It's that time again. Time to take stock of your life and realize, hey, it could be worse, I could go without salsa for three months strait. God, I miss salsa. OK, photos first.

Many people cover their mouths with these surgical masks when they get sick to prevent infection. Very cool.


Street photography in the bomb-shelter, er, I mean subway.


Outdoor seafood stalls in Nampo-dong. Get out of the cold, eat a live octopus, drink soju.


What more can I say about this image, really.


Julie left us to go home to Canada on Monday. Here she is giving her departing speech.


The funniest part was when she gave an elegant quote by the author Paulo Coelho. Mr. Kim stopped her in mid-speech and informed her that the students did not understand enough English to grasp the meaning of the simple quote. He then proceeded to translate into Korean.




Bye-bye, teacher. Notice the smirks.


Yes, the never-ending party that is life as a Nampo shopkeeper.


I went to my weekly Korean lesson near Busan Station.




Man, kids got it easy in Nampo. Mom and Dad do the walking for them.


Daeque, the Korean student ESS keeps locked up in the copy room, touches up a hallway in anticipation of the tax-assessor coming to take a peek at ESS. He is really good with computers and the copy machine loves him, too.


Coffee shop near ESS where the downtrodden residents of Busan get hyper.



Hello children.

Hello Mr. Jones.

Woon-hye, wake up! How are you, class?

I’m fine, thank you. How are you?

I’m fine, thank you. Anjaseyo!

I love the 1-2 level auditorium class I co-teach with In-hye on Fridays. For an hour and a half In-hye and I entertain thirty first and second graders. They are ridiculously cute, their fearless personalities not yet buried and homogenized under the crushing weight of teenage angst and pop culture. I know almost all of their names, which is unheard of, simply because no two children are alike.

There sits Sung-mo, arguably the best English speaker in the class. His patient, intelligent eyes scan the class. Jeong-yeon, the second best speaker from 1-2B, is barely awake. She yawns and gapes at In-hye as if in a daze. Jong-gwan, the self-proclaimed ‘monster chicken,’ is strangely silent and morose. He glares at me when I ask him to pay attention. Jeong-joon has a bouquet of flowers in his hair put there by Woon-hye, who has her eyes closed in mock meditation. They chitter and chatter like birds on a wire, pausing every now and then to wave like idiots at Mr. Jones.

The 1-2 level students have some of the most outrageous pencil cases in the school, with some of the most outrageous English sayings on them. As In-hye gives the lesson, I calmly stroll around the room, picking up tidbits for the Korean Files.

Ahh-Hmmm.

“Ultimately, Taste is Comparing” --Apples to Apples, because all of these infuriating fifty cent cans of over-sweetened coffee that I buy from the Maxwell House vending machine taste exactly the same. Advertisment for coffee drink.

“You and I have to love long, long puppy momo” --Because it’s here to stay. A student’s pencil case.

“Less class, More love” --Got that right. English academy advertisment.

A storm was brewing over ESS for most of the past week. Among other problems, we had a surprise inspection by the tax-assessor. Since ESS is technically breaking two laws, this was a problem, which was subsequently dumped on Mrs. Nam.

The language and cultural barriers effectively keep Gavin and I in the dark concerning just about everything that happens at ESS. Trying to get a read on the state of the school is incredibly difficult. I liken it to trying to predict the weather when all you have are the five senses God gave you. The clouds are dark. The wind is blowing hard in an unusual direction. The ocean is choppy and the animals have all found holes to hide in. There is something wrong, but what is it and when is it going to happen and how bad is it going to be? All we can do is wait the storm out and pray it doesn’t effect us.

Mrs. Nam was an emotional wreck the whole week. She carried a frown on her tired face every time I saw her. There could have been more to it than just the inspection. It had been hinted at by a number of people, Mrs. Nam included, that there was trouble in paradise concerning her husband. I made myself scarce as much as possible and as helpful as possibly whenever Mrs. Nam needed me. I didn’t want to rock the boat. Sadly, my toilet forced me to confront her with more bad news.

A mysterious, sulphurous smell like an open sewer has permeated our bathroom since the day we moved in. At first we thought it was just the water itself, as the smell got worse whenever we flushed the toilet. We combated the stench with three well-placed charcoal air-fresheners, accomplishing little. The plot thickened when the toilet developed a small leak at its base, leading us to conclude that we had a cracked wax seal on our hands (thanks, dad). Any reasonably competent plumber could fix this problem in a matter of a few hours.

