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