Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Intensives and eclipse

(view of the eclipse from India, stolen from the BBC)

Not only do Korean children have incredibly short summer vacations (about a month), but they still have to go to academy (i.e. what I teach). Some children have to take even more classes at academy to ensure that they have no time to just be children. Our school calls this month of extra classes 'intensives'. This happens every year, but as with the start of the new school year, it caught my bosses completely off guard. We got our schedules on the Thursday morning before the classes started, but we weren't told what the hell we were doing in those classes until after the last class of the day on Friday. And by 'told', I mean that ambiguous minimal instructions were left taped to the white board in the teacher's room. We've been scrambling and screwing up all week, but two of the people here only have a month left, one only has this week, and Will and I have been infected by the contagious senioritis. In addition to all my normal classes, teach reading and writing classes, and a class on Harry Potter, in which they will theoretically read a book a week for four weeks.

On the 22nd we took a break from the intensive classes and escorted the children to the roof to watch the most impressive solar eclipse for decades and the longest lasting one for the next century. I didn't know about it until I got to work (thanks Will!) so I didn't have my camera, but it looked like a waning moon only of course it was much brighter. The children were given sheets of colored plastic, which when folded over a few times provided a little protection for their eyes, so hopefully none of us damaged our vision too badly.



Update: photos taken and collected by Will:


This is what we saw with our colored sheets of plastic:This is the view from the space station:

Monday, July 20, 2009

Incheon

This weekend my company sent me to a conference in Seoul dubbed a 'refresher course,' which is amusing since I was never given any training to begin with so I could hardly be refreshed on it. I ended up being hours late due to confusing the Sincheon subway stop for the Sinchon stop, both of which are on the same subway line but completely on the far side of the city from each other. I realized the growth I've had since a year or two ago I would have been exceedingly frustrated and anxious about being late even though there was nothing I could do to go faster. Instead I was calm and mildly bemused. The second presentation (i.e the one I was actually present for) was dull and highly condescending (the speaker treated us like seven year old just now learning English rather than people whose English was far superior to hers), though it did have a couple useful points. Afterward Alanna and I had dinner at an all you can eat buffet of delicious Indian food, where I ate to the point of being uncomfortably full for the first times in three years (right after I got back from Europe my stomach capacity was greatly diminished but I ate at a barbecue as if I was still a teenager. I am not quite as skinny now, but I certainly don't gorge myself as much as I once did).

We spend Sunday in Incheon, the city of 2.5 million that is Seoul's port and is really part of the greater Seoul area. It is mostly industrial and about what one would expect from a modern port city, but there is a small area that is remarkable for its diversity (by Korean standards) of influences. For starters, it has a great China town: As we finished a brunch of pork and onion dumplings larger than my fist we heard the drums of a parade:The porters were carrying whoever wanted to be at the head of the procession:Up the stairs from the statue was a friendly cat:
Above Chinatown was a hill with a nice overlook of the harbor:
Also on the hill was a monument commemorating 100 years since the amnity treaty between the United States and Korea. It was far more interesting than the usual pillar-with-statues-and-bronze-placard monuments one sees everywhere. People were playing badminton in the shadow of the monument: The park also had a statue dedicated to General Douglas MacArthur on a pedestal stamped with the UN symbol:
It was notable for the contrast between MacArthur's grandfatherly visage and the usual statues of generals in armor mounted on barbed steeds, and because I am fascinated by propaganda, such as that found on the placard below it:

... And until the last battle against the malignant infection of communism has been won may we never forget it was also he who said, "In war, there is no substitute for victory."

The park also contained oddities such as an aviary filled with birds that I think of as commonplace, but which are of course exotic half a world away, including a turkey in full display:
Incheon is most interesting for the varied influences on it. It has a Chinese district that borders upon a Japanese district. Many of the Japanese buildings (banks seemed to have survived particularly well) were designed by Europeans:
Another interesting building was much more modern: it was completely covered in bottlecaps:On the way out of town we stopped back in Chinatown for what I can't help but refer to as pot stickers, since they were delicious pork-stuffed buns that were cooked by literally sticking them to the inside of a large heated ceramic pot.

