So far, the only thing I’m attempting to set up is a tour of the DMZ for us. My family liked it when they came over, and it’s something unique and worth doing if you are in Korea. The thing with the DMZ tour is that it is a half day, but you need to be in Seoul the night before since it leaves so early. Also, after the tour you might have half a day left in Seoul, but you just want to relax. The soldiers try their best to scare the crap out of you the entire time, so it’s normal to need some time to unwind.

Perhaps a trip to the National War Museum, or something else cultural in Seoul would be enough for everyone. I tend to get into Seoul, see and do what I need, then leave as quickly as possible. This trip will be no different unless my friends come up with something different they need to see.

Other than that, we’ve got a housewarming party for our new apartment, and that’s about it for plans. My parents had 10 days in Korea for the wedding and everything else, so we shuttled them around the entire peninsula. My friends have less time, and less money. We want to hang out as much as we can, but I’m not letting them travel across the world without seeing some cool stuff first.

I guess Gwangju is nice for it’s history, but not really a place I know well. A bunch of hills and museums to people that don’t have any attachment to the culture. I always end up at Bulgoksa, which is the prettiest temple in Korea. It may be touristy, but it’s pretty and unique. On my family trip around Korea we also went to rural Andong as well, which is a polar opposite of Seoul. The only difference is that in summer, Andong’s local village is relatively crowded and expensive, while we were traveling before everything was rock bottom prices and deserted. Still, hanging out in a rural village in the middle of Korea is definately a neat thing to do.

If that’s all we can accomplish in 7 days, that’s what it will have to be. Do any readers have ideas of “must see” sights to include in a trip to Seoul, or around Daejeon that don’t require a car? Yuseong spa, Kyeorang mountain, or anything I’ve done multiple times doesn’t really need to be said. I’ve been here so long I’m jaded and don’t really remember what impressed me most when I first arrived in Korea. Anything super pricy or hard to reach will also be out too.

Starting a new class with 7-8 year old students is rough, because anything you do is something new to them, and you’ve got to get over the “dance monkey, dance” stage with these students pretty quick.My first class, students kept poking me to see if I was “real”. Yeah.

If you speak Korean, they are shocked. If you only speak English, they act like you are from another planet. If you ask them to read, they’ll wait for your prompts. If you tell them to write, they’ll pause after every word as if it was a herculean effort to continue. These are the sorts of things that wear down over time, and eventually they’ll learn what to do in class.

One of the girls, in particular has a wicked case of ADD. I’ll ask her to sit down, and while I am telling her to sit down and face the board, she’ll turn back around to talk to her friends. She’s got different ways of distracting herself. Playing with erasers, talking to friends, playing with her bags, playing with a chair, standing around. Anything and everything but looking at a book and studying. She can’t sit still long enough to read a sentence.

I’ve started using peer pressure to keep her in check. I pause the class and just WAIT for her to realize we are all waiting on her. She’ll get the point eventually. Today she turned around and chatted with her friend so often I asked if her chair was broken. I made her stand up, then I turned the chair backwards. Then I told her to sit down again. I said, “If you always face the wrong direction with the chair facing forward, maybe THIS is the solution.”

Of the five students in the class, when reading any sentence together, one of them will get the word correct while the others will just make sounds. It’s never the same student, and it’s never the same word that they get correct. It’s just that if you flap your gums and make random sounds, EVENTUALLY one of the words sounds close enough to be correct.

This is a pretty big adjustment for me. I complain when students can’t write coherent sentences, or don’t listen to my explanations fully before trying to argue their points. Now I’ve got students that don’t KNOW the shapes of the letters yet. They are very cute, and a few of them try hard, but it’s a challenge to go back to the very juvenille behavior and short attention spans of very young learners. It is rewarding to help them grow, and hopefully when they get to higher level classes I’ll know they were helped by my attention, but right now I’m adjusting.

This was the gift I got. Slightly racist individually wrapped cookies.

This is what my wife got. Eeeewww. Placenta Essence Mask.

When looking for information about the latest Final Fantasy release on the Wiiware service, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals: My Life as a King, I disliked the design choices that underpin the game. I started thinking about why I find some games rewarding, and others pointless.

