::A Geek in Korea::

I got invited to dinner. My wife was visiting her aunt who happens to be an excellent cook. She lives in a apartment complex nearby, so I got the call and decided to take the subway over to join them for dinner. I don’t mind going over there for dinner, because the food is excellent and everyone is nice to me, but there are some things that bother me.

When I am over at their house, my aunt and uncle pressure their kids to speak English to me. I totally don’t mind working with pidgin Korean and English to get my point across if need be, but they want me to practice with their kids. They are always pressuring the kids to have conversations with me. They want to give their kids a chance to speak with me, so it’s fine. I’d rather get some attention from the cousins than be ignored, certainly. Since they make it a big deal, the children are actually more shy as a result. The more shy they become, the more pressure is placed on them to speak English. I’d just like everyone to be comfortable.

At the same time they are getting pressured to speak English, I’m getting pressured to speak Korean with my relatives. My wife doesn’t want my aunt or uncle to feel uncomfortable when I talk, so she encourages me to speak Korean. Of course, I feel embarrassed at my childlike intonation and vocabulary. I’m around students all day, so I sound like one. Usually I’ll make someone laugh with a silly mistake in Korean, usually my wife, then I’ll switch to English.My wife gets stuck translating everything between both parties most of the time.

Today was particularly embarrassing when I got served kalchi, one of my favorite fish dishes. It was served with steamed potatoes and a sweet spicy sauce that was delicious. I really like this long silver fish, but the problem is there are tons of bones! I still haven’t mastered the technique of eating kalchi without having problems with bones. I made a mess of my area of the table.

So much so that my wife came over and started picking the bones out of my fish since she had finished eating. This did nothing to make me look like a competent person. Soon everyone at the table was watching me eat the food. I felt embarrassed, like a child that couldn’t manage to get the food into its mouth. This amused my relatives greatly.

I’m always being challenged when I meet relatives. I’m never sure how to act, or what they want me to do. I felt the same way in the United States, but there are more complicated issues here that sometimes make me feel helpless.

My students have  a series of rigorous mandated mid-term tests beginning next week. These tests are standardized, so all my elementary students will be taking tests in at least the following subjects:

Korean (국어) (gook-oh),

Math (수학)(su-hak),

History (사학)(sa-hak),

and Science (과학) (kwa-hak).

This is also abbreviated as: ( 국,수,사,과) (gook, su, sa, kwa). Students always recite the abbreviations while subtracting on their fingers, as if each finger represented one of the subjects.

I find the coincidence of how they list of the tests amusing, because 국수 (gook-su) in Korean means “noodles“, and “사과” (sa-kwa) in Korean means “apple”. I’m not sure if it’s the order of the tests as they are given, or sheer coincidence.

At the end of the class today, as the students were getting ready to leave, I would wish the students luck on their “Noodle Apple Test”. Students looked at me for a minute, then would do their hand subtraction routine. Some would grin, but others would scowl in annoyance. “NO! TEACHER! NOT NOODLE APPLE! 국,수,사,과!”

“Yeah, Noodle, gook-su, Apple, sa-kwa! Score a 100% on your Noodle Apple Test! Bye Bye!”

I realize my humor in Korean is exactly like that lame uncle you would run into at your family’s Christmas party. You know the one that always gave you a noogie, or stole your nose when you met them, and then tortured you with bad puns until they needed to get up to get a beer.

I’ve got that lame, barely funny quality to all my Korean jokes. I really relish telling my bad jokes to students. It’s not because I know they will laugh, it’s because I know they won’t, and I enjoy their efforts in trying to tell me why I am so lame or wrong.  Their frustration at my poor jokes is my satisfaction. I guess this is what Yakov Smirnoff felt like.

Right as I was sitting down to type this post, an alarm rang out in the night from outside our apartment. My wife went to the door to poke her head out while I grabbed Yoshi, and a rain coat. She grabbed the umbrellas, and we were gone. I was pushing her down the steps a minute after it started ringing.

Go, go, go! We saw a lot of people poking their heads out to see what was going on, but they were dressed in their house clothes. Not many had any intention of stepping out in tonights rain. It’s a FIRE alarm people. BRIGHT RED ALARM, BUZZING? HELLO? GO DOWN STEPS. EXIT APARTMENT. AVOID IMMOLATION. SAVE LOVED ONES? HELLO?  (Oddly enough, I had no desire to yell “PORK CHOP SANDWICHES!” even if it was what I was thinking.)

