One day last week, while I walked to the bus stop to go explore the city some more, two boys walked past me carrying a soccer ball. When they arrived at the top of the little rise leading to my apartment building, the one carrying the ball set his burden down and then both boys raced at top speed for the end of the sidewalk thirty or forty feet down the hill. The ball followed slowly at first, like a puppy unsure of itself after the sudden disappearance of its master, and then picked up speed as gravity took hold and its potential energy became kinetic. When it reached the bottom of the hill one of the boys kicked the ball back up the hill with a gleeful laugh that he gladly shared with his friend.

I had to smile as I remembered a time long ago when all the joy in the world was to kick a ball up a hill with my friend. The memory is old, and to have it resurface and reconnect with my life now, here, is surreal but hardly unusual. It's been happening to me a lot the last few months.

In some measure, memory is a tool your mind uses to craft your behavior in all of life's social situations. When you go into a new social situation, your mind draws on similar events from your past for guidance. While walking the path of a teacher I have encountered those old memories and reconnected with those old joys in part because they are the only experiences I have to fall back on when I need to understand the children in my classroom. I'm being taught to be a teacher by my inner child.

I'm really enjoying teaching. It's strange, because a year ago children were a complete mystery to me. I would go on assignment for the newspaper to photograph them at a school, and I would look at the teachers and think, "wow, how in the hell to they hang with ten-year-olds all day and maintain their sanity?" But there'd they be in my viewfinder, smiling and laughing with their charges like they were ten years old, too. I understand that now.

Being around children, particularly children as carefree and eager to learn as Korean fourth-graders (my personal favorites), is good for the soul. Advanced One is my favorite class. When I come prepared to teach, they're always ready to learn, and when I want to goof off and be silly, they are equally equipped and happy to oblige.

Every Friday after we've read the hopelessly inadequate reading assignment, I give them a word search puzzle as a treat. Most of them sniff out and circle all the words within minutes. To the winners go the stickers, and even to some of the losers I give stickers (which they redeem for pencils, rulers, and other treats from Mr. Kim). Then we goof off for the last ten minutes of class.

Last Friday we had a wrestler-impersonation contest. The whole class calls me "Mr. Jones Cena," mixing up my name with the W.W.E wrestler, Jon Cena. I took it upon myself to find out who this man was, his moves and his sound bytes, and I started out the contest with my best impression of the actor.

"Hey! You CAN'T see Me!!!" I growled at the class with a steely look fixed in my eyes and flexed my imaginary biceps. The class roared with laughter and Young-jin jumped out of his chair and stood in front of me in a square-step wrestler's stance, his pudgy Korean hands ready to deliver a Bautista Bomb, 6-1-9 or Pile-Driver.

"NO, fool!" He shouted in perfectly enunciated English. "You Can't see ME!" And he ran at me, head lowered. I easily scooped Young-jin up and spun around with him on my shoulders, both of us yelling our heads off and laughing. The class went bonkers, clapping and rooting for Young-jin.

* * *

I strive to rise to the challenge of making learning fun for the kids. I don't always achieve my goals. I'm working against a number of obstacles. First of all, the best I can do with English is speak it. As Gavin pointed out a few nights ago over dinner, we really don't really have a complete academic background in the language we speak fluently. This only becomes a problem when the children start asking 'why.'

Strangely, that doesn't happen much. Since they don't really have to worry about flunking out of ESS, I guess most of the children take what they get and don't worry about what they're missing. Every now and then one of the few students who are truly invested in learning English will ask good, pointed questions.

While teaching 3E1 about the past tense utilizing an impromptu dialogue between me and an imaginary taxi driver, a student named Yeo-jin asked me why the dialogue was in the present tense while the narration was in the past tense. I cocked an eyebrow and stared at the blackboard, wondering if I had made a mistake. The sentence she was talking about was as follows:

--Mr. Jones stepped into the taxi. "Take me to Gimhae airport at once, driver!" he said.--

Yeo-jin pointed at the word 'said,' and then she indicated the jump from 'stepped' to 'take,' which according to the rules laid out in their book is incorrect.

