::A Geek in Korea::

Walking the dog today, we saw a wall of water slowly approaching from the west. I thought that if I headed back early enough we would beat the storm to our home. I timed it wrong.

Unfortunately, Yoshi and I got caught in the middle of the thunderstorm. We went from walking on the edge of the sunny, bright blue sky to being under assault. We found cover in a playground that had a shelter area. I knew of this place because I had gotten stuck there once before when it started to rain. This time was a lot worse. I had to hold Yoshi while the water slowly filled up the area over the course of a thirty minutes of strong, windy rain. Eventually I was standing on a bench while the water rose over the height of my shoes on the ground. Once the rain let up, I walked back home with Yoshi. This wasn’t even a typhoon related storm as far as I know. This was the raining season throwing a quick thunderstorm at the city to keep people on their toes.

Tomorrow will be the first class of the semester. There is a typhoon that is going to be really close to Daejeon all week dumping water on the city. Earlier they were projecting that it could actually hit Daejeon according to my wife. I’ve been through enough near misses that I really don’t want to see what a typhoon hitting directly will be like.

I wonder what attendance will be like if the typhoon hits during class time? Class won’t be canceled. I wonder who is dedicated enough to show up in a typhoon on their first day of class.

There wasn’t really a concept of a fashion “season” when I grew up. We’d buy clothes at the beginning of school, then get some stuff for Christmas holidays.  Whatever wasn’t run through with holes or too small became our new spring clothing, and any clothes our cousins could no longer fit into were the clothes my brother and I destroyed during summer. When I got finished with something, my brother wore it. Then the next set of cousins or friends with suitable children would inherit anything left after my brother and I got done wearing it.

My wife went out to a department store last week and found some end of season discounts. Things move swiftly here, unlike where I grew up in rural Ohio. You can’t just walk into a store at any point of time and expect to see the same deals or the same types of clothing. The bargain bin is hardly a thing to count on when looking for deals. When stores get a new set of clothes they need to move them. They are at least two seasons ahead. There are trends and campaigns in children’s clothes, like adult clothes from designer labels. The prices reflex all of this.

Anything in Korea that needs to be sold to children has at least a 200~300% mark up compared to what it would cost in the United States. I can say that without exaggeration having shopped on things in both Korea and the United States. We picked up a suitcase worth of children’s clothes while on vacation, and that would have been the cost of two designer items in Korea. It’s staggering how expensive everything is, and insane that parents spend that much money on items to make kids look like little versions of themselves. All we wanted were a few items my wife had saw on sale a few days earlier, but it was not to be.

We were looking at things that were on sale, and they had completely priced us out of our price range with a t-shirt. The sale had ended, so it was back to $150 cardigans for toddlers, $40 t-shirts for little kids, and $100 mini-skirts for children that can barely walk. I wonder if the people that buy this are so flush with cash that they simple don’t know what else to spend their money on? After you have your huge apartment, nice car, and spend money on a kid’s education, everything else is money to burn, right? These people want to spend money on this stuff to look good. That’s how petty their life must be. I don’t envy someone that feels the need to spend that much money on clothes so that they can fit in with some play group.

It’s still warm and stormy. Despite being in the rainy season of summer, late fall clothes are occupying all the prominent stores. Most kids are growing, so it’s a little difficult to buy clothes three months in advance for small children. We missed their sale by a few days, so what we were looking for has already been shipped off to the lower tier fashion department stores that sell things from the previous seasons at a steep discount. In a few weeks this stuff will end up being for sale at the places we normally shop.

We found some items that were out of season and nice looking for a budget a block away from the department store. If we wanted to buy a lot of stuff, we would have started looking at the discount places to begin with. They recycle clothing by dropping it in big green metal boxes next to dumpsters. Those clothes get shipped off to other countries, or burned. It’s not like you can find second hand baby clothing shops anywhere. The baby that had been supplying Glow with clothes left for another country with her parents, and we don’t have any close friends with children of the appropriate size. Glow is also tall enough to be confused for a girl two or three times her age, so we’ve got to keep up with clothes more than the average parent with a small child.

