me, and the ajummas, and the weird naked solidarity we shared watching the lunchtime news.

Relevant to my Life

2011-12-15T20:43:00.000+09:00

I've been reading this webcomic since high school. This latest one struck a particular chord with me (click the image to see it full-sized) in an "I take myself too seriously, hah" kind of way:

Student Profile: Travis

2011-12-14T22:24:00.000+09:00

Travis is a weird kid. He's also incredibly smart. He is one of my favorites among the younger set that I teach, but some days he really breaks my heart.

It's clear that Travis is not developmentally normal. I think he's a pretty good candidate for Asperger's Syndrome/high-functioning autism, but that's only my armchair opinion. Whatever it is, my coworkers have assured me that his mother insists that her son does not need therapy or anything of that kind—even though his outbursts could potentially hurt other children and already mark him as a weirdo to be preyed upon.* It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that South Korea does not handle mental health issues all that well.

NOW THAT I'VE SUFFICIENTLY DEPRESSED YOU, let's get back to the happy bits. Because these are supposed to be happy entries for me.

I cannot overstate how smart he is. He is also, despite the meltdowns that will strike at random, very self-possessed and mature. Yes, he's obviously still an elementary-school aged child, but there are aspects of his mannerisms that are much more like an adult.

One of the public school districts had an English speech contest last month, and part of my job was to help them train: correcting pronunciation and intonation errors, helping them memorize, and so forth. Travis participated and gave a wonderfully non-sequitor speech on pollution, and saving the environment from pollution, because pollution caused his neighbor's leukemia. I don't know how he performed (he didn't get first, but he rated pretty high), but while he rehearsed with me, Travis performed with aplomb. He was impassioned and serious as you don't normally see children get, both in his performance and in his practice. After he handed me the paper with his speech on it, he said to me (in Korean, my boss translated it for me): "Please listen carefully and correct my mistakes, every little thing." I'm pretty much convinced that the only reason he didn't nab first place was because his speech wasn't "rah-rah Korea!" like everyone else's.

Also, he has these awesome pastel plaid pants that just melt my heart every time he wears them. And a perm.

On good days he is sweet and affectionate to boot. None of my kids now are as huggy as my last group (tears and lamentations!) but sometimes Travis will play with the ends of my bolo tie, stroke my hand, or rub my back. The downside is that if he's angry, he will be just as apt to try to hurt me.

Since his mother seems hell-bent on insisting that her son's "special"ness does not require assistance or input from a trained mental health professional, I can only hope he figures out a way to deal with his issues on his own. I love him to death and I don't doubt he has the potential to go far in life. It's just a question of whether or not he self-destructs.

*There's no way to read that sentence without it sounding like victim-blaming. What I mean to say is this: in class, the students are tolerant of Travis up until he has an outburst of some kind that actually interrupts whatever it is we're doing. They're still too young (and, perhaps, too Korean?) to understand that Travis is processing a world that is a lot different from and a lot more intense than theirs; instead they read it as him being selfish or spoiled and react with disdain accordingly. If Travis had help in dealing with his frustrations in a more productive way than shrieking (full-on shrieking) or hitting students, he would get less negative feedback and more POSITIVE feedback from his peers. That's what I mean by that.

A Typical Day

2011-12-11T20:12:00.001+09:00

I still think that teaching is pretty much the least "blog-worthy" part of my life, but since my dad has been asking and since the school is a bit different than most other hagwons, I figure a brief rundown of my day isn't entirely vacuous narcissism. BEHOLD, MY LIFE:

My day officially starts at 2, but I try to get to work at least ten minutes early because I dislike arriving later than the Korean teachers (who all start at 1.50). It just makes me feel privileged and pampered.

The first hour of the day is given over to time for lesson planning. If I have to, this is when I hammer out the Power Point presentation I'll be using for the next couple of days. Otherwise, I correct written assignments or plan activities for my more challenging classes: making worksheets, generating puzzles, downloading relevant videos from the Internet, etc.

At 3, we all have lunch. One of the moms or other relative of a student prepares lunch for us, presumably in exchange for a discount on tuition. It's pretty good, there's a nice variety (though it's obviously always Korean), and there's plenty of it (as opposed to Cassandra, which always had the same lineup of kimchi, jjigae, and rice, and never enough for the teachers). I do miss my daily dose of Kimbap Cheonguk and dolsot bibimbap, but I'll gladly take a free lunch! Especially when the free lunch has a good chance of being budae jjigae, as done properly by a Uijeongbu ajumma.

After that, it's back to planning until my first lesson, which is anywhere from 3.40 to 4.35. The curriculum at this school is largely based around pop music and American movies. They watch one movie every two months, for November and December it's been Elf. My job is to review scenes of the movie with the students and make sure they understand what's going on. Since the clips are never longer than like ten minutes (and mostly falling in the three- to six-minute range), there's not a whole lot of content and I teach in short twenty minute blocks. With most of the classes, I put together a Power Point with screen captures from the movie and questions from the students' homework book, and then tag on a Power Point game at the end, usually Bingo but I'm always on the lookout for something else.

I have two of these movie classes that are forty minutes in length, so I spend a bit more time prepping those. It can be difficult to stretch out a three minute movie scene for that length of time, but on the other hand, it's nice to have the time for proper warm-up activities, giving feedback, etc.

Three of my classes are advanced beyond the point of the movie curriculum. Instead, I teach them from a "Speaking and Writing" textbook. It's a pretty low-budget affair (typos, no proper bookbinding, WordArt graphics) and the topics can be hit and miss. "Identity Theft"? Not really that interesting or relevant to a 13 year old Korean. "Green Profits"? Lots of stuff about the environment to talk about. "One Laptop Per Child"? Great time to talk about charity, poverty, and the ethical and moral obligations surrounding wealth. These are the classes I show videos in: first of all, they're forty to fifty minutes long, so there's plenty of time. Second, sometimes the topics are boring, so the videos help maintain interest. And sometimes I think they're just good for cultural awareness, like the ad campaign for One Laptop Per Child. The more access Korean students have to other cultures and accents, the better.

My last class ends around 8.50 or so, depending on the day. I go home at 9 or 9.20, depending on the day, but I usually stay a little later to finish marking written assignments I've accumulated through the day or to brainstorm lesson plan ideas for the next day. Again, I feel like a huge jerk leaving at 9 when everyone else is stuck there until 9.30.

Everyone takes turns washing the dishes from lunch. My day to do that is Tuesday. Sometimes other miscellany comes up but it's never unmanageable: help some of the students practice for an English language speech contest, proofread and edit my boss' son's essay for his SAT prep hagwon, etc. Then I come home, eat dinner, go to bed, and do it all over again the next day.

Student Profile: Lina

2011-11-30T21:52:00.001+09:00

Now that I have the time in my life again (I won NaNoWriMo, by the way), I decided to bring back student profiles. There's a colorful bunch of students at this school and I like having these sorts of entries to go look on and think, "Oh yeah! I remember her!" after my job is finished. Also, my dad complained to me over Skype that I "never write in your blog about teaching anymore." So, here you go, Pops. Enjoy.

I'll start with one of my favorite girl students, Lina. She's in probably the most advanced class at the school, and is pretty much the "leader of the pack," as far as the girls go. Which, since it's a class of three girls and one boy, is most of the class. Lina's very willful and very frank, things which may later make her more frustrating than amusing. At the moment, though, I like her.

The textbook for this class is a series of essays on more or less random topics, accompanied by writing prompts and a few short answer questions: identity theft, India's economy, artificial intelligence, and most recently, the well-intentioned, if problematic, One Laptop Per Child project. I started off the class by asking them what they thought was important for a good education:

"Good books."
"Good teachers."
"Money."
"Passion."

And then Lina chimed in with a firm: "Good educational policy. Changing Lee Myung-bak."

I always like when my students have firm enough political opinions to rag on presidents.

Sometimes the book is pretty dry, though; it gets pretty repetitive and so a lot of times I'll try to find a salient tangent to what we're talking about. When discussing India's economy, for example, one of the textbook questions asked what problems poor countries face, and a student said, "Crime."

Ah-hah, says I.

"What about crime in Korea? Do you think there's a lot of crime here?"

"There's a lot of..." Pause to consult her phone dictionary. The phrase that came out made perfect sense, but it was something we'd never actually say in English. "Sexual violence," I think it was.

"Ah. Rape." Second of week of teaching and we're talking about rape! None of the girls seem particularly fazed by it so I decided to let this one play itself out.

"Yes." She nodded her head vigorously. "There's a lot in Korea."

"How can we fix that? What can we do so that rape happens less?"

"Teach women how to fight." "Stronger punishment."

"What about the American soldier in Dongducheon? Do you think his punishment was strong enough?"

"What was it?"

"Jail, for ten years."

Lina looked like she was going to punch someone. "Ten years?! No, that's not enough. He should have thirty!"

"Some Americans think that ten years is too strong."

"What?! Really? 헐~."

"I think he should get punched in the face every morning while he's in jail," I declared. Which I do.

Or, while they were copying down some work from the board: "Teacher, your tee is very...uncommon." (This in response to a Ben Folds concert shirt.) I'm still not entirely sure what she meant by that. Either I wear it less often than my other clothes, or it's not the kind of shirt you see in South Korea (but by that logic, all of my shirts you don't really see in South Korea, so why this one in particular?).

There's a note from her to the teacher I replaced that he kept on the fridge, apologizing for being a poor student and promising to work harder. I'm not surprised that she had been a bad student for him; she chatters a lot in Korean as soon as she's bored and will simply not do pages, but I can't exactly blame her. The book's extremely repetitive and about as engaging as watching paint dry, especially with this class that's so far above it. The one benefit is that it provides a whole spectrum of topics to talk about—I've just come to realize that to make it at all engaging, I'm going to have to ignore the book a lot. I spend a lot of time looking for videos to download from YouTube, or extra reading material, or whatever.

There are moments when the limitations of the student-teacher relationship (and my own low level of Korean) make me sad. I'm sure if Lina were older, she'd be exactly the kind of woman (Korean or otherwise) I like hanging out with: outspoken and passionate and a take-no-shit attitude. She has a feisty attitude that I hope will get her far instead of holding her back.

Un-Korean-ness and White Whine

2011-11-22T23:21:00.001+09:00

I originally wanted to call this entry title, "Eat a Dick, Chris." I panned that for obvious reasons. The next title was going to be, "Let Me Tell You All What It's Like, Being Male, Middle-Class, and White," but that's kind of long. Fortunately, after my knee jerk reaction of "eat a dick," I have moved on. Now, I just hope Chris was just having a bad day when he wrote up his bit of white whine about embracing his un-korean-ness, and I hope he feels better now. Because to that Chris, in that moment of time, I still say, "eat a dick."

Before we go any further, I feel that this is an incredibly appropriate soundtrack. Facebook won't embed any goddamn videos ever, so just read this on my blog at the link here. I'm also posting the NSFW version with all of the swear words because I'm ~edgy~ like that. If ever you listened to a song I've posted here, listen to this one. Never has a song been more apropos.

Korea is not a perfect place. I don't need to enumerate the many ways in which it is not perfect because that's not my point. My point is that when white "waygooks" (good Christ, how much do I hate that word, especially in anglicized form?) suddenly complain about racial and ethnic other-ness, about not being able to integrate, about being judged and presumed about based on their race, I have one and only one response: eat a dick.

Never mind the UNSPEAKABLE FUCKING HILARITY of someone from a pretty privileged class complaining about being treated differently because he's a minority, let's just talk about the big reason all of us teachers are here in the first place, the giant elephant in the room when it comes to our lives as teachers. Okay, yeah, we all love teaching kids or molding minds or kimchi or whatever, but the biggest, fattest reason of them all is

MONEY.

Of course there are people who are just so unfit to teach that no amount of money would make life worth it for them. And there are people who are glad to be doing the teaching no matter where they are or what they were being paid, because they're saints. There are people who came for the money but stay now because they have adapted well to the country, put down roots here and have (gasp!) integrated into society. But if you take a quick survey of foreign teachers here, you'd probably find that the vast majority are relatively fresh out of school and in need of a job and this was easier/more exotic/better-paying than back at home. At some point, it was indeed about the Benjamins. (Or the Shin Saim-dongs, rather.)

Because of this, we get paid better than the typical Korean does, too—and they're often on their own about the housing, plus the workload-to-payscale ratio from native speaker teachers to Korean teachers is (usually) ridiculous. Who among us has the typical Korean work schedule? Who among us has the typical Korean salary? What Korean enjoys the liberty of being able to quit a too-demanding, too-miserable job because their particular demographic is just SO UTTERLY IN DEMAND?

It's not quite an exploitative system, but it's damned close. Roboseyo (I think?) mentioned a while ago that the overall attitude of English teachers in Korea is a pretty mercenary one and I'd generally agree with that assessment. Whether it applies to Chris, I don't know, I haven't met him personally (and however much of a person's blog you read, you can never get the full picture). But to ask a culture to embrace you with open arms (which seems to mean giving you a magical foreigner bubble through which no ajosshis can shove you or ajummas can elbow you, even like they do to other Koreans; through which no biographical details or "typical" foreigner questions can be put to you; through which only the "acceptable" Koreans can pass) while also (presumably) demanding that they pay you a relatively handsome salary and not work you too hard for it? To also have the luxury of never needing to learn even the most basic bits of the language to survive? Jesus Christ, did you also want the happy ending? Maybe you work ten hour days, six days a week (and spend your Sundays at the Korean hagwon), Chris, but I'm going to go ahead and doubt that.

And yes, I get that sometimes people have bad days, or that sometimes they need to vent, and that no one is perfect. I have also been an entitled foreigner in Korea, more often than I'd care to remember or admit: I read back on earlier entries and cringe. It's necessary to recognize your entitlement, though, and to see how it affects your attitude towards Korea and Koreans. For people like, say, Roboseyo, The Grand Narrative, I'm No Picasso, and so on—the "big names" of the K-blog network, you know who you/they are—there is an especial burden/expectation of you to think twice before you post this kind of white whine. It reflects poorly on other foreigners and it reflects poorly on you, as well. (I mean, not to beat a dead horse, but mocking Koreans' crappy English accents? Really? Especially as an English teacher, that's poor form.)

Instead of closing with another dick joke, I'm just going to say: I hope you feel better, Chris. I hope writing and posting that was cathartic. I also hope that next time you're tempted to vent your frustrations, you either take a critical look at them and realize what kind of impression you're giving, or you find another, much less public (and much more anonymous) space to air them out. What you choose to do with your blog is your own business, of course—I'm a true 'murican at heart and no one but you should dictate what you say in your own space on the Internet—but I think we all expected a little bit better from you.

2012: The Year Korea Came to Hollywood

2011-11-20T15:16:00.001+09:00

Four big name Korean directors have Hollywood films debuting next year. The list includes three of my favorite Korean directors:

Probably the king of contemporary Korean cinema, Park Chan-wook. Oldboy (and to a lesser extent, the entire "Vengeance" trilogy of which Oldboy is just one volume) has become an international success and has pretty much made Park world-famous. If you've seen only one Korean movie, it was probably Oldboy. Park's Hollywood project is a "gothic thriller" called Stoker, though it has nothing to do with vampires, Braham Stoker or Dracula, as people were originally speculating, since people seem to still be into this whole vampires thing.
Bong Jun-ho, director of the megablockbuster The Host. He's directed a cinematic adaptation of the French graphic novel Snowpiercer, a post-apocalyptic free-for-all, set on a train designed to be impenetrable to the Arctic climate people in the future suffer under due to global warming. Bonus points for this one: it will feature Song Kang-ho in a supporting role.
Kim Jee-woon, whose most notable features include A Tale of Two Sisters (which was later remade by Hollywood under the title The Uninvited), A Bittersweet Life, and my personal favorite, The Good, The Bad, The Weird. For Hollywood, Kim's working on an action piece called Last Stand, about a drug dealer whose only obstacle on the way to freedom in Mexico is a small town sheriff played by...Arnold Schwarzenegger. There is no way this can be bad.

Out of all of the films listed, I'm most excited to see Last Stand. Kim plays really well to big name Western classics (The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, obviously) as well as contemporary hits (Kill Bill) and he creates really original and exciting action scenes. Take, for example, the final chase scene in The Good, The Bad, The Weird:

This is one of the most awesome things you will ever see in a movie.

All of these releases are really exciting news, though. I've been out of the Korean movie loop for a while (between being in the states and then working too much in Korea) and this is the perfect thing to jump back into.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment?

2011-11-13T16:09:00.001+09:00

I'll let you decide. That said, some of those prisoners have some pretty sweet dance moves.

Book Recommendation: "This is Paradise!"

2011-11-11T10:57:00.001+09:00

Since my first go-round in South Korea, North Korea has become one of my pet interests. The latest book I read on the subject is one of the few books written by a refugee (with the assistance of a French[?] journalist). The writing itself is pretty simple and dry; it would be a boring book if it weren't about a first-hand look into what living in North Korea is like.

There's two scenes that I think are pretty telling.

SCENE 1

As a student, the narrator had to fulfill quotas of fecal matter to be used in the communal fields as fertilizer. He and his friends would go around town emptying out outhouses and collecting animal droppings. Some other people managed to have gardens, though, and would get fiercely protective over their manure. At one point he almost came to blows with a neighbor over a frozen dog turd.

A fistfight over dog shit. Over who gets to keep the dog shit.

SCENE 2

The other story is less surreal and just plain horrifying. The narrator's father escaped into China, found out you could actually make money and eat and not starve to death, and decided his family needed to get out. Patrol guards caught him as he escaped back into North Korea and threw him into prison. The prison experience itself was horrendous, but that's not the real story. (Though fortunately the father survived and eventually brought the whole family to South Korea, happy ending!)

As Jong-min put it, "It's a North Korean gulag, not a day spa." The prisoners were often beaten before being thrown in a cell with eighteen or nineteen other people. One day, this guy gets thrown in their cell who looks especially like hell. He had obviously gotten a special round of body blows. The other prisoners noticed and asked him why. At first he was really reticent about it. "I stole some meat." No one buys that, of course. Eventually the truth comes out.

The man's wife had gone off to look for food, so he was home alone with their young daughter. They were both starving more or less to death, like everyone in North Korea who isn't a top party cadre. The girl was so hungry she started crying and asking about food. The man, irritated, knocked her back. She fell and cracked her head pretty hard, eyes rolled back and mouth foaming and all of that stuff.

She would either not survive, or would survive with all kinds of brain damage. So he picked up a hatchet and cracked her a good one on the back of the head. Then he cooked her up and ate her.

Again: he killed and ate his own daughter. That is how hungry he was. That's the kind of hunger that's ongoing in North Korea.

It's a book worth reading, for sure. It's also a pretty quick read and you'll burn through it in just a day or two.

Funny Because It's True

2011-11-05T20:43:00.000+09:00

The image is a link to the original website. Most of them are pretty funny and manage to avoid go-to, "HERP DERP KOREA IS WEIRD" jokes.

Family Pictures

2011-11-01T22:38:00.000+09:00

I will be quiet around here again, for a little bit. This time, I will be writing a novel instead of working at a crappy school, so don't worry! My silence means good things! But since today was the first day at my new school, I wanted to share the highlights of my "getting to know you" day. I showed them photos of my friends and family and important places back home. Two pictures in particular I want to pick out.

This me and my family on Thanksgiving. Clockwise, starting with the person who is very obviously my grandmother: my Mom-mom, me, my brother, my mom, my dad, my Uncle Steve, and my cousin Haley. (Not pictured is Aunt Donna, my mom's sister.) A pretty textbook "American" picture. Everyone knew it was my family, my older students knew it was Thanksgiving. Then I asked them if they could guess who's who. Every single student who saw this picture was convinced of two things. One, that my brother was my father. Two, that my father was my grandfather.

Before they saw that one, though, I showed my kids this one.

This me and the boy on a springtime cruise to Helsinki. I asked them: "Who is this?" A not insignificant number replied, in all earnestness: "Your mother and father."

My lifestyle must be aging me faster than I realize!

Everyone's a silver hero, everyone's a Captain Kirk

2011-10-27T02:49:00.000+09:00

Since I've been back in Korea, I've taken to watching Star Trek: The Original Series. I just finished watching "Miri," which is honestly a terrible episode. (Seriously? A planet that looks just like Earth? Were all of the model and miniature builders on strike? Never mind that none of the drama or the pathos or plot in the episode is at all relevant to the fact that it's "Earth, Jim, but not as we know it.") (McCoy never actually utters those lines but it felt appropriate, allow me the artistic license.)

