Other things I see on my bike rides

Besides car accidents and gardens, on the way to work I also see decorative flowers that are changed out for the season on a bridge over a canal:

... the same thing but with an elementary school in the background instead of the omnipresent identical apartments:... and sick people wandering the streets in their gowns just in front of one of several hospitals on the street with my school (sometimes with IVs, but in this case just with a cane).

Between my house and Alanna's I saw this mobile sock shop:

Trucks that convert into mobile stores are also everywhere. Clearly Korea either does not have or does not enforce zoning laws (not to mention noise ordinances; trucks often cruise neighborhoods with huge speakers attached to them and blare out recorded messages that I'm pretty sure translate to "buy the shit in the back of this truck!"). Trucks can also convert to be part of the setup for the tent restaurants that pop up along the river every night:
In the median of the street in front of one of the major universities in Daejeon (and Korea) is a new statue of Yi So-yeon, Korea's first astronaut. She is from Daejeon (the science center of Korea) and she spent two weeks on the international space station courtesy of the Russians.

I also saw a couple (literally two) fireworks above the university right across the street.

Urban Agriculture, continued

By request I documented a bit more of the agriculture in my town. My last post had pictures of gochu (peppers) drying on the road. Now that garden has some sort of grain(?) laid out there:

Even closer to my apartment is this tree where an old woman and a young child were shaking and collecting its fruit [Update: Actually, I think this might be a ginkgo tree, in which case the fruit collection is for reasons of quality of life, not agriculture]:
Here are the other twelve farms directly adjacent to the path I take to work every day (there are at least as many within sight but not actually bordering the streets I take):

1: Across the street from the last post's garden there is an English academy (which are also ubiquitous) that has a vegetable garden along with some animal hutches:
The rooster that lives in here crows when I come home at five in the morning to emphasize that I have been up far too late:
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6, complete with ajima working in the field. The house behind it was another garden lot when I got here, so maybe in a year these will be mansions too:

7.
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9, which is the first of them to be more than a hundred yards from my apartment:

10, which looks like an abandoned lot from one side, but then you see that a strip of it has been cultivated:

11, which has a semi-permanent produce store set up next to it that might sell vegetables from that very garden (though the fruit is certainly from farther away):

12, which is rather high up:

Most of these gardens grow peppers, squash, lettuce, cabbage, and grains. I've also seen tomatoes, green onions, beans, and other plants I haven't identified.

Korea and mortality

I don't know what it's like over in North America, but here people are completely freaking out about H1N1 (a.k.a. swine flu). The students at my school have their temperatures taken several times a day, and if they have even the slightest fever they are immediately sent home. Apparently this wasn't enough to give any advance notice when one of my students, Erica, actually contracted H1N1. I saw her in class the day before she was confirmed to have the virus, and she looked fine. She was sent home for two weeks, and her classmates (and their siblings and the class' main teacher) were not allowed to attend for a week. The parents of the school's other children flipped out. Many pulled their kids out of my school for a week to a month. Some have yet to come back and may not ever do so. Meanwhile, Erica is back and doing well. She says that H1N1 felt basically like a cold. Her mom gave us a 'sorry my kid got swine flu' cake (cakes being the appropriate gift for any occasion here). I don't mind kids being pulled out of classes (it actually makes the wilder classes far more manageable). However, I do mind that half the festivals in Korea have been canceled due to swine flu paranoia. This coming weekend I wanted to go to an international martial arts festival, which I chose over the Seoul fireworks festival and a traditional dance festival, but all three have been canceled. The weekend after that is Chuseok, sometimes called Korean Thanksgiving, and I had a five day plan that involved going to a lantern festival and a mask festival--both of which looked awesome and both of which are canceled, so I'm back at square one for planning for that five day weekend. I can't leave the country because Will is the only foreign teacher who got permission to do so and he will be forced to stay home from work for a week afterwards as quarantine, even though he is going to Japan, which has the same rate of infection as Korea.

I find the whole thing ridiculous. H1N1 isn't nearly as dangerous as, say, being on or near a street in Korea since a significant portion of Koreans have a complete lack of regard for the rules of the road. Yesterday my class all ran to the window when they heard an ambulance siren. A delivery man on a motorcycle had apparently (as witnessed by New Lindsay at street level) been hit by a car (both parties having been speeding, and presumably at least one was running a red light) and his helmet-less head dented the car. It looked like his neck was broken. At any rate, he wasn't moving, he was in a neck brace, and people were running around the street screaming. This is the second time this summer that I've looked out the window and seen a motor cycle delivery guy lying on the road in that intersection (which isn't all that dangerous or busy from an infrastructure point of view). The last time the guy was lying bloody in the street, but at least he was moving of his own volition. His bike was about thirty meters down the road [side note: motorcycles are here known as 'autobikes' or 'autobi'. Also, mechanical pencils are called 'sharps' and cell phones are 'hand phones,' pronounced 'han-deu po-ne'. I'm fascinated by the use of English words for things that have different names in English]. Anyway, that's my rant about how festivals shouldn't be canceled for H1N1 any more than they should be canceled for Koreans ignoring traffic laws.