"Teacher, the sentence has a past tense and a present tense verb," she calmly pointed out. The other students, normally only half-interested in my lessons, detected the smell of blood in the air and woke from their lethargy to see which way the wind was blowing. The balance of power was in limbo. I knew the answer was simple. I knew there was a clear, concise reason for the inexplicable shift in verb tense and I knew it had to do with the grammatical structure of dialogue. But the glaring spotlight Yeo-jin turned on me cast my supposedly solid grasp of English into a spurious shadow. I had no answer for her.

"I'm sorry, Yeo-jin," I said calmly. "I don't know why." Yeo-jin nodded thoughtfully and for a minute teacher and student regarded each other in the new light of common understanding. I am not qualified to teach english, and she knows it, but in that prolonged exchange I detected a degree of understanding. Something was confirmed for her at that moment, I could tell. Yeo-jin is one of the brightest students in the school. She's been here for years. I am positive she knows who the pieces in this game are and how they are moved. There was no malice or disrespect in her countenance. She just wanted an answer.

It galls me how much better prepared and trained the Korean teachers are. The two newest teachers at ESS, a perky Korean named Na-ri and a small woman whose name I forget, have spent the entire month of January training under the careful tutelage of Mrs. Nam. The both have degrees in English or English education from Marine University and Na-ri has teaching experience.

As Gavin points out, the Korean teachers normally stay with ESS longer than a year, but the difference in training still stands as a glaring reminder of the native teacher's true purpose in this business: Window-dressing, promotional material, purchased credibility. "Hey, look! We have real, flesh-in-blood native teachers working at OUR school. We're professional." Even the name, "Native Teacher," connotes a certain degree of unsophisticated, colloquial knowledge of our culture and language, like we're some sort of bushman-guide for the refined Korean explorers of the English language.

Don't say I told you so. I was perfectly sober when I signed that contract. Still, the one day of training I received at the hands of Mike, Julie and Dennis was a joke, the punch line being my first day of class the following Monday. After a while I realized how simple this lack of expectation made my job. I got the joke, so to speak, and I had to laugh. However, the laughing stops whenever a student like Yeo-jin asks me a question and I can't give a strait answer.

* * *

The new room given over the teachers is working out well. It's big, warm, and outfitted with snazzy new lockers that help control the clutter of a dozen people working there at once. Mrs. Nam chose Tuesday and Wednesday nights to organize the mountains of books at the foot of her desk. I shoveled down kimbop (Korean ham-and-cheese-and-vegetable sushi) between helping Gavin put the books to be thrown away in a giant box. Gavin set aside the Sesame Street books.

"You don't just throw away Sesame Street," he stated and stacked the precious relics from both our childhoods on his desk.

Over dinner I spoke my first complete sentence in Korean. "I eat dokpokki," I slowly said. The Koreans cheered me on and I felt a little like one of my 1-2P students when they nail a word like "red."

* * *

A child named Rick in Special Class played a practical joke on me. Special Class is a group of children who for whatever reason lived in English speaking countries for an extended period of time and their parents want them to retain the conversational skills they naturally formed while abroad. They aren't in the conventional learning tract that the other children follow over a course of years. First of all, some of them speak better English than a few of the Korean teachers who would instruct them. We focus on conversation and tougher subjects like social studies and science.

So I afford them more perks than the other children. I would never let a child in 4B go piss in the middle of class on the rationale that if they can't even put together the four words " I need to go pee," in the first place, they shouldn't miss a minute of class. However, when Rick (Pil-su) in Special Class calmly and naturally asked me to go piss when I walked into class Monday, I said sure. I had to piss, too, so we all made a small field trip out of the event. Everybody got five minutes to go piss and grab a cup of water.

I sidled up to the urinal and started to piss just as Rick was washing his hands. He walked out the door and left it wide open, leaving me in plain sight of anyone in the lobby.

"Hey, Rick, close the door, please!" I yelled after him. I heard a giggle come from behind the door that I took to be Rick and Gyeong-gu, his partner in crime. "Rick! Close that door!" I yelled again. Still nothing. The door was far out of reach and for a good minute or two my urination was public spectacle for all the world to see. After I washed my hands Rick and I had a little conference on his manners.

