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Around six A.M. two Mondays ago I was roused from my sleep by a tremendous but sublime sound seemingly coming from everywhere at once. Korea's soccer team had just scored the tying goal against France with only a handful of minutes left on the clock and the people of Dongsamjugong apartments were on their feet in front of their TVs, yelling...

...DAE-HAN-MIN-GO!!! DAE-HAN-MIND-GO!!! DAE-HAN-MIN-GO!!!

I fell back asleep.

The World Cup. Never has it had much impact on my life...That is until I traveled outside of the United States...

Once every four years the world comes together in peace to kick a round plastic ball back and forth. Obscure nations like Togo pop out of the woodwork to engage major world players like France in 'The Beautiful Game.' As you well know, the event is more than just a contest between soccer's finest athletes. The World Cup is a geopolitical forum of sorts where the recently oppressed can do battle with their oppressors, the smallest of nations can reign over the giants, and obscure countries can showcase their forgotten or underrepresented cultures.

When I think of the World Cup, I think of England versus Argentina in 1986, I think of Nigeria versus Spain in 1998, and most recently I think of Korea in 2002. That year Korea and Japan co-hosted the sporting event. Japan made it to the final 16, a respectable finish. Korea, on the other hand, stunned the world (and in some measure its own people) with a tremendous fourth-place finish.

As far as my own country is concerned, soccer is a growing, but still undernourished, seed in American culture. Actually, I find the American attitude towards soccer painfully reflective of our isolated national character and snobbish relationship to the rest of the planet. Nothing serves to highlight the emotional and social disconnect between the United States and the rest of the world quite like soccer. The most powerful nation on the planet couldn't even make Croatia blink as the smaller nation nailed it to the wall, three to zilch.

According to my coworkers, until the 2002 World Cup, soccer took a back seat to baseball and basketball in Korea. As the World Cup got under way in Germany a few weeks ago, someone new to Korea would think quite the opposite. Everyone was dressed in red. Se-yeon and Ji-Hyun came to class every day wearing oversized red T-shirts with red and black devil's horns on their heads. Se-yeon's lit up like Christmas tree lights. Ji-hyun's were longer. Much to the detriment of my sanity, the two girls routinely engaged in spirited "dae-han-min-go" yelling-contests.

The children were electrified by the event, full of energy, and I knew from the outset that I would need to find a channel for that energy or risk being overwhelmed by it. All they wanted to talk about in Advanced Three and Advanced Four were penalty kicks, teams, the new coach and the Korean athletes.

I structured a number of our activities around the World Cup. In 6A, which was studying the past tense, I crafted a writing exercise called "play-by-play." I drew a soccer field on the board and diagramed the movements of the soccer players from both teams during a critical play. I then numbered the play from 1 to 5. In groups of two, the children wrote what happened in each play. They were the announcers. They used new verbs like dribble, tackle, shoot and defend, and lots of new, soccer-oriented nouns. The spatial nature of sports also forces the students to think about and correctly use prepositions. While they worked, I walked around, checked their work, and when they were finished I had them present to the class.

"Play-by-play" was a good activity. The students liked talking about their favorite players. However, my opus this past two weeks has been a game called "Shootout." In Shootout, I write a bunch of verbs on the board, separated by lines like a goal net. I write the names "Korea" and "France" on the board and tell the students that the score is tied, the overtime period is over and the game must be determined by a shootout. One student from France serves as a goal keeper and one student from Korea serves as a shooter. The shooter throws the Sticker Chicken at the board, and if the keeper doesn't block the shot, the shooter must make a correctly-conjugated sentence with the word he hit. If he makes a correct sentence, it's a point. If he fumbles the words or miss-conjugates the verb, the goal keeper has a chance to "block his shot" and make a correct sentence. Then they switch.

This game was the "perfect storm" of teaching English. It combined the children's love for throwing things at one another with their nationalistic fervor for soccer into one high-energy, high-competition game. What's more, it was a highly malleable game, open to many different lessons. There was only one problem: Mrs. Nam hated it.

