Trekker Drew

Europe "will never block the internet" [self-translated news article]

2012-01-23T18:42:00.000+09:00

LeMonde had a good article about Europeans' privacy and rights on the internet. I thought it was worth translating, so I tried to do as well as I could. I've always found that French news articles have much longer sentences and are a lot more wordy than English-language news articles. Original here.

The European Union "will never block the internet" in the name of enforcing copyright laws, said the European Commissioner of Justice, Viviane Reding. "The protection of copyright holders should never be used as a pretext to reduce freedom on the internet," said Reding. She emphasized that the current question of freedom on the internet is one of "lively debate."

In the US, political power took one step forward and two steps back with its controversial proposed PIPA and SOPA anti-piracy laws. An unprecedented number of websites, including internet giants such as Google, Wikipedia and dozens of others shut down or otherwise openly protested the proposed laws. Around the same time, American authorities closed down Megaupload.com – an emblematic and controversial file-hosting website – citing copyright law violations. "You will never see Europe restricting the internet, it's just not an option we'll take," said Reding at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich.

"Freedom of information is a fundamental right closely intertwined with freedom of the internet," said the European Commissioner. She added that "European politics is designed to reach an equilibrium in respecting rights," both of content creators and internet users. A number of countries, including France, have passed legislation that permits the shutdown of certain websites. Gambling websites that do not conform to government standards on online gambling, for example, can be blocked under such laws.

EUROPEAN LAWS ON PRIVATE INFORMATION

Reding detailed her ideas for protecting Europeans' personal information on the internet. Her ideas, which should be published in the following several days, "replace the patchwork of current laws with one unified European law, applying to all online enterprises – based both inside and outside of Europe – that offer their services to the public." She also said that laws should prevent giants like Facebook or Google, for example, from collecting personal information and evading laws by storing information abroad. European internet law reform will require users' consent in "clear" terms before personal data can be collected. This will include information about how data is stored and for how long. The law will ensure Europeans have the "right to be forgotten," that is to say, "the right to revoke consent they have already given."

"Citizens should have the right to more power, and the power to control what is put online," said Reding. Finally, in the case "of loss, theft, or piracy of personal information, individuals should be quickly informed," and companies should be obligated to keep authorities informed of such events within 24 hours of their taking place.

Une fois à Paris, vous devez... / Once in Paris, you must...

2011-10-07T21:57:00.000+09:00

It all began with bureaucracy. Most of these trips do. But, the French have a special knack for making bureaucracy their thing.

I cannot begin to describe the amount of paperwork that had to be filled out in order to validate my stay here. In fact, I'm not even finished with it. My my visa isn't 100% valid, whatever that really means, until I've been here another 2-ish months.

The practical stuff, or what one would consider the practical stuff ends up getting pretty complicated. The first big thing I had to get done in order to do anything else was to open a bank account. It took me 4 days of going to the bank, rounding up the proper documents, getting rejected, going back, getting more documents, and going back again. Fortunately I came across a bank that was a bit more willing to help me than others, and I got lucky that the guy who helped me was the branch manager. He spoke English (voluntarily!), which was not necessary, however it was a reassuring sign that he was willing to help me out. Believe it or not, I actually had to go to the bank with my landlord's ID, her utility bill, and a signed statement from her saying that I lived in her apartment. I was just lucky she trusted me with the documents. Eventually everything got settled at the bank.

Once your account is open, the bank gives you a couple of slips called "R.I.B.s", or "Relève d'Identité Bancaire," which contain your name, address, and bank account information. You give one to the treasurer at the school and then they use the slip to set up your payroll.

Being Friday afternoon, I just finished my first week at my school and of training. My hours were sorted out and I got my "emploi du temps" which translates to "work schedule." As promised, I only have 12 hours a week of class. No work on Mondays, and only one class on Wednesdays. Tuesdays and Thursdays are very busy, and Fridays I only have 2 classes. All in all, it's a pretty good schedule.

I think I'm working with about 6 English (French) teachers directly. Another one is in charge of me and another one I won't be working with until later in the school year.

---

So far, I've given introductions to a number of small classes and have given a speaking test to another class. The students all seem pretty motivated, and the general level of English is VERY high. High enough that you can speak at a normal pace and they know exactly what you're saying so long as you don't use vocabulary that is too scientific or complicated. The other good news is that I'll have no more than 6-12 students per class, which makes it very manageable. In addition, I was told that I should not plan lessons that span more than once class, which means that each discussion class I give will need to be self-sufficient. That makes it easier to use lessons across groups and levels.

Classroom keys, mailbox keys, copy card, and lunch card having all been taken care of, I can start to settle in a bit now (at work, at least). I've been enjoying the school lunches, which myself and the other assistants are getting for 2,50€ apiece (super bargain!!). Compared to US school lunches, the French ones are really fantastic. They're a lot different from Korean lunch meals, in that, they're not spicy in the slightest. So far, for main courses, I've had lentils and ham, fried fish and potatoes, chicken and vegetables. Sides always include bread and fruit. Other sides include paté, caramel vanilla pudding, couscous, and a few others. Considering it costs half of what a bakery sandwich costs and comes with a lot more, it's really worth it to eat at the school, even on days I'm not working.

---

Over lunch we were discussing multilingualism and the varying attitude across countries about making language your specialty. The German assistant and her co-teacher were saying that in Germany it's sort of a de facto standard to speak multiple languages. To make that your goal is not at all unusual. In the US, this is not at all true. I think France is somewhere in the middle. The sciences are still respected fields and studying literature or language is not considered as important or valuable as the sciences. It's interesting, though, because ALL of the career language teachers I've met at my school (and others) speak their target language with near-native fluency. This is very much unlike in Korea, where many of the language teachers haven't even traveled to the country whose language they are teaching. All of the English teachers at my school with the exception of one are French (the other one is American, a curious situation to be sure). Their English has virtually no French accent and is just about as fluent and fluid as you could possibly imagine. It's seriously impressive. To me, that's a sign that they take their careers seriously and/or that they put lots of time into their profession.

At my school, there is an assistant (like myself) from Germany, Russia, Spain, and possibly Italy. By requirement, all of us speak French, and we all like to practice amongst ourselves. However, I think most of them also speak English as well. Truly an international community!

At this point I'm writing more of a book than a blog post, so I'll save whatever is left for the next one.

En route to Paris ... and finally, Vélib!

2011-09-28T03:14:00.000+09:00

Part 1: Leaving

Due to recent advancements in technology, I am now able to post this from 35,000 feet in the air. I'm currently flying from SFO to Philadelphia where I have a connecting flight to Paris. This route adds about two hours of flight time and one hour of layover time compared to a nonstop, but costs about half of what a nonstop flight would be with Air France (the only carrier out of SFO that currently does nonstop flights to CDG).

This time around in Paris is going to be pretty different from the last few times I was there. I'm doing it on about half the monthly budget of prior trips, and for about 6 months longer than any trip I've done to Paris. This has caused me a lot of anxiety lately as I search for housing (another thing I've never really had to do in Paris for myself) that is affordable with the stipend I'll be getting.

As with most things travel-related, the anticipation has been killing me. How am I going to make extra money? How will I find housing? How will I cover rent? How many times will I have to move? Can I afford to travel at all once I'm there? What will I do afterward? These are only some of the things I've been asking myself in preparation for the trip. A lot of these things are honestly take-them-as-they-come issues, but I can't help but worry about them being a planner at heart. To others it looks like I just packed my bags and went to France, but there were a hell of a lot of details that had to be planned out before I left home.

TAPIF, Teaching Assistantship Program in France, is the program I'll be working with. It's a government-sponsored program (not unlike EPIK in Korea) that allows foreigners to come teach English in exchange for a (small) stipend. I was very fortunately selected to teach at a nice technical high school in the heart of Paris. I first started my application last December, and it has taken most of the year to get everything in order to come over to France. Why do these processes take so long? My trip to Korea took a good eight months of planning and paperwork before I ever got there, too.

Once I'm there, I've got six weeks of housing lined up before I get to panic about housing again. In reality this means that I have about three weeks to settle in before I actually start panicking. I think once I'm in Paris that it will be easier to find people who need to share an apartment. Apartment-hunting in person is much easier than online, I would think. For the first five days I'm there, I will be at a hostel. After that, I have my own studio for 5 weeks until I can find something cheaper with roommates.

Other cost-saving measures will include no monthly metro pass, fewer trips to the bakery, and more trips to the Monoprix for raw cooking ingredients. That 5 Euro falafel on the Rue des Rosiers is going to taste that much better when I can't eat it every day!

The one thing that has already been already paid for and will save me lots of money is Vélib, the bike share service that has canvased Paris since 2007. A few months ago when I was in Paris I promised a post about Vélib and then never put one up, so here it is...

Part 2: Vélib

Vélib (vélo-bike, and liberté-freedom as one word) is a way to get around by bicycle in Paris by bike without actually owning one. For about $45 per year you get a pass that gives you access to over 2000 bike stands within the city limits, with each stand being no more than 800m (1/2 mile) from another stand. Each one contains between 5 and 50 bikes, which are heavy (seriously, 50 pound) cruisers with built-in headlights and baskets on front. They are utilitarian to the max, but that hasn't stopped the masses from destroying a certain percentage of all bikes that are out on the street. (There's some sort of principal or theory that explains how a common resource meant for the masses is eventually destroyed, albeit not intentionally, by its users. Very applicable in the case of Vélib.) They are geared such that you can't really ride faster than 10-12mph on flat land without looking like an idiot. Downhill you can certainly get some speed and momentum, but that's it.

Here's how it works: You pay online and receive a card in the mail. You can link your account with your transit (Navigo) pass or use the Vélib card they sent you. You walk up to a bike stand, find a working bike, and tap your card to the reader on the bike's post. The bike is unlocked, and then you pull it from the stand. At that point, you have 30 minutes to ride the bike without any additional charge (beyond the monthly fee), at which point it must be returned to a bike stand. (Additional fees are 1 Euro for the next 30 minutes, and then they start to get really high beyond 1 total hour.) The key is that you can return the bike to any bike stand in the city with open spaces. If you arrive at a bike stand and it has no free slots, the machine will show you a map and give you 15 minutes to take your bike to another stand. It usually works.

When it doesn't work, you're usually faced with a bike with flat tires, a chain that has come off, or some other anomaly. You can report bad bikes, but the informal way of dealing with bad bikes is to leave them in the rack with the seat turned backward. Every so often (which is pretty often) maintenance crews come around and fix (or replace) broken bikes.

There is a common issue with Vélib where people in one area will take bikes to another area but never return bikes to the original stand. This usually happens in Montmartre, which is a big hill. People love coasting down the hill, but they really don't like to bike back up. So, bikes have to find their way back to the top somehow. This is usually done by Vélib, who often shuttles around trailers of bikes to replenish the stations that are out. It's a good system, though Montmartre still doesn't have as many available bikes as the flatter parts of Paris.

I used Vélib as my main mode of transportation in Paris when I was there this summer. I had a metro pass, which I could probably count the number of times I used on one hand. Paris is surprisingly accessible with bike, and they're trying to make it even more accessible. Bus lanes are shared with bikes in most places, which means you have a 1.5x width lane in which to ride safely. People on the road are generally very aware of you and there are more cyclists on Paris roads than ever before.

The one thing I should really do if I'm going to be riding a lot is to buy a helmet. You'll occasionally see people carrying a helmet around, sans bike, intending to use them with Vélib. Smart is an understatement.

À Paris!

Paris' philosophical homeless

2011-07-30T04:41:00.001+09:00

I was eating dinner on the steps of the Société Géologique de France with a friend when a pretty rough-looking guy came up and sat on the steps, pretty near us.

He had burned hands, one of which was covered by a glove... he also had an uneven beard with what looked like gold spraypaint stuck in it. Overall, a pretty sad looking fellow.

I had an extra piece of lebanese food that I didn't feel like eating. When I got up to walk away, I figured I'd give it to the guy. I thought he was homeless given his appearance, but I wasn't sure. I took the chance and the following transaction took place:

Me: "Excusez-moi moisseur, est-ce que vous-avez faim?" (Excuse me sir, are you hungry?)
Him: "Bien sûr, on a tous faim." (Of course, we're all hungry.)
Me: "Vous voulez prendre cela?" (Would you like to take this?)
Him: "J'essaie de boire moins d'alcool." (I'm trying to cut back on the alcohol.)
Me: "Mais vous avez faim, non?" (But you're hungry, right?)
Him: "Oui. Mais, allez-y, merci." (Yes. Go on, thanks though.")

Not sure exactly what happened, but he politely refused what was clearly food. He didn't seem offended, so no harm no foul.

Paris by scooter

2011-07-21T19:58:00.001+09:00

I read somewhere that there are two types of people: those who would ride a scooter in Paris, and those who wouldn't be caught dead on one.

I'm the former.

Some say it's a death wish, but after 8 of my last 24 hours on a scooter, I can safely there are many reasons this simply isn't the case.

Yesterday a friend and I went and rented a 50cc Vespa from Freescoot in the 5th Arrondissement (Paris 5ème arr.). For a modest $72 we had the scooter for 24 hours, unlimited mileage, with liability insurance. The only thing we had to pay extra for was whatever gas we used. It came with a half-tank and it only cost us $11 to put in 3/4 of a tank (~4.5l/1.2gal) when it got low. Yes, we paid $9.70 per gallon, even on the cheaper outskirts of Paris. But, when your vehicle gets 50mpg, it's very worth it.

Here's the scooter I rode around on for the last day. With two of us on it,

it didn't go all that fast, but we saw plenty of smaller scooters with 2

people on it. When in Rome, er Paris....

The French guy who runs the scooter rental/repair shop told me that two-wheeled travel as a mode of transportation in Paris has changed a lot in the last 15 years. He said that there were very few scooters on the road 15 years ago and that it was very dangerous to ride in Paris. Nowadays, you can't walk 50 feet without one (or several) passing you. You can park them practically anywhere, and as long as you use a lock (which many people don't), your bike will be passed up for an easier target if thieves come along.

Since there are so many scooters on the road now, most drivers, including taxi, bus, truck, and auto drivers are very aware of your presence on the road. People give you space to get in a lane. They realize that if the lane you're in is blocked ahead, that you'll need to go around. They give you room to split lanes and go around traffic. It's quite spectacular how well people play together on the road here, despite the perceived traffic chaos that Paris seems to be so renowned for. It's still somewhat chaotic, but it's organized chaos. Orders of magnitude better than the drivers in Korea, where I'd hear a traffic accident outside of my apartment every two weeks on average (I'm not exaggerating).

There are 1.7 million people on the road every day in Paris, and I read that there were only 19 road fatalities last year within the city. Given 50% of them were two-wheel-related, odds seem to be roughly 1 in 62,050,000 that you'll die in a scooter crash in Paris in a given year.

That isn't to say that riding up to 35 miles per hour with nothing but a helmet is safe. It's a calculated risk people take when they get onto their motorcycles or scooters here, but it's practical, and a hell of a lot of fun.

After 3 weeks of biking around here on Vélib bikes (I promise I'll write a post on these!), I thought that I had a general idea of how traffic worked and how people acted on the roads. I was right. I also thought it couldn't get much more fun than being on a bike in Paris. I was wrong.

Aside from inhaling diesel fumes and smelling up my day's clothes, riding around Paris on a scooter is an absolute blast. You don't do it to sight-see, unless you're stopping here and there to look at the attractions (we did stop for lunch and casually walked in to a restaurant with our helmets... so French, we were!). You do it to blend in and flow among the highly-mobile Parisian life. Eyes on the road, Paris by scooter is an adrenaline-induced state of Zen, if there is such a thing. I can't quite describe how satisfying it was. My friend, even though she wasn't driving, said the same thing; that despite her sore legs, it was very fun to take it all in.

If I had to guess, I put about 60-80km (40-50mi) on the bike in the 8 hours of riding I did. It could have been less, but I didn't look at the odometer reading before and after.

This won't be the last time!

Chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate.

2011-07-17T00:16:00.000+09:00

En français (for English, scroll down):

Ceux qui vraiment me connaissent savent très bien que j'aime beaucoup le chocolat noir.

Chaque fois que je suis à Paris, mon but est de manger n'importe quelle création chocolatée que je puisse manger, soit les éclairs au chocolat, les bonbons, la glace... n'importe quoi chocolat.

Une étudiante a laissé un lien sur le mûr de Facebook pour notre groupe. Il s'agissait des chocolats chauds le plus célèbres à Paris.

J'ai mémorisé l'adresse du premier chocolatier que j'ai vu (Angelina), et j'y suis allé par Vélib. Il se situe au côté nord du Jardin de Tuileries, à la Rue de Rivoli. Je pensais qu'il s'agissait d'un petit chocolatier, mais je me suis trompé. En fait, c'était un resto très grand et célèbre. Je me sentais un peu bizarre d'y aller tout seul, mais ce sentiment a rapidement disparu.

Je me suis assis, et j'ai bientôt commandé la spécialité de la maison: "Le chocolat chaud l’Africain." A ma grande surprise, la boisson est venue très rapidement (j'avais lu que la service là n'est pas du tout rapide). C'est le seul chocolat chaud que j'ai jamais bu qui a été servi avec deux cuillières!

Ce qu'on reçoit, c'est une tasse pour servir, comme celui duquel on sert la sauce pendant le Thanksgiving, une petite tasse de la crème chantilly (non-sucrée), et une tasse dans laquelle vous versez (pelletez?) la boisson.

Comme vous voyez, la viscosité de la boisson est très haute. Le site-web n'a pas menti, si c'était plus épaisse, cela ne serait plus une boisson.

C'était si riche qu'on pourrait avoir bu comme repas. Sans débat, c'était le meilleur chocolat chaud que j'ai jamais bu. Mais, le gôut ne faisait qu'une partie de l'expérience. Aller au resto haute-classe pour tout simplement boire un chocolat chaud, c'est un peu bizarre, non? Je me sentais mieux quand j'avais vu d'autres Américains en commandant la même chose que moi.

Pour voir la liste des chocolatiers qui servent le chocolat chaud, cliquez ici.
Pour voir le site-web d'Angelina, cliquez ici.
------------------------------

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a huge fan of dark chocolate.

Whenever I'm in Paris, I make it a point to eat whatever great chocolate creation I can come across, be it eclairs, small chocolates, ice cream... anything chocolate.

One of the students posted a link on the Americans in Paris Facebook wall. It was a link to the best-known hot chocolate establishments in Paris. I located the first one, Angelina, took a Vélib bike (more about that in the next post) and rode there. The place I went to is on the north side of the Tuileries Gardens, on the Rue de Rivoli. I thought it would be a small chocolate shop, but I was mistaken; it was instead a pretty large and well-known restaurant. I felt a bit weird asking for a table by myself, but that feeling went away pretty quickly.

I sat down and soon ordered their house speciality: "Le chocolat chaud l'Africain." I don't really know how to translate the name, though. To my great surprise, it came pretty quickly considering I'd read that the service at Angelina was pretty slow. This was the only hot chocolate I've ever drank that was served with two spoons!

What you get with it is a serving jar, sort of like what you serve gravy from on Thanksgiving, a small cup of unsweetened whipped cream, and a cup to pour (shovel?) it all into.

As you can see, the viscosity is almost that of maple syrup. As the website said, it's just about as thick as it can possibly get and still be considered a drink.

It was so decadent you could almost consider it a meal. It was easily the best hot chocolate I've ever had, but the taste was only half of the experience. Going to a fancy restaurant just to order a hot chocolate was kind of funny, but I felt better when I saw to other Americans come in and do exactly the same thing.

To see the list of hot chocolate joints in Paris I referenced, click here.
To see the website for Angelina, click here.

------------

Pardon any grammatical errors or strange turns of phrase; I actually wrote this almost entirely in French and then wrote the English version to match.

This is why I'm here.

2011-07-13T02:40:00.001+09:00

Crisis mode in Paris.

Three times in a week, I've had to run around like what my old boss used to call "a one-armed paper hanger," whatever that is supposed to mean. A little backstory...

UCD Summer Abroad has sent me for the second time to serve as the "On-Site Coordinator" for a group of university students on credit-earning summer trips. This means staying in the lodging with the students wherever they are traveling for the summer. In 2009, it was "The Grand Tour" around Europe, but this year it's "Americans in Paris," which is a month-long course in Paris, the same one I was a student of in 2007.

Even though we haven't been here more than 10 days, in the last week, I've accompanied students to the dentist, the emergency ophthalmology clinic, and the police prefecture. Actually, this is exactly what I'm here to do: be responsible for responding to students' needs so that the professor can do her job and teach the class, uninterrupted.

The first student had a toothache and insisted on seeing a dentist to verify she didn't need an emergency root canal, something she said had happened to her in the past. I ended up calling about six dentists, only one of which was available on a Wednesday afternoon for a last-minute visit. Turns out that many people in France like to visit the dentist before going on vacation, and vacation is reaching prime-time pretty soon. We were taken out of place, in between appointments, to the somewhat veiled chagrin of the dentist, though I thanked him profusely. "It was you that saved us in 1944" he said in French. Not sure how serious he was, but it was nice of him to take us regardless of our actions in World War II. Total cost for the student for an exam with state-of-the-art digital X-Ray equipment and a very knowledgeable dentist: 40 Euros. Total time: 45 minutes.

The second student woke up one morning unable to see out of one eye; it was swollen shut. So, off to Hôtel-Dieu, a big hospital on Paris' Île de la Cité (caddy corner to Notre Dame cathedral). This was a bit more of an ordeal. While Hôtel Dieu is a stunningly beautiful old building, when you couple the fact that it's old and that it's governmental, you get... a labyrinth: corridors every which way, paperwork, sick people waiting for help, multi-step bureaucracy. The works. Total student cost for good, though curt service from an emergency ophthalmologist: 50 Euros. Total time: 2.5 hours.

The third student was actually a pair of roommates who approached me this afternoon after class. Their wallets, which had been left in their room, had been poached to the tune of about 140 Euros. It must have happened when they were in class. The cleaning ladies this morning had a more extensive task than usual, which was to change the sheets in the rooms (only done once a fortnight). So, they were on our floor for longer than they usually are and had the rooms open for longer, too. Funny thing is that their rooms had been locked and nothing else had been stolen (among American cash, computers, and cameras). Purely a simple crime of opportunity. The Foyer management was dismissive of the idea that their staff could have taken the money, but we can't see any other plausible way the money could have disappeared. They said their cleaning staff "some of which have been working here for 20-30 years" are very honest. However, you never know all sides of the story. Perhaps the room had been left unlocked at some point. Nobody knows. The prudent thing to do was go to the police prefecture to file a formal report for the records and for potential insurance use. This, contrary to what I thought it would be like, was very painless, and the La Police Nationale were very friendly to us. I get the feeling that since violent crimes aren't as common as they are in the US, they take a lot more petty theft reports than one might imagine. We were in and out of there in about 25 minutes flat. Pretty impressive!

Part of managing all this, contrary to what I said above about running around like a madman, is about being calm and dealing with the situation as things unfold. Panic doesn't achieve anything, especially if I'm the one panicking. As soon as the responsible person starts to panic, others panic too. I have a lot of spare time on my hands while here, so there's no reason I need to hurry or panic when I have whole mornings/afternoons/days to deal with these things as needed.

Each of these interactions took place entirely in French, which most of the students in the group don't speak. A few of them have some formal French education, but most have said that it really helps to have someone (more or less) fluent to explain things. I really couldn't imagine having to do this myself in a country where I don't speak the language. I got really lucky nothing terribly more serious than this happened to me when I was living in Korea.

Sunday evening in Paris

2011-07-04T04:11:00.000+09:00

There was something about the last hour that compelled me to write something short and swift, leaving the reader to perhaps fill in the gaps. However, I can't leave this one without some sort of record or explanation. So, spoiler alert. This explains the half-assed poetry from the prior post.

After sleeping most of the afternoon, I woke up, hungry. I took a bite of my day-old baguette to see whether I was really hungry or whether my body was fooling me. Nope, I was hungry.

I strolled down to the Place Edmond Brossard and sat down at one of the busy cafes. I ordered a plate of smoked salmon and a salad, which ended up being wholly too much food. I should have taken it as a hint when the guy did a double take upon my ordering. When they brought the food out on three separate plates and they told me that I must have an appetite (all in French, of course), I knew I'd be there for a while.

The taste of the food was nearly inconsequential, because the experience as a whole was so much more than those plates of food. I ate slowly and watched people crossing the boulévard, in the height of French fashion. Everyone in the cafe faces the street, so you see the street and the backs of people in front you.

You also hear their conversations, and sometimes you end up talking to people. Tonight, I heard a British woman talking to what have must been her niece. What she was telling her niece was so inspiring that I felt compelled to thank her for her words and that I wished more adults had the same attitude as her. Travel young and explore, she said. You don't need much money when you're on your own and traveling. Do what you love to do and happiness will follow. I had the feeling that the girl, probably high school-age, the woman was addressing, might not have heard this from her own parents. I could tell by the way she was receiving the advice, both appreciative and a little surprised at the same time.

My bill eventually came (eventually, as in, they took their time as usual), and just as the bill was placed on my table, I see a familiar group of people.

It was the people I sat next to on my flight 4 days ago. Another group of incredibly open-minded, inspiring, intellectuals. They were from the Bay Area and had 2 high school-age kids. Come to think of it, they held a remarkably similar attitude in life to the woman I had just been talking to at the table next to mine.

I quickly paid my bill, tipping a little more than I probably should have for Paris and the service received, and ran down the street to see if I could find the people from my flight. Fortunately they hadn't gone very far down the block, so I said hi and we shared some stories. It was really interesting to meet them in a less jet-lagged context and out in the Paris sun. We exchanged some friendly parting words and went our own direction.