I waited until Thursday to ask her. Mrs. Nam and the Korean teachers took Gavin and I out to Pizza Hut for Thanksgiving. Our delicious 30 dollars pizza gave me cramps and gas all day because I don’t eat that much cheese anymore. Mrs. Nam, on the other hand, thoroghly enjoyed the luxuriously greasy, cheesy Western dish, and it was over lunch that I asked if she could get the toilet fixed. Her smile turned into a frown and she promised to send Mr. Lee over on Satuday.

Thursday of last week I walked into my Advanced Three class with a smug little smile on my face. My co-teacher Ji-hyun taught me a new Korean phrase I hoped would strike fear into the hearts of my students. As is usual for most of my classes, the children were still chattering away with one another as they stood to greet me.

‘Hello class, how are you?’ I boomed and the class mindlessly answered with a monotonous ‘I’m fine, thank you. How are you?’

‘I’m great,’ I quipped, paused for dramatic impact, and spilled the beans.

“Naeil sheom choiyo,” I said and grinned, awaiting the looks of speechless horror I had been anticipating.

Utter these words in an American classroom and every student will wheel around in their chair as if struck by lightening and protest with great vigor. Speak it again and the class will fall into a dark, deathly silence. Back before cellphones were commonplace, back before MP3s, wireless internet or the war in Iraq, back when Mr. Jones was a lonely teenage punk with a yellow flower and a pickup truck, these were the words that struck fear into the hearts of all who heard them: Test next week. Not Advanced Three.

My announcement brought only curious, ambiguous looks from my students. At first I thought I had mispronounced the words and I repeated myself.

‘Naeil sheom choiyo.’ A girl on the front row named Soo-min raised her hand.

‘Teacher. Test next week?’ she asked nonchalantly. Yes, I answered. A few of the students exchanged unreadable, passionless glances and whispers and then went right back to chattering endlessly about wrestling and pop music with one another. I sighed, utterly defeated by the children’s complete lack of interest. I had hoped the threat of an impending test would jerk Advanced Three into reality and focus them on the task of learning. In reality, I was learning another lesson about the pitfalls of running a school as a business in the twenty-first century.

The director of ESS, Mr. Kim, is learning about them, too. Early in the week he threatened to expell every student in the Best Junior (3E1, 3E2, 2E2, 1E1, etc.) program from the school. The rumor goes that during one of his auditorium classes it became painfully obvious to Mr. Kim that these students, supposidly the most advanced English speakers in the school, barely knew how to form a coherent sentence. Shoot, I thought. I could have told him that.

The hagwon system has two fundamental flaws, neither of which I have enough authority to speak on at this time. Basically, problem hinges on two distinct issues: The erosion of traditional Korean cultural norms by Western consumer culture and the hagwon’s focus on its bottom line, but like I said, I don’t have the experience or education to enlighten anyone on either of these two topics beyond my own intuition. It’s just that every now and then their effects become painfully obvious, such as when students who have been studying English for six years can barely say their own name.

On Monday Mr. Kim sent the teaching staff to another product placement session disguised as a teaching workshop. An annoyingly peppy female presenter bombarded our coffee-deprived brains with buckets of information about her company’s teaching materials, but little practical classroom advice. Whenever she would ask the audience a question, we would reply with a sleepy murmur as if praying for death. Half way through my body rebelled against my boredom by demanding that I take a leak. By the time I came back even the murmured answers to the presenter’s questions had ceased and the poor woman was answering her own inqueries. Mrs. Nam’s patience ran a few minutes later and we all left to buy some lunch.

Mr. Lee came by the apartment Saturday while I was at Hangul Seodang learning Korean. Gavin reported that Mr. Lee brought the apartment handyman with him, who then proceeded to change every fitting on the toilet except the wax seal. Gavin said he protested the repair job, which he rightly considered indifferent to the real problem, by pointing out the smell. Mr. Lee and the repairman assured him that it was the city itself, and not the toilet, that Gavin was smelling. A few minutes later Mr. Lee declared the matter resolved, left, and the leak (and the smell) had reappeared by the time I returned from teaching the high schoolers that night. Gavin was in a sour mood.

Complicating Gavin’s life was his pair of beautiful leather dress shoes, which badly need to be polished. A simple search for good Kiwi shoe polish was thus transformed into...

