::A Geek in Korea::

One of my students is someone that studies at a private school taught entirely in English. She needs extra help with her English, so I’m her tutor. I work at the school in an intensive one on one class to help her through her homework. She supplies the study material (Her homework or recent classwork for review), and we go through class working on what she needs to get done.

Today we were reading a story about firehouses. In the story, a group of students visit to see where firefighters work, what they do, and how they protect the community. As the students in the story were walked around the firehouse, they encounter the dalmatian named "Spot".

The sentence in the text was written:
"As Spot ate, the children walked around."

My student has the habit of ignoring punctuation, which causes a weird sense of flow and unnatural pauses that native speakers do not have. Normally this has no affect on the meaning of the sentence itself, but is simply something we repeat and try to fix as we read. Today was the exception, as she read the sentence as:

"As Spot ate the children walked around."

This radically changes the meaning of the sentence. Trying to explain why that comma meant that Spot went from "a dog eating dog food" to a "dog eating children" was hard to explain. The student didn’t really understand how the comma altered the sentence meaning. After all, it’s not a word itself, but groups words and ideas into logical parts. It’s just another way to emphasize that pronunciation and pauses when reading are important.

In my last class of the day with 11-12 year old students, I heard some of the students talking about the current political situation. Usually students don’t have a clue what is going on in the world, but since this issue is more "local" to a degree, taking place on the peninsula, the students wanted to share some opinions about the topic. Seeing as they were already talking about the issue, they might as well be talking about it in English. I indulged them in drawing a map on the board and going over the "basics" of the situation in English, teaching them some horrifying vocabulary as I went.

Imagine my face when I heard this conversation in the back of class begin between a few of my students:
Girl A: What country will you go to when you are a refugee?
Girl B: I’ll go to China, because my parents live in China right now.
Girl C: I’ll go to America! Everyone is Christian there!

I had heard about enough at that point. I asked them about why they would be considering such a thing.

They basically reiterated the situation, and stated that since I was American, I clearly wanted to see an American lead war on the peninsula that would destroy the North Koreans. I emphatically denied that I wanted any part in any war, ever, and that that such an action would lead to the destruction of all of Korean, not only the North. Considering that we live here, I thought that was a fairly simply, straight forward point to concede. They viewed it more or less as an inevitability, and that it would be better to have it done, even if it meant that everyone died. They didn’t understand an American could be against war, period. They viewed the severity of the situation on par with going on a long vacation to a new country. It’s not that I expect Korean children to ponder nuclear annihilation at any time like I did as a child. Just don’t be so glib about it is all I ask.

The reason I don’t talk about politics, or religion, or more serious matters is that children at the age I teach tend to say things just to get a rise out of you, and it’s completely futile to try to rationalize, explain, or complain, because they don’t mean what they say. If it’s not "Rah Rah Rah, we’re the best!" They don’t want to listen to you. It’s better to let them keep whatever misconceptions they have in tact and let them shatter their brains if they ever happen to travel or go outside of Korea.

Up until now, I had been handling the situation exactly the same as how Koreans do. I was thinking, "How will this affect the economy, will I get hurt by that, and how badly?" Now I’ve got children asking me if I want to die in class. What a wonderful turn of events.

Today I had prepared a "Halloween test" as I had called it to get my students interested in studying for it. The truth was that some of the students were in need of practicing prepositions. Drawing the different monsters, items, and animals associated with Halloween around a haunted house is just fun enough for them not to think of it as studying.

I printed out the directions that listed where they had to draw specific things, then gave them the haunted house sheet that they would fill in. I hadn’t gone through Halloween vocabulary in this class, and that wasn’t the point of the lesson, so if they needed to know one of the words, I was happy to explain it to them in English. Failing that, I would translate it with my Halloween vocabulary skills the best I could.

One of my students loves to speed through her work, so once she got a few of the questions finished, I went over to check her work. She had placed the werewolf, vampire, and witch in the correct place, but was having problems with the sentence, "There is a bat flying in the sky."

I made my way around the class answering the same few questions, then worked my way back to the first student I had checked. Flying high in the sky was a picture of a baseball bat.

"What’s this?" I asked.

"A bat," she said.

"Yeah, but not the kind that usually flies. I think the word you are looking for in Korean is bak-chi." As if this wasn’t enough, I fluttered my "wings" and pointed to the rather large picture of winged bat that I had drawn on the board.

"Ahhhhh!" She exclaimed, and went to work fixing her picture.

Today the new, permanent foreign coworker has arrived. There is no training period at the school. People simply show up, are handed pages of paperwork for each class, and basically have to learn the system themselves. You can ask questions between classes, but there is a lot to cover. Different days we check different things, go to different classes, see different students, and sometimes have multiple books per class. It’s all rather confusing.

My coworker made the best of it, asking questions to the head teacher. She answered some of his questions regarding tests and collected journals.