Korea’s low birth rate has complex social and cultural consequences, but I can’t imagine the high price of simple things while raising a kid is going to increase the birth rate any time soon. Children’s education is criminally overpriced (and from a teacher that’s been on the receiving end of that money, I know it is true), and even things like lotion or toys are substantially more expensive. If they aren’t expensive, they are cheap, dangerous products from China you shouldn’t be touching, let alone letting your child play with. We’re relatively lucky, as we can get to the United States to shop, or have my parents send care packages of different things we need. I can’t imagine what a working class Korean family does to make ends meet if they try to make their children a priority here. There are small things, like a subsidy for child day care services that even we take advantage of, but there are a lot of kids that won’t reach their potential simply because they will be priced out of achieving it.

My vacation is mostly going to consist of spending the last few days before the semester trying to figure out what I need to do in class this semester. The time for procrastination has ended! I will shake off the heat-daze that has prevented me from getting any real work done, and go to work for real this week. Really. Honestly.

I must admit, the summer vacation this year has been a lot of fun. First of all, I got through a vacation to the States with my wife and daughter and had a great time just hanging around the house sleeping and catching up on the World Cup games. Then I returned to Korean to teach a single “Survival English” class that I claimed “was death.” After that extremely underwhelming class was finished, I got to teach elementary and middle school students. It was a much needed change for me. I enjoyed it a lot more than the difficult college intensive course I taught last winter. I gave the farewell speech to the audience at the end of the elementary school camp, and I had a good time doing it. The entire camp was a blast. As long as the winter camp is run by the same people, I’ll be volunteering again without reservation.

Now it’s back to the grind of planning my syllabus, working on materials, and preparing for new classes. There has been a miscommunication with the office, and I’m scheduled to teach institute at night once again, despite it not making any bit of sense to anyone that would look at my schedule. I’ve asked for a change, but once again, being the lowest person on the rung of the security ladder will only make that harder. I’ve also been alerted to a potentially HUGE change in who I am teaching. There is a chance I might end up teaching middle school students during the semester, not just at camps. This is the first I’ve been told of this. Other than the time of the class itself, I am indifferent about the idea. From what someone let on, the class is running EXTREMELY late in the evening for me, so I’m a little annoyed that I haven’t been told about this before now. I had two goals this semester. Get out early, and spend less time at work. The office is trying to suck me right back in again, and I don’t like it now that I have a taste of freedom.

If I don’t get to change my schedule to move my classes to the morning schedule, I’ll be getting a few more hours of sleep. I’ll just be up later every evening working all the time. This extra sleep in the morning would help, but that would also require my dog and daughter to follow along with that particular script. As of right now, I wake up two or three times a night to a screaming, inconsolable daughter. If she wakes up when it is dark, I let my wife handle it. If she wakes up when the sun is up, I try to take her out of the bedroom to settle her down. If the semester starts and she is still sleepless, I’ll end up banished in the spare bedroom once again. Daddy needs his sleep. Even in a hot room without an air conditioner, Daddy needs his sleep.

Because I have a problem saying, “No time!” to people with similar interests that want to spend time with me, I’m not only planning a schedule for an entire semester, but also planning out a low level campaign for Dungeons and Dragons. This is a labor of love, not unlike writing daily for this website, but it is also a fair bit of time commitment for a week where I really should be focusing on something else. I built a map and picked out a scenario to run for Wednesday after I finished my chores today and whittled down my sleep debt to a more manageable amount with a short nap. I’m nervous about what is going to start happening when the play by post game I am involved with starts going again during the semester and I have to juggle two games potentially, one periodically offline, one daily online.

There is a lot of other stuff going on. We have to deal with any potential abandonment issues Glow might have from her short weekday trips to daycare. I have to find some time to exercise, and walk Yoshi in this unbearable humidity. I have to help with the housework and all the other responsibilities of being a parent. With no sleep…and a time deadline looming. It’s a bit worrying that I still don’t have the drive to sit down and be productive this close to the start of the new semester. Last semester I had a clue as to what I was going to be doing for the entire first half of the semester. Now I’m still trying to decide if I want to make the students buy the workbook, or have them just do copies I make available on the web. Eventually I’ll have to start deciding on those choices, because my schedule is running out of free time.