The premise is, on Earth 2, people were working on a way to manifest immortality. The result was a virus that would age you extremely slowly (one month every hundred years) until puberty hit, whereupon you turned into a shrill, buboes-covered zombie thing and then died. Result? A planet full of children. Three hundred years ~~(assuming, of course, that the Earth twin moves around its own sun at a similar speed)~~ of nothing but children. At one point the children try to foil Kirk and company's attempt to find a ~~cure~~ vaccine. One of them—the titular Miri, who at maybe age 14 is Kirk's creepiest romantic conquest yet—leads Kirk to the shrieking hooligans. Amid the ironic-I-guess? background of their "playing school" setting he does his best to get them to listen to him. Naturally, they don't.

All of this is to say that watching that ninety seconds of footage was like a mirror into my own (not necessarily current) life, though with better English: dealing with a room full of hyperactive defiant children, struggling to communicate key ideas and concepts to these monstrous little hellspawn, dying of a deadly plague...all part of the hagwon job. Alas I can't find it isolated, and don't feel like downloading and learning how to use a video editing program just for that, so content yourself with the few seconds in the original broadcast preview for this episode.

The next time I'm frustrated in a class, I'll just think to myself: what would Captain Kirk do?

Unfortunately the show doesn't really give us an answer. Instead, through the magic of editing, Kirk and the children show up to save the day, sans all that messy "classroom management" business.

Return of the Temple Stay

2011-10-24T20:53:00.000+09:00

My week of funemployment gave me the time to touch up and upload my photos of the Golgulsa Temple Stay. Instead of retroactively editing the entry (which no one will go back and check anyway), I'll just share the pictures here (where no one will read anyway).

Bonus points: in which I attempt to be a Writer (better known as, selections from The Little Orange Notebook I Carry All The Time):

The morning started out rough. My cell phone alarm was so subtle as to be...absolutely silent. I'm still not sure how that happened. I only overslept by five minutes, however. It was stil early enough that I took the time to hit a PC-bang before I got on the subway—no job leads whatever, though I had been expecting at least three.

With only slightly diminished hopes, I promptly boarded the subway...on the wrong line. Again, fortunately my mistake was rendered relatively minor as I figured it out by the next stop. All went smoothly until I got to the Express Bus Terminal, a labyrinth of a building given over to an almost exclusively local clientele. In other words, this was no Incheon Airport, no Seoul Metro—English was in tiny print and not spoken. It took two foiled ticketing window encounters to realize that I was in the wrong building. My sleep-dazed self had somehow missed signs for the Gyeongbu Terminal, which is separated from the rest of the terminal for reasons unknown to me.

Once there, the situation was, at first, intimidating: the demanding-looking schedule, the four A.M. wake-up call, the 3000-bow penalty for missing morning chanting—but it soon degenerated into a summer camp type atmosphere. Only, at summer camp people gave a shit if you didn't show up. The minders here didn't seem to give shits or even know who was still here and who had left. They were all too busy being hippies, I guess.

I was expecting something like a sesshin: functional silence, room to myself, lots of time for meditation and to generally be alone with my thoughts. But there was no silence to be found, and rooming with nearly all of the girls on the program meant lots of chatter. And when there was silence—during sitting meditation—the cushions supplied were less than adequate. My hips needed the extra lift from a proper zafu to get into a good quarter lotus position like I had learned at my sangha.

Ceremonies were led by a ginger woman who had "drunk the Kool-Aid," as Mark described her. I, too, had noticed her tendency towards "Koreaboo."

I decided on an experiment the second night (or rather, followed Mark's lead): skip evening chanting and Sunmudo practice altogether. If questioned I would claim debilitating stomach ache. Or slitting migraine. But of course, no one questioned me (or even noticed I was missing).

Frankly speaking, the vast majority of other English teachers in Korea piss me off. There are some who never get over the culture shock, and others who are so blithely unaware that it never hits them in the first place. I don't believe in making "Korea Friends" (people you only befriend because you are both foreigners in Korea) so I didn't say much to any of the other guests. Without Mark I may have been well and truly miserable the whole time.

WHAT I LIKED

the food

the apathetic atmosphere (It became more of a blessing than a curse, as I could basically do whatever the heck I wanted and make my vacation my own.)

beautiful grounds

nice accommodations

attending a Buddhist Chuseok service

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE

lack of organization

lack of discipline

lack of authenticity

lack of silence

Obligatory Tourist Spot #5: Gyeongbokgung

2011-10-21T17:05:00.000+09:00

Seoul has lots of Joseon era sites to visit (and earlier, too, I guess, but Seoul was the capital of Joseon-era Korea). One of the bigger and nicer palaces is Gyeongbokgung: literally, "The Palace of Shining Happiness." Why do Asian names for things sound really, awfully dumb when translated into English?

Most of Gyeongbokgung is a reconstruction, as the Japanese basically razed it not once but twice. Oh, and the second time, they put a new residence for the Japanese Governor-General on top of the ruins. Way to go, guys. Surely that will endear you to your newest colonial conquests...or inspire them to vomit on the steps of your embassy.

I had always meant to visit (it just seemed like one of those things I should do), and my week of funemployment provided me the perfect opportunity to do just that. I didn't take a tour or anything (read as: I don't know jack about the palace beyond what I just wrote up there), so I'll just picspam a little bit.

Heungnymun, the Second Inner Gate (also pictured above).

Changing of the guard ceremony.

"Don't eat on the bench or Haechi will swallow your soul!"

Department of Redundant Redundancies: "...longevity symbols...symbolize longevity." The rest of the English on the signage was impeccable, in terms of both grammar and style, so this stood out. "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?"

Geunjeongjeon (Imperial Throne Room): originally built in the 1390s, burned down (by the Japanese) in the 1590s, reconstructed in the 1860s and has survived all Japanese invasions since then.

I think this is Gyeonghoeru Pavilion but I can't be sure, everything runs together. Gyeongheoru Pavilion is where emperors had feasts and banquets and fancy unofficial fun times.

Part of Amiran, the gardens behind the queen's quarters.

The impression I can't really convey here is that Gyeongbokgung is kind of big. Even with restorations only 40% complete, it's pretty big. The South Korean government launched a 20-year program to rebuild the entire goddamn thing (which clocks in at 330 buildings and over 400,000 square meters) and if it ever gets done, Gyeongbokgung will be even more impressive. Of course, The Forbidden City is still bigger (three times as many buildings and just under twice the amount of land), but I don't think China had to rebuild the thing three times.

I'll probably make another trip in the spring to take the English tour and to visit the two museums attached (The National Folk Museum and The National Palace Museum). Unfortunately, their price isn't included in the general admission (I don't think?), but Gyeongbokgung is such a deal (3000 won) I can splurge without feeling bad. Museum admission in South Korea tends to be very economical, anyway.

Ernest Goes to Immigration

2011-10-19T16:54:00.000+09:00

And going to Immigration is only a couple steps above going to Prison, but definitely not as fun as going to Camp. (Confession: I haven't seen a single Ernest movie.)

Anyway, I have successfully done whatever it is I had to do to change my visa and not be a questionably-legal worker in Korea. It took the better part of my morning and I did it all without crying! ("Cry until something works" was actually my plan B, in case the plan A of "Hope that someone will speak English and babysit you" didn't work out.)

A word, then about the Immigration Office in Yangju.

First of all, Yangju is a speedbump on the way to the DMZ. My good friend Maddie has a grandfather whose quote often got tossed around between all of us (back when we worked together): "Uijeongbu?! That shithole's a speedbump on the way to the DMZ!" Not so anymore.

So I don't understand the decision to move the immigration office to Yangju, which by all means seems much smaller, poorer, and more difficult to get to for most of the people concerned. Nonetheless the building is nice, and new, and probably the nicest and newest thing in the entire dong, if not the surrounding ones as well.

Second of all, despite it being, y'know, Immigration and dealing with, y'know, people who are not Korean, there is a dearth of helpful interpreters or signage in any language but Korean. I'm not trying to play the "I'm an English teacher and my life in Korea is SO HARD" card: I mean to say, a government office providing extremely necessary services to a group of people who might not speak Korean, or might not speak it well, should probably take that into consideration when setting up its office. I mean, even subway announcements are in Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese. Would it be too much to ask the same of Korean Immigration as well? (Honestly, they probably only really need English, Chinese, and Russian.)

They did, helpfully, check off all the boxes in the forms you needed to fill out beforehand (literally every copy of every form had checkmarks, grandfathered in from whatever master copy years and years ago) as well as provide a sample guide so you could see exactly what to put where (though only in English). Unhelpfully, the forms were in no way labeled and there were quite a few there to pick through. What US military needs is (presumably) different from what I need is different from what a student or gyoppo needs. Seoul immigration does have the helpful "1345" foreign language hotline, which I suppose you could call in a pinch,

Other blog accounts of this office spoke of understaffed desks and long wait periods, but while I was there every station was manned and I only waited a couple minutes to speak with a clerk. The first one I talked to was a fellow whose English seemed limited, and after looking at my papers provided me with the correct forms to fill out to transfer and extend my visa. I finished those, took another number, and talked with a younger and more fluent girl (fluent enough that she commented to her coworker, in Korean, on the "Konglish" in the Korean forms). She got me squared away and was probably more patient with me than I can imagine, as fatigue, vague illness, and stress were doing their best to make me an impossible human being to deal with.

It would have been easier with a native Korean with me, but everyone at the new school is too busy working so the unspoken assumption was that I'd take care of it myself. My mom commented on my self-sufficiency back when I was considering leaving my job in Bundang, but really I'm not. If I had not had the sheer dumb luck to have a clerk with a relatively high level of English fluency, I probably would have cried, at which point things would either sort themselves out (to get the fat blubbering foreign girl to stop being an awkward production as soon as possible) or I would have gone home in defeat. Neither way is a very graceful way to handle failure.

Beyond the stress of foreign paperwork, it was a beautiful day to be out and about for four hours. All of the cabbies in Yangju drove with the window down to take advantage of the mild weather and the sunshine. The leaves are just beginning to change in places, and while it's getting chillier (down to single digit Celsius temperatures in the night), the humid summer air has evaporated away into the refreshing clarity of autumn.

I have to go back and finalize everything in a few weeks (things get outsourced to the big office in Seoul instead of being taken care of in the assorted provincial offices) but 95% of the remaining bugbear hounding at me since I changed jobs has been taken care of.

Real Life Drama: Take This Job And Shove It

2011-10-16T17:02:00.000+09:00

I suppose now that I have moved house, it's an appropriate time to say that I no longer work at Cassandra Academy. I've settled back in to Uijeongbu and am due to start a new job one week from tomorrow. I'm really excited both to be back in Uijeongbu and also to start this new job because it seems like a good one. And once again the header of my blog is relevant to my locale!

Even with all the excitement, however, there's also more than a little resentment and bile below the surface—after all, I did leave the job for a reason. Many reasons. The first instinct is to spew that bile far and wide over the Internet, even though I realize that's not entirely fair. The school was simply not a good match for me, and they can't be blamed entirely. Not only that, but there are plenty of other English teachers who get treated even worse—to say nothing of the manic work schedule of a typical Korean. There is a little bit of entitlement in my anger, I realize. In the interest of moderation, I will enumerate my reasons (because hey, it's my blog and I do what I want), but avoid naming names.

Cassandra Academy used to be to a branch (or franchise, I'm hazy on how these things are sorted) of the mega-chain POLY. That's the most identifying information I'll name, mostly because its history as a POLY school has a lot to do with how it's run now. The books and curriculum are all (I'm 90% certain) POLY's material, as are the hours (9 AM to 7.30 PM). Cassandra has two campuses, with plans to open nine(!) more; right now one campus has typical hagwon hours and the other campus has atypical hours. I worked at the atypical one.

My first and foremost complaint is the hours. While there is a ninety minute block in the middle of the day to prep for your afternoon classes, plus another hour for lunch, the fact remains that you spend ten and a half hours every day more or less tethered to your work. If you're the kind of person who has boundless energy, both mental and physical, then it's not an entirely untenable schedule. When I first arrived in Korea, even, I could manage it, since the sheer and utter exuberance of being back in Korea carried me through the hours to scheduled dinner dates with friends I had not seen for a year and change. Once I got settled in, however, it didn't take long for me to wear down.

That's why my updates have been so intermittent and lacking in depth since I've been back: I don't have the time to sit down and set down my thoughts in anything other than a cursory, skim-the-surface manner. The longer entries I've posted (for example, what I wrote a while back about "who owns Arirang?") have taken weeks, due in part to the fact that just as I would hit a good writing groove, I'd check the time and realize I had to go to bed.   Then factor in revisions and editing and spell-checking, and you add even more time. There are still two more drafts sitting in the Internet ether, waiting to be finished at a time when I have more brain juice.

Not only that, but the broad expanse of hours means that doing any kind of life maintenance is impossible. Your only real free time is the weekend, but most of the things you need to do are closed on the weekend. Either that, or they're the things you don't WANT to spend your weekend doing (like getting teeth pulled).   Your only window of opportunity for life administrative duties would be your lunch hour and part of your prep. Otherwise, you have to call off and then everyone else who does work gets screwed over because they have to cover your classes.

The other big reason I left was an absolutely toxic work environment. My manager at Sherlock was not the most popular guy, but I've never carried as much sustained rage at his shenanigans as I have at the (former) head foreign teacher at Cassandra, a woman held in utter contempt by each and every teacher who worked under her. In one of those twists of fate you kind of come to expect in the corporate world, at the company picnic on Saturday the owners announced that she was being promoted to Vice Director. The fact that they did this despite numerous complaints from teachers about her is, paradoxically, both mind-boggling and par for the course. Clearly they value her decision to stick with the school (and the pretty sweet gig and cozy schedule she set up for herself) above the complaints from teachers who come and go after a year, or two at the most.   Even when they keep hearing complaints from a number of different teachers.

There's a whole litany of complaints I have about her, but I will sum it up as neatly as possible: she is in a managerial position without even an iota of managerial training, and it shows. She micromanages, she undermines your authority in the classroom, she delegates work to teachers that should really be under her purview, and she is not one to rise above petty disagreements. Even the students—or at least most of the ones that I taught—dislike her. One of my older students called her Voldemort. And I say all of this as a teacher who managed to get treated pretty well: she only dumped work for me to do during my free periods (named, of course, "R&D periods" so they can justify giving you more work to do) a couple of times and never pulled me aside for awkward confrontations.

Other little things came up that contributed to my decision to leave: lack of communication between the owners, other administrators, and the teachers; the fact that they do the bogus "base salary plus a monthly bonus" bullshit so as to cheat you out of money on your pension and severance; useless and inefficient "teacher meetings" (but then, is there ever an effective and efficient meeting?); lots of little bullshit that we were some how required to do despite it not ever being mentioned either in the interview or in the contract.

In the interest of being "fair and balanced," I will say this: those who work at the other campus with more typical hours and without the same head foreign teacher enjoy their work and seem to be treated pretty well. It is not a problem with the whole company, per se; just that the particular campus where I worked was not a fun place. If the managing situation was different, it could easily be a tolerable, if not fun, place to work. And while the "low base salary plus monthly bonus" is a bunch of crap, they still send you home every month with very decent pay, all told. The actual teaching is a breeze, as there is a lot of content in the material (maybe, in some cases, too much) so you're not stuck with wondering what to do next. Coming from a school that used utterly contentless books (try spending ten class periods teaching fifth graders the concept of comparatives and superlatives after they get it on the first day, from a book targeted at seven year olds), I had a lot more fun in my classes at Cassandra than I did at Sherlock. It just wasn't enough to counter the fact that the hours were soul-sucking and that the management was subpar.

I would hate for this to be anyone's first experience in Korea. My prior life here meant I had loads of networking opportunities available: people recommended recruiters to me, forwarded job openings, and eventually I found my new job via the Uijeongbu Crew Facebook group. Many other people at Cassandra, however, don't have that prior experience to draw on, which makes leaving much more difficult. Hopefully I can provide them even just a fraction of the assistance I received, should they make that decision.

Anything else would be too personal to provide in a public forum, I feel, but I am amenable to any questions asked of me in private. I'll just let Johnny Paycheck and David Allen Coe play this entry out:

Obligatory Korean Tourist Spot #4: Temple Stay

2011-10-13T23:54:00.000+09:00

Remember that time I went to Gyeongju for Chuseok? Yeah, I had almost forgotten that, too. Fortunately, with the three day weekend (and canceled trip to Gwangju), I now have time to tell you all about it!

Just kidding, it's been two weeks since my three day weekend and I've been incredibly remiss in updating this. I kept a notebook my entire trip in Gyeongju (since I had a lot of time to myself), and I would love to do some kind of pseudo-literary write-up on it. Maybe I will in the near future. But before they vanish entirely from my memory, let me get the bones of the trip out here, even if they lack the meat.

Gyeongju is beautiful. While the naked Korean winter has its own kind of beauty, I was glad to be down there in the summer for the greenness and foliage and so forth. If anything, expectations were exceeded in that department. Since I don't have any of my pictures ready for Internet publishing (in need of some GIMP adjusting and image resizing), I'm stealing some of Mark's. He'll deal with it.

The weather was intermittently rainy, with some spots of gorgeous sunshine. The temple itself was also lovely, though not as huge and extensive as Bongeunsa or Bulgoksa.

Truth be told, that was about all I got out of it. There were a lot of mitigating factors involved: my personal experiences with Buddhist retreats and thus my expectations thereof; the sheer number of foreigners (way more than they seemed to really be prepared for); unpleasant life situation leading to uncharacteristically dyspeptic mental state; my general disdain for fellow anglophone foreigners; whatever. In a nutshell, I found the experience extremely tourist-y and not particularly well-organized.

The former descriptor is a subjective one, absolutely: other people seemed to really enjoy themselves and I don't doubt they found the experience enlightening or life-changing or whatever. Organization is a fair one to take them to task for, though. The schedule often changed at random and without warning; meals that took ten or fifteen minutes to eat were allocated to ninety minute blocks which left you with a lot of random meandering to do (or, presumably, naps to take). If you didn't show up for an event, no one came to look for you. Upon arrival they warned that "missing morning chanting means you do 3000 bows for punishment, and it's 1080 bows for any other chanting that you miss," but I skipped out on the evening chanting my last day there and suffered no consequences whatsoever.

Mark and I left one day earlier than anticipated—traveling ON Chuseok proper—and it was probably the smartest decision I could have made. Nonetheless, it was nice to be out of Seoul for a few days, and seeing Mark was also a pleasant (and totally unexpected) surprise.

Overall, I wouldn't really recommend this particular temple's program, at least not their Chuseok one. Maybe during the off-season it's a different tone, but Chuseok is simply too scatter-brained and too disorganized to really give you any sense of culture that isn't prettied up for white people.

Ich bin eine Erdnuss

2011-10-02T11:43:00.000+09:00

A conversation my kindergarten class had with their other teacher:

"Lisa-teacher, you are tall!"

"No, I'm just wearing tall shoes."

"Ah. Katherine-teacher is very very short. She's like a peanut."

Bae Doona, no!

2011-09-22T22:56:00.000+09:00

Like every other kid my age, I freaking loved the heck out of The Matrix. Doubly-so for me because not only did the wire-fu-fighting-exploding-oh-god-what-was-that-oh-sweet-Rammstein-soundtrack aesthetic pretty much plug straight into a teenager's typical attention span, but also because at the time I was heavy into a cyberpunk phase that I haven't really ever grown out of. (I mean, I run Linux, fer frack's sake.) I missed the initial theatrical release, but caught up with it on DVD. I watched The Animatrix. I rented the bullshit video game but never actually completed it because getting out of the intro level was anything but intuitive (I spent many an hour on GameFAQs trying to figure it out; one day I plan to pick up a used GameCube copy to see if age has improved my addled video gaming wits). I have the poster hanging up in my bedroom. I had (have?) a sweet sleeveless, cyberpunk-looking top with asymmetrical seams and Matrix glyphs on it that I cannot find anywhere online. I waited for the sequels with bated breath.

And if I die before I wake, I pray Keanu my soul to take...

tl;dr: GUYS I REALLY LIKED THE MATRIX. Also, prepare for some massive tl;dr coming up, whilst I nerd out.

I thought the Wachowski Brothers had done something cool that, while not visionary storytelling as such, was solid storytelling with really interesting visuals. I looked forward not only to the sequels but whatever else they would do.

And then...the sequels happened.

"Well, they had a bad run of luck," I thought. "Maybe they didn't really want to do a trilogy. Maybe the studio botched it up." Still I had faith.

And then...V for Vendetta happened.

Admit it, you only saw this to see Natalie Portman wth a shaved head.