There was just something about the whole experience that was remarkably human and social. It was coincidental, inspiring, interesting, and heart-warming all at the same time.

Here is the current view from the terrace on which I'm writing:

9:10PM, and still 45 minutes to Sunset!

Day

2011-07-04T03:49:00.000+09:00

Paris. Sunday evening.

Hungry. Cafe culture. Food ordered. Too much. Ate slowly. Watched, listened, ate. Listened, ate, watched. Discussion everywhere. German, French, English. Low sun.

Long pants. Short skirts. Bikes. Ice cream. Park view.

Good advice. Good vibes. Oily food. Delicious cuisine.

Meal finished. Incomplete. Best effort. Familiar faces. Bill paid. Foot chase.

Smiles. Stories. Laughs. Best appearance.

Parting words. Parting ways.

Roof. Discussion. Polyglots. Books, computers, sunglasses.

Melancholy. Quiet. Park view.

Sunset.

Sunday in Paris.

Library of Congress

2011-03-25T06:54:00.001+09:00

I thought this was interesting (read: cool) enough to warrant its own blog post.

I'm currently sitting in the main reading room of the Library of Congress, which I was originally told I would not be able to access. It's "sort of" open to the public, meaning you can't waltz in, but you can gain access if you have an academic or research need.

Initially I was disappointed that I couldn't go inside the main reading room, since that is what I thought the Library of Congress was all about. However, there is some awe-inspiring architecture and history even if you can't get into the reading rooms:

Nonetheless, I went through the proper channels and applied as an individual doing individual research. Not too long after, I was given a card with my name and picture on it.

Currently I'm waiting for a book to arrive to the main desk, since you can't necessarily browse the shelves. It takes about an hour to get a book, since a staff member has to physically retrieve it and send it (via conveyer?) to the requested desk. While I won't stick around reading the book until closing, I'll put it on reserve and come back tomorrow. This place is just too inspiring just to see once.

P.S.: It's a shame pictures aren't allowed in the reading rooms or I would have taken plenty by now.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Sacramento

2011-03-18T02:08:00.001+09:00

It's amazing, how, in this day and age, you can still waltz into the state Capitol Building and basically see the whole thing on your own. You have to go through security at the door, but that's not such a big deal on a Thursday morning at 8:30AM.

It's strange to walk around and be among the suits, interns, and security guards with neigh a layperson in sight. (Well, there was a school field trip moving through.) I feel very out of place as the lone guy with the huge camping backpack, walking the immaculate marble floors of our state's most official building. I suppose it would be a different sight at 2PM on a summer Saturday afternoon, but alas I prefer feeling slightly awkward over having to jostle crowds in order to see what I want to.

I ended up walking here from roughly mid-to-East Sacramento, where my friend lives. She had to leave early for work and didn't want to bother her roommate, so I just left when she did at around 7. When I made a comment about not having been up this early for a while, she apologized. I told her I actually wasn't complaining and that I'm more of a morning person. There hasn't been a hugely compelling reason to get up early lately since I'm more or less on vacation.

Anyhow, I digress. It has been a long time since I last visited the inside of the Capitol, despite having made many trips to the grounds to cover protests for the newspaper in Davis. In about an hour, I'll head back upstairs to watch the assembly in session. I was told it's a bit of a zoo, since the budget has been hotly contested as of late. Should be an interesting sight. Here's a picture of staff readying the assembly hall, which, despite it's permanently green color, is quite fitting for Saint Patrick's day.

Hopefully I'll get to enjoy the clear weather some more before we get rain again.

Back in the US

2011-02-28T08:43:00.000+09:00

I never did make a parting post, though I guess the one I wrote on the train a few days before departing sums up how I felt about leaving. Now I've been back for about 2 weeks and the reverse culture shock is starting to wear off a bit.

I had quite a connection getting back, as I had to stop in Hong Kong, which is the opposite direction of San Francisco from Incheon. So, it was a 3.5 hour flight to HK and then a 12 hour flight from there to San Francisco. By the time I got home, I had been up for an ungodly number of hours, and it was still only 10AM (the same day I left, funny how that works). I managed to stay up until 9PM that night, at which point I had been up for about 31 hours with no more than a 3 hour nap in the middle. Ouch.

Amazingly, I slept the whole night and never once woke up at a weird hour or had trouble getting to sleep. However, I didn't give myself a chance to rest and was kind of a busybody for the next week after that, where the effects of international travel finally crept up on me. I was exhausted, felt ill, and had sensory overload from being back in a surrounding where I could understand most of what was going on around me.

I've gotten to see a bunch of friends and family since I got back, which is really excellent and has helped me re-ground myself in California. The California countryside is even more gorgeous than I remembered, especially coming from a barren urban Korea where trees and wildlife are unheard of, especially in the wintertime. East Bay hills and Humboldt County, respectively:

There were a few days where I had to re-adjust to driving again. After spending many hours in Korean taxis vigilantly being aware of any impending death, situational awareness wasn't really the problem. It was more the fact that driving demands a lot of constant attention and I simply hadn't had to do that for a solid year. However, later getting behind the wheel of my mom's car – the one I first learned to drive on almost a decade years ago – was a great feeling. Nothing like that glove-like familiarity to make you feel like you're at home.

Everyone I talked to who went home before me said that the average size of Americans was striking upon returning home. I guess it has taken me a few weeks to really realize that, but it wasn't until I saw some average-sized Asians in SF that I realized how huge we are in comparison. I'm no longer the tallest one in the room! The thing I noticed first, however, was the difference in personal space. I quickly got used to being seated on the subway in Korea, squished on both sides by others' elbows and arms. It was a really nice thing to re-experience the 3 foot bubble that is so commonly associated with Western culture. Sitting down on BART or MUNI it was strange when people made an effort NOT to touch or otherwise bump in to each other.

As for photography, it's interesting how easy it was to get out and shoot in Korea. You have an excuse to do weird things as a foreigner, since you're already weird by definition (in Korea, at least). Here, dedicated photo walks are a little less common and I'm probably a bit more picky about what I want to go out and shoot before I actually leave the house. Gotta ramp up that freelance business, though. I'm going to be shooting more for California Beat when I go back to the Bay Area in a week, and hopefully that'll get my photos (and writing) some more exposure.

People have been asking me a lot about my plans for travel and whatnot now that I'm back. Here goes:

Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston (March 23 - April 4)
Portland, a road trip (mid-April?)
New Mexico, a road trip (early May)
Paris, helping staff Americans in Paris for UC Davis (July)
France (October), that is, if I get the ESL teaching job I've applied for, though I'm hoping my chances are good considering my French education and relevant teaching experience in Korea

If I don't get into the program in France, I need to find employment or go back to school, the former of which will probably happen first because I'll need to apply to a grad program. The grad program would likely be in education, so that I could teach French either at the high school or community college level. However, I'm hoping to get a photography business going or become a part of what we're hoping is going to become a profitable news organization in the bay area. The Beat is already providing great breaking-news coverage and exclusive features on Bay Area news, but that needs to be ramped up more.

So there you have it, no shortage of things to do!

1 celebration down, 2 to go

2011-02-12T21:41:00.000+09:00

Currently I'm on the train back home from Seoul on Saturday night. I spent the day with my photographer friends, taking pictures up and down Namsan Park and enjoying food (and margaritas) at Tomatillo, the Chipotle-like restaurant near Jonggak Station.

Today was my last day visiting Seoul, as I don't really have any intention of going back tomorrow for a visit. If there's one thing I'll miss about Seoul, it's the public transit and the food. Okay, that was two things. There's a lot more than that to miss about Seoul, but those are the first that pop into mind.

As the sun started to get low in the sky, we were treated to great blue colors above, orange on the horizon, and warm colors on everything ground-level. People were out in mass today, despite the coldest day we've seen in Seoul in 2 weeks.

Three weeks ago I talked about being sad to leave Korea but excited to be coming home. Three weeks is an abstract time to be looking forward to, but there has been a lot more emotional impact lately when making that statement. Those remaining days become easier to quantify. 3 more days I'll wake up on my stiff Korean bed. 3 more days I have to plan my hot water usage in the mornings, 3 more breakfasts I'll eat in my cozy neighborhood of Sinpo-dong.

A year has gone by so quickly, yet so much has happened in that same year. I was talking with my New Zealander friend about that absolutely irreplicable feeling of novelty you feel just once in a new country. I distinctly remember the first morning I woke up in korea and visited a Korean convenience store. What they carried on their shelves was so different from anything I'd seen before. I didn't even know how to say "thank you" to the cashier (now I can do it in 3 different ways). I even remember what I bought: a bottle of water, a vitamin water, pocket tissues, and some Halls cough drops (so much for utilizing that unique stock, huh?). Despite having visited too many convenience stores to count since then, I'll never in my life forget that first morning in all of its novelty. That is what keeps me traveling and makes for a seemingly unquenchable wanderlust.

And there it began: a new year of adventures unlike anything I would have expected, and far better too. It has had its ups and downs, but there was never a time in this year, even at it's lowest points, that made me want to say "fuck it" and get on a plane back home. And for me, that's important because it is reminiscent of other times in my life that I really enjoyed.

Yet, home remains that: home. It beckons you to return, at least for a while, to repair what one loses from leaving home, and, to remind one of what home really means.

For me, that includes 3 foot personal space, 3 dollar a gallon gasoline, 3 seconds to phone a friend and not have to worry that it's the middle of the night, 3 miles to bike to UC Berkeley, and 3 seconds to look out the window and reaffirm that I'm home. The latter thought was my last before drifting into a deep sleep last night. 3 days and I'm home.

Enough waxing philosophical here, this is my stop. (As a side note, this is an obscene amount of writing for me in 45 minutes on an iPod.)

See you soon, California!

A rundown of (a few) Seoul Museums

2011-02-05T15:58:00.000+09:00

Seoul is a pretty huge city, and despite going there nearly every weekend for a year, I hadn't made it to any of its excellent museums until recently.

As I posted about previously, the war memorial and museum is definitely my favorite. Really fantastic, diverse collection for people with different interests. It's located near Yongsan station and is only a few minutes away by taxi. Pictures here:

Next is the Seoul Museum of Art, which is actually split up across different buildings. The one I went to recently was the one next to the Seoul Museum of History. It's located inside of Gyeonghui Palace, about a 7 minute walk from Seodaemun station, which is on Line 5. They had a really great Seoul photography exhibition going, which illustrated very well the urbanization of Seoul. Accompanying the exhibition was a large room with more photography books than I've ever seen in one place. Just about every historically famous photographer was represented there along with a multitude of styles. I could have spent a number of days in there, but unfortunately the exhibition closed before I got to go back. Picture:

This week, I went to the Seoul Museum of History. It had some great visuals about Seoul's urban development. The best part, by far, was the scale model of Seoul. It took up an entire room and was pretty interactive for something so intricate:

There is an exhibition going right now about 40 years of development in Gangnam, which unfortunately was all in Korean. We went through but didn't understand much aside from the pictures. They did have some interesting aerial photography plates spanning 4 decades, showing the development of Gangnam from farmland to an urban center, though.

Yesterday, I visited the National Museum of Korea, which is located at Icheon station, exit 3 (formerly exit 2). Apparently it's the 6th largest museum in the world. For what it's worth, the architecture of the museum is stunning and there is a lot of stuff on display. However, a large percentage of it is ceramic pots, which you can only see so many of before you get tired of them. There were some great neolithic artifacts to appreciate, since they were in really good shape and displayed well. There were a lot of people there yesterday, being the day after lunar new year, but the museum is so big that it didn't feel crowded. Pictures here:

Memphis King Barbecue (MKB) in Seoul

2011-01-25T19:58:00.000+09:00

By winning the Groove Magazine photo contest in December, I was treated to a couple of gift cards, one of which was a coupon for a free rib dinner at Memphis King Barbecue near Gangnam (강남) in Seoul. I was anxious to redeem my free dinner and have some American style ribs, which are far superior to anything they can come up with in Korea.

According to the owner of MKB, a Korean-American from Memphis, Korean ribs have the top layer (the bulk of the meat) skimmed off to be used for Samgyeopsal (삼겹살), a Korean pork barbecue dish. So, when you buy ribs in a Korean-style restaurant, they have almost no meat on them and aren't smoked at all.

MKB changes everything. Lots of meat on their ribs, and lots of flavor, too. Their ribs are smoked for 4 hours, ensuring a great smoky taste throughout the meat, rather than just on the surface. I got the full slab of ribs, which came with fries. I split them with a friend, and were quite pleased with the quality. They were juicy, the meat came right off the bone, and just delicious overall.

We also ordered the sampler platter, which came with fries, chicken nuggets, mozzarella sticks, pulled pork, a little salad, and two dipping sauces. That was 15,000 won, or about $13.50. Not a bad deal for all the food that came with. The pulled pork was by far the best part (and the one obviously in-house dish on the platter).

We had to practically roll ourselves out of the restaurant after all the food we had eaten.

I'll definitely be going back if I have the chance in my last few weeks here. Highly recommended if you want some Memphis-style American food. For something quite affordable, check out the pulled pork burger, which I think was just under 7000 won.

Their website is here: http://mkb.kr/

War Memorial of Korea

2011-01-25T19:57:00.000+09:00

Sunday was a really awesome day all around. We got about 3 inches of snow in a single afternoon, during which I was roaming the grounds of the War Memorial of Korea, in Seoul:

In short, this is one of the best museums I've seen in Asia. It includes at least several dozen aircraft in the grounds that surround the impressive structure:

The B52 bomber they have on display was pretty impressive. There's a ladder that leads up to the cockpit windows, which were nearly impossible to see through. However, the view of the rest of the grounds from the top of the ladder was pretty great. The snow really added to the effect:

They had some smaller wartime trainers on display as well. They were strangely comforting to be able to walk up to and examine up close. In doing so, I realized how deeply I miss flying and what respect I have for the sky:

There are apparently more than 10,000 objects or artifacts on display in the museum, which explains why it took me roughly 4 hours to get through the whole thing, including the aircraft.

The parts of the museum that detail wartime poverty were particularly striking to see. 50 years ago Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world and the museum really reminds you of this fact. Being a country of younger wealth and an entire generation that still remembers Korea's poverty, there are many carryovers from wartime years, like budget foods (soups, rice, porridge):

After I had finished seeing the museum, I went and saw the special exhibition, which is currently the traveling Leonardo da Vinci exhibition. Half of it was dedicated to his inventions and the breadth of his interests, and the other half of it was dedicated to dissecting the Mona Lisa. They had each part of the painting blown up far beyond life-size, photographed with different technology to more or less reveal layers of the painting and the wear it has endured. I didn't take any pictures because photos were forbidden in most areas. It's worth noting that despite the museum being free, this exhibition was 15,000 won and I may go back and pay to see it again just to try to absorb the multitudes of information about da Vinci.

Leaving Korea 3 weeks from today.

2011-01-25T10:25:00.000+09:00

Getting down to the wire here in Korea. I depart 3 weeks from today, almost to the hour. I've been making more frequent trips to Seoul recently to hang out with friends and see things that I haven't seen yet. And, of course, to stock up on second-hand camera gear that's far far cheaper in Korea than in the US.

Last week and this week has consisted of "desk warming" or "desk sitting" where I have to come in to work and do pretty much... nothing. My school was very kind and told me I only have to come in from 9-12, so that's made things a bit easier. Between photo editing, watching episodes of "How It's Made," and browsing Reddit, it's hard to be bored for 3 hours at a desk every day.

After work I've been using my afternoons to run at the gym and to visit Seoul. Yesterday, a friend and I went and had dinner at Memphis King Barbecue, a really good Memphis-style restaurant near Bangbae Station (방배역) in Seoul. Review in another post coming up.

Friends talked about how bored and antsy they get in their last month in Korea, especially when they leave in the middle of winter. I sort of knew what my friends had talked about, but only fully realized what they meant once I've started to get close to zero-day. It's cold outside, there isn't much incentive to be out in the elements, and you have too much time to think. I've seen exactly 4 people I know from since coming to Korea, and every other person I've encountered in Korea has been someone new. It's actually quite mind-bending when you think about it, but also re-assuring of my ability to comfortably post up somewhere new for a year.

Next post: War Memorial of Korea
2nd next post: Memphis King Barbecue

Last "real" day.

2010-12-27T11:07:00.002+09:00

It's snowing, the kids are watching High School Musical, and I just found out that today - not tomorrow - will be my last day of regular teaching. Actually, that's a bit of a misleading statement, since we haven't had regular classes for about 3 weeks. But, as for the semester, today is it.

You'd think I would be elated, but I'm a bit melancholy about it. I have said my goodbyes to the bulk of my students for the year, with the exception of the 20 students scheduled to come to winter English camp for the first two weeks of January. Some of the kids have been a horror, and some of them were great, and there were a lot in-between. It's the in-between and good students that have made this year absolutely fly by.

As for my winter camp... if it's anything like the summer camp, that "20 students" number usually wanes down to about 6 students who take it seriously and actually show up. It's scheduled to be pretty laid-back, with activities involving scavenger hunts, stop-motion movies, and cooking. I have to prepare a quiz game for the kids, and that's pretty much the extent of my preparatory duties, since the Korean English teachers organized the bulk of the curriculum. Classes are only 2 hours a day, and unless the school follows through on their previously vague request for me to give classes to the school's teachers, I'll have lots of time to work on my own projects (photography, writing, and job hunting).

My application for teaching in France starting October 2011 is all but finished - just waiting for a last-minute recommendation from a former French professor to come through. I think if I get my application in by the deadline, my chances should be fairly good considering my French education and tutoring/teaching experience. My friend with nearly identical qualifications, French proficiency, and experience (minus the year in Korea) got into the program, so that gives me some hope!

Christmas was good, albeit not very Christmas-y, since it's not a holiday celebrated widely in Korea. We went out to TGI Friday's for Xmas eve and then had a smaller home-cooked meal for Xmas dinner. I still have cat hair on my jacket from my friend's cat (which I will be taking care of for 2 weeks in January.)

That's all! Next post: winter photography adventures.

Living and working in Korea

2010-12-13T09:58:00.000+09:00

I wrote this in a post on Reddit today for someone who was asking for advice on teaching abroad in Korea. I thought this would be helpful, even if I've said the same thing over a number of earlier of posts:

Let me just start by saying that I love living in Korea. Just about everything adds up to make for an awesome experience. Examples:

There are a ton of things to do even if you live an hour or two away from Seoul. If you're an outdoorsy person, you're lucky since Korea is 80% mountainous and there is a lot of hiking to be done.
The pay is good. Eating out every single day and taking cabs several days a week, and drinking one night out of the week, you can still save around $1000 per month. You can save $800/mo if you're more liberal about your spending. I keep telling people that your overall salary is not a good indicator; sure, in Japan you make more money, but Japan is insanely more expensive than Korea.
Things are cheap. A dinner out by yourself should cost you no more than $5, or about $8 for a huge sushi dinner. A BBQ dinner with a beer or two out with friends averages about $8-10. A Western-style lunch or dinner at what's considered a "fancy" restaurant will set you back $15-20. If you're working at a public school you get lunches and the cost of about $2.50 per lunch is deducted from your salary.
Food is healthy and fresh. You don't see many prepared foods here, and everything is a lot healthier than American foods. I know some vegetarians and they have a hard time here, but that's because Korea will serve you a salad with bacon and call it vegetarian. Vegetarianism is a very foreign concept here. Even a lot of Kimchi is made with seafood products and most soup broths are meat-based.
Public transit is amazing. a 2km cab ride is about $2.25 and I've spent as little as $18 for an hour in a cab in Seoul traffic. The train is insanely cheap (about $1.40 for a trip as long as 2 hours in many cases), and city buses go everywhere. "Limousine" buses are cheap and will get you across the country and back for around $30 round-trip. So, travel within Korea is amazingly affordable and consistently so.

Things I don't like about living in Korea:

You get made fun of for trying to speak the language. English is butchered a lot more by non-native speakers than Korean is by non-native speakers. So, it's hard to get taken seriously when you try to speak Korean even if the people you're talking to don't speak any English. It's not always like this, but it's an annoyance at times. Tolerances for understanding bad pronunciation are also very low because Korean pronunciation is A) hard and B) rarely attempted by non-Koreans.
There's xenophobia and racism. Most people are nice, but I've been turned away from restaurants or charged more because I'm a foreigner. It doesn't happen a lot but I remember each time it has happened. It's not because you're American, or because you're white, it's because you're not Korean. This is a very old and complicated issue.

And then there's the teaching....

As an inexperienced teacher you don't get a lot of support. Most GETs here are more or less ornamental fixtures in the school, and you really have to develop a rapport with your school (which means staying more than a year) to really get your kids and your staff to take you seriously.

You get paid to sit on your ass a lot, and then you get paid to deal with horrible kids as well. Your mileage varies a LOT depending on where you are and the English ability of your students and co-workers. I have friends who've had far worse experiences and I have friends who've had much better experiences than I. My experience I think is pretty much middle-of-the-road as far as teaching goes. I also teach middle school, which is just about the hardest possible age group you could ever hope to teach.

There's a layer of bureaucracy and distrust that serves the employer to control the GET and basically annoy the hell out of the GET at the same time. Communication issues are unavoidable at times and you are often left with a lot of WTF days.

That said, the good days outnumber the bad days. I'm not staying a second year at this public school, because I know that I could get a better gig in Seoul (I'm in Incheon) teaching at a private school. My location away from Seoul and my teaching situation leave me with some angst that prevents me from wanting to stay another year. However, I have a feeling I may be back in a year or two because the expat community here and the standard of living are both very excellent. It's a comfortable life if you can put up with the job.

Washington Times: TSA Advanced Scanners Are Useless

2010-12-10T23:27:00.000+09:00

Ever hear of the Streisand effect?

Republished with permission for 1 month from the Washington Times.

My six best photos of the fall: a rundown

2010-12-08T09:41:00.003+09:00

Class didn't show up this morning, so I thought I'd give a rundown of my best photos from the fall. These are a combination of my favorite ones and the ones that have gotten the most attention on Flickr lately.

#1: The Running Men: This image was featured on Flickr Explore in October, and will be featured in the January Seoul Photo Club exhibition at Cafe Bene in Chungmuro, Seoul. I took this photo at a marathon on Yeouido, an island in West Seoul. I was standing on an overpass and took a bunch of photos before I got one where the runner wasn't covering up the stenciled man on the pavement.

#2: Apples in Sinpo Market: This was originally just a test shot I took in low light with a new (used) lens I bought last weekend in Namdaemun. The detail was in the shot and there was plenty of room for editing, and I was able to pull a nice contrast out of it. It ended up getting really positive comments on Flickr. I have to admit the photo sort of grew on me, whereas when I took the runner photo I knew it was a keeper.

#3: Fencing With Sparkler Sticks: I took this near Cheonho, in East Seoul. We were out all afternoon and evening near the water for a strobist seminar, where experienced strobists came to share their knowledge about portable flash photography. Toward the end, people were packing up and I noticed some Koreans playing with fireworks. At the time I couldn't really tell how it came out on the screen, but once I got it home I liked it. It took first place for the December Groove Magazine photo challenge, and is being printed 1/2 page in Groove magazine this month:

#4: Untitled: I took this at the Anyang Art Park, which is basically a forest with some odd, large sculptures scattered about. This was just about at the decline of the fall leaves, where any nice colors stood out among the brown.

#5: Untitled: This is the view from the interior of the 88th floor of Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai. This was a tricky shot because there is this (and very reflective) glass keeping people from falling in. I had to get my camera right up against the glass, kind of killing part of my composition ability, just to get a clear shot.

#6: Guess what?: This was a ~1:1 macro shot I took with an improvised macro lens configuration. It looks somewhat like a ballpoint pen, but is actually the tip of a 1/8" stereo headphone plug. The scratches are not otherwise visible with the naked eye.

The Seoul Photo Club has been a great creative drive for me in the last 6 months. The people are interesting, the meetups are entertaining, and we all seem to feed off of each others' creative energy. It has definitely influenced my work even outside of the meetups.

Officially not staying for 2 consecutive years in Korea

2010-12-07T10:24:00.001+09:00

Yesterday, I got the email saying that I was not accepted for the university job I applied and interviewed for. It came somewhat as a disappointment, and somewhat as a relief since I was kind of apprehensive about staying a second year.

Yesterday I bought my ticket back (thank you, Cathay Pacific, for your awesome 1/2 price sale), and this morning I officially signed a paper for my co-teacher stating that I am not renewing my contract at my school. It's nice that they offered; it reassures me that I'm not one of the bad ones. I was given an additional sheet and asked to write about my experience as a GET in Incheon. Here's what I said:

Teaching in public schools has its ups and downs in Incheon. There is a lot of time in the summer and winter sessions where the GET must come to work even if there is no work to be done. In other provinces, the GETS have this time off, but this seems to be held up by bureaucracy in Incheon.

Otherwise, it has been a positive experience. I happened to get lucky with my housing location, being in Sinpo-dong, but others were placed in remote locations in Incheon, still on city-type pay.

As a motivated teacher, I learned a lot, but I think the system could use more support for newer teachers, or at least some consistency across schools. The EPIK experience, at this point, is still almost entirely dependent on the staff's attitude at any given school and is thus widely different for each GET.

I don't know whether it was unkind of me not to explicitly mention the things that had gone well. A lot of things went well, but it's always the bad things that get (and need) the most attention when it comes to improving a program like this.

So here I am, 2 months and 1 week away from leaving Korea. I may be back at the end of next year or the beginning of the following if I don't find something else that is equally interesting and pays well (or if I haven't gone for my master's by then).

