It rained.





It hasn't rained since Gavin arrived exactly two months ago. Also, what precipitation did transpire over the course of the last three days wouldn't really qualify as rain by most folk's measure. It was more like a heavy mist, as if the land had been begging the sky for rain and this was all the miserly sky would relinquish. How can this place go so long without water?

It makes me wonder about the stuff I don't know about, you know, being almost completely illiterate (in Korean). Maybe every single newscast I blithely sat through while eating dinner at Kimbop Paradise the last two months contained a segment or advertisment warning Busan residents to conserve water. Perhaps while I was carelessly indulging in fifteen-minute showers and laundering my clothes willy-nilly the Korean residents of Busan were applying more deodorant and fervently praying for rain. Who knows what calamities pass clear over my head while I float in the deep bliss of near-total ignorance. If this country were to be invaded by the North, I'd probably be clueless up until the moment that AK47 muzzle was shoved down my throat. OK, well, maybe not, but you get the idea (sorry ma, don't mean to scare you).

In true Obsessive-Compulsive style, Mr. Kim decided out of the clear blue sky that the claustrophobia-inducing teachers' office would be moved from the meat-locker in room 404 to the warmer, roomier digs in room 410. His son, Byeong-soo, and his son's friends were contracted to do most of heavy lifting. We teachers did what we could. Gavin and I put our corn-fed American muscle to work and relocated a few particle-board desks to their new home. The women moved books, chairs, and even a few desks themselves. A couple of students, Yeo-jin (my best 3E1 student) and her sidekick So-Yeon, pitched in.

In this photo, Sook-hyun picks with a magnet on a stick through the wreckage of the old teachers' office for paper clips. For some reason, paper clips are expensive and rare in Korea. I like paper clips, so I joined Sook-hyun's scavenger hunt and found a few of the twisted metal treasures for my own. One thing I find interesting about this picture is how the pile of refuse is so nice and neat.



This is Mrs. Nam sorting through her own private mountain of educational detritus. She and Ms. Ha both hosted their own giant collections of junk from years of working at ESS: Grammer books, student books, notebooks (some with notes, some without), flashcards, and other odds and ends took up one entire end of the bank of desks in room 410. Being at the foot of this packrat mountain, I did all I could to keep it from sliding into my own space. The coolest part was somehow Ms. Ha stashed the entire mess under her desk in one sweeping feat of organizational wizardry.



One of the nice things about the new room is its bank of particle-board full-size lockers, one for each teacher. I could hide in mine should the North invade and keep that AK47 out of my mouth for a few more minutes.



The photo I left out of the blog was of the Korean teachers obsessively aligning the desks in the new room with rulers and geometry squares. As I am fascinated by the Koreans' bizarre OCD behavior pattern, this was just the photo I was looking for. Oddly, I think all Koreans are aware of their own collective mental illness.

Earlier, Ms. Ha was calmly ignoring me as I photographed the desks being moved, the chairs being rolled into place and the plants relocated. However, when she caught sight of me documenting the laser-precise alignment of our desks, she moved as quick as a Forrest County sheriff's deputy to put a stop to it, asking in an embarrassed little laugh if I 'would please not take any photographs.' No, that's not how Forrest County deputies stop photographers.

ESS is putting on a play. Yes, in English. In the past ESS has produced elaborate renditions of tried-and-true Disney favorites like Beauty and The Beast, Aladdin and Snow White. As Gavin points out: Copyright don't mean shit in Korea, so I figured I'd probably be a backup singer in The Little Mermaid.

However, this year Mr. Kim made a major right-hand turn in his choice of theatrical material: The Christian Creation Myth. Genesis. Adam and Eve. Out with the dancing cups and happy endings, in with original sin and paradise lost. We held tryouts last week. Students from the Best Jr. classes (many of whom can't speak English much better than my elementary school students) took the stage and delivered their lines.

Despite the look of abject terror in her eyes, the girl with the blue jacket standing in the middle was the most expressive Korean student I have ever seen. She read her lines with clarity, volume and her expression was engaging.



Still, her pre-emptive stagefright made for amusing photography.



The other girls did their best. For most, it was task enough to speak the lines without cracking up. A few didn't make it.