I’m a relatively understanding when it comes to people approaching me on the street. It doesn’t happen as much as it used to, or if it does, it doesn’t take on the air of, “SIDESHOW FREAK! LOOK AT THE FOREIGNER!” anymore. That used to happen fairly regularly in a large city when I was new to Korea. Now it is only small children and the elderly that have issues with foreigners being around. Slow progress, but it is something. Three times I had something weird happen to me today because of strangers on the street.

The first time was when I was returning home from dropping off Yoshi. He badly needed a trim to survive the summer heat. As I was walking across the street from the pet shop, a lady TAPPED on my shoulder to get my attention. I get bothered on the street from time to time, but unless I am getting on a bus or entering an elevator, no one is going to touch me. I turned around expecting either a friend of mine, or at least an old student. Nope. A young girl with her clipboard folder held up like a shield, and a friend standing nearby was asking me about where I am from and how long I had been in Korea. Same old getting to know you “Taxi Questions”.

I was already somewhat annoyed by being stopped, but I deemed it polite to at least take off my headphones to listen to her…one ear, at least. She introduced herself, and I thought that she was going to go into some sort of introduction about a topic she was gathering information on, which was why she was holding onto the binder. Nope. It turns out she was a pushy religious lady that wanted to know my background with her particular sect. I told her that I had heard of them, but didn’t need to hear anymore. I told her I was inconvenienced by her chat because I was exercising at the time and the delay was affecting my workout, which was true. She let me go with little fuss.

She was definitely brave. She spoke English well, in a practiced way. She clearly had religious training in approaching foreigners to deliver her message. She wasn’t as pushy as some of the other religious people that approach foreigners. They will drop whatever they are doing to walk with you. Trying to escape that is a lot more tricky. You have to duck into a business or home.

Another person, a lot older and probably not as good with English, bothered not only me, but my daughter at a store. My wife was getting a refund for a defective item, stranding Glow and I at the customer service area while she negotiated the details. A lady approached my daughter and I and started asking invasive questions. “Your daughter….is she your daughter? Is she American? Her mother is Korean?”

Is that really the first thing you want to know? You don’t even want to know her name, or how old she is? Not even a polite question first? What the hell business is that to you who the mother is? Do you score extra points or something? Ugh. I can deal with a Korean kid pointing to me and saying, “Hey! You aren’t from here!” Trying to make me feel that my daughter is something different because she is of mixed descent is a good way to rile my righteous anger, NOT win favor or start a conversation. It was only after she approached me this way that she started telling me about her religious group. My wife walked back into the conversation at the point where I was grabbing the stroller and walking away to avoid a scene. I had already been bothered by this particular group once, and I didn’t need them to be in my face while I sat around at a store too. My wife swiftly dealt with the issue by saying we didn’t need her particular brand of religious opinion.

I used to complain I was never targeted for religious handouts on the streets when places of worship passed out religious paraphernalia emblazoned on tissues and pencil cases. Now they approach me and speak to me in English. I think I liked it better when I was ignored.

The best interaction I had with someone on the street was entirely non-verbal. I was walking Yoshi home after his shave, and an elderly man riding a bicycle stopped five meters in front of us. He looked at Yoshi, looked at me, then gave me a huge smile and gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up. I walked away smiling, and I almost wanted to stop and start asking him a series of questions about why he was so awesome, but decided I didn’t want to be a pestering person that bothers people on the street so I stayed away.

Just documenting a very common experience. Koreans think shit is adorable. This was at a playground.

File yet more evidence for Korean’s fascination with poop involving inappropriate products.

We were looking for children’s toothpaste for Glow. The two brands of toothpaste pictured have the phrase “Who took a poop on my toothbrush?” as their slogan. The packages are also shaped like little pieces of poop too. I’ve never seen this bag style of toothpaste before, but it was targeted at children, and was at child height on the shelf. I think it is supposed to be edible and flavored, so that if children swallow some of it they won’t be sick. The LAST thing I want to think of when I brush my teeth is if someone pooped on it. Gross. Hilarious, but gross.

