::A Geek in Korea::

I went to my local game importer to get some information about the Nintendo Wii, a home console that I’ll likely be buying sometime in the next year or so. I wanted to see when they would get some import models in, when some of the games would arrive, the general price, and how much such a device might cost me in Korea. In generally, the shop owners didn’t know a thing beyond the date of the Japanese launch.

The problem was they didn’t know any real details and what was included in the bundles they were getting pushed to sell.  According to what I think I understand, if you purchase a Wii in the next month or so, it will be a bundled with a separate second game and a second controller and run around 400,000 won. This is a fairly reasonable price considering the console itself is around 240,000 won itself, and comes with a controller and a packed in game already. Unless what I thought was the "additional" control and unnamed game was actually what was in the box in the first place. Then they are trying to sell the system at a huge premium, which, when I think about it, makes a hell of a lot more sense considering the demand.  I’m not paying a 60% markup on a game console.

The only other information about the Wii is that there will be a Korean 220 volt model coming out sometime next year, but I’ll need to find out what region games it plays before I make any plans on purchasing it. The Wii was rumored to be region free, like the Playstation 3, but that got shot down later as the European Nintendo group realized no one would wait around for months for game translations at inflated prices when they could just import from the United States. As of now, the word is that publishers can decide to lock down games to different regions. If this turns into a huge problem for me, I’ll skip the Wii entirely unless games are widely available in English in Korea. I won’t get involved in importing games on my own. It’s too expensive.

Anyway, one of the main reasons I am interested in the Wii is the next installment of the Legend of Zelda series: Twilight Princess is available on the platform. It will also be released to the Gamecube in a few weeks after a tremendously long delay. Since I own a Gamecube, and I plan on holding off on a Wii until things are a little more solidified in Korea, I wondered when I would get to play this series again. I noticed there was an abandoned Gamecube in the corner of the store that had long since started gathering dust. Since all the store managed to get in were Disney movie tie in games, the poor Gamecube had been resigned to a window display.

In one corner of the display was a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master’s Quest for the Gamecube. The manual and everything is entirely in Korean, but the game itself is in English. I picked this game up for cheap with a used memory card. I plan to play this game to hold me over until Twilight Princess is released. I don’t do much sit at home gaming since my wife watches her dramas on television and I play portable games on the go or at home most of the time. As such, if I even finish this game I’ll be surprised. It’s yet another reason to hold off on the Wii until I know I can spend some time actually being able to afford and enjoy my purchase.

I fired up the game, and after reformating my cheap used memory card, got to play a game I haven’t thought about in years. I remember the Christmas holiday of 1998. I spent my time watching my brother play this game while I was home from college. We had a great time discovering secrets and opening up new parts of the game. When I went to college I actually got to see a friend beat the game as well. The disk contains the "Master’s Quest" version, which is something of a remix with harder dungeons and whatnot. I’ll try to get through the first game before I beat the Master’s Quest edition.

My mid-level students are studying a story that features codes. The idea of the story is that the characters send messages to each other in codes. The book gives the keys to the codes, and this gets the students involved in the story by finding out the message. To prepare for the lesson, I covered the word "symbol" and gave lots of examples. We went through traffic signals, popular food logos, computer symbols, and basically any other symbols the students might know. Their homework was to find or make ten more signals and give their explanations in English.

One student used his computer to print out road signs. He wrote the Korean and English translations to accompany the pictures. It was extremely well done. Another girl created symbols in her notebook and then labeled them. Some of the students used examples in class, or used suggestions that they had said in class but I didn’t know.One boy, in class, when we had been talking about symbols, had been yelling about the Daejeon Zoo mascot as a symbol. I didn’t know how to draw this, so I left it up for him to explain what he meant.

When I was checking his homework today, he started out with the same symbols as everyone else. He would list the word next to the picture, then write "symbol". His handwriting is terrible. This lead to a sort of spelling feedback loop, where each time he tried to write "symbol" by copying the example above, he would get farther away from the correct spelling. While the first time he had written "Go symbol" correctly, the last symbol on the list said, "Daejeon Zoo Land Sodomy".

This is rather amazing, and disgusting at the same time. Of all the words, and letter combinations he could have come up with, he ended up with something so strange I laughed out loud and went to show my foreign coworker simply to have the evidence that this story was in fact true. Of course I didn’t explain to the students what I found so funny about this particular student’s homework, so they will always wonder what made me have such a reaction.