* * *

On to the photos! I must admit that I was sort of slack about taking photos this week because I have been smitten with my new video camcorder. I am currently involved in a time-lapse project centered around the subway system in the style of the movie Baraka. It's not an original idea, but it's fun and it gives me experience to employ in future creative explorations of the moving photo. Here's what I got.

There was a cold snap on the way this past Sunday, so I used the last day of unusually warm weather - Saturday - and drove around the city on my bicycle. Korea has taught me to be an incredibly defensive driver. There's nothing quite like watching a ten-ton city bus veer across four lanes of traffic without regard to anyone else on the road to sober a man up. I ended up at the cultural center near the UN cemetery.

In one of the buildings, auditions for some sort of music show were being held. Musicians from across the city sat in the auditorium and strummed their songs on the silent strings of electric guitars while others took the stage and showed off their skills. Their music had a classic rock sound despite the musicians being dressed like indy or punk rockers. "Is that a Boston or a Chicago tune?" I would think to myself as they played. But the music was original. Only the style had been pilfered.



Some of the singers should have studied more.



Their sound technicians were top-notch. The music was live, but it had a highly-finished quality to it.





Practice, practice, practice. Eat kimchi.



The cultural center itself was an architectural dreamland, with many levels covered in manicured gardens framed by benches and lightposts. If it had been warmer, I would have stopped and read my book for a spell.



From it's perch at the top of a hill, the cultural center sported a commanding view of the mountains around Busan, too.



Naturally, the place was overrun with families out for a little quality time and fresh air. This child was climbing around on the structure and got in a little over his head. Luckily, that's why God created parents.



A nice pattern in the courtyard presented an attractive background for a Stephen 'walking guy' photo.



Part of the beautifully-patterned courtyard was adorned with these giant concrete sculptures in the shape of, well, big piles of shit. Strangely, Gavin came across a different concrete statue on the other side of the city that looked like a big naked ass crapping right in front of an office building. Maybe at night...



Don't give me no 'annyong haseyo.' Shut your big American hole and buy my vegetables. Now.



Just so you had to read through my ENTIRE blog and appreciate the melodious sound of my voice, I put the Korean files at the end of the blog.

"Pinkming: You share all my joy and sorrow...My other half..." (...of this sentence I still cannot locate. Pencilcase)

"Tranemprise" (This is the name of a rip-off Transformers toy that I saw in a junk store by my house on Young-do. I don't know what they were trying to accomplish with this Frankensteinian English name)

Alright, that's it for the gnus...Now for the weather. Cold, dry, with a forty-percent chance of something perspective-altering happening. Peace. --Notes

OK, everybody is going to have to wait a day for the next installment of SoKoNotes. I apologize. I'll update tomorrow night when I have more time to talk. Here's a photograph to wet your appetite. --Notes

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

I think I'm going to lead with photographs today to get the ole' creative juices flowing. Since we started the Winter vacation schedule and I'm getting up at the asscrack of dawn to plan my classes, energy is at a premium these days. The following is a few piece of street photography I picked up on my travels around Busan.

This shot was taken at Holly's, the Korean coffee shop that does a fair imitation of Starbucks: Corporate, sterile, decorated in that squared-off polished wood and plastic style so familiar to those who frequent major corporate coffee venues. The only difference: They take FOREVER to make an espresso...But they do it right.



Old guy. Bus. Light. Point, focus...Ker-flop.



Ker-flop.



Ker-flop.



Damn, where is this bus, anyway? Hey. Weird light. Shadows. Ker-flop.



Drunk guy, 10 o'clock high. Ker-flop.



I'm not taking photographs. I'm ker-flopping! I'm a ker-floptographer! OK, maybe I should think this one through a little more. Yes, this girl in the next photo is brushing her teeth in the open sewer outside her clothing store. Wanna kiss?



We haven't had rain in weeks and weeks. Sometimes the sky will cloud up in the morning, but it always burns off by mid-day, replaced with a brown stain on the horizon in all directions. Our apartment fills with countless inexplicable dustbunnies that I assume is this thick particulate pollution coming to rest on our floors. Gavin madly sweeps them up day after day while I practice the zen-art of denial.