She lectured me on playing too many games last week. She said that the children were starting to expect games all the time, even in their Korean classes. In short, it felt like she was asking me to chant all the time.

I extended my contract into mid-October so I could pay for a journey to Argentina. My friend Faith has lived in Argentina for a few years, and thus I can tour this beautiful country on the cheap. So look for SoKoNotes to become El Notes in October! Just kidding. It's going to be SoKoNotes until the day I step off the airplane at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport November 2nd.

After many requests, I've decided to bring back the Korean Files. I had no idea so many of you enjoyed the desecration of the English language that much! Helping things is the approach of summer. The warmer weather means more T-shirts. More T-shirts means more Konglish. Lots more. What I'm saying is that I have plenty to work with these days. These two statements are from students' T-shirts.

"We Hope, We Will Camp All Friends" (Nurse! I need a preposition, stat!!!)

"Spoon Athletics" (The brand of choice among high-performance gluttons the world over)

Ah, and here are a few photos from the last few weeks. The aperture-actuation arm (say that five times fast) on my Nikon D100 keeps getting stuck and ruining my photos. I've got to take it to get fixed on Monday, so don't expect any photos for at least one update. These are the last ones for a couple weeks.

It must be hard to be a taxi driver here. They drive so fast that their radiator grills and windshields must pick up bugs like crazy. Their like Busan's four-wheeled fly-swatters. Must be hard to keep that finish shinin.'



Meet the most wonderful person I have met in Busan: Hyun-jeong. I cannot express to you how happy I am when we are together. She is a very thoughtful, creative person, and I learn so much from her every day. Case in point: We went to the BEXCO center a few weekends back to see the International Tea Festival. Performing traditional Inca dances on the tarmac outside the hulking glass and steel monolith were a trio of Ecuadorian men. Hyun-jeong, who majored in Spanish and who spent a month living with a hispanic family in Sacramento, California, struck up a conversation with one of them.

Other people just stuck camera-phones in the Ecuadorian's face. I guess to them, he was nothing more than a foreign curiosity, like an exotic animal. It was a striking contrast to Hyun-jeong, who was engaged and interested in the man, his home and his history, making an effort to see and know the human being behind the strange traditional clothes and face-paint. I was really impressed. Here is a photo I took of her in the Busan History Museum.



Like many Koreans, Hyun-jeong is a fierce defender of her country's history and image. She is up on all of the major issues, from the American military presence to the slow drifting apart of North and South Korea. She has a lot of interesting insights into these issues and she has managed to turn my fledgling knowledge on its head from time to time. Take for example Park, Jeong-hee, the seminal figure in South Korea's Phoenix-like rise from the ashes of the Korean War.

In college, my Asian-American literature class briefly touched on Korean history when were reading books such as "Comfort Woman," a book about the atrocious sexual subjugation of Korean women by the Japanese army during World War II. My teacher, a plump feminist with a penchant for sad stories, described Park, Jeong-hee as the "JFK of Korea." At the time, I just swallowed that information like I swallowed most of what was taught in University as truth and didn't give it any more thought.

Last winter I gave my high school students the job of researching and then making a presentation on one person in Korean history. One student picked Park, Jeong-hee. In the course of the project, this student reported that Park, Jeong-hee helped secure the loans and laws needed for robust economic growth to take off, and is credited with providing the conditions necessary for companies like Hyundai and Samsung to get their start. He also was assassinated.

Wait? What? Why would anyone assassinate someone who did so much good for their country? The student reported that Park also forgave the Japanese their reparations debt to Korea in exchange for normalized diplomatic relations. Oh, I see, I said and left it at that. Koreans generally hate Japan the country, and with ample reason.

However, the story goes deeper than that, and I had no idea until Hyun-jeong gave me an article on Park, Jeong-hee. Though born into poverty, Park, Jeong-hee was a savvy politician from the beginning. When he was born, Japan was the colonial ruler of Korea, and they were working hard to erase everything "Korea" from the face of the planet. They forbade the use of Hangukmal (the language), gave everyone Japanese names and forced them to practice the Shinto religion. Like I said, during the war they kidnapped and shipped thousands of Korean women into the Japanese army's prostitution corps.