My upper level students were doing their listening intensive book today. There was a section about shopping. We would listen to scenario, then talk about what the person was trying to buy. One of the scenarios was hauntingly familiar:

Man: I love living here, but it’s so difficult sometimes to buy things I need.
Woman: Like what?
Man: Like deodorant or toiletries. I go to department stores, pharmacies, or even supermarkets. No one has anything I need. It makes things very difficult
Woman: Why is that?
Man: Well, because when I run or exercise, I sweat. Without deodorant, I can’t feel comfortable around people due to my odor. I usually have to stay away from people on very hot days.

I was laughing because I’ve had this problem living in Korea. Finding good strength deodorant is absolutely impossible. I wasn’t the only person laughing. The students were too, for entirely different reasons. They asked why foreigners needed deodorant. These were younger teenagers, around twelve years old. I told them that people tend to stink after they sweat, so deodorant helps keep those smells under control. I asked them how they deal with sweating after running or exercising in gym class.

One boy raised both of his arms and said, "Like this!" He then pretended to waft the funk around the room, as if he was some sort of oscillating stink machine. He said everyone in his Korean elementary school class did the same thing. What a pleasant smell that must be. Another boy put his hands in his armpits, pulled them out, the blew the girls in class a "B.O." laden kiss. It was equal parts hilarious and disgusting. I almost vomited in my mouth while laughing at the same time.

The students thought I was crazy for suggesting that placing something under their arms to control bodily odor might be a good thing as a societal practice. I told the students that, generally, body odor is viewed as rude, or at least unfavorable. To come home reeking of perspiration, alcohol, or the various foods that you ingested wouldn’t be something an average person does. The students told me their parents and people they know stink after a good night out.

Lack of odors being desirable isn’t an opinion shared by Korean people it seems. Ew.

I was participating in a thread about multiplayer games as a spectator sport. I happen to know a lot about quality game broadcasts considering I’ve been watching Starcraft on television for six years (!). Lots of gamers were interested in watching other professional gamers play games. Gamers develop an appreciation of games and their players, the same as any sport. Luckily for me, in Korea, watching pro gaming is as easy as tuning into any one of several channels dedicated to gaming at any time of the day. For people living outside of Korea that have never experienced what two teenagers wearing silly costumes battling in an arena filled with thousands of people playing a game for thousands of dollars is like, I will show you what you need to do to witness such a spectacle:

First, download the GOM player. There are two versions. The excellent English version, and the Korean version. While the English version is my  freeware media player of choice (really, it plays anything AND has a great user interface) , the Korean version has the features we need. Download the Korean version of the GOM player and install it. We want GOM TV.

Expand the interface on the right hand side so you see a menu filled with Korean, which I have translated below.

Now, click on the "Games" section of the menu highlighted above to bring up the menu screen below:

In this section, click on the "Starcraft" section. The green box lists all the current Starcraft tournaments in Korea at the moment. There are 5 individual leagues with teams, games, ladders, and different players on two different television channels. If you didn’t want to watch Starcraft, go to the "Online Games" menu. This has other online games of note in Korea, such as Warcraft III and Counter-Strike.

To start a video click one of the matches listed in the lower right hand menu. The button next to the screen shot will start loading the video. There are television commercials before the match starts, but not during the actual game. The announcers are Korean, and while most people can’t understand them, following a Real Time Strategy game while not understanding the commentary is actually fairly easily. The announcers also get very animated when something important happens, so even if you don’t know what’s going on, you can judge its importance by their shouting.

All of this is free, and updated daily. I’ve heard it’s rather bandwidth intensive, but it loads quickly (well, for me it does) and is of respectable quality for the time it takes and the effort to find the matches. Totally beats Youtube or other embedded players for quality game viewing.

My previous stylist has stopped cutting hair. Her popularity led her to stand at work so much that she developed a hip problem and had to retire early. Talk about occupational hazards. I had no idea that was even possible. Anyway, now I’m forced to go to from stylist to stylist, even sure how my hair will turn out. I don’t really worry about getting regular hair cuts, but one of my old coworkers is getting married, and we are under orders to "Look good" from the bride. As such, I needed to go get a hair cut and have it not turn out to be a disaster. My wife was along to do some shopping, so we went to the hair salon together to get my "hair situation" settled.

