::A Geek in Korea::

One of my students had a wedding today. I went with my wife and another of the teaching staff that shares the class to attend. It was across the street from where my parent’s stayed while they were in Daejeon. We met up with the other teacher, showed up early enough to chat with the groom, and gave our envelopes to him.

Sadly, his mother saw the cash so he had to “add it to the book”. We didn’t actually slip the money into the hands of the intended target, as he will only get a share of the cash after everything is paid for now. We got our meal tickets and headed inside the buffet to wait for the wedding to begin. Since we went to eat before the wedding was started, we had lots to choose from, unlike our own wedding.

When the wedding was set to start, we left the restaurant and showed up in the wedding hall to watch the proceedings. Like our own wedding, they had under booked the seats, so we had to stand for the ceremony. I didn’t mind being at the back, but the people that were near us were really rude. It’s clear they showed up for the cheap buffet and not to watch the wedding. They were talking on phones, letting their children run around, and talking. The sound system in the hall wasn’t that loud, so we had to strain to hear the announcers over the guests.

We had an opera singer at our wedding, and the man didn’t even need a microphone to be the loudest person in the room when he was singing. The people this couple chose sang very well, but they were hard to hear with all the rabble around. A second song done by some teenagers was so good it got people clapping, and some drunk person right next to me started shouting, “Encore! Encore!” Uh, shouldn’t a wedding be about the people getting married be about the couple, and not some kids singing? Did he want the people to get married again? This is the danger of letting people have access to unlimited bottles of alcohol before your wedding.

nyway, as a return favor for catching the corsage at my wedding and being in my pictures, I was ‘the foreign guy’ , in his pictures. The other teacher left after the ceremony ended, so I was the only non-Korean in all of the pictures. My wife chatted with another student from the same class that had shown up for the wedding.

The bride had the same problems my wife did trying to toss a good bouquet. She tossed it to the wrong person 3 times. It’s rigged as to who is supposed to catch it, but that didn’t stop the wrong person from grabbing it out of the air. Why they didn’t just make her stand by herself confused me. It’s the small things like this that no one prepares for.

The meal, wedding, and pictures all were accomplished in ninety minutes, which was fantastic. We got to everything and still get out at a reasonable time. I’m sure the wedding party had hours of preparation and work still to do. Now all that is left is to pack for China and catch an early bus tomorrow to the airport.

I’ll be traveling with a group of 50 Korean people again. The last time I did this I swore, “never again” but a sweet deal and soem vacation time later, here I am again. Since we depart for China this weekend, we went down the list of things we need to travel in another country. Here is what we are bringing, and why:

• Chinese cash: If we do any tipping or shopping, we need a foreign currency to be ripped off without knowing.
• Passport with visas: We need to alert the country that potential suckers are on the way.
• Tissues: We were told by people that there is no toilet paper provided anywhere. Toilets also have no doors. (*)
• Shampoo, soap, toothpaste, basically anything you need to be slightly sanitary: Not provided by hotels. (*)
• Aspirin/Ear plugs (one set): For the Chinese opera we will attend. Chinese music gives me headaches.
• A book: For the long waits on the bus while we are taken to jade expos, duty free shops, and tourist traps.
• Seaweed Laver/Kimchi: We are bringing Korean side dishes.

(*) Unconfirmed reports by other teachers we know.

While I complained about Korean people bringing Korean food with them when they traveled in Thailand, now I am participating in the same exercise. It wasn’t my idea either, it was actually recommended to us by a foreign teacher at my wife’s school, and shown as proof we needed to prepare for China in far more ways than I expected.
The foreign teacher said that since Chinese food tends to be very oily. It’s fried in that wonderful heart clogging substance known as lard. As a precautionary measure, she suggested that people should bring kimchi to help their system deal with this influx of cholesterol. Also, sensitive eaters that confront Chinese food they have a problem with can always go back to eating kimchi and seaweed as a sort of safety net food. Korean people tend to cling on kimchi as a sort of cruch, claiming they have evolved a special, extremely sensitive diet, or any other excuse that let’s them not have to try new foods while traveling. I through caution to the wind in Thailand and ended up eating some “rat shit peppers” that points to the wisdom of dining on the things you know while in another country.
The ultimate irony would be if the kimchi we brought with us from Korea happened to be imported parasitic Chinese kimchi. I’m going to try all the food presented to me fairly, but I might have a little kimchi on the side if things demand it. But, I won’t be happy about it.