God knows what is happening to my lungs. For the past few weeks I've had this dry, hacking cough off and on. It never gets bad enough to warrant a doctor, but just reminds me that I am living in a major city. What's worse, our water is saturated with sulphur. A fart smell fills the apartment when we take a shower and permeates our clothes. Oh, and Gavin pointed out that there could possibly be lead in the water. For a country that doesn't give a rat's ass about intellectual property rights, water purity in old run-down apartments like Dongsamjugong might not be a priority. Speaking of priorities, that reminds me: The Korean files!

"Ubiquitous Life Partner," Inexplicably everywhere! Slogan, KT telecom corporation.

"Roading, wrestling, and Writing!" Roading? I'll take 'can't possibly be a verb' for 200, Alex. Sweater.

"If you can avoid pain, enjoy it." As for the rest of us...Pencil case.

"We make dreams of hope.
We wish that all those hopes
come true and we believe
those hopes will make world
beautiful design by Imnibus."

More vaguly egotistical, megalomaniacal blabbering by the Omnibus Corporation. Hmmmm...Pencil case.

Gavin and I attended the wedding of one of our co-workers, Su-jin, over the weekend. I was excited. This was my chance to experience Korean culture up close. My imagination went wild on the bus ride to the conference center (conference center?) where she was to be wed. What where the Korean traditions surrounding the marriage of a man and a woman? What sort of insight would I gain into their culture? I bristled with journalistic gadgetry as I stepped into the conference center: A camera hung around my neck, my pockets bulged with lenses, and my headphone mic cord disappeared somewhere into the depths of my jacket. The video camera waited on standby in my bag and my notepad bulged in my back pocket. This was going to be great!

Go figure: The wedding was mostly western in style and execution. Su-jin wore a white wedding dress. Her father walked her down the aisle.



Her husband led the procession. He wore this garish silver and white tux with white gloves and a big, happy smile that just wouldn't go away.



Su-jin made a beautiful bride.



Her fellow Korean teachers were especially happy for her. Many of them, such as Ji-hyeon (front) and Soo-hee (wiping a tear away), were married within the past year or two, and Ji-hyeon admitted a certain amount of girlish longing to 'be in that dress again.'



I saw many of my students, from 2E2 and 3E1, and even a few from the high school classes, including Jae-joon.



In true Korean fashion, there was a host of recording devices (besides mine) rolling the whole time. Unlike me, the official documentarians made no effort to be discreet. The best among them hid behind the plants between the preacher and the couple.



Following the long, unintelligable speech by her father's friend, Su-jin and her husband bowed to their parents.



Then the fun began. Su-jin is well loved by the 2nd grade middle-schoolers. For weeks they secretly met with Su-jin's friend and fellow teacher Sook-hyun and choreographed a song to perform at the wedding. Following the speech by the stand in 'preacher,' they took the stage next to their beloved math teacher, and Sook-hyun stood in the back and choreographed their performance.



Despite her best efforts to remain calm, the normally cool Su-jin began to cry.



Following the song, Su-jin and her husband walked off the stage and down the aisle, he still wearing that high-wattage smile. She looks a little worried for him in this photo.



Unlike the Western wedding that I have witnessed, there was no reception for the hundreds of people in attendance. Su-jin, her husband, their families and close friends went to their own private reception while the rest of us fended for ourselves. The other teachers took Gavin and I to lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Beomil-dong and then Gavin and I went home and prepared for the week ahead.

I tend to use my breaks to break out of ESS for a few minutes. I grab a cup of coffee, a bite to eat, or I just wander around Nampo-dong for a half-hour with my iPod on, lost in thought. One interesting aspect of Nampo-dong is the frenetic nature of the architecture. The history, culture and obsessive-compulsive nature of Korea is all at once visible if you take a moment to look up.

Cross the main road on the south side of the district and enter the International Market and you are confronted with this fascinating aspect of Korean infrastructure. The average intersection is teeming with commercial life. Old, plump, weathered ajummas swathed in rags, down jackets and scarves huddle against the cold while keeping watch over their wares: Endless buckets filled with every conceivable form of sealife wriggling desperatly against inevitability, dried fish hanging like panties from clothes hangers, trinkets, old dusty electric shavers, watches that don't tick, watches that do, clothes, bottles of American liquors covered in a fine dust, and out-of-date skin care products with dubious names. People are everywhere, squeezing past one another while they poke and prod the products; stopping every now and then to haggle over an item, buy a bag of this or a couple of those. There are live deepsea crabs so incredibly large I joked once that instead of a bag the ajumma just gives you a leash and you walk it home. The entire scene is lit with bare incandescent bulbs hanging by their power cords from the rafters of the aforementioned buildings.