Park thought he saw which way the wind was blowing during the war, incorrectly pinned the Japanese as the eventual winners, and joined the military. He was trained in Japanese Mongolia and quickly rose through the ranks to officer status in the air corp within just a few years. However, when the Japanese eventually lost the war to the American military, Park was quick to shed his Japanese name and rank and he reentered Korea in secret.

In the following years, Park vanished into the fog of postwar Korea. He found work as a spy for the fledgling Korean secret police, and following the Korean War, he staged a successful coup and took power. Park was deeply in love with Japanese culture. It is rumored that he fancied himself a samurai and enjoyed Japanese geisha and music. When he forgave the Japanese their debt, he also confiscated the money the Japanese had paid to Korean war veterans and plowed it into Korea's infrastructure.

In the final years of his "democratic dictatorship," Park's corrupt regime stole billions from their taxpayers, controlled elections, skimmed off the top line from the developing corporations and ran up huge debts to American and Japanese banks which the Korean people are still paying back at obscene interest rates to this day. Like all politicians, Park was a mix of good and bad, I just had no idea how much 'bad' was involved. The man might have done some good for Korea, but he was certainly no JFK.

As I just mentioned, we went to BEXCO to see the International Tea Festival. It was Sunday, so the festival was winding down by the time we got there. Vendors from across the country and China manned booths, letting people sample their steaming green or yellow teas. When I drink green tea, the flavor is like the pungent taste of the earth itself, spiced with a raw, leafy, slightly bitter aftertaste.

The women serving the tea dressed in colorful Hanbok and carefully served their wares in handmade fired-clay cups. From preparation to the first sip, everything about green tea screams, "healthy."



Some of the vendors at the festival were artisans. One woman made clay statues of Koreans engaged in daily life. Another person painted beautiful watercolor-style portraits in the black India-ink of traditional Korean writing on long white tapestries.



Well, I’m done for now. I hope you enjoyed this segment of SoKoNotes. Next weekend my sister Sara comes to visit. She is an amazing person, and I can’t wait to see her. Also, like I said, the culture shock will be interesting to document. She doesn’t have any idea how different Korea and Japan really are. Peace. --Notes

Hey you, pull your head away from the World Cup for one minute: SoKoNotes is back!



It's been almost a month since last I updated the blog. I apologize. Much has transpired in the interim, including a hiking trip with ESS, a trip to Japan to visit my sister, and the beginning of the World Cup.

Why has it been so long since my last update? Why can't I just sit down and jot a few notes down once a week? I know so many blogs where the owner starts them with good intentions and ambitious updating goals, but over time the updates start to fall off, if not stop completely.

There are many factors that contribute to an intermittent blog. It takes a lot of time to sit down, organize one's thoughts into a coherent document, not to mention toning, uploading and organizing the photos. Beyond the commitment of time and energy lies the problem of content. Perhaps for you, SoKoNotes remains a source of interesting anecdotal reporting on another part of the world. Perhaps there is still a sense of wonder and excitement. I remember feeling that, too. In the first half of the year it was strong.

However, the feelings of "new and exciting" have naturally subsided over time, giving way to routine and the personal patterns into which I think all people settle over time. These contented patterns are subtle assassins. They smother creativity, strangle the desire to explore new places and blindfold the clear eyes one needs to see the world in fresh new ways. To me, a routine is a kind of social entropy, a tendency for people to find the easiest, most hassle-free path through life like water finds the easiest route down a mountainside.

Perhaps its because life just feels too big. Perhaps its because there is simply too much to explore and know (and this overwhelms people). Perhaps it just makes more logical sense to walk the quickest way to the busstop day-in and day-out. But what did I not see this morning? What did I miss by going home the same way every night for two months? Worse yet, what child have I left behind as I fine-tune my lesson plans to fit the majority of the class? Of the troubled students, the ones with learning disabilities or behavior problems, which of these children are lagging as I trim back the energy I once used to help them?

