Yes, you too can now become a full fledged Arab and speak fluent Arabic phrases such as Dirka Dirka! All it takes is a short beard, a dishdashi and associated head dress. Call now and you’ll receive the Authentic Arabic dishdashi and headgear PLUS an official CIA waterboarding kit!

You’ll be the life of the party as the only one officially dressed to be waterboarded. Your friends will be green with envy as you gasp for gulps of air between water dousings.

Buy two and you’ll receive a testicle electrocution kit, perfect for those late summer Abu Grab-ass parties, complete with battery, clamps with cruel teeth and a black hood.

Offer void in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Water not included.

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That was my Halloween get-up. We had a couple of kids come dressed up (at my urgings) and the school was OK if I wanted to dress up. They gave each kid a fistful of hard candy but that was as much of a party as they felt comfortable, it being a Wednesday. A couple of the other academies had some type of party and my boss was thinking maybe he should have. A lot of the kids were bummed that we didn’t. Almost every class expected some special activity besides a few suck candies.

But it was fun to get into the spirit of things, if only for a little bit. It made me a little sad today, just thinking about how I’d spent years past during Halloweens. They don’t have many parties here. Seems like you could always find one back home on Halloween or just enjoy the trick or treating. Neither is done here and the kids don’t really have an idea of what they’re missing.

The kids all liked my costume, though, so that made it all better.

Geez, I sound like a drag queen. 🙂

That’s it. $97. The sum of all my monthly bills for October. Absolutely everything to run a household. That includes all of these:

• Electricity
• Gas
• Water
• Cable TV
• Hi-speed internet
• Cell phone
• Home telephone

I think the cell phone was the highest, being around $20 or so. Of course, things will change dramatically when winter comes and I crank up the heat. But for now, I’m enjoying the cheap utilities.

The kids at school don’t get to have a party for Halloween this year. We had a great time in 2004 at the party, but it was on a Friday which is normally game day. Since it falls on a Wednesday this year, we get nothing. No dress up, no snacks, no party. Not that it’s a big deal to the kids as they don’t do anything anyway. There’s no trick-or-treating in the streets, no going from door to door showing off their costumes, no bags of candy.

Ah, the fun they miss out on. It was always something I looked forward to when I was a kid. I’ll have to wait until I come back to the States to see this “holiday” done up right. And I have the perfect costume, too: Sam shipped me an Arab knee-length white robe with red checkered head scarf in exchange for sending her some Korean noodle soups. I was going to be Osama Bin Martin.

Grace is one of the four Korean teachers I work with at the school. Today I went with the rest of the school staff to her wedding. It wasn’t the Korean traditional wedding, but a “western style” one. Although that’s a very loose term I’ve learned. The fact that the bride wore a white gown and the groom a tuxedo was one of few reasons to call it western.

The Korean version of western wedding has a photo opportunity up front. David, another teacher I work with suggested we get our picture with Grace, who was seated in a small room just to one side of the chapel. She sat on a wide sofa waiting for guests to arrive and take pictures before the ceremony. She was radiant and very beautiful. On the other side of the chapel was the reception desk where you are expected to present your gift. There a team of men will record both your name and your gift (90% were envelopes of cash, which they happily opened, counted and recorded.) I snickered inwardly as they tried for several minutes to read mine which I wrote in English. I’m just being a pest, though, because I can read and write Korean enough. After they record your name and gift, they give you a pass to the buffet reception.

About half of the guests had gone immediately to the reception hall on the 18th floor before the ceremony down on the 3rd floor had even begun. I decided, much to the raised eyebrows of my co-workers,  to stay and watch the ceremony.  I’m glad I did, just to see it for the spectacle.

After a short ceremony with their backs to the crowd, they turned and bowed to their families in the first few rows.  Grace did a curt bow from the waist while her husband bowed on his knees with his nose to the ground. Then they brought out a wedding cake/candelabra set. They flicked on a misting device in it and it rapidly poured out mist. They rapidly did a cake cutting ceremony with the parents and then they wheeled it off stage where the mist immediately stopped again – all within 60 seconds. I almost didn’t get a picture of that whole thing.