Making matters worse was Mr. Kim, who would break in during a tryout and heckle the poor sap in the middle of their fumbled line. Still, despite these obstacles, most students managed to perform one entire scene without breaking their stride, testiment to their intelligence and learning capability. I envied and admired them. God knows how long it would take me to memorize a Korean script of similar length and depth and then recite it on stage in front of my peers while the director of my school grills me and the bumbling foreigner he hired takes pictures of me from the third row. Still, they managed.



After everything had been properly put away (and my blood sugar levels had dipped dangerously low), the Koreans all went to dinner, Gavin and I in tow. As usual, we went to the Samgyupsal joint up the street. As we sat around discussing our classes; pork, mushrooms, garlic and Kimchi cooked on the round grill built right into the table. As I was cutting the meat with tongs and scissors, Ji-hyun told me that she had received a call from a distressed parent.

A boy named Seong-soo had been crying when his mother picked him up at ESS after my Phonics and Storytelling class. Ji-hyun said the boy was upset because I didn't let him read from 'The Giving Tree' as much as his female arch-nemesis, Na-young and the other children had. Both Seong-soo and Na-young are stars in Ji-hyun's 2A class, outstripping their classmates in pronunciation and vocabulary by a wide margin. Their competition for bragging rights is well-known to me, as I taught them both for a month and a half in the early fall.

The problem with my Pronunciation and Storytelling class is that the other students, Jeong-yoon, Jae-young, Hyeon-suk, and Ji-min are far behind the two hotrods Na-young and Seong-soo. So, as I explained to Ji-Hyun, I give the less-experienced readers the bulk of my attention during reading time. Ji-hyun nodded, said that my logic was understandable and that she would explain it to Seong-soo's mother. OK, I said. Secretly, I wished that I could have called Seong-soo's mother. It feels sort of demeaning when I need a middle-man to talk to the children's parents.

On the other hand, it excited me to know my students demanded more of me, even if it was just so they could win a battle in the war between the sexes. In an educational system described by more than a few people as nothing more than glorified babysitting, I found it refreshing to know a student wanted me to be more than an entertainer: Teach me, Mr. Jones, I want to learn (and show that girl who's boss). I promised Ji-hyun that I would give Seong-soo the proper challenge he desired.

This anecdote highlights a growing interest in teaching as a profession. In all truth, I've been flirting with the idea since November when I started to get my feet under me. I say 'flirting.' 'Flirting' with the idea of teaching is similar to 'flirting' with a beautiful woman. Somedays you fail and you go home totally rejected and feeling incompetent; other days you feel happy and refreshed, charged with an airy sense of purpose and direction. What's more, teaching would be a lifelong commitment for me, and like any lifelong commitment, over the course of thirty years it would grow old and tired, so I better love it a whole lot.

Helping these thoughts along is the realization that I have NO training in teaching. I'm being baptized by fire at the hands of careless pastors and I'm loving almost every minute of it. If I do decide to become a teacher, it will be a decision based in reality, experiece, not fantasy. In this respect, my dream of being a teacher differs wildly from my earlier dream of being a newspaper photographer. That was a fantasy fed by my ego, without a clear goal, working off of my reasonable talent for photography.

As much as I love photography, the first shreds of doubt concerning a career path involving my camera have crept into my life here in Busan. I don't need to give you the details of starting a free-lancing photography career, but rest assured they are staggering, logistically and psychologically. Also, I love photography in such a way that when it becomes my job I start to hate it.

So on Saturday, instead of attending Hangul Seodang for my weekly Korean lesson, I took the subway out to Centum City in the heart of Haeundae to see the Busan Art Museum and chew on these thoughts. Gavin had visited the museum the previous weekend and spoke highly of its design, use of space, and exhibits. Moreover, it is free and there is a large, well-stocked art reference library from which we can get inspiration.





These two photos to not do the museum justice. A polite, strikingly beautiful usher asked me not to take photos while in the museum. Rendered helpless by her beauty, I was apt to comply. The art at the museum was simply amazing.

Two huge, yellow tables in the shape of keyholes thirty meters long displayed a series of sculptures crafted from the detritus of the city. An old tugboat nameplate shared space with a tangle of barbed wire impregnated with old aluminum pop cans while old 'parking rocks' from lots across the city stood guard, all of them accompanied by photos and maps of the location where they were found. It was captivating to think about all the little things swept up in the surging tide of a living city, things ignored or taken for granted by the residents. Perhaps the only reason I thought about the objects in this light was because they were in a museum, but when I left I found myself looking for similar relics of modern civilization as I walked the streets.