FFCC:MLaaK is a marked departure from the typical RPG. In this game, you play a King confined to his castle. You have to rebuild your kingdom by harvesting the minerals found in the dungeons. This is a pretty cool concept. When I first heard of this, I thought, “It’s more of a resource management game. Neat. SimCity + Final Fantasy + Dungeon Crawling. Awesome.”

In SimCity, you needed to allocate resources wisely, because if you didn’t collect enough taxes, you couldn’t keep the city running for the next year. Then things started getting worse and worse, and you could only hold on so long before something came along and wiped you out. FFCC:MLaaK removed all the “risk and failure” from this model of game design, and I’m scratching my head why anyone would want to play it.

When the idea of FFCC:MLaaK was introduced, I thought that there would be a certain building you needed to build at a certain time to equip your forces with what they needed, and that if your troops were defeated, you’d lose the game. There had to be some sort of time limit driving you to work fast, otherwise you could just sending your forces to lower level dungeons to level them up, then clear out harder dungeons easily. If there is no consequence for failure, like the inability to raise taxes in SimCity, why continue?

Instead of controlling the people you send out to collect the materials (AKA, gain income on your own) in the dungeons, adventurers simply send back reports from the dungeons. If they come back with the materials by killing the boss, success. If they fail to defeat the boss, they come back wounded and need to rest for several days before returning to a dungeon. There is no time limit for when quests must be completed. There is nothing you can do to change the outcome of beating a boss to get income for the kingdom other than leveling the troops by sending them to easier dungeons. The only other way to use money is to donate it to the buildings in town to make better items to increase their chances of succeeding the first time.

Later, you can group the troops in different configurations with skills and medals to support each other. They still fight on their own without your help, but they pass or fail as a group. If you give them medals for achievement, you can manipulate statistics to further increase their rates of success. You still don’t directly control them. Your are the king in the castle. You don’t want to soil yourself with the “adventure”. You get to construct buildings that influence the townspeople. Now THAT’S exciting.

There is no danger of going too slowly. There is no benefit to going quickly either. Finish fast or slow. It doesn’t matter. Fail a quest? Try again. It doesn’t matter, you aren’t actually going to the dungeons, your adventurer proxies are fighting for you.

Beating the game opens up “New Game+”. The only difference here is that the higher level dungeons take a longer time to open up. This means that as long as you put time into the game, eventually the troops you are sending will level up and defeat the boss. Any outcome of the resource scarcity introduced by the game is handled by the game itself. There is no strategy, because all you have to do is try again and your chances will increase each time because your adventurers level up between battles.

You can make the characters in the game happier by building bakeries or parks. This might make it easier to beat the game, or not. I guessing you’ll need to build each item possible to progress through the game, because that justifies the quests into the dungeon. Each demand of residents means you need to continue with the questing portion of the game to get more resources. The resources you get are determined by the adventurers you send off into the dungeons, but don’t actually control. The game demands something, then gets it for you if you’ve played long enough.

All you do is press a button to complete the loop. It is basically masturbation in video game form.

Basically, the lack of consequence for failure or strategy mean the game is entirely pointless. I play games that have heavy consequences for failure (roguelikes= permadeath of characters), or heavy strategy (Magic the Gathering). Removing one of these elements of game design can still be fun, (card games without keeping score) but I can’t wrap my head around someone who would want to pay money to play a more active version of Progressquest.

When I asked about the gameplay for some clarifications to see if there was more of a point, the best response I got was, “All RPG games are just time sinks. It’s joy to play and looks pretty, and isn’t that enough?”

If I don’t control the outcome, and there is no strategy involved in the game, no it’s not really enough for me. It is pretty. The character art has a good design. You can even pay more to buy new costumes for your characters that do nothing. There are new dungeons to download, and different races to unlock, but you never actually fight to acquire the resources you need.

If there is no gameplay of consequence, why do I care?

I. don’t. get. it.

(EDIT) It’s been brought to my attention:

Some quests can only be defeated by certain classes, so you need SOME strategy in troop deployment (AKA, Reading a report to know why the person you sent before failed, then sending a different class.) If you fail a mission 13 times, you don’t lose the game, but there seems there is a Ranking system based on how you completed the game.

