::A Geek in Korea::

Seeing as there were so many Nintendo DS games I had purchased in the last year or so, there was a time where my Gameboy slot on the console was hardly getting any use at all other than a dust cover. I carried around the same GBA game in the slot for close to a year without firing it up once. While there are plenty of great Gameboy Advance games, the ones I’ve been playing recently, like Wario Ware Twisted, are oversized and don’t leave themselves to traveling well. However, while I was back in the States, I picked up a handful of Gameboy Advanced titles that I wouldn’t be able to find in Korea easily. Since I’ve gotten back, it’s my Gameboy that’s been seeing more play than my DS. I’ll give a rundown of what I’ve been playing for the past week.

Dr. Mario and Puzzle League.

I paid for Puzzle League back when it was called "Pokemon Puzzle League"  for the Game Boy Color. It was essentially Tetris Attack with a Pokemon face lift. Tetris Attack, in my humble opinion, is one of the best, if not the best, falling block puzzle game ever. I very seldom "repurchase" games, but I’ll make an exception for a portable Tetris Attack I can play on my DS. Everything else is just a bonus. Dr. Mario is good, but I absolutely suck at it. I can’t keep the rotation mechanics in mind when I try to squeeze a pill between a virus or two. I used to play a really good version of Dr. Mario for Texas Instruments graphics calculators back in High school, which killed more batteries than anything else in study hall.

Riviera: The Promised Land

This is an odd little game. It’s an "angels bringing upon the apocalypse", cliched sort of RPG. It’s utterly linear, as you have no choice where to go other than a few branching paths. There is little to no free exploration. It’s got rythm based action segments. The leveling system is entirely item focused and can lead to heavy repetition.

However, I really dig it for some reason. To be honest, I usually never finish RPG games because they usually drag out the plot by making you traverse across lots of empty territory or are filled with lots of random encounters. Riviera doesn’t do this. You can level up by practicing against monsters, or challenge yourself by playing with less abilties. You get points to "explore" the environment depending on how well you perform in battle. You can only carry four items into battle which enable all your abilities, so you must choose wisely to avoid being defeated. The best thing about Riviera is the artwork. I adore all the characters and monsters attacks. I’m willing to look past some of it’s flaws (small inventory, plot) to see more of what lies ahead.

Rebelstar Tactical Command

 I never played X-com back in the day, but squad based tactical fights against aliens seems like a formula that can’t miss. Squeeze the basics into a Gameboy cart, and you’ve got Rebelstar. You control a group of troops as they go level to level clearing out aliens. The action is AP based, meaning it’s strategic instead of twitch based. Everything requires planning and a little luck to get the bad guys before they get you. The learning curve is a bit steep, but the tutorials let you start out slowly before dropping mutliple characters in your control at the same time. Still, it’s hard. Trying to position everyone without getting surprised by some creature hiding behing a window with a sniper rifle will lead you to restarting a few (dozen) times. The cut scenes before the battles are typical cheesy anime style "Young punk with mysterious powers rises to fame fighting aliens", but the game is still holding my attention a few hours in.

Gunstar Super Heroes

Gunstar Super Heroes was a bit of a gamble on my part. It’s made by Treasure, which is a sign of quality. It’s an action shooter, a genre which I haven’t really played much of since the NES or early PC days (Commander Keen anyone?). I liked Astroboy for the GBA, but I never ended up buying it due to varying difficulty. There is a chance that I’ll really like it, but as of yet, the other games have been taking up too much of my time to give this title a fair shake. It’s well made and technical, and it’s got some replay in the form of speed runs and high scores, but I rarely play games for either reason. It’s got some intense action and some interesting enemies, but some of the levels seem frustraiting until you memorize attack patterns.

All of the games were purchased cheaper than I could in Korea. The four games cost me what two DS games in Korea would be. Considering I’ll be playing them for a few more weeks barring a replay or two later, I think I’ve already got my money out of them.