People were casually going down the elevator to see what was happening. Even small children know better than that. It didn’t seem like it was a warning that carried much weight. By the time we had descended the stairs from our apartment, only ten other men had bothered to check what was going on with the security guard. This is in a building with 60 apartments. Pathetic.

The guard was in his office, frantically poking at a control panel. It wouldn’t matter much, as it didn’t appear that there was any fire. We had descended from the 10th floor and hadn’t smelled any smoke or seen anything that would lead us to believe there was a fire. I took and umbrella and walked around the apartment. No signs of smoke or fire. It seems it was a false alarm.

It would hardly have mattered. The firefighters that arrived had to park at the end of the block. Our apartment is surrounded by cars so densely packed that they couldn’t approach any closer. Every call legally parked in a space was blocked by a second car that parked it in. These cars are left in neutral so you can roll them out of the way, but in the case of an emergency, no one would have the time. With fire engines blocking the only path away from the apartment parking spaces, it’s ridiculously dangerous to think of people rolling cars out of the way for fire trucks. There are too many cars in this country!

Anyway, the firemen arrived and checked with the security guard. No fire! They rode up the elevator to check the malfunctioning alarm. They commented it was their sixth false alarm of the day. Poor guys. After they gave it the all clear, we rode up to our apartment. Ironically, the only smell of smoke we could detect were from the firemen.

There was no fire, but if there was, there would be excessive casualties by the lack of simple safety preparation. Typical Korean disaster response.

A woman I met briefly with my extended Korean family on Lunar New Year last year passed away. She was an elderly woman that was on the verge of death for a very long time. She finally passed away this week, and we were expected to visit her funeral service.

I have not been to a Korean funeral service before. My wife had shown me pictures of her grandfather’s huge funeral procession in their home village. Their grandfather was buried in a grave site on a small hill, and everyone in the village had turned out. This funeral was taking place in a mourning room in a large hospital. The burial would be done later in the country on a mountain.

We had a limited time to spend at the funeral rites because I had an early afternoon class that started today. We arrived at the large university hospital. There was a building for funerals. There were seven rooms for mourners. You would walk by other funerals in process and hear wailing as you passed. There were also reception areas staffed with a few people to serve drinks and snacks. Before the ceremony, people were sitting around snacking. You could also rent a new black suit for the occasion right there as you waited! That’s amazing!

When we arrived there were people preparing the body for burial somewhere out of view of the service at another location when we arrived. My wife told me they used to put three spoonfuls of uncooked rice in the mount of the deceased. This custom might have changed. They wrap the body with hemp clothing. The rice in the mouth, as well as some money is placed with the body for their “long journey over the river to heaven or hell”. The money also acts as a tip to the people that prepared the body. (My wife was uncertain on some of the details. The customs might also vary greatly. We’re not sure.)

Since the family bought a plot on a mountain, they will bury her tomorrow in a special ceremony I won’t be attending. This isn’t the norm. Cremation is more common simply because of space issues.
We went to what would be called the “wake” in American terms. The body isn’t present at Korean wakes. There is a picture of the deceased, surrounded by flowers. On a table in front of the picture are several specific dishes of food. They all have to be placed on the table in a manner relative to each other with certain symbolic significance. It’s a Confucian thing.

My wife’s relative participating in the ceremony all put on hemp hanboks. The men wore light brown hanboks with hats, while the woman wore bright white hanboks, with white hairpins. The son of the woman didn’t actually know how to perform the funeral rites.

The second oldest uncle in law helped him poor the rice wine, told him when to bow, and what to do. I have no idea how he knows all of that procedure. The uncle even stuck the spoon and chopsticks straight up into the rice. I was told never to do that when I ate rice in Korea. It is only done in the presence of a spirit at funerals. I saw the reason why today.

After they poured the alcohol and prepared the food, the people in the hemp hanboks bowed. The number of bows depending on the closeness of how they were related. Some people bowed more than others. We followed, kneeling politely in the back of the room. I was only obligated to bow my head in the direction of family members and the picture. After we had “bowed”, they said that the spirit had then departed. It was safe to leave the service. My uncles went to the reception area and began eating.

There was a black book and table at the entrance of the room. We gave the mourning family an envelope of cash. Just like weddings, you are expected to bring money to give to the family. I like this idea a great deal. I know businesses donate flowers for the service as well, as there was a huge bouquet outside of the room with the business name displayed prominently on the banner offering condolences.

