That's Gavin's shirt standing on our kitchen table.

Before I came to Korea, I was researching the living conditions here and I discovered a peculiarity: There are washing machines in almost every household, but very few dryers. At the time, I found this to be highly irregular. In my admittedly limited experience, washer and dryer were as inseparable as hotdogs and buns. You could not have one without the other, it just didn't make any sense. Luckily, I've done a lot of growing up since then, and my world travel has enlarged my world view.

Plain and simple: It's damn dry here. The humidity, as measured by our digital humidifier, hangs around 25% all day. I first noticed it back in October when my polyester Columbia hiking pants began to generate an indomitable static cling and I started getting a nasty electric shock every time I touched a metal door handle. My lips chap twice as fast as normal and Gavin has been having problems with the skin on his hands cracking and bleeding. If I don't drink enough water before going to bed, I wake up feeling like a mummy. The dry air works wonders on tabletop spills and can suck the water out of damp laundry almost as fast as a consumer dryer. A shirt properly hung on the drying rack in our living room can take on the structural rigidity of thin cardboard. Hilarity ensues. See photo above. Laugh.

Laugh, I say!!!

The dryer is one of the newest Western curiosities to hit Korea. Not many people here have them. Koreans don't even have a proper word for a dryer beyond "machine that dries," though they do have a word for washing machine: "Setaki." Most of my students call the dryer a "drum" and strangely almost none of them seem to know exactly what it does, with good reason. Most of the dryers I see in stores across the city look like the warp drive on the Starship Enterprise, bristling with buttons, digital displays and compartments for trilithium crystals, er...Dryer sheets. They're price tag will steal your breath away.

Speaking of price tags, it's Christmas time! Happy Birthday, Jesus! Cue 'bum' photo.



Sorry Jesus, not much has changed in the last two thousand and five years. Whenever you get a minute, we could really use your help. What that you hear? Oh, it's the sound of millions of credit cards being hustled through their little slotted credit card readers.



Where are all of those people going? Lotte. It's a mall. It's ten floors of every imaginable retailer selling people things they don't need. Am I a what? Yes, I'm a hypocrite. There is a beautiful new digital camcorder with my name on it coming in the mail courtesy of my beloved family.



Please forgive me, Jesus. I sometimes forget why we celebrate your birthday. Christmas is a time for loving, giving and thinking of all the special people in our lives. It's a time to reflect on the year and all the good times we've have in 2005. It's a time to look forward with bright eyes and high expectations because we have a chance to set our mistakes right and make the future a better place to live than the past.

There are some of us who remember what Christmas is about. As I walked around Seomyeon Saturday, I came across a large group of students from Busan Young-sun Middle School. These noble youths had commandeered a wide pedestrian intersection, laid out cardboard mats, and were selling their old clothes, books and toys to raise money for victims of the Pakistani/Indian earthquake. They were creative, vigorous salespeople, using every resource within their grasp to coax passersby into tossing a few hundred won for someone in need.



The weather did its level best to deter them. The intersection was bound on all sides by tall buildings that lowered the temperature and channeled the fierce wind into open coat pockets and zippers. They huddled together like penguins and drank cups of warm hot chocolate.



They're efforts certainly warmed my weary heart. I gave them a few thousand won in exchange for a few photos. The more traditional Christmas charities are also present in Busan. See below.



Thus far, Christmas has had a decidedly low impact on my life this year. This will be my first Christmas without my family, and it's just not the same. My life is filled with a tasteless loneliness that cannot be replaced by things or carols or strangers decorating a tree. I try not to think about it. During the runup to coming here, I figured I was mature enough to deal with Christmas alone.

I was wrong. I miss my family, plain and simple. Everything I've ever known or felt about the holidays hasn't really materialized, like somebody in my brain decided to leave the Christmas decorations in the attic this year. The traditional feelings of Christmas seem to be hiding from me.



In some respects, the sooner Christmas is over, the better.

ESS decided to get in on the holiday spirit. Mr. Ye bought a fake, plastic tree and set it up in the corner next to the third floor door. He strung lights on it and then all of the Korean teachers decorated it with gusto.





Many of the teachers here are fundamentalist Christians of the Presbyterian or Baptist flavor. They're a friendly lot, and they make Christmas feel a bit more, well, American.

This week also marks the 8th Anniversary of Hangul Seodang, the Korean class that Gavin and I attend every Saturday. We heard they were going to have a party this Saturday, so we made sure to attend. The founder of the school gave a speech.



A few more people gave speeches and then it was on to the Indian Dancing. Hold the phone. Did you just say "Indian Dancing?" Yup.