Laundry list / plans / ideas for 2011:

Have a photography show at a gallery or cafe sometime in the spring
Buy a road bike and bike long distances, possibly a west-coast trip
Get back into flying if I have the money (that's going to cost about $800 for training to pass my my Bi-annual Flight Review, plus whatever recreational flying I do with friends.)
Cook more and eat more Asian-style healthy foods back in the US
Get back into a regular pattern of playing tennis. Possibly take some amateur soccer lessons
Paris in July: This is pretty much a done deal. I'm going to be be the on-site coordinator for the UC Davis Americans in Paris Summer Abroad program.
Travel more of Europe either before or after Paris
Get my own place in the SF Bay or Davis (Davis is a huge 1/3 cheaper for flying but thin on the job prospects.)
Make money doing photography and writing (The latter is already happening, whether I can live off that money is going to be another story. I'm set up to resume shooting sports and photojournalism-type photos. I might be able to sell theater photos at colleges or high schools like I did some years ago.)
Hope I get a teaching job in Paris that I'm applying for.

9 months in Korea

2010-11-21T12:35:00.001+09:00

As of last Thurdsay, I have been in Korea for 9 months. Time really flies. The summer was the most drawn-out part to date, but everything else has been flying by. I wrote the rest on the subway last night:

So, I'm applying for a job in Suwon. I hadn't planned to stay another year but the opportunity presnted itself in an unlikely scenario. A friend who has been in Korea for 13 years has decided to return to Canad to pursue another degree, and is vacating his teaching position at the university level. The only condition under which I told myself I would stay in Korea was to teach at the university level or at a very reputable hagwon (academy) in Seoul. So, I'm running with this chance and have prepared all of the materials needed for the application. I mailed them off the other day and will likely hear back about an interview in a couple days. Interviews are slated to take place next Saturday, a week from today.

The job would entail teaching non-graded English converastion courses 18 hours per week. I would have to forefit my travel plans for the winter so that I could go back home and visit family for 2 weeks. On the upside, though, the job includes a lot (3-4 months) of paid vacation time.

Lately the weather has been getting more and more winter-like, and I feel like I'm on the definite verge of a really bad cold. Malaise, skin allergies, the works. Nonetheless, I've been enjoying my time in Korea lately. Today alone I got my ass kicked playing paintball with a bunch of people at a Meetup.com group event in Seoul. I've got the body pains to prove it, though no bad welts. Last time I went, I wasn't nearly skilled enough to get shot in the neck, leg, and forearm (/sarcasm). I was commissioned to lead the group since the organizer couldn't make it, so at least I didn't have to pay for my battle wounds. Met a lot of cool people today as well.

That said, these next weeks of teaching, my last six or so, aren't going to be great. The kids stop paying attention to classes after finals, which are scheduled in the middle of December, 2 weeks before the end of the semester. Seriously, who plans finals with 2 weeks of class to spare afterward!? It's not like they take more than a day to grade the (sacntron) tests.

Do you have a pen?

2010-11-03T19:57:00.000+09:00

Communication seems fundamentally different in a lot of ways when you compare English and Korean. Prime example:

Tonight I had an unprepared student. He had no pen or pencil with which to complete the worksheet I gave all students. Dialogue goes as follows:

Me: Do you have a pen?
Him: Yes.
Me: Take out your pen and start writing.
Student does nothing.
Me: Where's your pen?
Him: In the dormitory.

This isn't the first time I've heard of such conversations between Koreans and native English speakers. It's not that they don't understand your question, but that the translation of said question is vague and broad in Korean. So "do you have a pen," to the student, apparently meant: do you own a pen somewhere? The answer is yes. He just doesn't have it with him.

Usually the kids are able to recognize that what you're asking is more direct than the Korean equivalent question, but not always.

End of week festivities

2010-10-28T16:19:00.000+09:00

My school is hosting both a sports day and a school festival this week. Actually, we just finished with sports day, which for me consisted of sitting at my desk until 2:30 when I had to run a relay race with a student. It was fun and energetic, but I tweaked my knee somehow and now it pops/hurts when I move it certain ways. I'm a regular runner, too... go figure I should hurt my knee on a stupid sprint.

Tomorrow is our school festival, which I'm gravely concerned about. I was handed 17 pages of sheet music yesterday, and was asked to play the guitar part for two Korean songs.

Uh, what!? I can't read sheet music. Fortunately the chord names were on the sheets, but I don't know how to read the timing. It helped that I was able to key in the Korean and find the songs both on Youtube, but the prospect of pulling this off with 500 onlookers is... terrifying. Never performed live before, though I've wanted to. This wasn't the baby step I was hoping for, however. We won't even get a chance to practice as a "band" (other teachers playing drums, keyboard, and bass) until tomorrow morning... that's right, the day of the event.

I figure if shit goes south I can just turn my guitar down and pretend to play, since most of the other teachers are far more competent playing from sheet music than I am.

Oh, and the guy on the side of the road is still there every morning. A few friends read my post about him and one suggested we try to take the guy to lunch one day and see if he'll share any of his wartime stories.

Morning walk

2010-10-22T10:05:00.000+09:00

Every morning, I walk to the middle school where I teach. The school is about 25 minutes from my apartment, and getting there is not particularly boring or interesting. Lately, though, I've been having some interesting experiences, ranging from the relatively banal to the flat out thought-provoking.

I guess people are so regimented in their schedules that they leave their houses at the same time. This includes me. So, I end up crossing the street and passing the same person in the same crosswalk almost every day. If not in the crosswalk, it's within 50 feet. Every day.

Then there's the dog that belongs to the owner of an auto shop. I usually see him tied up in front of the shop, though the day-to-day placement of the dog varies. I've seen him up to 2 blocks away, still tied up and excited to see passers-by. He's got a gorgeous white coat and is really friendly. I'll usually stop and let him lick my hand since nobody else seems to care too much about him.

By far the most interesting experience I've had lately is with the man who sits on his front steps every morning. For about 2 weeks now, he's been on his porch as I pass by, on my way to work. He always says hi. I began to stop every day and talk with him. For an old Korean man appearing to be no less than 70, he speaks remarkable English. We usually chat for a minute about the weather and I continue on to work.

This morning was different. I stopped to say hi, commented on the weather, and then he began to speak. He said: "You remember me every day. My oldest son is at MIT with his wife. I am here alone." He put out his hand for a handshake. I shook his hand. He didn't let go. It ended up being a two minute long handshake. He continued talking... "My wife is with god, and I am here." I could tell he was sharing something emotional, though only by virtue of the fact that he was telling these details complete stranger, a foreigner nonetheless. His demeanor was very calm otherwise, and he went on. "My daughter is in Incheon." I asked him, "does she visit you?" He said "No, I told her, 'be with your family. Papa is here for you if you need.'"

So here's this man, completely alone every morning at this little hut of a house. He sits there and watches traffic go by, recognizable a block away by the blue face mask he wears every day. He's lonely, yet selfless enough to tell kids to live their lives and not worry about him. I'm... well, speechless.

Unfiled and miscellaneous

2010-10-13T21:39:00.002+09:00

I learned a new Korean word today when my students were frustrated. It is supposed to be difficult to pronounce for Koreans (though not in English), and is also used as a mild swear word: 뷁. It's an impossible-looking syllable that I didn't actually think could be typed until I tried. 5 letters: ㅂ ㅜ ㅔ ㄹ ㄱ I think "breck" is used in frustration as in "oh crap" or "oh shit" but maybe someone Korean with better English than my co-teachers could chime in on this one.

Another more innocuous word is the one for snail, which is 달팽이 (dalpaengi). I learned this when I was teaching the word "shell" (in contrast to the similarly-pronounced "shall").

---

The last couple of days, the school elevator has been out of service. Most of the teachers on the 5th floor use it frequently to get down to the first or second floor, since the stairs are usually overrun with students whenever you need to get anywhere, and students aren't allowed to use the elevator. Actually, the real reason that we take the elevator is that us teachers are lazy and don't like climbing numerous flights of stairs right before a class.

I found out today that the elevator was intentionally shut off because the teachers were using it too much, and apparently elevators use a lot of electricity. Not sure if that's true or who made this decision – it could have been the Nambu office. After all, they're the ones that sent the memo saying that they'd be inspecting teachers' desks and classrooms for "unauthorized personal heating devices." We had to hide our coffee makers and water boilers for several days until the inspectors were gone. Ahh, the sweet smell of bureaucracy.

(As an ending note, I'm guessing elevators really don't use that much electricity. After all, the load is counter-weighted, so the energy is just taken up by turning the wheels to move cables across some railings, right? So, the more load, the more friction, and more power needed. Still shouldn't be much though, I'm guessing.)

Slow-mo subway incident

2010-10-10T22:42:00.000+09:00

It's half past 10, and I'm headed across Seoul on the circle line. I am with a friend from the photography seminar group who is also headed in the same direction. There aren't any available seats, so we are forced to stand, carrying our photography equipment for 11 stops until we get to Seoul City Hall.

We're stopped at a nondescript station, people offloading like normal, a few stragglers hopping on. I see a woman at a coffee machine about 25 feet from the train. She picks up her coffees, one in each hand, and the warning bells start going off. The real warning bell is the signal that the subway doors are about to close. The other warning bell is the one that goes off my head, when I realize the woman is running directly toward me, the person closest to the doors.

This woman runs, spilling not a single drop of the two coffees she is holding. I take one large step back. Whether I step back to make room, because I am being charged, or because I predicted what happens next is up for debate.

The doors start to close, and what the woman does next is beyond comprehension: She decides to intercept two sets of closing subway doors with her arms... the same arms holding up two piping cups of insta-coffee.

What follows is the coffee flying out of the cup, splashing the people around and forming a 3 foot puddle right inside the subway doors. The doors open, as they always do when they're chopping someone up, and she gets onto the train. She looks down, and as if nothing strange had just happened, and goes to another part of the train. The bottom of my pants and the tops of my shoes now have brown, wet, sugary coffee on them. At this point, I figure taking that step back was the best thing I did for myself all day, or I wouldn't have gotten just a splash of coffee.

Nobody on the train reacts. The Koreans on the train just ignore it, and the 4 foreigners on our car just start to laugh in disbelief. It's one thing if someone acknowledges what just happened, or attemps to clean up the spill, but neither of those two things happen happen. Instead, it's as if the entire population in the subway car are robots, noticing but excusing any misdoings that might occur. It's part of the Korean culture that makes public gaffs very forgiving but surreal at the same time. Just like when you sneeze and nobody says a peep.

The rest of the trip goes on without incident, but I continue to think to myself, 'what the fuck possesses someone to that?'

Muuido on a budget

2010-10-04T13:27:00.000+09:00

This weekend was my second time to Muuido (무의도). Four of us met up for the weekend. My friend Trish, the one who I've visited a couple times in her Gangwon province (강원도) riverside town, was around Incheon this weekend. So, she came with and we met up with Lee and Sarah on the island.

Here's a rundown of the cost for one person if you take 4 people to Muuido for a weekend (Saturday night lodging included):

2500 won to take the airport bus from my house to the dropoff point for Muuido
3000 won to take the ferry the 300 meters across to Muuido from the airport island (return trip included)
1000 won to take the bus from the ferry dropoff point to Hanagae (하나개) beach to the beach huts and restaurants
2000 won to get onto the beach
7500 won for the beach hut (30,000 per night total, sleeps 4-6)
11000 won for snacks and a couple of meals
1000 won for the bus back to the ferry
2500 won for the bus from the airport island back to mainland Incheon

Total was 30,500 won or about $27.15. This is for a good weekend of beach-going, a warm place to sleep, several good meals, beer, snacks, and transportation. You can spend more than that on a night of drinking at an expat bar. Plus, the view is unbeatable, especially at sunrise or during a late-night rainstorm:

Lively Shanghai

2010-09-26T11:49:00.000+09:00

Four days in Shanghai barely scratched the surface of what's possible in this giant Chinese metropolis. Shanghai is the largest city proper in the world by population, topping in at almost 14 million people. As a metropolitan area, it ranks as number ten, at 16 million people.

Shanghai is a very new city, most of it having been built from the ground-up in the last 25 years. As such, it's a very cosmopolitan, clean, organized, and entertaining place to be. Busy areas along the Huangpu River include The Bund and Pudong neighborhood. At night, The Bund lights up with boats, cars, and people. Hordes of people, Chinese and tourists alike, come out to enjoy the view along the river or avail themselves of Shanghai's world-class restaurants and bars.

As for the food, it's difficult to describe how excellent it is. You can really pick your budget. An expensive dinner out on The Bund can easily surpass $300, but if you follow some of the recommendations in Lonely Planet Shanghai, you can get a still-world-class dinner for 3 for around $100. An example of such a dinner includes Shanghai crispy duck, pork noodles, sweet chili sauce prawns, and spring rolls, beef dumplings, and a couple of martinis at Yè Shanghai. Remember, tipping is not expected and taxes are built in to the prices, so WYSIWYG when it comes menu prices.

Of course, cheaper meals are to be had many other places. Even at an upscale mall booth, you can find a grilled eel lunch box for around $5. Add to that a bottle of fresh guava juice, and you're in business for a cheap and filling meal.

Shanghai's skyline is the definition of impressive, boasting nearly 1000 high-rise buildings. From the top of Jin Mao Tower, you get a 360 degree view of the city, blocked only by the Shanghai World Financial Center. The Financial Center, which is next door, towers another 13 floors over Jin Mao Tower – striking, even from the top of Jin Mao Tower.

Public transit is cheap and plentiful. Getting from Pu Dong International Airport (PVG) to the city center via metro takes approximately one hour and costs 7 Yuan, or almost exactly $1. Transit within the city is usually between 3 and 5 Yuan. Cheaper than Seoul, Singapore, but not necessarily Malaysia.

Taxis are abundant and cheap, with most fares, even in traffic, rarely costing more than $3. However, busy or rainy nights, especially in busy areas, will cause the availability of taxis to be very scarce. Many taxi drivers had trouble figuring out where we were trying to go, even when presented with the address in written Chinese. The Lonely planet guide was dead-on when they advised looking at the 0-5 star rating on taxi drivers' dashboards. The no-star or 1-star drivers were pretty incompetent. The only 3-star driver we got was far more competent and drove a nicer car. The price, of course, was still the same.

There are plenty of museums and other attractions to see in Shanghai. Expo 2010 is one of them. We paid the modest admission price of ~$15 per person to see the gargantuan grounds and wait in line for a couple of the exhibits. The exhibits are very visual, with little or no written explanation for the majority of countries' buildings. It was a more of a show than an educational experience, though I've heard it described as being centered more for Chinese tourists than for foreign tourists. Invariably, at every exhibit, there were Chinese Expo-goers taking photos of the host country's line staffer. (It reminded me of how novel I feel in Korea as a foreigner among such a homogeneous population.) The architecture was very interesting and each country had a unique design for their building.

I'm not sure I can necessarily recommend seeing Expo 2010, the long (1-2 hour) lines and lack of textual information being my main qualms.

While in Shanghai, seeing the Shanghai Acrobatics Troupe, or a similar show, is an essential. These dizzying acts are attention-gripping and, by the end, leave you wondering how 90 minutes could have flown by so quickly.

That's all for Shanghai. It's definitely one of those cities I want to explore more of on another trip.

Week's woes + Shanghai

2010-09-21T17:03:00.000+09:00

Last week was a tough one. I ended up in the hospital with a GI that I'd never had before. Being in a foreign hospital where you don't speak the language can be an unnerving thing to say the least, and downright scary when your co-worker is trying to translate the condition you have (as the doctor is describing it in verbose Korean). Long story short, I'm OK and have regained enough energy to travel with my family to China this week. My dad and stepmom arrived last Friday, the day I got out of the hospital. I did my best to play tour guide as I recovered, and showed them around incheon and a very very small part of Seoul. It was rainy but we dealt with it, the only real downside being the very obscured view from the top of Namsan.

Anyhow, being on a weeks worth of antibiotics and other gastro drugs doesn't exactly make you feel normal, even if recovering normally. In any case, I woke up this morning pretty excited to once again use my passport and my travel legs. Destination? Shanghai.

Recently the Chinese government raised the cost of getting a visa by about 150%... just for Americans. There's also a new restriction on getting a visa if you have anything less than 6 months left on your alien registration card in Korea. I initially went into E-Mart to get my visa and was refused because I had, yes, 5 months and 20 days left on my registration card. So, I had to go to Seoul to a travel agency that will process your request in cases like this. Apparently the Chinese consulate in busan will do it in what must be the most blatant or careless, yet helpful loophole I've ever seen.

This trip is a treat for me, since I wouldn't be going if my parents weren't traveling here and my dad hadn't bought me a plane ticket. I've heard good things about Shanghai, compared to Beijing, an equally close Chinese city to Korea. Its a very new city, pretty much built from the ground up in the last 25 years. The world Expo is still going on, but I'm not sure how much we'll get to see considering the reputation it has for insanely long lines. Nonetheless, there are plenty of things to see there even if we skip the Expo entirely.

I ran into a friend in the airport, who happened to be on the same flight as me. To make the coincidence even more uncanny, he was also traveling to Shanghai with his parents.

... A couple hours after starting this post, I've arrived in Shanghai. The city so far is very clean, strikingly international, and very hot, even compared to Korea, only 500 miles East.

The bed at the hotel is softer than anything I've layer upon in the 7+ months since I've left the US, so that'll be nice and welcoming upon returning to the room tonight. Stay tuned!

Update!! Not only is Facebook blocked by the Chinese government, but so is Twitter, Blogspot, and a couple others. I can't view my own blog posts via the web but I can modify existing posts and make new ones via the iPod touch app (how I wrote this post).

2 amusing stories and a story about moving on...

2010-09-09T10:18:00.002+09:00

Last night I did something that's never fun or easy: I broke up with my girlfriend. We'd originally met back in February when I started teaching at the middle school. We had some great, memorable times together, but in the end, she wants something different out of a relationship than I do; I think she was much more attached to me than I was to her. She was only a temp teacher at my school and hasn't worked here since mid-July, so fortunately there's no post-breakup work awkwardness to deal with in that regard.

Cultural differences, a language barrier, and age difference all played a part in the breakup. Korean dating is usually a lot different than Western dating, and while this is changing, many people here date with one large goal in sight: marriage. Despite that, parents in Korea are extremely controlling of their kids and how they can go about dating. As my now ex-girlfriend said, Korean parents treat their kids as children up until they get married; regardless of age. She was 28, I'm 24 (tomorrow), but she was still forbidden from staying out past 11PM. Like most younger Korean people until marriage, she lives with her family. It's amazing how much of a say Korean parents have in their kids' lives, especially in their daughters' lives. Young men don't get nearly the same treatment. Despite her self-described bad relationship with her mother and sister, a "social contract" (her words) meant that she had to abide by her mom's rules, despite there being a total lack of give-and-take in their relationship. As I understand it, many people abide by seemingly strict social contracts because it means that they will be taken care of by those they abide to. That was not true in her case, and it just left me angry on her behalf, her unable to do anything about it. She and I both knew explicitly that once I left Korea that things were going to be over. However, my friends and I all agreed that dragging it out that long would be a disservice to both of us.

I'm glad that I have a supportive social network here, since most of my friends jumped right in and offered consolation and distraction.

To that wit, distraction is not a huge challenge for me lately. Weeks ago, I was offered a position at Incheon Maritime Boys High School, teaching conversational English Monday through Wednesdsay for several hours each night. The pay is good, and though I'm tired by the end of the night, the work itself isn't terribly challenging. I'm teaching with 6 other foreign teachers, 3 of which live in my building. It's nice to be able to talk with them, share lesson ideas, and socialize; these were the things I liked the best about the very short summer camp I had back in August. have 12 more weeks of night classes.

The remarkable thing is that we were able to jump through the bureaucratic hoops required to have a second job with the E2 visa in Korea. We were told that this may have never been done in Incheon before - we may actually be the first bunch of foreigners here to have a fully sanctioned and legal second job with an E2 visa. It required the authorization (and extensive leg-pulling) of my principal to let me teach at an additional school. My co-teacher did everything she could to dissuade me from taking the job. "The kids are very low-level." So what? They're still higher level than the kids I teach at the middle school. "You refused night classes at our school last semester, why do you want to do them now?" Well, you weren't offering me any sort of break between classes and I would have had to work 10 hours straight 4 days a week. At least I get 2 hours off between work shifts with this new gig. Plus, they pay more (and more frequently).

Anyhow, teaching these night classes, I've seen progress even within the 1-hour period I have with these kids. I was doing a lesson on family and names of different family members. I said that I have one sister in college, and one of the boys piped up and said "I want to be your brother-in-law." I was floored. Not only was he able to pick up this vocabulary in an hour, but he was able to use it in a humorous way. This is the kind of thing that makes teaching worth all of the crappy minutes you have with your students.

Earlier this week, I was teaching some minimal pairs as an opener for my class. I teach the pronunciations and then explain what the words mean. One of the words was "thick," so I explained that it was the opposite of "thin." My co-teacher for that class, one with really horrid (but hilarious) English, said "this girl, you, are thin." I could see where this was going. He pointed to another girl, a larger kid, and said "this girl, you, are thick." All in this amazingly dense Korean accent. It was all I could do to keep a straight face without either busting up laughing or doing a massive facepalm.

So there you have it: two amusing stories and my story about liberation from a bland relationship. To my GMT-8 readers: Happy hump day!

Letters from my students, semester 2

2010-09-07T13:23:00.000+09:00

I got a pleasant surprise on my desk yesterday in the form of four new letters from my students.

I really want to photograph a couple of them, but that's a little bit weird considering I'm at my desk right now. Instead, here's the text from a few of them:

Hi~ Andrew~ Good morning ㅋㅋㅋ
I can't English. But I like
English.
I want dialog you.
기타연수 해소세요 [This means "please resolve any other training," much help you were, Google Translate...]
Do you like 김밥? [Kimbap]
And do you know Ne-Yo singer?

Andrew is very handsome. Good-looking handsome.

Yo. hi My name is W.F
I will be a rapper
but I can't speak English very well
and In your class, I want to listen
about USA rap
2pac, B.IG, Jay-Z, 50cent, Eminem raps
So. please turn on the rap In your class
just 5minute
and I wanna listen about Jay-Z flow.
rhyme and Eminem's rhyme
but Korea hiphop is
better than USA rap
Come on!
I can break USA rap from my flow
I think. USA rap is same
Sorry, just kidding

Hello? My name is ___
I like your lesson because it
is very fun and You
teach me very well. also
you are very handsome
I want your class,
SO I want you teach
me every days 아, and
How are you? I'm fine
Andrew? Good bye!

Hi! Andrew teacher
I'm ____
I thikn so...
Andrew is kindly
and
Andrew have small face
Goodbye!

(A bunch of Korean at the bottom that I don't have enough time to type up.)

Certainly brightened up what was a less-than-fun Monday back at work.

The DMZ: North Korea and South Korea, divided

2010-09-03T13:17:00.000+09:00

At the end of August, a friend, his girlfriend and I went on a tour of the DMZ - the area that divides North Korea and South Korea. It is called the "most heavily militarized border in the world." Though no large incidents have taken place in recent time, this is not considered a stable area; we had to sign our lives away in order to get close.

We didn't have any trouble getting a tour, but South Koreans must jump through hoops to tour the DMZ. They must undergo a 3-6 month background check to ensure they don't have any family residing in North Korea. It didn't used to be this way, though this changed some years ago because of a sad event: A South Korean DMZ tourist got emotional, ran across the border North Korea, and was killed by North Korean troops. It's easy to forget that many older South Koreans still have immediate family in North Korea. The ideal held by many South Koreans, however unrealistic (for so many reasons), is that the two Koreas will at some point become reunited. As our tour guide said, the two Koreas were one for thousands of years; why should they be so permanently divided just because of 60 years of political turmoil?

The tour we took was administered by the USO based at Camp Kim in Seoul. Part of the actual tour was given by South-Korean tour guides and part by US Army MPs (military police). Here was the schedule of our very early-starting day:

07:30 Departure from Camp Kim USO
09:00 20 Minute Briefing at Ballinger Hall in JSA and then tour to the JSA area
11:20 The Third infiltration, Dora observatory
12:30 Lunch at a Korea Restaurant.
13:30 Dorasan Station
14:00 Departure from Dorasan Station
15:30 Return to the Camp Kim USO.

We actually had to be at the USO at 7AM, which means I got up at 5 to take the train to Seoul and meet my friends by 6:30. Despite the early hours, it was completely worth the fascinating day ahead.

After an hour-long bus ride to the Southern edge of the DMZ, we got an introduction by the MP who was giving our tour. We then switched to a military bus, since our tour bus was not allowed inside the Joint Security Area (JSA). Map:

We were told to follow very strict instructions during the tour. We had to stay within certain limits, and never leave the group. In their oh-so-formal military language they told us repeatedly to "maintain the integrity of the group," and when going from point A to point B to not stop for any reason, even to take pictures.

One of the most fascinating and tense parts of the tour was seeing Conference Row, the built-up area that sits upon the Military Demarcation Line, or MDL. This is the line that quite literally divides North Korea and South Korea. There's a concrete slab between two buildings that realizes this line. South Korean soldiers stand alert, 24 hours a day, watching the North Korean side. Their pose intentionally places them halfway-sheltered by the building, and halfway able to view the North Korean side of the MDL. There are North Korean guard towers and troops stationed on the other side, and we were very clearly told not to try to communicate with them or gesture at them in any way.

Inside one of the conference rooms, there is a table that sits atop the MDL. The entire room is accessible to tourists, though the door to North Korea is guarded by a South Korean soldier who stands in a very firm modified tae-kwon-do stance, fists tightly clenched. You may not stand anywhere behind this soldier, or you may be physically moved.

So yes, you can stand in North Korea for a couple of minutes. No passport stamp, though.

