Quote of the week

"I hate four and six because four means death and six is the devil's number."

I think my tutor student is going to provide a wealth of quotes. To unpack this one a bit: in the Chinese-Korean hybrid numbers the number four sounds like the Korean word for 'death' (the six part we know about, but I can't capture the facial expression and hand gestures that went with it to convey 'devil'). Today he had another toy dinosaur with him (so far there's been a velociraptor and a pterodactyl), and we talked about international incidents, which is amusing enough of a topic with a nine year old, and even funnier when he doesn't know all the words he needs. He got the story through to me anyway, though: a South Korean hiker went to climb a mountain that she thought was South of the border but which was actually North of the 38th parallel, and a North Korean border guard killed her thinking that she was trying to infiltrate the country.

I'm realizing that these quotes need some context in terms of the consistent oddities of my students' English. The older kids write weekly journals (theoretically), and this would be a prototypical essay "Yesterday I go to roller coaster. It was excited and very funny. Yesterday was happy."

My favorite story of a student at my school misunderstanding English is the case of Tiger. All the students here are assigned English names when they first arrive, and one of the kids was dubbed 'Ryan'. Ryan's best friend thought that the name was 'Lion', and he wanted to be an animal too so he insisted that his name be Tiger. Most of the students are pretty good at distinguishing L and R, but the newest students have some trouble. Even so, I've only been called 'Randon' once or twice. 'Roren' and 'Rindsey' weren't as fortunate for some reason. I wonder if my inability to audibly differentiate between some Korean letters leads to anything as humorous as the Lion/Ryan mistake, or even as funny as the Rindsey Rohan t-shirt I saw (Yes, in print. I kid you not. The t-shirt only got better from there.)

Call me Minjun (with Prank Signage II and other miscellanies)

My schedule is getting busier. I now tutor a student during the one break I had on Mondays and Fridays. This means that I have to start getting to work earlier to plan for my classes instead of doing some of that during the day (hence the reference to mindless walking dead).

I think my tutor student and I will get along well. His favorite movie is Jurassic Park and he is learning English in order to travel (he will soon be attending an English academy in Malaysia, for example). However, his English is rather limited at the moment. Due to their early immersion, the regulars at my school must think partially in English in order to speaking it so well. My tutor student, on the other hand, came to English a bit later than a lot of the kids at my school, so he sounds a bit like I do when learning Korean: he stops to think and translate his thoughts and he asks a lot for me to repeat things.

Speaking of my learning Korean, I've started meeting with one of the Korean kindy teachers after classes on Thursdays so that we can both improve our language skills. The Kindy teachers collectively gave me the Korean name Minjun (pronounced like 'mean June'), which is apparently a very common Korean name. Now that I am being taught by native speakers twice a week perhaps I will actually finally learn a (living) foreign language.

We want Change!

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.

Lunar New Year hikes

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):

Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die

(Hat tip Darksyde on Daily Kos)

"I will crush them"

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)

Food

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).