OK, photos first. The first four images are of my classes at ESS. The first image is of a girl in my 5A class all the kids call "mungee," which means "dirty" because of her wild, curly Western-style hair. She is a regular class clown, as you can see from this picture, a roll she is plays with gusto. The other three photos are of my 6A kids playing "Human Scrabble." They love the game and it expands their vocabular because they not only have to spell the word, they have to tell me what it means and use it in a sentence. The photo of the boy reading is from my 2E2 mob. As I said before, you have to keep these jokers occupied or it's anarchy time. The class is divided evenly eight girls to eight boys and they sit on opposite sides of the class. So I had each girl describe and boy and each boy describe a girl (without giving names) and had the other students guess who they were describing. Let me just say right now that mischief is not a trait one should bring into the classroom. My social experiment turned into a flirting, fighting battle of the sexes that periodically got out of control. Some of them used my lesson to openly flirt and others used it as an opportunity to ridicule. Periodically one of the boys would say something egregious such as "She is heavy" and one or more of the girls would leap across the desks and serve him a flying notebook sandwich much to the bemusement of the rest of the class. There is a shot of the auditorium at the Red Cross and a few shots from the markets in Nampo-Dong. Enjoy. Now for the blog...

The conference was a sham. 600 or so groggy, grumpy foreigners showed up at 9AM at the Red Cross near Seomyeon and drank coffee until our Korean captors ushered us into an auditorium and gave us pamphlets full of information we already knew. People generally sat with the other teachers from their hagwon and aired their complaints to one another while Korean photographers strained their eyes for anyone who might be smiling.

For a solid hour bureaucrat after bureaucrat after infuriatingly boring Korean bureaucrat took the stage and gave us profoundly boring speeches delivered in Hangul. The only interesting part of the whole damn thing was the playing of the Korean national anthem, which I recorded and will upload to this blog just as soon as my computer rises from the dead. The next hour and a half was spent listening to more well-groomed Korean bureaucrats deliver more tedious speeches. However, these were translated into garbled English. So we got two unintelligable speeches for the price of one. I spent the whole time with my nose buried in a book. Dennis graded papers. Mike slept. Julie fidgeted neurotically while thumbing through Cosmo, periodically getting up to go outside and unwind for a few minutes.

The conference was not the social event I had pictured it to be. People kept to their own and my attempts at conversation were little more than protracted small talk. I felt cheated. Here were all the people in my little community who I could communicate with and all they wanted to do was talk to the people they already knew. It was; however, interesting to me to have my entire Western community in one room. I took a photo and that was all I took from the conference besides the Korean National Anthem.

I figured from the start that this whole three-hour conference was an exercise in bureaucratic formality. Someone was justifying their paycheck. I could imagine the pamphlet for next year's conference: "Last year's conference attracted teachers from across Busan," while quietly omitting the fact that we were required by the department of immigration to be present.

Friday night while walking home I ran into a teacher from ESS Adult Academy who said she was not told about the conference. Shocked and slightly irritated, I took this as another example of a slowly evolving theory on Korean honesty: They tell you what they want you to know. The conference probably wasn't required, but we didn't need to know that. My guess is that having all four of our names on that rollsheet would look good for ESS in the eyes of the Board of Education. I cynically noted that the teacher-coordinator, Ha-young, and our Director, Mr. Kim, had convenient escape plans already in place for Thursday morning. They sent their business manager, Mr. Lee, in their stead.

I have lived in Korea for one month. Although much of the culture shock has worn off, I still find the country fascinating.

Yesterday I made one last stab at finding a shower curtain. Just to recap, I've been hunting the back alley vendors, outdoor markets and superstore aisles for the simplest of Western conveniences: the plastic shower curtain. My current green shower curtain has moved past the 'mold' stage and is now home to some variety of evolving black goo that I suspect will jump up and eat me one day while I lather up. What in America is a twenty-minute trip to Target has turned into a four-day epic surely to be put into verse and sung to generations of Korean children like the Greek story of the Golden Fleece. Stephen and the Quest for The Plastic Sheet.

I jumped on bus 302 and headed out to Haeundae Beach. Haeundae is not only the most affluent part of town, it is ground-zero for tourism in Busan. The popular beach front is always crowded with perfumed French, Russian, American and British tourists sporting fancy Osprey backpacks, Teva sandals and giant maps looking all around like they were on Mars. If I was going to locate the elusive Korean Shower Curtain, this was where the wiley beast probably made it's home.

Sadly, my expedition was a total failure. In a shopping-induced daze, I haphazardly wandered down the endless aisles of Lotte (Korean Macy's) and the SaveStop (Korean K-Mart) like a lost kindergartner who wandered off during a trip to the zoo. The Koreans didn't know quite what to do with me. A shower curtain was an alien, unfamiliar concept to them. One of the sales women spoke excellent English and still couldn't wrap her head around the idea. She asked me multiple times to explain how exactly a shower curtain worked. Using the skills picked up in my classes, I repeated the action of stepping into the tub, turning the faucet and then shielding the rest of the bathroom from my naked body with a simple pull of the shower curtain. That's when her eyes lit up and she scratched her head.