We got to tour one of the tunnels dug by North Koreans and later intercepted by South Korean forces. It was a steep slope down about 25 stories to where the tunnel spans its way to North Korea. The clearances are low and it's a very tight space, even for those like me who aren't claustrophobic. My back, however, didn't like having to hunch over and walk a half mile underground. No cameras were allowed down.

One of the most intriguing things on the tour was the view of the North Korean town and the world's tallest flagpole. It seemed like a very modern industrial town, complete with lit-up traffic lights and factories. However, it was eerie to see that there was no sign whatsoever of humanly activity in this town. It reminds me a bit of how North Korea contains what is said to be the third largest hotel and casino in the world, staffed 24/7, yet completely devoid of visitors because nobody can afford to stay or gamble there. We weren't allowed to take pictures of the view, though they had telescopes you could use for 50 cents. One tourist next to me got caught taking a picture, and the guard deleted the photo from her camera. I was a bit more careful and was able to successfully take a photo before the rain set in and completely obscured the view:

We got another view during one of the bus stops, so here's a heavily cropped image of the tallest flagpole in the world, yes, in North Korea:

The other most-interesting thing we saw on the trip was Dorasan Station. This station has train tracks running both to Seoul (SK) and Pyeongyang (NK), and was built with that same idealistic view that the two countries would be re-united and easily navigable. It stands now only as a representation of this ideal. Even though it has never been used, it looks just like any other Korean train station:

As mentioned earlier, South Koreans have a very different view of relations between North Korea and South Korea. To Westerners, North Korea is viewed mostly as a hostile force, a country that is incredibly isolated and shut off from the rest of the world. The Western media usually blows its dangers well out of proportion. This is not to say that North Korea isn't dangerous; it's a very dangerous place, but not nearly as much as an imminent threat as CNN would like you to believe. Remember, mass media in the US does not inform you objectively. It is simply a money-making machine. How do they make money? By retaining viewers. How do they retain viewers? By scaring them into watching the news. It's deceiving to say the least. I can't emphasize enough how much crap gets through to US viewers, completely unquestioned, and on the flip side, how much important information is omitted from US news because of our flailing journalism protection laws and standards.

I digress. Most South Koreans aren't very concerned about North Korean threats. There is little palpable tension in South Korea, at least not recently. The most tension I've ever felt from the NK/SK turmoil was standing right there at the MDL inside the DMZ. Outside, people don't really talk about it much. Sure, NK has a bunch of missiles pointed right at Seoul, yet the topic remains relatively silent.

For the rest of the photos from the trip, see this Flickr gallery.

North Korea, as experienced at the DMZ.

2010-08-28T22:20:00.000+09:00

Today I embarked at 5AM for a guided tour of the DMZ, given in part by the USO in Seoul.

I have more to say later, but I wanted to share this photo I took. This was taken in Conference Row, at the heart of the North Korea / South Korea DMZ. Both myself and the South Korean soldier in the room were past the line of demarcation, meaning that we were both standing on North Korean soil when the photo was taken. The door behind him leads... to the rest of North Korea.

You are allowed to stand next to the guard, as long as you're not so much as an inch behind the invisible line on which he stands. One woman got behind that invisible line and was greeted by an extended fist and a loud stomp. She was not struck but was certainly startled, along with the rest of us. This posture was kept by both guards in the room the entire time.

The Land of the Morning Calm... in ways

2010-08-22T10:12:00.000+09:00

I'm currently posted up at a coffee shop in Seoul called Tom N Toms. It's a chain of large coffee shops, pretty much like Starbucks on steroids. Except, this place is open 2 hours before Starbucks is on Sunday mornings, and I wanted my morning Joe. So, here I am.

Koreans have an interesting and intense obsession with coffee, but apparently don't find it profitable enough to have many coffee shops open before 9 or 10 on Sunday mornings (or any other morning, for that matter).

I'll back up a bit. Last night, I stayed in a Jjimjilbang (public sauna/bath) in the Chungmuro area of Seoul. I'd been out last night showing some newcomers around Myeongdong, and figured in advance that I'd be too tired to take the train the 90 minutes back to Incheon. The particular Jjimjilbang I found is right next to Chungmuro station, but tucked away in the back part of the 4th floor of a 20 floor building. It was a weird experience getting in there, being that the building is really dark and a little scary inside. I eventually saw a guy in the elevator and I asked him where the Jjimjilbang was. He explained in broken, but comprehensible English, that I had to go up to the 5th floor, wander around a bit, and find a staircase back down to the 4th floor. I followed his instructions and made it into the Jjimjilbang, which still wasn't impressive at first glance. I went in, did the whole shower/tub thing, and then searched for a place to sleep. There were people sprawled around various benches and I figured that was my only choice. Then, I saw a guy come in through a door I hadn't previously noticed - this was the door to the co-ed area of the Jjimjilbang, which apparently is a HUGE area with a ton of mats, TVs, darker rooms, restaurants, and whatnot. I found a mat, a darker room, and crashed. There was plenty of snoring around me, but I've slept worse nights in my own apartment. Though, I did hear an Ajumma yelling at a guy at around 4 in the morning (in the middle of a room sleeping ~50 people), which simply necessitated me re-inserting my earphones and putting on some music.

I got up this morning, did the shower and tub thing again, used the sauna, and headed out. It was about 8AM when I came outside in search of a coffee shop. Starbucks wasn't open till 9, Cafe Ti Amo wasn't open till 11 (!!), but Tom N Toms opened at 7. Good for them, and good for me. I got a bagel and a mocha and have been here for about 2 hours. There are more cars on the road now than there were 2 hours ago, but still not many people on the street, and still nobody else in the (giant) coffee shop.

It's really interesting and refreshing to be in Seoul for the weekend, even if it's just overnight and for no significant reason. It feels novel and it feels like traveling, which is a good way to recoup and reset before the workweek starts again. Of course, since I'm not home to get my shopping and apartment cleaning done in the earlier part of the day, I'll be busting ass to get this stuff done tonight when I get home... still worth it for a weekend away with nothing more than a netbook and a minimal change of clothes on my shoulder.

New computer at my desk

2010-08-20T10:04:00.000+09:00

The advantage of rarely asking things of your supervisors: when you do, they respond quickly (if they like you). My desk computer has been ailing for a couple months, and it became pretty unbearable as of late. I asked the guy at the desk next to me what to do, and he said to talk to the principal.

I went to the principal's office two days ago and broached the subject gently. He picked up his phone and went to call a tech person. No answer. He said that he'd take care of it. I took that with a grain of salt because people are often liable to forget things that aren't terribly important.

The next day, a tech guy comes in with a brand new machine, still in its plastic wrap. He spent a little while setting it up, and I spent the rest of the day restoring my documents and putting English-language software on it.

It's almost faster than my new-ish MacBook Pro, which really says something. Makes it so much easier when I don't have to wait 5 minutes to switch apps or 10 minutes for it to boot (not exaggerations).

6 months in Korea

2010-08-19T10:44:00.000+09:00

Time really flies.

It's truly amazing how you can perceive something in the past as both "an instant ago" and "forever ago." That's how I feel about coming to Korea. On one hand, it feels like just yesterday that I stepped off the plane at Incheon airport. I remember the people, the excitement, the bleary eyes, the many unknowns looming ahead of us. On the other hand, it feels like I've been here an eternity. I feel very comfortable living here, and while there are things I miss from home, I generally love living in Korea.

What strikes me is that, in the last 6 months, I've only ever seen one person I previously knew from the US: Brooke. She's leaving soon. Another friend, Julian, who lived in my building, left yesterday. They both started their contracts last August. This part isn't bittersweet at all; it's just plain sad. Both have had their share of Korea, and both are off to do interesting things. I digress, though. What I mean to say is that I haven't really seen anybody I knew in my "other life" since I stepped on the plane in San Francisco 6 months ago. This is bittersweet. I've been able to meet a bunch of new people here but still keep in contact with people I miss at home. Fortunately, my Dad and Stepmom are coming to travel a bit of Asia in less than a month from now. They're going to visit Korea for about 3 days (not nearly long enough to see much, though I'll be as good of a guide as possible), and then we're going to travel together to Shanghai for 3 days. They'll continue on to Japan for at least a week, and I'll come back to Korea.

From that time, I'll have 5 months left on my contract, only about 3 of which include regular teaching. Winter vacation will have a few summer camps, but I will be sitting at a desk for much of my last couple months in Korea. I've heard this part is particularly hard for people who are finishing their contracts, especially in the winter time. There's a lot of downtime, lots of time to over-think things, and lots of anxiety (and bureaucracy) about leaving Korea.

Teaching in Korea, or more specifically, how much I like teaching here, is the determining factor in whether or not I renew my contract. Of course, there are tons of benefits in staying, including saving money, the perfect location for country-hopping in East Asia, and so forth. Being the way I am, obsessed with travel and doing it on the cheap, I don't think that leaving Korea would preclude me from traveling. I've been weighing my options, and have come up with a few:

Renew my contract at my current school, if they offer such (they probably will). -- This is probably the most convenient, though least favorable option. I get to stay in a nice neighborhood, but risk things becoming stagnant. I don't particularly like the support (or lack thereof) from my co-teachers at my current school, because most of them speak very poor English and are reluctant to give any sort of constructive criticism.
Renew my contract and move to another school in the district. -- This will require moving to another apartment, which may or may not be as nice as the one I'm in now (the one I'm in now is small, but very well-kept and cheap in terms of fees). The new teachers would be a crapshoot, but most of all, the fact that students are unmotivated won't change.
Find a job at a Hagwon (academy). -- These generally pay more than public schools, but the hours suck. You work from 1-9PM, or worse off, split shifts. They don't always pay consistently. The upside is that the classes are a lot smaller (big bonus), the kids are more motivated (they're paying for the classes), and all of the curriculum is put out in front of you. This option, barring the pay inconsistencies and possibly weird hours, lessens the burden (on the inexperienced teacher) of planning lessons, which is one of the main things that would make the experience a lot better (for me, at least). Now, if I could find a job at a reputable Hagwon in Seoul, it might be one of the most favorable options.
Leave Korea and find work/travel elsewhere. -- This option has a lot of unknowns, but is also very exciting. I submitted an application this morning to do a 3-month work/stay stint at a very nice hostel in Montréal (the one I stayed in last December), and I'll hopefully find out soon whether or not they have openings. It's part of a network of hostels going all the way down to Miami, so there also might be a chance to work in NYC or Miami. Basically, for 32 hours a week of work, you get free lodging and likely whatever free food the hostel patrons get. It's one of those things you can't do unless you have a little money to live off of, but it's nonetheless an extremely cheap way to stay in a city for 3 months and explore.
Leave Korea and live back at home for a while, then return to Korea -- This is also a very interesting option. I personally know a couple of people who have done this, and they seem pretty content doing so. You save enough money by working in Korea that you can live or travel for months before having to work again. If you've completed contracts in Korea in the past, you basically have a golden ticket back in if you please.

With one university friend gone from Korea soon, another one is arriving tonight: Rita. She and I worked together at the California Aggie in Davis, and I think she's going to really enjoy Korea. She's going to be on Jeju Island, one of the most fantastic and scenic places in the country. Welcome, Rita

Korean delivery is awesome

2010-08-12T08:44:00.000+09:00

Notwithstanding the fact that I can get McDonald's delivered to my apartment, Korean delivery kicks ass in other ways.

When you order Korean delivery, the food comes fast. You don't pay anything extra for delivery and you don't tip the delivery guy.

The driver arrives with a giant aluminum box full of your food. On the side, there is a sliding door that comes off to reveal the tasty Korean goodness inside. Inside are real plates (plastic, metal or otherwise) with your food, covered in cling-wrap. The driver leaves it all with you.

You eat the food, leave the plates/utensils inside the box, and leave the box outside the door. The delivery driver comes back later (an hour or more) and picks up the box.

Yesterday we had galbitang again at my school. Here's the box waiting outside after the food was consumed:

So, when you see a 50cc scooter going around town with a big metal box on the back, you can bet it's delivery food.

Latkes in Korea. / Deep fried potato, OH THE HORROR

2010-08-10T12:11:00.000+09:00

This post was written while I was on the train to Seoul on Monday afternoon.

Today was the first day of the summer camp at my own school, Hwadojin Middle. It was definitely a lot more casual than the district-held summer camp last week at Inju Middle. Last week there were a lot of formalities involved, and some of them were downright silly. For example, we got "certificates of commission" when we started teaching last week. We had an opening ceremony and closing ceremony, both with special guests.

This morning, I walked into work and none of my co-teachers were to be found, anywhere. 8:55 came around, and the kids had no idea where to go, and came to me, equally confused about where to start. Fortunately, my co-teacher of the day showed up and we were able to get the class started. I apologized for not remembering to call her about going grocery shopping for the cooking class ingredients, and she didn't seem overly peeved. Turns out she'd ordered some muffin papers and pans (for her banana bread recipe), which never showed up, so my recipe was the only one we would be doing today.

The recipe I put together for this case was potato pancakes, or Latkes, the traditionally Jewish dish. I chose it because there are only 6 ingredients and they are relatively easy to make.

Everything went well for both of my (small) classes today. However, at one point a girl cut her finger on the peeler, which was promptly taken care of by my co-teacher. I threw out the culprit potato, and sterilized the peeler best I could (dish soap and scalding water). The hazmat team didn't get involved, though I suppose it would be good to have training in cleaning up hazardous bodily substances. (As a side anecdote, in my 7 weeks working at Safeway an eternity ago, they emphasized that we should only let trained and qualified personnel clean up things like blood and vomit if something were to happen.

There was one thing I didn't expect to happen, which was immensely funny: the kids were APPALLED at how much oil is required to cook potato pancakes. Yes, you need a lot of oil. You basically have enough oil in the pan to come halfway up the sides of the pancakes. Compared to sauté cooking, which is what these kids are probably most familiar with, it's a boatload of oil. Every time I had to add oil to a pan that was getting too hot and low and oil, they would recoil in horror (seriously) at the oil being added. Perhaps they didn't realize we remove a good portion of oil with paper towels after cooking the Latkes.

I had galbi tang (갈비탕)for the first time today, which is basically a beef rib soup. There isn't a whole lot to it: a couple of floating veggies like green onion, and a bit of meat. Of course, it's served with rice and all the standard Korean side dishes. It was nice to try something new for lunch. It was either that or Kimchi soup, which I've had plenty of times and am not particularly fond of.

All things considered, today was easy, amusing, and I got to leave work an hour earlier than I normally would. The whole week will be like this, I think.

Summer camp

2010-08-04T17:43:00.001+09:00

This week, I've been teaching a summer camp at a middle school other than my own. They selected teachers from all over the district (10 of us) to teach the camp, and we get paid extra for this particular camp. So far, it's a lot more fun, laid back, and interesting than my normal classes. I'm working with a bunch of new Korean co-teachers, all of which have excellent English skills and teach entirely in English. I'm learning a lot from them and I'm getting a lot of ideas for my classes for next semester. It's very refreshing!

Each of us foreign teachers was told to prepare materials for a "club activity" of our choice. Of course, I chose photography, and came up with a bunch of ideas for the students. Yesterday, we spent an hour and a half doing a photo scavenger hunt. I gave the students a list of things to photograph, and had them go out in teams of two. They came back with some great photos! Examples:

Today, I had them make stop-motion videos with their cameras. I compiled them on my laptop and gave the students the final products. Yesterday, I showed them the "Tony vs. Paul" video from Collegehumor that was made a few years ago. They got a huge kick out of it and I think it may have given them some inspiration for their own movies. They only had 45 minutes to shoot their videos, and I used the last 20 minutes of class to process all the photos into 10fps videos. It was by far the most well-received club activity. Here is what they came up with:

On monday, one of the kids shattered a plate-glass door, the kind of door that practically every Korean restaurant and school has. Apparently the door was locked, and he was running down the hallway during the the "amazing race" activity we did. He tried to open the door, but instead it shattered. I was just down the hall when it happened, and it made a huge crashing noise. There were about a million pieces, and the kid was visibly stunned. He was fine, but he seemed pretty upset when one of the Korean teachers had to come and take note of the situation.

Tomorrow, we're going to the Incheon Science hall and the Incheon International Airport on a field trip. Should be an entertaining if not a little nerve-wracking day.

Post-travel blues, start-to-finish

2010-08-04T17:40:00.000+09:00

It seems anytime I vacation, there's a progression of things that happen:

1) I get really excited to go on the trip as I leave for the airport.
2) I spend days 1-4 kicking ass, seeing everything I originally planned to see.
3) I start to get a little bit tired after going full-swing for those 4 days.
4) I start to pace myself better and manage not to cram so many activities into a day.
5) By the last few days, I'm tired and am about ready to go home.
6) I get back home, recoup a bit, and find myself dreading going back to work. I ask myself "why am I not still on vacation?" (The grass is always greener on the other side, right?) I get a bit depressed and more than a bit cynical.
7) I find myself having to push to get back into a routine for the first couple of days after I get back.
8) I finally get back into a routine and wonder what all the fuss was about, and look back at an awesome trip. Commence planning for the next trip (December: India?)

I'm guessing a lot of people probably experience this as well. Travel is exhausting, throws a routine temporarily off-balance, and can be an all-around shock to your system. That said, I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Photos from Malaysia and Singapore: They're up!

2010-08-02T22:44:00.000+09:00

I've finally finished processing uploading, and tagging the photos I took. I made a "best of" gallery for each: Singapore and Malaysia. Here they are:

Malaysia:

Singapore:

If you want to see all ~450 images I put online (out of about 2,000 that I took), please visit my Picasa gallery here: http://picasaweb.google.com/zakool21/SingaporeAndKualaLumpurMalaysia

Tailwinds to Korea

2010-07-31T23:22:00.000+09:00

// Wrote this post flying back to Korea a couple days ago.

5 nights in Singapore, 4 nights in Kuala Lumpur. Everything went without a hitch, and both of the "long" flights were an hour shorter than scheduled (closer to 6 hours than 7 hours).

Writing this, we're about 2.5 hours from touching down in Seoul. Slept for the first hour+, watched a French movie, and had lunch. Singapore Air definitely knows how to do their food. It wasn't a question of whether I wanted wine with my lunch, but whether I wanted red or white wine. :-D

I met some really awesome people on this trip, a couple of which I hope to keep in touch with. Several of them were exchange students coming from all over the world (Holland, Mexico, Canada, Denmark) to study at National University of Singapore. It happened to be orientation time at the university, so many of them had to post up a few nights in various hostels before they could move in to university housing or find apartments in the city. I definitely spent more time with them than I did with the people I met in KL. The hostel in KL was definitely more upscale, which I think attracted a less down-to-earth crowd. People there weren't particularly sociable, despite the much larger common area. I did however meet a woman, about 65, who was traveling Southeast Asia on an extended trip. She had lots of stories and travel tips, and it was great to learn something from a seasoned traveler.

There were some funny stories from the trip, too. Last night, a bunch of us were all talking in the dorm room when one of the guys came in from outside. He said he smelled acetone in the room and that he was certain it couldn't be anything else. He was an engineer who spent lots of time in clean rooms and said that he trusted his sense of smell. He started to get really concerned. He was even about to switch rooms. None of us thought we smelled anything like acetone (maybe a shampoo at worst), until one girl's bag tipped over. Turns out there might have been a bottle of nail polish remover that had previously spilled in her bag. So, she put the bag out in the hallway, and we vented the room. I wouldn't be surprised if we hadn't all been a little high from the fumes, because you could definitely smell it if you left the room and came back in.

Smaller things, like sharing a cab with a couple of Dutch strangers and a very enthusiastic driver, make travel that much more interesting. Everyone seems to have an interesting story, and a lot of the time it's very humbling to hear what other people have done.

Singapore highlights:

* The National Art Gallery. It's moderate to large in size and has a bunch of great contemporary art and special exhibitions. I spent about 2 hours going through the gallery, which is twice as long as I spent in the National Museum. Lots of variety: everything from small wood sculptures to oil impressionism to Chinese calligraphy and photography. There was even an exhibition made by middle school students. It was supposed to be about personal identitity in an increasingly technological world. The art they made was of higher caliber than I'd ever seen from middle-school students:

It was only $5 to get in, and is probably one of the best 5 dollars I spent on the whole trip. I'd love to go back and explore it again next time I'm in Singapore.

* The Marina Bay Sands Hotel. This building is an engineering marvel that consists of 3 57-floor tours, linked by a giant ship-like top. It includes a 150 meter long "infinity" pool, which, for someone on the roof, appears to go right over an edge of the building. The amazing part of the building is not just its height, but the construction. Each tower is straight on one side, and curved on the other. I once saw a TV show about the engineering involved to build the towers. The challenge was in building the curved part of the building and not have it topple over before it reached high enough to rest on the vertical part of the building. There's nothing else like it in the world, and it turns out that the entire complex is also the most expensive in the world. Total cost? About $5.7 billion (US). It also just opened about a month ago, which I had no idea about, since I think the TV special I saw about it might have been a few years old.

You can pay S$20 to go to the top of the building. The elevators only take about 15 seconds to go the 57 floors to the top. I went last night with one of the people from the hostel. The view is absolutely incredible. You can see the entire Singapore skyline, which is bright and gorgeous. Marina Bay sits in the foreground, so you are treated with some fantastic reflections on the water to boot. We'd visited the Observation Wheel the night before, which was more expensive and not nearly as tall as the Marina Bay Sands. Both were highlights, but the view (and photography) from the hotel was better:

* Food, food, food. The Chinese, Malaysian, and Indian food in Singapore is really amazing and very inexpensive if you look in the right places. Aside from one shopping-mall dinner at a crepe restaurant, I don't think I had a meal over $10. Most plates are between $6 and $9, with my cheapest meal being about $3.20 at a Chinese food place in a small shopping center. All of the food is freshly prepared. I think part of this has to do with the number of people who eat out in Singapore; it's a place of widespread disposable income where eating out regularly is pretty normal.

Kuala Lumpur highlights:

* Kindness extended to and from fellow travelers. The day I was seated with the Italian girl at a restaurant, we decided to go take some pictures of the Malaysian graffiti that is seen all over the city. Unfotunately, she'd forgotten the memory card in her camera and we were a 15 minute walk from her hostel. As luck had it, I'd just bought 2 more memory cards and told her that she could use one of them for the afternoon. She told me that she would give the card back later, and she seemed genuinely honest. She gave the card back later without issue.

The next day, the older woman I'd met at the hostel was about to leave for the US and has a bag full of Singaporean change totaling about S$11. She was going to offer it to me just to get it off her hands (since money exchangers won't usually take change), and she didn't want anything in exchange. I really wanted to give her something in return, and I eventually found a S$10 bill in my wallet from my layover a few days prior.

I'm finding that the more you stray from the beaten path (OK, Kuala Lumpur is urban, but I don't think most consider it a "destination"), the nicer and more compassionate the tourists are. I know these are just two stupid anecdotes from one trip, but I think I'll continue to see more things like this in future travels.

* Visiting the Sikh temple. I'm still struck at how welcoming the temple was and how friendly they where when I got the personal tour of the building. It's sad that places like this are still attacked out of hate. This temple was targed as recently as last month.

----

How do you encapsulate a trip in a couple blog posts? It's hard, if not impossible!

Art in Singapore: "Head On" by Cai Guo-Qiang

2010-07-30T22:18:00.001+09:00

At the Singapore National Museum, I came across an installation that was instantly familiar for unknown reasons. I don't know if I'd seen it on TV or something, but it's an impressive piece of installation art by Cai Guo-Quiang, a well-known artist who supposedly made his Singapore debut with this installation.

These are the pictures I took, with the first being a bit of an explanation about the installation. Please see this exhibit if you're in Singapore.

Patronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur

2010-07-28T19:42:00.000+09:00

The Patronas towers, the talltest (complete) twin towers in the world, are a great sight at night. They're located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, an urban, but laid-back city a couple hours north of Singapore. When I get back to a real computer (editing on a netbook is possible but tedious), I will have a whole Flickr gallery from this awesome pair of buildings.

I never did go to the observation deck, since I learned that KL Tower actually surpasses the height of the Patronas Towers' observation deck.

People in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

2010-07-27T01:08:00.000+09:00

After arriving in Singapore, I looked through the images I took in KL and chose some of my favorite people shots. Here they are:

Three people walk through the lobby of the Patronas

Towers, the tallest twin towers in the world.

A man who appeared to be a sort of fortune teller works

out mathematical equations for street onlookers.

Two men prepare chicken pastries on a hot skillet at

the Chow Kit market. The pastries cost approximately

80 cents each.

A young Malaysian sneaks into the frame at Chow Kit market.

A woman prepares street food in central KL.

A man is seated on the prayer floors of Masjid Jamek

Mosque, an old mosque in KL which opened in 1909.

A Sikh priest reads from scripture at Gurdwara
Tatt Khalsa, the largest Sikh temple in Southeast Asia.

KL time lapse project

2010-07-24T22:28:00.000+09:00

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: LRT time lapse from Andrew L. on Vimeo.

I was content to chill (literally) in the shopping mall this afternoon when an idea struck me. I was inspired by a video I'd seen, taken in Tokyo. It was a set of time-lapse footage, some of which was taken from the front window of a subway train.

Since the LRT trains here have front windows you can look out of, I decided that I would undertake a project: to document part of Kuala Lumpur from the front windw of a train.

First, I needed something to rest the camera on that would be stable enough to get consistent photos. A tripod is too expensive and probably wouldn't have worked too well. Instead, I found a $.60 piece of anti-slip matting, like the stuff you use to keep your plates from sliding in a cabinet. This kept the camera from sliding around on the flat metal area just by the front window of the train.