I fight against these entropic enemies by willingly changing patterns, trying new things, and hanging out with new people. In my classes I teach from different angles, I talk to Gavin about his ideas, and I keep an ear open to the children. Every week I sit down and assess each class in my notebook, identify problems, narrow down what worked and with whom and customize my next lesson to that specific group of children. I even bring a little creativity to bear on the deadly routines themselves, such as here, right now, in this blog. I explore them and think about them.

But like any fight against entropy, all of this requires a lot of energy.

I find the slow slip into routine to be the strangest, most eye-opening part of this chapter in my life. It gives me pause and makes me postulate that, given enough time, a person could get used to any sudden change in life, even those as radical as prison time or floating adrift in a life raft for months. That's the positive side of routine, I guess. One the other hand, how much of my life could have been more interesting if I had just answered that email from someone I just met, walked that blue-blazed trail, or opened my mind to some strange, radical new idea. My days in Korea have become as comfortable as any I lived in the States. There are still serious challenges that I haven't properly addressed, such as the language barrier, and the seed of homesickness has blossomed and grown around my soul like an ivy creeping up the trunk of a tree. But these are problems that have a clear solution: Go home.

Home.

last week I explained the difference between the words "home" and "house" to Advanced Three. A house is a structure, I explained, like an apartment building or a wood hut. A home is where you live. To help clarify the distinction, I had two students; one who lived in a house and one who lived in an apartment, stand up. I pointed to one and said, "Her home is an apartment building" and "his home is a house."

"Teacher, where is your home?" Jin-soo asked.

"I live in Dongsamjugong apartments," I replied. Jin-soo paused, as if confused, and looked around at the other students, who seemed to know where he was going with the question and remained quite. He cocked his head at me as if about to speak, but Han-sol beat him to the punch.

"Teacher, is your home America?" Han-sol shot from off to my right, picking up and echoing Jin-soo's line of reason. I think she meant to ask, "teacher, isn't your home in America?" But her level of English isn't quite up to affirmative questions asked in the negative form of the verb. I knew what she meant. My heart seized and thoughts of my parents, my sister and my friends flashed across my mind. I smiled.

"Yes," I said. Ju-young, the tallest girl in the class, piped up.

"Do you miss your family?" She asked.

"Yes," I again replied, my voice getting softer. The line of questioning broke off, but I could tell something had been confirmed in the students' minds. They looked at one another in silence. There was nothing malicious in their inquiry, but rather curiosity, even a little sympathy. These children were instinctively aware of the outward signs of homesickness, and it seemed to fascinate them. They had obviously seen it before, perhaps in other native speakers before me.

I don't think people give children enough credit. I think they have senses that adults have lost or neglected. They recognize homesickness when they see it.

Home. Nine months in Korea have forced me to redefine that term. At one time 'home' was where my family lived, but as the years have gone by, 'home' has increasingly become wherever I happened to live, family or no. I guess that's the way it goes as you age. Like I said, I miss them, but there is a growing disconnect between missing them and missing 'home.' Perhaps I should redefine "homesickness" as "missing my folks."

In a way, the correct question to ask myself is, "what is the home I will build for myself?" Who will live there with me? I've built quite a nice life here in Busan. I have friends, a good job and all the comforts of modern life added to the opportunity to explore and know a new culture. I joke with Dave that it would take an act of God to keep me here another year, but now I'm not so sure. Korea could be a part of my "home."

The key to making Korea "home" versus just 'that place I happen live' is learning the language. Nothing contributes more to the gulf separating me from the society around me than the silence of words I don't understand. I think when people can't communicate with each other a wall goes up between them and they instinctually distrust one another. It is horribly easy to dehumanize people when the words coming out of their mouth sounds like so much noise.

I think this is really dangerous, and when I come across foreigners complaining about Korea and its customs, I notice a striking correlation between the strength of their bitterness and how much Hangul they speak: Almost none. I have my share of complaints, too, but I put a healthy dose of the blame for those problems on my own misunderstanding of the culture. People miss out on a lot of the magic and knowledge a different society can impart when people hold that society at arms' length. I will be the first to admit that I haven't studied or practiced Hangul as much as I should, but when I do take the time to use what I have learned, I reap some rewards.