You see, much to my general surprise (and this is yet another damning reminder of how narrow-minded I was before I came to Korea), there are more than just honkies, er, Americans and Canadians, trying to learn Korean. There is Alla, a Russian violin teacher who showed off her virtuosity and played a masterful composition for us by an American (I think) composer.



A Japanese man broke out his clarinet and skillfully filled the room with jazz.



Naturally, we honkies had to flex our musical muscles. Doing the heavy lifting was a Canadian named Wayne, a former ESS teacher, who softly played Bach on his guitar for those gathered. There were video presentations on Turkey, Indonesian and even Uzbekistan. I never figured on meeting so many different people in Korea. It was fun watching and learning about their cultures.



However, we were here for a specific reason: All the delicious food! OOPS! I mean, er, a birthday party. And what birthday party is complete without a cake and candles? Strangely, the cake was six inches of solid Korean "dok," a rice composite that has the consistency of cookie dough and tastes like, well, nothing whatsoever. The man on the right who helped cut the cake said it was unusually difficult to cut.



Saturday night Gavin and I went back to Ole 55 for our weekly Stella Artois. Sadly, the same meat-and-potatoes punk band was playing again, filling our ears with the same tired sets they played the week before. The bar was packed and so we didn't stay long.

Sunday saw me down two cups of coffee and head out towards Haeundae. I wanted to explore the island where APEC had been held: Dongbaek. The island is slightly legendary in Korea. The famous Silla poet and scholar Choi, Chi-won, who upon chancing upon this island during his travels, sat down and carved three words into a rock on the tip of Dongbaek: Sea. Cloud. Hill. Hae. Un. Dae. The Koreans built a huge, outlandish conference building in the shape of an alien spacecraft adjacent to the ancient Silla carving. It was here that the leaders of the Pacific Rim came together, drank tea and talked about the future of billions of people throughout Asia. I had to see the place where my own fearless (tactless, feckless, brainless) leader, President Bush, made his brief appearance.

The long train ride to Dongbaek gave me time to finish my book on theoretical physics. Man, they have got to get an express train in this city. I took these photos from the pavilion where the world leaders met.





The building itself is something Dr. No would be proud of. When I first saw a picture of it I thought it had been built back in the 60s. I'm sorry I don't have a photo of it here. That represents a serious failing on my part as a journalist simply because the building is so ridiculous as to be noteworthy. It's image is on countless billboards throughout Busan. I guess I just am so tired of seeing it I couldn't bring myself to waste a frame on it's visage.

I went and took a peek at the inscription on the rock, which was much more impressive to my mind. The inscriptions were no mere bronze-age graffiti. They were deep, professional routings of the rock's surface. The middle symbol, "un," was badly worn away by the patient hand of the sea. I stared at them for a long time.

A man sat here and was so awestruck by the beauty of nature that he felt compelled to carve his feelings into a rock. This appealed to the part of me that hiked the entire length of the Appalachian Trail back in 2003. Despite the thousands of years between us, I felt instantly connected to this man on a deeply personal level. We shared an appreciation for nature that went beyond reason. I could almost see him sitting there, hiking stick resting on the ledge, chipping away at the hard granite. I bet he'd have some amazing stories to tell.

As for my culture, we don't turn rocks into poems. Our inscriptions are practical and short-lived.



It seems that the architects who designed the ubiquitous high-rise apartment buildings in Busan didn't take into account the fact that the people living in them might actually own furniture. There are no freight elevators in my building. The current rust bucket that carries me to and from my holding block is barely big enough to fit three people, much less a couch or - God forbid - a table or even a big box. The only opening through which you can get big items is the porch window. This presents certain problems when you are moving into a flat on the twentieth floor. Heck, it presents problems when you are moving into the second floor. How do you get all your crap into your trap?



Enter the moving ramp man. For a fee this guy will run a pair of steel tracks up to your window and move all of your things into your apartment with a winch-driven cart. Genius.

Ah, I almost forgot. From the land that slept through English class comes...The Korea Files!

"Bring The Take: Chip Chip Mother Fucker" (Sweatshirt. I'm speechless. I truly don't know what to say to this.)

The following is all from the cover of one of my student's notebooks.

"Wow, it sees there" (It has a subject, verb and an object, and yet it's still not a sentence. Hmmmm)

"We give to everybody the happy 200% bay always. Be sweet and love only be feeling take" (Hey, it's a new slogan for Wal-Mart: Always 200% Bay. Always)

"It pours out honey fully and makes it complete. Ted time is pleasure everyday" (Who is Ted and why is he involved with pleasure time?)

Well, that does it for SoKoNotes. I hope you enjoyed your fifteen minutes of Korea. Peace. --Notes