After that, my aunts and mother in law all packed into the car to drive me to the subway. There was no reason everyone needed to go to see me off, but I’m guessing they didn’t want to be in the funeral the whole day. Any excuse to leave, even briefly, was worth it. We were only at the ceremony for an hour total. After they dropped my wife and I off at the subway, they returned to the ceremony. They’d be spending the majority of the day there most likely, and possibly all of their time until the burial. Some people might spend the night in an adjacent room too.

For families with surviving blood relatives, it’s expected that on days of memorial, like the day of death the following year, or on certain lunar holidays, you should do “chae-sa“. This is similar to the funeral rites I witnessed today. This is when Koreans pray to their relatives spirits, who then enter and “eat” the food presented to them in offering.

I’ve seen my wife’s family do chae-sa on Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving Holiday) for their grandfather. They spoke prayers, bowed, and offered alcohol to the spirit as well. The customs are similar, but chae-sa is performed in a person’s home. Our family also didn’t wear special clothes for the ceremony either.

My wife and I talked about the differences between the Korean and American versions of funerals. She was shocked that any of the family members would want to see the body at any time of the proceedings. I tried to explain how a wake was supposed to provide closure and a sense that the person had “found peace” by looking at them in the coffin. It was also a chance for people to say their goodbyes and console the family. The bowing and wailing provide the same comfort to Korean funeral mourners.

I don’t know where our funeral practices came from as Westerners. I’m not going to judge Koreans system either. It was simply a new experience very different than what I was used to, and I’m happy I managed to get through a serious family ceremony without offending anyone unintentionally.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/v/GSmc-C0q0WU[/video]

Using gtk-recordMyDesktop, I recorded a screencast of how to convert and resize .avi video files to work with the Cowon D2 using Avidemux, a free video editor for Linux. Upon further review of the previous sentence, very little of what I wrote happen to be words, so perhaps I should explain.

I own a Cowon D2. It is very useful. I adore it. For the longest time after I got it, I had problems figuring out ways to get video working with it correctly. Something had been giving me problems.

It turns out that when playing files, the Cowon D2 can’t handle B-frames. You don’t have to worry about this when you use the bundled Windows software, but I’m running Linux 100% of the time now. What was I going to do?

I struggled to find some solutions. Iriverter works most of the time. It’s cross platform running Java so it works almost anywhere too. If you can’t use Iriverter, or if it gives you problems, try Avidemux.

Avidemux more robust. It lets you do a lot more things with a wide variety of formats. I only created a simple guide to get things working for the Cowon D2. Further tweaking, for example, might be needed for widescreen videos on a small screen (I scale video to 320×176 resolution to preserve the black bars) (use the check box and slider on the resize filter menu), or changing the audio is possible to shrink the size of videos even further. That’s your preference.

This screencast for anyone using the Cowon D2 that had no clue how to get video working correctly. I hope it helped!

The Firefox Google Reader Notification add on lets me in on when my feeds are being updated. It’s been sitting at zero all day today, so I thought that there may have been a problem. I aggregate my RSS feeds with Google Reader. Today there was a widespread Google Reader Outage. I was affected from the outage and left pondering what to do lacking my daily updates. I need my feeds.

I’ve been checking websites with syndication far longer than the average blogger. Back when I was big into litestep customization, I used to check dozens of sites for the latests updates, themes, and widgets. I was around in the RDF days when sites had to bend over backwards to offer syndication, and there were only a few aggregating tools around. I was there, blogging in the winter with frozen digits, walking ten hours to post a nugget of news, and I liked it!

I knew a good thing when I saw it and wasn’t surprised when eventually people caught on to using RSS on everything. Now it’s just something required for me to even consider keeping up with someone’s work.

It’s grown from a hobby worthy convenience into something huge. I don’t check those old feed anymore, but I use my RSS feeds more than ever. I keep track of fifty or more feeds, and I add and remove sites depending on their content and updates. Having a good feed promptly updated will keep me returning to your site.

I can fire up my computer and check to see everything that has been written since I last checked, easily, in one place, quickly. When I read something, I can revisit it in detail, search for it later, or keep it in a special place to share with friends if I so choose. As far as rapidly increasing the amount of information I process to keep up with things I find interesting, it’s must.