...Sir Gavin and The Quest For The Brown Shoes Polish. Every time he takes a walk through Nampo-dong, Gavin scours the stalls for good shoes polish. Most of what he finds is this cheesy dark orange polish that looks like its been sitting in a Russian freighter for twenty years. The quest for the brown shoes polish is very similar to much-recounted tale of Sir Jones and The Quest for The Plastic Shower Curtain, which we all know ended with Mr. Jones slaying the dragon and winning the heart of the princess. Wait a minute...

Gavin’s father is sending shoe polish along with Gavin’s St. Martin’s Handbook. Still, Gavin is convinced that somewhere hidden deep within the labrynth of stalls there is a magical ajumma who sells fine brown Kiwi shoes polish. He relentlessly searches for her, popping into shoe stores and grocery huts, querying shop keepers and delivery boys, straining to unravel the mystery locked in a language barrier. However, anyone who has ever gone on a quest in Nampo-dong knows that they will not find what they are looking for until they stop looking or the object is found elsewhere (e.g. shower curtain, towel, etc.).

Saturday morning a knock at the door roused me from bed. I opened the door and three burly, filthy Korean workmen filed into my house as if they owned the place. The last one to walk into my apartment stumbled over something about a ‘hole’ and ‘wind’ in a mix of Korean and English. Oh shit, we have a gas leak, was my first thought. But no, nothing that serious.

There was a small conduit crammed with water, gas and electrical pipes that had a bad draft, and these men were barging into every apartment and putting up barriers to the windy invasion. One man shoved my washing machine aside and began to stuff newspaper and cardboard handed to him by his co-worker into the conduit. At one point they even stuffed a religious pamphlet about Jesus into the hole. They weighed the plug down with balls of wet concrete and left.

OK, I got to go. I've spent six hours putting this together and I have to take a shower so the students don't hold their nose, point at me and repeat the word 'munjee' over and over again. If anyone out there reading this is interested in teaching in Korea, ESS has two positions available immediately. For 2000 bucks a month, paid airfare and apartment and a 2000 dollar end-of-contract bonus, this job cannot be beat. If you are interested, please contact me via email. My address is Notesjones@gmail.com. Peace. --Notes

As usual, photos first so as to intice you into reading the blog below.



A photo I snapped on the subway. For some reason, subways lend themselves well to photography.



That big mountain is bongnaesan rising out of the urban sea of Young-do island, where I live. I live on the other side of bongnaesong. Notice to two bridges in the bottom of the photo. The orange one was built by the Japanese, I have been told.



A grandfather and his granddaughter at Beomosa. There is nothing quite as satisfying to photograph as an honest smile.



One of the math teachers, Su-jin, had her 28th birthday party at ESS. One difference between her birthday and mine: After she blew out the candles another teacher quickly re-packaged the cake so she could take it home. After I blew out MY candles the other teachers decended on it like vultures to a crippled animal.



Cups lit by the cold winter light at Beomosa.



The pride of Busan: The Gwangali Bridge.



The view from 394 meters up the Hamjigren side of Bongnaesan.



It's my favorite time of year.



Gavin found this bottle of snakeoil at a knickknack shop in Nampo-dong.



A frame I thought was a dud turned into a keeper with the help of good ole' Photoshop.



Valient protestors at Gwangali sharing their two cents with a couple of guitars and a wig of dreadlocks.



Soju sadness in Nampo-dong.



A scene from Beomosa. Be sure to take off your shoes before entering the temple...



...And bow before you leave.

I have almost no notes from the last week. As I sit at my (now kind of working) computer and type out this blog, I find page after frustrating page of nothing but ‘to do’ lists, shopping lists and random bits of hangul scribbled here and there. When explaining what I’m trying to find to a Korean, the notepad makes for an exceptional tool. I only have one entry for the Korean Files.

'Fruit Virus' --Kinda like the happy virus, but tastier.

Gavin and I pushed into previously uncharted areas of the Nampo-dong market on our quest for simple household accouterments such as bath mats (our toilet leaks), charcoal air fresheners (our toilet stinks) and toilet paper (we’d like to be able to use our leaky, stinky toilet). By bus, train, and on foot we traversed the length and breadth of Busan, scouring the many stalls, shops and rebar carts for our quarry.

