::A Geek in Korea::

Ever since I started riding the subway, I had wondered about the flooring of the subway stations. There was gray tile everywhere, except for around the entrances to the subway doors. There were also seemingly random tiles running from the elevators and stairs to one of the doors. They were bump and raised with different shapes. I thought it was odd.

I went to work riding the same train as my wife, and she explained that these tiles were set so that blind people could navigate through the subway station by themselves. The tiles follow a pattern. At the beginning and end of each set of tiles, the tiles are raised in a set of circles. In the tiles between there are long columns raised on each tile. If you follow the columned tiles, you will eventually end up at one of the raised circle tiles that represent the exits, either to the subway, an elevator, or the steps. That’s very cool.

She told me that cities in Japan use this to help blind people navigate using public transportation. I had never heard this before, but she explained that people can walk in neighborhoods with these tiles installed in the sidewalk and know when they are crossing streets and where business entrances are. She said that any city block with a Braille library would have these installed to help people find their ways inside. That’s so cool. If I see any more of these raised bumps, I’ll try to follow them myself with my eyes closed to see where they will lead me.

You are late to school. You run into the building straight to your class. In your haste you throw open the door to the room where you are about to take a test. Everyone in the classroom laughs at you. Only then do you realize, you are naked.

You wake up. It’s only a dream!

Who hasn’t had this sort of experience? I remember a particularly vivid dream where I was incorrectly registered for a class, and I only found out about it on the day of the final. I had to show up and pass the test, otherwise I would fail the course and wouldn’t be able to graduate. This was months after I was out of college and was living in Korea. Even after I got my degree I was having the “can’t graduate” nightmare.  I think this is a normal sort of experience.

Today, my upper level students were answering questions about clothing and style. One of the questions was, “Have you ever had a dream about being in a public place without clothes.”

None of my students would admit they ever had any sort of dream that involved their clothing in any way. I told them I had the “naked to a test” dream before. Even with that sort of, “It’s okay” sort of coaxing, no one would admit to anything of the sort.

I’m not surprised. It was hard enough for most of them to admit where they shopped for clothes, or what they liked to wear. Middle school students are particularly vicious about fellow students lack of confidence. I’m sure if they started to talk about clothes they liked to wear, or styles they enjoyed, someone would mock them for it. It’s much easier to keep a distance from the subject and just laugh at the silly foreign teacher.

I loathe middle school students.

Today happens to be my wife’s birthday. We don’t make a big deal out of birthdays most of the time. A simple dinner, possibly a gift negotiated for in advance, and some time together is all we do to celebrate. Still, we need to recognize we’re doing something for the day.

Yesterday, my wife came home from a dinner party with coworkers. She had a cake and a small pendant they bought for her. She asked me, “Do you know why I got the cake?”  She thought I had forgotten her birthday, and it wasn’t even her birthday yet! A preemptive accusation of forgetfulness?

I could understand why she would have gotten that impression. We had both worked out beforehand that she was going to get her present while on vacation. She would get to choose something nice while we were visiting Europe instead of making me try to find something nice for her here. As such, she didn’t want me to go buy her something now. She wanted to pick it later.

Today we woke up to rain. I had to go into work extra early to help choose the books they’d be teaching while I was on vacation. I had to leave in a hurry, and it was raining, so my plan to purchase flowers while walking the dog was ruined.

We agreed to meet after work and go to our favorite downtown restaurant. Can it still be a romantic dinner choice if we have a point card with the restaurant? I had some handmade pizza, while she had crab risotto. Seafood is served “in shell” here, so much of the conversation during dinner was stunted while she tried to suck the crab meat out of the shell. Her opinion: “It’s delicious, but I’m never ordering this again!”

We left the restaurant, and were going to walk around for a little while, but got hit by a huge downpour. We both had umbrellas, but were getting soaked. We ran into a sticker photo boot to snap a few shots. We’ve gone to this same place three times to have pictures taken. Eventually I’ll remember to contort myself so that the camera can catch all of me in a frame. We got the pictures cut, and by the time the process was finished, the rain had died down well enough to walk around.

We headed back home via subway. My family never did anything more than a dinner and a gift for birthdays. Even though I know I’ll be getting something expensive for her in a few weeks, I wish I had the opportunity today to get her flowers or some small “thinking of you, no I didn’t forget your birthday” gift.

Today I had a class of young students doing a unit about food, again. Today we talked about the containers and units you use to measure food. “A jar of jam” or “a bottle of ketchup”. That sort of thing. They went through the unit, writing down everything with ease. At the end of class, like always, I told them to open up a notebook and get ready for dictation.

Their about a week away from the next level of the school. Their next week will include grammar classes in their lessons for the first time. The reason I was told to do dictation was to help them have practice writing grammatically correct sentences earlier to lessen the severity of the change.