There IS a consequence, however slight, for being faster and or better at completing the game. You get graded on the happiness, speed, and other factors of how you managed the kingdom. Getting a better score MIGHT even unlock different content, but no one knows. There is a “point” to completing the task, if you play a game to get a ranking.

While we were skipping around to different banks to find out loan rates for the house, I decided this would be the perfect time to make a new ATM/Debt card. Since I never use my card to actually withdrawl cash, if I actually needed to purchase something I didn’t have money for, an actual card to spend from would be better. Whenever foreigners deal with banks, they bring their foreigner card, as well as their passport. I grabbed these two legal necessities and headed out the door. After we got the needed info and signed for the card, we headed to Emart. I picked up my WIFI router. We dropped into a realtor for some paperwork, then headed home.

Last night, we got an automated response about my debt card. They needed my passport number. Odd, since we had BROUGHT my passport with us to the bank. My wife asked, “So, where is that passport. We need the number.

“Where is the passport? I thought YOU had it,” was my reply.

Uh oh.

Yesterday night we spend an hour or two tearing the apartment to pieces. We checked all the newly laundered clothes. No, it wasn’t in the wash. I checked every coat, bag, and book in my computer room. No where. My wife checked our legal documents drawer where all the paperwork is usually kept. Nothing. We found HER passport, and all HER documents, but mine was still nowhere to be seen. I found a copy of the passport info I kept for emergencies, but not the real thing.

We retraced our steps and hoped for a miracle. We headed back to the bank. They took down the number from our copy of the passport and told us that if they had found the real passport, they would have called us. No luck. Next we went to Emart. There was a list of all the items they found each day at the information desk. They find a LOT of stuff in that store, but not my passport. The trip to the real estate agent was fruitless, but extra awkward because we had signed a contract with the real estate agent across the hall, meaning they had lost out on the commission. No wonder they hadn’t looked very hard.

The bad timing of everything freaked me out more than anything. Losing a bank card AND a passport in the same week? Was I getting senile? Was I being robbed by a very patient identity thief? What the heck was going on?

We returned to the house and proceeded to tear it apart again. We have a small house, so looking involved checking the places we looked at before. We went through the computer room, and started looking back through documents. My wife got in touch with the bank and started to move funds from my account over to hers just in case of fraud resulting from my missing document.

We hadn’t found anything, and I was already looking at how hard it would be to replace the passport. As long as we had a copy of the information provided on the passport, as well as a police report, made an interview, paid a large fee, had all the places I had visited outside of Korea, and made two trips to Seoul, I could probably have a new passport in two weeks. Gee, it’s almost TOO easy! I was resigned to having to call the cops and start on this process rolling. Once we reported it missing, we couldn’t stop until we had a new passport, as it rendered the old document invalid.

I picked up a pile of documents we had sorted through to put them away. Wherever the passport was, it wasn’t in the house…then something plopped on the floor from the pile of documents. I thought it was just my wife’s passport, till I noticed it was blue. ASSA! I FOUND IT!

There was a huge sigh of relief, then an angry scowl from my wife. “NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.”

No kidding.

I don’t complain about this behavior. It’s rather nice of her. Today I had cooked a very big meal to repay all the hard work she did this week. We were eating some salad out of a bowl together. I took my bite, then she took hers. We both agreed it was delicious.

Eventually we got down to the last bit of cheese and roasted almonds, and I was waiting to see if she was going to pull some sort of stunt to get me to eat the last thing again. Did she know that she did this? How long could I delay before testing to see if she was really waiting for me to eat the last bite?

I moved some scraps around on my plate, waiting for her to take the last bite. She made no move for the food.

“Why don’t you just eat the last bite?” I said.

“I want you to eat more than me,” she replied.

“I eat faster than you, so I probably did eat more. Also, it doesn’t matter if I get the last bite, or the first bite. I still ate. If I want more, I’ll make something, or just ask for it. Just eat it please. I don’t always need the last bite.”