Man, I’m starting to feel heroic here. For one thing, we found a shower curtain store here in Nampo-dong. For 15,000 won we can now enjoy the luxury of a simple piece of plastic hanging on a bar. And guess what? Next door was a towel store! Like a latter-day Lewis and Clark, we charmed the natives into guiding us to each item on our list. We purchased trash cans, wall hangers, a mouse pad, power strips, air-fresheners, a bath mat, tea towels, water pitchers, food, toiletries and even discovered the elusive Nampo-dong Starbucks (actually, it was in plain sight. I just almost never go to that part of the district).

Gavin (yes, the new guy has a name now) was overwhelmed by the sheer number of shops, stalls, malls and vendors in the city. It didn’t make any sense to him at all.

“How do they all do enough business to pay the rent?” he asked repeatedly as we walked away the hours down endless streets of merchants and shoppers. Rare is the building that is not festooned with neon signs or blanketed with billboards, posters and business names from threshold to roof line. The top floors could be a motel, the middle floors a PC bong or restaurant, and the lower floors a doctor’s office. The vegetable vendors, gamerooms, dokpokki stands, fortune tellers and hair salons fend for themselves at the foot of the building or fill the alleyways branching off and vanishing deeper into the urban jungle. Some people are seemingly scraping together a living from nothing more than a naked piece of cardboard covered with vegetables and dead fish. No matter where you are, from Haeundae to Songdo, from the sleepy neighborhoods of Young-do to the bustling tourism centers of Seomyeon and PNU, it’s the same story.

Is there really enough business to sustain such a massive commercial presence? Do the residents of Busan really have that much buying power, or is the level of tourism substantial enough to offset the shortfall? For a city where the buildings rarely grow more than fifteen stories high, where is the money? Gavin had an interesting theory about at least one aspect of this conundrum: The subway.

The Busan subway stretches the length and width of the city, most of it underground. Measured in terms of ease of use, cleanliness and technology, the subway wins high marks in my book. The quiet metallic trains run on electricity provided by an overhead wires. They are smooth enough to allow a person to stand and fast enough to carry you the length of the city in under an hour, and following them like a ghost from station to station is a mall. Yes, I said a mall. The Lotte Underground Mall (my words).

A person could literally walk from Songdo to Haeundae - all underground - and if that person so desired, they could shop the whole way. Both sides of the trainless tunnel are lined with clothing, camera and knickknack shops staffed by bored (sometimes asleep and snoring) Korean clerks. It’s low ceilings and sickly florescent lights give the mall a clammy, claustrophobic character. Missing are the crowds of people that fill the streets of Nampo-dong. Only at the subway terminals do you find an appreciable number of people. Old men gather around the fountains, play go, get drunk and stare at the few people who walk past. Teenagers haunt the fastfood joints and bums sleep in the stairwells lit with daylight from the city above. The prices for goods sold in the Underground are much higher than their counterparts aboveground. To be perfectly honest, it feels a lot like a mall back home.

Why would anyone set up a business down here, I thought to myself. Perhaps to justify a bomb shelter, Gavin answered. This startling answer made logical sense: An underground chamber big enough to hold the entire city within reach of the entire city with it’s own water, food and transportation systems. Considering South Korea’s proximity to the jealous North and their strained relationship with Japan, a bomb shelter is probably not a bad idea.

Gavin, besides drawing fascinating conclusions about Busan’s infrastructure, completed his first week of teaching. Fearful of not being prepared to entertain a classroom full of children, Gavin spent every night fastidiously scouring books, inventing ideas, firing questions at me and drawing up lesson plans for his classes. I felt like an American Special Forces commander teaching the South Vietnamese how to fight the Communists.

Gavin, being better informed than I, sidestepped early problems such as the locating materials, finding lesson plans, and learning the names of the Korean teachers. He was also very strict with the students, a recipe for better behaved children down the line. Still, a few classes gave him trouble. Gavin noted how short their attention spans seemed to be and how little material the school provides for its teachers.

APEC, the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation, was in session throughout the week. I was so preoccupied with building my nest and helping Gavin that I forgot all about it until Thursday night. As the bus taking us home crossed over the harbor into Young-do Gavin noticed crowds of people gathering along the bridge. Far off in the distance a magnificent fireworks display was lighting up the sky over Haeundae. I stared at it listlessly, too exhausted to follow my journalistic instincts any further than my imagination.

President Bush and Condoleeza Rice both made cameos at APEC. It was rumored that the Secret Service rented out every room in three of the biggest hotels in Haeundae to insure the President’s safety. The Chimpanzee in Chief used his two-day soapbox to demand that Asian countries open their doors wider for American goods and services. His speeches infuriated Koreans. There was footage of protests and riots in Haeundae on the local news.

