The weekend and the morning that followed it

I woke Friday morning feeling like hell. Through the night, I'd been waking every hour or so to expel the mucus that was cascading down the back of my throat. This has happened before and after waiting a week to see if it would go away, I got a sinus infection. The local doctor's office was filled with high school students getting their physicals, so I went to the one over in Gongdan, the University hospital where a friend works. Though I didn't see him, I did see the ear doctor pull out a marble's worth of wax out of my right ear. A present from my last week in the pool. I got an idiotproof strip of medicine packets with who-knows-what inside and had to run to work. (Sorry, Greg it took them a little while to dig the shit out of my ears, I didn't even have time to ride over and say I didn't have time. If you had a cellphone . . . )

I fell asleep at work repeatedly. When I got home I fell asleep in front of ROK beating Bosnia.

Despite feeling like it was a bad idea, I went to Seoul the next day. And it paid off handsomely. At Seoul Racecourse Park, I won a cool 900W. I was a high roller, hobbling around with a bad foot and nasty cough, wearing a shirt fit for the tracks, my chest hair protruding from the neck, suggestive of what lurked below. I put 2 g's on Mr Secret to win in the eighth, and he did. The odd's were real low, so I didn't get rich, but I did shout and urge as I stood by the finish, ticket in hand. After collecting my winnings, Traci, Joe, Christa and I went to Anyang for the night. Andy had to come later. He make a mistake and put a lot of money on the favorite in the last race. He had to stick around to see some unknown come and take away his money.

Anyang. Party with foreigners who never leave the Seoul area. There are twenty of so of them in one school, a little terrifying. I felt to bad to really participate, but the food was good.

Sunday, got an external hard drive, another 190 gigs to fill. It took me a year and a half to fill 30 gbs, this next 190 will probably go in a few months, but then I can always get another. It was rather cheap, about 110$, but maybe another would be just hedonistically greedy. Traci and I went to a Picasso show, both felt to tired to really enjoy it, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. KTX train back to Gumi, asleep somewhat early.

And this morning. I woke up, looked in the mirror and the left side of my face was swollen, still is. I went to the doctor who, after a ultrasonic scan, said it was a swollen saliva gland and I should come back in two days.

The terrible thing about that is, Wednesday is a vacation day and I was planning on riding my moto to a national park.

Procrastinate the morning away

In procrastinating I put a little map of countries I've been to on the bottom of this page. It seems I've been to two dozen, though you can hardly see the ones in in the Carribean. If I go to the four or five largest countries, it would seem I've been everywhere. You can make your own, then paste it on your website. Or you could just play in the hosts website, creating what if scenarios and wasting time. A little bit of travelers masturbation. I've been here, and here, and here. Ooh what if I go there, then that continent will be a little more red. Look at that, Asia is filling in nicely, oooooh.

I've been swimming in a secret location. I can't say the name in public, because if I do, herds of people will appear, making it less than desirable. It's amazing I even found this place--a pool with nobody in it. Nobody. The most people I've seen has been 5 including me, and that was when one woman had just got in, and one woman was about to get out. It's loads better than the other pool I used before the accident, where at least 10 people, very slow, analagous to open beer bottle in the water people, drowned back and forth. In 30 minutes, if I was lucky and the drowning ajummas took a break from my agony, I could get in about 30 laps. In the new pool, I can actually get in 100 or so, the only limit being my terribly atrophied muscles. I pay for it, but not so much considering. The crowded pools come out to about 50,000 a month if I go every day and pay by the pop. 40,000 if I get a months membership. The secret heaven of empty swimming pool is 80,000. Worth every penny. Though now I've got a waterlogged right ear to deal with. I got a dropper bottle to make the homemade concoction friends of mine dowsed their ears with after every swim practice while growing up. Never needing the pretreatment myself, I never learned the recipe. Vinegar and water?

Haeinsa

Monday after a great weekend. Saturday morning I woke, far less hungover than I should have been for the amount of soju I drank, to the my phone ringing. Will was asking what time we wanted to get going down to Gaya San. We were rolling within 30 minutes. The first half of the ride was pretty flat, going through Seonju, where all the little yellow melons you see in the street markets come from. Once we hit 59, the hills became dramatic. Gaya is a large block of land, imposing from a distance, protruding angularly out of the surrounding hills. Winding through the passes gave the new bike its first real workout. Traci and I on it are a little heavy and couldn't keep up with Will, who was riding fast. On the tighter turns where I'm used to leaning, the kickstand would scrape scaring Traci. It was her first time on the back on such roads. The roads were so twisting, and lush that I figure we'll ride back if we have the chance. It's close enough.




Inside Haeinsa. Built in 802 in thanks to the monks that cured the queens incurable disease.