I couldn't even really blame them entirely for this one, either. The source material (oh yeah, I'm gonna go there) is pretty mediocre. Hardly Alan Moore's greatest work. The art's pretty "meh," the dystopian future not all believable, and (most importantly), EVIE IS THE MOST ANNOYING WOMAN CHARACTER TO EVER APPEAR IN A SERIOUS-BUSINESS GRAPHIC NOVEL. Fortunately Alan Moore grew out of this with Promethea, and one of the things that was better in the movie (oh yeah, I just went there, too) was that Evie, while still kind of dumb and irritating, was not half as dumb and irritating as the source material. I wish I could find even just one scan to show you, but you'll have to take my word for it, Internet. This is why Natalie Portman was an awesome casting choice because while she sometimes makes questionable film decisions (see: the entire Star Wars prequels shenanigans), under it all you can tell she's a smart cookie.

Nonetheless, the movie's a pretty hammy, mediocre thing overall. Not eye-gougingly bad, but not on par with, say, Zack Snyder's take on Watchmen. Though to be fair that's also better source material.

And then...Speed Racer happened.

A look of horror crosses Christina Ricci's face as she realizes exactly what movie she's in.

Now, for summer blockboster shlock, you could do worse. Subjectively, I still like this movie. A lot. But I realize that it is truly and utterly deplorable and without any cinematic merit whatsoever and is pretty much a QED reason to permanently ban les frères Wachowski from the world of cinema. At least until they make another Bound. If nothing else, Speed Racer is a pretty clear indicator that they've gone George Lucas/Sam Raimi batshit by this point: more interested in special effects and visuals and all the cool technology you do with a computer than in telling a good, interesting, or even exciting story. I mean at the very least they could have put in so many shoutouts to the old show: the cheesy sound effects, the pose Speed strikes at the end of the beginning credits (would be a perfect bullet time moment!)...and you gave us nothing, Wachowskis. Nothing.

So when I read that not only are the Wachowskis attempting another movie (based off the novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell), but that my number one favorite Korean actress Bae Doona is going to be involved, I was sad. Disappointed. Though I admit it took me a second because I have been so utterly disappointed in the Wachowksis that my brain parsed "Wachowski brothers" as "Coen brothers" and I thought, Wow, Bae Doona with the Coen brothers? Awesome! Then my reading comprehension kicked in.

On the plus side, Tom Tykwer (remember Run Lola, Run?) will be co-directing so we may see some substance yet. It also seems that Bae's role will be relatively minor; the film is actually six short vignettes that overlap in small assorted ways, and Bae will only appear in one of them (the dystopian future Seoul populated by clones) while the white people with the main billing will appear in two or three.

You can read more (with less Wachowski-inspired rage) here: Bae Doona to Play Clone in Wachowskis' New Sci-Fi Flick, courtesy the Chosun Ilbo.

Noraebangin' Hits, Volume 2

2011-09-06T00:06:00.000+09:00

In no particular order:

I Am Woman (Helen Reddy)
Johnny B. Goode (Chuck Berry)
Rehab (Amy Winehouse)
Don't Stop Me Now (Queen)
Take This Job And Shove It (Johnny Paycheck)

To be edited as I see fit.

From the Mouths of Babes

2011-08-30T21:29:00.000+09:00

One of my lower-level classes read an article about Ban Ki-moon being reelected as Secretary General of the UN. This was the worksheet they did after the reading.

DON'T JUDGE ME FOR USING COMIC SANS I TEACH LITTLE KIDS OKAY??

Obligatory Korean Tourist Spot #3: Bongeunsa

2011-08-28T13:25:00.000+09:00

On Saturday, my friend Breda and I, and her friend Bo Seul, went to Bongeunsa temple. It's kind of deep in the heart of Seoul, right across the street from COEX (of the aquarium fame). Despite being in the middle of one the loudest, busiest, most crowded cities in the world, Bongeunsa still retains a very quiet and isolated atmosphere. I'm pretty sure there's some kind of force field (powered by super secret Buddhist voodoo?) keeping out all of the sound and chaos of the city around it.

This is part of a display in the main courtyard of the temple. The white flowers are left in memory of people who have died. The other plants are left with wishes. On the other side, you can light an incense stick and leave it burning there as a wish. I guess the idea is that the smoke or the scent carries your wish up to heaven?

Pretty sure this is related to some expression about enlightenment and the tail of a tiger or some such. Too lazy to look it up.

While we were there, they started the call to evening prayers.

After a couple hours of traipsing about the temple grounds, we sat here for a rest and a bit of zen.

And we ended the visit with spring water from a fountain.

We wandered around the long way to find it. Even though all the signs at Samsung Station point you towards exit 6 for Bongeunsa, it's probably easier just to walk all the way through COEX. Bongeunsa is right across the street. And best of all, it's free to visit. All in all, a great way to spend a free afternoon!

Korea, China, and Arirang

2011-08-26T19:42:00.000+09:00

Recently, China decided to put the Korean folk song Arirang on their Heritage List. Specifically, they put a particular version sung by ethnic Koreans in Yanbian Prefecture, Jilin Province.

Now, for some background: China has a population of about 1.4 billion. Two million of that number are the ethnic Koreans living in China. About half of them live in Yanbian Prefecture in Jilin province in northeastern China. A visual reference:

It's an autonomous prefecture specifically because of the high number of "joseonjok" (Chinese people of Korean descent), as with other parts of the country where any of China's 56 recognized minority groups live in dense populations. I don't have sources on this, but I assume many of them are North Koreans who fled when they had the chance. A significant portion of China's landmass is actually taken up by these autonomous prefectures/regions/etc:

All that green out in the northwest is Chinese Muslim territory.

The problem with these "autonomous prefectures" is that despite the name, they enjoy something of a second-class status in terms of legislature and so forth; they are actually more restricted than non-autonomous prefectures. You'll notice that Tibet is one of those autonomous regions. So autonomous is actually not-really autonomous. Apparently every day is opposite day in the PRC.

In case you didn't know which one was Tibet, I'm saving you the embarrassment of having to look it up. You're welcome.

This is all to say: China may or may not respect the rights, desires, and wishes of the joseonjok living within its borders. It's safe to say joseonjok probably get the short end of the stick. And they don't even get the fringe benefit of American celebrities ~~ignorantly trying to champion their cause~~ ~~using the situation to make themselves out to be better than everyone else~~ ~~maybe knowing where they are on a map~~ knowing that they exist!

Free Tibet, free Mandela, free Mumia. Whatever.

China has listed other distinctly Korean things on their "Intangible Cultural Assets" list. Quoting from the English version of the Chosun Ilbo:

Earlier, China had designated as its own cultural heritage the traditional Korean feast celebrating one's 60th birthday, traditional Korean wedding ceremony, the traditional Korean dress hanbok and a farmer's dance, saying they are practiced by ethnic Korean in northeastern China.

Not Chinese.

Unfortunately, the news trail is difficult to follow beyond the superficial responses of REACTIONARY KOREAN RAGE, so I don't trust that everything coming to the top is unbiased. Unsubstantiated rumors are that China wants to make a push to put (this version of) Arirang on the UNESCO Intangible Heritage List as well—for China. There's shadowy Internet talk about how this is related to China's Northeast Project and possible plans to absorb North Korea.* I can't find anything to back this up, so at the moment I'll give China the benefit of the doubt. All I know for certain is that China has included a bunch of Korean stuff on its list of intangible cultural assets already (presumably in a totally domestic, "for-our-use-only" way), and has now gone and added a version of Arirang to the list.

Roboseyo (a blog worth reading whether or not there's controversy) asserts: "Nobody owns Arirang."

The Korean begs to differ.

Nonetheless, Roboseyo stands by his point. In a four-part series, no less.

So. Does China have any claim to ownership of Arirang? In any capacity? What about hanboks or farmer dances or 60th birthdays? Who wins, Roboseyo or The Korean?

Well, first of all, what the heck is Arirang?

Here is the hotly-contested Arirang. Or well, not necessarily the specific version currently under contention. I don't think this is the version China intends to lay claim to, but I'm also not sure if this is "the" version of Arirang (that is, the Seoul version; the most popular one).

You can look on YouTube and find hundreds more.

It is old. The all-knowing Wiki says the "standard" version of Arirang is about 600 years old, though it also says there are other folk versions that are even older. Importantly: it is old. It is old and it is a song every Korean knows and probably loves—or at least associates with being Korean, with their country, with their family, with the assorted accomplishments and achievements of their people, with their history that stretches back for thousands of years.

I think North Americans have a tough time understanding things that are just so old. We absolutely have culture, and we have songs and traditions and celebrations that are American (or Canadian) as much as there are are songs and traditions and celebrations that are Korean.

But at the same time, they are young practices. And because of their youth they are inherently plastic, flexible, transnational. I heard a performance of Handel's Messiah and Irving Berlin's White Christmas by a Tico choir while I lived in Costa Rica. I wasn't outraged at the theft of my American/anglophone culture; just mildly amused at a bunch of Ticos singing about their desire for a white Christmas in a tropical climate. The closest thing I ever came to cultural theft outrage was the recent cellphone commercial that used images of Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, and the fucking Greensboro riots to sell their product—but that was race rage, not cultural theft rage. I don't think there's a single American cultural item at whose cultural appropriation I would be utterly and grossly offended. America's culture has all come from somewhere else to begin with, after all.

Part of the reason for this is that those cultural items are practices that have come into fruition in a relatively globalized age and place: the great composers of Europe all had news of what the others doing and developing, even if not instantaneously; Shakespeare set many of his plays in locales very far from England. There was no radio, no TV, and little contact with the outside international world in Korea when Arirang was establishing its hold over the Korean mindshare. It developed in an extremely Korean setting and has continued to be associated with "being Korean."

So basically wait 600 years and Americans of the future will be listing this among their "Intangible Cultural Assets".

I think we also have a tough time understanding what it's like to be a minority culture. (Minorities within the US or Canada probably get it, at least a little bit better.) It's kind of easy to roll your eyes and scoff about China's claim on Arirang, or even to respectfully and intelligently argue for it, when you've never experienced your identity being the non-normative one; when you've never been a colonized people, or a citizen of a country forcibly divided in half exclusively for the benefit of other outside powers. I'm not trying to play the race card here, but my point is that if a significant number of Koreans are pissed off about this, there might actually be a good reason to be pissed off. And as a white guy from a relatively privileged nation, telling them they shouldn't be comes off as a wee bit patronizing.

(If you couldn't tell, I tend to fall more in line with The Korean's argument than Roboseyo's.)

There are a few factors, however, that mitigate things, some of which Roboseyo already outlined so I'll try not to repeat them:

Is China listing Arirang as a whole, or only the Janbian variant thereof?
Are they listing it domestically, or pushing for an international recognition of (one particular version of) Arirang as Chinese?
Are they doing this to make amends with the joseonjok in China, or for less altruistic reasons?
Are they doing anything else to foster better relationships with the joseonjok?

I think those go a long way towards deciding if China's actions are laudable, neutral, or reprehensible. My own take on it:

On the face of it, China's attempt to list anything as distinctly Korean as Arirang** in their own list of Intangible Cultural Assets smacks of hubris. Especially when you consider the attitude China has towards contemporary international IP laws (to which I think this is an analogous situation), this can only make China look bad.

That said, I do think China has a claim on any traditions that have arisen among joseonjok people since their move from the Korean peninsula. Culture doesn't appear in a vacuum, nor does it change or adapt in one. No doubt there are plenty of "Intangible Cultural Assets" that belong distinctly and uniquely to Chinese people of Korean descent, and the credit for those assets goes just as much to their Chinese environment as it does to their Korean heritage.

Plus, if China is doing this as a step to recognize the value of their Korean citizens, and to assign a value of worth and respect to the native culture of their immigrant/minority groups, then this should be encouraged. Presumably it could open up the door to Yanbian and the other autonomous prefectures actually becoming autonomous. Not opposite day, PRC-style "autonomous." This is good, and this is a case where I think it would be worth Koreans to bite their lip and deal with it.

It's my own estimation that this take is a bit too Pollyanna, however. I admit I may be buying into the modern-day "Yellow Peril" hype that gets propagated around the US ("The Chinese own us! Evil Commies!") but the current Chinese government doesn't really do a whole lot of things that are in any way commendable. Why they would suddenly reverse SOP on this particular topic?

But where does Arirang specifically fit in with all of this? If it is significantly different than the versions of Arirang that are well-known on the peninsula (above and below the 38th, by the way), then can China still lay claim to it? Or is it simply just too Korean?

I think there's a simple litmus test you can apply in this situation. When Korean people in China sing Arirang, do they think, "Wow, I feel so Chinese right now!"? When Irish immigrants, and second- and third-generation Irish in the US sang Black is the Color of my True Love's Hair, did they think, "Wow, I feel so American right now!"? Like Roboseyo asserts, the people who practice the culture should be in charge of labeling and preserving it, not governments.

(Of course all this discussion of "Who owns Arirang?" is so much less important than doing what we can to help the DPRK normalize, excise the corrupt regime, and save its people. That goes without saying. But culture is still important!)

*Why would one want to absorb one of the most backwards, bankrupt, chaotic countries in the world? Two reasons. One, upon total regime failure and national collapse, the flood of DPRK refugees into China would be extremely disruptive, and quietly absorbing the country minimizes that damage (or even turns it into an advantage: lots of cheap, educated labor!). Two, North Korea has vast mineral resources. Vast as in, valued in the trillions of US dollars (give or take, obviously it's hard to get solid data). They just lack the means and manpower to extract it due to, you know, starving to death.

**I know that the burden of proof is on me to demonstrate how Arirang is "distinctly Korean" but I don't feel like going into that right now. My proof is this: most Koreans feel that it is part of their culture as Koreans (as opposed to part of their culture as Asians), therefore it's something uniquely Korean.

Chuseok Plans

2011-08-23T23:19:00.000+09:00

Originally I was going to do some international traveling in Southeast Asia, but surprise! Those things cost money! More money than I can responsibly spend with just one paycheck in the bank! So finally, tonight, I came to grips with the sad realization that I will be spending my second long-haul vacation in Korea. At first I was groused at having to keep my Chuseok domestic—not because of Korea, but because it's Chuseok and therefore domestic travel will be packed and things to do will be closed.

Then I remembered: I hadn't done a temple stay the first time around. What better time than Chuseok? I nosed around a few places which all seemed okay except I wanted more than a two-day stay (since I have four days off). Then, I found a winner: a special "just-for-Chuseok" retreat at Golgulsa Temple that starts Saturday evening and finishes around lunchtime on Tuesday. Check out this schedule:

Sunmudo? Archery? Tea ceremonies? This the closest thing I'll ever get to training at a shao-lin temple!

The only downside is that Golgulsa is in Gyeongju. Remember that time I went to Gyeongju? Part of me feels that going to a place I've already been to is a waste of a vacation, but I'm convinced that the experience will be worth it, since I will be doing something entirely different. Plus, my trip was in January before; it'll be nice to see the landscape in the late summer/early fall greenness. The tricky part will be making sure I can get to Gyeongju.

I've also heard people grouse about the temple stays: "Why pay money to wake up early and do work?" Granted, certainly not everyone's cup of tea. Fortunately, I've been to equivalent retreats in the US and so I know exactly what it entails. Plus something about it speaks to the part of me that still wishes she could be an old-school monk. (Though, I guess technically I would be a nun.)

If you're interested in doing this with me, send a message on Facebook or leave a comment.

History: A 7-Year-Old's Perspective

2011-08-21T19:41:00.000+09:00

While I'm sure this student had help from his parents, I'm also sure he understands exactly what he wrote. My favorite line is: "It was [a] dark age for Korean[s]." Quite the poetic turn of phrase!

Movie Review: May 18th

2011-08-14T08:56:00.000+09:00

A Korean friend of mine mentioned this movie to me when I asked him about the Gwangju Democratization Movement. I've been meaning to go to Gwangju (and probably will at some point), mostly because it's an important piece of history I know almost nothing about. Also, Gwangju seems to be a hip and happening art city that would be worth a visit on its own without the history.

The story centers around a few fictional characters placed in the midst of the turbulent events leading up to the violent clash between the civilian militia and the ROK military under the command of Chun Doo-hwan. Kang Min-woo is an easygoing taxi driver, supporting his studious younger brother, Kang Jin-woo. There's the requisite fragile love interest in Park Shin-ae, a nurse at the local hospital.

The movie clocks in at just under two hours, and while it doesn't drag per se, you do see a lot of slow-motion death scenes and shots of overwrought mourners that might have been trimmed by a few minutes here and there. (I'd like to take this moment to say: can moviemakers agree to stop with the overdone "slow-motion, cut the sound" editing style whenever someone mourns the loss of a beloved character killed in action? It's overdone to the point of being cliché.) It doesn't quite cross the line into ham-handed (for me, anyway) but it gets kind of close. Melodramatic theatrics are more of a staple in Korean pop culture than in American, so I assume this was well within the Korean standards of "acceptable drama."

It's also easily excused because the rest of the film is pretty damn good. I admit to not being a good judge of acting (except in picking out the absolutely terrible), so when I say I thought it was extremely well-acted, take it with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, Kim Sang-kyung's performance as Min-woo definitely gave me the sniffles. It's a shame he hasn't been in more movies; IMDB lists a little under one a year since his first movie released in 1998. Hopefully this is because he has discriminating taste: one of his roles is the detective Seo Tae-yoon in Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder (another movie I've been meaning to watch because Bong Joon-ho makes some good stuff).

The only problem with the movie is the lack of moral ambiguity. When you take a story about military action that left hundreds of civilians dead, you're going to have to tread a fine line when it comes to representing the soldiers. I don't doubt for a second that at least some of the paratroopers were as bloodthirsty as portrayed in the movie, but I'm sure there were ones who were just plain horrified. Instead you get a black-and-white, "the militia is good and the paratroopers are sadistic bastards" treatment.

Unfortunate since it started out with potential to be fairly balanced: the movie opens with an idyllic (if a bit overdone) shot of Min-woo driving around the countryside in his taxi. The title flashes, and then immediately cuts to paratroopers getting ready to be deployed. As the plane takes off, the commander gives them your generic military pep talk: go get those commie rebels and give 'em hell, etc. One of the troopers asks his commander if that means they're going north. The commander replies that their destination is top secret and that they'll know when they get there. Everyone takes this to mean that yes, they are going north. Only when dawn breaks does another private realize they're flying south:

"We're going south."
"What?"
"The sun's rising on the left. We're going south."

Upon upon realizing this, the expression of smug satisfaction on their faces (at fighting the DPRK) changes to a mix of confusion and horror. An expression that you don't see on another paratrooper's face for the rest of the movie; they all seem to take pretty readily to massacring unarmed civilians.

The only exception to this portrayal is the token "good guy" paratrooper. Shin-rae's stoic and respectable father had served in the military and left or been discharged for reasons never made clear. One of the mid-ranking paratroopers assigned to Gwangju served under him during this stint in the military and holds him in great esteem. He pays a visit to Shin-rae and her father to warn them of the troops being stationed at the university in Gwangju, lamenting the corruption of the generals and other higher-ups. In the final confrontation at Provincial Office, he lets the father go, unwilling to kill him in cold blood.

The rest of the movie, though, the paratroopers are all sadistic and violent, with nary a shred of humanity in them. And on a visceral, am-I-enjoying-the-movie level, I'm okay with this. People want clearly-defined bad guys and clearly-defined good guys; it makes for easier story-telling. The too-easy moral schematic only really bothers me if I stop and think about it too much.

The movie follows most of the major events that happened over the course of the nine days, ending with the doomed confrontation at the Provincial Office. The violence is also handled tactfully, in that it's far more understated than the events in question were. For example, eyewitness reports confirm the indiscriminate use of bayonets on unarmed civilians, even a pregnant woman. Needless to say this doesn't show up in the movie. No headshots, no extreme gore or mutilation, just your standard-fare bullets and corn syrup splatters.

Did I learn anything about the Gwangju Uprising from watching this movie? No, nothing I didn't already learn from Wikipedia and reading around on the Internet. But does it help bring to life the some of the absolute horror of the incidents? Sure thing. Worth watching? I'd say so, though this is hardly the first SK movie about Gwangju. 1996 saw the release of A Petal, which won a bunch of awards at assorted film festivals; Peppermint Candy is not exclusively about Gwangju but touches on it; and the TV drama Sandglass. Sandglass is sometimes credited with touching off a sort of "Gwangju revival" in the Korean public consciousness, resulting in movies like A Petal and Chun Doo-hwan's conviction of assorted war crimes (though his life sentence was later commuted on the advice of Kim Dae-jung, Chun still paid something like 53 billion won in reparations).