One student kept having problems with his spelling. I had written several “hints” on the board before the test started, but didn’t give them the entire sentences scrambled as in previous dictation tests. “Teacher! Teacher! Strawberry spelling what? What spelling? What?” He kept asking over and over again. “Strawberry spelling what?”

I’ve explained in previous classes that if someone wants to ask a question for help, or to go to the bathroom, they need to use proper grammar. When he asked me “What spelling?” I told him “W-h-a-t”. He wrote it down, looked, squinted his eyes in comic amusement, then said, “Hey! Strawberry spelling what?!”

I took a marker to the board and drew a fantastic picture of a strawberry holding a pencil writing the word “what” on a piece of paper. The students started laughing. “Teacher? What’s that?”

“A Strawberry spelling ‘w-h-a-t’! Isn’t this what you wanted?”

I told him if he wanted to ask me for hints on how to spell words he should say, “How do I spell this word?”

Instead, he started asking how OTHER fruit would spell words. “Apple spelling ‘this’?” “Orange spelling ‘orangutan!’”

Smart ass.

I teach one of the most infamous students in the school. He’s a complete misogynist and picks fights with everyone in the class. He’s the smallest student in his grade, smaller than most of the kindergarten students, despite being four years older than them. What he lacks in stature, he more than makes up for in cruelty and a wicked tongue.

The boy cackles, actually CACKLES LIKE A WITCH, when he makes a classmate cry. He has his own little henchman that laughs at everything he says too. The girls in the class have banded together to stop his abuse. They complained so much to teachers that he’s moved onto the biggest boy in the entire class.

When I say “biggest”, the boy is twice the bad mouth boy’s size, but he’s also a little fatter. The mean students constantly knock down the bigger boy’s confidence by calling him a pig in Korean between classes. Sometimes they even mock him in front of me. Here is an exchange I heard today:

Me: “I need to check your homework please.”

Mean boy: “Yeah pig, let him see how many you got wrong, you stupid pig.”

Henchman: “Heh heh heh. Stupid pig. Hah!”

Me: “What did you just say? Give me your rewards papers! I’m punishing you!”

It’s ridiculous. Completely inappropriate for class. It doesn’t matter how many times you yell at the student for being a total ass, the simple fact he made someone upset is what gives him pleasure.

I tried to explain to him, once, that the fact that he hits girls means he lost, not matter what she did, or how angry he got. He can never “win” a fight with anyone by hitting. He said that as long as the girl was upset, he had won. I told him that the only thing that stops the tiny boy from getting his ass kicked every single day was that THEIR parents had taught them how to behave, and that if he ever really picks on someone bad, he’s going to get slaughtered. He didn’t understand.

The large boy in class would absolutely destroy him in a fight, but never lifts a finger. The bigger student yells, and cries, but he never tried to actually fight. The little boy knows taekwondo, but really, at that age it’s just punching and kicking anyway. Plenty of students have a reason to beat the little jerk up, but he’s escaped a major pummeling somehow.

Today, while the small boy was berating the secretary of the school for not letting him cheat on his vocabulary test, I saw another boy running around with the exact same clothing on. Smaller, younger, but positively the same clothes. The director was locked away behind closed doors with a parent. It turns out the bad boy has a younger brother. THERE IS ANOTHER ONE! HE MIGHT ATTEND THE SCHOOL TOO!

My mind boggles at the possibility of seeing multiple members of this family on a weekly basis. If this boy is bad after a few years of studying English, I can’t imagine his lawless, uncivilized brother in a class full of first grade students. He might be feral, although he seemed used to the idea of wearing clothing when I observed him in the school.

I suppose I am doing the community a service. If the kids are in school with me, they can’t be on the streets torturing animals or burning down houses. I think they let their child fail the vocabulary test so that it takes him an extra few hours to get home while he is retested every day. I know I would be happy to see him supervisedyet out of the house.

I got kicked out of the house with Yoshi while my wife went on another cleaning rampage. I had encoded some Simpsons, again, and grabbed a bag of amusements for myself. I also had some plastic bags to keep Yoshi’s mess under control. We headed out after a rainstorm had cooled down everything.

I had planned to be outside the house for at least 90 minutes, which seems to be about the time needed for things to get moderately clean enough for me to escape problems when I return. A 90 minute walk is a lot, so I planned to go to a pagoda area near the river, watch some Simpson episodes, then return.

I had miscalculated how far the pagodas were from my house. The only time I ride the length of the river trail pass the pagoda area is when I ride my bike. I’ve never actually walked the entire length of the area from my apartment to the place before with Yoshi. It’s a lot farther than we normally go. It wasn’t a big deal, because I had some podcasts I wanted to listen to and Yoshi will walk anytime he’s out of the house without incident.

