It's been an eventful week.

We were given Monday off due to the Chusok holiday.

On the teaching front, I have become a Lord of Discipline, having discovered a new and wickedly efficient form of crowd-control: Writing English! The Koreans have their own special way of holding a pen or pencil when they write in Hangul, so (as I've said before) writing in English is awkward and even painful for many of them. So when any of my classes gave me any trouble last week I had them write a paragraph about their Chusok holiday.

"Noooaaaaa, teacha!!!'

Then if they were really bad I would have them stand and deliver their torturous compositions (which at times was a little painful for me, too).

Make no mistake: English is a wretched language bereft of anything resembling logic or grace, and these kids stumble over it constantly, God bless them. An extra vowel can be heard hitching a ride on the back of an unsuspecting word. For example: Noa (no). Teacherah (teacher). Stickerah (sticker). Or they confuse or insert extra pronouns into sentences. Often times the "which, witch" "this, that" "road, rode" conundrums transform a simple composition on their favorite food into something akin to radical free-style poetry. Next week I'll find a good example and post it.

English can be maddening to teach. I have become a pantomiming master skilled at transforming words into visual monologues. I hobble in front of the class hunched over an imaginary cane craning my neck and cupping a hand to my ear like a shrivled old geezer. "Grandpadder!!!" the kids yell. For "grandmother" I do the same thing but I cup my hands over my chest first. The kids break out in riotous laughter and scream out "grandmudda!!!"

It's when I have to explain the difference between isn't and aren't that I hit a wall and my woeful lack of training gets shoved in my face. I furiously write on the blackboard, diagraming "singular" and then "isn't," and "plurul" and then "aren't." My masterpiece complete, I'll turn around triumphantly and one of the students will stick his hand in the air. "Teachaah. What singular means?"

My classes are beginning to develop their own personalities. All but one of my seven youngest students (1-2P) have come around and started paying attention. They're barely eight years old and they have a better grasp of English than my 6A students who are nearly twice their age. One of the early mistakes I made was assuming the students had been studying English all their lives. Annnnnnttt! WRONG! What does he win, Johnny? He's won an all-expense paid trip to the GS25 to buy more Tylenol!

The really fun kids are the 5A's I inherited from Dennis. They're ridiculously bright, and if I can focus their energy on a task they are a pleasure to teach. I have a group of seven sixteen year old boys in my 3E2 I call my "Crew." They like playing Scategories, acting out professions, animals and famous people. They're social structure revolves around an "alpha male" named Gong-ok. If I have his cooperation, I have everyone's cooperation, and Gong-ok decided early on that I was to be respected. I have a similar group of girls, my 1E2s. Then I have three huge classes of high schoolers who are almost impossible to control through conventional means. They made something crystal clear during my first week: Keep us interested and occupied every bloody second or dig a bunker and take cover.

So I invented a game: Human Scrabble. I divide the class into teams and everyone draws a huge consonant and a huge vowel. They then have two minutes to make the longest word they can with their letters. It's a riot! I had one class come up with words like 'Spiderman' and 'achievement. They have fun competing with one another and most importantly, all that energy is focused and working on something involving English.

Enough about work. As you can tell from the above photos, I've been socializing. Last night I went with Robin and Julie (the two girls laughing) to a house party in seomyeong or somewhere. It was great. The host, who has been here for three years, prepared traditional Korean food, homemade Kimchi (that even now makes my mouth water), along with Chinese stir-fry and even an Mexican bean dip and southern style deviled eggs. We stayed up dancing and socializing till the sun came up this morning. A good time was had by all.

Mike's time here is getting short. He leaves October 11th. Julie, too, will be gone by November. I can't speak for Dennis, but I'm pretty sure he's not as enraptured with Korea as I am. There is a lot of turnover among the aliens (e.g. us) as people finish their contracts and head to places far and wide. Laura, our host, told me it becomes difficult to make friends. You start to get to know someone and they up and leave for Slovakia or Brazil or somwhere three months later. Brief affairs are the rule among the tight social circles of Busan. You have to remember there are less than 800 registered aliens hidden among the 4.5 million residents of Busan.

Of course, many aliens turn to the Koreans for their emotional and sexual needs. Julie has a friend who is having a baby by her Korean boyfriend. Laura, the host at the party, has a Korean boyfriend and her Austrailian friend Andrew has a Korean girlfriend. I went to the bars in the PNU district for the first time Friday night and discovered that the rumors were indeed true: Korean women find Western men irresistable. No, I didn't experience this first hand. As usual, I witnessed it from the bar afar or from my sweaty vantage point on the dance floor. A "playa" I am not. Julie and I danced and had a good time and that was enough for me for my first night out on the town.

The bars were remarkably tiny. At the dance club Soul Trane I expected to walk into a massive multi-leveled multi-bar'd techno-lit disco-ball riddled cafeteria of debauchery. Soul Trane was a one-bar dance club with a dance floor no bigger than my tiny apartment. The crush of people all sweating in one place was overwhelming and I periodically extracted myself for a bit of the fresh Busan air scented with garbage and rotting fish. Ahhhhhhh, amore!

Though many teachers barely make it a year here, many others stay in Korea for years and years. I met a man from Ottawa, Canada, who has been in Korea for two years and recently signed up for a third.

"Back in Ottawa, I am not making as good money and on top of that the government takes 30% of it away from me," he explained. "Here I have the same standard of living but I'm saving thousands and thousands of dollars a year. Where else can you do that?" He had a point.

One of the Korean teachers, In-Hye (pronounced in-hey), met me at Kosin University today for my first lesson in Hangul. I hadn't slept in over 24 hours. I smelled like ciggarettes, alcohol and ugly sweaty women. In-hye, who is an ultra-orthodox Christian, was quite concerned for her schookered student. "You look really tiwerd," she'd say. "Drinking ahcahoo last night?" "Yes," I'd admit shamefully. "But the word is 'booze,'" and I'd spend ten minutes explaining how to pronounce 'booze' to In-hye. This seemed to cheer her up, I don't know why. By the end of our lesson I had sobered up enough to have a decent conversation following the lesson. In-hye made for pleasant company as we walked to the bus stop, talking about our respective languages.

OK, I got to go. I've been in this PC-Bong for three hours and I've racked up a MASSIVE bill typing away for you guys: about $2. Till next time...

--Notes