Overall, I liked it, but I seem to be in a minority, as reviews online are mixed. It's managed to escape the view of all the major critics in the US: it has only one audience review on Rotten Tomatoes, and nothing from the so-called "Top Critics." Not sure why this is, when the deplorable and mediocre 2009: Lost Memories has five proper reviews, including three Top Critics. The difference in the audience rating between the two is only a mere .2, but oh well. I stand by my assertion that May 18th is a good movie and worth watching, nonetheless.

The Great Pierogi Reckoning

2011-08-09T01:05:00.000+09:00

One of my kindergarten students went to a farm over their three-day hagwon vacation and picked some potatoes. ("On my vacation, I found out what it was like to be a day laborer!") Her mother, in a gesture you see far more often in Korea than in the US, gave both me and their "homeroom" teacher a giant shopping bag full of potatoes from the trip.

Mmm...

And as far as I'm concerned, there's only one thing you do with potatoes: starchy Eastern European goodness!

So that's what I did with my weekend: schlep back and forth to HomePlus for supplies and ingredients and make what promise to be delicious little packages of joy that I can fry up for dinner whenever I come home from a terrible, rotten, no-good, very bad day.

Round One: Finished

I have so much filling, though, that this will probably be a project for a few days.

(Korea has its own dumplings too, of course; but nothing that comes close to approximating the starch-in-a-starch of a good old-fashioned potato pierogi.)

Visit Seoul With Yorae

2011-08-06T15:06:00.000+09:00

I managed to stumble upon promotional material from the Seoul Metropolitan Government, presumably to entice foreigners to come to Korea (for vacation?) or to try to educate the foreigners that already live here. It's...interesting. Yorae learns about makgeolli, for example, which she says is the liquor most representative of Korea.

Really? Makgeolli, and not the little green bottle?

That aside, take a look at how the Seoul Metro Government goes about trying to sell makgeolli:

The healthy, traditional Korean alcohol, makgeolli! A variety of factors make makgeolli popular, but its nutritional value is one of the main factors. The health benefits of this drink give it an advantage over many other alcoholic beverages.

1. Nutrient-rich ingredients
You’ll find at least 10 amino acids and an abundance of proteins in makgeolli. It also contains 1.9% protein content, compared to 3% in milk, as well as vitamin B.

2. Helps in cancer prevention and menopause
Makgeolli has been found to be effective in preventing liver damage, cancer and helps with menopausal disorders. It’s recommended that you shake well before you drink so that you get the nutrients found in the chunks that settle to the bottom of the makgeolli.

3. Excellent skin care
Makgeolli promotes healthy blood circulation. Also, organic acids found in the drink, such as lactic acid, malic acid, tartaric acid, and others, help revitalize your metabolism and clean out wastes that accumulate in your body. In addition, the yeast found in makgeolli helps relieve constipation.

Health benefits? Really now? That's why people drink? Imagine if Sam Adams tried to bill itself on relieving constipation and "promoting healthy blood circulation."

The Korean currency one is kind of cute and interesting, but some of the others are a bit more surreal and scattershot. You can find them all here. They're way too long (and big) for me to post even a selection here (each entire "episode" is one giant image instead of a few smaller ones), but here's a sample of the art style:

If nothing else, it's reading material for down time.

Piggy Dolls "Piggy" No More

2011-08-01T00:20:00.000+09:00

Piggy Dolls now looks like a generic K-Pop trio. I am so disappointed by this, but I can't say I'm all that surprised. Being fat (or "fat") was a gimmick; the gimmick didn't work; now on to the tried and true formula.

Before...

...After

In Case You Missed It

2011-07-29T17:24:00.000+09:00

The massive rains over the last week or so have caused deadly landslides in parts of the Korean peninsula, North and South.

I'm okay, though, never fear.

New Digs

2011-07-20T20:33:00.000+09:00

Requisite apartment post. Nothing to see here:

It's larger than my old apartment, and it has a better bathroom and came with a microwave. Unfortunately, the stove doesn't really work (but I think that's getting replaced).

Thinking Too Much About K-Drama: "Dream High"

2011-07-14T21:18:00.000+09:00

I've settled nicely into my new job at Cassandra Academy (not the school's real name, obviously!). I feel like I owe you an update on that, but everything is so mundane it would make for trivial reading.

The one perk is that my schedule involves a lot of science classes. I get to spend about half of my day geeking out at small Korean children (although they all seem to be on a "rocks and soil" unit that is literally as boring as dirt; nothing about volcanoes and the rock cycle and minerals to be found!).

The other perk is that I have grown-up Internet this time around, so I've been torrenting entertainment with abandon. Abandon! In addition to some old-school Star Trek and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (don't judge), I have the Korean Dream High.

It ran for 16 episodes on KBS2 from January to March of this year. At the outset, it is at least nine merciful episodes shorter than Boys Over Flowers. But it seems no better in terms of...anything. I've only made it through the first episode but I wanted to articulate my expectations and thoughts so far.

It takes place at a "performing arts" high school that is exclusively devoted to churning out pop idols (in-story justification for intricately-choreographed dance routines and heartfelt ballads? check! excuse for all kinds of K-pop star leading roles, cameos, and performances? check! chance to market new musical material and further solidify pre-existing hits in the public consciousness? check!). I can't imagine a place like this exists in Korea; or rather I should say, I hope it doesn't.

Do K-drama writers realize that they're coming up with absolutely ridiculous premises? Boys Over Flowers deals with wealth that's absolutely obscene; Winter Sonata (the king of all K-dramas) brings on the amnesia, brainwashing, and identity confusion; in Dream High one of the protagonists is blackmailed into attending said school because loan sharks are after her father. She is coerced into repaying his debt by becoming a K-pop sensation.

Doesn't that seem like a roundabout way of getting money from a teenaged girl? Send her to a school and bank on her becoming an idol in a few years? I mean, I can think of at least one obvious alternative, especially if you want the money, like, now (but pimpin' ain't easy). In the first encounter with the loan sharks, he even makes some creepy comment about her paying "with her body" which sounds a lot more sinister than "become a member of the next Girl's Generation."

The first episode ends with the main female protagonist (played by singer Suzy from the relatively new Kpop group "Miss A") dropping to her knees in front of the head director, a man we're instructed to believe is pretty much some kind of sorcerer when it comes to scouting and nurturing talent, begging him to "save her." Something about that just skeeves me out and makes me kind of sad/frustrated, because you know a male character would never do that.

(Aside: I wouldn't be surprised if the raison d'être of Dream High was to garner a fanbase for the freshly-produced girl group Miss A and solidify their media presence. The other leads are well-established in the K-Pop world: 2PM, IU, T-ara, etc.)

There's also an "overweight"/"ugly" girl who struggles with body issues (who is honestly adorable and it's appalling that the show treats her terribly), which are magically solved by losing weight (though this happens later on the series, not in the first episode); that whole situation is so broken and so enraging I won't even comment on it.

All right, time for a manicure and episode 2!

Connected

2011-07-07T20:49:00.000+09:00

I finally have my own grown-up Internet, which means I can start ~~pirating movies~~ planning Skype dates, streaming media, and updating on a regular schedule! How about that?

Photos of the neighborhood and the apartment and so forth will go up. Eventually. The irony is now that I have the ability to post content from my own computer again, I'm just too tired to do so. So instead I'm going to stream some awful K-dramas and think about them too much, and pass it all on to you!

Landed, Part 2

2011-06-28T06:45:00.000+09:00

I've more or less established myself in Bundang. Unfortunately, as it's only my first full day here, I lack an alien card and am thus barred from important things like a phone or my own internet. (People in Bundang are much smarter about WEP-encrypting their connections, and I ironically need an Internet connection to get the WEP-cracking program I would normally use. =P) At least I still have a bank account and debit card!

So happy birthday to me, I get to spend it in this PC-bang and then at the hospital and then (maybe) training.

Bundang is definitely a bit more happening than the sleepy old 'bu. Which isn't necessarily a good OR bad thing. Just different. It will take some adjustment.

Visa Notes AND a CHALLENGE!

2011-06-15T05:09:00.001+09:00

I am in the midst of getting my E-2 sorted for re-entry into the ROK. Everything was going swimmingly (if at that sleepy pace one is accustomed to when dealing with bureaucracies) until today.

Visa issuance number, passport, and photo in hand, I went wide-eyed to the consulate general in NYC, eager for the piece of paper in my passport that would unlock the doors of the world—or at least of the Land of the Morning Calm. Finally! I thought to myself. No more waiting! No more nail-biting! I can get my ticket and finish my packing and maybe make some last-minute visits!

All of those hopes and dreams were dashed in one fell swoop after I pushed my papers through the little document slot. In one simple word.

"Transcript?" the ajumma behind the window asked me, in a thick Korean accent.

Transcript.

"I was told I didn't need it," I stammered, which was the truth. I had asked multiple recruiters if I still needed a transcript and they assured me that with the new E-2 rules, I didn't. That the apostille-certified copy of my diploma would suffice.

"No, no. No more interviews. Just transcripts now." To her credit, the ajumma dealing with me went to work clipping and gluing my photo and was generally patient and as helpful as she could be. She confirmed my visa issuance number and told me that I could leave everything there, and they would grant the visa if I could fax them my transcript, and that everything would be ready a full 24 hours after they received the transcript.

I canceled the afternoon appointment I had made with a friend so I could get back home in time to fax off transcript request forms and make some calls before offices closed at 4 pm. And as I pushed buttons through the consulate's phone tree, the recorded message informed me that I did indeed need my transcript.

Oh. Great.

Only I had never bothered calling the consulate directly before then because everything I could find on the website seemed to point to only needing money and a photo. I've decided to do something productive and potentially helpful with my rage and frustration and embarrassment, and as such here is an incomplete collection of notes that I would have found very useful 24 hours ago.

VISA NOTES

You no longer need your transcripts to acquire the visa issuance number, but apparently you do need a copy to actually acquire the physical visa itself. What you no longer need is an interview. (NB maybe you can circumvent this by bringing your diploma with you, if what they're after is proof of your education. I might try this tomorrow.)
Special note to those of you serviced by the consulate in NYC (which would be: the commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the states of Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Delaware): there are two locations in NYC, one near the UN and one on Park Avenue. The office at Park Avenue is the one that handles the visa processing. (I made this mistake the first time I applied for the E-2.)
I've seen some recruiters list letters of recommendation as necessary paperwork. Neither time have I needed those, and my guess is that they are for the schools and not for the Ministry of Justice (which handles visa applications).
The consulate in NYC will accept transcripts from universities by fax, so fortunately that cuts down on mailing time and costs if you find yourself in a bind like me. No word on if they accept the transcripts by fax from you.
If you have to leave your passport at the consulate, you may enlist the help of a trusted assistant to pick it up (in lieu of shelling out the money for a courier, or risking your passport in the mail). So long as they have the receipt issued to you upon the deposit of your passport, the consulate will give it to them.
If you need to call the consulate for any reason, you will default to a phone tree. But as of this writing (June 2011), the "press 0 to get a human" trick still works on their phone system. You'll probably get connected to someone who doesn't speak English well, but they will connect you to someone a bit more capable in the language.
The fee is $45 (at least for the E-2, I saw other numbers floating around the website).

THE CHALLENGE

Had I been thorough in my planning, I would have called the number listed on the site and found out through the phone tree that I still needed a copy of my transcript. (I would have Googled, too, but a post-visit Google search was fruitless so it wouldn't have helped me any.)

Had the Korean Consulate's website not been a useless monstrosity of fluff, tiny text, Konglish, and animated everything, I would have also found out that I needed a copy of my transcript.

I will own up to bad planning, but I believe web designers should also own up to poor design. Hence my challenge:

If you can find, on this Korean consulate's website, a clear and concise list of the documents necessary for the E-2 (specifically where it explicitly mentions a college transcript), I will buy you dinner. Seriously. Should I lose, it will be a humbling experience for me, but it will also be extremely helpful for other people navigating this international job hunt process. Should I win, I get to feel really smug and slightly vindicated. Basically, there's no losers with this contest!

RULES FOR THE CONTEST

To qualify for the dinner, you must email me (should be on my blogger profile) a link to the page in question, as well as a description of the search path you used to find it. (As in: "The Immigration tab, and then the Visa bullet point..." etc.) If there is no search path description, it doesn't qualify. (This is to help me verify that you found it organically, and didn't get lucky with Google or knowledge of some direct link.)
It must be from the Korean consulate English website here: Korean consulate. Answers from recruiter's websites, Dave's, and assorted expats-in-Korea communities, while helpful, are not valid to win the dinner because the point is to prove how utterly useless Korean web design typically is. (However, the best of the helpful links will also be posted when I announce the winner, so others will still benefit from the fruits of your labor!) I will accept other websites if and only if the above Korean consulate links to them.
Contest ends July 31st in Korea. Americans, this means you're at a disadvantage. Sorry.
Please put "blog contest" in the title of the email, that way I can find it easily!
The search has to be conducted in English. First time teachers probably don't speak Korean and mine's way too awful to navigate a government webpage. Or any webpage.

RULES FOR THE PRIZE

The contest is open to anyone but I can only offer dinner compensation to people in or near Seoul—basically, if you are serviced by Seoul metro, I will hunt you down and buy you food.
Food offer is good for: gimbap holes-in-the-wall and sandwich shops; sit-down galbi, samgyeopsal, duck, hot-pot, barbecue, boshintang, gobchang gui, etc. joints. Or something Western. Or Indian or Uzbek or whatever tickles your fancy. Just some place you would be willing to pay for on your own. In other words, please don't try to bankrupt me. ^^ But the dinner bill will also include the drinks as well!
In lieu of buying you dinner due to geographical constraints, I will donate the dinner equivalent to a charity of your choice. Aww, warm fuzzies!
If more than one person submits a winning answer, the first answer received gets a dinner. Maybe other respondents will get some soju or cash money from me. I don't know. I'll decide later.

Go to! Winner—assuming there is one, between what I believe is the Herculean nature of the task and my absolutely non-existent readership—will be announced August 1.

Autism in South Korea Skyrocketing?

2011-06-08T02:20:00.000+09:00

Study suggests autism is diagnosed more frequently in South Korea than in the US.

South Korea just sent autism prevalence rates surging north. Autism-spectrum disorders affect an estimated 2.64 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren, or about 1 in 38 youngsters, a new study finds.

That’s a considerably higher figure than has been reported in the United States, England and elsewhere, where prevalence estimates range from 0.07 percent to 1.8 percent. A 2006 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 1 in 110 children had an autism spectrum disorder, at that time considered a surprisingly high rate.

I'm not sure what I make of this at the moment, though it's interesting food for thought.

Boys Before...Feminism

2011-06-03T11:52:00.000+09:00

Everything I'd want to say is basically here: Why Boys Before Flowers Sets Feminism Back 20 Years at Da Hee's Plastic Castle. In a nutshell: Boys Over Flowers / 꽃보다 남자 takes a surprisingly feisty, empowered, stubborn female protagonist and turns her into a wilting delicate flower, trembling for the love of her broody, emotionally constipated man. I won't rehash everything that's wrong with the series; instead I want to know what the Korean feminist reaction to this series is.

Each person in this photo is individually responsible for setting feminism back exactly four years.

Jong-min once described feminism in Korea as "less feminism and more a special interests group for women." Since I don't have access to whatever the Korean academic world is discussing and postulating (as regards feminism or anything else) because I don't speak Korean, I can neither confirm nor deny this. All I have is Korean pop culture through the filter of white Western feminists and that's obviously going to be a whole different kettle of fish. By his account, academic feminist reaction to 꽃보다 남자 has been mostly to shrug at it, or forget the glaring issues in the story in favor of handsome curly-haired man—far from the outcry that still reverberates in Western circles as regards Twilight.

If anyone has any insight regarding the reception 꽃보다 남자 has enjoyed in the feminist circles in Korea, I'm keen to hear them. I sincerely hope that Jong-min is wrong (the only time I'd ever say that!)...but I have a sinking feeling he's not.

J/K Crossover Movies (Part 1 of ?)

2011-05-12T01:29:00.000+09:00

Korea and Japan have a complicated history. Complicated. Kind of like how the Titanic sprung a leak. Movies that touch upon Koreans in Japan, or the relationship between Koreans and Japanese, or Japanese people in Korea fascinate me—whether directed by Koreans or Japanese or whoever else. There's not really a whole lot that I've seen, and some of them are just plain bad (there's a disappointed rant/review about 2009: Lost Memories forthcoming, some day).

The most recent one I've seen is Linda Linda Linda. It's a Japanese movie and it's mostly Japanese, in that Korean-Japanese relations are barely even a tertiary issue. Much more central to the movie is the infectious love of music and four high school girls' push to get ready for a performance at their school festival.

Even without the Korean angle, I would have loved this movie. The cinematography is exceptionally well-done, as is the characterization. But the fact that the lead singer is a Korean exchange student (Son) whose Japanese is sometimes lacking pretty much seals it for me. Add in the fact that Son is played by Korean actress Bae Doona? Consider my heart warmed to the very cockles. (You often get Japanese movies about Koreans in Japan that simply cast Japanese actors as Koreans. Come on guys, they're right next door. It's not so hard to find the real thing.) Also, Bae Doona is amazing—you might recognize the name from Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance or The Host.

The movie makes a point of highlighting the Korean Son as the school's "token Korean"; when the movie opens up, she is the only student in charge of organizing the "Japanese-Korean Culture Exchange" for the upcoming school festival. She has a perpetually confused air about her whenever she interacts with people around her, like you can tell she's working really hard to listen and comprehend and formulate her thoughts. You also get the impression that this leaves her socially stranded; the only people with whom you see Son interact prior to joining the band are the teacher in charge of the "Japanese-Korean cultural exchange" and Son's "host sister," an elementary school student who reads manga with her. Son is Korean, and because of that (at least in part), she's alone. Not an outcast, not a pariah—but without a group.

Bae absolutely steals the show as Son, as far as I'm concerned. She's a lighter, slightly chattier version of Ally Sheedy's character in The Breakfast Club: earnest and to the point and charming.

All of the girls are worth watching, though, and I appreciate the fact that Nobuhiro Yamashita made sure to find actresses who could at least pass as musicians. The girls all play their own instruments, at least on screen—I haven't done enough digging yet to see if they also performed on the EP released, with music from the movie.

What I found kind of interesting was the subtitle job, at least in English. In other movies I've watched where more than one language was spoken, an attempt was made to differentiate between them, for the sake of the foreign audience. Not so here. Which isn't really a big deal, I guess, but there's a couple of parts where the essence of the scene is lost if you don't realize that the language you're hearing is Korean instead of Japanese. I guess Viz figured, "The only people interested in this movie are going to be able to tell the difference anyway."

For all of the frenzy inherent in the story of a thrown-together band pulling through last-minute rehearsals for an important gig, the pace of the movie itself is relaxed. People have complained that it moves too slowly, but I disagree. It never really drags or gets bogged down; I guess the best way I could describe it would be "dream-like." It has less of the tone of nervous anticipation for the future, and much more nostalgic recollection of the past. As if the story we're watching unfold is being presented through the framework of remembrance, and not current experience. It does help, though, that movie is quite visually striking and well-shot, as I mentioned before.

As for Korea and Koreans and their relationship with Japan, it's hard to tell. There's the odd scene or two where it seems like Yamashita was trying to present some larger message about Korean-Japanese reconciliation (Son doodles and dreams up the name of the band on the back of a flier for the Japanese-Korean culture exchange), but in the end it's really a movie about the music, and about a love of it. This is no gritty immigrant tale like Yôichi Sai's Blood and Bones or Fighter in the Wind; no drama like Go!. It's about how one outsider finds her place in a foreign country because of a shared love of music.

When you see Son rock out and belt out "Linda, Linda! Linda, Linda, Linda~!" with her classmates, what you feel inside is very much a warm fuzzy. You don't get the impression that she's been mindlessly assimilated into her new culture, without any room for Korean-ness. On the contrary, Son very much thinks and feels "in Korean"—her innermost thoughts and most heartfelt exclamations are in Korean, not in Japanese.

(Also a scene where the girls are shopping for dinner supplies, since the bass player is making them dinner: Son gleefully adds a whole bunch of garlic to the cart. I had a laugh.)

Maybe the larger point is simply that people should stop making a point; that there are things two cultures can love and have in common and that if we focus on those, the differences don't matter anymore.

No matter how you spin it sociologically, Linda Linda Linda is a solid movie with great acting and an awesome J-punk soundtrack. Definitely worth watching and (in my opinion) owning. I leave with you one of the songs covered by the movie's fictional band (since "The Blue Hearts" were a real and much-beloved Japanese punk band):

Owaranai Uta (Endless Song) by The Blue Hearts

This is just a post to say...