“Oh, okay.” She finished off the salad.

She claims to never have delayed or stopped eating so that I can eat the last bite of food, but I’m not sure I believe her. There is probably some deep seated Korean manner rule that she wasn’t aware of following.

This is partly because while we put down money for a down payment, and we have a moving date, we still aren’t any closer to really living in the apartment than we were when we signed the contract. There are still loan negotiations and the process of actually moving in that sort of hamper any sense of accomplishment gained by signing and stamping a paper to agree to buy an apartment. Sure, the apartment is eventually going to be ours, but it’s not like I can kick my feet up and play some Wii at the new place now is it? Until we move in and figure out where we are financially, all other plans are sort of on hold.

The place we ended up purchasing is literally ACROSS THE STREET from our current apartment block. We’re moving MAYBE 300-500 meters (I suck at long distance metric units), yet now we have a debt to worry about, logistics of a move, and the responsibilities and worries of people that now own a small piece of real estate. To be fair, 90% of the burden of all the work falls to my wife since she handles most of the Korean language work. I’ll pack boxes and carry the entirety of the apartment over on my back if it would make it easier for her though. This is work I want everyone to consider a success.

All of this worry for an apartment to call our own. There are definite upsides to knowing you own a place, but I haven’t really wrapped my head around those yet either.

There are certain milestones in my life that I never expected to happen while I was in Korea. Getting married? Getting a dog? Buying a house? The longer I stay here, the list of things I’ve done in Korea keeps growing. I’m tremendously happy that we can accomplish our goals to improve our lives, and that we were successful in finding a home almost in our price range where we wanted to live.

Once we move in and start paying off the loan, there will be this huge sense of relief that we accomplished our goal for this year. Sure, being in serious debt for the first time in my life will probably be a new experience that I won’t enjoy, but risk versus reward, you know?

Plus, my friends visit Korea the week after we move into the apartment. That’ll be one hell of a housewarming party.

(xkcd is brilliant.)

My faith in humanity has been restored. There is now a Firefox plugin called Youtube Comment Snob that filters Youtube comments based on the following critera:

• The number of spelling mistakes.
• lack of capital letters to begin a sentence.
• ALL CAPS.
• Excessive punctuation!!!????

This will basically remove 99% of all comments from Youtube. While it might not sort the remaining comments for actual interesting comments, at least I don’t have to bother myself reading all the dumb ones anymore.

In my lowest class, I set up a modified multiple choice test. The twist was that the multiple choices were definitions of different words. The listening part of the test was me saying the word that they had the definition for. The students copied it down for each number as a spelling test on top of choosing the definition. This has several advantages over a standard multiple choice test.

First of all, none of the students could go faster than I let them, so I could give all the students time to look over their answers and try to find the correct response. It also tests multiple skills at the same time. Listening, reading, spelling, and comprehension. Even if students couldn’t spell the word, they had enough time to pick the correct definition.

Also, because of me being the only person knowing the answers before I started the test, I could control the difficulty of the exam as it progressed, question by question. Since I pulled all the definitions from their books, I knew all the answers were valid. Some words are much harder to spell than others, and some have much harder definitions. By manipulating the difficulty from question to question, I made sure every student was being challenged without frustrating anyone or causing them to quit.

The downside was that I had to make the key as I was announcing the words for each question. When you make the test yourself this isn’t so difficult, but I also loaned my test to my coworker, who might have a harder time figuring out which hints correspond to the student’s vocabulary in the book.

In my other classes, I used a repeating table structure that modeled one whole question and answer before I left gaps that the students had to fill by modifying their patterns. This helps remind students what I am looking for them to do.

Just to see if the example made a big difference, I left one table in the test without a set of examples, and gave it more complete directions with English and Korean. Students had more trouble with the section with Korean directions and no examples than the sections with English directions and simple examples. This is because they don’t READ directions, but DO use the examples. In the future, I’ll include examples if suitable for the questions and levels.

I had a frantic day of testing, then grading in the next class. I handed tests back to the students as they headed out the door to give them homework. They had to get their tests signed. There was a very typical spread for all my classes, but there were less people completely bombing out, so I think my tests were better explained this time around.