Two good friends of my wife and I have made plans to leave Korea for the hotter, more desert like climate of Egypt. We saw them off today with a goodbye meal. While saying goodbye to good friends is always hard, their choice of venue left me disappointed.

We went to an opening day of a new restaurant in Daejeon called “All that Barbecue”. It is not far from the upscale Indian food place we used to love. We when went to Indy on opening day, there were a few hiccups with the service, and once that got sorted out we returned a few more times. It wasn’t until cheaper Indian restaurants started popping up when I started to work at the University that were a quarter of the price that stopped me from going to a place which gave me a hopeful, but cautious view to its opening.

I can safely say right now I won’t be returning to “All that Barbecue”. We had a nine person party for our friend, and it took a while for them to find a table for us. We waited for forty minutes, which is fine for an opening day buffet restaurant. People still had to show up, so there was no hurry, but only because we made it clear that despite our wait we were going there because there was a “Lunch menu” deal. Before 2 PM, people ate at a cheaper rate. Technically we started our meal around 2:10 PM, but only because the servers couldn’t find us tables. At the end of the day, the bill was done correctly, so it wasn’t a problem, which is the only thing they did very well.

The idea of the restaurant was a “self-service grill” area that was part of the buffet. Self-service sadly didn’t mean you were cooking your own steak. The steak and meat was cooked partially behind the buffet counter, then placed on kebab style grills that finished cooking it. I think they were supposed to be putting enough meat on the kebabs that there would always be some rotating in, then when they ran out of space in the cooking area it would be pushed out to the buffet area. Something approaching a “Just in time” philosophy of cooking. On the opening day they radically misjudged the amount of people that wanted some meat with their buffet choices, so they never cooked enough at any one point to keep up with the demand.

The problem with their model, as I recall this particular topic being discussed in great length in my management classes in university, was that they were trying to apply a “just in time” system to something with too many variables that would cost them too much money. They can’t accurately predict the amount of people showing up for the lunch rush. Even if they could,  they would need to figure out how much meat would need to be available for the majority of people to get something from the grill with a minimum wait. There are a limited number of slots for cooking, so if they had to start cooking before the rush arrived and sit the meat out, they have to build in loss due to cold meat, and for a lower than expected turn out. People that line up might also take a larger amount for each minute they were in line, either to take to someone in their party, or simply because you tend to overestimate how much food you can eat at a buffet when you stare at it cooking for a long time. Some people might be willing to settle for a hot dog after a long wait, but for every slot taken up by something that wasn’t the steak people were promised, the line is going to get longer.

They have a seriously flawed business model. I don’t think they were doing the monitoring or the math to figure out how to optimize it from a customer’s perspective either. If I was looking at the bottom line, the steak was the most expensive thing being cooked in the entire buffet. If I actually needed to provide meat for at least half the people that show up to the buffet for free, there is no way they could make a profit. Pushing out cheaper meat is an alternative, but delaying the meat so that there is only one or two opportunities to get it per hour is probably all they can do. There were no “tiers” of service. Someone that left without eating expensive items just make the restaurant more money. Too bad if they don’t get to eat what they wanted. I’m sure they didn’t think about how it was going to work in much detail. First come, first serve, if at all. That is simply not going to work at a buffet.

The “just in time” nature of the buffet broke down because people queued up for the meat. The salad offerings were weak, bordering on bad. The choice was half the size of competing buffets in the same building (VIPS). In other buffet restaurants, the meat is an additional cost, but it gets delivered to your table. The salad bar was perceived as a “bonus”. Here there were no menus besides for drinks, so everyone just ate a little salad and then wanted some steak as part of the meal. It was purely a buffet restaurant, and everyone was there for cheap and bountiful meat, as implied by the name.

I lined up for ten minutes and ended up with two pieces of flabby grilled chicken and a hot dog. Another person in the party lined up for twenty minutes and ended up with the last three pieces of steak they were serving, and it wasn’t even very well cooked. It was not worth the effort to line up at the grill at all, and everything else about the experience was totally mediocre at best. The price was at least 50% off for coming on the first day, and I still felt like the 10,000 won was still a rip off.