Delayed gratification

I'm pretty sure 80% of my kindergarteners would fail this test:

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

(hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

Kids say the darnedest things

I just witnessed this conversation in one of my classes of six year old kindergarteners:

Vivica: Scott, you like me?

Scott: Yeah.

Vivica: I want to marry Scott.

Me: Aren't you too young to get married?

Vivica: When I'm a grown up I will get married.

Enter Michelle, the academic advisor at my school and Scott's mom.

Me: Michelle, did you know that your son is getting married?

Vivica: I will marry Scott.

Michelle: Oh. I thought Ellen was marrying Scott.

Ellen: Me is Michael.

Raymon: I want to marry Scott... and Michael and Justin...

Justin: No! Only girl!

Raymon: I no like girls.

Justin: No! Only girl!

Me: No, that's not true...

Kindergarten Drama Contest

All of the kindergarten students at my school had a drama contest, and the foreign teachers were the judges. The older students put on actual plays, while the younger classes sang songs. The largest room in our academy--which is still not very big, was converted into the stage by pushing all the desks against the wall and then letting the students run all over these desks:

The front two rows are Saturn class, my vote for cutest class at my school.

Jupiter (the baby class) is rather adorable too (Janet always wears giant animal ear head bands like the one's she has on here; in fact these ones are fairly subtle by her standards):

Malory from the baby class here models the currently popular dress-with-cartoon-figure-on-it:

The first class was Mars, the most advanced. They performed a dramatization of the old folk tale where a man is granted three wishes when he agrees not to chop down a magic tree (I'd always heard the version where he releases a magic fish, but whatever). He wastes his first wish saying 'I wish dinner were ready' then gets angry at his wife for cooking slowly and making him waste his first wish and in his anger wishes that the sausage she cooked was on her nose. Then he has to use his final wish to get the sausage off. Will is giving a skeptical look because they are doing really poorly (screwing around and hitting each other and forgetting their lines), especially since they are capable of doing really well:

Lauren had given a talk about being a good audience (which she had to convince our boss to put before the first performance) and the kids did alright for a while:

The babies knew their song and choreography surprisingly well:

Uranus class and Neptune class both did a play where the numbers dismiss zero as worthless, then realize that they need him to make other numbers worth more.

Michael (pronounced the Russian way: Mik-kay-el) of Uranus had a fantastic outfit for his part as announcer:
Lily of Neptune also had a great announcer costume:

Saturn class did well too.

My fellow teachers are really cute with their students:

Baby Kevin really is a baby, just barely three years old. He calls Lindsay uma (mommy).

Pluto class--the terrors--did a good job with their song about combing shapes to make objects:

They also had another song involving sock puppets:

Tiffany is the best behaved student in the class. She is super sweet; right now she is in a phase where she likes to hold teachers' hands:

Johnny here looks like the smug asshole he is:

Brian often overreacts to Johnny and here looks mildly traumatized:

Lisa is a fantastic kid all around:

At the end of the contest Will and I had to kill time until lunch, so we had to get the kids to sing songs, dance, etc. Lindsay was busy holding baby Kevin, so the teachers never conferred in order to determine a winner of the contest.

[Wow, I sound like an obnoxiously proud new parent in this post. Huh. Anyway...]

While we are on the topic of goings on at my school, one day Will did a little art project (Sunset with Whale, crayons on plain paper) along with some of his oldest kids and decided to post it on the teacher's lounge white board as if it were a fridge. I added one of my art projects (Dinosaur and Volcanoes, construction paper cut outs) I accumulated from doing the activities along with my kindergarten art class:

Urban Agriculture

Daejeon may have a population greater than Portland's, but it is still very provincial and stays true to the spirit of it's name: Great Field. Every bit of available land, including the median in the highway, is farmed and farming is still at the heart of life in Daejeon. Ample evidence of this can be found within fifty yards of my apartment, and even within it. I walked out of my door one morning on the way to work and saw this:

The old woman who lives below me apparently didn't have enough space in their apartment to prepare her cabbages, so she cut the right on the floor of our stairwell. I saw her sweeping up later.

A block down the street there are super nice houses--possibly some of the best in Daejeon--alongside lots that are used for gardens. It is odd to see what are essentially small scale cash crop farms in the shadow of mansions and twenty-five story apartment complexes. My first reaction was to marvel at how odd it was to put such different values on adjacent bits of land, some worth a fortune and others owned by poor farmers, but when I considered this further I realized that I like the fact that the land use is not determined simply by sheer economics and that the mixture of urban and rural is rather pleasant.
My neighbors are growing gochu, the Korean word for pepper which also means 'penis', which explains the sign over a 'sexy bar' that depicted a woman riding a horse-sized pepper.

I see about a dozen of these tarps where gochu is being dried out on my ride to work.