2011-04-29T12:36:00.001+09:00

...another one is coming up soon: a more than shallow, less than penetrating analysis/review of Boys Over Flowers. Yes, yes, I know that I'm late on the train considering that 꽃보다 남자 came out in 2009, but I only got around to finishing the series relatively recently.

It's also a post to say that my return has, sadly, been delayed. Hopefully this will get sorted sooner rather than later.

Packing List

2011-03-21T10:04:00.000+09:00

As my return to the ROK draws near, I've begun to reflect on what I'll pack this time around. Now that I'm older and wiser, I'm beginning to think what I could have done differently. My first round took two large checked bags; I want to see if this time I can use just one. (I am obsessed with packing light and I embrace the "one bag" philosophy whenever possible; as a result, customs people sometimes give me strange looks.)

Apparel

4 pairs work pants (solid color/understated pattern/non-jean)
2 pairs casual pants
4 pairs bermuda shorts/capris
1-2 blazers
1-2 nice hoodies
3 "warm weather" blouses
3 "cold weather" blouses
5 pairs of leggings
2 casual-to-dressy dresses
1-2 dusters
My t-shirt collection's "greatest hits" (maybe 6? 8?)
1 pair nice shoes
1 pair sneakers
1 pair sandals
Scarf collection's "greatest hits" (about 3)
1 winter hat
1 "aesthetic"/bad-hair-day hat
1 heavy winter coat
1 medium fall/spring coat
1 light jacket
2 pairs pajama bottoms
1 fuzzy bathrobe
My jewelry collection's "greatest hits" (2+ necklaces, 3+ rings, 3+ bracelets)
2 bras
1 sports bra
5 pairs underwear
1 pair mittens

Last time I was in Korea, I didn't quite have a good sense of Korean hagwon attire: how to dress without being a) really boring or b) a slob. Hopefully, between nice blouses and nice blazers over t-shirts with interesting graphic prints/text I can navigate that better. Also, obvious protip: keep your separates mix and match and you'll go far. Fortunately my life in the states pretty much revolves around the color burgundy, as pictured here:

so most of my wardrobe kind of matches itself.

Layering was really important at Sherlock, as the building could fluctuate in temperature easily—never mind that work started in the middle of the hottest part of the day, but let out after the sun went down. I often took only a light jacket in the afternoon, and ended up freezing on my walk home in the evening. Having more "throw-on-top" options is important.

You'll notice there's no socks in that list. Packing socks (unless you have specialty hiking socks, huge feet, or the like) to go to Korea is dumb. Buy them there. They're cheap, they're cute (cuter than what's usually available in the US and also kneesocks!), and it's that much more space you save. Were I not a fat chick, I'd also forego packing underwear and just buy it there. But I'm a fat chick and I'm not about to pay whatever dumb markup it is on fat people clothes imported from other countries, so I'm bringing my own.

I could even nix all of the winter items (since I'll be arriving in May) and have them shipped to me later, or buy some of my own once I'm there. If I wanted to really be a minimalist about it. I don't know if I'm willing to go that far, though.

Toiletries

5 sticks deodorant
Dr. Bronner's Soap
Lotion (Burt's Bees)

If you bring anything more than deodorant to Korea, you are a chump. That is the only thing in here that I would list as a necessity.

Antiperspirant deodorant is simply not the standard in Korea that it is in the US and you're going to pay stupid markup on it if you don't bring your own. What do the Koreans do to not sweat? They just don't sweat as much, and you can find what I call "armpit spray," but it's not going to keep you from sweating it out when the summer rolls around. Maybe antiperspirant deodorant and fear of sweating is just silly, meaningless Western convention? Probably, but that's a convention I'll cow to, since I'll be working with other foreigners. Also, my preferred brand I simply couldn't find at the foreign market, anyway.

I could even forego the Dr. Bronner's, if necessary—if that was all that stood between me and one checked bag. But I like to maintain a hippie lifestyle whenever possible and I use it for washing things besides myself: clothes, dishes, floors, etc. Likewise the Burt's Bees lotion: I like it a lot for multiple reasons, but I could junk it. I'm convinced that if your toiletries section is anything more than like four items you CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT, you should reconsider a traveling/ESL-teaching career. (I am sympathetic to foreigners who bring their own big fluffy towels, though; they don't exist in Korea and the luxury of a big fluffy towel after a shower is priceless. Also, you should always know where your towel is.)

Razors, toothbrushes, aftershave, shampoo, toothpaste, towels, conditioner: you can buy it there. So why not? Most of it you would use up anyway, and things like towels you can wash and give to your replacement (or a homeless shelter, etc).

Make-up is a strange subcategory of toiletries, in that it's not physically necessary, but is nonetheless an expectation as far as women are concerned, both here and in Korea. A lot of times I wore makeup to work just so I wouldn't feel as young and as much like a little kid as I did. (I did wear it when I went out, sometimes, too, but not that often.) I don't think I'll bring any this time. The only cosmetics I'd consider would be my nail polish (the one girly indulgence that doesn't send me spinning into an awful feminist rage).

Entertainment

Laptop
X books
Jewelry supplies

When I pack, I spend more time fussing over books than I do over clothing. And if I were really a hardcore type, I wouldn't bring any and just depend on the kindness of hostel-based bookswaps and used bookstores to tide me over. I haven't transcended to that stage of One Bag-ism yet, though, so I bring my own. Also with the exploding popularity of e-book readers, you might very neatly sidestep this issue with something like a Kindle. Tons of space saved. Of course, I don't believe in the Kindle so I'm taking my dead tree editions with me.

The jewelry supplies there is where this begins to really depart from my minimalist packing scheme. Do I really need my bead collection? My wire? My metals supplies, if I break down before I leave and invest in a whole bunch of stuff? Not to survive in Korea, no. But for my own, outside-of-Korea interests, yes. I may end up compromising by taking only the most essential of hardware and buying the rest of my supplies at places like Dongdaemun.

Homelife

Afghan
1 large box baking soda

I see people packing things like sheets and bedsets and that makes no sense to me. Why would you pack those before you even know what your bed will look like? Mine ended up being a king-sized beast (two people lived in my apartment before I got there), which I would have never predicted.

People also put "pillow" as an essential on their packing list but I think that's silly. Whoever tells you that "Koreans don't really use pillows" or "Korean pillows are hard and uncomfortable" is mostly talking nonsense. At a yogwan, or at the jjimjilbang, yes, they're firm to the point of not-as-comfortable. But otherwise I found bringing my own pillow to be quite unnecessary.

My afghan I bring out of sentimental value as well as function: it's warm but it's also a nice piece of home to have with me. I could drop it, if necessary. This is the bulkiest thing I ever take with me, and if I want to make it to one checked bag I'll probably have to drop it. This is the point where I'll probably cave and simply pack two bags again.

Baking soda, though, is hard to find in the quantities I use it in. At LotteMart, it came in little spice-sized plastic containers. I go through a large box in a year (medicating my stomach, washing my hair, occasional household cleaning). Better to bring my own and bring enough of it. One bag travel bonus for using baking soda to wash your hair: no dumb liquids rule for carry-ons.

Recruiters often recommend bringing difficult-to-find spices for anyone who likes to cook. Not my thing, personally—my palate is not that sophisticated—but I wouldn't fault anyone who did.

There's a whole other list I have, of "things to buy with my first paycheck," but that's just tangentially related to this, so I'll save it for another time. As far as packing, I think this pretty much covers it.

Quickie: Matchmaking in the ROK

2011-03-11T22:45:00.000+09:00

I've seen a couple people link to this silly little article about finding a wife for Kim Jong-un (mostly a goofy promotional gimmick to coincide with White Day). But I thought this snippet was really telling:

The agency claims to have matched 23,000 people over the past 20 years using Korea-specific criteria that emphasize their clients’ jobs and educations, their families’ assets and their parents’ levels of education, especially which universities their fathers attended.

This is what matters in South Korea—or maybe what South Koreans want to believe matters, at least when it comes to interpersonal relationships. Titles, jobs, education, and other assorted things you can list on a resume. Things that are not of you but are around you. I wonder what those matchmaking professionals would say about my own relationship, with a boy whose education and familial assets are in no way similar to mine. Our fathers went to universities in different countries, even.

I've been busy hammering out the details on my new contract in Uijeongbu. With any luck, I'll start on May 30th. I look forward to re-immersing myself in Korea soon!

Fat Chick Rock: Piggy Dolls

2011-02-23T06:19:00.000+09:00

A new girl group has surfaced during my absence from Korea. This, in itself, is not newsworthy. New musical groups pop up like mushrooms over there, at a breakneck speed that mirrors the bewildering frenzy that is life in South Korea.

This one is newsworthy because they're fat. Or they're fat by Korean standards. And this is the number one gimmick their label is pushing. What label it is, I'm not sure, as it's not one of the big K-pop powerhouse labels (YG, SM, and probably the granddaddy of them all, JYP); it's merely being described as "independent." One website lists their manager as "위닝인사이트".

There is so much ground to cover, I don't know where to begin. So, let's start at the beginning.

(Left to right: Park Ji-eun, Kim Min-sun, Lee Ji-yeon)

Yes, their name is Piggy Dolls. And yes, the name of their debut "mini-album" (only five tracks long) is Piggy Style. (Reference to Will Smith's Big Willie Style? "Doggy style"? Pussycat Dolls? None of the above? Who knows. I don't!)

The whole premise is: "Look at these fat girls sing!" One line that keeps getting bandied about everywhere is that their combined weight is over 200 kg. That's about 441 pounds. For three people, that's an average weight of 147 pounds / 66.7 kilos. I would like to say, first and foremost, how cracked it is to reduce three talented women to, and sell them on the basis of, numbers. I cannot stress that enough. Who cares how much they weigh? Why doesn't anyone give a flying fart about SNSD's combined weight? Oh, right, because they're all skinny. It's only fat people that need to be conceptualized strictly in terms of numbers.

But even then, look at those numbers. 147 pounds is enough to merit the nickname "Piggy"?! If that sounds messed up, that's because it is. Korean society is perhaps more enamored with a slim physique than the US, given that their expectations of celebrities and pop idols are generally much stricter and narrower. Most female pop stars are underweight to one degree or another, surviving on a strict 1500 kcal / day regimen. A 20-year-old, 5'5" and 147 pound girl has a basal metabolic rate of 1498 kcal / day. Now, if this girl is also a K-pop sensation, then she's going to have loads of intense dance routines to practice and perform—like daily, hours-long aerobics classes on a fairly regular basis. On a schedule like that, you either lose your weight or your mind.

When you take into consideration that Kim Min-sun also clearly weighs more than the two other girls, that becomes even more bizarro-land. The maths suggest that Park and Lee weigh less than 147 pounds. It's great to see pop stars with figures like (albeit young) adults instead of 12 year old boys—singers who look like real people—but on the other hand, I cringe at associating "realness" and normality of figure with being a "piggy doll." It's not the name "Piggy Dolls" in and of itself that bothers me (unlike Mixtapes and Liner Notes, who rejects it—and with good reason—categorically). I'm excellent at being a self-deprecating fat chick and I'd be stoked to be in a band called "Piggy Dolls." What bothers me is that two of the three "Piggy Dolls" aren't even.

Part of this "weight marketing"/"it's a FAT group" gimmick might simply be that due to the fact that Kim Min-sun is the designated "leader" of the group, in addition to being the largest. In the promotional materials, she's the clear centerpiece:

And like the back-up singers to the lead, Lee and Park can't out-do their larger leader Kim—including in size. The whole phenomenon of pop groups also being a cohesive social unit and having actual leaders (maybe with implied hierarchy?) is another mainstay of K-pop; I don't think that's ever been as much of a marketing ploy for bands in the West. I'm sure there's a whole lot of sociological digging and commentary to be done on that but that's a post for another day!

Most of the conversations I've been reading online have been dealing with a few repeat issues: the band name, the whole "gimmick" of a chubby girls' group, and their debut single "Trend." There is so much more I could say that I haven't already, so instead I'm going to focus on something I found very striking while watching the music video for "Trend," that I have yet to see anyone mention. The video that everyone keeps posting has been taken down, so here's one that should be available, at least for the moment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sVmBlHyD7w

This is the shortened version of the song; the official music video released opened with a rather deplorable introduction of the girls lazing around eating pizza. Inspired by a series of interviews with overweight girls (overweight by Korean standards only, pretty much) tearfully discussing their weight-related angst, the girls get on their feet and proceed to rock out. Not only that, they rock out about being fat chicks, with lines like, "My body? So what? My face is unique" and "I'm sexy, I'm looking good, check it out in the stage. I'm looking good, we are trend."

I don't have much to say about the song itself: it's catchy, you can actually hear some talent under the autotune, what lyrics I've found translated are empowering and body-positive and awesome. Rather, let's compare this video to 2NE1's "Fire (Street Version)" video, since both bands seemed designed to target the "grrrl power" market.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/Cwq-XdPfpeA?rel=0

(First of all, it would do goddamn wonders for Piggy Dolls if they would fire whoever the hell is in charge of their wardrobe. Some of their outfits tread way too closely to ajumma land. And stop dressing Kim in muu-muus!)

The most interesting thing in these videos for me is how "they" (as in the editing and directing eyes assembling the video) treat the clearly designated, well-advertised leaders. Kim doesn't get the kind of show-stopping front-and-center treatment that CL does. The vast majority of "Trend," the choreography is done within in a triangle, with Kim being at the point in the very back until a full three minutes in; in "Fire," CL commands the front and visual focus for most of the song, except parts where she very visually "hands off" to one of the other members. And the closing shot of the video? Kim strikes a pose behind her girls. CL? Right up front. It seems like Piggy Dolls is still hoping to sell on sex appeal in addition to gimmick by featuring Lee and Park much, much more than Kim. I will grant that it's possible Kim simply isn't a good dancer—on their live MNET appearance, Kim rocks it out even less than in the video. But if that's the case, you can clever edit around that. Even just have shots of her singing. But no—guess Korea isn't ready for a fat "leader" yet.

People are also comparing them to Big Mama, a group I know nothing about because their downbeat, soulful numbers aren't the kind of thing to appeal to 12 year olds, and because I'm a teacher, I only ever confront Korean pop culture through the lens of a 12 year old. Truth be told, I honestly prefer the style of the stupid dance-y K-pop for my daily music needs—I listen to music to keep me perky, mostly. Nonetheless, it is so refreshing to hear strong vocal chops stand on their own. Their version of Lean On Me is right up there with any American gospel rendition.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/qx-u22-vkN8?rel=0

(The second soloist does go flat, but that's easily a nerves issue from singing in English.)

Normally I don't bother expounding on Korean pop music to such a degree, but body image and being a chubster fat chick is a really big part of my life. (No pun intended.) It might be tough to be a fat chick in the West, but it's even tougher in Korea. That's why Piggy Dolls is so shocking and making so many headlines. At the very least, maybe Piggy Dolls will be able to broaden the spectrum of typical K-pop fare, if not in style (because even if they've got pipes, you can only do so many variations on a synthesizer) then in image.

Tom Lehrer And ESL

2011-02-17T10:02:00.000+09:00

I first came across Tom Lehrer in high school, and the combination of accomplished piano-playing and biting satire won me over immediately.

It wasn't until a few days ago, though, that I came across some educational songs he wrote and recorded for children's show The Electric Company. Surprisingly, there's very few hits for "Tom Lehrer" and "ESL" online. Whether due to obscurity or conflation with the much-lauded The Electric Company and the subsequent video shorts, I aim to rectify this sad situation! All of the educational songs Tom Lehrer wrote would work really well at an elementary level, with or without the videos (though the videos ARE cute). But the best ones, which I'm posting below, are:

Silent L-Y (about creating adverbs)
Silent E (how silent e changes vowel sounds)
N Apostrophe T (contractions with "not" and also some modals)

Silent L-Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB2Ff8H7oVo

Silent E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91BQqdNOUxs

N Apostrophe T (Not Tom Lehrer performing, of course.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sScHUorw-Hc&

There are all kinds of old clips on YouTube from The Electric Company, with similar songs on other sounds and grammar topics (Good Old Apostrophe S, Thanks to TH, etc). I'm sure they're great too, but this is a blog entry about Tom Lehrer, not The Electric Company.

Those were all, as you can guess even from the titles, very elementary songs. I wouldn't use them outside of that context because really, how patronizing would that be? Instead, Lehrer's satirical songs might be better for intermediate or advanced classes. The only downside is that Tom Lehrer wrote and recorded music for an extremely short period of time in the very early years of the Cold War; many of his songs reference people or ideas of a past zeitgeist. You have to choose carefully once outside the realm of his educational ditties.

With that in mind, I think these would work pretty well, either with adults or teenager-ish age. The lyrics to all of these are readily available online, too (or very easy to transcribe yourself), perfect for fill-in-the-blanks or ordering verses and so forth. Plus, the content is pretty timeless and still relevant today.

The Masochism Tango (Maybe only with adults, this one.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TytGOeiW0aE

Pollution

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPrAuF2f_oI

National Brotherhood Week

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=OAOwYDlEQXo

And finally, my favorite Tom Lehrer song of all time; it may not be good classroom material (at best, requires vocabulary words with low coverage and use; at worst, satirizes Catholicism which might not go down with some students), but it's what initially endeared Mr. Lehrer to me. Enjoy:

The Vatican Rag

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=3f72CTDe4-0

Happily enough, Tom Lehrer's birthday is coming up (April 9th). Why not honor the man with a "Tom Lehrer in the Classroom" day?

Movie Review: "Unborn But Forgotten"

2011-02-04T17:24:00.000+09:00

It's thanks to my boyfriend that I made my first foray into Korean cinema. We continued that tradition a couple days ago with the acquisition of three new movies for his K-movie collection:

Arahan
Unborn But Forgotten
The Wig

Last night we watched Unborn But Forgotten, or Hayanbang (하얀방). I think, with the possible exception of 2009 Lost Memories, this is one of the worst Korean movies I've ever seen. It was bad enough for me to feel compelled to complain about it on the Internet!

Right off the bat, the title is a goofy, not-quite-Konglish translation. 하얀방 means "White Room," which refers to the name of the killer website in the movie. My beef isn't that the title isn't a literal translation of the Korean, though. This is par for the course in Korean movies. Rather, my beef is that the English title makes no sense. Yes, it makes grammatical sense, but "Unborn But Not Forgotten" would make more aesthetic sense. (And, in fact, there's a reference to just that line in the movie.) Or even "Unborn And Forgotten." That should have been the first warning sign. But Todd David Schwartz of CBS Radio assured us that "It'll make your blood run cold," or so the cover said, so onward we pressed.

After a brief sort of prologue, where a pregnant woman, wearing a nightgown while taking a bath gets brutally attacked (killed?), the movie jumps right into things: women visit a website and die 15 days later after injuries sustained from a bizarro, instant onset of phantom pregnancy. Men remain unaffected, presumably due to their lack of a womb. A cool concept with loads of potential, honestly. Other movie reviews spit on the concept as being too much of a Ringu derivative, but any horror movie with a technological spin is going to be compared to Ringu, fairly or no. The only substantial similarity is a time limit and (presumably) a revenge element, and I'm willing to overlook those as being "inspired by."

TV reporter Su-jin stumbles upon the incidents by accident, while filming a documentary style newspiece about a detective in Seoul's cyber crimes unit. It's only when, worried she might be pregnant with her TV anchor boyfriend's baby, she searches for a women's clinic that she actually finds "The White Room" website. Surprise! You're cursed!

Straightforward so far, but it's about to get convoluted and lazy. Su-jin moves into the apartment where one of the women died, which the landlord says people don't stay long because they complain of noises. Now that someone's died there, he laments, no one will want to live there!

Except another woman (who lives in the same complex?), who had clicked on the site and survived beyond her 15-day time limit (due to extraordinary psychic powers?), who has tried to move in, too. But for whatever reason, Su-jin manages to swing it. She also befriends Vaguely Psychic Lady in the process.

Now, the movie opened with an attack (a death?) in the prologue; you've figured out by now that it took place in this apartment. But a ghost-pregnant woman (the first you encounter in the movie) died in here, too; according to her old roommate, ghost-pregnant lady felt strangely compelled to move into that apartment for whatever reason. The same reason that drives Su-jin, presumably (though not ALL of the ghost-pregnant women die there, one dies at a nightclub right on the dance floor).

Fortunately for us, Su-jin is an intrepid reporter (and has the cybercop Detective Choi to help her out) and actually makes something of an effort to find out about the previous, died-in-the-prologue tenant, whose belongings are still in the apartment. The biggest clue comes in the way of a painting, which leads Su-jin to an art student described as a mildly autistic orphan.