Does this road go to Daegu or Gayasan? Putting my new map to use, the only time thus far. You don't really need maps in this country. If you get lost, it's not a big enough place to be really far out of yr way.


There are 80,000 of these blocks housed in Haeinsa, with the Buddhist cannon carved into them. The buildings are designed to allow air to circulate in such a way to preserve these 800 year old printing blocks.

We ran out of gas on the way home. A nice farmer gave us a lot, even when I kept saying it's ok. We only needed enough to get to the next gas station. And we took the long way home by poor judgement on my part. It was quite a nice road, though we missed out on an extra hour of the new all you can eat, all you can drink buffet in town.

I spent Sunday riding around country roads alone. Hot and relaxing.

Last of the last

It's late night. I just got home from the last "class" with my morning group. As a morning group, I enjoy their company at night. All are animated and lively, quite unlike the morning, when all of us, including me, are just trying to keep everything straight, not worrying about the complexities or the English language. We ate meat and drank soju, too much soju (any soju is too much soju, because when you start drinking the stuff, there is really no point in stopping--you'll feel like death regardless. Then we went to another bar to drink a little beer. Not so much really. I was expected a lot more. I was expecting to be shown the seedy underworld of Gumi, the places some the students in the "running" club have been telling me about. But alas, nothing was seedy about the evening. I gave out my phone number, hoping that in losing the class, I would gain friends. Maybe, maybe not. One guy, just a little younger than me, is a drinker, getting wasted often on weeknights. He talked about beer with me tonight and is quite talkative on the subject, unlike class--morning--when he feels like hell. I do hope they contact me. While I didn't enjoy the class, early when none of us really wanted to do anything intellectual, I enjoyed their individual company, especially in a different setting, a more relaxed setting where we could be ourselves a little more freely.

Is Stephen Merritt a Racist?

Here's a quote from the New York Times (quoted from Salon): "If the number of black artists in your iPod falls too far below 12.5 percent of the total, then you are violating someone's civil rights." There should be a link below, but Blogger (defective piece of crap) won't publish links for me lately. The URL is there for cut and paste for those interested.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/arts/music/18rock.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin


Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields was accused of being a racist because black artists are underepresented in his musical tastes, because he said Zip a dee doo dah was a catchy tune. Does this logic carry through in that if you don't like klesmer music, then you're an antisemite? Does anybody else see this--the interpretation of one's personal artistic tastes, by others as bigoted behavior--as ridiculous? Am I misinformed on this? Underread? Please enlighten me.

The sky is falling

Is something wrong? My student's today refused a game of bingo, the game to end all games here in Korea. Isn't it axiomatic that you can never go wrong with bingo in Korea? I suspect Bush may have bingo at the top of his unspoken new strategy to deal with N. Korea.

But today kids refused to play bingo. They wanted to play a game of my inventing. A game where they open picture dictionaries to a map of the world. I then call out countries, from easy (China) to very difficult (Kiribati) and they scramble to find them. The first finder receives a coupon, which with hundreds of such s/he can buy terribly overpriced goods on "Market Day." They love this game. Me: "Borneo B-o-r-n-e-o" Them: silence, then "teacher, one more time spelling," and eventually screaming me me me me me me me me and pointing frantically to the page. Today I had the students pick random countries for each other. Among the chosen were Qatar, Antarctica, Chile, Honduras, Tonga, Nigeria (twice) and others. When a student couldn't pronounce a name and tried secretly pointing it out to me of guidence, it usually ended up in the rest of the students looking for a hint--where s/he was pointing.

아쉽다?

Second to last morning class finished. And my unmotivated, hungover factory-worker students were motivated enough to be upset at my leaving and get me a going away gift. The manager gave it to me, just pulled it from behind him, saying the company prepared something. It's a watch. Not an expensive one, but one with shiny silver casing around a face that displays two dials--one for home and one for Korea. The company's logo is in between the two dials, though small and unobtrusive. I didn't look very critically at first; the manager had to mention the name before I noticed it. Anna, one of the students, was expressing something that appeared to be shock, though I don't know exactly. (Over the course of the class, through my translating of strange and random words, words that most foreigners wouldn't know, it's been gradually assumed that I understand most things they say, Korean or English. As a result, little Korean is translated for my benefit anymore, leaving me guessing at a lot more than they assume.) Anna said earlier that she would come out to my hogwan to study, that I should wait.

As students over the last two months, the majority were unmotivated and lazy, or just to busy to care about learning English before going to work. But as a teacher the same bullet wounds me. It was too early for me to motivate them from the outside. I was trying to jumpstart my mind too, but didn't have the luxury of sitting back and letting one of my classmates speak while I deliberated a question, answer or explanation. I didn't have the luxury of being hungover from the night before, quiet in class (or like today, one of the higher level students made frequent trips to the bathroom between his sometimess politely lewd, but always funny comments) One or two students always came early and prepared, though.