There isn’t even very much LAND in Korea. How do they keep busy? People swap apartments much more easily than Americans swap houses. Apartment prices rise and fall on a whim here. It’s insane. Prices can fluctuate 20%+ from year to year in just this city.

When development is hot in a neighborhood, people are fiercely competitive about grabbing up and inflating the land prices. The prices of apartments also connect to politics, social expectations, education, and anything else that moves house prices in other countries. It just is accelerated here.

What do people look for in an apartment? A general rule is to treat an apartment like a bunker during a war. The closer you are to the center, the less damage you are going to recieve. Here are some of the rationale I’ve heard from different people in the past week about what makes for a good apartment:

• The difference in price between an apartment on the first floor, and an apartment on the second floor can be 20%. An apartment on a “Royal” floor (in the middle of the apartment building) is sometimes 30% higher than the bottom floor. Everyone also avoids the top floor because of the heating costs.
• You could buy a lower floor apartment, but never a first floor apartment, if you want to have many visitors. If too many people come to your apartment in an elevator, the people on the elevator “line” will complain you are using a disproportionate amount of electic and will demand gifts. (SERIOUSLY).
• If you have an apartment near a road, your plants will die on your veranda. Getting somethng in the middle of the block is better because less pollution is around.
• If you don’t buy a new apartment, you’ll almost always be expected to pay for new wall paper and floors. Also, all remodelling is done BEFORE you move in. No one remodels an apartment by themselves.
• The difference between a 26 pyeong and a 25 pyeong apartment being livable for a couple always comes down to how intelligently it was designed. A badly designed apartment with a front approach to all apartments on a floor will lose you space in the apartment. An elevator shaft approach with 2 apartments on each side will gain you space.

Here are some tips that I’d pass on for anyone getting involved in this process (ZenKimchi, looking in your direction.)

Tips:

Despite the government’s insistence that things be measured in square meters, everyone uses pyeong, the traditional Korean measurement of area. Get to know it and use it comfortably before you go looking at ANYTHING with a realtor. Find out what your current apartment is measured in. Ask people to size things in pyeong when you go somewhere. Learn this measurement. (1 pyeong is 3.3 meters squared) (1 pyeong is 35.58 square feet for metric neophytes)

Before ever talking to a realtor, make it a habit to stop outside their offices. The words 매매 “Mae Mae” in Korean mean “Apartment for sale”. When you look at a listing, note the apartment location and block, the size, the floor, and the price. That is the rubric to which apartments are compared. The price is always listed on the sheets hanging out in front of a realtor. That is th asking price. Depending on the situation you can usually knock off a few million won from that price.

Once you narrow it down between, say, two or three apartments of the same size, in a close proximitry to where you want to live, that are roughly the same price, contact the realtor to see the apartments themselves. Then you can decide if you need to remodel before moving in, or if the design of the place is suitable.

We can arrange most viewings in little more than a few hours. We can call ahead if we need to see it at a specific time, or even drop into a realtor’s office, ask to see any of the places listed outside, and see them withing an hour. We have viewed three or more houses in under an hour. Be warned that an apartment you looked at on Monday MIGHT be closed and gone on Tuesday if someone saw it and made a better deal.

There are bank repossesion auctions online that can let you save a lot of money, but the houses that come up for bid are distributed almost by random chance, and it would be a miracle to find something that met all your criteria for finding a place that also happened to be going cheaply.

You can go to a bank and find out how much the average apartment in a complex is worth, how much the max loan a bank will give for any given apartment block, and if the apartments are tending to rise or lower in price. They update this weekly, but you only get this kind of information if you tell them you are looking at a place and need to know how much you need to get a loan. I doubt they’d tell you unless you hinted you were about to buy an apartment and wanted to know how high the asking price was from the median price of the apartments in the area.

Once you find an apartment, stike hard and fast, and push any grandmothers out of the way that might be on their way to the realtor’s office to steal your dream apartment. This is just a rough guide in my experience, but I am not dealing with any of the financial or legal headaches involved in the process. My lovely wife has all the stress, and I just come along for the ride.