After my last vacation, my feed had swollen to over 600+ posts. If I go over a day without checking, I’ll end up with hundreds of things waiting for my attention. Most of it is trivial stuff that I don’t need to actually read. A political site I check updates once or more every hour, and I don’t do much more than scan a headline to see if it is the most current for the topic before I move on. I still like to keep my waiting queue down to zero, and sometimes I can go for an hour or more reading really interesting news.
I still have some RSS holdouts that haven’t set up their own feed readers. I’ve converted one friend, and am working on one more. I’m fighting my addiction to surf perpetually (a habit easily formed with you get enough RSS feeds waiting) by using the TimeTracker Firefox extension. It lists the time I am spending surfing at any site other than my own, or any sites I define as an exception. It’s already helping me get my RSS habit back under control.

My wife, her mother, and an aunt arranged to go to a sauna for the afternoon. My wife was excited, as she was going to “come back clean”. The shower facilities we have in our home aren’t up to true Korean standards of cleanliness. To be truly clean requires a trip to a hot spring sauna.

It’s common for people to arrange to go to a sauna once a month or so to do some more detailed “scrubbing” of their body. They use abrasive hand towel to scrub off the layers of dead skin and collagen called “tae“. This tae comes off in black clumps on your skin when you scrub hard enough, much like an eraser will leave blackened detritus on your paper after a vigorous erasing. This is what they are seeking to remove. The idea is that by scrubbing off the dead skin, you’ll leave your remaining skin smoother, free of body oils, and fresh.

The special towel they use is called an “Italy towel” or “tae mil-e towel” (literally, tae removal towel) in Korean. The texture is what you would find for scrubbing difficult dishes in the kitchen. It’s not a Brillo pad, but it’s pretty rough to use on skin. The one my wife loaned me left my skin feeling like it had been deeply scratched after a few rubs.

The procedure at the hot spring sauna is as follows:

1. Take a soapy shower. This is to keep the water in the hot spring as clean as possible for other bathers.

2. Hop in a hot water sauna bath for five to ten minutes to make the skin easy to scrub.

3. Get out of the bath then go to the special area set up. There are seats and mirrors with individual shower wands to help your scrubbing. Start scrubbing your entire body free of “tae“. It’s best to go with someone you know so they can scrub your back.

(Note: At some saunas you can hire professional “scrubbers” also called “tae mil-e” that sit in the saunas for this purpose. They are easy to find since they are the only people wearing clothes in the sauna area. For a small fee, they’ll scrub you too.)

4. Wash yourself off, with a body shampoo and soap.

5. Enjoy your tae free body.

Koreans can sometimes take their obsessive cleaning habits to the extreme. This is an example of how far people go to stay clean and look good. My wife really liked going with her relatives for a scrubbing. She came back with some abrasion marks on her skin that make me think they were using rough sandpaper though.

The first time you get an offer from a Korean person wanting to wash your back in a same-sex sauna, is very disturbing. I had no idea that there were people that did that for a job the first time I went to a sauna. I did not take anyone up on their offer to scrub my back.

Westerners have a lot of issues when confronted with semi-public nudity, but the offer to have a relative, acquaintance, or worse yet a complete stranger offer to scrub your back is a little too much. We’ve got a “personal bubble” that’s been ingrained in us from a very young age, and that’s just not easily rewritten brain firmware.

It’s not for me to judge what other people want to do to feel “clean”, but next time I hope my wife doesn’t return from the hot springs looking so battle worn, as if she lost a fight with a power sander.

Since it’s the beginning of the rainy season, no picnics in the park would be possible this weekend. My wife was busy too, leaving me at home with the dog. I decided I’d surf the web for a little while, then make every effort to get out of the house.

I was multitasking, watching some videos via Democracy (soon to be Miro) and surfing the web. I stumbled upon Boxhead, which is my new favorite flash game ever. You are a heavily armed character that fights off hoards of zombies and devils throwing lightening while running around a level. You are granted upgrades, and can pick up boxes left by defeated foes containing more ammunition. There is a strategy involved in keeping your combo timer ticking upwards as you slaughter the undead. I wasted around a hour or more on this game alone today. It’s quite violent and unforgiving of mistakes at higher levels too.

After a nap, I was ready to leave the house. I hadn’t seen a movie at a theater in quite some time, so I was hoping to catch something playing down the street. I grabbed my umbrella and was out the door after putting the dog on the veranda. A little rain wasn’t going to stop me from enjoying myself.