I’m not fluent in English conversations about haircuts, let alone Korean. I simply go to a place to make my hair more socially acceptable at a reasonable price and let them worry about the details. As long as my hair is marginally shorter and my scalp isn’t visible, I’m happy. I’m a far cry from my first year in Korea where I would turn up at a small hair shop, grab a book, tell them "like this", and just nod along as they sliced at my ears. My vocabulary has grown to include words and phrases like, "Hey, not so short", or "I’m bleeding."

Today, the man that cut my hair had a few choice things to say about my shampoo. He was telling me that the brand I was currently using wasn’t suitable for my skin, and that the other brands I had previously used ranged in quality anywhere from "bad a cleaning hair"  to "likely to make me bald". Yikes. Now, this is just what I understood of all the advice he was giving me. During the twenty minutes or so he was cutting my hair, he went on, at length, about all sorts of things that were wrong with my hair.

I wasn’t helped by the fact that my wife basically left me to the stylist. He asked her if I understood Korean well enough to get a haircut, and she agreed. He must have taken this to mean I had a wonderful grasp on the language and wanted to hear about every single detail of haircare he had learned. He told me how I should now part my hair, gave me shampoo technique advice (palms, not fingers!) , and generally spouted off enough vocabulary I didn’t know that I was reduced to simply nodding (potentially a huge mistake in a salon chair) and saying, "Yes," to everything. He’s the guy with the scissors near my ears and neck, it’s best not to make him too angry.

I walked out with a decent hair cut and more knowledge about shampoo that I ever knew I needed.

There are certain facts about people you only learn after spending a considerable time in their culture, or living with them. For example, my wife and I were talking about ear wax. She mentioned that before she lived with me she didn’t know why it was called "ear wax", but that looking at me digging in my ear with a cotton swap she understood why.  My wife happens to mention to me about how Koreans have different ear wax than I do. This is the kind of conversation that usually ends up with me learning something incredibly strange about Korean culture. I urged her to continue.

My knowledge of Korean ear wax was as follows: Koreans use a long small spoon like device (according to Wikipedia, known as a curette or ear pick) to scoop out ear wax. Families sitting around, perhaps watching television, will get the urge to clean someone’s ears. They go grab the ear wax spoon, which is as common as a nail clipper or emery board in Western households. The person getting their ears cleaned will sit on the floor, usually with their head in the cleaners lap, the cleaner with the spoon will "dig" out the ear wax carefully.

What I learned from our conversation was that that people call ear wax, "kui bab" or literally "ear rice" due to it’s flaky white appearance. The fact that she called it "ear rice" combined with the fact it’s dug out with a spoon gave me a creepy feeling, like it’s some sort of zombie appetizer before they devour your brain whole.

I’ve had my ear "spoon cleaned" before. It’s a rather odd sensation. My wife said that she no longer does this because I use cotton swabs. She said it was better for my "waxy ears". Apparently my ears are much more like "wax" than what Koreans usually see. Who knew?

The American Thanksgiving holiday has once again arrived with me being in Korea. I haven’t made it to a turkey dinner for Thanksgiving for years. Not that Korean Thanksgiving, Chuseok, is bad. Visiting the Korean in-laws and eating lots of food is great. The men are still lazy like in America, but their are differences. We watch soccer or The Lord of the Rings on Chuseok, not American football. During Chuseok we eat seafood and rice with kimchi, not turkey, mashed potatoes, or the various unnameable casseroles produced by my aunts for the occasion. Two different excuses for gluttony and assal horizontology are always welcomed, but I must say, things just aren’t the same.

To make up for this, we happened to be in Costco during American Thanksgiving this week. We had picked up a sweet rebate coupon on a computer printer that we wanted to cash in. It just so happened that the first day we could cash it in coincided with the holiday. As we walked around, we stumbled upon pumpkin pie, which was always a holiday mainstay at my relatives gatherings. The only way we could have purchased whipped cream was in a bulk shipment that would make an whippet snorting fast food worker laugh with delight, we decided that we’d go for the alternate "vanilla ice cream" route.

I was told that there were turkey available in select locations that cater to the foreigner crowd, but as you’ve probably guessed, I don’t run in the foreigner circle by and large, and I usually avoid the habit of pining for something likely to make me overly homesick. My love for turkey is something I have a handle on most times of the year, but if I get to thinking about Thanksgiving with the fixings too much, the drool can sometimes overwhelm. It’s best not to think about it. I’ll count my pumpkin pie as a victory and simply substitute what I’m missing with something hearty and meat that’s easier to get in Korea. I might pick up a rotisserie chicken or something. Those things are common enough to be sold out of trucks on the street (!) As an aside, the sight of a giant rotisserie with cooking chickens set up on a truck is truly glorious, but remains a mystery to me as to how it came about.