Turns out the Little Oprhan Autie that Su-jin found was a really gifted artist in school. After graduation, though, she met a guy and started dating and stopped painting as much and oops! Got pregnant. Her best friend and the boyfriend both told her to get an abortion, but she decided to keep it. Detective Choi and Su-jin find the hospital where she was admitted, and a nurse there confirms that Little Orphan Autie (accompanied by a nameless, genderless friend) was eight months pregnant and ready to give birth, though the baby was confirmed to be stillborn. The nurse casually mentions that Little Oprhan Autie came in with bruises on her abdomen. Anyway, the baby is born via C-section, though very very dead, but Little Orphan Autie insists on having the remains.

Oh, and at some point, Su-jin's TV anchor and douchebag extraordinaire boyfriend visits her in this apartment and flips out at the painting, which very clearly perturbs him. See where this is going?

This is where shit stops making sense. By now, it's clear that the woman attacked/murdered in the prologue is Little Oprhan Autie (and heavily implied that Anchor Douchebag was the one who did it). But the woman murdered in the beginning was pregnant, so how could she then be admitted to the hospital, alive, to give birth? Okay, so she wasn't killed in the prologue, just her baby was. But then when and how did Little Orphan Autie die? Was Little Orphan Autie not actually pregnant anymore when she was killed?

Because, see, she had to have survived long enough to build a complex shrine to the baby's remains in a strangely large crawlspace that Su-jin finds after mucking about with the ceiling tiles in the bathroom. She could have not died at all, maybe, except that after her miscarriage, she's dropped off the face of the earth and isn't in contact with any of her close friends. Everyone Su-jin interviews talks about Little Orphan Autie like she's dead, but the movie gives no cause or timeline to work out. Was it last year? Last month? Five years ago? The movie never bothers giving any hints or even answering those questions outright. The shrine is well-constructed enough, with dolls and decorations and a tape recording of a woman singing Brahms' Lullaby, to suggest that this wasn't the harebrained scheme of a dying woman. It took time and effort.

Su-jin and her vaguely psychic friend scatter the ashes of the baby over a lake and assume it's all over...BUT IT'S NOT.

Vaguely Psychic Friend dies of the same ghost pregnancy; Su-jin, convinced she's pregnant, or going to die, or both, goes mental. She stocks up on baby supplies, talks to the ghost baby (who just wants to be loved!) and then decides she needs a nice long bath. In a nightgown.

While she's bathing, Anchor Douchebag arrives and they have a really creepy confrontation. Both of them are unhinged, though in different directions. Right as a psychotic Anchor Douchebag raises his scissors in a menacing gesture towards Su-jin's maybe-pregnant belly, she gives birth to the phantom baby. This time, some kind of actual physical baby crawls out. Detective Choi arrives just in time to kill Anchor Douchebag, torn between stabbing his girlfriend or stabbing the demon-baby. Su-jin, for some reason, survives, presumably because Anchor Douchebag is dead?

That final scene is really the only scary part of the entire movie. Everything else is more of a plodding, dimly-lit whodunnit: who lived in the apartment, what happened to her, who was the baby daddy, etc. Only it's a fairly predictable whodunnit, so not even that aspect is all that satisfying. And the plotholes in the story are too glaring to be ignored:

1. If it's the ghost of Little Orphan Autie girl that's behind the deaths, why would she punish women? Wouldn't she instead go after the man who killed her baby (and possibly her)?

2. I've already voiced my complaints about the timeline of Little Orphan Autie's death.

3. Why can Purple Dress (the first ghost-related death we see) and Su-jin get access to Little Orphan Autie's apartment, but Vaguely Psychic Lady can't?

4. Vaguely spooky shit happens with no follow-ups or explanations: while Choi's nosing around the server room for the webhost of"The White Room," lights swing and the power flickers. Su-jin sees a ghostly pair of feet under a sheet but then nothing's really there, of course! The movie ends with a flashback where Detective Choi encounters Little Orphan Autie and then, inexplicably, a little girl with a creepy smile. Both are dressed in white (intentionally connecting them to the killer website?). Is the little girl a random spirit? Is it the dead baby? Are we to assume that the killer baby ghost was a girl and would have been THIS little girl in real life, had she not died? This is probably the biggest problem with the movie: it's basically a series of scenes where weird or spooky stuff happens, strung together with the thinnest, most incoherent of stories.

5. How did Little Orphan Autie and Anchor Douchebag even meet? What's their backstory? We get nothing except that Little Orphan Autie would sometimes present him with paintings.

6. If it's the act of giving birth to the phantom baby that kills the women, why does Su-jin survive?

I will grant that we did watch it pretty late at night, so I might have missed some key expository points due to fatigue. But the end is still absolutely incoherent, and the Internet seems to agree.

I guess you can read some kind of sociological commentary on South Korea's ostracism of single mothers on to the movie, to try and prop it up with meaning, but at the end of the day, it's just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Paradise is Puerto Viejo

2010-12-27T12:12:00.000+09:00

Puerto Viejo. A small town that garnered much infamy within our CELTee group, mostly because of one particular students' recurring trips there (three in total, during her time in Costa Rica). Not that you can really blame her. There's a lot to do and very much a "small town, slice-of-life" feel to it (Ticos vacation there about as often as foreign tourists).

With funds and desire to stay in San Jose for the rest of my time in Costa Rica dwindling, I decided a multiple-day beach trip was necessary. Everyone had their opinion about where I should go and what I should do, and eventually I settled on...Puerto Viejo. Decision motivated mostly by cost of accommodations, however; not going to lie.

Or not entirely cost. Character factored in, too.

"You have to stay at Rocking J's," Eva insisted multiple times. "It's amazing."

And so, before I even get to what I did on my winter vacation (not much), an introduction to where I stayed.

Rocking J's wins two awards: Cheapest Hostel I've Stayed At, and Most Unique Hostel I've Stayed At.

In short: it's an entirely open-air, tin-roofed joint with razy mosaic art and hammocks, as well as a tasty in-house restaurant.

As for the rest of the trip, I think I'll shut up for once and just let the pictures do the talking.

Happy New Year, readers. :)

First North Korea, Now Sweden?

2010-12-18T04:01:00.000+09:00

I am so unplugged from the news that I don't hear about suicide bombings in my future adopted homeland until days after the fact from other people. (And not even from my Swedish boyfriend/fiancé-type-creature who lives in Stockholm!) And since no one on Facebook was posting about it, I had to hear it from my boss here in the States when I dropped in to return a work shirt.

Only the bomber himself was killed, apparently—guess he failed the "massive explosives" course at terrorist training camp!—but obviously it's still a bit of a shock. Between this and escalating North-South tensions on the Korean peninsula, it seems like everywhere I want to go has recently been under threats of violence.

I'm not frightened about it. I'm not angry. Those are the kind of responses that actions like this set out to trigger; you give into those, and "the terrorists* have already won." I will still go to Stockholm in January, and I will still move there after another year in Korea. Likewise, the Cheonan sinking or military shelling in Yeonpyeong won't keep from going back to Korea. If South Koreans aren't living in fear, then why should I?

I think the only appropriate response to political violence is disappointment. Sadness. There's one fewer person on the planet, that much less potential for good and kind things in the world—though arguably that was lost long before Taimour Abdulwahab Al-Abdaly blew his guts out, people can turn around. Can change. He also left behind a wife and three kids to live with what he did. What he wanted to do. "Oh, your dad was the guy that blew himself up in Stockholm back in 2010, that's right." What a crap legacy to leave behind for such cute kids!

My condolences go out to his widow and children.

*why I hate the word "terrorist" and go to great lengths to avoid using it is another blog entry altogether; just making my dislike of the word vocal, here.

Does this make me certifiable?

2010-12-08T10:29:00.000+09:00

As of last Friday, I am officially a CELTA-licensed teacher of English.

And for the umpteenth time, I am so glad that I did this in Costa Rica instead of NYC. I met some lovely people here—seasoned travelers from all over the English-speaking world—and staring down language analysis sheets and lesson plans and cover sheets would have been suicide-inducing in NYC's awful November weather.

The course is so worth it. Whether or not it reflects in a pay increase in South Korea (or of course it does, it's just a question of how much), I did learn a lot about teaching and pedagogical techniques. Everything I didn't learn in my first hagwon. Not that Sherlock Academy can really be blamed for that: this was a month of full-time classwork and practice teaching, and it wouldn't exactly be cost-effective for Sherlock to only get 11 months of teaching out of my 12 year contract. But I think I went into the thing rather under-prepared.

But all of that's neither here nor there! Gaps have been filled, methodologies taught and deconstructed, etc etc. My head is filled with teacher-training and language-analysis and I'm good to go! But I have another week in Costa Rica, so what to do?

Today I finally worked up the gumption to visit the National Museum in the downtown part of San Jose. It only took a month of me seeing it and feeling guilty about not going inside to spur me into action.

It's a history museum, in short, starting with prehistoric nomadic tribes up until the 1948 Civil War. (One of the results of Ferrer's victory in the war was the abolishment of the army, so the building that now houses the museum was once military barracks/headquarters.)

My favorite parts were the assorted prehistoric/pre-columbian exhibits. Observe:

But everyone has been telling me how I have to get out of San Jose, and so I'm trying to figure out what my options are.

One option is a 4 - 5 hour bus ride down to Guanacaste and lay on the beach for a few days. It's expensive down there, though, and I don't have a tent for the cheaper camping lodgings.

The other option is the closer (~3 hour bus ride) Jaco Beach, with lodgings about the same as what I'm paying here in San Jose.

There's also a volcano nearby, to which I can take a bus. Though, the internet is telling me I should visit a different volcano. Yikes!

Plus, there's the old capital of Cartago, with ruins and sites I have yet to see. Schedule looking like this:

Wednesday: Cartago

Thursday - Monday: The beach at Jaco, staying at Las Camas

Tuesday: Volcano, if I feel like it

Wednesday: Go home! :C

Brief Musical Interlude: "Anything You Can Do"

2010-12-02T17:12:00.001+09:00

Great idea for comparatives class: "Anything You Can Do" from Annie, Get Your Gun.

With any luck, I'll get to this in my class tomorrow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3xwDDLuLcY

CELTA, Week 3: This Time It's Personal

2010-12-01T10:44:00.001+09:00

Now that I'm partway through week four, thoughts on week three:

God. Damn. Brutal. We had to design our own syllabus for this week, which was fortunately fairly hands-off and not as terrifying as it sounds. I think at this point my fellow CELTees have started to wonder if I'm not going to just "get a Glock and mow these people down!"* This isn't commentary on CELTA as such; more that my time management skills are terrible. (I should be working on a self-evaluation right now. What am I doing? Hint: you're reading it.)

The other thing about CELTA is that there is literally a whole rainforest of paperwork to sort. In addition to the two to four handouts we get per "how to teach" class (two of those classes per day), for every lesson we teach we have to fill out lesson plans, cover sheets for the lesson plans, and language analysis or skills focus sheets. Additionally, whatever handouts we use or create, we need an extra copy for the portfolio we send off to Cambridge. Then, once we've taught our lesson for that day, we go home and type up a self-evaluation to go in the portfolio, along with our lesson plan and the tutor's evaluation of our performance (which we get the next day, during group feedback). If we're not teaching, then we're assessing other teachers (so we have things to contribute to group feedback the next day), which means we get copies of their lesson plans to mark up with notes. And for the cherry on top, there's the written work we have to turn in. For the first two, it's quite straightforward; for the second two, since they're about planning a theoretical lesson, we have to (again) include any handouts we created for that theoretical lesson.

In case you couldn't tell, that's a lot of paper. Paperwork, and keeping track of papers, is just not really my forte. I think at least half of the stress I've had to deal with on this course comes from sifting through a whole notebook of papers. Every couple days I go on what I've come to call a "hole punch bonanza" so I can at least not have them faffing about loose, but it's still annoying.

"Oh, but Katherine, there's so many ways to organize your stuff! You can fix that easily!" Well, nuts to you. Every attempt to impose some kind of logical order on my morass of stuff degrades into chaos, 99% of the time. The 1% exception is books. My library at home is very neatly sorted and categorized, maybe because books are much bigger and easier to see? No clue. Without the time to sit and sort and purge my coursework of unnecessary faffery, things get out of control. Papers and little things are a hot mess and will continue to be so until I die.

Moral of the story? If you have issues with your executive functions, prepare to crank your attention knob all the way up to eleven if you're doing CELTA.

So three weeks of swimming in handouts and lesson plans will just do you in. My latest feedback session, I probably gave off the impression of being absolutely frustrated with myself and depressed and convinced I'm a total failure etc. It's not that. It's just a combination of 1) having high standards for myself that I never live up to 2) getting absolutely overwhelmed with handouts and paperwork and bits of paper every day, five days a week, for the last three weeks, 3) a broken sleep schedule and 4) having to, within a lesson, be conscious of five trillion things at once.

And here we're back to the executive functions bit again.

Instead of just planning a lesson and having it assessed on whether it was a successful lesson or not, you are constantly performing to CELTA's standards. Some of those are fairly broad and important, like: creating good rapport with the students, successfully conveying the meaning of new material, whatever. But others are minor, almost to the point where I'd call it nitpickery. Things like task-checking, when you drill and when you write things on the board, etc. Having to juggle all of those nine hundred things in your brain while simultaneously interacting with your students and facilitating a successful language class takes an intense amount of concentration—at least it does for me, since interacting with students and taking on the performative role of a teacher sucks up more of my spoons than other people.

(Aside, that article is really interesting. No, I don't have Lupus, but I think it works out for everyone—teaching may take more of my spoons than of a coworker's; on the other hand I can sit down and breeze through a writing or "language awareness" assignment with only half a spoon or so.)

So on some level, CELTA is going to cost you some spoons. Either you're an energetic, gregarious entertaining-type who can't bear to sit and spout off a lot of analytical nonsense, or you're a total language pedant introvert who cranks out the essays with a certain academic glee, but absolutely struggles with classroom management and engaging people. It's not even a spectrum, probably, it's more like a Cartesian plane: at (0,0) is where you need to be to get through CELTA without losing any spoons, the ideal balance between whatever factors are relevant. But of course people have strengths and weaknesses and so you have (6,0) or (2, -2) or whatever else. You're going to have to make some weekly (even daily) sacrifices and struggle (to a greater or lesser extent) through all of them as you try to traverse the distance from your point back to (0,0). And it will take a toll on you. The question is, how far do you have to go, and how much can you push yourself?

*To end on a more lighthearted note, the "get a Glock and mow these people down!" line is a reference to the legendary MST3K episode Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. I quoted it to myself during a break and managed to confuse just about everyone who heard me. To clarify, here's the clip. The whole thing is hilarious, but the line in question is at about the three minute mark. It loses something in the pure reading of it; half of the humor is Mike imitating Raul Julia (or imitating Mike's imitation of Raul Julia).

Fingal: Maybe I had to put up with out there, but not in here.
Mike (as Fingal): I'm going to get a Glock and mow these people down!

And for Facebook, which hates embedding video in notes:

You make me tingle, Fingal. Are you single? Gimme a jingle. ;)

House Cleaning/CELTA, Week 2: Electric Boogaloo

2010-11-25T09:41:00.000+09:00

Tidied up the links bar, over there on the right. Teachers, if you have any blogs or resources you think I should link to, drop a comment.

Second week of CELTA went by just as blazingly fast as the first—so fast, in fact, that I didn't sit down to write about it until Wednesday of the third week! The upshot is that there's not much more I need to expound upon as it's all the same, only more of it.

The one notable thing is that I have new students now; you switch from an Intermediate class to an Elementary class about halfway through, so you can get practice at both levels. While my new students are total sweethearts and generally quite nice, I do miss my chatty, funny, Intermediate class.

The last day of week two (which was actually their first day with their new teachers), they bought us soda and cake and we had a little snack party after the day was over. IT'S SO SWEET THAT I CAN BARELY STAND IT AHH. ;-;

Bonus game: play "find the teacher" with that photo. There are three!

Afterwards was "conversation club," which is more like "go to the bar down the street and relax with a few glasses of Imperial."

A few cocktails in, and a few of us (two other teachers and one student) decided to go to "Monster Pizza."

And if it seems like all I'm doing here is basking in the sun and drinking, it's because that's the only thing I'm doing that's actually interesting to write about. Going on about language analysis and all the self-evaluations and essays I'm writing and the classes I'm taking isn't exactly riveting material. Suffice it to say, it's not all peaches and cream. It's actually mostly the mushy vegetables you have to eat before you can have your dessert.

Fortunately, this Friday we have a brief respite from all of this; afternoon classes are canceled and so myself and two other teachers are going to Arenal Park, home to an active volcano, hot springs, horseback riding, and the cherry on top: The Venado Caves.

All We Are Saying...

2010-11-23T22:14:00.001+09:00

Facebook is probably my number one source for news, not going to lie. I woke up to find no less than a bajillion links to this story: North Korea takes aim at South Korea with hour-long shelling.

When I was getting ready to leave for South Korea, one of the topics people brought up the most was their wacky neighbor to the north. "Are you going to North or South Korea?" "Isn't it dangerous?" (Runner-up: "Don't they eat dog there?") After all, in the US we're under a constant barrage of "oh, that wacky Kim Jeong-il!" updates. Far more so than in South Korea, actually—when they launched that torpedo/failed nuclear device/failed satellite or whatever last year, I actually found out from an American. South Koreans, we reason, should live under more or less a constant cloud of fear, given their location next to one of the so-called Axis of Evil countries.

And yet, they don't. Stories that made the front page back home, or headlined the international section of the paper, barely got a second glance in SK. Why? One argument that a lot of my fellow teachers put out was simply head-in-the-sand thinking, that South Koreans simply refused (for whatever reason) to acknowledge how dangerous their nothern counterpart was.

Personally, I didn't buy that, and I still don't. Jong-min, currently doing his compulsory patriotic duty, assured me that on a scale of 1 - 10, with 1 being flatly impossible and 10 being altogether certain, that high brass in the ROK army rates an invasion by North Korea as "a 2 or 3." (This even after the infmaous Cheonan sinking.) I don't think armies typically have their heads in the sand. I think after fifty-odd years of unease, tension, and sabre-rattling, you just adjust to a new normal. You have to, in order to survive. Extended periods of stress are just unmanageable in terms of psychological well-being.

Even with this, most reports aren't linking this new shelling to a potential full-scale assault. The BBC (referenced earlier) suggests that it's an attempt at power consolidation, as an ailing Kim Jeong-Il prepares to hand things over to Kim Jeong-un. In addition to power consolidation, The Daily NK theorizes that the attack could be an attempt at forcing dialogue with the United States. An anonymous claim within the article even suggests that the dialogue attempt isn't with the US but with the ROK—striving for "an appeasement policy by raising inter-Korean and military conflict." You know how when you were little, you got your way by repeatedly annoying your older sibling/cousin/friend/whatever? Now imagine instead of poking them or repeating everything they say, you have military shells. Of course, I'm always skeptical of claims that come from anonymous sources. Nonetheless, at the moment I'll entertain it for seeming reasonable.

Does this change my decision to go back to Korea? No. I tend to agree with the ROK army's stance on "a 2 or 3." I think Kim Jeong-il is perfectly aware of the fact that anything approaching a full-scale assault would end with his ass being handed to him on a platter. He may have one of the largest standing armies in the world, but as Napoleon taught us, "an army marches on its stomach." The food situation in North Korea is, and has been, so dire that the average North Korean is now 6 inches shorter than their democratic counterpart. Likewise, the DPRK's strongest ally has been tepid at best in their support of the Kim dynasty as of late—it seems they don't want a repeat performance of their involvement in the Korean war.

Not to mention all of these incidents are taking place relatively far north of where I would be in Korea, along disputed borders and waters. Here is a map:

(Admittedly the action is slowly creeping southwards! Maybe I should be worried. :O )

(An armchair international studies student is me!)

Unfortunately, though these skirmishes are minor when compared with the Beowulf clusterfuck that is full-scale war, they still take their toll. Two South Korean Marines are dead as a result of this latest incident; three civilians and fourteen more Marines are injured, though how badly the BBC doesn't say. This is in addition to the forty-six sailors killed in the sinking of the Cheonan last March, and however many North Koreans suffered through the ROK's returned fire. My thoughts and well-wishes are with all of them, South and North, especially as we approach the winter holidays—Christmas as well as Lunar New Year. I don't see how a reconciliation would be possible any time soon, but at the least we can hope that Kim Jeong-il/Kim Jeong-un will move away from a strategy that punishes people who have nothing to do with political policy.