When we finally GOT we were going, we had a few problems. One of the pagodas was filled with people eating. That’s no good for someone with a dog. The next one had an older couple with their own dog. Yoshi wanted to bother that dog, but it was sitting on an old man’s lap. I had to move on. There was a set of seats available, and I had just arranged the dog and my mp3 player to get comfortable when a group of three young men each with a dog in tow walked past. Of course Yoshi wanted to meet everyone one of these dogs personally. He was whimpering to visit the newcomers, so we went down to the river area and got to meet them.

As soon as I let Yoshi off the leash, it started raining again. I had to chase him down, leash him up, and get under the shelter again. The three men with their dogs joined me, and we all let our dogs run around for a bit. I decided to head back, as the sky looked to get darker as I went. I got about half way to my house when another downpour started. I looked around. I saw some steps leading over a hill I had never been up before. There were some trees on either side, and what could have been a park. If there is a park, then there is a pagoda for parents. I ran up the hill, worried I’d need to run the entire way back to my apartment soaked head to toe with all my electronics in my lap dripping. Why hadn’t I carried an umbrella?!

I was in luck. There was a pagoda! I ran inside, found a clean seat, fired up the mp3 player again, and waited out the storm. It was another 45 minutes or so before the rain had stopped enough for me to venture outside to work my way home. I got a call from home, “It’s raining? Where are you?”

“Yeah, I know. I’m on my way home. See you soon.”

Seems I had killed enough time for her to have cleaned the entire house for once. We got home and I was told to immediately to clean myself up before I messed up the house. Next in line was the dog. Eventually everything in the house got cleaned.

My wife went downtown to do her bead art for the day. She takes hours to complete something, so there is nothing for me to do if I wait for her. She told me to meet her downtown at 6:00 PM, then we would hang out and do something. I lounged around the house, returned the DVD, walked the dog. The usual.

When it was time to leave, I got my gear ready and left Yoshi to “protect” the house. I knew I wasn’t going to be in and out of the bead shop on time. Never has her estimate about time been accurate when it comes to completing something at the shop. I encoded some stuff to watch, brought my Nintendo DS, and headed downtown.

I got to the shop, and sure enough, she was still working. I ended up waiting an hour for her to finish a butterfly for a necklace she was making. That’s why I’m always prepared with lots of other stuff. Eventually she got her stuff done and we headed out to wander the downtown streets.

The downtown experience is punctuated by pure waste. There are so many neon lights it’s like the sun never sets. There are so many advertisements on the ground that you can barely see the streets. Night clubs pollute with loud, obnoxious advertisements that seemed designed to annoy someone into going into their club.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa-Ezsja6ts[/video]

 We ended up in one of the few arcades left downtown. It was my wife’s idea! She played an arcade game called “Catch the Mouse” based on a television show that’s been running a few years. She wasn’t very good at it, despite my help.

She moved over to her standby game, Puzzle Bobble. Now, we have played some head to head Frozen Bubble but she was doing particularly well at the game today. I let her use the change instead of running around trying different things in the arcade like I usually do. There wasn’t much I wanted to play, but I was really proud of how well she was doing. I was happy being her cheerleader.

We eventually moved over to a Puzzle Bobble 2 machine with head to head multiplayer and she totally kicked my ass. She works downtown, so she might have been practicing in secret instead of doing the beads like she claimed. She doesn’t play anything else, but it’s a start.

After our long month of teaching morning classes, we were given two days off this week. Since my wife isn’t as lucky, I’m home alone and just hanging out until the weekend where we can actually go do something together.  I spent yesterday catching up on sleep, but today I wanted to get some things done.

My wife and I prepared a shopping list for me. I managed to get everything at the grocery store back to the house, even with all the bottled water and liquid goods we wanted for the week. After that, a brief nap. It was my day off, I might as well enjoy it. If that’s all I would have accomplished in the day it would have been a success. My dog and I are professional nappers.

Later, I finally beat the easy campaign of Advanced Wars Dual Strike. I had put the game down, more than a year ago, because of my disgust with a certain missions victory requirements. After consulting a guide, I quickly beat the mission I was stuck on. With a few more peeks at the guide, I eventually beat the entire campaign. Now I’ve got some unlocking, and possibly some leveling to do as I work through the maps available to get more characters.

Truth be told, I had burnt out on the Advanced Wars franchise because of Advanced Wars by Web. While AWbW retains most of the gameplay of Advanced Wars, and can be played by friends all over the world, the web interface isn’t that well done. There is no “undo”, and you have to wait for each move to load, which turns the game into a chore.  After getting my butt kicked online repeatedly with web interface and balance issues, I swore off the series for a while. Now, my turn based strategy lust is returning viciously. I’m still not as obsessed as I was at the height of my AWbW playing days, but that’s a good thing. The game has a ton of replay value, and I haven’t even scratched some of the modes yet despite owning it for years. It’s almost scary.