The head teacher turned and asked me, "So, about how long did it take you to learn what was going on in the school?"

I replied, "Everything you just told him was new to me too."

Seems I’ve been at the school for a few months now and still don’t know all the paperwork procedures. Not that I’ve ever been told what to do. I track attendance, homework, give tests, proctor other tests, teach, assign homework, create worksheets, hand out papers, and everything else required in "teaching", but I still have more paperwork to track and keep organized. Wow.

Not only that, but there are shifting priorities. Once I graded with a score, then I was told to change to a letter, now it’s back to a score. All that kind of stuff means I’m constantly learning on the job. Just when I think I’ve got a handle on the situation, things change. I spend probably an hour a week in each class fiddling around with paperwork and checking boxes, signing, or collecting papers. It’s all an enormous hassle that makes me only slightly more productive. The students and the school wouldn’t be able to keep the schedule and operate without it however, so the likelihood it will decrease is no where in my mind.

I was in college during the mp3 digital revolution, it is has made me the digital equivalent of a crusty old curmudgeon of sorts. For example, I don’t like Digital Rights Management (DRM), or DRM-friendly players, and I don’t play friendly with stores trying tell me what to do with the music I’ve purchased. This wasn’t the way it "used to be way back when" and I refuse to change. I’ve stuck to my guns and have supported players that support open, license free codecs like ogg-vorbis. What does this mean in the long run?

Probably nothing, as there are plenty of people willing to go down the locked down, producer controlled route to get their tunes. Music inspires something rebellious and anti-establishment in me at times, and I’d rather be principled and stubborn than carrying around an iPod where I don’t even "own" the music on my machine.

One of the ways to discover music is through music stores and browsing their selection. People at last.fm have a good idea. Learning about music can be a viral sort of experience. A friend recommends a song, which gets you interested in a new genre, which changes your tastes, which leads to new discoveries, etc.

Another way to find music is through music blogs. I had heard about various blogs posting music for sample, profit, or possibly exposure, but I had no way of easily finding, linking, organizing, and keeping a coherent view of the scene. Enter Songbird. Think of iTunes but with a choice to visit any site you want. Instead of being locked into what Apple wants to sell you at the behest of the record industry that they represent, roll your own service. Visit any mp3 blog. Have any of the music available displayed. Play it as you would locally. Download it for free. Transfer and sync it to your device. Create a playlist with songs on the web. Browse and find new mp3 blogs and new music. It all works wonderfully well.

I spend the afternoon doing something new. I was easily discovering music I liked that I had never heard before and downloading music that the bands want me to hear for free. These aren’t main stream bands, but the underground new artists that need to get their name out and use the web as a digital distribution center. Best of all, it works with your existing library and brings you up to speed with little hassle. The screencast shows you all you need to know to get started finding and subscribing to new music quickly.

The program is only a beta release candidate now, but with some time, some polish, and some open source ingenuity, it might be the "NEXT BIG THING". If the ability to save and store videos from viral sites like Youtube or Google Videos as easily as finding and downloading music was included, this would be my media surfing program of choice. It’s still got a few bugs about discovering and finding music on a page, but it’s very impressive and has let me find the music I want to listen to very quickly and easily.

It might not be for everyone, because the majority of people, but it works for me.

Living in Korea as a foreigner can mean sacrifice. Specifically, the familiar food you have access to on a daily basis shrinks considerably without access to a military base or other sources. This trend is only going to continue, with the departure of both Wal-mart and Carrefour from the domestic Korean food shopping market. Even if I didn’t shop at the two stores out of principal. Wal-mart because of some of it’s business practices, and Carrefour because they have been completely rude to me in the past, it’s still really hard to get the food you want at times.

Case in point: We went to Homever, the new domestic rebranded Carrefour. It was just to check out if there were any deals to be had as they started decreasing their product mix and stopped having the "foreigner food aisle" that was good, if not really expensive. On the way around the store, my wife and I found lasagna pasta. I was sure I had seen them somewhere in Korea, but for months I hadn’t come across them in all the pasta and noodle aisle I shopped in. Silly me, they aren’t in the pasta aisle, they are in the "foreigner" food aisle, no wonder. Retailers quarantine food, as if it’s a bad idea to let Korean housewives know about variety. If it’s not one of the three hundred different kinds of ramyeon noodles, no one cares about pasta.

Anyway, I’m a lasagna fiend of Garfieldian proportions. I love the stuff. I always thought that the ingredients included in my mother’s awesome recipe were impossible to find. Once we found the noodles, we were only missing one other thing. Ricotta cheese.  Everything on the list was in the store. I was desperate enough to consider tofu and cheez whiz as possible alternatives to make the recipe work. So close, yet so far. To fail because of a cheese that is never on sale in Korea was depressing.