Next, I wanted a better way to actually shoot the photos. I could have just hit the shutter button repeatedly, but I think my hand would have gotten tired and I would have risked the camera moving too much. In one of the lower-end shopping malls I visited today, there was a camera booth that had both a great selection and an awesome proprietor, something I had yet to see in KL until today. He found me a wired remote that works with my 40D, something I honestly didn't expect him to have. It was about $14 and worked perfectly.

Next, a subway ticket. I bought a ticket to a station about 8-10 stops down the line. That was about 60 cents. Total project cost: $15.20

I propped the camera up on the box that the remote came in, and wrapped the anti-slip matting around the box so it would keep both the camera and the box stable on the train. The camera's lens fit nearly flush with the window and rested fairly well on a very small metal frame that lined the window.

The first trip was hit-and-miss, but by the end of that trip, I found settings and intervals that worked. I got off the train, got on one going back the other direction, and started shooting. I think the interval between shots was about 3/4 of a second, but it wasn't as consistent as I'd hoped. Still, it worked well.

I gathered a crowd of curious people several times throughout my 90 minute trip on the LRT. Since I was checking the shots at each stop, people were pretty floored to see a mini-movie made from stop to stop. It was really fun!

I didn't edit the images at all, so the video is quite flat compared to what it could be. I'll be editing the photos once I get them back to a computer with more power (and software). For the time being, they were assembled at 24 frames per second using a free program that was #1 on my Google search for a program to assemble JPEGs for a time-lapse movie.

You'll notice if you look carefully that the train appears to slow down as we're passing trains coming the other direction. In reality, I snapped photos twice as fast and didn't remove the extras to even out the timing.

KL, after full day #3

2010-07-24T22:14:00.000+09:00

Sometimes I forget how much traveling can deplete your energy, especially when it's hot. Though, I still have to insist that this is the best kind of tired.

This morning, I got up and researched my options for getting a massage. My muscles are perpetually tense, even when I haven't been carrying a backpack. Since I particularly enjoyed the first massage I'd ever had (my mom bought it for me around Christmas time last year), I decided that I'd spring for another one. In the end it was only $26 (including tip) for a 60-minute, full-body massage. It generally felt really good, though with muscles as tense as mine, it's bound to hurt quite a bit. She also wasn't as tactful as I would have hoped, but I guess you get what you pay for. It appears Malaysia is a good country to find a cheap massage, though I honestly haven't priced out the options in Korea and in Singapore.

Afterward, feeling a little bit light-headed but relaxed as I ever get, I got an(other) awesome lunch at one of the many traditional restaurants that seem to be everywhere in the city. Many are buffet style, with all of the food near the entrance. You don't even need to go inside to figure out whether or not the food is what you want. Lunch was 11 ringgits, including a bottle of water. That's about $3.43, and included a huge plate of rice, beef, lamb, and vegetables. Delicious!

Came back to the hostel, showered, and relished in the A/C for a while. Temperature was about 88 degrees and 75% humidity. Not as hot or as humid as it can get, but since we're so close to the equator (216 miles to be exact), you can FEEL your skin burn if you're in direct sunlight.

Regarding the question I asked myself in the last post about the Burkas... I think there are a significant number of women who live in Malaysia who wear the full Burka. I think I also saw some Middle-Eastern tourists, but it's hard for me to find out.

In the afternoon, I headed out to the Bazaar Baru Chow Kit, which is an amazingly cramped market that sells everything under the sun. The Lonely Planet book talked about still-flapping fish in the market, and they weren't lying. Lots of stuff was fresh, but I also got the impression that lots of stuff had been sitting around for a while, too. I got myself some sort of chicken pastry-wrap that was pretty delicious. I attempted to find a picture or a name for it to no avail. People were friendly and were happy to let me take pictures (and I took a lot).

Afterward, I wandered somewhat aimlessly until I came across the Sikh Temple of Kuala Lumpur, which is the largest Sikh Temple in Southeast Asia. I was greeted by a very welcoming and informative Sikh guy who gave me a tour of the temple. He helped me put on a head covering (and reminded me to take off my shoes) before we went up to the main - and huge - prayer room. I wasn't going to take any photos, but he invited me to take some and I obliged. The whole place was very elegant and welcoming, and I was glad I got to see a place I otherwise wouldn't have thought to visit.

See my next post about the photography project I did later this afternoon...

Oh, and to the guy clipping his toenails in the hostel's eating area: dude, not at the tables!

After two action-packed days in Kuala Lumpur...

2010-07-23T23:15:00.000+09:00

... I've gotta say that this place has a lot to offer, despite being a relatively small "big" city (population: ~1.2 million).

The diversity I've witnessed in KL is second to nothing. Having grown up in the highly-multicultural town of Union City, California, where over 70 nationalities were represented at my high school, it is pleasantly striking when I come across a city that seamlessly integrates so many cultures in one area. It's not at all something I see in Korea, which is just about the polar opposite of this part of Malaysia when it comes to diversity.

I hear a lot of languages on the street. I see people of all colors. I don't get looked at (much) for being a chalk-white foreigner. It's pretty cool. And the tourists I've seen here seem to be genuinely nice and respectful of the culture and the other people. Today, I was roaming the city with a recent Italian university graduate who I was seated with at lunch. It struck me as very considerate (and I remarked to this effect) that she covered her shoulders when we were in a predominantly Muslim part of one of the city-center neighborhoods.

I don't want this to sound trite or ignorant, but I have never once seen so many women wearing full Burkas (with the Niqaab that covers everything but their eyes). I was told that it's high season for Middle-Eastern tourists, but I have not determined whether the women I was seeing were tourists from stricter Islamic countries or whether they live here. After all, 60% of all Malaysians are Muslims. A huge number of women are seen generally wearing a "tudung," (growing up, there were many girls at my middle and high schools that wore these) but the full Burka is something I've never really seen except on (mostly knee-jerk) segments on TV.

I went to an old mosque yesterday, called Masjid Jamek. There were some very friendly people there to explain the history of the mosque and to ensure that people followed the proper decency standards for entering:

Yesterday, I also saw the Patronas Twin Towers, both during the day and at night. They've become more or less a national tourism symbol. They are the tallest twin towers in the world, after all. At night they're amazingly well lit, and it's hard to take a bad picture since they're so gorgeous. I didn't (and probably won't) go to the viewing platform, because I already went to the top of KL Tower, which, at its viewing platform, actually has a better view of KL than the Patronas Towers do. Here are a few shots from the top. I apologize for the color; this computer has limited options for adjusting the photos:

At the base of the tower.

Yesterday, I also visited the National Art Gallery, which, on a Thursday afternoon was all but deserted. There were some awesome modern mixed-media art that I would love to buy if I only had a way to get them safely back to the US for keeping. Just about everything in the gallery (which was actually a quite large museum-like building) had a price.

Today, I visited the butterfly park, the KL Bird Park, and the Batu Caves. The trip to the Batu Caves took the entire afternoon, but it was certainly worth the long bus rides and every unforgiving stair I climbed (and there were a lot of them). It was hot today, too. More on those destinations in a later blog post....

KL seems to have every sort of food. All of it is cheap, unless you go to someplace that really thinks what they have is a rare specialty. So far, Malaysian meals have averaged me about $3-4 and other meals about $6-8, including beer for the latter.

There's been a bit of difficulty with my camera's memory cards, and I think the hostel's computer is corrupting them, so I won't be able to post any more photos until I get either to Singapore or back to Korea. They're all in tact, and computer-readable, though. I had to buy $50 in new cards for my camera, at which point I learned that wholesale prices on camera accessories seem to be nonexistent here. At least they let me haggle the price down by $15.

I need to get better at ending my blog posts. Until then.....

Update from Kuala Lumpur

2010-07-21T23:50:00.000+09:00

I'm currently in the Malaysian city of Kuala Lumpur, about 45 minutes north of Singapore by plane. I flew to Singapore last night, got in late, and crashed at a hostel until about 7 this morning. I had until 3PM before I had to head back to the airport for my flight to Malaysia, and wanted to make good use of the time.

I met someone in the hostel who also wanted to make use of her time today, so we decided to go to the Singapore Zoo. It's about an hour outside of downtown Singapore via MRT and bus. While we were navigating, I was multi-tasking, and acquired a SIM card for my international cell phone. $15 (Singapore Dollars) for the card and $18 of credits. International calling is cheap and something like 20 SMS were included.

Lunch went a little longer than expected, but was delicious; a chicken wrap at a Moroccan restaurant. This meant I had to hurry back to the airport, but I made it with a good 30 minutes to spare before boarding. Nonetheless, Singapore airport is insanely HUGE!

Got into Kuala Lumpur and took a 28 minute (yes, they advertise it as such) express train into the center of the city. A return ticket was RM 75 or about $23. The hostel is only one LRT stop away from the terminal station for the airport express train, and then a short walk from the LRT station. Quite a fancy place. I opted for my own room, which is only the size of a closet, but has a bunk bed and some room for me to spread out.

Lots of exploring in the next few days.

The only picture I have to put online is from the market near Chinatown, which is where I'm staying. A fruit wagon was struggling to make its way through the busy market crowd:

The rainy night, the bird, and the cat - a WTF moment

2010-07-17T00:26:00.000+09:00

My girlfriend and I were walking around my neighborhood after seeing some awesome music at Mo' Better Blues tonight, checking out the old buildings in the aftermath of the huge thunderstorm that came through this evening.

As she went ahead a few stores to find a trash can for her ice cream, I spotted a pigeon sheltered by the window frame of a restaurant's basement window. I stooped down, and the pigeon let me get surprisingly close. In my slightly alcohol-induced thinking mood, I was thinking about mortality, the bird, and myself, and now none of us were different in that regard. Silly, I know. But then it gets weird.

My girlfriend and I walk down the street some more, and turn around and come back the other direction. We pass the spot where the pigeon is, and it sort of flops itself into a flower bed, wings open. It didn't seem very healthy, an assumption further confirmed by the fact that it let me get so close in the first encounter.

I look left, and an orange alley cat darts from the far side of the street to our side. Didn't think much of it. However, it ran directly toward the pigeon, and the pigeon flew out of the flowerbed. It made it to the ground, and then tried to fly away again.

The cat did this amazing ninja flip, caught the pigeon in midair, about 2 feet in front of where we were standing. It has the pigeon (and not a small one, either), firmly in its mouth, and runs back across the street where it came from. Where the pigeon originally stood was a pile of feathers, the only evidence of it having been there.

Absolutely surreal to watch. We laughed in disbelief all the way back to the apartment.

Photographers: your first camera(s)?

2010-07-14T13:05:00.000+09:00

I had a childrens Kodak camera from a very young age, maybe 3 or 4. I can't believe I actually found it online. Same color and model exactly. I remember being able to buy disposable 10(?)-use flash units from the supermarket. I'm convinced my dad still has it somewhere, along with a likely undeveloped 17-year-old roll of 110 film. Back at home, I still have some of the pictures I took on it.

http://kodak.3106.net/index.php?p=211&cam=1037

Here's a photo that I *think* was taken on the Kodak. I scanned it some time back. The only other alternative was that it was taken on my grandmother's Polaroid, a camera on which I took many photos as a child:

Circa 1990? This was Basky. She lived until 1996.

For my 10th birthday, my grandparents bought me a "real" 35mm point and shoot camera, a Canon Sureshot Owl. I think I still have that one somewhere if I didn't trash it before I moved last. I took 10 rolls of film on that camera as an 11-year-old in Paris and London.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/captkodak/271841562/

I received some humbling advice on teaching... the best kind of advice and the hardest to receive.

2010-07-14T00:36:00.000+09:00

Nothing like just a tiny bit of caffeine (mmm… the first Dr. Pepper I've had in Korea; you can get them at the music bar) late at night to get those typing fingers astir again.

I usually don't blog about things this personal, nor do I blog this candidly about my issues in Korea. I've talked with Brooke about this kind of thing, and we both seem to agree that our blog posts tend to be on the overwhelmingly positive side when it comes to all things Korea-related. This is a departure from that pattern, more of a cathartic vent for me than anything else. Nonetheless, I thought it would be interesting for others to see the "other side" or the real-life challenges of teaching.

Lately at work I have been slacking a bit, even more than what I consider "slacking" in the high standards I set for myself. In fact, instead of beating around the bush, it's safe to say that I've been doing the minimum in creating my lesson plans lately. My lessons have been meeting the requirement of teaching the necessary information out of the textbook, but aren't very interesting to teach.

The Korean education system and Korean culture lets foreign teachers skate a bit. It isn't without long-term consequences, namely in the form of contract renewal woes, but most foreign teachers only stay one year. Part of this ability to skate has to do with the fact that Koreans do not give open criticism to other people. Koreans who do give open criticism of others' work are rare and certainly in the minority. With six co-teachers, I have one co-teacher that has been on my case off-and-on throughout the semester. The mistake I've made is believing that she was in the minority since she was the only one that *voiced* any criticism of my teaching. It's an incredibly easy mistake to make, especially when I've openly asked my co-teachers for criticism about my teaching. Two or three of my co-teachers have told me to keep doing exactly what I've been doing (including my main co-teacher; my boss). A couple others were rather ambivalent and seemingly satisfied, and the one I already mentioned has hounded me more than once about my work. My response to her hounding was to comply and satisfy her requests as to maintain the peace, because she isn't exactly nice to me when she makes the suggestions. She's maybe a couple years older than me, but quite methodical and unemotional; It's a bit intimidating. So, logically, if one person out of 6 is giving you advice that contradicts the others, you tend to be skeptical or even defensive.

And I've been mildly defensive at times. But, today I was greatly humbled.

One of my (Korean) co-teachers is my girlfriend. That's been the case now for a couple months, but we do an extraordinary job of separating our work from our personal lives. She is only a temporary teacher at our school, and is actually in her last weeks working there, so there wasn't (much of) any potential for disastrous office complication. She hasn't said much about my teaching, and we even commiserate about making it through hard days together. But, I've brought up the critical co-teacher a couple times in the course of my own occasional venting, and mentioned that I don't think she likes me very much. After all, she had a pretty awful experience with the foreign teacher from last year, who'd stayed one too many years in Korea and had some mental instabilities (I'm not tossing that term around casually, either). It would be understandable if the co-teacher had some hesitations or a bad taste in her mouth about foreign teachers. Some Korean teachers simply don't like foreign teachers by virtue of the fact that we are able to waltz right in and get benefits and treatment that would take a Korean 5+ years to achieve in the normal career hierarchy. That's also understandable; we have it pretty damn good for what we are required to do.

I digress…

I was talking with my girlfriend tonight, this time about work, and got on the subject of teaching and lesson plans. And I finally got something I wanted to hear, something that was level-headed and even validating of the unusually open co-teacher I've been talking about: an honest, and most importantly, non-attacking critique of my teaching.

She hesitated, and hesitated more. It was a difficult thing for her to do, being both a girlfriend and a co-worker (both hard positions to be in when giving criticism, even if constructive), but she eventually volunteered her thoughts about my teaching. She said that she'd been wanting to say something for a while, but was having trouble getting there. She acknowledged that I'm a new teacher and that I am not experienced in the world of teaching. The most important thing that I got from our conversation is that I need to bring something uniquely "me" to the classroom. And by "me," I mean something unique to the foreign teacher. I've been teaching out of the book a lot, something that I was *told* to do by my main co-teacher at the beginning of the year when I had been attempting to make all my lessons from scratch. But, as my girlfriend said, anyone can teach out of the book. It's true. I need to make lessons that I enjoy teaching, and make the kids have a reason to learn. Lately, I've failed on both counts. The kids are discouraging, which makes me discouraged, and further discourages them. It's a self-reinforcing cycle that must be broken at some point, preferably sooner rather than later.

My girlfriend also volunteered that the co-teacher I'd been concerned about sincerely wants to be a better teacher herself, and has offered helpful advice to other teachers in the department. So, I'm going to try a LOT harder to communicate with her and really collaborate on lessons. My girlfriend suggested that I might gain some respect from the said co-teacher if I really show that I'm trying to improve my lessons. I think she's got a point.

I still need to teach from the book, but I think I need to make the book material around 1/3 of the lesson, rather than the 2/3+ of the lesson that it currently is. More about Western culture, more projects, more things that really engage the students. Getting them intrinsically motivated, rather than forcing them to learn English is the real challenge. It's the real challenge in any learning situation. What's the old adage? You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. I need to give them a reason to drink and help them understand that it really is for their own good (and not just for a grade).

My personal challenge has to do with keeping busy. For me, the easiest option (making easy lessons, and sitting around) is also the most boring. They're easy to make, but boring to teach. I thrive on being busy and am very productive when I have momentum, but I also burn out pretty easily. It's a hard balance to strike for myself. Lately, I've been pretty bored and have been *gasp,* underachieving, possibly as a protection mechanism from over-stressing myself. It's something I have a history of doing, and it's one of the things about myself I have the most trouble coping with. But, I've made it this far (5 months) at this project, much longer than I made it in my first unsuccessful run at graduate school nearly two years ago. And, I've been pretty happy the whole time, which also wasn't true when I was going to grad school. I long ago told myself that I would stick to my project and my goals, since mastery really does come from consistent practice and effort. My convictions and qualms about the number of crappy educators out there really makes me want to do this right, just because I know I have it in me. I've had some amazingly memorable teachers in my life, and I have an honest and deep respect for what they do and how they do it. I just need to keep my motivation up. Since I want the option to stay more than a year here, I need to take the best road there, which is to make good lessons and become a better teacher.

I have exactly four more classes before my summer vacation from work. I'm taking a solo trip to Singapore and Malaysia for 8 days. No friends coming with, no girlfriend; just me. I hope that it'll be a time to recoup and reflect more on my work, what I hope to achieve, and how I'm going to achieve it. After two week-long summer camps, I can start afresh on the new semester and revamp my lessons.

That's just about as candid as I'm willing to get on a public blog.

The engine on my airplane just quit. Am I going to die?

2010-07-12T15:19:00.001+09:00

This is a question and answer I submitted to the Facebook team to apply for a beta tester position. You are required to pick a question and answer it with a knowledgeable and detailed answer. I've discussed this particular question before on my website.

In short, the likely answer is "no."

There is a pervasive misconception about airplanes that leads people to believe a loss of engine power will cause an aircraft to fall out of the sky. This is false, as almost any airplane with the exception of a fighter jet (which has very small wings with little ability to generate lift) make excellent gliders. As a pilot, I am constantly reassuring people of the safety of airplanes; it's human error that causes the vast majority of air fatalities, not mechanical failure.

There's a little bit of science and technology that can explain why planes make such good gliders. Yes, even that trans-Atlantic Boeing 747 or the Airbus A380 can make a safe landing with no engine power. Here's how:

1) Physics: Most planes have very efficient wings that allow the airplane to generate lift with as little engine power as possible. The aspect ratio, or the proportion of length to depth of an aircraft's wing, is optimized for lift.

Each aircraft has a specific glide ratio, a number that tells you how far an aircraft can glide versus how many feet in altitude it will lose in the process. For example, a small Cessna 172 has about a 10:1 glide ratio, which means that for every 10,000 feet (or 1.64 nautical miles) it can glide, it will lose 1,000 feet in altitude. From a cruising altitude of 6,500 feet, a Cessna 172, depending on the wind, could glide about 10.7 nautical miles before making a soft landing. The descent rate is actually shallower than a normal descent; roughly 300 feet per minute, versus 500 feet per minute in a normal descent.

A Boeing 747 has an approximately 17:1 glide ratio, which will allow it to glide even farther than the Cessna 172. When I reassure people of the safety of a jumbo jet without power, I usually say it will glide about 100 miles. This is a conservative estimate, with theoretical numbers being closer to 125 miles.

2) Technology: A total engine failure can cause other issues completely unrelated to how far an aircraft can glide. You need to be able to control the aircraft, which on larger aircraft is achieved through engine-driven hydraulics. On smaller, cable-controlled aircraft, this is a non-issue, but this is a potentially disastrous issue on larger aircraft. Fortunately, the designers of the Boeing 767 (and a few other models of aircraft) found a way to power the plane's hydraulics enough to maintain control in a total engine loss.

A 'RAT,' or Ram Air Turbine, is a small hydraulic generator powered by the relative wind of a moving aircraft. When deployed, a fan spools up and can provide enough power to marginally control an otherwise powerless aircraft.

The RAT on a Boeing 767 saved many people aboard the "Gimli Glider" in 1983. Mid-flight, the aircraft ran out of fuel. Having deployed the RAT, the pilots were able to guide the wide-bodied airliner to a safe, albeit crash landing in the prairies of Canada.

---

Many people don't like to fly because the consequences of flying are largely out of their control. Part of peoples' fear stems from a lack of understanding. It is this aspect of their fear that I hope to alleviate with the clear presentation of factual information.

References:
Aspect ratio here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_%28wing%29
Gimli Glider information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
http://www.wadenelson.com/gimli.html
Ram Air Turbine information: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/electronics/q0044c.shtml

My first experience with Korean health care

2010-07-08T19:56:00.000+09:00

Aside from the dreadful medical tests we had to take during the first week of our stay in Korea, I had yet to avail myself of Korea's national health care... until today. I've had my insurance card from near the beginning, and I've kept it in a safe place should I need to use it.

About a month ago, I developed a rash on my leg that didn't go away with home remedies. It was itchy as all hell, but tolerable since it wasn't uncomfortable all the time. I finally asked my main co-teacher if she could get me set up with a doctor. She asked some kids in the classroom if they knew where the closest clinic was. Kind of odd, but it worked; turns out there's a doctor's office just above the pharmacy across from the school. I avoided going for the last week or so, and decided on a whim this afternoon that I had nothing better to do and I might as well try.

I go in and am greeted by a couple of somewhat bashful secretaries who spoke no English at all. They send a message to the doctor via computer, and he comes right out. Surprisingly enough, he is a younger guy and speaks very good English. I briefly explain the problem, and he takes me right back to an exam room after they take my insurance card info. He asks me some questions, takes a look at my leg, and tells me what is wrong. He asks me a few more questions, and tells me to go wait up front. I pay 3600 won ($2.98, yes, that's just short of three dollars), and they send me off with a freshly printed, barcoded prescription.

Downstairs at the pharmacy (separate entity from the doctor's office, seemingly), they fill the prescription for a cream and some medication and hand it to me for 2000 won, or $1.66.

So, for less than $5 and in under 20 minutes, I saw a competent Korean doctor and got a prescription to hopefully fix my very irritated leg. I think I pay about $60 per month into the national health care. Without going into my long, opinionated rant about how terrible health care in the US is, I'll just say that this was the best encounter with the health system I've personally had in years. (The second best was a doctor in France I took a student to when the student had a likely case of Swine Flu. We got that settled in about 30 minutes and for about $50, including medications like Tamiflu).

Holy crap, formalities abound

2010-07-06T14:25:00.000+09:00

You think that the US has it bad with bureaucracy? Think again, because Korea might give you a run for the money.

I've noticed ever since arriving in Korea that formalities for the smallest things are commonplace, especially in a school environment. There are ceremonies for everything, you need to fill out a form to get the most mundane thing done, and the student testing is regulated to within an inch of its life.

Just two minutes ago, I witnessed the conference room being sealed off with a 4x8 piece of paper that simply reads "봉인" or "seal." It was taped across the door and the door frame, and then stamped/sealed 9 times (yes, I counted) to ensure that no snot-nosed kid gets in and steals the test questions.

The tests here can't just be written by the teachers, either. They're written by the teachers, then read over and over by the head teacher and even the vice principal. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing. However, I fail to see how a vice principal, who likely hasn't taught in years, is going to be a good judge of what constitutes a good or fair test question. The teachers should have a much better handle on that than some higher-up.

On the upside, I'm getting to go home two hours early since there's nothing to do here during testing. They even brought ice cream in after lunch.

The nonsensical vocabulary string

2010-06-30T09:24:00.000+09:00

Luke's newest ROKetship post summarizes exactly what happens to me on a regular basis:

Source [here].

The most common one I get is from the girls as we pass in the hallway. It usually sounds like "Hi Andrew teacher, how are you? I'm fine thanks, and you?" Mind you, this is without any response from me in the middle. I think they know what they're doing.

I think monsoon season is here...

2010-06-30T09:19:00.000+09:00

At 3AM, I was startled awake to some of the deepest and loudest thunder I've ever had the pleasure of hearing. It set car alarms off on my street and afterward I could hear people outside, astir.

Lightening must have struck either my building or a tall building nearby (or something at the park). Since I was asleep, I didn't see the flash, but... the thunder was immensely loud and you could hear it echo out into the distance.

It wasn't raining at that moment, but once it started, it didn't stop. Six hours later, and it's still raining hard. I took a cab to school this morning, which was apparently a smart idea; my shoes aren't waterproof and an umbrella wouldn't have done much. A friend in my building said he walked (he works at the school next to mine) and he was soaked from the waist down, even with an umbrella.

The rainy season over Korea, the so-called changma season, continues for a month from late June until late July. A short period of rainfall comes in early September when the monsoon front retreats back from the north. This rain occurs over a period of 30-40 days in June through July at all points of South Korea, with only some lag in time at different stations, and accounts for more than 50% of annual precipitation at most stations. [Source]

The weird multi-package

2010-06-29T20:21:00.000+09:00

I've noticed a trend in Korea that usually ends up being beneficial, even if it's a little weird: the multi-package.

When you got E-Mart (이마트) to buy your groceries, you'll notice that seemingly unrelated things are packaged and sold together.

The first time I noticed this, it was a package of Mandu (만두 or dim sum) being sold with a roll of paper towels attached to it. I almost bought it that day because I couldn't find paper towels sold in anything less than 6-roll bundles.