I ended up seeing Hot Fuzz. I had heard some positive comments about it on the forums, so I decided I’d check it out. It’s by the “Shawn of the Dead” guys, which makes it a very easy sell. This is about the only movie in the theater not getting a heavy advertising campaign in Korea, so the theater wasn’t packed either.

I liked the film. It seemed like it was doing a few things at once. It was part “Scream” gory horror with a concealed killer running around, part comedy, part buddy cop flick. For being a comedy with a few action sequences, there were some extremely graphic deaths in it. I had spent the morning blasting zombies, but still.

There were quite a few red herrings, but I liked the fact that it rewarded you for paying attention to the details. I disliked the ending. The movie had an anti-climatic resolution, then did the horror “fake out” ending that left a bad taste in my mouth. It mixed genre well, but the second ending seemed forced into the story.

I’d recommend the movie, and I’m glad I got out of the house even on a rainy day to enjoy myself for once.

The pictures in a textbook to explain that yawning was contagious were unintentionally hilarious.

Chen discovers the Goatse man

Then he shows it to the group.

(That Flickr group is something so wonderful and yet so terrible at the same time.)

My foreign coworker managed to take his vacation at the BEST POSSIBLE TIME EVER. We’ve canceled all middle school and late evening classes, so I don’t have to stay later to cover all of his classes. Every teacher has been teaching on their break, so despite his absence I’ll only cover three of his classes this week. All of those classes were today.

My first class of the day was the youngest set of children that attend the school. They are the lowest level students of a huge class. My coworker often is defeated in his attempts to explain things to the children. With 12 very young students, any misstep would mean anarchy and chaos. It was a fine line to walk.

It was amusing to see how these students were conditioned by the teachers that usually control their classes. One student acted as a “number relay”, trying to translate every single page number I said into Korean for her classmates. I assume this is because some of the students don’t know English numbers yet, or my coworker doesn’t use Korean numbers when students don’t know what’s happening in class. Whenever I would tell the slower students what pages to turn to in English, I would hear an intake of air. The students would gasp in surprise.

One student that sat in the front of class didn’t know how to get my attention except to poke me with a pencil. I was sitting right in front of her, and she would poke my hand when she wanted to talk. This might have been cute, except when I went up to the board and started writing, she would walk up and poke me in the ribs with her pencil when she wanted to keep talking. My first rule: No touching the teacher. It didn’t apply in my coworker’s classroom.

One student forgot her book. I made a copy. Another student forgot a pencil. I loaned her one of mine. Another girl forgot her eraser. I tossed her a spare. One girl said, “You have to give them a demerit! They forgot their supplies! That’s what the Korean teacher does!”

I thought that was rather harsh. Most of the kids were just out of kindergarten. I let them off with a warning. When I got back to the teacher’s room, the Korean teacher in question asked me about the students. I told them that she had a reputation of being strict with the students and explained what one of the students had told me in Korean. My coworker denied ever punishing the students and called the young girl a liar. Heh. I found it immensely amusing to watch her squirm about the accusations of an 8 year old.

The next set of classes I covered was odd because my own cousin by marriage was in the class. He is in a class full of idiots I used to teach last year. I vowed never to teach his classmates after they made me angry repeatedly last year. This was the first time I had to be in a room with them again.

We did an activity where we had to draw a character in a story and what they were dreaming about, then draw our own dream and write about it.

The boy with the electronic dictionary said his dream was to, “Kill his sister.” What a wonderful child. Other students wanted to be pro wrestlers. The smarter ones, like my cousin, diplomats. I could tell that my cousin didn’t think much of his classmates.

The last class was filled with students that I had taught in other classes at various times, but never at the same time. They were all the overachievers of other classes thrown together to study textbooks much harder than the books common for their ages. This is the only class I would have volunteered to keep out of the classes I taught extra today. They were really very nice and well behaved. After the other classes my coworker taught, they must have seemed like heaven.

Regarding the workload for students, I give tons more homework compared to what I saw from my student’s notes. At every single level I give tons more homework than he does. My temporary students seemed dismayed when I wrote an extremely “light” load for them to do because they needed to study for their mid term examinations. I have no idea what will happen when I need to mix students with his for this summer vacation. I expect a backlash of rebellious students.

Anyway, it was amusing covering his classes, but I really wouldn’t want to do it for an extended period of time. The differences in the classes were subtle. I think I work the students harder and get more done in each class, but I also think he befriends more students. Meh.