And here comes a bit of Korean culture (it's the teacher's responsibility and fault) that somehow I've assimilated and internalized--As the teacher, I feel I let this class down, both in my style and my desire to end the class. In hindsight, I started the class wrong. With the momentum of precedent and the accumulation of time, changing the classroom atmosphere becomes more difficult until nearly impossible, if it doesn't start with the majority of the students. I was too easy, too relaxed for the students in the class. Most needed some form of discipline imposed on them, and I didn't provide it. I learn best informally, partly because I can't stop thinking about an aspect of language and asking questions about it, if provided the chance. (yeah, I'm a dork) My few adult classes in the past seemed to have benefitted from this relaxed, ball-in-the-students-court approach. One adult class no longer wanted me to teach them when I was too formal, too academic. I've since changed my style in that class with somewhat better results. The experience confirms my belief that a teacher doesn't teach subjects, rather a teacher must teach students--each case is different--in order to be effective.

I don't regret my decision, though. With Traci and I on similar schedules again, the inconveniences of noise, early and late, lack of good sleep, and irregularly spaced classes will fade. We'll argue less over what time we turn out the lights, about how late Traci is up pounding on her keyboard. I'll no longer have to worry about her staying late at the bar, coming home and opening our obscenely loud door, thus sending an unhealthy amount of adrenaline through my body, waking me and keeping me up. (I never got used to it, no matter the time, possibly because somewhere in my subconscious I believed someone or something was bursting into our apartment prepared to take everything, including my life)

Rednecks and Teachers II

No one showed again today, though two were in Seoul on business. On a lighter note, I believe Friday is my last day of waking up at some uncomfortable hour to teach unmotivated hungover factory-worker students.

Rednecks and Teachers

I was excited today. For one it was teacher's day. And I had an unconventional lesson plan--redneck culture--to test out on my advanced adult class. I emailed the adult students a link to a Colorado Springs Gazette article about the burgeoning popularity in redneck culture

The word came up last week, talking about country style coffee here. Inrae asked if English used 'country style,' and I lauched into explaining rednecks, hicks, and hillbillies. I touched on pejorative meanings and prejudices and stereotypes, and eventually even called myself a redneck at heart. I think I only confused them. This week was to set the record on rednecks straight. And hey, they want to learn English and a little about American culture. Articles about rednecks and country songs like "Redneck Woman" and "White Trash Wedding" seemed like a good break from the sometimes dull book we use.

No members of the class showed, nor did they call to say they wouldn't make it. I did however get to follow through on my first attempt at substituting the Dixie Chicks for the textbook with a lone woman--a housewife thinking about getting into teaching English again and considering a brush up--auditing the class. Poor lady. She came wanting to see the atmosphere of the class and got only the teacher, with an experimental lesson plan. I think, the article may have been a little difficult for them, but I only asked them to scan it if they had the time; we would go over it in class. The class meets again on Wednesday . . .

I received presents from two of my younger students, probably some of the only ones who genuinely enjoy class. But who wouldn't enjoy a class where we sing and make up our own words to the karaoke versions of the book's songs? Today we threw a paper ball around, practicing baseball vocab. In class, they got the syntax and structures better than the older students, though, in the hall as they left they relapsed into using an unnecessary 'are' because of the song's beat. Just hold the 'we!'

Relax

Ahh, a weekend with no rain. Two days of outside lethargy, riding my moto, enjoying the absence of responsibility and rain. I make it sound as if we're in the middle of a flood. We're not, though beautiful teasing weeks are followed by gray, wet weekends, leaving another week of longing for weather like this weekends. I found this temple by accident yesterday.


I rode north through Seonsan with half a mind to continue all the way to Sangju, some 60 Km away from Gumi, but turned around to take pictures of Boshintang (dog soup) restaurants. I saw the sign, and thankfully anyone who did didn't care to go. It was nearly deserted, something rare in this dense country of hikers and day trippers. The only sounds were the wind, moving the bells, and birds and frogs singing from the woods. I felt I could actually go inside the halls. But I didn't, of course, and thought that I should've after leaving.
Today was Traci's first extended ride. I think she liked it, and we didn't even take one of the really cool roads.

