::A Geek in Korea::

Today my mid-level classes we practicing the "Have and Has" grammatical structure. Nothing is more boring that repetitive grammar, so I went and found some relatively fun activities for the students to do that practiced using the English without making them write endlessly. I found a really good lesson in a book I used at my first school made copies, and set about organizing it.

The unit was a writing, coloring, and drawing style worksheet focusing on facial features, parts of the body, and size. For example the students had to follow the directions and complete the drawing of a clown, adding the appropriate number of teeth, drawing the correct size nose, or coloring the correct color hair. This is fun for them as they don’t have to write, "He has a big nose." Instead, they get to draw just how big it is. We went through the activity, drawing clowns, aliens, and eventually, I handed the students a mirror and let them draw themselves.

The only thing was, since the activity involved aliens and strangely colored clowns to practice exaggerated features, the students felt that I was trying to make them draw only weird things. One of the girls ran over to the dictionary, looked up a few words, then asked me, "Why is everything we draw so….creepy? Why is the clown….fleshcrawling?"

I didn’t tell them to draw scary things. That’s just the natural result of drawing clowns. Clowns are naturally terrifying. The pictures where the students  looked in the mirror to draw often came out terrifying as well, since they would use comic book or animation style features on a realtively normally proportioned head. Perhaps the next time I do this activity, it should be around Halloween so that they can make scary pictures intentionally. The students worked through six pages of material total and never complained. That’s some sort of record for both classes. I think they might have even learned something in the process.

For thousands of years, man has been singing songs. The telephone was invented, allowing people to communicate with someone far away. The radio was invented, allowing people to listen to all sorts of sounds from around the world in many different locations. Then, some pucky Japanese individual decided that they wanted to embarrass themselves by trying to sing popular songs as well. Karaoke was born.

Everything was leading up to this moment. In what can only be their dogged determination to be more annoying, Korean radio show hosts have combined three things that should never been brought together. Radio + Telephone + Karaoke.

Now, bored housewives, old people, and the unemployed can call into local radio shows, request a song, then sing along on the radio. The hosts interview the people, ask them what they want to sing, then turn on the music. The callers then sing into their telephones to the music.  It’s not bad enough that Korean radio show hosts don’t play music for long periods of time, or when they do, they talk over it. Now, they have other people sing over it. There is a reason that most popular music isn’t recorded by singing it through a telephone. It sounds horrible. Either the people are too quiet, can’t sing, or don’t know most of the words to the song they requested. It’s all the fun of going to a singing room without the lights, dancing, alcohol, or good music.

You’d think with a premise this bad, it’d be like a tree falling in the forest. No one would want to listen to people singing via telephone, so it’s harmless. Not so. No matter how bad an idea this is, Taxi drivers are listening to this sort of show constantly. I’ve heard more songs being sung by people at home this month than by actual singers. Do Korean radio stations save money by not having to pay the rights to songs sung by their callers? Why would people listen to this? What are the alternatives? Are hosts just farting into microphones on every other station, making this the best choice?

I think, secretly, that Korean talk show hosts hate music, hate sound, and hate people listening to their shows. They are doing everything in their power to kill radio as a medium, thus fueling the Korean economy by driving everyone to buy mp3 players. If this is their goal, I commend them, as I could ride in silence without having to listen to old men trying to sing Korean drinking songs on the way to work.

In my basic adult class, their book had one of my favorite adult level games, "Two truths and a lie." In this game, you think of three statements about yourself, two true, one a false. It’s the job of the other players to figure out which is the lie. The better the three statements, the more interesting the game. I usually get caught immediately in this game because I am a terrible liar. I thought of some good statements for this time however, and got away with lying for the entire time.

I wrote my statements on the board as follows:

1. I had my picture taken with a beautiful North Korean woman.
2. I had my picture taken with a beautiful Thai woman.
3. I was once rescued after falling through the ice at our lake by my brother.

My students, at one point or another, doubted all three of those statements, questioned me, then couldn’t decide on which of these statements were true. When I finally revealed my answers, they were laughing. I had to explain the back story of each of the statements and explain why one of them was a lie. The students have to prepare their own statements for class on Wednesday, so I hope to hear some more very good stories. Some of my previous students were very good liars.

What was the lie in the statements above? Five years of archives and lots of personal stories to sort through? Can anyone find the answer? Register and leave a comment if you want to play.

The apartment I live in is fairly small. While huge for a single person living in Korea year to year, as a couple who has accumulated some things with semi-long term plans on staying in the country, it’s rather tiny. Serviceable, functional, but not exactly large. If we were to be given a piece of furniture, say, a couch, the only place we could put it would be on the veranda. The reason for this cramped space is the fact that while we only have three total rooms in our apartment, we have two beds, but we try to put them to good use when we can.

The first twin sized bed was given by the school, as I didn’t have my own apartment, I also had no need for my own bed. We purchased our own queen sized bed a few weeks before the wedding because we’d drive ourselves mad trying to sleep on a bed that small together every night. We now have a second bedroom that no one sleeps in, and a bed taking up a lot of space.

One thing my wife is very specific about is her sense of cleanliness. Anything  on the larger bed that isn’t pajama or bed related is not really "allowed". She gives me a glare if I set my bag down to pack, or if I happen to wear pants and sit on the sheets as I watch the news. It’s not that I’m an obscenely dirty fellow, it’s just that we do have nice sheets, and if they require washing, she’ll probably be the one to do it. Things as large as sheets get washed by hand, as keeping to her upbringing where her mother worked cleaning and scrubbing the household all day. Hand washing thick sheets is really hard work, and she wants to avoid it. I want to avoid making her work hard, so we have established the large bed as a sort of undeclared "clean zone". Despite the fact that the large bed is in a prime lounging location in our living room, we don’t crawl inside it if we are wearing our "day clothes".

These clean rules are less strictly followed in our second bedroom. For example, if you wanted to study, read, or play a game without bothering the other person, you could head to the second bedroom, drop onto the twin bed, and just relax. It’s rather nice to have the second bed, as it functions as a sort of resting area in place of a couch. It’s plenty large enough for one person, and you don’t have to change out of your clothes. We dress in the second bedroom, so there might be an article of clothing from the previous night laying on the matress depending on how busy we were the previous day. Despite the fact that our queen size bed is more comfortable we do rest on the twin bed from time to time.

Today, we went to see Crash. After the film, we were both exhausted, so we came back to the apartment to take a rest. We got as far as taking off our coats before we both ended up napping on the twin bed for two and a half hours. It was a nice, solid nap, where you wake up not knowing where you were, what time it is, or how long you were sleeping until you find a clock. I find the best naps, sleep wise, are the ones where you don’t even manage to get out of your clothes before you reach a deep slumber. I’m not sure why we didn’t just go to our normal sleeping bed for the space, as we were both tired, but the nap was very nice.

Have a favorite place for a nap? Leave a comment.

I went over to the Aunt’s house to visit today. I picked a bad day, as they were painting the stairwell into the apartment. The place had been sealed off with plastic for a day or two, but they didn’t do the actual spraying until today. They had plastic on the doors, and I thought that I wasn’t going to be able to get in. They let me inside, but all I had to do is walk through a room full of paint fumes with no mask, hold my breath in an elevator, and quickly get inside the door to the apartment before I was speckled with white paint and lost too many brain cells.

The apartment stank, of course. Paint fumes give me a nasty headache. The Aunt had to leave, as she was going to visit her mother, my Grandmother-in-law. Her teenage daughter was getting babysat by another older cousin. They planned to stay in the house despite the fumes. I invited them over to my house, as we had nothing else to do, and my house didn’t smell as foul. They had never been to my place, so I got to be "in charge" as we took a taxi and went to the apartment.

Luckily, Mrs. Torgo (This will be her pseudonym from now on) was home, so we had a translator for more difficult conversation. We played a nice game of Monopoly, and taught them the card game Rummy as well. While we were playing, my mother-in-law called to see what we were up to, and she stopped by as well. The games stopped, as it was time for the ladies "drama". They all watched the latest evening Korean soap opera, and I jumped on the computer to keep from getting a headache from trying to follow the plot.

It was good to spend some time with the family. They seemed comfortable hanging out in the apartment with us, and they got to play some games with us. They also didn’t have to sit a smelling apartment.

One of the children that lives on the tenth floor of my apartment building is a little strange. He’s very polite, but he always asks lots of questions to the people he meets in the elevator. This is atypical elevator behavior for most Korean people, which give me the "Elephant in the room" reaction most of the time. I’ve rode with him two times, and I can just sort of accept that he’s going to ask something utterly baffling to me each time I see him.

The first time I rode the elevator with him, I was with my wife. We were going out, and he asked me where I was from in Korean. I told him I was from the United States, and he made me repeat myself a few times. He then asked if my wife had gone there, and she replied she hasn’t visited the United States yet. Then he asked me if I had visited there. Confused, I answer that I had visited the States before, then I got out of the elevator.

The second time I rode with him, we were with an exterminator. As we rode up, he asked what the exterminator was going to kill. The man replied he was going to kill mosquitos. The boy then asked me if there were a lot of mosquitos in America. I was impressed, because it had been a few weeks since I told him where I was from.

When the exterminator got off, I had to ride up with him to my floor. He asked me how high elevators were in the United States (I think). I told him I had been on a hundred story elevator once. This was true, as I had visited the Sears Tower in Chicago, which had 110 stories. I said this as  the door was closing in the elevator, but I could hear him squeal in delight and amazement. I think he was under the impression everyone lives in apartment complexes like in Korea, and that my previous apartment was 100 stories tall. 

I wonder if he has some sort of mental condition. He seems to have that endless curiousity paired with the lack of common sense that younger, innocent, but attentive children have. The strange thing is that he seems much too old for this usually positive quality to make it seem wholesome.

So the Nintendo DS WIFI dongle I ordered from Play-asia arrived. This means that all those games I had spent hours on playing single player now double their content by as I become multi-player fodder for the online gaming masses. I’ve already set up the dongle, and used the dongle to play online games. Dongle is a great word and needs to be incorporated in my daily writing more often. The setup and connection to the WIFI service was a breeze. The games are lag free and fun to play.

I was able to get online. I registered my name at Nintendowifi then started a game of Tetris DS right away. I was actually able to set up the WIFI service easier than I was able to find the "instand drop" button for Tetris DS. (It’s +up.) I won my first game of Tetris online, then promptly lost every single game after in a matter of seconds.

I don’t know how the ranking and matching system works, but the first game I played was against someone with 11 wins, and the second was against someone with 111 wins. That’s a substantial difference in experience, and I was showing a need for some practice. I was a little underwhelmed by the options to play online. Either one player with no items, four players with items, or push mode. What’s up with the limited choices? I hope actual WIFI games with friends will allow for some more variations. Of course, I’d need to be told someone’s friend code, as there is no actual way to gleen this information from the game itself. Why didn’t they add a "add to friends list" option for people you meet in random WIFI games?

My initial experience with Metroid Prime: Hunters was more encouraging. I was able to hold my own in a match with four other players and came in a solid second after leading the match for a solid minute or two. I actually went from last to first, held on, then lost at the very end. This sort of excitement, and I don’t even have to log off the service when I go to the bathroom? That’s simply going to be disasterous if I ever have anything I need to do around the house, at work, or ever. You can also do Voice chat with your friends via the game. I have only "rivals" at the moment, so I haven’t been able to test this out.