Recently, my friend Hyun-jeong sent me a poem she had written in Korean. She had gone to trouble of translating it into English for me, I liked it a lot, and I told her so in an email. I wondered aloud how the poem must be different for people fluent in Hangul, and today she told me why. The poem's title is "Elegy," and I will only give you the first two lines in both English and Romanized Hangul. I'd give you more, but I don't want to embarrass my friend.


Korean: Bee-ga
English: Elegy

Korean: Nay-reen-da
English: Is falling down

An elegy is a poem or song of mourning for someone or something lost. I took these two lines to mean she had lost someone and she was falling down into sadness. However, for a native Korean speaker, the meaning was quite different.

The word "bee" in Korean means "rain." "Ga" is the subject marker. However, if you stick them together they make the word "Bee-ga," which means, "Elegy." The word "Nay-reen-da" is a verb meaning "coming down." So literally, the elegy was falling like the rain. The lines are a metaphor, a play on the word for rain and the word for elegy, built into the structure of the words themselves. That's much more sophisticated than the English translation implies, and I completely missed it.

Mr. Kim took the ESS Best Jr. middle school students on an excursion into the mountains. We staffers came along to make sure nobody got eaten by a bear. At seven in the morning some ninety students, Gavin, Dave, all of the Korean teachers and myself converged on the PNU subway stop and began hiking up mighty Kumjangsan, the long ridge north of the city that runs all the way to Beomosa temple.

The girls and boys found their friends, played and chatted with one children from similar social standing until Mr. Kim reshuffled the social deck along academic lines with colored flags denoting class.



Everyone brought a hat and some kids brought sunscreen.



Mr. Yi helped organize the children into an organized mass so they could cross the busy street.



The trail was beautiful, lined in pine trees, mountain laurel (not unlike the laurel in the Appalachians) and big, contented boulders. The way was not so steep until the trail reached the top of the mountain's shoulder. It then pulled back and launched up the steep sides of the ridge.



As Gavin likes to joke, the trails are so steep it's as if they were built by putting a garden hose at the top of the mountain, finding how the water reached the bottom, blazing it and calling it a trail. The Best 2nd and 3 rd-year students went ahead to scout routes and help people, like Ms. Ha (pictured below), over obstacles.



Still, the kids did really well. A few struggled, but by the time they reached the summit, they were just as happy as ever, sitting in the sun and eating candy.



We hiked down to the bottom and regrouped at a campsite for lunch.



Kumjangsan is a major player in the Korean Buddhist tradition, and there was a beautiful gate near the campsite through which we could go down to the restroom by the parking lot.







I had to give another impromptu speech and then we ate lunch. Mr. Kim spoke at length, and introduced some former ESS students who attended the hike with us. Following the hike, Dave, Gavin and I went to Burger King and wolfed down some good old-fashioned junk food.

The next weekend I visited my sister in Japan. Mr. Yi reserved my hotel room and Soo-hoo, my banker at Pusan Bank, got me a cheap ferry ticket courtesy of his girlfriend, who worked at the terminal. For $200 I was going to spend two days and one night in Fukuoka, Japan.

My sister, Sara, was in Fukuoka putting the finishing touches on a minor in Japanese, part of her six-year, duel-degree ordeal as an undergrad at the Georgia Institute of Technology, one of the toughest tech and science schools in the States. My sister is one of my best friends. We've got along famously since we were little, and she is a constant source of love, insight and advice that none but my parents can match. She's also a lot of fun to be around. I love my sister.

I boarded the high-speed KoBee ferry Saturday morning. The Kobee is a hydrofoil, meaning it lowers big wings into the water, turns on a jet-engine, and literally "flies" through the water at sixty to seventy miles-per-hour. We covered the 200 miles between Busan and Fukuoka in three hours. The wings cut through the water like they would have cut through the air. I watched as giant swells rolled towards the ship, but felt nothing at all as the wings sliced effortlessly through them.