Last weekend, I needed to buy some canned tuna. I came across a nice 6-can pack of tuna, so I picked it up... only to find it was attached to a roll of paper towels. Before I opened it tonight, I took a picture:

Now, there have been some weirder and even lesser-related things attached to each other at the supermarket, but this is a phenomenon not terribly common in the US. Occasionally you'll see some junk toy attached to your box of cereal, but that's just about it. Anyhow, the guy who does the ROKetship did a pretty funny comic on supermarket attachments. It's the first comic on this page:

http://roketship.tumblr.com/page/12

"He can watch porn" -- More tidbits on Korean life

2010-06-28T14:12:00.001+09:00

Tidbits, the best thing in the world, especially on pizza.

(I seriously love Canadians for using "tidbits instead of "wedges.")

Story #1: Last Saturday, I decided to get some Jajangmyeon (자장면) from the Chinese place kitty-corner to my apartment. I can see the restaurant out my window, so nothing much is required to walk across the street and get some food. I put on my slippers (rubber sandals) and walked over for the food. In the 5 minutes I was inside ordering/waiting for the food, it started to rain heavily. The owner noticed this before I had, and hands me an umbrella from behind the counter. I was a little confused, even after I noticed the rain. I said "아파트저기요," which in my barbaric Korean was supposed to mean "my apartment is just over there." He motioned at covering his head and insisted that I take the umbrella.

It saved me from getting very, very wet. The rain was coming down in sheets. His small gesture actually made my evening. The owner of a restaurant handed me an umbrella to take home, fully trusting that I'd bring it back to him after I was done using it. It was an act of kindness and trust that you almost never see any more in urban America.

Story #2: I was teaching a class today and reviewing "can" and "can not" with my students. I picked a student, and said "what can you do?" A general response should have been "I can speak English" or "I can play baseball." Instead, the kid said nothing. In the absence of his response, the kid next to him said "he can watch porn."

Mind you, these are the lowest-level, lowest-grade middle schoolers that I teach. To boot, my girlfriend (also a teacher) had just been telling me last week about how her boys class (same age) was telling her how tired they were because they had been watching too much porn. Pretty candid, isn't it?

Check your email!

2010-06-25T15:51:00.000+09:00

I've found this to be a very common thing: Koreans don't check their email often enough.

Specific example: My co-teacher asks me to email her the script to our "English radio" show a few days in advance. I sent it to her at about 9 this morning. 3:45PM, she comes in and asks me if I can provide her with the script. This has happened about 2 or 3 weeks in a row now. Maybe I should just make it a habit of going to her classroom once it's sent to remind her that it's there.

I find that most Koreans I know don't check their email more than once a day, at best. I find this peculiar considering Koreans are on the cutting edge with their technology. Does this somehow mean that email is antiquated to them?

Cold in Korea

2010-06-25T13:33:00.000+09:00

Considering I've been teaching for 4 months, I'm kind of shocked that I haven't gotten some sort of common cold... until now.

A few nights ago, I woke up in the night with a sore throat. I knew it was the beginnings of a head cold. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming with all the sneezing I've been doing in the last week. By morning, it was worse, but I was feeling fine otherwise. I explained to my co-teachers that my throat was hurting and that I couldn't talk much, and all of them recommended I stay at my desk, gracefully taking over 5 teaching periods for me. At the end of the day, I held my last afterschool class of the quarter, for which all of my students brought a plethora of snacks.

The next morning (yesterday) I woke up feeling like hell, at 6AM nonetheless, and called my main-co teacher to let her know I'd be taking a sick day. I felt progressively worse throughout the day: congestion, body aches, the works. My girlfriend brought dinner (rice soup, mmm) and stayed with me until 9 last night. I was running a 102.2F fever (that's 39C), which finally broke with the help of some cold towels and the gentle hand of my female companion.

I slept pretty well last night and woke up feeling much better than yesterday, albeit with another symptom: a mild cough. After trying to teach my first class this morning, the co-teacher for that class told me mid-class to go back to the office and that she'd take over for me. All things said and done, I don't have to teach for the rest of the day. The upside of this is that I'm getting some deadline-centric work done in the off time.

In Korea, taking a sick day is somewhat frowned upon, even though us Guest English Teachers get something like 11 of them per year. They must have thought I was nearly on my death bed to take a sick day, since everyone has been constantly checking up on me today at work (the Vice Principal, the Principal, teachers I don't normally talk to, co-teachers, and students). I didn't even have to visit the school nurse and they brought me cold medication and a bitter drink called Ssang Hwa Tang, which is an herbal drink for alleviating cold symptoms. I'm not sure if it helped, but it sure tasted bad. It was like drinking bitter black licorice with a hint of cinnamon thrown in.

As for Korean cold medicine... That stuff is potent. Take it with caution; it contains about 10 different medications (I typed the Korean name and then translated the webpage I found) and will make you pretty out of it while you're on it. I've found that I can only take it when I'm realllly sick, like I was my first week in Korea. Otherwise, it just makes you feel more weird than you need to considering your symptoms.

Photography community in Korea + Noryangjin Fish Market

2010-06-23T10:36:00.001+09:00

Wow. I actually have time to blog. The only reason is that I woke up with a nasty sore throat this morning, made it to work fine, and was told that I could just sit at the desk all day. Better than wearing my throat out more by yelling at students.

Part 1: Photography meetup: As I've talked about before, Meetup.com has gotten me involved in some really cool activities in Korea. I recently came across a very cool photography meetup group. I made a suggestion that the group check out the Noryangjin Fish Market in Seoul. I thought it would be a cool place to photograph because it would push the limits of peoples' cameras as well as peoples' comfort levels vis-à-vis photographing things in tight (and poorly lit) spaces. The suggestion went over well, and about 3 weeks later, the group organizer had gotten 40 people signed up.

So, on Saturday, I made the trip out to Seoul and met the group. I was pleasantly surprised at how energetic everyone was and how everyone carried themselves. The whole gamut of the photography community was represented there. There were people with point and shoot cameras with virtually no experience, all the way up to some really talented or long-time photographers. Since I shot professionally for more than 6 years, I volunteered (and was gladly accepted) to help people out during the meetup.

The fish market was a really neat place, and didn't smell as fishy as I thought it would. However, that's like saying that it doesn't smell on a farm; you get used to it after a short time. When I got home, my clothes (and backpack) all stunk of fish and I had to immediately shower and wash the clothes.

We got some great photos at the market. At one point, I came across what I'm certain is one of those once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunities. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a crowd gathered around one of the vendor booths. There was a very small child and a shop owner standing near one of the tanks. The shop owner had handed the boy a fish-catching pole and let him get a fish out of a tank. At this point, I ran over to where the people were gathered, and got right down to see the whole thing unfold.

The boy pulled a fish out of the tank and was completely terrified when the fish started flapping around in the basket. That terror underwent a 180 degree change in about 5 seconds and the boy became visibly elated. I was clicking away the whole time, but here is the best shot with the best angle:

It's rare that you come across such "decisive moment" photography unless you're really alert and already have a camera in your hand. The photo isn't perfect (busy background, fish not in focus), but I got the photo and successfully captured the joy on this kid's face.

Here's my favorite non-fish shot:

Part 2: Namdaemun: After the meetup, several of us geeks and gear-heads went to Namdaemun, a district in Seoul. For all intents and purposes, it is the Digital SLR capital of Korea. There's one particular store that advertises English-language service and has a really good reputation among expat photogs. About 5 of us went inside and started to look at the plethora of gear this place had. This is when I realized that Yongsan is a baaaaaaad place to buy your camera gear. Namdaemun is so much cheaper and has much better gear.

Once upon a time, I had an entire collection of photo gear, including nice Canon L lenses of various focal lengths and a very nice flash to go with it. When I decided to get my pilot's license, I realized that I could sell the gear, use the money (about $2500) toward getting my license, and continue to use the (even nicer) stuff my employer had. So, I went for about a year and a half without a dSLR of my own. I had a Nikon D40 for a period of time in 2009, and finally re-acquired a Canon 40D before my trip to Korea, albeit only with a kit lens.

In the store in Namdaemun, I found a used 17-40mm f/4L, which is the wide zoom I used to have on my 20D a couple years ago. The lens I found was in impeccable shape. I decided to see what I could do to get a deal on it. After all, I know exactly what this stuff is worth and what constitutes a good deal.

A couple of things sealed the deal for me. First, the shop bought the kit lens I had. Second, they gave a pretty good $50 discount on the new lens. Then, they had a nice Hoya UV filter that they threw in for free. That's another $50 off, essentially. Then, they had the original box, original manual, and original lens hood, all in perfect shape. In the end, I got the lens for $115 less than KEH charges for their cheapest and lowest-condition copy of the same lens. All those after-school hours this semester paid off in the end!

Part 3: The Seoul Photography Club and publications: The gearhead photogs I was with, like I said, were really great people to be around. Not only were they very knowledgeable about their photography, they were genuinely nice and seemed truly involved in the community. We all had Samgyeopsal after going to the camera stores, and talked more photography. I learned that several people at the table photograph and write for some of the Korean expat magazines. They said that the magazines have contests and generally will take good writers and photogs. Though most of it doesn't pay, being published is still great, especially when you already have a full-time job doing something else.

All of them are members of the Seoul Photo Club, a group on Flickr. The group has a really awesome photo pool that allows you to post images and always receive feedback on them. Each time you post a photo, you're required to post critiques for the two prior photos posted. This means you always get two comments on each photo you add to the pool. The photo pool is already heavily trafficked, so you often end up getting more than 2 critiques. Now I know why those at the table at the Samgyeopsal dinner kept saying why they had grown their photography skills so much through the club. People are incredibly open, honest, and helpful in a way that's not condescending or degrading.

There's almost no way to describe how content and excited I was after a day like Saturday. I got to meet some really fascinating people who have similar interests. This is the kind of thing that makes me truly enjoy being in Korea, and it's exactly the thing that made my university experience so incredibly enjoyable.

Here are the rest of the photos from the fish market:

Korean hand gestures

2010-06-22T23:35:00.000+09:00

This kind of post is way overdue, but I thought I'd make up for it by making a video. I realize it's probably been done once or twice, but nonetheless:

Korean hand gestures. They're confusing.

Korea and the impermanence of... well, pretty much everything

2010-06-18T11:05:00.004+09:00

"Dynamic Korea" is one of the most commonly-quoted slogans used to describe odd and inconsistent goings-on in Korea. Day-to-day schedules, while usually choreographed to an extreme, often change at the drop of a hat.

My planner pages are never this empty.

The impermanence of schedules is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to talking about impermanence as a whole in Korea.

Impermanence of job location: A while back, I talked about jobs and trades that often take a long time (and a lot of apprenticeship) to master. However, I've noticed that people move around a ton in the process of pursuing their careers. Given, a lot of people in the US move for job-related reasons, but people in Korea expect to be re-located many times during their careers.

For example, Korean teachers can only teach for a few years at any given school before they have to re-locate to teach in a new area. While this might be good for the educational system, it sets up an expectation of change. As a Westerner, I don't think I would like being uprooted so many times and so predictably; it would be hard for me to set roots in any one place. Then again, Koreans seem pretty well-rooted in their families and home situations to begin with, so maybe it's less of an issue in a purely Korean context (meaning, not looked at in the framework of Western ideals).

Impermanence of home: This sort of builds upon the impermanence of your job location. I would wager a pretty educated guess that more than 70% of Koreans live in some sort of medium-to-large size apartment building. There are entire cities of apartment buildings that stretch for miles. Take for example this picture I took out of a plane window on the way back from Jeju to Seoul.

Freakishly dystopic-looking isn't it?

This type of housing is MADE for maximum capacity, which is why I think such a high percentage of Koreans live in something resembling the photo above. Let's face it: These apartments are anything but homey. They all look the same on the inside. On the other hand, most Koreans can probably move their entire apartment across the country with no more than a (very) small truckload of stuff. This is one thing I envy, being that us Americans are so used to having a whole garage for storing all the crap we so carelessly accumulate. The garage I had in my house of three years in Davis is literally twice the size of my entire apartment in Incheon.

The impermanence of the Guest English Teacher: Us waygook teachers are in an even more unique situation when it comes to all things temporary. We sign a one-year contract, leave our home countries, and come to Korea with the expectation that we'll be here for roughly a year. Some stay for longer. Some do the "night flight" thing where they leave the country early with all their stuff and don't tell their employer (not recommended, and will prevent you from ever working in Korea again).

I love it here, but the majority of GETs are in it for a year, and nothing longer. I may stay longer, but I'm only 4 months in, so I have no way of knowing yet. So, we try to do as much as we can in that short time. I've been told that I've traveled around Korea more than most Koreans have, and I know that I do a lot more on the weekends than my colleagues. What many Koreans don't realize is that us GETs aren't just crazy adventure-seekers (well, we are), but we're also trying to get the most out of the time we have here. You can count the weeks: 52 of them. You have just about that many weekends to do something interesting.

So, just as much as we observe the impermanence of the situations of many Koreans, we have our very own version to remind us that everything here is just... temporary. So, for those who are having trouble with their work or living situations here, just keep that in mind.

Eating establishments: A friend and I have an ongoing joke now about restaurants and construction. Near our apartment, they built a Dunkin Donuts in about a week's time. Recently, I guess some Filipino restaurants closed in our neighborhood. My response to him telling me this news: "Next week there will be a few more open, so be patient." Lots of restaurants come and go here, and they build them in record time. It usually takes no more than a couple weeks to completely rip out an old store/restaurant and replace it with a brand spanking new one. Where are all of these Korean construction workers when we need them in the US, all questions about workmanship aside?

Final blurb: Today marks the completion of 4 whole months in Korea.

Are you going to pre-order the iPhone 4? + Another video of my crazy students.

2010-06-15T19:13:00.001+09:00

How many people are going to buy the iPhone 4 when it first comes out? In order to get one quickly, you'll need to Pre-order your iPhone 4. Whether or not you get one at first depends on a few things: first and most importantly, do you want one at all? Second, do you want to buy a "Revision A" product? A lot of people seem to wait a couple months, even if there are no indicated changes in the product. Often times, a company will use a different component and not make mention of it, but it makes the product more stable or more usable in some regard. If you have to have it now, you'll have your chance soon. If not, you have approximately 8 months before people will tell you to just "wait for the next iPhone."

And now, here is another video of my bat-shit crazy 9th (or 10th?) grade boys. It's the last class on Fridays and they always act up.

This particular day, I was able to get them to calm down and teach them a lesson out of the book, but it required my game face and going around the room to each student to verify that they were doing their work. At the end, I rewarded them with candy and a game (which is what they were yelling about in the video).

The word-by-word story

2010-06-14T16:11:00.003+09:00

This week, just like every week, I made a card with a warm-up activity, a set of minimal pairs (this week's were boat/vote, myth/math, alive/arrive, in case you were wondering), and a closer activity that I can use in each one of my classes. That activity card accounts for roughly 15-20 minutes of each 45 minute class period. Since I teach 21 classes per week, I get to play the same game about that many times. I usually make it up to about 15 or 16 before I want to shoot myself, so sometimes I'll switch it up toward the end of the week.

The game for this week is a pretty simple but fun one: Each student provides one word to add to a sentence, hence building a story. It's pretty easy to explain, and the kids have fun coming up with some convoluted stories that are still loosely grammatically correct.

My experience with this kind of productive task parallels my experience receiving letters from students a month or so back: the kids have no idea whatsoever how to create a story or write a letter in English. Part of it has to do with the fact that they are much better at reception than production, and part of it has to do with storytelling being very very different in Korean than in English. (Culturally, the sense of agency and action used in Western stories is quite foreign compared to East Asian story formats.)

Here's a couple example, unfortunately not verbatim, that I've reconstructed best I can from memory:

"Today I am going to buy an iPhone and an MP3 player. I will go to the 이마트 (E-Mart) store with my mom and buy a Samsung Galaxy S. We will steal these. We will invent dynamite and drop it."

"I like English class. Andrew-teacher is very cute and handsome but he is also funny. So students do not love Sumi [the co-teacher for this particular class] as much. Sumi is tall and has big shoulders. So, she is mean and very pretty. Andrew loves Sumi."

UPDATE! Actual story copied and pasted: Today is warm and hot. It is terrible. I went to the park. There are many handsome boys. It is very nice. I am happy. I love handsome boys.

Surprisingly (well, not so much for the second one) these were both from girls classes. The last part of the second one, even though created by the students themselves, causes an endless amount of giggling. And no, Sumi and I have nothing to do with each other outside of class (and I already have a girlfriend).

Even though the grammar isn't great, it's one of those tasks where ALL of the students are engaged, even if they're not the ones giving the word at the moment. All of them seemed very interested in the outcome and were glued to the screen as I typed out each word.

The inexplicable afternoon....

2010-06-14T15:56:00.001+09:00

Just when I think that I've become comfortable with "dynamic Korea" and all of its weirdness, there still come times that completely throw me off.

For example, I was told by two teachers today that we would be resuming the English teacher training course, which is where I sit down with the 6 English teachers and help them improve their conversational English. Two others said they wouldn't make it, but I expected at least 2 teachers.

I go to the room where it and other English-related activities are held, and it's locked. OK. I come back to my desk and scratch my head for a couple of minutes. Then, I go to find one of the teachers who should have been there. Her room was full of students, so I assumed that she was in the room teaching it (I didn't actually see who was teaching). I went down the hallway, and found another English teacher (who was supposed to be at my class) teaching a classroom full of students in a room that was not his. I go further down the hall and discover the original teacher, teaching a class in another room that was not her's. Bizarro world.

Two of the other teachers who were supposed to come were not accounted for, and nobody has come to me yet saying "where are you!?"

Guess I'm off the hook for this week. I'm actually glad; the one and only conversation class I've had so far with my teachers has been a disaster. One of them can understand about 95% of what I'm saying, and another understands less than 10%. I'm required to make my best effort to cater to everyone, and I certainly try, but at the end I just want it to be over with.

A critical look at Apple, AT&T, and Verizon tactics. Calling all techies!

2010-06-10T14:13:00.001+09:00

Part 1: The new iPhone is here.

A couple of days ago, Apple announced the new iPhone 4, which, just like previous re-iterations of the iPhone, is leaps and bounds ahead of the last one.

I bought the original iPhone soon after it came out. I paid $600, and ended up getting $100 back after they lowered the price to $500 and people complained about the sudden price drop.

I had an iPhone 3G when the 3Gs came out, and didn't make the jump to the 3Gs. But, the iPhone 4 looks gorgeous in all regards. The screen alone on the iPhone 4 is a deal-maker for me; I can't wait until I can get my hands on one (same could be said for the iPad, too). Unfortunately, like when the first iPhone came out, I was out of the country. I wasn't able to get one until a month after launch last time, and it may be a lot longer than that before I can get one this time around.

I had to sell my iPhone 3G when I moved to Korea and was able to get out of paying the AT&T ETF. Essentially, when I moved, I parked my phone number by signing up for a year's worth of pre-paid service. It was $100 and they waived the ETF for me without (much) hassle. (I say "much" because nearly any interaction with AT&T is a hassle to some degree).

Part 2: Control, control, control.

American mobile phone companies and Apple *love* to have control over their products.

Mobile phone carriers are very quick to lock you down to their services and extras, and do this via carrier-locking and proprietary software. I'm looking at you, Verizon. You consistently cripple features on your phones, features that the phone would normally come with straight from the factory with the factory OS. Nearly every GSM carrier in the US locks their phones to one carrier so that people need to buy a new phone with another carrier in order to move to another provider. Despite DMCA exceptions allowing users to unlock their cell phones, carriers will do nearly anything to keep you from playing by any rules but theirs'.

Apple plays into the same game, adamantly chaining you to AT&T when you purchase an iPhone. There have always been ways around this, but things have gotten complicated legally and lawsuits have entered the picture, when those looking for fairness (and frankly, money) sue providers or manufacturers.

AT&T has recently upped the bar in terms of trying to control their customers. AT&T would prefer to call their new practice something like "protecting their interests." Given, AT&T does have to protect themselves from losing money when people ditch their contracts and sell the heavily-subsidized phones.

Here's how it used to work: if you wanted a discount on a new a new iPhone, sans contract, you had to buy one from AT&T, sign the contract, and then cancel. This imposed a $175 early termination fee (ETF) on the buyer, but you still had an iPhone for $375 or $475, depending on which model you bought. It was still less than the $600 or so that you pay for a brand new iPhone without a contract.

Now, the early termination fee costs $325. That's a hell of a lot of money. Now, you pay $200 or $300 for the phone, plus $325 for the early termination fee. Worst case scenario is $625 for the best iPhone. Now, if you buy it without the contract, not looking to save any money, you're still spending $599 for the 16GB model and $699 for the 32GB model.

To make this look less "unfair," AT&T has said that the $325 ETF fee covers all netbooks and smartphones, and they've lowered the ETF on non-smartphone models. So, the expensive, subsidized phones are now subsidizing the cheap phones. A whole chain of subsidies!

Part 3: Questions

How much money was A&T really losing from people jumping ship and re-selling iPhones at full price? Is it really worth exorbitantly punishing people who legitimately need to get out of their contracts?

What happens with multi-line contracts? Is the ETF the same for these accounts? What happens if you buy 2 iPhones at $200 each, with a contract, ditch the contract, sell one iPhone at full price, and keep the other one? Elaborating a little: pay $400 for two phones, $325 for the ETF, and sell one iPhone for full price at $600. In the end, you have one un-contract-burdened iPhone for less than $150. Is that even LEGAL? Does the contractual jargon have any protection against this?

Note: I am not encouraging breaking your contract to profit from an otherwise subsidized phone. I just am trying to analyze the situation to determine why AT&T does this and whether they've covered all their bases. I also don't at all condone this rabid behavior by Verizon, AT&T, (which frankly is a hugely lackluster carrier for one of the world's best phones) and Apple.

Korean driving habits

2010-06-09T15:49:00.002+09:00

I've talked about what it's like to be a pedestrian on Korean roads and how much of my walk to school doesn't occur on anything remotely resembling a sidewalk. I've talked about cab rides, too. But, I haven't really talked about Korean driving habits.

To drive like a Korean:

1) Put your car in neutral every time you're stopped at a signal. (I could see how if your car is running rough at idle that you might want to disengage the transmission, but everyone seems to do this regardless.)

Do this every time you stop.

2) Turn your headlights off anytime you're stopped at a signal. (Can't quite figure this one out: is it not to blind the person in front of you?)

3) Use lanes as a suggestion, not as an actual guide for where to put your car. (Seriously, WTF!? It's like this ALL the time.)

Drive like this. Hover back and forth between

lanes as you decide where you want to go next.

4) Make multiple lane changes without looking or signaling. (Again, WTF!?)

5) Drive within inches of a pedestrian's life. (They're pretty good at this, but Korea still has the third largest per capita traffic fatality rate in Asia.)

6) Make turns at a stoplight from non-turn lanes. (Cabs will frequently pass a line of 30 cars at a stoplight and squeeze in by turning from a non-turn lane.)

7) Honk your horn at 3 in the morning in otherwise quiet neighborhoods.

8) Speed up while going through downhill blind curves. I shit you not, every cab driver I've ever ridden with has done this.

9) Make really wide right turns that jeopardize the safety of traffic waiting to make a left turn at a T (3-way) intersection.

10) I've mentioned it before, but: watch TV while you drive. Yep, cabbies have DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) TVs in their cabs, which usually double as their GPS systems. Sometimes it's a split screen with half being TV and the other half being a map.

OK, so not all Koreans drive like this. Actually, I've found there to be quite a discrepancy. It's mostly the cab and bus drivers that drive like this. People in regular cars don't quite drive like this, save for maybe #3, #5, and #6. Still, I'm not sure where I'd be more afraid to drive: England or Korea. Probably Korea because less of the potential involved in creating an accident is in your hands.

Breaking: Heat causes projectors to melt to death in South Korea

2010-06-08T15:50:00.002+09:00

It's Northeast Asia, and Summer has arrived. Well, it may not officially be Summer for another two-ish weeks, but it sure feels like it. It's been over 80 degrees (F) for the last several days, with pretty high humidity.

At most schools, air conditioning is either non-existent or is used very scarcely. I was told by a couple of my co-teachers that the school did have A/C and that it would be turned on later in the summer. "This is only the beginning," one co-teacher told me.

Yesterday, it started to get really hot at about 9AM, and there wasn't much of a breeze to speak of. Just as I am right now, I was sweating at my desk, exerting myself almost none save for typing on a computer. Suddenly, I feel cold air. Surely there wasn't a cold breeze. I looked up, and the louvers on the heater/AC were swinging back and forth. AIR CONDITIONING! For a while, they left the windows open, which I thought was strange. They eventually closed them and sealed off the room, at which point it got nice and cool.

The A/C for the classrooms is turned on at the discretion of the principal. Fortunately, since I share an office with the Vice Principal, if she gets A/C, then the other ~10 of us in the office do, too.

The students are expected to endure the heat much longer than any administration staff, as are the teachers teaching the classes. Cue the fanning, sleeping, and general pissing and moaning by the students. The worst is when they've just come back from P.E., where the dirt field is easily 10-15 degrees hotter than normal.

Anyhow, several classrooms I teach in have had intermittent problems with the projectors. The co-teachers in each case hadn't really thought to check out the actual projectors themselves (they just said it was broken after they'd poked at the control box for a while), so I got on a chair and tried unplugging them and plugging them back in. Seemed to work for a couple of days. Today, I tried it in my 9th grade class, and the projector worked for a while. Then, I got a blinking signal on the screen with something in Korean, which I pointed out to my co-teacher. She said that it was too hot to run. Within seconds, the thing shut itself off and I had to... *shudders*... write on the blackboard. It's actually not that big of a deal, it just takes longer since my handwriting that fast and I can otherwise type 120WPM. Poor students didn't get to watch a hilarious soccer video.

Another narrated speech

2010-06-07T16:18:00.001+09:00

I meant to post this on Friday after I made the video, but never did get around to it. This is one of the speeches given at the English speech competition a week ago.