I, for one, found the whole situation terribly ironic. The Korean government had spared no expense preparing for Bush’s visit. For the week of the APEC conference the streets of Haeundae bristled with heavily-armed soldiers and policemen. Great care was taken at the airports, seaports and in the subways to insure no villians entered the country, and Bush shows up and starts making demands of his gracious hosts as if they were nothing more than his servants. That’s gotta burn you. I wanted badly to put these thoughts on film and document the protests. I got my chance Friday.

APEC created so much chaos in Busan that Mr. Kim gave everyone Friday off. I used the free time as an excuse to take the subway out to Haeundae. At Gwangali I met a group of protesters with guitars and a cardboard box declaring APEC a tool of George W. Bush. One of them was dressed up in a rastafarian style complete with a dreadlocks wig covering his short black hair. They were suspicious of me, but allowed me to follow them to the beach where they played a few Bob Marley riffs translated into Korean.

Few people took the time to look up at the rebellious youths or listen to their anthems of protest. The beach was bare save for a few couples braving the biting wind to get a few moments alone by the sea, which was the same slate-blue as the sky. As the lights flickered to life on the Gwangali bridge, I took a walk down the beach.

I came across a knot of off-duty riot police standing by the shoreline getting drunk and staging bare chested wrestling matches despite the frigid weather. Many of them looked no older than the high school students in my Saturday classes. Their menacing black fatigues and square-billed caps lent them an air of hard-boiled authority belied by their smiling eyes and wirey physiques. An older man with a bottle of soju who I assumed to be their superior officer was mingling with his charges, joking and passing around his bottle of orange brew. Every now and then he’d cajole a couple of the boys into stripping off their shirts and jumping into a ring drawn in the sand for a contest. Bets would be placed, speeches made, and after everyone had said their piece or had their laugh, the boys would grapple until one or the other hit the sand first.



Gavin and I spent Sunday at Beomosa. The weather is truly cold now and the leaves are in full swing from green to gold. Even at 1 p.m. the sun was low and people’s shadows stretched far from their masters. We hiked up the mountain and ate kimbop in a grove of tall trees clinging to a forrest floor covered with boulders.

Well, that’s all I got for now. I have to get some sleep. Julie worked her last day Thursday and she’ll leave Tuesday. I’ll have photos from her going away ceremony on Monday. Peace. --Notes

I apologize for not updating by Sunday. We've had a new arrival from the United States here at ESS to take Julie's place. Since he and I are roommates, I decided to take it upon myself to serve as his grizzled guide. Despite being time-consuming (which accounts for my lazy blogging), I've rather enjoyed giving this guy the introduction to teaching that nobody bothered to give me.

Mr. Kim, Julie and I traveled to Gimhae airport to pick up the new recruit. I spotted the American standing alone beside the baggage conveyor belts, a handcart loaded down with his camera bag, suitcase and backpack. "This must have been what I looked like," I thought to myself as we walked up to him. Tired, confused, apprehensive, scanning the endless river of Koreans for his guides, he didn't see up until we were right on top of him. We shook hands, made introductions, and escorted him through the airport to Mr. Kim's big, ivory Chairman (which looks suspiciously similar to a Honda Accord).

Earlier that day, Mrs. Nam informed me that from that day forward, I would no longer live in Julie's apartment. I was to gather up my belongings and move to Mike and Dennis' apartment first thing in the morning. Nice timing, I thought sarcastically to myself, all the while smiling and nodding to Mr. Kim (who had come over to make sure I swallowed the medicine like a good little employee and didn't spit it up). Both he and Mrs. Nam said the place was as clean as it had ever been. Mr. Kim himself had got down on his hands and knees and scrubbed the dark green mildew from the sides of the plastic bathtub. Yeah right, I thought.

My last impression of Mike and Dennis' place had also been my first. On my third night in Busan I went home with Dennis to hang out and drink some beers. They hadn't cleaned it in months. The shower curtain was a vision from hell. The floor was caked with dirt and the couch looked like it might get up and walk away at any moment. Dennis had caught a praying mantis during the ESS summer camp in August and named it 'Little Homey.' For nearly an hour we all drank beer while Mike and Dennis caught cockroaches and staged one-sided gladitorial contests between them and Little Homey. Suffice it to say that I was not looking forward to moving into this rathole.