Update: this post has been supplemented with the addition of Alanna's pictures.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Cultural experience

Tonight Will and I went to see the new Harry Potter movie (It is definitely one of the better ones. This and the third one are the only ones that add anything to the books at all. The acting is a bit flat, but the cinematography, directing, visuals, and editing were all good, and it managed to capture some of the little things that make the HP universe interesting. But I digress), and as is natural after a two and a half hour movie, everyone in the audience needed the restroom afterwards. I was waiting my turn for the urinal and people kept moving in front of me, cutting in line. Then I realized that by Korean standards I wasn't in line at all. In the West we tend to give a rather large berth to people using the restroom, but here they lined up five behind each person in about five feet of space, so that everyone is practically touching the person in front of them, including the person pissing. Koreans' personal space bubble is smaller than Westerners as it is, but in this case Westerners want even more space than they usually do when using a urinal, whereas Koreans seem to be willing to accept even less space than usual when everyone is trying to fit into a tiny restroom. I've heard stories about people from different cultures subconsciously trying to move to the distance at which their culture thinks people should stand apart, but since those distances vary from culture to culture they end up chasing each other across the room trying to get the spacing right. Tonight was an even bigger lesson in cultural sensitivity to space, since I was able to recognize that my uneasiness was purely cultural.

Best headline ever

Snipers sent to protect fairy penguins from mystery predator

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Rain days

I had an unspeakably good time at the Boryeong mud festival last weekend. I'll have a full update on that when I manage to get pictures from people who brought cameras. For now I'll just say I had fun in the mud and rain and show some pictures from the professionals of previous years:

(from the Herald Sun in an article about an outbreak of dermatitis at a previous year's festival)

(This is the official poster of the event. The main image was plastered all over the place)

Anyway, more on that later. Tonight there was a thunderstorm and I went out to play in it. There is a park a couple blocks from my apartment which has a pedestrian bridge over the street to connect its two sections. The bridge is lit along its suspension lines, so it looked like there were sharp triangular walls of water rising above the bridge as the the raindrops reflected the light. Also, the bridge resonated loudly when I jumped on it, and I could feel the whole thing shake, which was especially fun if lightning flashed as I landed. The bridge is directly adjacent to a police station, and I'm pretty sure the officers thought I was crazy for jumping around in the rain half naked and laughing maniacally. Good times. When I came back I had ice cream and deliciously overripe plums. Life is so fucking amazing.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Quote of the (however long it's been since the last Quote of the Week)

As I've mentioned before, most of my students have to write journals of various levels of difficulty. This week I received one that reads as follows:

Today is raining
I don't like the raining The rain smell is very terrible and rain is dirty I want the this the rainday is no!
What was most striking to my was the similarity the last 'the' heavy sentence bore to one of the 'questions' [note the lack of a question mark] in the science book this week:
Why does the eagle doesn't not fall off the edge of an object.
However, neither of these examples can remotely touch a journal Will got in one of his classes:
Topic: Eat milk or yogurt, cheese much
I have my healthy habit. This is very important to people. Sometimes people is don't want eat food, made milk for due [fondue?] for they, They are so glad and we was have a shit a brick and constipation, we need to read my story. Milk, chees and yogurt is delicious and very famous. We say they milk products We eat milk every day. So, milk is very friendly, But others are we eat sometimes. So, we are have shit a brick or constipation. We eat milk 3 times in a day.
I'm pretty sure this was written in all innocence, and just shows how hard it is for pocket translators to translate things in a non-literal way. I'm betting that she looked up synonyms for constipation and the translator was just plain wrong on the meaning of 'shit a brick', and missed the coloqualism.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Barbecues and tombs