How about a cold churro with lunch... and don't forget to eat it with chopsticks.

2010-06-04T13:04:00.001+09:00

Today's lunch was really good. The only kind of strange part is that I've never seen churros served with a meal. To boot, the churros were snack-sized and served nearly frozen solid. When I used the tongs to serve myself one from the main tray, I wasn't even sure it was a churro because it was so hard. Then, I smelled the cinnamon and all doubt was erased. And yes, I ate the entire churro with chopsticks, since, as I indicated in my last post, eating food with your hands is not done frequently.

Other parts of the lunch consisted of (from top left, clockwise): bean sprout kimchi, pork patties with sauce, cucumber kimchi, tofu and seaweed soup, and rice. All of it was delicious.

Four more observations on Korean culture

2010-06-04T10:43:00.001+09:00

1) Elevator etiquette: Koreans don't like to share elevators unless they have to. People will usually take separate elevators. In my building, there are three elevators, all side-by-side. Believe it or not, there were three people going up from the lobby yesterday (including myself), and all three of us took different elevators. It's definitely rubbed off on me. If I see an elevator coming down, I won't bother the person by stopping the elevator on my floor. Instead, I'll call a different elevator. Maybe that's just common courtesy? Before Korea, I'd never lived in a building that necessitated several elevator trips per day.

2) Never touch the food: There seems to be a pretty big aversion to touching food with your bare hands. I've heard of people eating pizza with utensils instead of picking it up with their hands. If they pick up pizza with their hands, it's usually with a napkin. One day at school, they served hot dogs, completely made up and ready to eat. I took one and ate it with my hands, which is pretty much the only way I can envision eating a hot dog. Nobody else ate them, though. They weren't wrapped or anything, so I suspect the aversion to touching food played a part in this. When you buy hot dogs at a walk-up window, they come wrapped in foil, so people eat those.... I don't know if these two things are associated, but I've mentioned in the past that people don't really wash their hands after using the restroom. I keep a bottle of spray-on hand sanitizer in my office desk since hand-washing supplies are scarce.

3) Getting attention: There's a very commonly used word in Korea for a middle-aged or married woman, which is 아줌마, or "ajumma." The male equivalent is 아저씨, or "ajosshi." Apparently, you can use these to address someone, too. In a restaurant, I'd usually say "저기요" ("jeogiyo") to hail a waiter to the table. It's very polite and you can yell it across a restaurant and have it still be very polite. However, you can also use "ajumma" to hail the lady working at the restaurant. I read that it can also mean "restaurant proprietress." I was eating dinner the other night (at a 뼈해장국, or pork bone soup restaurant) when the man at the table next to me yelled out "AJUMMA!!" The lady says "네!" ("yes/coming!") and comes right over. I'm told this is polite, but as an English speaker it feels like it translates to "hey, woman!"

4) Seniority and taking criticism in stride: I was out the other day with a female friend at the park, and we stopped into a small store to get a bottle of water. We were standing there waiting to pay, and one of the ajosshis at a table said something to my friend. It didn't sound friendly, and she seemed a bit startled. She just said "네" ('yes") in response, and once we got outside, I asked her what happened. Apparently the skirt that she was wearing wasn't proper enough for the man. It was one of those denim skirts that have the frayed ends, just like how mens denim shorts have ends that are styled to look a little frayed. What could she say? Nothing much, really. It was a matter of seniority. Even though she didn't know this man, she wasn't really at liberty to say much back to him since he was a lot older. I see this type of thing a lot, and it's a part of Korean culture that's very deeply ingrained in society. If you are criticized or talked down to by someone older, you don't talk back. Its roots are in Confucianism and hierarchies of respect.

So, that's all I have for now. Stuff has been pretty standard lately, save for some interesting dating stories, which I may or may not broach in a later post. I've been enjoying the live music in my neighborhood, as the house band at Mo' Better Blues continues to blow me away. Weather is improving, and it's getting warm enough to the point where it's a bit sticky outside, even in the mid 70s (F).

Happy Memorial Day (to my stateside readers)!

2010-05-31T22:39:00.001+09:00

As luck has it, my school is closed tomorrow (my Tuesday, your Memorial/Monday) for some sort of student work/study-related event. That means that I've worked a Monday, but don't have to work Tuesday and Wednesday, and then just have to work Thursday and Friday.

Nice-uh! / 나아스!

Enjoy your steaks, micro-brews, and all that other good stuff that doesn't exist (affordably) in Korea.

The chase.

2010-05-31T13:07:00.002+09:00

I was walking back from the cafeteria/gym building to the main school building after lunch, when 3 girls dressed in P.E. clothes started chasing me. I started running just as a kind of joke (easier said than done, since rubberized slippers tend to fall off pretty easily). They caught up with me in the hallway once inside, and giggled like they usually do before they try to speak English. One girl says, "can you feel my heartbeat?" In Korean-accented English, it really sounded like "can you fil mah haht-beat-uh?"

I said "yes," and they giggled again and went away. I think they make each other do this on dares.

Hilarious.

By the way, this Trekkerdrew's 102nd post. Doesn't seem like I've made 102 entries in a period of 5 months, but then again, I love writing.

Live music in Sinpo-dong

2010-05-30T20:24:00.001+09:00

The apartment I live in borders Chinatown and Sinpo-dong, two very old neighborhoods well-known for their food and entertainment. The area used to be a hot spot for younger people 20-ish years ago, but larger, newly-built areas like Bupyeong and Arts center have taken over this role in recent years. From Dongincheon station, go through the underground shopping mall and get out at exit 23 or 24. This is the top of the Sinpo shopping street. Continue toward the giant gate that says "Sinpo shopping" and walk down the heavily-lighted street. This takes you right into the central part of Sinpo-dong. It's no more than 8-10 minutes walking distance from Dongincheon.

There are at least two live music clubs in the neighborhood that I have now sworn to become a regular of. The closest one is across the street from my apartment. It's so close that I can sometimes hear the shows through my apartment window. The other night, I actually fell asleep to the sound of a horn from a jazz ensemble.

Thursday night, while coming back from a friend's birthday party, I was walking back through the central part of Sinpo-dong when I heard the unmistakable sound of cymbals from a drum set. I naturally gravitated toward the club, which is a bar called "Mo' Better Blues," located above the Baskin Robin's. What I witnessed that night was the best guitar playing I've ever seen from 10 feet away. The 5-piece (vocalist, drummer, bassist, pianist, and guitarist) band played a variety of music before the vocalist got off the stage. Don't get me wrong, she's got one of the best voices I've heard at a bar, but when she got off stage I knew things were going to get serious. The guitar player started the first licks of Santana's "Europa" and my jaw dropped. For the next half hour he and his band proceeded to completely blow my mind with their skill. I never did get the name of the band.

Fast forward to last night: Saturday night. I hadn't done much all day, so I asked a friend in my building if he felt like watching some live music. We hit up the place near our apartment building (Bottom Line), and watched a jazz trio of very awkward, high school-looking Korean guys dressed in suits. They were good, but they didn't seem all that into the music; they were so caught up reading their sheet music to look anything but seriously concentrated. We had our beers, paid the table fee for seeing live music ($2.50), and headed to the next place.

Surprise! It was the same band I'd seen Thursday night. I deduce from this, the fact that their instruments were meticulously set up, and the familiar-looking crowd that this band is probably the bar's house quintet. We got there for the beginning and they played a very good 30-minute set including some modern-ish rock songs, 80s pop songs, and a couple of others. The vocalist did a great job and her English singing skills were fantastic. They took a 30 minute break, and got back on stage. The playing continued, but with more of an instrumental emphasis. Again, with a little bit of time left, the vocalist got off stage and the guitarist took off with his fantastic skills. Not five notes into the song, I realized he was playing Clapton's "Crossroads." He did a kickass job at the song. I really wish I had gotten the name, a video clip, or SOMETHING about this band. Serious talent.

Anyway, the guy plays what looks like a 1960s sunburst Stratocaster, as evidenced by the yellowed pickup frame and dulled tuning knobs. Very fitting for the type of guitar work he was doing.

I feel very fortunate to live so close to this type of stuff. It's a stone's throw away from my place and really makes me appreciate local community and culture.

Korea, the specialty, and the apprenticeship

2010-05-28T16:25:00.002+09:00

In North America, apprenticeship and the specialty seem to be two ever-dying practices. Where they still exist, they aren't very obvious, and they're certainly not seen as a keystone of society. Certain things like welding still require some level of on-the-job apprenticeship before you become a "real" professional at what you do. "True" specialty stores are becoming more and more rare with the increasingly ubiquitous multi-store.

In Korea, things are a little bit different. Take specialties, for example. Stores in Korea sell to a much higher level of specificity than do stores in the US. In addition, retail is a lot more dense/common than you'd ever see in the US. Here's a short list of various shops I've seen that sell only type of item or practice only one kind of trade:

Bamboo chutes (Juan-dong): They sell anywhere from 10' to 30' bamboo chutes that stand in a big stack in front of the store. They're chained up at night so people can't steal them.
Seaweed (Itaewon): A cart where all they sell is packages of seaweed for various culinary uses.
Guitar cases (Insadong): A store where the ONLY thing they sell is guitar cases of various styles and sizes.
Guitar amplifier/speaker repair (Insadong): A guy whose sole job is to repair guitar amplifiers. He doesn't even sell them or other guitar-related stuff. All that's in his shop are a ton of speakers, enclosures, and wires.
Chair/floor cushions (Dongincheon): Gotta be comfortable, right?
Comforters (Dongincheon): Near all the wedding dress stores.
Refrigerators (Juan-dong): A typical appliance shop that specializes in only one type of appliance.
Headphones (Yongsan): A booth where they sell nothing but headphones. They sell every model of nice pair of headphones I've ever owned, albeit at a substantial markup for the nicer stuff.

I find it interesting as well as perversely humorous that there's a guy making his bread and butter selling guitar cases. Still, there's something respectable about it. He knows a lot about guitar cases and could probably sell you the best guitar case for your money. I doubt that Guitar Center would do that for you; they'd just like to sell you the most expensive case they can. In many cases, these specialty stores cluster around in certain areas; there's a pet district in Seoul, a motorcycle district (same area as the pet district), and various other districts for different purchases.

As for apprenticeship in Korea... It's a very important part of peoples' careers. The strength of apprenticeship in Korea probably has to do a lot with their culture of community and cohesiveness. In the US, where independence is seen as an important virtue, people are faced with a lack of support when furthering their skills in a field or job. Teachers in Korea, for example, aren't considered "experienced" until they've been teaching for 30+ years. Compare that to the US, where most "higher-level" positions (in many fields, in fact) require only 5-6 years of experience. The skills and the experience required to build them are a result of many years of partnership in training. In the US, after 2 years of grad school for a teaching credential, teachers are dumped into a sea of other teachers, left to survive or quit. Skills are developed independently of other teachers in many cases, save for some mandatory seminars (which are arguable in efficacy). Teachers in Korea, however, go into teaching with the expectation that they will be learning about their field for many years as they work.

Just my observation du jour.

Photos of Bill Clinton from 2008: First public posting

2010-05-28T11:11:00.001+09:00

In what seems like an eternity ago, I had the great pleasure of being able to attend and photograph a speech given by Bill Clinton at UC Davis in January of 2008. He was on the campaign trail for Hilary Clinton during the primaries, where she was running against now-President Barack Obama.

The photo equipment was screened by the secret service and sniffed by dogs before I was allowed to carry it inside. After all, the 300mm f/2.8L lens I was carrying, along with the 1D Mark II and the monopod all made for an impressive piece of equipment. On a press platform with a clear line of sight of President Clinton, they wanted to make sure it was in fact a camera and not something malicious.

Somewhere close to 10,000 people attended the speech in the ARC Pavillion at UC Davis. It was a huge spectacle. I shot many hundreds of photos, but these were the best ones I got. I re-edited them today with Lightroom, as I wanted to have a fresh look through them to make sure I wasn't missing anything I edited 2 years ago on the first go-around for the newspaper. Check 'em out:

Damnit, I miss photojournalism.

My crazy students, captured on video

2010-05-26T16:21:00.001+09:00

Again, here's another tame video compared to what I see some days. I just happened to be in a good mood and got my cameraphone out fast enough. Usually, they see the camera and quickly pretend like nothing was going on.

These are my middle-level middle school boys. Depending on the day, they may or may not calm down for class time. Don't be fooled; the girls can be just as rowdy. Notice the awkward "hi" from me as I walk past some of them; they generally don't like to be filmed. The boy sitting on the ground, just seconds before, was being wrestled 2-on-1 by some other students. An interesting species of student, indeed:

Election season in Incheon: Annoyances abound (with video)

2010-05-26T16:15:00.001+09:00

So, it's local election season, and campaigns have geared up to get people to vote for local politicians. Or, rather, to annoy the hell out of them until they pick the most annoying candidate. Sounds a little like elections in the U.S., right?

Wrong.

Here, there's almost no such thing as "quiet hours." Just as bars blast music from their storefronts, candidates blast catchy theme songs from fruit trucks that roam the city day and night.

I was woken up at 8AM last Sunday morning by the sound of such a truck roaring down my street, speakers full blast.

It's kind of amusing; they hire a bunch of people (maybe they're volunteers) to dance on the street corner for hours on end while the candidate's giant, awkwardly smiling portrait looks at all the people traveling to and from work.

I got a video, but it's really tame compared to what I've seen lately. I just haven't had the time to record one of the crazier intersections. They aren't dancing in this one, but seriously, who would want to in this weather?

The upshot of all this madness is that we get next Wednesday off work for election day. Huzzah for a mid-week break!

At home while abroad: technology in action. Benefits and caveats...

2010-05-25T15:03:00.001+09:00

It used to be that going abroad was a really big deal because you'd rarely have contact with your family or those outside your immediate vicinity. It could take weeks to get a letter halfway across the world, and that might have been your only option for communicating.

Fancy one of these?

Easy communication with friends and family was the first of two large steps toward making travel easier for everyone. International phone calls became more affordable, and airmail became available (albeit at a premium). Suddenly you weren't as far from those you love. But what about culture? Anything that entailed entertainment, media, or visuals was still mostly out of the question.

These days, the internet has further reduced the perceived distance between point A and point B. With immediately-deliverable content and seamless interactions with old social groups, culture can follow you abroad.

I am 5,600 miles away from my home in the San Francisco area, yet, thanks to the internet, I just attended a live Kina Grannis concert at one of my favorite places: Cafe du Nord on Market Street. I can communicate with entire groups of people from my childhood, high school, college, and grad school with a few easy strokes of the keyboard. It's fantastic. Not only can I communicate with people from back home, I can teach my Korean friends and students about culture at home... that is, if they haven't already learned about it on MTV Korea.

There's a bit of a caveat, though. Proponents of technological social networking tools say that it allows people to connect with each other. However, I've argued in the past that social media makes us more and more isolated from what really matters: real contact with real people. For those who were brought together in person by technology, there are just as many (if not more) who now have an excuse to sit home and Tweet all day because they're still "connected."

And this caveat still extends abroad, but in a slightly different way. We can port our cultural comforts with us in the form of Facebook-equipped smartphones and iPods loaded with our favorite television shows from home. Sure, it's nice. But what does this achieve? Sure, it slightly mitigates some of the homesickness we all experience while globetrotting. It's a good way to kill time on the bus while commuting to work, or to kill time when you don't want to get drunk at a Noraebang. In almost all other cases, having your head buried in social media does a disservice to the experience of travel.

Travel is something meant to expand horizons by experiencing and interacting with a new and unknown culture. You're effectively putting yourself in a bubble when you're mentally and communicatively at home and physically somewhere else.

We're all guilty of it. There are times where I lose myself in a game, a website, or talking to a friend at home. I go downstairs to buy food and I realize that I'd forgotten I was in Korea. Maybe that's part of having adjusted to life here, but maybe it's also a sign of my head being many places at once. I use Facebook way too much in my free time. The internet is really a black hole in this way.

The key is to use your technology wisely. Don't let it isolate you from your surroundings just because it provides some comfort away from home. Traveling and living abroad is very much about feeling uncomfortable in a new place and breaching the limits of your comfort zone. You're inhibiting this process if you don't allow yourself to be uncomfortable.

BRB, gotta Tweet this.

The translated speech, narrated

2010-05-24T20:39:00.001+09:00

After not seeing the script for the translated speech for a couple hours, I re-read it and decided I needed to narrate to show just how hilariously absurd it was:

The translated speech

2010-05-24T15:56:00.005+09:00

I used to wonder how language teachers were so good at telling a self-written paper from a translated paper. Turns out it's not very hard, especially with Asian languages. Well, it was easy for me, the native English speaker. But, you be the judge...

I had been tapped to judge an English speaking event this upcoming Friday, to which I happily obliged (did I really have a choice?). I thought it would be kind of cool since I used to participate in and judge speech tournaments for James Logan High School's forensics team. Upon returning back to my desk from a class today, I found a couple of stapled pages with a note from my main co-teacher. It was one student's script for the competition (click for something readable). I'm wondering whether my co-teacher thought this was passable or whether she even read it:

I started to try to correct it, as you can see, but I wasn't more than a couple paragraphs in before I realized that such a paper could not be resurrected. It made no fucking sense at all.

Here are a couple samples, typed up for you:

"But it was practiced and plentifully and the hand followed well and it was not widely known and the enemy who is strenuous was many."

"I the Beethoven or wool car lu thu, under, to hit the music of show Paeng and so on and to know and that only the piano it learns simply, it learned their lifetimes to learn the history of music. It will be like that and it will see will meet music examination from the school and 100 pieces the possibility which it was."

"That only knows raised the sense against music plentifully. To hit the piano and the possibility of having the interest regarding the music the music to get better it was."

So here I was, sitting at my desk, a little bewildered. There was no way to fix it without completely re-writing it, so I went to my co-teacher to deliver the news.

"There's a little bit of a problem," I said quietly, as there were some students around. "This wasn't written by the student. They wrote the first few lines and then typed the rest into a translator." She responded with a surprised "reallly!?" to which I responded, "sorry, I wish I could help, but this isn't English." She was very understanding and said "that's OK, I'll ask the student to re-write it."

Tomorrow I may be receiving something similar.

July vacation plans: Malaysia and Singapore

2010-05-23T11:48:00.001+09:00

For the last couple of months, I'd been going on and on about how I could use my United miles to get a business class ticket to Singapore for next to no cost. Turns out that even two months advance booking is not quite enough to get business class seats. A couple weeks ago, there were still tickets available, but I think that United only receives X number of seats they can use to book award tickets on.

So I booked the last seats I could find, and there were very few left, even on coach. On the upside, I only have to pay 20,000 miles and can do a multi-city trip for the same price as a simple round-trip ticket. So, here's what I have planned:

July 20: Fly from Seoul to Singapore (about 6-7 hours).
July 21: In the evening, fly from Singapore to Kuala Lampur, Malaysia (1 hour). Spend a couple days exploring the city and any nearby parks I read about.
July 25: Fly back to Singapore and spend a few days there.
July 29: Fly back to Seoul.

The reservation is on hold, and all I need to do at this point and call and pull the trigger. Don't see any reason not to!

Here are a few interesting things about Singapore:

The airport is only a couple minutes from the city center via Subway.
Singapore is well regarded for its food and many consider the food selection in Singapore to be among, if not the best in the world.
It's only 80 miles from the equator so the weather is nearly identical year-round.

Here are a few interesting things about Malaysia, specifically Kuala Lampur:

KL is home to the world's tallest twin tours, the Petronas Twin Towers. They're slightly taller than the Empire State Building but still dwarfed by the Burj Dubai, the tallest building in the world.
KL has actually become a well-known shopping destination. Who would have known? (I certainly couldn't care less about the shopping, but find it interesting that a developing Southeast Asian country has gained this reputation so quickly.)
Malaysia consists mainly of two large landmasses that are separated by the South China sea. KL is on the western landmass, at the bottom of which is Singapore (island and city-state).

Seoul x 4: cat cafe, han river, humidity, and rain

2010-05-23T11:31:00.002+09:00

In the last week alone, I have been to Seoul 4 times. This is a great testament to the efficiency and the affordability of the subway system here in Korea. The most I've paid for a single train ride is 1600 won, or about $1.34. Usually the rides are about 92 cents and are rarely longer than an hour. Last weekend, it was two days in Insadong for the lantern festival. This weekend, I was all over the place both Friday and Saturday.

Friday was a national holiday celebrating Buddha's birthday. I made arrangements to give my co-teacher a guitar lesson, in exchange for which she gave me a really great loaf of home-baked raisin/potato bread. We ended up finding a place on the river trails away from some of the hustle and bustle of city life, and posted up for a guitar lesson. She is new to the guitar, so she's going through a steep beginners learning curve, making progress nonetheless! It was a bit hot outside, and there were tiny aphids crawling everywhere, but it was nice to be outside on a sunny day.

Saturday, I left relatively early in the morning to meet some out-of-town friends who were in Seoul for the weekend. We met on Yeouido at 10AM to have brunch on the lawn and ride bikes around the island. It was a bit cloudy, but it was still warm and humid with a light breeze. It was actually perfect weather for a casual morning hangout. It was quite unsurprisingly quiet on the island, being that Korea is known as "The Land of The Morning Calm." This is doubly so on weekends, since many people stay in after long nights of drinking (see: Black Out Korea). It didn't start to get busy on the island until about 12:30, and even then it was pretty tame.

Two of us made our way to Hongdae to see if we could find an English bookstore and the Cat Cafe. We didn't succeed in finding an English bookstore (Kyobo or otherwise), but we eventually did find the Cat Cafe after a call to a friend (thanks Brooke!) and some searching:

The Cat Cafe is an interesting place, in that it would never be allowed to exist in the US. It might have something to do with something crazy, like perhaps public health codes. Basically the idea is this: it's a cafe where they keep about 40 cats. You're required to wear special slippers, abide by some basic rules, and purchase one ridiculously expensive coffee (or other) beverage. (A mocha was about $7.50) For this, you get to play with, cuddle with, and otherwise chill out with the cats for as long as you want. They only let a certain number of people in the cafe at once, and we fortunately got there just before the waiting list got long.

Tower o' kitties

Each table comes with a card containing information about each cat in the cafe. They only have about 20 cats out at a time; the others stay in the "cat hotel" or in cages near the front entrance. Considering the fact that the idea is a little strange, it was executed very humanely and it seemed to work well for the cats. They were all very tame and used to people constantly touching them. You aren't allowed to wake sleeping cats, but there's actually not much you can do that will rouse a comfortably sleeping cat:

Anyhow, we spent about 2 hours there. Here's a short video I took with the camera on my phone. It's just about as bad as the photos I took with the phone:

Later, we went to the motorcycle/pet district where a friend bought a new motorcycle helmet and a sidecar for her dog. Just kidding about the sidecar part.

Afterward, we went Myeongdong and walked around in the rain amid the masses of people that one can always find in Meyongdong. We then had a great dinner at a Napolese/Indian food restaurant only a couple of subway stops away.

Great day, but I'm glad that it is a 3 day weekend! Sunday is always a nice day to rest.

Asian conformity and cultural perspective

2010-05-20T13:46:00.004+09:00

Disclaimer: This is a cultural observation, not a criticism. I feel like I haven't explicitly talked about the subject of conformity, so why not now?

In East Asia, the cultural norm calls for conformity: Conformity of opinion, conformity of attitude, conformity of style and actions. Not only is this woven into the fabric of society, it's even promoted by people, who in the states, would be the most likely to rebel: teenagers.

Brooke wrote an excellent blog post today with some great pictures to boot. And even though it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it reflects a reality, a very different reality than ours in America. This is a case where students had to make posters about school rules. Given it may have been a school assignment, the kids took it seriously.

Take a look at her post here. Notable quote about one of the posters:

Have self esteem?
Actually, I think this is pretty much what is says. The best translation I could do was "Do you see? Your appearance."

I think it may have to do just as much with self esteem as it does with making sure that students all fit in with one another. And since Korea is so appearance-oriented, the image (a kid looking in the mirror) suits the message appropriately. This is a country where kids have to wear school uniforms and sport nearly identical haircuts to school. And guess what? This kind of conformity is not abruptly given up upon graduation, either.

And to take that even further... this is how people want to live. It's not like they're being forced to conform and resent it. Westerners see conformity as something to avoid, as we pride individualism and individual differences in society. East Asians, on the other hand, find cohesiveness in the form of conformity.

A book I read - and have already quoted once - highlights the East Asian preference for common versus uncommon items. (Again, the book is called The Geography of Thought, How Asians and Westerners Think Differently, and Why by Richard E. Nisbett). The study went something like this: people in Western and in East Asian countries were asked to choose a gift for a friend. Essentially, the Westerners would choose the rarest, most unique gift to impart on a friend. The East Asians, however, would choose the most common gift to give their friends or colleagues. The take home message? If you're looking for a gift for a friend or co-worker in Korea, go find something nice but really common. It's appreciated in the same way a unique gift would be appreciated at home. It's a big difference in culture, measured and quantified at that.

Again, this is a case of culture being extremely relative. Some people can't grasp the idea that other cultures have different ideals, or furthermore, ideals that would be polar opposites of their own culture's ideals. It's kind of an amazing thing to see in action, because it tends to work pretty harmoniously in its native setting. It's when you put it in the framework of Western cultures (for example, Asian communities in the US) that it starts to appear bizarre. And for many Westerners, that's all they know of Asian conformity: conformity as seen within a society where conformity is not the ideal. Put into context, it makes a lot more sense.

This is the kind of thing I would really like to elaborate and discuss in the book I eventually want to write: Why it's important to travel in order to get perspective. In the US, cultural representations are just that: representations. You need to get out in order to get the bigger (and more accurate) picture.