My wife and I were sitting outside a supermarket enjoying some ice cream. We were waiting for a ride from my Mother in law. We were going to visit her maternal mother, who has just moved in with an aunt. We were sitting around enjoying ourselves. I had tried to play a crane game, but couldn’t win the prize because the cage containing the portable flashlight was too big to fit over the lip of the prize drop. I had given up putting money in the machine and we sat down under a canopy talking.

An elderly woman approached us and looked as if she had something to say. This is usually a bad sign. I’ve been harassed by surprisingly few people in public since I’ve arrived in Korea, but the elderly are occasionally unpredictable. This woman looked as if she had some grudge to bear about us sitting around talking in English.

The woman, in a rambling way, went on to tell a story to my wife about this guy that was taken to America. Some pastor at a church convinced him to sell all his worldly possessions and move to the United States. Then she went on about how this neglectful man abandoned a niece and grandfather in Korea. She claimed that this guy, and she even gave us his name, had abandoned his relatives and they all died because he had stayed in the United States. She kept mentioning details about him, as if I was going to stand up and say, "Oh, yeah, I know him." She then sort of deputized us to go, find out information about him and report back to the "red apartment, over there, where I live."

Whatever grudge she had about Americans might not have been formed in a still fully functioning part of her brain. One of the more enjoyable parts about understanding a situation as it unfolds is when I catch my wife lying. When this woman started asking where I was from, and if I knew the man she was going on about, my wife said I wasn’t from the United States. I played along, mostly because it would spare this woman from getting more upset than she already was. My wife, always the quick thinker, claimed I was Australian, not American, It’s not like this woman had any idea, so I didn’t have to start talking about dingos and surfing to pull off the impersonation.

Eventually the strange woman left us alone, but as she was walking down the street, I saw her yell at another man for entirely no reason at all. She just had to get her aggressions out. I don’t take it personally, as I think she probably had some wires crossed in the head. The last time a crazy old person approached me five years ago, they were drunk and were spitting chicken at me as they screamed in my face, so this was almost a pleasant conversation by comparison.

It’s been a rather stressful week for Yoshi.

Yesterday, with the summer heat and rainy season occasionally making the veranda a rather warm humid place from time to time, we decided that having thick fur probably wasn’t making Yoshi comfortable. We decided to take him to the pet store where we bought him for a trimming. We’ve cut off all other business with the store, but they are located much closer than our vet, and I was pressed for time trying to get him there on my lunch break. They were booked solid until late into the evening, but eventually we got to get him shaved down. We opted for the extreme trim instead of the "bald shave" that many pet owners get here. Hairless dogs look freaky.

Yoshi fought like a champ against his first haircut, but the result was an uneven hairdo. His neck, legs, and belly all were shaved to different lengths because he struggled so much. They told us that if we want to have him shaved again, they’ll recommend that we knock him out with a shot so he can be shaved in his sleep. Considering the fact I don’t trust this pet store to even feed our dog correctly, the chance I’d let them inject him with medicine is extremely small.

Today we took him to our proper vet to have him "snipped". Behavioral modification through mutilation! We weren’t there, as the vet had things to do, so we dropped him off and did some other errands around town. The surgery only took ten minutes. The tests for antibodies that required several shots took three times as long.

I didn’t have the habit of personifying animals until I owned a dog. However, I can’t help but to think my dog is thinking poorly of me now every time he stares up to me with his dog collar on. At the moment, Yoshi doesn’t have the energy to do anything other than lay around and look nearly dead.

 
"Why me?"

"I thought you were cool."

As far back as I had the luxury of being bored sometime in the afternoon in front of the television, I can remember watching The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. There was something therapeutic about watching a landscape appear from nothing in just 30 minutes. The large afro and the little expressions he used were also a treat.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I was channel surfing before going to work and stumbled upon Bob Ross painting on television in Korea. Not only was it Bob Ross, but it was Korean dubbed Bob Ross. They didn’t go the route of simply subtitling him and his expressions, they had a Korean actor saying them for you. I was giggling madly when Bob really got going and the Korean voice over actor started talking about "a happy tree saram (person)". I actually just waited the entire show to hear that expression come out of the dubbing.

It’s strange to think Bob Ross is such a phenomenon. He’s been dead for 11 years, and yet you can still see his show on television. They are even making video games with his name on them now. There is something about him that comes off as relaxing and  peaceful, even if nearly all his pictures look the same.

The school I now work for has a very similiar discipline and reward system compared to my last. When students do homework or accomplish something, you reward them by giving them "smiles" in their "communication journal". When students fill up their communication journal with 50 smiles, they are given e-cash partcipating at a site and allowed to shop for their own gifts.

This system improves on my last school in that collecting the smiles doesn’t become a way of showing off to other students. Several of my students would never spend their "star" points. They used this to make new students feel bad, much like "leveling up" in a game lets you brag about how much time you’ve spent playing. Also, since they could purchase items in front of other students, and there was a limited number of items, students would purchase things just so someone else couldn’t. Allowing students to use rewards to spite others isn’t something you should encourage.

This system, since it is shop at home friendly, won’t prevent people from bragging about smiles, but will prevent spite purchasing. It’s not perfect though, as some of the rewards are nearly impossible to reach. I’m not joking when I say the site’s name is "Lemons". I worked out the exchange rate from the rewards at school. If the average students gets five "smiles" in a week, when converted to e-currency to save up for a PlayStation Portable, it will only take approximately 25 years to reach their goal.

Ironically, the same person thinking they could achieve that goal probably spends the same amount on English education in a few months, if not less. Of course, the whole point is to let the kids choose their own rewards to work for, and let them get the experience of shopping online as soon as possible. I think it’s a cool system as long as you were going to study and get the rewards anyway. The only danger is that students set unrealistic goals for themselves, and I can already tell that a lot of parents at the school might have that problem.

I’m back to teaching once again. Although I haven’t recieved any training about the "method" my new school employs, I seem to be making it through the majority of the day relatively well enough to avoid causing any major problems. The school varies from my last, as there is a Korean "head teacher" that organizes classes and maintains the schedule. There are at least six other teachers, and I don’t envy anyone that has to organize all of that while keeping in contact with parents.

Some of our classes are hellishly long for the students. Some of the students sit in class upwards of four hours a day. This is their vacation time, so we have morning intensive classes that add extra hours to the schedule. One teacher will handle two hours, then another will teach the next two. There are ten minute breaks between classes where the students can run to the bathroom or chat with friends. Some of the afternoon classes are split into  three lessons between three teachers.

Each of the teachers is compartmentalized by their teaching focus. I teach speaking and reading, and all my lessons are geared to teaching these two disciplines. This means I get a lot of "repeat after me" classes, where I try to pick out stduents having a hard time with pronunciation and give them extra help. In a class of twelve, this is next to impossible since we mostly read together. I also have been trying to get students speaking by answering questions about the text and what different words mean.

For the most part, their behavior has been really good. If I was trapped in summer English, I’d be pretty surly after the fourth hour too. Most of my students were completely surpised to learn that someone living here for five years could understand nearly everything they were saying. I got the impression that past foreign teachers at the school didn’t know what was going on when their students were speaking Korean. I don’t want to make it a habit of speaking in Korean to them though. That’s a tough habit to break when the students begin to rely on it.

The paperwork required for classes is time consuming. As of right now, I have to check homework, reward students, take attendence, assign homework, and list what I did in class. I also have to grade daily journals and look over any written work I assign. I’ve been given tons of schedules and papers to coordinate where I am supposed to go and who I am supposed to teach, but I still don’t even know where I would go if my proper books weren’t on my desk when I left the office.

I don’t know how I will coordinate any of the material I share with other teachers. I’m not even sure what the teachers that share my classes even do. I teach in three different rooms, never in the same room more than once or twice a day, so I have no way of integrating large, multi class projects into my study environment. My impression of my new school is that it reminds me much more of a machine than a place of creative people trying to share educational principals the best way possible.

I’m feeling a little confined by the paperwork and "system" at the moment, but once I get on top of what papers need to be pushed to make things run smoothly, I hope to be able to share my talents and get back into the groove being creative and having fun with my job.

We didn’t have the best of flights for our return to Korea. I blame this on Chicago, O’Hare airport. The connection airplane flying to Chicago was supposed to take a total of 49 minutes. We were held, according to our pilots, for no reason, and were delayed on the runway, nearly doubling our travel time. We we were getting off the plane, we saw runway baggage handlers just carelessly tossing luggage onto the ground. We had a bag of fragile stuff that made it onto the baggage cart without getting mangled, but the bags we transferred were just thrown down and put onto a waiting trolley. 

Luckily we made it to Chicago with lots of time for our transfer, although the terrible signs and directions to get to our terminal made it difficult to find the gate. One of the security guards we had going through a checkpoint was so lazy and or on a power high, she wouldn’t even turn her head to check our boarding pass. We had to hold it up for her to see, as she was busy leaning against the luggage scanning X-ray machine. If we weren’t short on time trying to get from point A to point B, the treatment of some of the security guards would have been complaint worthy as well.

The plane trip was only supposed to take fourteen and a half hours, but took an extra two. We would periodically check the information provided by the flight and the "time to destination" just never seemed to be correct. Eventually, the thing stopped reporting all together and we just had to guess how much longer we had on the plane. I couldn’t sleep at the beginning of the flight, which would have been the best time to offset jet lag. Later in the flight, after we were served our meals, I watched movies and played my Nintendo DS for a few hours to kill time. I felt trapped in the middle seat, and wasn’t ever comfortable enough to take anything more than a very brief nap, if I slept at all. In the whole 16 hour ordeal, I maybe slept for a total of 1 hour.

The fun didn’t stop there. While waiting for our luggage to arrive, there was a man that crawled out of the baggage handling center with a white board attached to a suitcase. He wrote the names of the people that wouldn’t be able to get their luggage because it was missing. I chuckled and thought, "Man, that sucked when they lost my luggage. Glad my name isn’t on there this time…." except it was. For the second consecutive flight out of Chicago O’Hare, they have lost the same bag of mine. It’s like a lottery, except bad. It arrives in a few days, and might be a blessing in disguise. I don’t think either of us had the energy to carry the thing if it had arrived on time, and now it gets delivered to our apartment free of charge.

Not only did they lose my bag, they also destroyed my wife’s bag. Handle completely snapped in half when we tried to get it off the carousel. Flying to America this same bag had another part snapped off and we got a $25 dollar voucher for our next flight. This time the damage was much more severe. We went back to the lost and found and they told us that we could get a replacement bag outside of customs. We headed there and they said they didn’t have a bag as big as ours to replace what they had damaged. We got the largest thing they had, and just rearranged everything we could to make it work.

By this time, I was much like the walking dead. I hadn’t slept, had tons of stress, and was ready to stab someone in the eye if they even looked at me funny. We got our tickets for Daejeon, then waited for the bus to arrive. I picked up a cheeseburger from McDonald’s while whistling the "Super Size Me" movie theme song in my head. I ate my burger and immediately regretted my choice. On the bus I was in such intestinal agony I had to loosen my pants and hope there wouldn’t be any delays until I got into a bathroom. It felt like Ronald himself had given me a kick to the stomach. I’m having problems with bathrooms and buses far to often these days.

Anyway, we made it back to the apartment, and I made it back to the bathroom just in time. We spent the evening unpacking and putting things away. Since this is a new apartment, I don’t know where most of our stuff goes anyway. After we picked up some stuff for our breakfast, I collapsed on the bed. I slept for three hours until 2 AM, then was off and on for the rest of the morning, Eventually I got up and made breakfast just to be out of bed.

No sleep for either of us today, as we both go back to work. I’m trying to stay awake at my first day of of class at my new school. All I can tell about this new school is that there is some sort of system at work that I am either too new or too sleepy to understand. There are tons of Korean teachers, tons of classes, and tons of different schedules and papers to fill out for each class. I taught a morning class that was full of bored middle school kids. All they did was "repeat after me" style exercises for two hours. This is after two hours of classes with a Korean teacher. I have three more classes today, and I know just enough to get me through a day. It seems "lots of homework" is the standard.