My wife then mentions to me, "Oh, that cheese? Ricotta? I looked up how to make it on the Internet. I’ll just make the cheese for the recipe. Don’t worry. We’ll have lasagna for dinner tonight."

Forgive me if I was skeptical, but make cheese? As in, forge an ingredient we need from it’s elemental parts? That’s a quest on par for a Culinary Macgyver. Consider me impressed. We went about now buying the ingredients for the ingredients we needed for our dish.

My wife had indeed gone on the Internet and found a chef telling how to make cheese. We even bought some cheese tofu cloth and everything. She mixed the ingredients into the pan when we got home, and thus began the long process of making lasagna the hard way. We made the dish together, only realizing the recipe was for 12 (!) people. Since acquiring the ingredients was so difficult anyway, it’s for the best we made enough for a few meals.

The cheese turned out exactly like the ricotta you’d buy in a store. Once that was accomplished, we were both pleasantly surprised. Several of our "fusion" cooking experiments have ended in disaster. The rest of the recipe had me translating and helping out with portions and directions. We split out tasks evenly from then on, and by the end were really surprised that the result looked or tasted as good as it did.

Just like Mom’s back home, the highest compliment any lasagna can achieve. It’s better than any in Korea I’ve ever had, that’s for sure. The last time we went shopping, there were only a few boxes of lasagna noodles left. With the withering of the foreign owned super chains, I might need to pick up a few otherwise I might not have the pleasure of eating this dish without making the noodles myself, which seems even more absurd, but strangely plausible, now.

We’re doing something different for Chuseok this year. Instead of going to relatives houses for Korean Thanksgiving, we’re spending the time hanging out at our own apartment. This is because there is no easy solution to the transportation and housing of our dog. Grandma’s not the kind to allow dogs inside, and it’s plenty crowded in that small house without Yoshi’s cage taking up some more space. We also didn’t take kindly to the suggestion made by our Grandmother that we should just leave the dog at home a few days. She said it wouldn’t die of starvation after a day. Yeah, Grandma’s a country girl all right.

Everything being closed in the city, and with few taxis on the street, our entertainment options were limited. We had talked about a trip to the mountain, but after packing and starting off on the long hike to the bus stop, we had second thoughts. We didn’t know if dogs were allowed in the actual park on the mountain. Also, an hour on a bus round trip with a dog didn’t sound that much fun.

We went to buy some pork and have a cook out near the river since the weather was fantastic. Incredibly,  we’ve been living by the river for a few months now and haven’t had a single picnic! We’ve been too busy and tired. We had been given a portable gas range by our Mother-in-law, and today we put it to good use. We had some problems at first. We had to set up the burner, but with a curious dog about to burn it’s face off, we needed to plan. I pulled over a heavy hunk of metal and concrete that acted as a place to tie Yoshi’s leash so he wouldn’t hurt himself or run off while we ate.

As we ate, dogs of different breeds would walk by, grabbing Yoshi’s attention. He’s just a puppy, but he’s bigger than any of the toy breeds and all of the dogs of his own breed that he meets. We eventually cleaned up and let him meet a few new pups. As my wife supervised Yoshi’s play date, I napped and thought about the safety, security, and care free nature of Korean society.

I was sitting in park, having cooked with an open flame, drank a beer in a public area, and let my dog run around without a leash meeting strangers. I could even nap outdoors, full on pork and beer and not worry about someone coming along and trying to steal something. Any one of these things could have got me in trouble in the United States. As long as you aren’t bothering people here, no one cares what you do. It’s liberating.

Here are some shots from the camera and phone from today:

Today was the first day off for Korean Thanksgiving. We didn’t go anywhere, so I had the day to do something I had been putting off since my trip back to the United States: My Taxes. While I was in the United States I visited my family’s accountant. My father went with me, as he handles the family’s filing and I needed all the help I could get to catch up on a few years of filing since I’ve come to Korea. The United States requires citizens to file tax forms even if they didn’t work or live in the country the entire year.

The family accountant gave us a list of information he thought he would need. When we returned to Korea we tried to collect as much as possible. We had a few trips to the tax office, called old employers, argued with people about getting paperwork and documentation. It’s a huge hassle. If I didn’t have a native speaker to get in touch with all the people I needed, this would have been an impossible task.

Working on all the results for submitting it to my family’s accounant today, I found out how little I made in the past few years in American dollars (living costs and the Korean tax system balance this out). It was also sobering to realize that half my bosses were probably crooks, or at least tax cheats. Let’s call them "Creative Accountants" to be civil about it.

After about three hours of calculations and lots of documentation, I had prepared something I felt would be of some use to my family’s accountant.