To wit: You don't know what Chinese food tastes like. Neither do I for that matter. I know what American Chinese food tastes like. I know what Korean Chinese food tastes like. But I don't know what real Chinese food is like, the food that a billion people in China eat on a regular basis. Why? I've never been to China.

5 tips for newcomers to Korea

2010-05-19T13:22:00.001+09:00

I got an e-mail today from a reader:

Hey there!

I have been following your blog the past few months about South Korea, excellent stuff! I was curious if you had any advice for a newcomer to Korea. I am in the process of interviewing with a couple of different individual schools ([names omitted]) for a position. Thanks for your time!

-Chris

Chris,

Depending on where you end up, your circumstances could vary greatly. The combined differences between schools and cities make for an innumerable set of possible situations. However, for all foreigners coming to Korea, there are some universal things to keep in mind. This is far from all of them, but I think they're partiuclarly relevant:

1) Finances: Make sure that you have enough money for the first month or month and a half in Korea. This is anywhere from 1 million (USD $880) won to 1.5 million won ($1320). I had 1 million won to start with, and boy, was I happy when I got my first paycheck. Stuff is cheap in Korea. Really cheap. But, you will always incur some one-time costs when first coming to a new country. You will likely need a medical exam and will need to pay to get your ARC (Alien Registration card). These two alone can total anywhere from 100,000 Won to 150,000 Won (원 or a W with a slash through it).

2) Public or Private? Public schools and private schools both have advantages and disadvantages. Private schools (Hagwons) will generally give you more vacation time and pay more. However, your hours can be screwy, and a best-case-scenario is usually working from 1-9PM. Worse cases include split shifts (for example 9AM-1PM, 5PM-9PM). Public schools are usually more consistent with their pay and give more vacation, but pay less. You also have less of a choice in location with public schools. The earlier you apply, the better the chances are of getting your choice province.

3) Watch the drinking! Drinking will empty your bank account faster than almost any other activity in Korea, except for maybe a shopping bender at the Yongsan electronics market. Drinks are cheap here; roughly 1/2 to 2/3 of the price of drinks at home. This leads you to spend more, and soon you're spending a disproportionate amount on drinks compared to what you would have spent on them at home. I can get away with spending 40,000-50,000 won per week on food (including eating out a couple nights a week), but I can spend that much or more in one night out on the town if I'm not careful. That said, a round of drinks at a modestly cheap bar with a large group of people ends up being roughly 6,000-8,000 won. And watch the Soju; drinking Soju and Soju alone can lead to some bad hangovers.

4) Make some Korean friends. You could not possibly isolate yourself more in Korea than by only hanging out with other foreigners. To this day, I still only have a small handful of Korean friends, but I've learned more from them about Korean culture and ideals than I ever would have from my Westerner friends. Friends, especially Westerner friends, are really easy to make in Korea; something about the environment and the fact that nearly all westerners you encounter outside of Seoul are teachers is very conducive for socializing. Plus, Korean friends make for excellent tour guides and interpreters.

5) Don't sweat it. There are a lot of things to worry about. You're going to worry plenty during your preparation for coming here, but it's quite predictable once you get into it. The language barrier is not insurmountable, you're not going to be broke (far from it, the pay is great and you save a lot), and you'll find food that you like. Teaching is not easy. Don't come here with that delusion. You're going to run into ups and downs, but take it all as it comes, and remind yourself to do so frequently. It's a very rewarding and enriching experience if you let it be so.

Send any more questions to zakool21 [at] gmail [dot] com and I will be happy to write more advice lists.

Eat Your Kimchi, spotted in Seoul!

2010-05-18T20:43:00.001+09:00

Just a shout out to Eat Your Kimchi, the two awesome, well-known bloggers (photo: left) who live in Bucheon. They posted up at a spot right near us in Seoul on Sunday for the Lotus Lantern Festival Parade. Hi guys!

Enjoy their blog at: http://www.eatyourkimchi.com/

Lotus Lantern Festival, Seoul

2010-05-18T20:30:00.000+09:00

My post about the weekend is several days overdue, but I wanted to make sure I had the pictures up and the time to finish it before I committed.

I ended up in the Insadong area of Seoul two days in a row this weekend. Saturday, I had plans to have lunch with a co-teacher after, but instead we ended up going to Insadong and staying all day after helping her make her first guitar purchase. There's a huge 4 or 5 story building with music vendors in Insadong, where you can find any musical instrument or instrument repair shop known to mankind. It's kind of like a miniature Yongsan, except for all things instrument-related.

After making the purchase, we walked around Insadong, which is surprisingly close to where my friend Lee and I had lunch on the day of our paintballing trip. Ended up staying in Seoul until 7PM on Saturday night.

Sunday morning, I didn't have any plans, but two different friends asked me if I wanted to go to the Lantern Festival in Seoul. My first thought was "damnit, more weekend crowds?" What I didn't realize is that the lantern festival is a fairly big deal and only happens once a year in Seoul. One friend was able to convince me, and we all met at 11AM to head out to Seoul. Being a little strapped for cash, I did well for myself and only spent a couple bucks the whole day.

Booths, booths, for as long as the eye can see.

There's a parade at night and umpteen booths for learning about lanterns, Buddhism, and Korean culture. In addition, there were booths representing Buddhist denominations from many different countries, including Thailand and Cambodia. It was great; they seemingly sent people from Thailand and Cambodia to come spend time at the booths. I'd never seen such a large multicultural gathering since I'd left home, and I was very pleasantly surprised. If you recall from my last post, I was a bit irked at my colleagues' reactions to me suggesting there may be a few non-ethnic-Korean students at our school, so I'm not entirely sure where the collective viewpoint actually stands on multiculturalism in Korea.

There was a spectacle practically all day where they had a jump-rope activity set up. Here are some kids jumping rope:

Backfocused. Shucks.

There were so many booths that we were destined to find some Engrish. And find some Engrish we did! This was by far the best:

"Fingering, Fingering, we can make the world together."

It was a booth for making ceramic cups and other sundry items.

There were definitely a ton of people out, but we found the best place to stake out the view for the parade, and stuck around there for about 2 and a half hours before we actually saw anything come our way. It got dark, and therefore very hard to get good photos, especially with a lens that only does f/3.5 and a camera body that only gets modestly decent performance at ISO3200. There was a of panning-and-shooting done, and even then, it was extremely tricky. Using a flash kills the ambiance, so I just shot in RAW and hoped for the best. Here are the best couple:

View the entire slideshow of photos here:

As of today: Three months in Korea

2010-05-18T13:22:00.001+09:00

Three months ago today, I stepped off the plane at Incheon International Airport. Jet-lagged and tired out of my mind from a 13 hour flight, I was nevertheless completely jazzed to be in a new place and doing new things.

Fast forward three months and it's really hard to believe how much I've experienced in this time. You ever have that feeling where a point in the past feels like an eternity ago but you remember it as if it were yesterday? It's something I've never been able to explain well, but that's how I feel about my time here. Intense experiences, coupled with a relatively short period of time, screws with one's perception of time.

In these three months, I have:

1) ...seen the Korean countryside in Gangwon province and hiked some of Korea's taller mountains in the Taebaek mountain range.

2) ...traveled to a beach island and looked out at the vast ocean toward China.

3) ...seen some of the most rural countryside I've ever experienced, both in Gangwon-do and on Jeju island.

4) ...learned to read/write Korean. I can't understand much of it, but if someone tells me their name I can write it in Korean, and I can pronounce almost anything on a menu.

5) ...learned to really like spicy foods and have acquired a new set of favorite foods. I don't crave western food nearly as much as I did in the first month or two, though I certainly miss me some tri-tip steak and microbrewed beer.

In these last three months, I have not:

1) ...gotten a grasp on Korean culture. Just when I thought I'd gotten a better grip on the people, I get a new curve ball thrown at me, one that completely fucks up my perception of Korean culture. Example: I thought Koreans, despite being fairly homogeneous, were fairly tolerant of other ethnicities. I started to doubt this when I was having a teaching session with my Korean co-teachers the other day. I mentioned, during a conversation about diversity in the U.S., that there seem to be a few non-Korean-looking kids at our school. They couldn't believe it. They started to ask me questions in a slightly stronger-than-curious fashion: "Which class?" "Which grade?" "Who?" The vibe I got from their reaction was: "It's impossible: We have foreigners in Korea, but there couldn't possibly be any at our school." Despite this, I'm certain there are a couple of Filipino or Vietnamese students, because they are markedly different in appearance than the Korean students. How could I not notice this? I grew up in a town that was 2/3 Asian. Given, these kids may have grown up in Korea and speak Korean as their first language, but their country of ethnic origin is not Korea, unlike 99% of the other kids at my school.

2) ...driven a car. I miss the hell out of driving. I don't miss the traffic from back home, and I don't think I'd particularly like driving in Korean traffic. I'm certain it's the longest I've gone without driving since I had my license. Even when I was in Canada for 4 months, I rented a car two different times and got to drive around.

3) ...learned how to do anything but recite rote-memorized Korean phrases. Not many, at that. If I'm only here a year, I really doubt I'm going to meet the goal of fluency I set for myself at the beginning. It's way too daunting of a task; I don't have the time for classes and don't need to learn to speak Korean. I suppose this is how a lot of foreigners in the US feel, too. You only need so much language to get by in an unfamiliar place, and it's a huge investment to learn the language. I sometimes take for granted my fluency in French and forget that it took me 10 years to learn what I know now in the language. Living in Korea makes me appreciate what I do have.

4) ...sent any souvenirs back home. Sorry guys. I'll get around to it.

----

So there you have it. 3 months in Korea. A lot has happened. Far more has yet to happen, but what is yet to come will be a bit more predictable than what's happened in the last 3 months. Now, the goal is to keep it as interesting as possible now that I've (mostly) settled in. Here are a few of many things I want to do:

1) Go to the top of Namsan / Seoul Tower. I haven't been up there yet, and I know the weekend is a horrendous time to try to do so. If it's a clear day, the view is great, but clear-as-a-bell days in Seoul are far and few between.

2) Travel international: My shortlist includes Japan, Singapore, and Vietnam. Others include India, China, and then a bunch of Southeast Asian countries. One of these is going to happen in late July (approximately 2 months from now), but I have yet to figure out which, as of yet.

3) Do some nighttime skyline photography of Seoul and Incheon. Easier said than done.

Dress code in Korea: what you can't tell from surfing the web at home

2010-05-18T08:43:00.001+09:00

Coming to Korea, I was very concerned about my appearance in front of my colleagues and students. Everything that I read led me to believe that being a teacher required the utmost formality and that I may even need to wear a suit and tie to class. All of the teaching videos I've seen were really formal. Now I realize that all of the teaching videos were from demo classes were teachers had spent a lot of time preparing to be observed (and on camera).

Turns out that in the realm of school dress codes, your mileage may vary, and significantly at that. It depends entirely on your school, what level you're teaching, and how formal your co-workers are. For example, elementary schools are much more lax about dress codes than are middle schools or high schools.

For the first 2 weeks, I wore nothing but nice slacks, nice collared shirts, and ties to work. After a bit more observation, I realized that this might not be necessary. Many of the younger teachers were wearing jeans and semi-formal shirts. So, I decided to follow suit, so to speak. I ended up being a lot more comfortable and didn't have to worry so much about properly washing nice clothes.

Don't make a sudden change, though; try to gradually change up your style if you're going to go from formal to less formal. Don't just show up in jeans and a t-shirt after you've been wearing a suit, because people are going to notice.

6 Tips for Flying Internationally with Your Air Miles

2010-05-13T13:12:00.002+09:00

So, you're living abroad and you have a bunch of air miles saved up with an airline. You have no idea what to do with them or whether you can even use them from where you're living.

There's some good news and some bad news. The bad news? Your wallet may be a little bit thin after you take the trip you didn't know you could take. The good news is that the air mileage system isn't as cryptic as it used to be; you may find yourself on your next adventure sooner than you realized. These tips are mostly applicable for United Airlines and the Star Alliance, but are general enough be helpful with other systems (American Express points, etc...).

1) Get your mileage balance. There are several ways to do this. If you have online account access to the company with which you are earning points, log in and check your account status. If you do not have a user name and password, you can call the airline and ask to be transferred to their customer mileage department. They will likely be able to pull your information based on your name, address, or phone number.

2) Learn about partnerships. Find out which airlines might be linked to the airline with which you have your miles. For example, United Airlines is part of the Star Alliance, which includes many other large, global airlines (Singapore Airlines, Asiana Airlines, and Lufthansa to name a few). Many airline partnerships allow you to use miles accrued on one airline to fly with another.

And here's a secret: flying internationally on partner airlines can sometimes be cheaper than flying with the original airline. You just have to be in the right region. For example, I can fly from Seoul, Korea to Singapore on Singapore Air (about 7 hours each way) for 20,000 United miles. This is a bargain, whereas a single domestic ticket in the continental US and Canada is 25,000 miles. It gets even better. For 30,000 miles, you can fly business class almost anywhere in East Asia on Singapore Air. For those who aren't familiar with Singapore Air, their business class is so good it might as well be first class on most of the world's airlines.

3) Call, call, call. Using your miles from airline A on airline B is difficult if not impossible to do on the internet. United, for example, has a special number to call just for booking with Star Alliance partners. You're usually phoning a large call center (if I recall right, the Untied center is in Detroit). Don't hesitate to take your time shopping with them to see where your miles can take you.

4) Consider multi-city trips if your airline allows it. Through United Airlines, via Singapore Air, I can fly from Seoul, stay in Singapore for 4 days, travel to Bangledesh, and back to Seoul via Singapore for the same 20,000 miles as it would cost to just stay in Singapore for a week. How do I know this? I took my time (and was deliberately patient) with the guy at the call center. You don't have to pay to call and ask for rates, and the people in the call center usually don't pressure you to book at the moment.

5) Be prepared for a small booking fee and/or a handling fee. You'll pay on average $75 per trip to book using your air miles. It's negligible compared to an otherwise $1800 flight, but it's a cost that still needs to be factored into your travel budget.

6) Go as far as you can. My philosophy with air miles is that you should always try to use them to go as far as you possibly can. Use your miles to book the most costly ticket that you otherwise wouldn't (or couldn't) pay for with cash. When living in California, I would never use my miles to fly to Vegas for a weekend. Instead, two years in a row, I went to Montreal on the cheap and stayed for a week each time. Both trips I did for under $500, including the booking fees for the airline. Check the mileage charts, like this (warning: PDF hard link) one for United Airlines, to see what the trips are going to cost you.

How can the airlines afford to do this? They're subsidized almost entirely by people who never take advantage of the miles. These are the people that pay yearly fees for mileage-earning credit cards, those who never redeem miles for flights they took, and those who never accrue enough miles to get a free trip. In my personal opinion, it's one of the industry's best, lesser-understood systems.

Crossing paths

2010-05-12T08:46:00.000+09:00

As an update from yesterday: My leg is seemingly better, but I'm not going to run on it for at least a few more days. Weights it is, for now.

Sometimes I walk to work in the morning with a friend who lives in my building. His school is about 3 blocks away from mine, so if we happen to be on the elevator at the same time, we catch up on the walk to work. Every morning, we pass one of his co-workers on the street, and the guy says hi. Now, whenever I'm walking alone, the guy still says hi, which is a pretty nice gesture considering he's a Korean school worker and doesn't know me at all.

On the walk to school, I have to cross at exactly 3 signaled crosswalks. I had to run for two of them this morning, as they generally don't stay green for very long. At the second one, I start running, and I see Mr. Korean co-teacher doing the exact same thing. We still both manage a smile and a wave as we're jogging across the street in avoidance of ruthless Korean traffic.

Sometimes, it's the smaller coincidences that can add spice to an otherwise ordinary day.

A morning of bizarre happenings

2010-05-11T09:27:00.002+09:00

It seems that I injured my leg running at the gym last night (5k run in 23:35). I had a mild pain last week but it seems to be much worse after last night. Not just soreness, either; full-on, alternating aching/sharp pain between my knee and my calf on the outer part of my leg.

Walking to school was a bit painful this morning, but I made it here. I did however get a snapshot of the tunnel in its full-on traffic congestion glory. This time, there was a tour bus coming through and a couple of cars waiting to go through the tunnel (on both sides). One car had to back up for the bus to fit through. To complicate things even more, there were people walking through the tunnel while this was all going on. See for yourself:

After getting to school, the stairs became my enemy. For some reason, walking up a hill and over a mile to school wasn't nearly as bad as climbing a flight of stairs to get to my office. I had my morning English show and then asked my co-teacher to go with me to the nurse's office. I hoped to get some sort of Tylenol or ibuprofen product, but instead, the nurse gave me a Bengay-like cream which has done nothing for my leg except make it smell like Bengay. I made mention to my co-teacher afterward that some Ibuprofen would probably help, and in a very typically Korean response, she said that it would be bad for me. *#$(*#$&!!! She then said that if I needed it tomorrow, she would take me to the pharmacy to get it. I thanked her and said that I would be able to get it myself but the pharmacy was closed this morning.

Waiting for my first class to start, the vice principal comes in and says to me "Andrew 선생님, thank you for your trouble every Tuesday." I assume she was talking about the English radio show. Rather than troublesome, I find it fun. It's the kids that get scared out of their heads to sit in front of a camera and talk into a mic for 5 minutes!

I was told 5 minutes into my class that I needed to go downstairs to have teacher portraits taken for the school yearbook. Hobble hobble. Go back up to the third floor. Hobble hobble. No more than 2 minutes after I start class back up, I was told the students need to have their portraits taken and it would be better if I just canceled class. Hobble hobble. Dynamic Korea!

Money, eating, and your surroundings....

2010-05-10T21:57:00.001+09:00

In Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, there is much discussion about what hunger does to you and your perceptions of the world around you. I'm going to make a comparison, and albeit mostly metaphorical, I did experience some interesting parallels to what I read in A Moveable Feast 3 years ago. Having read the book and spent hours of lively discussion around a table with the late professor Marc Blanchard drilled the book and (some of) its concepts into its head. I guess this one is still with me. Thanks Marc.

While studying in Paris, I would write about how putting off lunch to a later hour did something interesting to us all. It was easier to get through museums when our senses weren't dulled by full stomachs. We tended to think on our feet just that much more. This time it isn't so much about food as it is about cash:

After 5 days of less-than-careful money spending in Jeju, cash will be a bit tight for the next 2 weeks. I've always prided myself on my independence in making things work when things get a little tight, so I devised a plan: smaller breakfasts, no taxi rides, fewer bus rides, and no long nights out. $50 for 2 weeks without using a credit card is totally doable if you keep track of what you spend. Today was the first day.

When you're really mindful about money, you tend to be more perceptive and mindful of other things around you. You start to notice other things that you don't ordinarily notice. You're more mindful about what you can and cannot do at the moment, and since a lot of activities require money, you can spend more time getting around on your own volition. I hadn't realized it, but by the time I got home from work today I'd walked roughly 5 miles (only because I went to E-Mart to buy breakfast stuffs), and it was thoroughly enjoyable.

I am not trying to equate a lack of cash to a more enjoyable or pleasurable lifestyle. I do however enjoy the slight change of pace after a week of crazy, hedonistic spending. It quickly puts things into perspective for someone who has always had things pretty darn comfortable. So, again, thanks Mom & Dad, thanks Hemingway for the literary expression of the idea, and thanks Professor Blanchard for opening up that intense discussion we all had with you.

< / sentimental post >

Jeju island adventures....

2010-05-10T21:30:00.001+09:00

This weekend 3 friends and I flew down to Jeju island (제주도) for our 5-day weekend away from school. Originally I wanted to use the days to go to Singapore, but I said too much to my co-teacher and was explicitly told I had to stay in the country (regulatory thing that many ignore in a don't ask, don't tell type of deal).

Wednesday morning I took Eastar Jet, a small airline, down to the island on a paltry 55 minute flight. That's right, a 55 minute flight gets you as far from Incheon as you can possibly get and still be in Korea - it's that small of a country. I'm still convinced that you can be anywhere in Korea in 5 hours if you take the right mode of transit.

The 4 of us were all together by 3PM, and we checked into a motel near the water in Old Jeju City. From there, we went to Loveland, a sex theme park with more phallic and other genitalia-related statues than I care to go into detail about. Just click this for a very NSFW Google Images search. The one really bizarre thing is that children aren't allowed in, yet we saw many many children in the park with their parents. Dear Korean parents: You're actually cool with your 8 year old girl entering the bathroom via the giant penis door handle? k.

That night, we met up in Jeju-si and had Indian dinner and then drinks with some other EPIK teachers we'd met at orientation. Long Island Iced Teas, coupled with their insanely cheap price and high alcohol levels meant a lot of fun, but a less than pleasant hangover in the morning.

That day, we checked into the condo where we spent the other 3 nights of our trip to Jeju. The condo was about 30 minutes west of town via taxi or 1 hour by bus. We then set out, tired from the night before, to have a fairly low-key day near the lodging. We went to Hallim (한림) Park, which was only about a 5 minute ride from the condo. It features a botanical garden, limestone caves, a bird park, and some waterfalls. For the cost of admission, about $5, it was well worth it. We spent most of the day there:

An albino peacock.

Afterward, we went to the beach near the park and enjoyed the beginning of a foggy, but still very gorgeous sunset on the water. The water on Jeju in many places is an amazing emerald color. It's got great contrast to the jet black lava rock and the deeper, blue water:

Soon after, we developed an appetite and went to a hamburger shop that didn't disappoint. It was a little misleading, since they weren't really serving hamburgers but giant sandwiches shaped like hamburgers. You share one with 4 people and the total cost is $15:

On Friday morning, we decided that we would go to the Trick Art Museum, which was pretty much on the opposite end of the island from where we were staying. It took about an hour and a half to get there via bus. The ride traversed some really gorgeous rural scenery, and we weren't quite done enjoying it when we got off the bus:

The museum was basically a bunch of classic paintings (and some newer ones) painted on the wall such that you can take photos with them and have it seem like you're interacting with the contents of the art. Just think of it as a museum full of optical illusions:

Glued to the wall.

From there, we called a taxi and went to the shrub maze, which was a relatively underwhelming set of shrubs making up a maze. I say underwhelming only because I went two different years to the corn maze in Dixon, California, the largest corn maze in the world. (15 minutes to get through the shrub maze versus 2+ hours to complete the corn maze in Dixon.)

We again went out for dinner and drinks with more islander friends. 10 of us ended up eating at a Ddeok galbi (떡갈비) restaurant where we had some really good and spicy Ddeok and chicken. It was the first time I'd seen sweet potatoes in 떡갈비, but they added a nice touch to the dish. For those who don't know, 떡갈비 is a spicy dish of mixed vegetables (lots of cabbage), chicken, and ddeok, which is a compressed and chewy rice food. For drinks we had flavored soju and beer. We didn't "hit it hard" as our friend Lee likes to say, but we had a great time. We ended up at a foreigner bar and later were riding an elevator up and down an 11-floor building, being kicked out of every karekoke and establishment we tried to enter. Given my friends and I were with a ton of really rowdy and drunk Westerners, it was an equally hilarious and absurd experience.

The next day we went to the south part of the island to the other big city, Seogwipo. The city and surrounding areas are home to lots of beaches and waterfalls. It was a completely different feel than the big city; much more laid back and casual. We saw Chungbang waterfall, supposedly the only waterfall in East Asia that pours directly into the ocean:

Afterward, we spent most of the afternoon on the beach eating chicken and barbecued vegetables (thanks Maria and Chris!) and swimming in the ocean. I think it was the first time in about 4 years that I'd actually swam in the ocean. At home in California the beaches aren't terribly good for swimming unless you're down south during the hottest parts of the year:

Saturday night was fairly low-key since we had to get up early to catch our flights home. We did, however, have some great Mexican food at a restaurant in Old Jeju City. It was the first time I'd had anything resembling Mexican food since leaving California, and I wasn't let down. They even had guacamole!

Some observations about Jeju and the island:

1) Many people purport it to be a tourism island, yet forget about its farming capacity except in the context of their souvenir boxes of oranges and cactus candies. The island is midway between the size of Hawaiian islands Maui and Hawai'i, so it's not a trivial size. In fact most of the island is farming. Lots of burlap sack-laden people riding the buses It didn't surprise me, then, to see far more Nonghyup banks than I see in Incheon. Nonghyup is the bank with which most of us EPIK teachers have accounts, but it's well known for being a farmer bank. Here are two farmers waiting for a bus:

2) Transit is not cheap. It's not expensive, either, but I guess they have to account for the distance you have to travel to get anywhere outside of the city. The bus rides outside of the city were usually no less than 3,000 won, which is not necessarily cheap for Korea. We also took a lot of taxi rides that averaged 6,000 won per person. Again, not expensive by any stretch of the imagination by American standards, but not cheap in Korea. The nice thing was that getting to and from Jeju was pretty cheap. The regional airlines do a good job at keeping even the most expensive tickets under $150 round trip. A Jeju Air 737 and a tiny sliver of Seoul on the approach back home:

I've done aerial photography before.

For money. Alas, the 737 windows

were dirty and Seoul was hazy.

3) Koreans are really weird about outdoor activities. I already had this suspicion but Jeju confirmed it for me when we saw fully clothed people in the ocean at the beach. Not fully clothed as in t-shirts and shorts... FULLY clothed, as in denim jeans and long-sleeved shirts. It struck me as really bizarre. We were the only people in bathing suits on the beach, yet it was still 75+ degrees and sunny. The water was warmer than some swimming pools I've been in. This goes along the same lines of being told that it is weird to go camping in late April. I heard there's a designated (ok, maybe in a tongue-in-cheek way) beach and camping month in Korea, and it is August.

Flickr photo slideshow here: