::A Geek in Korea::

Yoshi!

Since today is a local election day in South Korea, everyone has the day off. My wife and I went to the voting booth early in the afternoon. She went to vote, I went to look. After she voted, she went over to her aunt’s house. Together with her mom and aunt, they prepared some of the grandmother’s maesil for juice later in the summer.  The wild maesil plums are put into a air tight jar with brown sugar and  white sugar and sealed for fifteen or more days. The resulting syrup will make a refreshing drink this summer when the temperatures get hot.

While they were preparing the seven jars for the summer, two cousins came over to play with Yoshi. They adore dogs, but their aunt doesn’t currently allow them to have one. They played with Yoshi, who took to them well. These are the first "new" people he’s gotten to play with since we took him home. They ran him around the veranda for a while. Then we got out Yoshi’s transport box, some food, cleaning supplies. We took the dog with us for a picnic at their father’s landscaping nursery in the country.

This was Yoshi’s first trip outside that wasn’t a trip to the vet. He still needs three shots to be allowed outside completely. We were careful about where he walked and what he could interact with since he wasn’t immunitized. Who knows how well we did.

We ate some very nice pork on a homemade grill out beneath the trees and sky. I’m not sure what it is with Koreans and barbaque grilling, but we had a ridiculous amount of meat. Two or three kilograms or more perhaps. They kept telling me to eat more and more, but eventually I got to the stage where I couldn’t even look at pork without cringing.  We put Yoshi back in the box for the night to keep him from being eaten by mosquitos. Everyone enjoyed peeking at the dog to see what he was doing. He seems to be popular with the relatives.

We got dropped off at our apartment and planned to wash the dog. I got deputized into shampoo and wash duty. Yoshi doesn’t fight too much, but he hates getting his face washed. For reasons unknown to me, my toothbrush was relagated to his "face brush". I get a new brush to myself, thankfully, and I made sure the old brush stays far away from the bathroom just in case.

I wish that living in another country was always a way to expand my horizons. Sometimes there is a bit of entropy that sets in after living in another country for a while. For example, you lose the slang and cultural references that people from your country make from time to time. You might miss out on minor details of life, or forget to keep up with something that you never needed to expend energy to do before.

For example, my college experience was full of a rich musical diversity that meant that discovering new bands or genres of music was as easy as meeting someone new or taking a trip down the hallway of the dormitory. When I got involved in the campus radio station as a DJ, I was getting exposed to a ton of new music on a weekly basis, some good, some bad. We even had one of the best alternative rock radio stations ever, WOXY located nearby as a neighbor. I had a friend that was a creative musician and would not only make music as we hung out with him, but would ask me on feedback on tracks he created. Finding new music was like breathing. So easy I never considered being in a situation where I wasn’t hearing something new all the time.

I don’t nearly have as many sources to discover new music. While I have a coworker in a band, they mostly do covers when I see them. This is good for live music, but not for stumbling on anything new. I don’t consider Korean music channels on the television to be sources of music, just like Mtv isn’t a source of actual music in the United States either. This leaves friends recommendations and anything I stumble upon on my own.

For a while, my mp3 player was fairly stagnant. I discovered so few bands that I really stopped listening to music for a while. There is only so many times you can listen to the same thing before it gets too old. However, one of my friends posted a link to his Last.Fm playlist. Intrigued but skeptical, I didn’t start using the service until recently. It seemed like it was a bit of a "Indier than thou" sort of social website competition. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone with my music playlist. I just wanted to listen to something new. It turns out that after you give it a few songs and tweak a few parameters, Last.FM spits out some  new recommendations for you.

Right now I haven’t listened to my entire playlist for Last.FM to have an accurate portrait of my musical tastes. The bands it’s recommending at the moment can be adjusted to more or less obscure.  Right now it’s recommending stuff so popular that it’s impossible to escape even on this side of the globe. However, it’s also tossed a few good bands unknown to me onto its list that might make their way into my current rotation. If a ramp up the "obscurity" I might find some truly rare stuff that will let me feel like a Radio DJ music snob once more.

The newfound success of the Korean soccer team in the last World Cup has swollen the ranks of soccer fans, who are collectively known as the "Red Devils". Stores sell accessories like horns, t-shirts, and banners to cash in on the trend. All advertising, no matter how abstract, now refers to soccer in some way. Telephones, skin cream, cars, ice cream bars…everything has soccer related advertising. It’s fairly inescapable at the moment.

The video is the "World Cup Song" that I’ll probably be hearing daily for the next month or so. "Tae-han Min-guk!" is the  name of Korea in Korean, and also the rallying cry for the Korean soccer team. It’s chanted endlessly during games at the World Cup to show support for the team.

Korean students idolise Korean soccer stars, and are crazy about the sport in general. Active boys in my classes will probably spend the majority of their free time outdoors playing soccer with their friends whenever possible. All schools have soccer fields (dirt only) where the students can play during their recess or gym class. Even the girls, who tend to shy away from playing soccer themselves, love watching the Korean national team when they play.

My wife was out of the country studying English during the last World Cup, so hasn’t experienced the hype and soccer craze that overtakes people before. I hope the Korean soccer team does well again this World Cup simply because it puts everyone in such a good mood to see their team win. I’ll probably cheer for the American team again too, but really their fate in the games is secondary to how well Korea does. I know that people in America wouldn’t feel passion about the sport even if they happened to win.

The day started out well, but that only lasted as long as the time it took me to wake up and pull back the curtains to our veranda.Our dog, Yoshi, who had no signs of illness when we put him in his bed last night, had soiled the floor of the veranda completely, with every possible bodily fluid known to dog-kind. It was foul, but worst of all was the look on the dogs face. He didn’t know what was going on either.

Today was already designated "wash the dog" day, anyway, so we got started a little early. I got veranda duty, while the wife got to drown wash the dog. We had just purchased a special mop for the veranda so finished early and started looking up what might be affecting the dog. There was a potential virus threat, and lots of lists of things to do. Universal to all the advice I found was the fact that a puppy of two months needed professional medical attention in his condition due to the threat of dehydration.

We mobilized a plan. We’d go to the puppy store/hospital we purchased the dog at and get the treatment he needed. We saw that the dog store didn’t open for an hour, so we got to witness dog retching for the first time. The joys of first time puppy-hood! When we were sure the dog store would be open, we grabbed an old care package box, once sent by Mother to keep me from being homesick, but now used to transport a shih tsu with a leaky ass.

I was filled with a bit of urgency when we left the apartment. Partly because I didn’t want the dog to have complications, but also because I didn’t want to be trapped in a taxi with a dog that couldn’t control it’s functions. We were heading in one particular direction, so when a taxi passed the other way, we sort of gave him a "Hey, turn around" sort of motion. He drove right by, made no recognition of us, and didn’t turn around anywhere we could see. We figured he missed us, so when a taxi heading our way happened by, we jumped in and told him to head to the hospital.

As we approached the light at the end of the block, the taxi driver we had flagged but had been ignored by pulled up next to us. He had his window down and started cursing at me in Korean. "Hey you F******* Foreigner! ***** You can’t wave me down ***** and then not ********* wait to get in my ********* taxi!"…or something similar.

We had no idea he was going to turn around! He didn’t honk his horn or even turn his head! Had he even SLOWED DOWN, we probably would have waited, but the finer points of taxi etiquette were missing considering the sick dog. It’s not like I was going to get in his cab to make it up to him now that he was cursing at me anyway. When I made sure we weren’t going to have to worry about him following us, I gave him the one fingered salute and an hearty curse of my own. Not my finest moment in international diplomacy.

The entire trip to the pet store I sort of expected to be hauled out of the taxi and beaten in the street by this man. The taxi driver we rode with downplayed everything and said that people get stressed when they miss a fare due to how many taxis are on the road and how competitive people are. When we got out of the taxi near the pet store, a driver trying to squeeze by to get another fare around the corner blared his horn. I jumped, thinking it was the same driver I had pissed off early. Thankfully it was just some other rude taxi driver and no one I had caused direct annoyance to.

The pet store/ hospital was a complete disaster. The first few hours they let the dogs run around the store for exercise. The vet wasn’t going to be into the store until noon at the earliest, which was two hours later than we were willing to late. The dogs were running around, defecating everywhere, sniffing each other, and just making a mess. Clearly there were many possible disease vectors in the store to keep a weakened dog in the store. (Hey, Thanks Microbiology 121! I remembered something! )

We made a decision to trust a coworker that had told me about an animal hospital somewhat closer to our house. My coworker swore by this particular vet, so we went over to visit and see what he could do for Yoshi.  By this time, the dog was shaking and clearly weak. We grabbed another taxi without incident, and by this time I had stopped locking to doors at every light for fear I would be tracked down and cursed at by the rogue taxi driver in the morning.

The vet at the animal hospital was much more professional and seemed to know what he was talking about. He even had some hearts with worms displayed in jars, which was gruesome but cool. In the course of a thirty minute chat about our dogs health he managed to stick three long tube like devices up the poor dog’s ass.

Yoshi was tested for a virus, which was thankfully negative.The vet recommended an IV drip and some medicine, along with special food for a day or two.
It was thankfully a less costly procedure than we had both imagined, and not nearly as serious as we expected. The dog still needs some extra care, and I’ve got to give him two more doses of Pepto Bismol like medicine, but thankfully the dog isn’t emptying at both ends anymore.

While it might have seemed that I was unwilling to take the responsibility for the dog, which I was, when it came plain that no one at my Parents-in-laws was going to be capable of taking care of it properly, I accepted that we needed to do was take Yoshi into our home and care for it the best we could. Perhaps my patience has grown considerably in the last year, but I actually don’t mind the dog….much.

He’s cute, doesn’t bark, and is as friendly as you can ask for in a pet. We’ve taught him to sit in two weeks, and we are working on a few other commands too. He generally stays to the veranda and doesn’t bother me except when I have to clean up his messes from time to time. When I can actually take him outside (post shots), I’ll even consider the dog a positive if he gets me exercising more. As long as his health doesn’t become a prohibitive factor in keeping him, I won’t mind having him around for a while.

The two boys in my Kindergarten class are very similiar in personality. So similiar in fact, that when one of them gets frustraited and starts making monkey sounds, the other one picks up the sound, much like a gibbon returning a call from it’s mate. This always gets higher and higher pitched  until all the girls in the class are sticking their fingers in their ears and I tell them to stop. There is very little children can do to annoy me faster than a high pitched wail for absolutely no reason.

Today, the two boys were particularly obnoxious. We were calling out words as I flipped over flash cards, but only they were screaming long after the word was revealed. No one else could learn anything since these two kids were screaming. I gave them a fair warning a few times, then asked them to stop one last time. When they continued, I grabbed both of their arms and took them outside.

The lesson I learned is that if you punish kindergarten students when they aren’t in the presence of their parents, it is completely ineffective. However, if parents, in front of their peers, sees their kid acting like an animal, you are very likely to get results very quickly. When I took these two students outside, I got two completely different reactions.

One student, seeing that he was already outside, and wasn’t going to play our game, decided the best course of action would be to stand next to the door where I asked him to wait for a few minutes. That way, while he wasn’t going to have any fun, he wasn’t going to get in more trouble from his mother. This is exactly what a smart student would do in this situation.

The other student proceeded to grab on every object he could to prevent himself from being removed from the classroom, got angry, started to cry, then began to hit me. I shut the door on him and saw a sort of wraith like shadow develop over him. I’m not sure, but it might of been his embarassed mother running at cheetah like speeds to quell the outburst of violence and tears.

From what the first student said when he was allowed back into class when he got a chance to settle down, the angry boy had not only hit me, but had also hit his mother. Whatever he had done, he was quickly taken down an abandoned hallway near the bathrooms and swiftly given a reminder about his behavior being innappropriate by his mother. The cries weren’t of anger any more, but of what I can only assume was a swollen ass.

When he returned after that, he went into "extra polite" mode. Not only was he trying his best to speak English, but he was using words like "Please" mutliple times per sentence to  make sure he didn’t get sent out again. I don’t bear any grudges, so I let him stay in class without penalty as long as he could behave. Later, I got an apology from his mother through my manager.

Since I don’t hit students for punishment, I can’t get that fearful respect that young children sometimes need to feel when they’ve done nothing but piss you off for a few hours a week. The amount of time I had to listen to that little boy scream this week was not made up for the fact he got punished by his mother today, but it didn’t make me unhappy either.

Remember Urban Dead? Remember how much fun it was to play a Low Tech Zombie Apocalypse based Massively Mutliplayer Online game for free with a few buddies? Setting up barricades, launching offensives against zombie strongholds, leveling up characters, getting new abilities, having those new abilities immediately get nerfed? Then just as you start having some fun, your character gets slaughtered as you slept without any action points to move or defend yourself? Yeah, good times.

If you were a fan of Urban Dead, perhaps I can advise you to try out Nexus War. Imagine everything you liked from Urban Dead, then add AJAX so you aren’t constantly reloading the page, some slick interface programming that streamlines the experience, three alignments (Good, Evil, Neutral), several character classes, more game balance, twice the action points a day (12 hour recovery!), more items, more unique buildings, more skills, and more of  EVERYTHING. Check the wiki for more specifics.

What seems really neat about Nexus War is how they took the concept of Urban Dead and made it more interesting at the same time. Morality and alignment come into play determining the path you take as you upgrade your character. If you go around killing anyone and everyone, you’ll be locked off from some of the good character classes. If you don’t kill people, but simply do tasks like unlocking or repair or construction, you can gain access to higher level neutral characters too. Killing only evil characters nets you morality to let you into Paradise and the good character classes.

Thus, while this is a Player Killing based Role Playing game, it’s also got a few other ways to progress.Nexus War allows for three characters per account, so you could potentially play all three alignments at the same time.

I’ve made my first character already, and am currently hiding in a house somewhere after looting a police station just like old times. I haven’t played it much, but I can already see that this game has the potential to be HUGE. It’s better to get in on the ground floor before you become a casualty of some sort of bigger struggle between warring groups. If anyone wants to play together, we could start a faction or align ourselves in some manner, set up a barricade and start figuring out how we are going to survive. The "Metagame" in these sorts of browser MMORPGs are even more interesting than the game play itself at times.

Add a message in the comments about your character when you sign up.

Something weird was going on with the school today. When I arrived, the manager asked me if I had touched his computer. Since he was at work when I left, and he basically never leaves the machine, I don’t know when I would have even had the opportunity. His files had gone missing, meaning a year’s worth of work was gone. I’m sure the implications of this suck much harder than I realize at the moment, but really, a manager not backing up his work is just asking for problems.

Not only did we have a computer go and lose documents, but all the school’s clocks went crazy today. We all have independent clocks, mounted fairly high on walls that have their own batteries. No one tends to mess with the clocks since they are either too short, or would get ratted on by other students. I keep a watch on me at all times anyway, and a phone with a clock on it too, do the chances my students would be let out early would be slim anyway.

During the first sets of classes for the day, I went to class according to the proper time in the office, but found out I was ten minutes late. The office clock had become ten minutes slow in the time I had spent in the office. I didn’t know what had happened until after my class had left and someone climbed the wall to reset the clock.

I wasn’t the only person to have a problem with their class times. One teacher lost track of the time while playing a game, looked up to see he was past the time on his classroom clock, and let his students out five minutes early. He thought it was odd that all the other teachers were keeping their students late, but couldn’t recall his students after he realized his mistake. He reset his clock in his classroom too.

The clock in the kindergarten room also started to keep poor time and was ten minutes slow. This clock was almost tamper proof, as even I had to get a table to pull it off the wall. There was no way the children or anyone else had touched it. This I attributed to the battery being slow, as the second hand didn’t move evenly.

The fact that four strange things happened on the same day might just be a coincidence. It’s very likely that the batteries of the school were all purchased on the same day, and through a tremendous coincidence, all happened to go dead on the same day, within the same few hours. The computer eating my manager’s files might be a virus, even though his scan returned clean.

Whatever is going on, it’s kinda spooky.

Moustache Tattoo

A new trend has been sweeping over the Internet. Moustache Tattoos, or alternatively, moustaches drawn on people’s fingers. While I’m not brave enough to actually get a tattoo, I did happen to draw on my hand in class while bored. The girl pictured on the right was reading her storybook and I would occasionally put my finger handlebar moustache to my face as I corrected the her pronunciation.

She would tell the rest of the students, "Look up! Look at the teacher!" By then, of course, I had already concealed my hand, so no one else knew what she was talking about. After she finished reading her book, she couldn’t wait to get a marker and draw her own moustache. Unfortunately, for her first finger moustache she went for more of a "Hitler-stache" instead of something more Rollie Fingers inspired.

She went on to color one more of her fingers as well with a more Boris Badenov sort of moustache that fit her somewhat mischieveous personality as well.

The rest of the class finally figured out what was going on and started in on the trend, showing off their different moustaches and talking in silly voices. My secret hope is that this trend not only spreads to the other classes of this school, but that they spread it to their actual elementary schools.

How awesome would it be to see Korean school children with moustaches drawn on their hands on the street as you went to work talking to each other in mock French Clouseau style voices? I would venture to say it would be completely awesome and highly improbably to the utmost degree.

Today was a craft day in my kindergarten class. We were doing "families", so I had the students cut out different pieces of clothes and "draw" their families into the clothes they colored. The idea was to practice family words as well as introduce clothing words, which we will study later in the year. Since the students were busy coloring, the talkative students were chatting.

I allow the occasional chatter in Korean in the kindergarten class if it is related to the topic at hand. Since students don’t have the vocabulary to actually talk about anything substantial, if I didn’t let them talk at all it would be silent as we prepared the papers we were working on. I tried asking students questions like, "What’s this, a shoe or a boot?" or, "What color is this?" sort of thing to keep them speaking and practicing their English.

The two most talkative students simply grab any crayon and color wildly with no regard to lines. This means they finish in two minutes what it takes everyone else the rest of class. Then they proceed to talk the rest of class about completely random things or annoy the other students. Today, I told them that they had to speak in English if they were going to speak in class.

The both looked at me. Then they started speaking in Korean very slowly, as if you would talk to a very young child or someone you think it too stupid to understand what you actually are saying.

I told them that I didn’t want them to speak slowly in Korean, but in English entirely. They both looked at men again and said, "Na English mo-te-yo". (I can’t speak English.)

Exactly.

Later, I was teaching various kinds of onomatopoeia to my students. We started talking about animal sounds in Korean and English. Animals don’t sound the same when expressed in Korean. For example, a horse’s neigh is more of a "ee-hee-hing" sound in Korean (when written back into Roman characters for extra confusion, of course). We stopped the entire lesson and started naming animals and the sounds attributed to them. I’d write and imitate a sound and the students would try to guess the animal. Then, they would reply with the Korean animal sound. It was like a weird international game of telephone. (I didn’t try a baby ox.)

Anyway, much like the scene in Flander’s fall out shelter, the students started arguing with me about the sounds the animals make. I’m not trying to tell them that a frog really says, "ribbit ribbit," but that when we write it in English, that’s how we express it. Students would tell me, "No! Frogs clearly say ‘Kae-gul, Kae-gul"," which is how it is expressed when written in Korean. They were adamant that I was making the sounds up completely randomly and I had never seen or heard any animal before in my life. I just asked them to indulge me in the favor of believing me when I said that animal sounds were written differently in English.

There is a local election for citywide leaders at the end of the month. This happens to be awesome, as it falls in the middle of the week, and election days are days off work! This is just one way things are different than in the United States. In Korean local elections there aren’t attack ads on television, and your much more likely to see the candidate himself on the street. While I can’t vote here, it’s not nearly as intolerable as when election season rolls around in the United States. People take a different approach to getting the vote out here.

Since this isn’t the first election cycle I’ve been here for, I knew what to expect. At the beginning of the month, gigantic pictures of the candidates started appearing on the sides of buildings. Since Koreans don’t tend to have things like lawns, instead of having small signs showing the support of some candidates placed everywhere, there are huge color coded and numbered signs showing a candidate in some thoughtful pose. These are placed on any large building for maximum exposure to traffic.

That’s just one way that people try to get the vote out. When walking on the streets, you are also likely to see this:

        

Those are volunteers that sit on the corner of sidewalks to drum up support for their candidate. Also, there is a truck with a mounted podium on the back. The candidate themselves will get up on the backs of these trucks, and with the help of the large speakers inside share their ideas deafen anyone nearby. The best thing about the set of pictures above was that there were to rival groups on opposite street corners on the same intersection.

The group in blue had a coordinated dance routine going on, waiving to cars with gloves, and also providing a show to the people crossing the street. The group in the red was waving to people crossing the street, and the candidate himself handed me a card. It’s not like I can vote, but I appreciate the effort of inclusiveness, since this was the very same street corner I was denied Jesus tissues.

This was the second time I’ve been approached by a candidate. Today, after getting a shot for our new dog, a man lurking in the trees near Wal-Mart handed me his card as well. He had a banner on proclaiming him to be the "Number 8" candidate for whatever it was he was running for. He lacked all sorts of dancing women and had no truck mounted podium, so he was more stealthy in handing out cards to people carrying pets and bags of food. Perhaps he was running for district "Peeping Tom".