To my great surprise, Mrs. Nam and Mr. Kim were true to their word. It was a different apartment I walked into Friday night. The refrigerator was empty. The floors were so clean it was like they had been replaced. The trash and old food was gone. The roaches were gone. The five-foot mountain of beer bottles in the closet was gone (wow, they have a washing machine). The bathtub was spotless (go Mr. Kim!). My room, which under the Dennis administration had resembled a North Korean cell for political prisoners, was spotless and sported a new matress. My eyes brightened.

I gave my roommate the bigger room (he had a lot of stuff), for which he was grateful. The next morning I crammed my belongings into a cab and 2000 won later I was in a new apartment.

I'll write more about the new place in the next update.

Now, I must give Julie her due: She was a wonderful teacher for living in Busan. For living here only two months, I am an encyclopedia on Busan, and Julie is in large measure the author of my knowledge. However, neither she nor Mike nor Dennis really gave me any teaching advice beyond, "don't worry, you'll do fine," or, "they're just children," or my personal favorite, "hey, if I can do this, anybody can." Right.

I've been here two months, and it has only been within the last week that I can finally say with any degree of truth that I'm beginning to get the knack of this teaching thing. Sometimes all I have to teach for 45 minutes are the words "Hello," and "hi." I can stretch "hello" and "hi" into ten minutes. What do you do with the other 35? I've spent two months figuring that out, and I considered it priority numbero uno to bequeath some of that information to the new teacher this weekend.

The new recruit didn't mind my foxhole expertise (God knows how far I am from calling myself an expert in teaching). In fact, teaching was just about all he could talk about. He was nervous, plain and simple. He didn't care about where we lived, or what there was to eat, or see or do or drink. His jet-lag-addled mind was fixed upon the moment when he would have to stride into a room full of Korean ten-year-olds and teach English. We've all been there. My heart went out to him.

So I've been a little behind on my update.

Here are your Korean Files updates:

"Realize there is nothing to realize" (Whoa man, that's deeeeep. T-shirt)

"What is given by the goods more desirable than a happy hour" (I am not thinking that means what you are thinking it means. Child's notebook.)

"War is not healthy for living things" (Nor is it covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia)

"Their parents gave them very energetic sperm" (Presenter at a seminar for a new teaching book published in part by Disney explaining the behavior of certain children in the classroom. What can I really say to this? At the time it was all I could do not to laugh)

"Give Mania" (a rare form of psychosis involving bums. Fast-food restaurant tip jar)

"Human Placenta Hydrolisis" (Ouch. Must be good for you. Saw this on a shopping bag).

OK, below are the photos I took that last week. I'll have more to say once I get the new teacher settled in.

Here are photos of my high school and Special Class classes building and launching their home-made parachutes. It was part of a science course on gravity and friction I taught last week.








Live Jazz at this Japanese restaurant in Nampo-dong. They were total showoffs.


The ajumma, or as I like to call them, The Human Swiss Army Knife. They can do anything.


I took Kevin up to Busan Tower to show him how beautiful Korea can be. There were all these foreigners there for APEC and the Koreans were showing off their cultural heritage with dances and music.



Well, I got to go. My computer is now fixed and fully functional. I signed up for internet service today, so expect better and more frequent blog entries in the coming weeks. Sorry about the protracted nature of this entry. When you are living your life and helping someone else live theirs, the available time for prattling on becomes scarce. Peace. --Notes

OK, photos first for all the Short Attention Spanericans.

These street dancers were gathered at the square in Yongdusan Park in the heart of Nampo-dong celebrating the harvest.







A group of monks put on a little show, too.



Love lives on in Busan.



While I was in Yongdusan, I couldn't help but watch the old men play GO.




A little Nampo street photography.



These two are of one of the Korean teachers, Young-in, teaching her nephew (who is in my 1-2A class) how to play the piano. The Koreans are very attentive to their children, though I wouldn't go so far as say they spoil their children.




It's been a pretty calm week all told. The weather warmed up and on Friday we finally got some rain. For most of the week the smog built up in the cool, dry air, hanging over the city and knocking a few minutes off of my daily 8-kilometer jog.

I've started classifying the hills I run up (and down) by duration and inclination. It's a highly scientific process: I count the number of swear words, factor in their strength and volume, multiply this sum by the amount of sweat pouring off my body and then divide the whole thing by the square of the number of times I stop and pray for death. I assign a hill a numerical rating between one and six, very similar to the system whitewater kayakers use to rate river rapids.