After I got my game on, my wife sent me a message. How about a DVD for the evening? Nothing was in the new release bin, so we picked up “Memoirs of a Geisha”. This was a movie 145 minutes long, which no one alerted me to when I gave the go ahead for the rental. Women dress! They gossip! They are treated as objects by rich men, and they love it! Ugh. While the story was really freaking long to get to the point, the costumes and scenery was beautiful. My wife said the book was better. Whatever.

I got some stuff done, and I’ve got nothing to worry about for the next two days either while I can relax on my long weekend too.

I’ve been an owner of a “DMB” player for a while. I talk about it from time to time. One of the features I never get around to using is the whole Digital Media Broadcasting aspect of the player.

First of all, when it first rolled out in Daejeon, there wasn’t much content. There were two channels, and they aren’t very entertaining. One was news. Boring, Korean broadcast news. I’d be more likely to fall asleep watching this than I would getting off at the right subway stop if I starting watching this.

The other channel wasn’t any better. This was the “youth oriented” channel. It’s all the lame Korean shows I avoid watching normally. Dating shows, game shows with no purpose, annoying stuff. The exact reason I DON’T watch Korean television ever.

Today, I had burned through all my podcasts, had no videos on hand, and was walking back to my house. I tried the DMB scanner and was surprised to find two more channels on the list. One of them was running a sort of “Korea’s most wanted” style show. At least I THINK so. It was terribly boring.

My last hope for entertainment was my new channel on the DMB. They were showing a “Wow, other cultures are strange!” style show with a Korean panel. The show would travel somewhere and video tape a segment with someone strange, then the host and other guests would make spectacularly obvious comments about what they were watching.

With insights like, “Will he eat that? What’s he doing? That’s sure strange!” this is a staple of Korean television. It’s also the format favored by Korean radio. Play something people want to watch or listen to, then TALK while it’s playing. It’s like America’s Funniest Home Video, without the America, or the bodily damage. No Bob Saget either.

The whole show I saw as I walked home was dedicated to a strange man in China with an unusual pet. He kept giant centipedes in his house. His wife didn’t like them at all, and his neighbors thought he was weird. Not for keeping the pets, but for eating them as well. He showed off for the camera by devouring the giant centipede that was crawling on him. It’s China. It’s not like this was high on the “shocking” scale of strange stuff I saw devoured or for sale to be eaten.

Anyway, watching the man go around eating his “pets” while grossing everyone out and hearing the Korean panel’s comments about it kept me entertained as I walked home. I recorded it to upload to an online video site, but it’s in some strange proprietary format (.TES?) that doesn’t work with anything else. What’s the point of downloading and saving a file in a format nothing else reads?

Anyway, now I’ve got a few more choices on my player for DMB. Nothing great, but it still is digital TV on the go.

I ride the subway line three stops until I go to work. My wife sticks on the subway for a good 20 minutes or so both ways, so she sees a lot more crazy stuff on the subway than I do. She’s been telling me about the strange stuff she sees from time to time. Most of it involves old people hitting people.

When she was riding the subway yesterday, she heard a younger Korean girl only speaking English. The girl had been abroad for such a long time that she had only basic Korean skills. The girl was sitting on the subway talking to her friend in English when the old man next to her hit her on the head and said, “Hey! WHY are you speaking ENGLISH! SPEAK KOREAN!”  It wasn’t even her grandparent or anything. Just a random stranger.

Even my wife isn’t spared the abuse. She rode the subway downtown last weekend. While she was riding, she was working on something in her lap, and had her leg crossed. She was wearing shorts, but nothing revealing. Nothing above the knee was being shown, and even if you contorted your view and tried to look down the flap of fabric, you weren’t seeing anything beyond some thigh about the knee. Completely modest shorts.

While my wife was concentrating on whatever it was in her hands, maybe sending a message on a phone or whatever, this old guy that was walking by stops, and starts staring at her. Old people with body space issues aren’t exactly uncommon, but this guy sorts of stares for a bit. My wife didn’t say anything. Then grabs his paper hand fan, and hits her leg as if he was an old style school principal with a ruler. He hit her leg, then casually moves on.

That’s how social norms are enforced here from the top down. Old people go whacking people on the leg or head, and you can’t say anything to them. I’ve had old people mutter things at me on the subway, usually when I’ve got a music playing device in my ear. I don’t know what they tell me. I just nod and agree, wait for my exit, leave, and make sure no one follows me. Anyone poking a foreigner and muttering in Korean something about manners is probably not someone I really want to spend any time talking with in any real detail.