Anyway, I’ve rooted through all my WIFI enabled games to pull out the friends codes I need to get some competitive play started with the people I know. If you happen to have a Nintendo DS and access to a WIFI enabled hotspot or play online, challenge me to one of the following games some time:

Animal Crossing DS: 4381-5518-3433

Tetris DS: 4503-8494-3825

Metroid Prime: Hunters: 1074-4269-0675

Mario Kart DS: 1503-9237-4437

I have wonderfully confusing conversations with my Kindergarten students all the time. They know only a handful of words in English, but their Korean vocabulary is at a level that is easy for me to understand…most of the time. The odd thing about speaking or listening to kindergarten children is that you often have to answer, or listen to, the very odd things they say, and very often they move from one topic to another with no logical connection that I can find.

For example, one of my students I like the most has a few quirks about her. She has absolutely only one volume, which is "Screaming at the park" loud. She has no "inside" voice, so it doesn’t matter if you are next to her, or across the room, she speaks to you at the same volume. We practice "whispering" occasionally in class together, but she doesn’t seem to have gotten the point. I’ve also got a mute student that hasn’t talked for a month in class, so she sort of balances things out.

The loud student also has no concept of the idea that while I work at a school, I don’t know the teachers at all the other schools in Korea. She will frequently go on about students in her class at her other "everyday" Korean kindergarten. She’ll talk about how this student said or did something, or about what one of her teachers told her. But the way she explains it, she’ll expect me to know who said it to her, and explain what they meant, or tell me what they will be doing tomorrow in that school. I’ve gotten used to just pretending I know what she’s talking about instead of trying to explain why I wouldn’t know. It’s just easier for both of us to maintain the status quo.

Another student told me today that I smell, but that I smell better than his other teacher. He said his teacher smelled, "Like cigarettes." He then detailed the smells of all his other teachers. I could only nod and wonder in awe.This boy also claimed the nasty stink floating around class in the class, proudly proclaiming it his fart. He might have been a bit obessed with smells today.

I can only imagine the strange things I used to tell teachers all the time that they grinned at.

Everyone knows the expression, "A watched pot never boils."

I happen to have a few other theories on time being relative.

For example, the international package I had shipped to my house will never arrive until I forget I ordered it and have no chance to check my mail. I ordered it last Wednesday night, and it shipped from Taiwan the next day. Unless they grabbed someone and told them, "Swim that way!" it should have arrived. Sadly, I got the mystery "sometime in the next 10 days?" shipping option with no tracking. The problem is, I’ve been checking the mailbox. As soon as I can wake up, go about my day, have no chance to check to see if the package has arrived, and have absolutely no time to actually recieve the package if I need to sign for it, it will show up. I could have had the package today, if only I hadn’t checked the mail. Only my desire to see if the package has arrived has prevented it from being here.

I’ve been told by a smoker there is yet another rule about time. A bus only arrives when you light a new cigarette while waiting. No matter how long you wait before you smoke, it’s the act of lighting a cigarette that makes the bus appear. This might be relative to the number of smokers present at a bus stop, because otherwise buses would be arriving constantly one after another and people would never complain about traveling by bus.

Any other alternative theories of time? Add them to the comments section!

Today my students were learning an exercise on prepositions. The book I chose for supplimental material unfortunately used people to explain their prepositions of location, so it was full of lovely sentences and illustrations of the following positions:

"Jack is in front of Tom."
"Ben is behind Tom."
"Tom is between Jack and Ben."
"John is under Anne."
"Anne is on John." (Anne is standing on John shoulders as he is on all fours on the ground.)
"Sam is on Sally."
"Dorthy is next to Sam."
"Mark is inside the box." (A picture of a boy box, which reminded me of the "Gimp" scene in Pulp Fiction.)

I usually use items arranged on a desk to teach prepositions, or drawings, or physical actions. I never use body locations for the obvious reason that it just sounds so…wrong when you write it down.