And since the title of this entry is a not-so-subtle nod to John Lennon, I leave you with this spectacular rendition of another Lennon classic:

(The sound quality is awful, but Pavarotti is still Pavarotti.)

The KSATs are coming!

2010-11-17T22:50:00.000+09:00

And in honor of probably the most important day of the year, here is a manhwa (comic), in English, about the Korean hagwon/education mentality:

The Successful Life, by "bpbp0709". Here's a teaser:

(NB That "nowgah" is just "hagwon" spelled backwards.)

There's a whole extended scene where the protagonist is actually in the hagwon that's probably my favorite part of the whole thing. Imagine "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" playing in the background:

We don't need no education...

Week 1: Round-Up

2010-11-14T13:29:00.000+09:00

This first week has been a blitz of assessed teaching (nerve-wracking) and semi-intense pedagogical instruction (classroom management, learning styles, "CCQs", etc). Each assessed teaching segment is followed by a written self-evaluation and a group evaluation by your other teacher-trainees as well as the tutor. In addition to the written self-evaluation I have to do for Monday, I also have a "language awareness" (read as: grammar blitz) task and a general sort of "week in review" self-evaluation to get ready as well. Oh man, I missed homework!

But I took a well-deserved break today and had my first San Jose walkabout with Jaime, another CELTee. I arrived in San Jose the day before the course started, so I didn't have any time to nose around the area and get acquainted with it.

My digs! Not pictured is my own private bathroom to the left of the nightstand, and my little tiny desk. It's a small room, but the price is right and I have an amazing living room and balcony for when I want to do my work. (I am a introverted anti-social weirdo, though, so I do spend a lot of time working in here.)

My walk to school every day.

Mostly, Jaime and I spent today shopping in the downtown area, combing the little tourist-y stalls as well as the nicer shops.

This little guy was just hanging out behind his grandma's stall (I ended up buying too expensive pants from her, but they are awesome pants that need a photo unto themselves), being adorable.

Of course after a long day shopping, we deserved some dessert.

A GOOEY CARAMEL CENTER WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN—

Next Saturday I have to observe a class, so weekend meanderings will again be limited to San Jose. Hopefully, I'll be able to get out and about the area a little bit more after that.

CELTA, ce-riously.

2010-11-10T08:54:00.000+09:00

Day 2 of CELTA involves the first (of many) assessed lessons. My lesson segment yesterday went well enough; today felt overwhelming and scattered, mostly because I am rubbish at dealing with handouts and papers and keeping things consistently organized.

I immediately flashed on teacher training at Sherlock and being observed and generally wanting to vomit. Some things never change! You'd think years of piano recitals and school concerts and tour guiding would have cured me of performance anxiety, but no.

Bonus points for the power going out midway through the day and not coming back on until half an hour before the lesson.

"Oh, there it goes," our tutor said nonchalantly. "If it's not on in time for the lesson, we'll just skip the break and go straight through so we finish before it gets too dark."

As if this stuff happened all the time. Which, apparently, it does. Pura vida!

Landed!

2010-11-09T12:06:00.000+09:00

I have arrived safely in Costa Rica! Pictures of my digs and the surroundings forthcoming, as soon as I get a chance to do a San Jose walkabout (this weekend, if the rainy season doesn't have other plans).

The CELTA course is working out well so far (but doesn't everything work out well on the first day!). I think most of my buddies still in Korea and still reading this (right? right?) are TEFL-cert'd otherwise, but just in case I'll probably be writing/freaking out about it in here.

CELTA seems like a lot of work on the face of it (and it probably will be!), and I spent much of my flight over—when I wasn't sleeping—freaking out about the first day and having to teach a lesson on my first day. The tutors here (and presumably elsewhere, but I can only speak for Costa Rica) do a good job of easing you into the group and into the teaching: doing ice-breakers, giving you suggestions for class activities. By the time lunch was over, I was ready to start teaching. First, though, was a lesson in Bahasa Indonesia, wherein we all remembered how much it sucks to not understand the language you're being taught.

(Apparently that sample lesson is usually in Swedish, but yours truly and probably also the Dutch woman in the course would have had an unfair advantage.)

The practice courses are, from the volunteer students' perspective, two-hour long English blitzes with four different teachers. From our perspective, they are miniature twenty-minute lessons with the rest of the time devoted to observing and evaluating the other three teachers. Fortunately, the other people in my group are very nice (and multinational! A Dutch woman, an English gentleman, and another woman from Costa Rica), and everyone has less teaching experience than I do so I don't feel like a total bumbling fool.

The students are all adults (the "A" in CELTA stands for "Adults"; teaching children is "CELTYL," for "Young Learners"), some my age, some with children, some might even have grand children. They all speak much better English than any of my students in Korea, which was a pleasant surprise. (Not that I didn't enjoy teaching my students because of their low skill level. If I didn't like them, it was for other, unrelated reasons.)

All in all, this looks to be a solid experience so far. Bring on the workload. ;)

Things I Didn't Realize I Missed in Korea

2010-10-23T12:41:00.000+09:00

1. 24 Hour Grocery Stores

Granted, the Buy the Way in the first floor of my apartment building carried everything I ever needed in a pinch, but sometimes I need the kind of therapy that only a giant warehouse of foodstuffs can provide. And sometimes I need it at midnight.

2. Looking Like A Total Schlub

Sometimes part of that therapy involves leaving the house in "loungewear" and uncombed hair. Bonus points for wearing a jjimjilbang t-shirt. (They have fast become my favorite autumnal "sit around and do nothing at home" shirts, on account of the surprisingly substantial material. They're so warm!)

3. Driving

Again, another essential part of this therapy is motoring myself there. Walking is nice, sure, but sometimes it's cold and sometimes I'm lazy and sometimes I feel like moving faster than I can go under my own power.

Just some thoughts on my way to some food retail therapy. ^^

Jet-Setting: Costa Rica

2010-10-13T14:04:00.000+09:00

As of 2.15 this afternoon, I was accepted into the International House Costa Rica franchise of Cambridge's TESOL program.

In plainer words: I'M GOING TO COSTA RICA FOR A MONTH!

This beats the crap out of my original plan of finishing a CELTA program in NYC, both in terms of price and in terms of pure awesome. An official TEFL certificate will be an edge back in Korea; one from Cambridge doubly-so (CELTA is one of the most-respected programs in the TEFL business). I will be too busy to travel around Costa Rica during the course, so I'm taking an extra week at the end of the course to properly see the country. Stay tuned for wacky Central American traveling antics!

Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis

2010-10-06T12:04:00.000+09:00

Meet me at the fair~!

This has precious little to do with Korea, except that I'M SURE THOSE OF YOU STILL IN KOREA WANT DETAILED WRITE-UPS ABOUT MY TRAVELS IN THE US, YES? YES!

I went to St. Louis to visit one of my "top tier" friends (of whom there are only two in the whole world), Noah. He transferred out of Hamilton after our sophomore year, so I haven't been in the same area code as him since 2006. That means we need planes, trains, and automobiles to see each other.

We make a neat set of opposites, n'est-ce pas?

(The reason this visit gets a write-up, while my weekend jaunt to visit my token Korean friend in DC does not, is that Jong-min does not seem as enthusiastic as Noah to photo-document our time together. I think Jong-min might be embarrassed about the trainwreck white girl he's added to his life. =P)

My flight to St. Louis was longer and more arduous than it needed to be, thanks to a combination of mistakes on both my part and the airline's, suffice it to say that my trip to St. Louis started at 8.30 PM at the STL airport in a poofy, over-the-top prom dress, pearls, and the most makeup I'll wear for the next three months, waiting for my ride from Noah. For that night was Metro Prom.

Sadly, I missed the metro part of the prom, but our prom getup got us free entry into a piano bar called Big Bang, where we sang around with the requests for an hour or so. The crowd started picking up soon after, so we fled for a nearby diner (a common theme in any of my visits to/from friends).

UNFORTUNATELY NO PICTURES OF THAT NIGHT EXIST. ;_;

The next day we made an abortive attempt to visit The Arch and the City Museum, but dead batteries and a private party rained on that parade. However, we did make a successful excursion out of Blueberry Hill (Chuck Berry's piano bar), the St. Louis Walk of Fame (notables: Chuck Berry, Yogi Berra, Vincent Price), a sweet old movie theater, a store full of spices, another store full of bottle-your-own-whatever (we left with two bottles of whisky), and a restaurant with the best milkshakes I've ever had. Five dollar milkshakes, even.

Things start picking up in my memory post the purchase of some new batteries for my camera. We walked from Noah's house to a movie theater/bowling alley/bar called Moolah to see The Social Network. En route we made a couple whisky stops.

The first was a pizza place/bar called pi. As in the irrational number. We went there for lunch later and I have to say, their pies are tremendous. Look them up if ever you go. The whisky list is also impressive:

(I don't know what connection the Rittenhouse Rye has to the Rittenhouse Square of Philadelphia fame, if any. I didn't get to try any, either; they were out.)

The second place had once been a speakeasy, but since converted to a proper bar. You can still go downstairs to drink in a super-atmospheric basement area. AND GUESS WHAT THEY HAD:

WHY ONLY THE WORLD'S BEST SINGLE MALT OF 2009. Probably my favorite non-Islay malt.

We also met a lawyer/countertop salesman? I don't know how that combination works out, but apparently he gets to travel to China multiple times a year for whatever it is that he does. And he can afford expensive bottle of port and nice cigars.

The next day we started with a hearty American breakfast at:

This is what I miss about America whenever I'm not there:

This time I had fresh batteries, so I got in some obligatory shots of The Arch.

And The City Museum was also open for us, which was awesome and probably the highlight of my whole trip.

A couple of things. First, note the metal spire type thing you can see on the roof. You can climb up into that:

Which is terrifying! But the view is awesome.

Also note the school bus. You can go in it.

Afterwards, Noah had to go in to work for a couple hours, so I slept in Forest park for a while. We picked up some ingredients for whatever meat-based dish he had planned for dinner (which was tasty), made dinner, and drank some St. Louis microbrew.

My flight home suffered from massive, massive delays (oh flying! you were just not happening for me that weekend), so I killed a couple hours in the airport reading some David Mack I had picked up in a comic book store on Saturday. I also emailed CELTA at International House Costa Rica from my phone to see what the turnaround on my application would be. A couple days after I got back, I'd find out that they'd want a phone interview.

St. Louis was too short, unfortunately; there was a lot more I could have seen, and more time could have been spent with Noah before I go back to Korea. Hopefully I can make it back for a longer visit some day!

Self-Reflection: Black Out Korea.

2010-09-15T13:05:00.001+09:00

There are a few huge blogs in the expat-in-Korea blogging community. I don't use the word "blogosphere" because I don't believe in neologisms. Also, it sounds stupid.

The biggest two are probably Ask a Korean! and Ask the Expat!. Others like The Grand Narrative, Gusts of Popular Feeling and Kiss my Kimchi spring to mind as well. My friend Breda (Annyeong!) was even ranked as one of the top Korean expat blogs by Go Overseas. So there's a lot of content on the Internet being generated about Korea, by foreigners currently living in Korea.

Somewhere up there you also have Black Out Korea, a blog devoted entirely to pictures of passed-out drunk people in the ROK.

I will admit, on a base level, it is kind of funny. Even to someone like me, with a sense of humor more cerebral than slapstick. Because once in a while, after all the shots of passed-out party-goers in Hongdae, you get utterly weird stuff like this:

which just transcends funny and becomes pure, sublimated surreality.

Early on in life, we all learn the important difference between laughing with and laughing at at someone. And usually when you're enjoying the results of someone's drunken shenanigans, it's the laughing at kind of laughing. This is the same kind of humor that drives pages like People of WalMart, LameBook, and Regretsy. Those sites all have their own thorny ethics to deal with, but they are also all people poking at other people within their own culture. (Cue the appropriate Seinfeld reference about "joke-telling immunity." Bonus points for Bryan Cranston prior to Breaking Bad or Malcolm in the Middle.)

When you get cross-cultural haw-haws, though, then it gets weird. Are you enjoying it from a position of privilege? Is there some underlying cultural thing going on of which you're (willfully) ignorant? Are you using humor to distance yourself from responsibility? Would this be just as funny intra-culturally? Did I just make up a new word? Anyway, here's the stated purpose of Black Out Korea:

Black Out Korea is a site devoted to the often hilarious situations in Korea that involve full grown adults blacked out in public, sometimes from 60 hour workweeks, but mostly because of Soju.

I've been to quite a few countries, but never seen this phenomenon like I've seen here in the ROK. So send in your best pics!

(As an aside, I do remember the blurb, in the version I initially read, talking about how South Korea is a country where adults typically get "utterly shithammered" or some such. I presume that the author has changed it as the blog has grown, and so I present you with the current version.)

Black Out Korea does not necessarily discriminate, either; you do find the odd assortment of blacked-out foreigners among the photos.

Note, though, that instances of the "waegook" tag are not as frequent as many of the others.

I'm inclined to distance myself from that kind of humor/attitude about Korea (at least I am now, not sure what year-ago-self would say). First of all, the laughing at style of comedy doesn't normally appeal to me, anyway. Nor does the slapstick, physical kind of comedy.

On a deeper level, to me it also belies a lack of respect for Korea, in a way. Not only on the "hah hah, he's passed out drunk, what a Korean" level, but in a more abstract sense. I think a not-insignificant portion of foreigners come to Korea and think of it as "College 2: Electric Boogaloo" and see it as less a country with citizens who are just as autonomous as themselves, and more of a giant playground with few rules and cheap booze. "We can party all we want, someone else will be there to clean up after us and take care of us."

I mean, it's one thing for your friend to get stupid-drunk and then pass out in a club. By all means, prank away and photo-document as much as you like. But a random stranger? Who has no chance to consent to this or establish a layer of rapport such that they would be okay with you doing this? Who doesn't have a way to contact you if they want the photo taken down? Also note that faces are almost never blurred in the photos; if they are, they're of foreigners.

This, coupled with America's military presence in Korea both historically and currently, suggests an unequal power balance and no interest to fix it. I think a lot of the submissions to Black Out Korea spring from that mindset, and that makes me uneasy. Mine, however, is certainly not the only take on it.

Your thoughts?

Etsy + Korea =

2010-08-18T08:09:00.000+09:00

Weigukin Must-Haves

(I like playing on Etsy and making treasuries like this one.)

Some items:

Wires in Seoul Illustration

Hanbok Pillow

Ramyeon Ring

Seoul Metro Fabric

Transfer of Power

2010-07-17T08:36:00.000+09:00

It seems pretty clear that Kim Jeong-il is getting ready to step aside for his son Kim Jeong-eun. Back in January, Jeong-eun's birthday was declared a national holiday (source: the AFP). Then in March came the sinking of the Cheonan (which granted is arguable, but either way suggests that THINGS ARE AFOOT in the DPRK), and now this: a shrine dedicated to Kim Jeong-eun. According to the article, the official hand-off may come as early as September.

The all-knowing Wiki cites a lot of information about Kim Jeong-eun (alias Kim Jeong-oon, alias "Yeongmyeonghan Dongji" ["Glorious Comrade"]) from a former private chef to the family, who goes by the pen name Kenji Fujimoto and occasionally appears on Japanese television specials as an "expert on North Korea." Tidbits include:

"Jong-un is 'exactly like his father'"
"He has superb physical gifts, is a big drinker and never admits defeat."
When Jong-un was 18, Fujimoto described an episode where Jong Un questioned his lavish lifestyle and asked, "We are here, playing basketball, riding horses, riding Jet Skis, having fun together. But what of the lives of the average people?"

Mr. Fujimoto has written a few books on his tenure as chef to the infamous Kim dynasty; one of them will probably be next on my library check-out list.

Mostly I'm posting this because there are hilarious comments in the Yahoo! news article. They're not hilarious for their insight or razor sharp satirical wit, however; they're hilarious in a way that also kind of depresses you.

BRONZE MEDAL
From "RBT", a male in Cambridge, Mass:

I thought Kim Jong II son's name was " Mentally ILL ".

Hah! Hah! Hah! It's punny, get it? Hah!

SILVER MEDAL
From "I Voted Obama," a male from...somewhere:

Forget pissing off china, they have no oil, therefore little or no interest there.....

Clearly he is an expert on foreign policy, with such a nuanced, insightful view of a complicated political situation!

And finally, the

~~LOL'D~~GOLD MEDAL
From "Richard," male from Texas:

has anyone ever found it hilarious that these guys are Asian, but have the name "Kim"? Kim!, lol, i've never heard of an asian with a english name! KIM! LMAO!

Really, the comedy just writes itself with this one.

DPRK Alert: Trip to North Korea!

2010-07-15T06:09:00.000+09:00

My friend Mark posted this on Facebook; I'm passing it along here for anyone interested.

2010 DPRK (North Korea) Tour

Saturday August 14th to Sunday August 22nd, 2010

Sorry about the short notice need to fill about 3-5 more spots....
I will be fantastic! Many places I haven't been...

Including: Pyongyang, (Mass Games, Mass Dance, ect.) Nampo, Kuwol Mtn, Sinchon Village, Sariwon, Kaesong, Mt. Myohyang and more

From Seoul via Shenyang (or Beijing) to Pyongyang

Guide- Michael Spavor email - mpspavor@gmail.com

TOUR WILL INCLUDE:
Kumsusan Memorial Palace, Pyongyang Zoo, Foreign Languages Bookshop, Moranbong Park, Funfair, City Walk, Mass Dance (expected)

Fountain Park, Mansudae Grand Monument, Mangyongdae Native House, Pyongyang Metro (extended ride), Juche Tower, drive to Mt. Ryonggak for picnic, Chonsam-ri co-operative farm, drive to Nampo, West Sea Barrage, to Hot Springs Guesthouse

Drive through Kuwol Mtns, Sinchon Village, Atrocities Museum, on to Sariwon, Tour around Sariwon (folk street etc), on to Kaesong, Concrete Wall
Panmunjom/DMZ, Return to Pyongyang Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, War Victory Monuments, USS Pueblo

Grand People’s Study House, Korean Revolution Museum, Monument to Party Foundation, Senior Middle School, Railway Museum, Metro Museum, Drive to Mt. Myohyang

International Friendship Exhibition, Manpok Valley Hike Return to Pyongyang, Circus, Kim Il Sung University Museum

*flight / train may be changed from Shenyang to Beijing if flights trains not available.
*itinerary may change slightly
* Note: American citizen's are alowed but will not be allowed to take the train out, they must fly.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

COSTS:
From Seoul to Pyongyang:
$2,500 USD per person
(Deposit for trip is $1400 USD)

Applications Due: Friday July 16th, 2010
Deposit Due: Monday July 26th, 2010

Once application is approved Bank Account Information in Korea will be offered.
These prices are the same for exit by train or by plane (option A. or B. in the itinerary)

Tour fee includes the following:
1. transportation from Seoul to the DPRK and back
2. all meals on the tour except on the train into/out of the DPRK
3. hotel accommodation
4. Korean tour guide(s) and a driver
5. all transportation in the DPRK
6. all entry fees for attractions such as museums etc in the DPRK

Not included in the tour fee:
1. single room supplement unless otherwise specified (EUR 30 per night)
2. spending money for drinks and souvenirs
3. DPRK visa fee (EUR 30 thru Beijing)
4. Double entry Chinese Visa From overseas Embassy / Consulate
5. tip for the guides (approx EUR 20-25 total)
6. meals on the train out of DPRK (EUR 5)
7. entry tickets for special events if applicable – for example Revolutionary Opera if being staged, or rides on the funfair, games of bowling
8. the lift up the Juche Tower has to be paid in the DPRK (EUR 5)
9. Optional Mass Games Tickets: Euro 80 100 150 300
10. meals will have a complimentary beer but you will have to pay for extra drinks above those provided (these are inexpensive though)
11. expenses while in Shenyang (or Beijing), China

For more information and application form contact:

Michael at mpspavor@gmail.com

(Ground Operator: Koryo Tours)

** All subject to slight changes

** NO JOURNALISTS, PHOTOGRAPHERS OR AUTHORS OF PUBLICATIONS ON NORTH KOREA

Still Kicking!

2010-06-20T13:15:00.001+09:00

YOU'RE NOT DONE WITH ME YET.

First of all, I have a tremendous post to do about Kim's Kitchen, which is fast becoming my default destination on my work-free days. But I think I'm going to wait until post-birthday-dinner (as if I would go anywhere else! Mm-mm, dak galbi, I've missed you) so I can have an excuse to take really dorky photos of the place.

But more importantly, I have swallowed hard, had a talk with The Boy, and decided that another year in Korea is the next step for me. My antics aren't quite over yet! I'm stoked to be seeing friends again and to get a second chance at everything I missed the first time: Busan, Jeju, the Mud Festival, at least one cave, and maybe even a visit to Dokdo. (Because Dokdo is ours, dammit!)