My parents called last night. We talked for two hours with Skype. They even activated their new webcam for the occasion. I had to stop surfing the web in an undershirt and actually put something on to chat with them. That’s how special the call was. At least they didn’t mock me by holding up a leg of turkey or something. We chatted and arranged Christmas presents. Christmas really does start earlier each year.

For the most part, I’m usually very comfortable living in Korea. Thanksgiving is always a time to be with family, but the little things that ease the sting of what homesickness I have always help. It’s also good that I have a family to celebrate Korean Thanksgiving with, if I so choose.

One of the teachers at the school wasn’t available for an hour, so I had to teach one of my classes twice today. Since we are already dangerously close to finishing our book a month early, I couldn’t exactly move ahead at twice the pace I had set down in my syllabus. A dramatic solution was needed. I set out to find a suitable game for their level. It would, ultimately, need to be something we could do for the majority of the two hour class.

I settled on the "Odd man out" game. We have a group of words, and each of them is somehow related to each other. You had to choose the most unique reason to make one of the words "Odd man out". For example, if you had a list of words like "Bear, Tiger, Cat, Lion", you could give a reason like "A cat isn’t in a zoo", or "A bear isn’t feline". While the challenge for the students was to figure out all the words, how they related, and making a coherent reason for excluding one in English,

I wanted to turn the game into a fun challenge. The students were divided into teams. Then they had a class to look up words and put their unique reasons on paper. I took the "odd man out" student since we had an indivisible number and I’m not allowed to cut students in half. We played on a team against the rest of the students

I had played this game with adult students at a previous school. The students in this class are in elementary school, and they consistently came up with more amusing and unique answers than when I played this game in the past. Some of their answers were really awesome. For example:

One of the groups of words contained a doctor, a psychologist, a priest, and a poet.

My group suggested ,"The doctor is the only word that starts with ‘d’, so it’s the strange one".
Another group said, "Doctor, but because it’s the only one to not end in the letter ‘T’. "
The last group said "priest", because that was the only one that was allowed to marry people.

Those were totally awesome answers.

The final group of words I tossed in to see what kind of reaction it would get. I wanted to know what these students would say when they had to choose between: China , Japan, America, South Korea

Our group said, "Japan is the only island country."
Another group said, "Japan is the only country that didn’t end in the letter "A". "
Another group said, "America, because it isn’t in Asia."

Their creativity really impressed me. For homework, I gave them a harder task. They had to come up with four logically related words that each had a different way to make them "odd man out" depending on the conditions. The students really liked the game, so if they can make a good list, I’ll try to begin making another round of the game later.

While my school might have sucked the fun out of Halloween, when it comes to testing and ways to make children study and memorize, they are truly a sight to behold. The "Announcer Contest" was today. While I had taken to calling it a "Speaking Contest" in class, it turns out that "Announcer" was a better word to use. My director set up a desk with a microphone and a faux background to simulate a newscast program. Then she got a projector and camera, so that the students were "on television", projected for everyone to see on a wall. The students than sat at the desk and read their selection of text like a newscast. It was pretty awesome.

The students were listed on a paper handed to me and my foreign coworker. I would call out their name and they would go up to the front. We then graded them on different categories. We noted if they had memorized the text and awarded extra points. We also had to note things like intonation, pronunciation, confidence, accuracy, speed. It was fairly frantic trying to mark down the scores, keeping the other students quiet, while also keeping everything running as smoothly as possible. The Korean teachers carried around cardboard tube cudgels to keep the noisier students in line. Two of my students took my helpful suggestions to heart and actually looked at the camera like a professional broadcaster reading a late breaking news show would. It was wonderful.

The margin between some of the levels was brutally evident. All of the higher level students of a particular grade performed significantly better than that students in the lower skill class. The odd thing was the near perfect agreement all of the grading teachers had about the top two or three students at any level. While we assigned different scores, the students that were "tops" were clearly distinguished. This meant that the factors we were grading on were well chosen, and that the students had been put into the proper classes judged on their levels. Yay for accurate evaluations!