Today we decided to head back to the Argosy Casino to lose money. Since the last time we weren’t allowed in because my wife didn’t have identification, we headed back with passports and some cash we could part with seeing leave our pockets.

My father and I headed to the video poker machines. A quarter a play. I burned through ten dollars very quickly before I realized I was playing fifty cents a hand! My next twenty dollars lasted about four times as long, and I was even a card away from a royal flush, but all of it was eventually gone.

Video poker gives the illusion that you are in control of what is happening, as you tap and touch the machine as your money disappears. My father said that with all the poking and prodding he was getting some exercise. The man next to us, who was probably our combined weight, leaned over to give my dad a few pointers as to how to gamble without moving any muscles at all. We both gave him an appraising look and sped up our per chip wagering before we ended up him.

My wife was the big winner of the day. After putting five dollars into a slot machine, she won twenty with one of her last pulls of the arm. She immediately cashed out and quit ahead. So smart of her. She’ll never have to gamble again because she left the first time a winner. My mother kept her company and didn’t break even. Eventually she ran through her twenty dollar limit too.

We left poorer, slightly more cancerous due to all the smoke inhaled, and a little bored from all the repetitive action of losing all our money. From there, we headed home to pack for tomorrow’s flight. We’ll cram everything we can into our bags, then head to the shopping mall for a last minute gift for my brother-in-law. Then it’s off to my grandmother’s house for some swimming, and some homemade lasagna.

My internet connection in Korea is temporarily cut off for our trip, so even if I had the energy to post after a 20+ hour flight in two days, I’d have to leave the house and find a PC-room. Expect regular posts to return on Monday or whenever my sleeping/work schedule sorts itself well enough to allow for it.

Yesterday our trip to the Great American Ball Park to watch the Reds play ended up in disappointment. It rained before the game to cool everyone off, but we got caught in the downpour on the way to meet my friends at a local sports bar. We met up with some of the people that we had seen earlier in the week, and two more people I knew through friends. We all headed to the park together, bought the cheapest seats possible, and sat out for a game of baseball. Three hours later, the game was over, our team had lost, and everyone had to say goodbye. The stadium is great for baseball, and was short enough that any line drive was a quick home run. We even saw a grand slam. Too bad baseball is so damn boring.

Today was our visit to the city’s largest amusement park, Paramount’s Kings Island. We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect visit. It was fantastic. A week ago, there was a safety problem with one of the premiere rides in the park, the Son of Beast. Cincinnati is also gripped in the middle of a nasty heat wave. Today was also a weekday. Combining all three of these means the smallest lines ever.

I grew up riding a lot of roller coasters. There was an amusement park literally a quarter mile from my house in the middle of a corn field, and I worked on coasters and in the park during the summers of high school. We would visit Kings Island once a year and wait in terrible lines, get really sunburned, sick on sugar, and come home having purchasing items of suspect quality at extremely high park prices. That being said, I memorized roller coaster statistics like other people would track the statistics of their favorite baseball players. We would even take trips to Cedar Point to ride new rides occasionally. It’s a rare treat in Ohio, we are spoiled by quality roller coasters.

Today we walked onto most rides, and we never waited more than fifteen minutes for anything in the entire park. It was wonderful. I got my wife on the longest, best wooden roller coaster ever, The Beast, and rode the rest with my father. My mom can’t even sit in the back seat of a car due to motion sickness, so she was given "bag" duty while we breezed through lines. My wife kept her company. We also enjoyed the water park at the end of the day to cool off. My experience with large Americans in tiny bathing suits leads me to ask: Where is your shame?

We had a good time in the Scooby Doo haunted house as we were leaving the park. They give you light guns on the ride which let you set off targets for points. These activate the "ghosts" in the haunted house. I crushed my family’s high scores, and my father, hunter that he is, challenged me for a rematch. I increased my score on my second ride while missing many more of the targets. I don’t know how it worked, but I was the undefeated champion of ghost shooting.

Coming home, we didn’t see any traffic, and got a seat at a restaurant in under five minutes. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect day out with the family.