John, Will, and I have roof access in our apartment, so naturally we decided to have a barbecue up there. We got a nice little charcoal grill and were all set for a big party, but it rained. The three of us grilled some steaks, sausages, and corn on the cob the next weekend. That Sunday I went out exploring a town near Daejeon. Before leaving I thought I'd document one of the numerous little farms in our upscale neighborhood on my path to work:
I took a quick bus ride out to Gong-ju, a very small city most notable for having briefly been the capitol of Baekje, one of the small empires that existed before the unification of Korea. The old walled portion of the city is still largely in place, though like everything here it has been destroyed and reconstructed dozens of times. I enjoyed the flower adorned bridge between the bus station and the fortress. These little purple flowers (which I could probably identify if I bothered to search my memory or the internet) are actually hung up for decoration all over the place in Daejeon too.
The other notable part of Gongju is that it is the local of the only Korean tomb whose corpses have been identified. King Muryeong ruled from 501 until his death in 523. He and his wife (who died a few years later) were entombed in patterned brick, which was actually considered higher class than the usual stone mausoleums (which strikes me as totally backwards, but to each their own. In this case, it was fashionable to imitate the Chinese, who didn't have the wealth of stone that Koreans did). The tomb was found intact, a sentence that has the unfortunate effect of making me compare it with the tombs of Tutankhamen and Agamemnon (which is by far the most impressive tomb that I have seen in person so far, though it probably actually predates that famous general of the Trojan war). Even though poor King Muryeong couldn't possibly meet my high expectations of intact tombs, there were some cool things in the museum built to show the artifacts. My favorite was a pair of gold diadems, which look way better in their current display than they would in their proper place rising from the temples of a ruler's head like a crown (they look rather silly on the statues that have recently been made of the king):
The tomb itself is of course closed to the public, though a life sized replica gives a good feel for the small tomb. The outside of the tomb is accessible, and it looks pretty much like a larger version of the burial mounds that litter the mountains all over Korea, even on the hills in cities.
After seeing the museums I walked back to the fortress and walked around the perimeter walls.
The walls had flags with interesting mythical creatures depicted upon them.
This minimalist helicopter did a flyby of the temple while I was on the walls.In case I needed further reminders of Mycenae, the fortress also had a step cistern, though one of very different construction than the Greek city of Perseus, Agamemnon, and Orestes. I assume that if the well were in constant use it would not have so much growing on its surface:
There were a few cool reconstructed building:
There was also a great view of Gongju, which looks the same as every other Korean city that isn't Seoul:
By the river I had earlier noticed a small dirt track and was puzzled by it since I was sure I would barely be able to make its tight curves on a bike. The mystery was solved on my way back to the train station when I witnessed its proper use:


John, Will, and I rescheduled our barbecue for this last Saturday, which was conveniently the fourth of July. We had twenty people over, including several Koreans and many Canadians, for a good old American feast that inspired some attendants to say that Will and I would be good husbands since we could make good pasta, potato, and cucumber salads, not to mention the deviled eggs (sometimes I wonder if the relationships I've been in lasted longer than they would have otherwise due to the fact that I like to cook and give massages):

(my apartment is so clean!)
An enormous amount of food was consumed, and I still have a few sausages and about a pound of steak left in my fridge. I enjoyed seeing our usual crowd, as well as a few fellow Portlanders from way across town who I was glad to get to know better.
Later we set off a few low key fireworks, which royally pissed off our neighbor on the fourth floor (one floor above Will and me and directly under the roof) even though it was before 10pm. Some folks also set fire to some things on the roof, which probably won't make us many friends in the building either. My reaction was to play "The roof is on fire." We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn. Burn, motherfucker, burn:
At about 1am a few people left and fell down drunk in front of a police car near our house, and the officers asked if they were coming from a party on the third floor of an apartment building (we had moved to Will's room once the mosquitoes got intolerable), and they were kind enough to call us and give enough warning that we were all gone by the time any cops showed up. Some of us went to a Noraebong (karaoke room), and though it was a very small group singing, it was definitely the most fun I've had at one.

I think I celebrated the Fourth more as an expat than I did last year....

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