I never miss Mississippi quite like when I jog in the morning. Mississippi makes even the most modest of joggers feel like an African bushman. Millions of years ago Mississippi was flattened into a jogger-friendly grade by a couple of epochs spent on the bottom of an ancient sea. I could run at a brisk pace for miles and miles in Mississippi.

I was totally unprepared for the tragic ass-whupin' at the hands of The Land of The Morning Calm. Korea sits close to the Ring of Fire. While Mississippi was lounging around on the bottom of an ancient sea getting smoothed out for the future generations of overweight Americans who would be living there in a few million years, Korea was blasting its way out of the ocean in big, lava-hurling leaps and bounds. Mountains punched their way skyward for an epoch or two before letting erosion reign them into their current incarnation. A few weeks of jogging and Korea quickly went from the Land of The Morning Calm to The Land of The Burning Quads.

On the other hand, my calves are rockin.'

A little news: Chimpanzee in Chief, er, I mean President Bush, is coming to Busan for the APEC meetings in two weeks! Yeah! Security is being beefed up all over the city. Fresh-faced youths with tiny .22-calibre handguns in blue uniforms prowl the subways and city streets looking for, well, geez...I think right now all they are looking for is a quiet place to take a nap, but rest assured, when Chim...President Bush comes to town, they'll be ready and on the lookout for bad guys. As for me, I'll be in Haeundae, camera in hand, ready to document the usual Rioting Extraveganza that follows this idiot like stink on shit.

Now time for your weekly update of the Korean Files: Sayings from the Land That Slept Through English Class.

"Happy Virus" (I hope it infect the whole world! Notebook belonging to one of the Korean teachers. She said she likes to 'spread happiness')

"Sometimes They Yell Sorrow" (Like when Julie rents a Vin-Diesel movie. T-shirt)

"Zebra Mode" (For those times when you are being hunted by lions. T-shirt)

"Fatdog Mania" (Psychologists beware! T-shirt)

"Jeanist" (A new religion based on the teachings of the prophet Levi. Sweater)

"Luxury and Sexy DNA" (Man, nothing 'turns me on' quite like a half-naked double-helix in a leopard-print thong. Plastic surgury clinic advertisment in a train station).

Laughing yet? No? OK, I'll post that naked photo of myself next week.

For Halloween Julie gave me a pair of Elvis-style sunglasses complete with black, hairy sideburns. She donned a pink wig and we taught class in-costume Monday. All of the children loved the get-ups. Every classroom I entered erupted into raucous laughter as I set down my books and did my best Elvis impersonation. Of course, all the kids wanted to be The King, too. In a few classes I had an Elvis-impersonation contest. The following pictures depict the winners.




Yes, he is smoking a pencil.

I had a scare Tuesday during the 3E2 class. The hagwon's director, Mr. Kim, popped in for a few minutes. Now, this in of itself is not really a problem for me. I like Mr. Kim. He reminds me a lot of my Uncle Keeve. A few times a week he calls me into his office to help him sort out some new, strange American saying, phrase or concept he's come across. Last week I helped him sort out the origins of the English system of measurement. We discussed the yard (from your nose to the thumb on your outstretched arm), the inch (the width of your thumb), and the foot (duh).

Mr. Kim seems to be a fiend for random knowledge (I bet he's a killer Trivial Pursuit player). One time he gently repremanded me for wearing my shirt with the front coat tails untucked (that's actually the style. Thanks for nothing, Banana Republic). After I tucked in the shirt, he told me how long ago English gentlemen used the long coat tails as their underware (boxers and briefs having yet to be invented). A man would bring the coat tails up under his butt and button them to the other side of their shirt. Fascinating, isn't it?

Mr. Kim has this smile that never, ever, loses it's high-wattage. He can smile for twenty minutes strait. Often times we talk about the history of ESS or techniques for teaching English. After a firm handshake, I always leave Mr. Kim's office with a smile on my face and a bottle of orange juice in my hand. To me, Mr. Kim is nothing more than my kind, eccentric boss. To the Korean children, he is something akin to a God.