"Bathtub?" she asked. "What's a bathtub?"

It was then I gave up all hope and decided to go to a hardware store and find a tarp, punch holes in it and hang it before my current shower curtain developes higher intelligence.

Following the failed expedition I spent a few hours surfing the net in a PC-bong where I discovered a poetry/music/open-mic night at a club down the beach in Keyoungsung called The Monk. After a rewarding dinner of cheesy dankas (Southern-fried pork cutlet stuffed with cheese and drenched in sweet gravy) and Kimch'i I walked down to the beach with a couple of cans of Cass and my notepad.

Most of the tourists had left the beaches for the more familiar atmosphere of the Western-style bars and clubs in Haeundae, leaving the beaches to the happy Koreans. I love hanging out among the Koreans. Being a photojournalist, my business is to be the practiced observer: An armchair sociologist with an artistic eye and an open mind. I have played witness to people of all flavors and colors along every rung of the socioeconomic ladder acting out the infinite scenes in the play of life. There has yet been a play of life as engaging and enlightening as the Koreans.

I plopped down on the cool sand of Haeundae beach and cracked open a can of Cass. The whole area was bathed in an eerie green light by the massive hotels rising behind me. People's shadows took on an otherworldly purple cast where they ran, walked or played in the course sand. The buzzing hotel lights turned the frothy white caps of the breaking waves into long flourescent bulbs advancing towards the shore. Children set off bottle rockets and Roman candles, the steady hand of the wind molding the smoke trails into ever-morphing sculptures dancing slowly down the beach. A couple, he in baggy military fatigues and she in a green sweater and jeans, moved past me arm in arm and stood at the edge of the sea in motionless tranquility for a few minutes before moving on down the beach. They looked content, happy. The whole beach was permeated with an energy of contentment and peace.

I like to see the Koreans so happy. Their careless joy fills my heart with peace. They seem to live free of pretention. It's strange, because their history is so tainted by oppression and war. To emerge so confidant in themselves and the world they have created in the last fifty years is a monumental achievement in my eyes. They don't seem to hold onto the pain in their past (though they relish the opportunity to stick it to Japanese every now and then) like we Americans are apt to do. The Koreans seem to be able to put the past behind them and breath with the long, deep peace of rebirth. I envy them as I sit and watch them live and laugh and love another so fearlessly. I am filled with joy.

I look over my shoulder and see an old woman in a wheelchair being pushed by a man I assume is her son. It is the first wheelchair I have seen in Korea, and I stare for a few minutes, wondering what that woman is thinking. Perhaps, I think to myself, all she wants in the world is to take off her shoes and dig her tiny old feet in the cool sand one more time. I am suddenly taken by an urge to go help her out of the chair and down the stairs so she can achieve her dream, but the son turns her chair and whisks her away down the beach and out of the reach of her would-be American Liberator. I turn around, sigh and take a swig of Cass.

Out to sea the blink of the lighthouse on Oukdo pulses steadily, reminding me of my grandmother's house on Cape Cod. Suddenly I feel sad and homesick and alone. The weight of these emotions shakes me back into reality. I need to get off my ass and go make some friends. I drain the last can of Cass and locate the subway.

Keyoungsung, which I am not spelling properly, is home to a major University as well as half the foreign population in Busan. The Monk, a jazz club named after (who else?) Thelonius Monk, was in the basement of a building deep in the nightlife district. I walked in and took a seat at the bar and ordered a Cass. At four thousand won a beer, I wasn't going to be here long.

The patrons were almost entirely foreigners. Various people, some of whom I assumed were regulars because I saw their photos on the webpage, got on stage and read poetry, short stories and played music. One duo even performed a little theater piece about Superman. The creativity and beauty in these near-extemporaneous performances was refreshing, reminding me of home and the little club in Hattiesburg I frequented on Friday and Saturday nights, The Thirsty Hippo. I liked the place and the crowd, but I only finished two beers before my wallet and my lower intestine voted to go home.

I didn't meet as many people as I had planned. The shy artistic type is not a social persona I would wish on anybody, and to play the part of a social butterfly takes a lot of energy I didn't have Saturday night. A girl I met earlier in the month named Sarah talked a spell with me and I conversed briefly with an enthusiastic young guitarist from Seoul while taking a piss between sets. I asked him what songs he was going to cover and he shook his head while he zipped up his pants.

"I play all original stuff," he said and smiled. "That way if I mess up nobody knows!"

Well, got to go. I have tomorrow off and I got to figure out what I am going to do with all that time when I have no money. Peace! --Notes
.