I was talking to the husband of one of my old college friends. She became a teacher in her hometown after she graduated. She’s been working at the same school since then, and her husband made it clear that each year her students have gotten progressively worse. He said that because there is no discipline possible from teachers, and parents are either too busy or apathetic to keep their own children in line, his wife’s classes had decayed far past a reasonable level.

I joked that if parents started caring about their kids and would threaten to beat them like some of my student’s parents, maybe the students would act better. It’s not that I condone child abuse, it’s just that the parents that expect good grades and good behavior tend to be harder on their children. He agreed. He said that whenever the words, “Phone call to parents,” were uttered, he would always act better. While I didn’t face an abusive punishment from my parents, I didn’t want to face their wrath either, so if I was ever in a “call home” situation I knew I had better act better. He said that the students have gotten so used to calling everyone’s bluff that teachers don’t even attempt discipline anymore.

I contrast this with the story of something that happened when my wife visited her aunt. It seems that one of my wife’s cousins hadn’t been studying. He had been hiding his books around the house claiming to have lost them. He had failed several tests. He hadn’t been doing his homework. The aunt had been furious when she had gotten a call from a concerned teacher, and while my wife was present, took him into a private room for a little “attitude adjustment”. He got a few “behavior modification” taps with a ruler to the hands.

This left my wife in the awkward position of watching this boy get embarrassed and punished at the same time. My wife said that considering the money the parents spend on his education, he’s lucky they weren’t harder on him. She said she would have said something if they had touched they boy’s head, but there wasn’t anything besides a few sore knuckles. I’m sure the psychological scars are worse than any actual abuse he received.

While I don’t want lazy students in my class, it’s not often that I have to deal with what parents do to “motivate” their children. I wouldn’t want to be in that rather uncomfortable position of having to see a student or a relative physically punished by their parents even if they hadn’t been studying hard enough.

It’s a difference in culture that leaves me conflicted. Children do achieve a lot more here at much younger ages. They study harder. They do more work. They deal with monumental levels of stress better than I can. They also have less free time than most adults and hardly know what to do with unstructured free time. Their motivation, whether it be healthy praise from a job well done, or intimidation from a parent, does bear fruit. Would that still work in the American educational environment? I don’t know. I’ve thankfully never been in the position to see what American teachers put up with on a daily basis. I’m not sure that I could handle it.

It’s not often that I try to use other’s stereotypes to my own advantage. There are few situations where other’s misconceptions about me might lead to a favorable outcome anyway. I try to treat everyone with the same respect that I want to receive in return. Even if that isn’t a realistic thing to do, I still try to present myself in a favorable light. There are times where being the dumb foreign guy has it’s advantages.

For example, the last time I went to the movies with my wife, we had to purchased tickets before one of the people in our party had arrived. Since that person didn’t have a phone, was new to Korea, and hadn’t visited the theater we were in before, we were worried she wasn’t going to make it on time. The line for tickets was 45 people long, so we had only one chance for tickets. We took a number, waited, and when our number flashed, my wife bought the tickets alone. Five minutes before the movie was supposed to start, we got a call from our friend asking us to hold a ticket for her. She was at a pay phone nearby and needed us to get the ticket before the showing started.

My wife had kept the number ticket for getting the tickets. She looked at the next number to be called. It was too late. If we waited in line again, we would miss our movie. Instead, she handed me and suggested I use the ticket to go to another cashier that hadn’t seen the number before. She thought that they would let me get the tickets because they would assume that a foreigner wouldn’t be able to figure out the complicated “wait for your number to be called” system of getting tickets.