Plus there's lots of international trips I want to take, too. I knocked Indonesia and China off my list in 2009; maybe I can cross off Thailand in 2011? Maybe Japan, too, if I can get over my irrational aversion to Japan. (Thanks, weeaboos.)

I have been putting out feelers about job openings in Uijeongbu (because I would love to go back to my old stomping grounds) and while I don't want to count my chickens before they're hatched, I'm confident I can find something in the early months of 2011. Just gotta update the resume, is all...

It Begins with C, Which Rhymes With T, Which Stands for TROUBLE!

2010-05-24T08:53:00.000+09:00

Right here in ~~River City~~ Bethlehem!

Or not really. While I was away in Korea, the iconic Bethlehem Steel mill was converted to a casino.

Before

After

No greater indignity has ever been done to a building or a piece of machinery than that poor steel ore crane. I salute you, relic of an America gone by; reminder of what we used to be.

Anyway, there's been a whole lot of fussing with this project, including hiring feng shui experts to make casinos (like the Sands and others in Pennsylvania, such as Mount Airy Lodge) more attractive to Asians.

I'll reproduce the story here, in case the link ever expires.

Countdown to Table Games
Pennsylvania's cash-hungry casinos are redesigning their floors to encourage an Asian invasion

Matthew Assad

matthew.assad@mcall.com

If you visit one of Pennsylvania's new casino table games this summer, you're likely to see a lot of eights, the tables won't be close to the door, and it may appear that whoever designed the poker room has an odd fascination with dragons.

That's because casinos are preparing for what they hope will be an Asian invasion.

"Asians like table games," said George Toth, president of Mount Airy Casino Resort, one of several adding tables with Asian players in mind. "They are good clients, and we want them to feel comfortable here."

More importantly, they want them to feel comfortable betting thousands of dollars—sometimes in a single hand—at Pennsylvania's soon-to-open table games, such as blackjack, baccarat and craps.

Some experts estimate that 25 percent to 30 percent of new table game players in state casinos will be of Asian descent, particularly at easternmost casinos with close access to New York City, where more than 800,000 Asians live, and New Jersey, which has an Asian population of nearly 700,000, according to the most recent U.S. Census figures.

Consider that Macau, China—not Las Vegas—is now the gambling capital of the world. Unlike Pennsylvania, Macau casinos are dominated by tables, not slot machines, because that is what Asian players prefer.

And no casino operator wants the wrong gaming floor design to give cash-carrying players the impression there is no luck to be had there.

No one has more riding on attracting Asian gamblers than Toth and Mount Airy. The casino has been among the state's worst performers almost since it opened in 2007, but Toth believes tables give him an opportunity to turn things around.

Mount Airy has brought in two designers whose sole job is to make sure the tables floor conforms to the theories of feng shui, the ancient Chinese belief that the proper design and placement of objects keeps the living and working environment in harmony with nature and the flow of energy.

When table games open in Pennsylvania this July or August, Mount Airy will have a special Asian room with 17 table games that include mini-baccarat, pai gow poker and pai gow tiles.

When players arrive they'll see a lot of 8s—a number feng shui followers believe portrays good fortune—and probably not many 4s, a number associated with death.

They'll see wall hangings and tapestries emblazoned with dragons and koi, and the decor will be draped in colors like red and gold, all emitters of good fortune.

The chandeliers will, of course, have eight hanging fringes, not four, and while the entrance to the room will be wide open, that opening will not continue unimpeded through the room. Screens or dividing walls will prevent the good energy entering the room from leaving too quickly.

"Feng shui followers truly believe in signs that represent good fortune and good luck," said Mount Airy interior designer Marcella Ravell, who has visited China and made two trips to Chinatown in New York to educate herself. "We intend to present a very lucky atmosphere."

But the effort doesn't stop with presenting an appearance of good fortune. Mount Airy will have eight daily buses into Chinatown, and its Asian room dealers will be fluent in Mandarin or Cantonese, said Edwin Chou, Mount Airy's director of Asian marketing.

That's right, Mount Airy has a special Asian marketing staff of people lured away from Atlantic City casinos.

And just as will be the case at Harrah's Chester Casino in Delaware County, Mount Airy will have a noodle bar buffet outside the Asian poker room. Willie Wong, Mount Airy's Asian player development director, noted the noodle bar has advantages well beyond the cultural benefits.

"It's a light meal, so they can eat in 20 minutes and get right back to the tables," Wong said, jokingly mimicking a motion of shoveling noodles into his mouth. "We want players at the tables having a good time."

Anyone who thinks casino operators like Toth are over-estimating what's at stake need only look back to the opening of the MGM Grand Hotel-Casino in 1993.

At the casino entrance, people walked into the mouth of a mammoth lion built to resemble MGM's corporate symbol.

But soon, casino operators realized Asian gamblers were avoiding their casinos for others on the Las Vegas strip.

It turned out that some who held Asian beliefs considered walking into the mouth of the lion unlucky. MGM quickly spent millions to reconfigure the entrance.

Toth may be taking the most extreme measures to attract table games players, but he's certainly not alone. When Las Vegas Sands opened its Marina Bay Sands in Singapore last month, it proudly proclaimed the $5.5 billion casino project "feng shui-approved."

Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem, Mount Airy's primary competition for the New York and New Jersey markets, also will have a feng shui-inspired Asian tables section and dealers who speak various dialects of Chinese. Officials there say they're upping the ethnic sensitivity ante.

"In addition to having no 13th floor in our hotel, there will also be no fourth floor," said Sands Bethlehem President Robert DeSalvio. "Four is not a good number in Asian culture."

It all may sound like a focus on culture and the mystique of feng shui, but at its heart, it's really all about dollars, millions of them.

Consider that Pennsylvania casino operators project tables games to boost casino revenues roughly 25 percent, and those in the eastern part of the state expect roughly 25 percent of their table players to be of Asian descent. For a casino such as Sands, that's an expected revenue boost from table games of more than $50 million year.

Carrying the formula through, that means Asian players alone could be responsible for leaving $12 million to $15 million a year on Sands' tables. And on top of that, Pennsylvania's table games tax, at 16 percent, is far less than the 55 percent tax on slot machine revenues, allowing the casino to keep a much bigger piece of the profits.

No casino wants to turn that money away because of a misplaced wall or the wrong color scheme.

"It's important that we show our friends in the Asian community the respect they deserve," DeSalvio said. "We want them to feel welcome."

Doing anything else would risk bringing bad luck to the bottom line.

I don't really know what to make of this article. Even if it is for cash, it's nice to businesses consider things outside the broader scope of their culture.

But it also does the "Asian just means 'Chinese'" thing you see all the time. (To be fair, sometimes it's "Asian just means 'Japanese,'" as well.) Most of the superstitions carry over from China to Korea and Japan as well, it's the part where the supposedly Asian room will have Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking staff. No Japanese, no Korean. The clientèle they're hoping to attract is mostly Chinese (they run buses to and from Chinatown to the various casinos around here), so that makes sense. But then why call it Asian? Yeah, it's nitpickery, but Asia is really really big! Look at your RISK board, see why it's worth seven armies every turn? There's plenty of countries that aren't China. Aren't even close. If they're serving Chinese noodles and hiring Chinese-speaking staff to cater to a Chinese crowd, why not just call it the Chinese room? I'm reminded of back in the day when you used to be able major in "Oriental Studies." What? ("Asian Studies" isn't really any better, but at least in a lot of places now it's qualified as "East Asian Studies.")

I'm also not entirely sure that the article gives the right impression about East Asians and superstitions. ("Better watch out and make sure your casino's feng shui is right, or you'll scare away the ignorant Asians!") I mean yes, obviously it's a big enough concern that they're addressing it, but I think Koreans, at least, are in general about as superstitious as Americans are. Mina wouldn't write student names in red ink, but Kate would; I don't have a thing about the number 13 but I say "rabbit rabbit" at the beginning of every month for good luck. It's not like a compulsive "it makes or breaks my day" thing. It's a small, inconsequential decision I make. The same with an old Chinese guy spending his pension gambling: choosing one casino over another is a really small, inconsequential decision, and if you use non-rational means of making that decision, what does it matter? Of course, thousands of people making the same decision based on those same non-rational means will mean something for the bottom line of a casino. But it's not like all those old Chinese guys gambling away their pension are walking around with a ba gua, scoping out the best place to set up their new business or plant their vegetable garden, which is what the article seems to imply. But again: China and Korea are two different countries, so who knows!

The point that also bugs me is this statistic: "Some experts estimate that 25 percent to 30 percent of new table game players in state casinos will be of Asian descent..."

Yes, there's lots of Asians here on the East Coast, mostly clustered around New York City. But, and here's the big but, of Asian descent does not equal Asian. There's no shortage of second, third, etc generation Asian-Americans, not to mention the half- or quarter-Asians they may or may not be counting in this statistic. No mention, either, whether those numbers include East Asians who were adopted and raised by American families. The implication seems to be that the 800,000 "Asians" (whatever that really means to the people conducting these surveys) in New York City are all superstitious old fresh-off-the-boat ajossis and ajummas, and that being of Asian descent is equivalent to being terrified of the number 4 or playing blackjack in room with blue walls.

In any case, Asia-ing it up won't bring me to your casino, Sands. That's not a casino, that's a tasteless monstrosity.

Oh hi, Denny!

2010-05-04T07:15:00.000+09:00

(A reference to the "Citizen Kane of bad movies," The Room)

Despite no longer being in Korea, I'm still here and updating. For one, since I'm considering coming back, I don't want to retired it quite yet. Also, I figure my teacher-buddies are SO TOTALLY INTERESTED IN MY POST-KOREA LIFE AND TIMES.

I hung out at home for a few weeks, then I hopped a plane to Stockholm to see my boyfriend:

Most of the time we spent bumming about Stockholm, which is one of my favorite cities in the world. I think it's absolutely gorgeous. One weekend we went out to Uppsala to visit his parents at their farm, along with his niece and nephew. And SHEEP! Very pregnant, fluffy sheep:

We also spent a few days in Finland, since it's so easy to get to from Stockholm.

Yes, we were ON A BOAT.

A fancy boat.

It was an overnight boat trip to get to Helsinki, a town small enough that you can walk the whole thing without much problem. We got off the boat at about 10 in the morning and made a beeline for our hotel on foot, taking in some of the city sights on the way.

We dropped off our bags and ventured out again, checklist in hand.

#1: The Finnish National Museum

#2: Tempelplatsens Kyrka

#3 Senate Square/Helsinki Cathedral

By the time we finished walking everywhere and seeing all we wanted to see, it was bedtime. The next day started with free breakfast at the hotel, and then the last item on our checklist, the Suomenlinna Sea Fortress. We checked out, grabbed our bags, and wandered down to the dock where we could catch the ferry to Suomenlinna.

Then some shopping in the market, and we were ready to go back to Stockholm.

In short: A+ would do again.

A taste of my home away from home

2010-03-23T12:57:00.000+09:00

Look what I found in Chinatown!

Kobarea: Music From the Motion Picture

2010-03-16T14:20:00.000+09:00

Or: My Year in a Playlist

(Now with commentary!)

Part One: Getting Settled
1. Suicide is Painless [theme from M.A.S.H.] (Manic Street Preachers) [I couldn't think of a more appropriate song to lead into a year spent in Uijeongbu. Also note the theme of this blog. Cough cough.]
2. Welcome to the Working Week (Elvis Costello)
3. It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere (Alan Jackson & Jimmy Buffet) [True, Alan Jackson isn't singing about drinking on a Wednesday night so much as he's singing about drinking on his lunch break, but the sentiment is close enough.]

Part Two: The Hagwon
4. Hard Knock Life (the Annie soundtrack) [It is a pretty hard knock life if you're a Korean kid.]
5. Who Needs Sleep? (Barenaked Ladies) [Certainly not high school students.]
6. Fight For Your Right to Party (Beastie Boys) [These kids could do with a little more fighting for their rights to do anything except go to classes and lessons and activities.]

Part Three: The First Few Weekends
7.Heroes and Villains (Beach Boys)[I would say that Seoul is full of heroes and villains. Heck, even Uijeongu.]
8. I've Got A Feeling (Black Eyed Peas)
9. Fire (2NE1)
10. Woo Hoo (The 5, 6, 7, 8s)
11. Just Dance (Lady Gaga)
12. Gold Digger (Kanye West) [Korean women do have a bit of a reputation...]
13. Bublitschki (Gogol Bordello) [I can think of no song that's more aesthetically appropriate for the post-partying fatigued/semi-hungover English teacher bumbling their way through Seoul. I think it's the tuba part.]

Part Four: The Acclimation
14. I'm Afraid of Americans (David Bowie) [I still feel weird around white people. Unfortunate, considering my current location.]
15. (I'll Never Be) Far From Home (Tiga) [The sentiment of "As far as I go, as far as I know, I always got a place called home. I cross all the seas, it's fine by me, 'cause I'll never be far from home." is something I think I already knew about myself but confirmed while in Korea: home is something I create around myself, not just the country on my passport or the town where I was born or the area where I grew up.]
16. Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta (Geto Boys) [Well, it does...]

Part Five: The Departure
17. Changeless (Carbon Leaf) [Basically anything I have to say about this song, I already said here.]
18. Take This Job And Shove It (Johnny Paycheck) [Korea I miss, sure. But hagwon politics? Eh...]
19. Leaving on a Jet Plane (John Denver)
20. I Bombed Korea (Cake) [I did. And I have my beer, and my stories to tell.]

Fellow (ex) expats, what would go on your playlist?

Dear Year-Ago, Pre-Korea Self,

2010-03-12T22:17:00.001+09:00

Don't worry, Korea will be awesome, but do bear these things in mind:

Don't worry about the food. In fact, worry about the food when you come back. You will miss it.
In fact, you'll probably like Korean food a little too much for your own good: JOIN A GYM RIGHT AWAY.
The clothes you got were acceptable, but they weren't quite in step with Korean style. Or any style. You dress kind of terribly. Just invest lots of good pants and buy the tops in Korea.
And just pack fewer clothes, goofball.
Don't waste so much time in Shinchon/Hongdae.
Be pro-active. Get off your duff and go do more stuff: Jeju, Busan, caves, templestays, etc.
Buy a toaster oven.
You should have started hitting the jjimjilbangs earlier. Much, much earlier.
There's plenty of cool stuff in Uijeongbu, you don't need to go to Seoul every weekend.
SPAM is really, really good. Yes, really.

This will much better prepare you for your year abroad, Self. Take this advice to heart.

Love,

Your Older, Post-Korea Self

East versus West

2010-03-10T09:37:00.000+09:00

Never mind that I think the breaking down of cultures into hemispheres is, at best, dated, and operates on outmoded stereotypes of both "sides." Let's get some side-by-side shots going! Mostly for the benefit for friends in Korea who might actually give a crap about seeing where I came from and what I came home to. For anyone else this is just a bunch of self-indulgent narcissism. Nothing to see here, move along.

ROUND ONE: THE DIGS

Korea

America

Winner: America

ROUND TWO: THE COOKERY

Korea

America

Winner: America again. I made those muffins in that oven.

ROUND THREE: THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Korea

America

Winner: Tie. The scenery is nice but you can't get anywhere without a car (leaving me feeling rather isolated and frustrated when my stand-in car's battery died this morning). I could walk to nearly anything I might have wanted in the 'dong: the grocery store; countless restaurants, bars, and *bongs; the bus stop; work.

ROUND FOUR: WORK

Korea

America

Winner: Again, a tie. It's one of those things where you always want to be where you're not.

ROUND FIVE: PLAY

Korea

America

Winner: Korea. (Apologies to Steven Bost—trivia night is great and I have a lot of fun, but the bartenders don't breathe fire.)

ROUND SIX: FOOD

Korea

Winner: It's all so tasty. Tie.

ROUND SEVEN: CREEPY CRAWLY PESTS

Korea

America

Winner: Korea. Mosquitoes are infinitely more manageable than stinkbugs.

ROUND EIGHT: NEIGHBORS TO THE NORTH

Korea

America

WINNER: Korea. Canada's cool and all, but you guys aren't half as hilarious as Kim Jeong-il.

ROUND NINE: EAR CANDY

Korea

America

WINNER: America, though that was a close one.

ROUND TEN: EYE CANDY

Korea

America

Winner: Who doesn't win? Everyone does. Yum.

Apologies for shifting focus from my own REALLY VERY INTERESTING life into general culture commentary. But I ran out of pictures of stuff at home.

Still Not Like the ROK

2010-03-05T02:24:00.000+09:00

Things I Miss From Korea

Noraebangs
Cheap, plentiful liquor
Being able to say, "Team Awesome, FIGHTING!" without sounding like a jackass
Billiards halls every twenty feet
Not being able to understand inane conversations going on around me
Jjimjilbangs
Sitting on the floor at restaurants

An Attempt at Curing the Reverse Homesickness

2010-03-03T13:03:00.000+09:00

Things I Don't Miss About Korea

Tiny bath towels
Terrible driving
People horking snot rockets on the tile floor of my apartment building
Not having a dryer
Not having an oven
Jackass students
My nasty bathroom + unreliable shower

Things At Home That Have Me Pretty Stoked

Food
Upcoming adventures with Tesia
The cave
The Q-Mart
Driving Yoda around again
Having a piano
HUGE bath towels
Being able to find clothes that fit
Being able to communicate with any given store clerk/bus driver/bar tender/etc
Thrift Stores

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, good night...

2010-02-27T11:22:00.000+09:00

I have no more classes left. (At Sherlock Academy, anyway.)

The last two days I spent pigging out on snacks with my kids to celebrate my imminent return to the States. I also was nicely surprised by my coworkers as well. Mmm, Paris Baguette cake!

Snack party:

Lily (above) has kind of a 'tude but she's so adorable that it never really bothers me. If I sing or talk to myself in class (it happens), she will mimic what I say like a parrot. She's funny and smart as a whip.

These are among the oldest of my students, Nicole and Isabel. Also really adorable.

Kate is definitely not a student.

My last class of the day I always assumed hated me (or at least that one girl in particular did and that everyone else was neutral), but they all pooled their money to buy a box of brownies and build an impromptu "cake," complete with candles. Holy crap!

After getting good and tweaked out on sugar, Team Sherlock and some friends from the 'bu went out for my favorite dinner: cheesy dak galbi.

Will I be able to eat this in the states? No, probably not. I don't think Kim's Kitchen has the proper setup for cheesy dak galbi, even if I'll be able to get my jjigae and kimchi fix. I'll have to go to Koreatown in Philadelphia for old school, sit-on-the-floor-and-cook-it-at-your-table style dining. On the plus side, I am returning to the land of pierogies and penne vodka.

Now, for a moment of reflection:

For a while, I was a bit miserable here in Korea. Not to say it was Korea per se that made me miserable—that would be a lie. I took to Korea and Korean culture fairly easily, and never felt so totally alienated or homesick that I wanted to go home. But I had very frustrating classes and, to be quite blunt, I had no idea what to do with them or how to run them. For a while, I was looking into adult hagwons down in Seoul, figuring that the physical toll of working a split shift would be worth it if I got to stay away from kids.

Some things you only learn by doing. Classroom management is one of them. When my second round of classes started in December (the classes changed in the middle of the month), I had a chance to apply all that I had learned from my previous failures and do it right. Maybe I just had better students. Whatever the case, I looked back on some private blog entires six weeks into teaching in the spring, and compared them with six weeks into teaching in January, after the new semester. Across the board, I was far more comfortable and stress-free in January than I was in the spring, so I guess I got at least a little bit better. No longer did I dread coming to work, and things quickly returned to their initial state of relatively blissful "this is hardly like work" atmosphere. Just in time to go home. D'oh!

This is all to say that I'm 90% certain that I will return to Korea in 2011, so this blog isn't officially retired quite yet. I'm still going home after this contract is finished, no worries (as if you were worried!). I'm going to take the time to get CELTA/CELTYL certified, which will not only mean an increase in salary in Korea for me, but an easier time getting a TEFL position anywhere in the world. I could go anywhere in the world, of course, but I'd still like to come back to Korea after I finish that; there's much in Korea I didn't get to see (Jeju, Dokdo, Busan) or do (temple stay, MudFest, the rock festival) or eat (live octopus, silkworm larvae) and I'd like to get one more chance at it. Even though many of my fellow weigukin friends will have traipsed back home by that point, some others will hopefully be around, and my Korean friends won't be going anywhere any time soon.

That's still a year away, though. So until then:

Goodbye, Korea. :C