Apologies for the format changes. The previous template was incredibly narrow, and I lack the skill and the patience to edit the html to make it all wider. I'm not totally happy with this one either, so I may end up changing it, but I promise to keep such nonsense to a minimum.
Update: I found a template I can tolerate, so I guess I'll stick with it. I hope none of you checked the site when I was trying out some of the worse options.
I have a four day weekend for the lunar new year, and I took this time to go hiking in the mountains that surround Daejeon. It turns out that there is a trail that circles the city and that hits every peak along the way. On Saturday Bo, John and I went about a sixteenth of that trail, climbing four peaks ranging from 436m to 570m (1,430ft to 1,868ft). By my standards as a Coloradan, these elevations don't even count as hills (my parents' house is more than three times the elevation and sits at the bottom of a mountain). However, snobbery aside, these were some nice rugged peaks and some serious hiking trails, especially since Korean trailbuilders don't believe in switchbacks. In the grand tradition of my highschool we enjoyed gummy bears on some of the peaks. Good hiking, good company, good conversations. Doesn't get much better. The mountain tops provided great views of both the surrounding hills and of the city. We agreed that this picture summarizes Daejeon better than words ever could:
On Monday Bo and I went to another mountain at the South end of the city. This one had a pagoda on top:
On a nearby smaller peak, there was a old (~600 BCE) fortress wall and another pagoda:
Strangely, there were eight well-fed cats up in the fortress seeking shelter from the snow:
On the walk back down we enjoyed views of snow-covered trees and the baseball stadium (with the city in the background and the edge of a Buddhist monastery in the foreground):
While I wasn't impressed by the inauguration, the Obama presidency (wow is that fun to say) sure has kicked ass so far. It seems that Obama really is going to stand by his campaign promises, since he has already acted decisively on some (closing Guantanamo, repealing the Mexico City rule) and has unambiguously reiterated some of the others that are controversial (repealing DADT, etc). I am also pretty confident in his ability to keep even the ones that require the acquiescence of the other branches of government (an effective and infrastructure-friendly stimulus plan, universal health care, a fix for social security, etc) because he is brilliant at politicking, because he has an army of volunteers and donors behind him, and because of what he says in this video:
(hat tip Daily Kos)
I pretty much split my dinners here between eating out and cooking for myself (which is somewhat limited by the fact that I only have two burners and no oven). I love galbi (Korean barbecue), and I used to enjoy kim-bop, which translates to seaweed-rice and consists of some veggies and meat wrapped in the namesakes, but then when I got the flu I wasn't such a fan of what I had had for lunch that day anymore. I'd probably be fine with it at this point, but I've been being cautious. I've also eaten at good Japanese and Indian restaurants. On Thursdays we go to Lindsey's for Family Dinner, so I have home-cooked but not cooked-by-me meals then.
For breakfast I usually just have cereal on my way out the door, but sometimes I buy pastry from Paris Baguette, a common chain shop with a store in my school's building. I like that French bakeries are the foreign food of choice here.
For lunch I usually have the kindy lunch. The kindergarteners are served lunch at school and the teachers are welcome to it. It always has purple rice (I don't know what makes it purple) and then there are side dishes and soup. The side dishes are always interesting and often good. I especially like the egg-based concoctions. Kindy lunch is always an adventure because we foreigner are unable to identify a lot of the food so sometimes we end up not taking enough delicious potato cakes but take a bunch of the weird tiny fried fish that taste like a fishmarket smells. Also, sometimes something strong, like a particularly strong batch of kimchi, will make me a bit queasy a few hours later. However, I think I will stick with kindy lunch because it is a convenient way to experience Korean food, and because I am cheap.
Update: I forgot to mention that Paris Baguette, and possibly Korea in general, is brilliant when it comes to birthdays. Paris Baguette has a kit that it includes with cakes: it has short and tall candles, matches, and a cake knife. Koreans have a convention that I think the West should adopt where tall candles represent decades and short candles represent years, which is way classier than the stupid block number candles I see in the US and more practical than putting a candle for every year (though this can sometimes be amusing, such as on my grandmother's 75th birthday when we were mean enough to actually light 75 candles on an enormous cake and she surprised us all by blowing them out with a can of compressed air).
"I don't think that vampires are a problem in Korea because we eat so much garlic."
~Olivia, approximately 13 years old (Western reckoning).
Other fun things about my students: kindergarteners love me for my imitations and drawings. In one class I can get them to do anything simply by pretending to be a robot (or by giving them a ball to play with, etc. Kindergarteners are basically perpetually tripping and find the smallest things either fascinating and wonderful or unbearable). In my other kindy class I draw whatever they request on their workbooks when they finish a page. Often they simply want hearts, ribbons, and flowers, but they've branched out to include witches, dragons, and Batman (I draw the logo). I'm not much of an artist, but they think I'm amazing.
Pretending to be a robot and drawing half-way decently does not win over the affection of the older kids, but I think they like me alright. They often give me little snacks. The first time they did this the snack in question was a rice cake, and I was amused to think of this as the Korean equivalent of giving the teacher an apple. Rice cakes aren't standard, though; I've received things both quite foreign (orange-flavored crackers) and from my childhood (fruit by the foot).
My class of oldest students probably doesn't particularly like me, but that is likely due to their not wanting to be there. I don't blame them: I wouldn't want to be at language school in the early evenings on my winter vacation from normal school. The saddest example of this is the Winter Intensive class, which consists of five eleven-year-olds (or 'thirteen' year olds in Korean age) that meet in the mornings during public school break. There was wonderful irony in making them write essays about how they needed more leisure time (and I completely agree: they spend all day in school (or in cello lessons, etc) all year with only a few days of vacation. They spend all night doing homework. It's not as intense as college, but they aren't even in highschool.) My intensive class is pretty fantastic. We were studying recent civil rights leaders in various countries so they learned the word 'petition' so they petitioned me for stickers. All students can trade in 100 stickers for markers or something. I'm not entirely clear on it. It is sometimes surprising to see which classes care about stickers and which don't.
Anyway, my students are often amusing and I will try to remember to provide their funniest quotes each week for your amusement.
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