DO NOT GO to this restaurant for a few months, if ever. If it’s still around in 6 months, I’d be surprised. I don’t think anyone in the party said they would return. Two people were leaving for a separate continent, but that aside, those of us staying in Korea left with a scowl.

You can tell how infrequently I get to go out to eat with my family when a story about how friends leaving for another country turns into a scathing restaurant review. The guy leaving is responsible for me meeting a lot of nice foreigners and broadening my social circle, getting me back into Magic: The Gathering, and starting me in D&D. We’ve known them for years, and they are some of our few mutual friends as a couple.

A lot of my hobbies today come from knowing someone that was interested in the same things I was and was willing to talk about the things I enjoy talking about. I don’t know what will happen to the social circle he had around his family, but I’ll miss that most of all. It was nice to get a call from this kind, outgoing couple to invite us out and do something different for a change. If you don’t challenge yourself to get out every once in a while, you’ll go mad. I owe his family a lot for that. I wish them all the success in the world where ever they end up.

An electified tennis racket and some large beer samples to whet my whistle? I didn’t have any plans this weekend… until now. Thanks Emart!

Now that my schedule has gone to strictly teaching morning camps, I finish early in the afternoon and can spend time at home. I’ve even started sleeping in the same room with my wife and child again. My daughter Glow steadfastly refuses to sleep more than a few hours a night. We can get her to bed around nine, then she’ll wake up at eleven, then every few hours for the rest of the night. This morning she woke up early in the morning, sometime around 6 AM. Normally there is a noise outside, or something that might stir her, but today she was trying to bang on the window to the veranda where the dog sleeps. Yoshi is rather testy from being outside the majority of the day, so we don’t want him to be disturbed. Everybody wants their sleep, except for Glow.

Instead of fighting Glow to keep her away from the window and quiet, and seeing that my wife was at her wit’s end trying to put her back to sleep, I decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to go for a walk with her. Just after dawn, the weather is cool, and there shouldn’t be so many people outside. I decided I’d take Yoshi along to get his walk for the day, seeing that if the weather got hotter later, I wasn’t going to be going out again. I strapped Glow into our backpack style carrier and took to the route I’ve started using with the maximum amount of shade in the neighborhood that isn’t overrun with dogs or slow old people.

Cardiotrainer, the software I use to track my exercise habits on my Android phone, has upgraded their notification program so you can see how often you’ve scheduled, or missed, your workouts. Extra guilt, extra motivation to get that exercise! When I started out with the baby on my back, and my dog on a leash, I was making ridiculously good times. I need to cross the street five times total in my trip, and I made the lights and happened to cut down two minutes on my initial pace kilometer. The rest of the time the routine was normal, except cooler than it has been for weeks, even with a baby strapped to my back.

Glow as about to fall asleep when a dog off a leash walking near its owner attacked Yoshi. I tried to keep the situation from getting dangerous by picking up my dog, because Korean people NEVER expect their dog without a leash to start biting. They act like it’s never happened before. There ARE leash laws, but no one enforces any kind of pedestrian laws in Korea. Good luck getting it enforced.

Anyway, this whole dogs snapping at my feet incident woke up Glow, so when we got back to the apartment I was not able to get her back to sleep. I gave my wife some time to sleep for a little while, and I got my walk and exercised with the dog at the same time. I also liked getting up early and doing something with my time. I went to work ready to go, having already been up for a few hours. I even managed to stay up a few hours without needing a coffee until I got to work.

Tomorrow is my long day, where I have a lot of classes with very little children, so sleep tonight will be even more important. Glow doesn’t care, and the weather makes me think getting up extra early to exercise might be my only chance once again. I don’t think I’ll be up for teaching a morning schedule, but an early workout routine for the next few weeks would be fine for me. There are a lot of other people with the exact same idea, with dogs or without, so I’m not the only one that exercises before the day gets started.

Spotted in a class.  The head creeps me out.