Now, this is dishonest. We didn’t wait in line for a second time, but I was going back to get a ticket for a friend. But if we didn’t get the ticket, we’d be snubbing a friend. This isn’t good either. I went against my principals. I summoned up my courage, and poor Korean skills the best I could. I would be that dumb foreigner for a friend!

My wife wished me luck, and I headed over to one of the cashiers with a confused look on my face. I asked for a ticket, held out the number card sorrowfully, apologized entirely in English, then asked for a ticket in a mash of Korean and English speech that would confuse anyone. It was good enough to get a ticket, but bad enough for them to know I didn’t know a damn thing about what I was talking about. I looked thoughtfully as the cashier circled the theater number and time on the ticket for me. I’m surprised she didn’t try to use a safety pin to attach the ticket to my coat for me so I couldn’t lose it. Ticket purchased, I went back to share the fruits of my stupidity.

With only so many hours in the day, there are two things I’ve been doing with the site at the moment. I’ve been trying to spend time trying to get up to speed on modifying and updating the site to add needed functionaliy, as well as keep posts about the progress and test new features. This means spending unhealthy amounts of time in front of the computer, even for me.
I’m pretty happy with what’s come as a result of the work so far. I’m sure with more practice as I get more accustomed to everything, I’ll be able to do more with this site than was ever possible on my last set of blogging tools. I feel like a lot of the time I spent overcoming the difficulties of that system will be better used now to make more use of the features of this publishing tool. That’s all behind the scenes stuff that doesn’t really lead to exciting posts. I don’t read sites that constantly update their site with the plugin fad of the week. I don’t come to sites to look at plugins. I go for content. I understand that as well as anyone and plan to get back to actually producing some soon.

Right now I’ve been spending time in front of the computer instead of more fun stuff. Hopefully this will settle down and I’ll get back into the routine of posting non-website update related posts more often. I’d say the trip to China at the end of the week will probably be good for me as I’ll be taking pictures, have lots to talk about, and be too tired to try to look at any more “behind the scenes” stuff for some time. I don’t know if I’ll be able to access my site at all while I travel. At leas people can amuse themselves with the forum and comments if that happens to be the case.

I’ve added more pictures to my Flickr account for all to enjoy. Here is a sample.

After several hours of staring at cryptic comments, .php files, and various online tutorials, I have a somewhat functional site. Comments should be enabled. People should be able to register. Archives should be…archiving. Anti-Spam tools are fuctional. I’m giving it a cautious “thumbs up” at the moment.
I still have a few things to do having to deal with the move over to a modern blogging tool.

• Beautify my archives with CSS
• Get some cool plugins going to justify the move
• Get my links back in order
• Figure out what the hell I am doing.
• Get “pretty urls” working. Seriously, anyone able to help on this one? mod_rewrite? .htmaccess? help!
• Use more bulleted lists.

I’m sure there will be a few growing pains now as I get used to this new software. The process using it has ranged from “Wow, that was simple,” to “Pound nails in my eyes, this stuff is confusing,” hard. Thank goodness I never got involved with any computer related fields after college.

Regardless, the site will continue on no matter what is driving the content creation at this end.

This is a test post of the new blogging tools I plan to run on this site for the time being. There tends to be a point in time where things tend to look like they are woking, then I break them horribly. This is that time. So far I like the Wordpress software very much, but it doesn’t do friendly URLs like it should. I wonder if I can manage to fix it. The WYSIWYG text editor is mighty nice.

This looks like a mighty fine tool. I can even post drafts, work on them online at home or in the office, then post them at a later date. This will help me find more time to work on higher quality posts. It is, however very complicated, with a few hojillion options to look into.

Be patient as I move content over to the new site layout. I’ve got about five years of stuff to move, a mess of html to untangle, and only a few days to do it all in before I’m out of the country.