Guns

I guess guns are in. I bought one this weekend. Not a real one of course, that would actually cost money and involve more licensing and paperwork registration. I bought a toy that looks damn real for 3000W. It's the kind that would get you shot by a police officer in the US and is thus banned. They're easy to come by here, sold in stationary stores where school children can buy school supplies like pens, pencils, notebooks, erasers and occasionally throw stars--they were in style here in September 2005, when one of my students demonstrated how to throw one at a wall. How could I not buy one? For 3000W I felt I couldn't go wrong. It's useful for target practice, intimidating drivers that cut me off, and capping my friends when they don't expect it. And right now, before posting this, they don't suspect a thing. This will be an experiment in seeing how often they read this, in seeing how prepared they are. Knowing them, they're prepared. They live together, Bryan and Greg, and have 4 such replica guns in their small apartment. I believe Bryan sleeps with his replica Uzi, finger on the trigger, while Greg shoots passersby from his window. A few weeks ago, Bryan shot random tough guys--they standing around being macho and talking about their souped up cars under his window--and nearly incured a wrath the toy Uzi couldn't handle. They just may be prepared . . .

What is it with boys, men, guys, whatever you want to call us and guns? Even mild mannered, proper folks can get into shooting their friends after a few beers. This morning one of my adult students told me he spent 100,000W on a CO2 powered BB gun this weekend. He and his wife shoot at targets and sometimes his wife shoots him. I believe this, though of most of my students, he seems to be the one who most realizes that veering off the road of truth provides excellent language practice. In this same class I have another student who speaks English reasonably well. One day a few weeks ago he came to class a little early and told me that the night before he had been on the other side of town in a park. He went to use the public toilet. Before entering he heard some moaning, unintelligible and prolonged. He didn't care. Maybe it's common to hear moaning coming from a public bathroom after midnight on a random week night in this park. He walked inside not thinking anything more of it.

Greg and Bryan, at times, stalk each other in the park late at night. A few drinks and a few guns and there is a park just a block away. This particular night they had grown bored of stalking the other and had decided to act out a more interesting scenario. Bryan was to be a suicidal man, whose wife had just left him, and Greg was to secure the bathroom swat team style, shooting the man-over-the-edge before receiving any pellets himself. Greg was taking his time, concentrating on a window when he heard Bryan screaming and shooting. It was time--Greg jumped in shooting. In the middle of this was my student, Donghyun, shrieking and shielding himself.

Donghyun told me that if it had been a Korean with a gun he would have thought it was a toy. But it was a foreigner, a screaming foreigner with a real looking gun leaping out of a stall, shooting.

The old bike

This morning I talked to the man who may buy my crashed motorcycle. He offered me 150,000W for it. I was hoping for more like 200,000 - 300,000 for it. It's a Hyosung RX 125 for those that care or know about these things, and in Gumi they sell for about a million won. I've seen or heard of at least two going for that price and briefly seen one other as I rode down a street in Sangmo Dong to meet a friend. His repair estimate was high, and now his offer is low. Sucks, because to get another estimate I have to move it to another shop. Without a front wheel it'll be difficult.

As for the new bike, I'm in the process of actually getting insurance this time. I figured it might be better to stay inside the law for a bit. Also, Traci won't ride very far on the back without it, and this weekend proved that it will be easier and more comfortable if we just drive ourselves wherever we want to go.

New Ride

The new bike. Someday, maybe I'll have a picture of the wrecked bike, though it's not all that dramatic for those not involved. This one goes a little faster, though since it's so heavy it feels safer somehow. I plan on getting insurance for this one; if any of the myriad visitors to this site knows a good South Korean motorcycle insurance company . . .

Acrylamide

According to what I just read, I've been eating cancer for breakfast for most of my adult life. The staples of my mornings--browned potatoes with vegetables and coffee--contain the carcinogen acrylamide. I discovered this during the morning; coffee in hands and potato breakfast on my mind, I was reading through the internet news and found this story:
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/nation/200605/kt2006050217464911970.htm
Several of ROK's fast food restaurants and potato chip manufacturers have products containing carcinogens. The real catch, after reading through the article, was finding out that the chemical is formed by cooking starchy products at 120 degrees C or above. It's not some profit driven corporate plan that produces the health risk, rather it's the simple act of cooking the food. Something we do ourselves. Reportedly consuming one small bag of McDonalds fries here in Korea (if it's different elsewhere, I don't know) is equal to consuming 2 litres of water containing the maximum recomended amount by the World Health Organisation for an entire year. Sign me up.
Supposedly most of the acrylamide in our diet comes from coffee, though coffee also contains anticarcinogens. Do they cancel each other out? If cooking a starchy food at high temperatures for long periods of time creates the chemical, then what about baked potatoes, cooked around 160 degrees C for 45 minutes. Is this seemingly healthy method of potato preparation in reality a cancer factory?
But according to Wikipedia, researchers don't agree that consumption of acrylamide causes cancer. In large doses, it's dangerous. But so are a lot of relatively benign substances.