Eventually, a set of winners will be chosen that will get a sweet incentive to continue their excellence. I told my director I’d love to do a speech contest like this every month, because it was a lot of fun, and it was a great motivator for the students. It’s also a hell of a lot easier than yelling at classrooms of students to practice their speeches. The students that didn’t work hard had the embarrassment of their peers watching them make mistakes. Everyone accepted that because their were two judges, no "final winners" could be announced when we went back to class. No one was asking for extra points or trying to complain about their scores either. That’s very refreshing.

We’ve been practicing more speeches in classes that need all the help they can get tomorrow. As such, I repositioned my desk to be part of the "audience". That way I can more easily give tips as I watch what the students. I would call students up, then have them pick the next person to read. I was settling into a nice, student run classroom with my green tea and paperwork spread out before me on the desk. I planned to grade the speeches as a way to get more activities written down on my attendance sheets.

As all this was going on, the student sitting beside me was chatting with other students and generally being an unhelpful little ass. He said that he had already memorized his speech, so he didn’t want to listen to anyone else. Since he hadn’t been one of the best students yesterday, I told him to go back and review his material. He hadn’t done his homework today, so even if he had nothing to memorize, he still had something he could have done. Instead, he got out paper and started throwing it at the speakers that were practicing in front of class.

That’s hardly the appropriate behavior I would have someone "too good" to practice do while sitting in my class. I grabbed his "communication notebook" where I record information about him. I wanted to remove one of the rewards I had previously given him. He went to grab for his communication notebook to stop me from punishing him, and it the process bumped my desk, then hit my cup with my hand, spilling my hot tea over everything. The teachers book was ruined, the attendance sheet was soaked, my papers and notes were doused in hot green tea. Everyone in the class took a huge breath in, got wide eyed, and learned back like I was going to toss the student on his head in their direction

In these situations, it’s best for me to not be around the student. I shouted a guttural, "GET OUT," so chilling it actually had the opposite effect. He locked up in sheer terror of what was going to happen to him, so I had to nudge him back in motion. I got him moving again, then pointed to the door and repeated myself, adding, "GET OUT NOW!" He didn’t move. My desk continued to drip hot tea onto everything, so I flipped everything off onto the floor.

At this point I was seeing red. I didn’t throw anything at anyone, or hit anyone, I just pushed the soaking things off my desk. There was a very good chance everything was going to be completely ruined because of what he had done. I just didn’t want any other teacher to have a hard time because this student didn’t do what he should. I picked up the dripping book and held it up for him to see. "See what you did?" Then I took his wet communication note and ripped out half of his "Rewards" section entirely. He didn’t have any rewards left anyway, and this got my point across. In retrospect, this seems a touch too harsh, but hey, I was pissed off.

I got him out of class, then told the desk teachers what had gotten me so angry. Then, I went back into the class with a smile, knowing that I wouldn’t have to deal with him for the rest of the day. The students had already started cleaning up the mess, fearing my wrath. They laughed when I walked back in and let out the breath of air they had been holding for a minute or more. They had already gotten yelled at earlier in the day by a Korean teacher, but I didn’t have anything against the other students. They were doing what they were told when the problem had transpired.

I got my books cleaned up by putting them in front of a heater that was blowing out hot air. Then I went around trying to clean up the mess. The director’s husband came in with a mop and helped clean up the tea on the floor. Then we went back to studying. The boy returned with the director’s husband to apologize to me in front of the entire class. I let him back in. He went back to his desk, put his head down, and cried. I didn’t have time to spend on him any longer. He sobbed for the rest of the class while other students read in the front of class.

Getting distance is an important thing to remember when surrounded by students. I couldn’t have rationally dealt with someone when they had gotten me that angry. I don’t think I did act rationally, but I did try to eliminate the troublemaker from the learning environment and get on with class as quickly as possible. It’s not a one time incident, but a slow build of weeks of "be quiets" and "please do your homework" that got ignored that finally got this student in so much trouble. Had he knocked over the cup in a different circumstance I’d be very willing to forgive him too. I didn’t know, at the time, that the stuff wasn’t all completely ruined. It’s a good thing I don’t drink coffee or something that stains.

My other students in classrooms that share walls with my disciplined class asked me what happened, since the whole class heard me yell at the student. I told them what he had done, and they got the same, "Oh shi-" look on their face. I don’t think they expected the boy to get off as lightly as he did when they heard about what he could have damaged. I’m pretty quick to forget a grudge as long as students don’t trying to keep up any hostility towards me after an incident such as this these days.