I got a great shot of Young-do as the ferry sped away from Busan. That is my apartment complex on the top right under the clouds.



As the hydrofoil approached Fukuoka harbor, suddenly things I took for granted about Japan became very relevant. Holy shit, I thought, my country was at war with this country once. We dropped the only two nuclear weapons ever used in combat on Japan. I reviewed my scant knowledge of Japanese and realized that I only knew two words: "Thank you" and "delicious."

I met my sister and her friend Christ at the foot of my hotel, the Court Clio. They walked me back the way I had come through Hakada station, past the Shinkansen Bullet Train terminal, and down into the subway. Transportation is more expensive in Japan. A simple eight-stop trip to downtown Fukuoka cost $2.50. An all day pass on the train? $6. The bus ride from the ferry terminal to Hakata station? $2.50. Taxis? Don't ask, it'll scare you.

Sara, Chris and I went to lunch with four former members of the program who were on vacation as well as Sara's advisors. One of them, Sensei Naki, had attended my alma mater, the University of Georgia, and we reminisced on Athens. She was part of a band while studying there. She took us to a sushi restaurant with big tanks of fish and crustaceans in the middle of it.

The food was exquisite, both in taste and in price, though $17 for a lunch like we ate is actually pretty cheap, I was told. The table across from us ordered a fish, and when it arrived, sliced thin and pinned to the plate with a wooden stick, I noticed that the tail was still twitching as the life ebbed from it's expertly-prepared flesh. I imagined watching something eat slices of me as my conscienceness slowly fell away into darkness.

Hunter, one of Sara's friends, spent the better part of a half-hour telling me about other, less disturbing, aspects of Japanese cuisine, such as the junk food.

"You can't be told about Japanese junk food," he said. "You must try it."

I got my chance later that night when we went out for Japanese-style pizza (pronounce it with no "t" sound) and "Yakisoba," which looked liked noodle-stirfried with Rice Krispies and was outstanding.

That night we went out to a Karaoke bar. Sara and the others sang a wide variety of Japanese pop songs, and a few songs that made no sense at all, but were fun to sing. They were a fun group of people, and I liked how they were so positive about Japan. One of them, Chris, is going to work there for six months following the end of the program in July.

Throughout the journey, I couldn't help but compare Korea to Japan. Given how close the countries are geographically and how contentious their relationship is, was, and probably will be for a long time to come, I couldn't help myself. Structurally, there were many similarities. The sidewalks had "blind walks" in them: braille for feet. People rode bikes and scooters everywhere.



Everyone was very friendly, just like in Korea.



However, there were fewer people who could speak English to me in Fukuoka than in Korea, which frankly surprised me. I figured Japan, with it's closer ties to The States, would have had a stronger English presence. I was wrong, and if it hadn't been for my sister, I would have been in a trouble. She speaks very good Japanese, and could do things in the language I can't do in Korean, such as get directions and express her opinion. She and Christ were constantly talking to each other in Japanese.

Japan is by and large the cleanest place I have ever visited. There is no weird smell. There is no trash on the streets. The buildings are taller and their architecture is very consistent. The cars all drive on the left side of the road, which is strange, but they drive slowly and obey the traffic lights. What's more, the bus drivers in Japan are very polite, as well. All in all, however, Fukuoka reminded me of a big, cosmopolitan American city like New York or San Francisco.









No one stared at me in Japan. In Korea, people are constantly staring at me like they've neverr seen an American in their whole life. Not Japan. There doesn't seem to be anything compelling about white people in Japan. That's fine with me.



There were bums everywhere in Japan, setting up homes made of cardboard in Hakata Station. I even saw one plugging in a cell phone to charge as I walked back to my hotel Saturday night.

It was good to see my sister in such high spirits. We had fun, and I can't wait for July 8th when she comes to Korea for a week. Can anyone say "culture shock?" Anyway, I've written enough. I'll keep you guys up to date as much as possible the next few week. I have a new Korean friend, and she is teaching me all about the culture, history and beliefs in Korea. I think she'll bring a fresh perspective to SoKoNotes. Until next time! Peace. --Notes