When Mr. Jones walks down the hall the children wave enthusiastically, yell out 'hallloooo Mr. Jones' and giggle or laugh or give me a high five. When Mr. Kim walks down the hall the kids come to attention and bow reverently as he passes. Nearly half the children in my 3E2 class named Mr. Kim as their ideal person, their hero. The normally gossipy Korean teachers never talk about Mr. Kim behind his back. He has two full-time female assistants that attend to his every need. Mr. Kim is indeed a masterful teacher. He always makes time every day to teach an auditorium class or two. As he calmly gives instruction all nintey children sit as still and quiet as a glass of cold water, eyes forward, wrapped in awe as this skinny, gray-haired Korean language god illuminates the shadowy difference between 'anything' and 'something.'

3E2 was in rare form Tuesday, doing their level best to ignore Mr. Jones as he tried to give a lesson on idioms. In just under a half-an-hour I had moved four of the boys and one of the girls, trying to dilute their power to ignore me by placing them next to people they don't normally talk to. Jee-hee was sitting with the boys, arms crossed, a hateful sneer (pointed at me) fouling up her perfect porcelien complexion. Gi-ho and Sang-hyeok were in the very back of the classroom, still chattering excitedly about their favorite W.W.E wrestlers. Hyeon-so was between them and the main group of girls and Chang-geun was on his second warning. The other boys tried their best to ignore Gi-ho and Sang-hyeok's chatter and pay attention. The situation was tense.

I have an old maxim for these types of situations: When in doubt, go insane. Yell, scream, gesture frantically, laugh loudly, fall down. Works every time. Get's everybody's attention. Idioms lend themselves to such a desperate teaching style. There is no better way to teach an idiom than to act it out. So I played Charades with the children. They loved it, yelling and clammering to get the right words as I bounced, ran and gestured frantically on stage. I was working on the "Merry" part of "Eat, Drink and Be Merry" when Mr. Kim calmly walked through the door.

Mr. Kim took a seat next to Sang-Hyeok, who went as stiff and white as if he were dead. The rest of the class noticed the abrupt absence of chatter and turned around. A girl in the front row, Da-ae, who had been wildly yelling "Happy! Happy! Happy!" when Mr. Kim silently walked in, gave out a short gasp, spun around and hung her head in shame. Most of the other reacted in similar fashion. Just when I needed them to be their normal, rambunctuous selves, Mr. Kim turned them all into statues.

Mr. Kim turned up the wattage on his radiant smile an aimed it at me. I smiled back, though my mind was racing. I quickly realized this was a battle of polarities, and the students were caught in the middle. Mr. Kim's presence demanded respectful silence, but Mr. Jones wanted them to be creative, loud and excited. They all gave me these pleading, confused looks, as if to say "What now?" I gritted my teeth.

We're going to finish our game of Charades. With the whole class watching and my boss, the Teaching God, sitting in the back of the room, I went right back into character as if nothing had happened. Maybe, I thought, maybe if the children saw me being my normal goofy self in front of Mr. Kim, maybe they would think it was OK and follow suit. It was a tremendous gamble. If it didn't work, I would just look outrageously rediculous. To my surprise, it worked. After ten minutes the children were back to yelling and celebrating as they guessed one idiom after another correctly. Mr. Kim nodded and walked out the door five minutes before class ended.

I got my 5-6P class back, but now it's called T5. I've nicknamed the class The Teacher Terminator and was quite relieved to learn the part-timer, Ashley, has it instead of me. After her first day I found her sitting at Mike's former desk looking glum.

"Really, tell me," she said, "they've given you all the smart kids and me all the bad, stupid ones, haven't they?" I asked her what classes she had. 3B, 5S, 5A, 2E2, 4A, T5, she said. Yes, I said. That's right. She went back to looking glum. As we planned for the next class, the usual sound of the monks chanting next door was spiced with the pleasant smell of incense.

One of my new favorite past times is watching the local news while I eat dinner. There is no other area of Korean culture as badly contaminated by American influence as the local news. Everything but the language is identical, right down to the cheesy camera angles, hot weather girl, and the obviously set-up shots of people in their stories. However, it is the lack of English that makes watching the news so much fun.

I like to pretend that instead of a news program, it's a sitcom about a bunch of scientists who have lost a batch of genetically-enhanced gerbils and have had to cover up their frantic search for the dangerous rodents by moon lighting as television reporters. The show is all about the wacky stuff that happens to them as they search for the gerbils. Hey, it's pretty funny, believe me.

No, the Kimchi hasn't gone to my head.

Allright, I gots to go. It's getting late and I got to get my beauty rest (like I can get any uglier). Peace. --Notes