For anyone wondering what they might (*) have to do to file American taxes:

1. Find out the months you were employed in Korea.
2. Find out your employer’s name and address.
3. Have Contracts or Bank records of your salary transactions. Something official looking to prove your salary.
4. Find out the Average Exchange Rate of the Won for the dollar. I was told a yearly average exchange rate number would be enough.
5. Any tax papers you can prepare proving you paid Korean taxes might help. Expect this to be impossible as a good majority of Korean school owners do not file taxes, understate them, or keep no records of previous employees.
6. Create a summary of your taxable income and make all statements in American Dollars (after accounting for the exchange rate for the year in question)
7. Hope that everything above is enough and that your salary is low enough to get a tax exclusion.

*Warning, I am not an accountant, this is simply advice given to me that I am parroting on to help anyone in a similar situation that has no clue where to begin.**

** Your mileage may vary.***
 
*** Offer not valid in Tennesee, Alaska or Hawaii. ****

**** Do not Pass Go. *****

*****You sank my battleship! ******

****** Yahtzee!

Today I was struggling to come up with an activity I could do with all my different classes. The problem I had was that on Monday I played a review game with my students, and since I see three of my classes again today, I needed something new. Then I remembered that it was now October, and I should start up my yearly "Monster of the Week" learning units. Lesson plans around October are so much easier with fall back material as fun as monsters and holiday traditions. That’s why Halloween is my absolute favorite holiday.

I varied the activities by level, but in two of my classes I had students write sentences that followed the pattern " A (Monster name) is a monster that …" The students needed to tell me two things about each monster. I went down the list naming and then helping them put their ideas into complete sentences, allowing for cultural differences. After introducing all the different monsters, they had to think of one more monster on their own and write down something following the sentence pattern.

The students started listing other monsters. Things like Greek monsters, or traditional comic book characters occasionally got mentioned too. This is another activity that heavily favors boys that play video games. Some of my female students were scared when I mentioned zombies eating brains. I assured them it was just for fun. One of the students yelled out the name of one of the other teachers when they were talking about monsters. That got a laugh from the rest of the class.

The next thing they had to do was use prepositions and their new vocabulary skills to draw various monsters and creatures in a picture of a haunted house. I had to answer some of the questions over and over again. My "freaky monster" vocabulary is disproportionately large at this point after three years of teaching monsters to children, so I handled their questions fairly well. Without fail, one of the students in the class wrote my name on the "graves" in their picture.

After class, I told the teacher that was called a "monster" about what happened. She said, "Why me? Why would they think I’m a monster?"

I said, "You might think that’s bad, but they want me dead, so cheer up"

My wife and I now work the afternoon/evening shift, meaning we get to enjoy our mornings before work. As children leave their elementary and middle schools, we go to work as they visit our schools to brush up on their English. This means that while we are busy later in the day, we are as bored as all the housewives in the neighborhood that send their children off to work until the afternoon.

Yesterday, as we were sitting around, we heard one of the trucks that sometimes bother the neighborhood with bullhorns. They mount the speakers attached to trucks with looped tapes selling anything and everything. As they drove through the neighborhood, this particular truck promised a free food garbage bin.

Recycling is mandatory in Korea, food included. Everyone must toss their unused or rotten food in covered bins located near the garbage containers.  These food garbage containers were said to dry out food and prevent smells. Anyone cleaning out a food recycling bin will tell you it’s a stinky task. Removing the stench of food recycling would make anyone interested.

We listened to the advertisement roll by, then got ready for work. My wife had to leave before me, so she couldn’t get the free gift and still make it to work on time. We went down together to investigate.  We witnessed a feeding frenzy!

This salesman wasn’t handing out the miracle garbage bins just yet. He had an audience full of bored house wives and the elderly to sell his wears. He went through the Ron Popeil-like shtick.  He wasn’t going to show them a new cooking pot as well. Whatever he had in his trucks, he had the rapt attention of a few dozen women.

Why did these women stick around?  He gave them some cheap sponges and cleaning tools before we arrived. Then he proceeded to talk about the qualities of his miracle ramyeon cooking pots. He had demonstrations to prove that it was the best pot on Earth. The women were enraptured with this man. He would ask those rhetorical questions that you hear on infomercials that people never say in life, but these women would answer, howl, and cheer at the right intervals. I don’t think all of them were planted by the people selling the merchandise either.

Then he handed out the price for the set of pots. Promising the free stuff was the only way he could get a crowd to listen when he tried to sell a 400,000 (~$400 USD) won set of pots. My wife and I both rolled our eyes and gave up any hope of seeing our "free" item promised to anyone that showed up.

This was just a scam preying on bored women that don’t have any other reason to leave the house at this time of day, and it was working. Since the sale wasn’t happening in the actual apartment complex, they didn’t need to pay the fee to the apartment for the space. Clever. As I went to work, I saw the same vans and set up outside the next apartment complex. They were simply driving from apartment complexes and selling them out of the back of trucks, and getting huge crowds every time. Bored, lonely people with disposable income sitting at home can lead to trouble.