Turn and look in any direction and you will see the same scene stretching off down the endless alleyways. It's only when you look up that your senses get turned upside down. In much of the International Market, there aren't any lights on in the upper floors of the buildings. Old neon signs in a 1960's style from businesses long since closed hang off of the old brick walls and block dusty windows where sometimes there can be seen a faint glow from within. Gavin suggested that perhaps the people who work in the market below live in the floors above, and that makes sense.

Much like the road I see is only one layer of concrete poured onto a path originally laid down long before I walked it, the buildings towering above me are the remnants of a series of progressivly more modern facades from a host of varied and different businesses nailed and torn down over the years. The buildings are like actors who don different costumes depending on the production desired by their directors. Each new shop alters it's outside appearence to match the spirit of their products. However, look under and around the plastic and brushed metal of some new shop hawking jeans at 150,000 won each and you will find the same old brick and morter of a buidling built when it would take a Korean years to save up that much money.

I like to wonder about the history of the buildings around me as I take my breaks walking the old streets of the market. I watch as some businesses close and others open in their place. I find new shops and make mental notes of items found and where and for how much. I am beginning to remember faces, and sometimes those faces recognize me.

"Hello, Stee-bu!" says the ajumma as she and her 'wingajumma' run their bustling, steaming dokpokki stand behind ESS as I pass every day. I smile and wave back as I make my way up the crowded alley. Sometimes these long walks will lead to a purchase. I'm never searching for anything more a few minutes of peace, but periodically I come back with a trinket that caught my eye or a stack of blank flash cards or markers. Some days I actually have a mission, an item I need to buy. Oddly, its the days that I try to find something that I come up empty-handed. I was having just such a day a few weeks ago as I scoured the market for gifts for my family.

I was hurrying back to ESS when I noticed a building on my right. It was large, gray; a hideous windowless beast of a structure built to look 'modern,' and failing miserably. It rose a few stories above it's neighbors, as if it were too good for the brick and morter rabble surrounding it, though it was obviously unoccupied. The building's parking garage was still in operation, like the beating heart of a comatose patient, and an attendant stood by to park cars for customers taking their business elsewhere.

The building depressed me. A badly shredded "Grand Opening" sign flapped limply in the stiff wind racing down the alley. All the words were torn away except the "ran" in "Grand." Ran. Ran away. Disappeared. No matter. Eventually there will be another store, another owner, another opening, and depending on his finances, it will be 'grand' too. Store fronts never remain empty for long in Nampo-dong.

Start-up costs and business licenses must be cheap, muses Gavin from time to time. Where there are not storefronts, people sell from carts and wagons and covered tents, some in the middle of the street. In this situation, with so many businesses, who believes their business will succeed where others have failed? I know I mention this all the time, but it never manages to blow my mind. Within days or weeks of a store folding, an identical store opens up with a different name, different facade, but the same wares at the same prices. The owner hangs 'good luck' banners, has a sale and hires pretty girls to wiggle their bodies out front to the sounds of bad techno blaring from a Karaoke machine. Will this draw people in? Will this business work? What magic potion or endangered species has this owner rubbed on himself or his business to please the Gods or tempt fate into smiling upon his adventure in cellphone sales?

Who cares. There are a limitless number of people willing to to roll the dice and win the pot. I guess that's why the old gray building disturbs me: It's unoccupied, and has been for longer than normal. I guess nobody thinks they can make a business work here, and I have my theories as to why. It's tall. It's modern-looking. It's intended to be a multi-level department store but it lives in the middle of a street-market. It doesn't fit in. It's just too new.

OK, I know I talk alot about the market, so I'll try to lay off for a few updates. I hope you liked the photographs and of course, I know some of you only read this for the Korean Files, but that's OK. Maybe I'll put together a compilation when I am done here, a Korean Files wrap-up. Well, until next time. Peace. --Notes