There was a 3D dog made of polaroid photos of the real dog it represented. Naturally, there were sculptures of naked women in various artsy poses. In rooms adjacent to the main gallery was a series of video installations dedicated to exploring the struggle to survive in the modern urban culture. A plaque explaining the purpose of the exhibit in decent Konglish had this to say:

"There is not my possibility to coexist with individual pleasure and social value without struggling against each other."

In one installation, two huge screens played Western advertisements for soap, detergent, and teeth whitener. Like the urban detritus, the display of these seemingly innocuous advertisements within the critical confines of an art museum transformed them something new: A glimpse into the soulless culture of consumerism. One of the ads stood out like a sore thumb.

The screen was divided into equal halves. In both halves indentical feminine hands dipped perfect white rags with identical black handprints into different clear liquids, one being the product advertised and the other being the competitor's product. Within a few seconds the black handprint on the right side of the screen was gone while the handprint on the left was faded but a little. The hand that dipped remained unchanged. The clip looped for ten minutes or more, I couldn't be sure, but the impact on my conscience was powerful.

The big screens also displayed recorded images from Times Square in New York city, obviously shot fairly recently. I stared for a few minutes at the jumbotrons blaring FOX news, ads for Clinique and various gigantic cars. It only served to remind me not only how far I was from home, but how far home was from me, reminding me of how much has gone wrong in my country. The thought of eventually returning home both excited me and depressed me all at once. I was reminded of this Canadian guy I met at O'Brien's early in my stay here. When I told him where I came from, he scoffed.

"America? What a shithole." Shithole, indeed. A shithole where my family lives. A shithole I called home for twenty-five years. A shithole to which I will probably reluctantly return. A shithole that at least provides me with the tools and freedoms to make it less of a shithole, which is more than I have here. All I've got in Korea is air-fresheners and a pocket dictionary.

After the museum, I jaywalked across an eight-lane highway to the BEXCO conference and event center. Big. Expensive. Lots and lots of empty space framed by steel and glass. Clean glass. The whole structure was dotted with ropes, ladders and moveable platforms where workers hanging by those ropes, clinging to those ladders and standing on those platforms could use industrial-strength cleaners and squeegees to obsessively scrub massive thirty by thirty foot panes of probably two-inch thick glass to a glossy shine.



The interior was just as colassal. The natural light was killer and I got jiggy with the 80-200 zoom, stalking my prey where they paused at the massive windows to gaze upon the concrete valley far below.











On the whole, BEXCO looked like a great place to stage a light-saber duel. I imagined the Jedi and Sith swordsmen dodging piece of falling glass and steel while a massive battle between robots and aliens raged far below, lasers and blasters everywhere! Man, I need a girlfriend.

OK, I've got to go. Gavin and I keep getting more and more comfortable here. We've got a printer on the way in addition to the videocamera. I've been experiementing with timelapse videography, the city lending itself so readily to this form of expression, so expect some wacky stuff in the future. Also, I might dump the iDisk in favor of a cheaper, better online storage service called iPowerweb. This would facilitate better soundbytes, download times, etc. Oh, before I forget, the Korean Files only has one entry this week (I've been lazy in writing the stuff down when I see it).

"The Union of The Handicapped Association of Busan" ...And who? The Dark Side? Sauron? Subway ad.

Oh, a few more photos (because I am a photographer, you know).

When you absolutely run out of shit to do and they're tired of hangman, have them draw monkeys on the blackboard. They love monkeys. Monkey, teach-ah! MONKEY!



I came across a massive gathering of teenage girls around the music store where I had been hoping to buy some new headphones in Nampo-dong earlier in the week. Seems a member of the boyband, SS501, was paying a visit to his loyal fans in Busan. I took a few snapshots, hoping to see a live Korean rock star. No dice. All I got was shots of frantic women and bored security policemen.





Street photography is just more fun in Busan. For one thing, there are people. Hattiesburg never really had many people out on the street, and the ones who were there didn't care to be photographed (and were probably armed). All I have to worry about here are garish Christian Dior busstop billboards. No biggie.



Light. For all you photography newbies out there, that's all that really matters. The rest will come.



Peace. --Notes