Next was a little choral arrangement by some family/friends – I don’t know who they were. But if there ain’t any singing, it ain’t Korean. The noraebang style is ingrained in many aspects here in Korea. These two guys sang some romantic ballad to the new bride and groom. They weren’t very good. Well, ok, they were bad. But it was sweet and I suppose another of the few similarities to a “western” wedding as I would experience it back home.

After the ceremony, everyone moved up to the reception room. Except the bride and groom. I think they stayed for more pictures. My school group stayed long enough to eat and then we left. There was no reception line, no toasting, no cake. In fact, we never saw Grace before leaving. We simply ate at the buffet and then left, some of them without even having watched the ceremony. I was doing my best to do like the Romans, but I was struggling with the lack of  things “western.”  I was expecting at have least some sort of social interaction with new couple at the reception. Shake hands, bow, say congrats – all the usual things one would say. I was even expecting, maybe, possibly some dancing at a wedding. Silly me, to think that a “western” wedding would be something recognizably western in Korea. I’m not complaining, I’m not saying its bad. I’m simply recording the fact that I expected something I did not see.

But it was nice to how they do things .

Being here in Korea, it’s difficult, if not impossible to gauge the impact of the falling dollar. All of my assets are in Korean Won. The price of goods here hasn’t changed much since I first came here in 2004. Even gas is still roughly $5.5-$6 a gallon, although it was less than $2 a gallon back in the US in 2004 and is over $3 now.  (That’s a 50% rise in cost, but the US Government doesn’t include fuel in its inflation calculations.) In Korea, gasoline, although not cheap, has, along with so many other goods remained steady. I have yet to see any semblance of inflation.

The dollar has fallen to new lows recently. The exchange rate as of 10/26/2007  had it at 908 Won to the dollar – a 25% drop from 1180 or so back in 2004.  Just this week its dropped significantly. Do your dollars buy less in America? Have you noticed a change in the price of foreign goods?  Are you worried that your savings may dwindle to nothing because the dollar buys less?

For me, the problem is not a problem. As the dollar goes down, my net worth goes up. That’s only if I convert my Won to Dollars when I return. But for my own personal economics, I hope it goes down even more.  Sorry.

But hurry, send me your dollars now. I’ll convert them to Won and save them for a few months. When the dollar continues to slide, I’ll send them back, worth more dollars than when you sent them here (minus my fees, of course.)
But wait! There’s more! Call now, and I’ll  throw in a set of Ginsu knives! Operators are standing by!

I made some Italian food for dinner last night. I thought it was pretty dang good. Nothing special – just a little dish of chicken and mushrooms over pasta with a garlic-lemon-butter sauce. MyeongHee was up for trying it, but it was short of the spicy flavoring she’s used to. I had plenty of garlic in it, which is a staple in Korean cooking, but none of the red pepper that permeates most things. She’s not afraid to improvise, however, and loaded each bite with a helping of kimchi.  That’s the equivalent of putting ketchup on a New York strip steak, but what the hell – I wasn’t eating it. Bon appetit!

Yesterday the kids at school told me about their event at the elementary school. It was “Woods” day and they were celebrating by planting a few trees in the area. They also had a couple of foreigners visit the school and tell about their respective countries. I have no idea what the American guy said in that session, but the kids came to my school afterwards and told me the Statue of Liberty is holding an ice cream cone. They had the part about “give me your tired, your poor…” but somehow they had it that if you came she’d give you ice cream. Sounds like a deal to me!

What started out as a nice, partly cloudy day turned into chilly day and some striking pictures. We hiked up the backside of Munsu Mountain the other day. Before we got to the top, the clouds formed up and grew dark. There were still plenty of wide open blue skies, but not where we were on the mountain. I snapped this picture of my neighborhood, Cheonsang, which was still basking in relative sunshine while the dark clouds rolled across us at eye level. As we stood at the top of the mountain looking down, the cold winds whipped us and left everything moist.

The apartment buildings below are clearly visible glinting in the sun. The rice fields beyond, yellow with grain, are just now beginning to ripen and be harvested. Above, dark clouds boiled around our heads.

My pup, SaTang, is always ready for a photo shoot.  Of course, it was either pick her up or let her beg food from all the Koreans who picnic at the top after their hike. Ergo,  a photo opportunity.

We took Mark back to the Busan airport yesterday morning for  his trip back to the USA. It has been a fabulous week having him visit. We were just too busy seeing things, talking, laughing and just catching up that I haven’t had time to write.

Some of the things Mark was interested in was the Petroglyphs that are dotted around the area. So we saw the dinosaur tracks and the whale rock carvings near here. We also visited Bulguksa temple,  a place for which I have framed many a pretty picture. It’s on the  left side of the banner image at the top of the page. This week it was still quite a bit greener and the leaves are just now beginning to show tinges of reds and yellows. Mark missed the fall colors by a week or three. The rest of the place was, as usual, in full bloom with the lotus flowers and dragons painted all over the temples. Below Mark and I pose in front of a large drum.

We also went had mass quantities of good Korean food. Mark likes spicy food and ate it all. We had traditional Korean restaurant food, but he also got a taste of real home cooking.  MyeongHee cooked for us twice while he was here. I waited several months before I got my first home cooked meal here so he’s way ahead of the curve.

Mark’s a dog lover, too, and he got along famously with SaTang. He walked her while I was at work and had fun talking with all the kids that swarm newcomers. Here, they both relax on the sofa.

For only being here a week, he picked up quite a bit of the language. He got really good at greeting and bowing and locals were all pleased with his manners. He brought one of his AIBO dogs to class on Friday and showed it to several students. They were blown away by its singing and dancing and interaction.

Friday during the day, it was market day. Mark had fun just walking up and down the street looking at all the booths selling anything from raw fish, chicken and vegetables to household goods, cheap jewelry and cooked foods. Sometimes its a booth, sometimes its just an old woman squatting on her haunches selling her stuff. After I went to school, he went back three or four more times to look at all the strange things they sell  and the strange people selling it. There’s nothing like it in America.

After a final night of drinking and singing at the Noraebang, we got up early and went to Busan. It was really good to have someone come visit. But it must’ve been wearing me out because I spent nearly all day sleeping on Sunday.

If you’ve wondered why things haven’t been updated much recently it’s that my good friend Mark is in town this week. Mark and I were housemates the last few months I was in Texas. He decided he needed to come see how Korea is done, so I’ve been showing him my world this week. I’ll post some pictures and write more soon. He’s only going to be here until Sunday morning, so I’ll try and write some when we aren’t out and about. But, for sure, more later.

One of my colleague’s at the school is a computer weenie like me. He’s been working on a web-cam based program for teaching. He is still working on it, but in the meantime has created a couple of tidbits.  There are two short video clips under the BigTop English web page. One is just a short clip of our building with some cool, flashy graphics. The other video is me.  David took some video two weeks ago of me playing the “whisper game” with my 1st level English class. The object is to whisper to two teams the same sentence and have them whisper it down the line from one to another. Whatever team first has it come out the same as what I said wins a  roll of the die and adds points. At the end of the game, the team with the most points wins.  This is one of my favorite games we play on Fridays. I whisper mundane things like “I want pizza” or “Do you want chicken?” or sometimes slip in some 50 Cent rap lyrics like “She fine as hell, she about the dough, she doing her thing out on the floor.” It’s funny how often things come out all jacked up on the far end.

I can’t believe I get paid to do this job.   Check out how excited these kids get. What a blast!

I have only two responses from prospective native-English pen-pals. No one else wants to email a cute Korean kid a sentence or two a week? Come on! The kids are excited!

As part of the course for my more advanced students, I’ve set them up with email addresses and a home page for our school. I bought a domain name and mapped it to the same server that this blog comes off of. You can check out the homepage here. Not much on it, but we’re on the web now. Woo hoo! My boss was impressed anyway.

If anyone is interested, I have 18 students who could use a pen-pal. Nothing big – just a few lines each week. These kids are all in 5th or 6th grade. Their English is rough, but understandable. Drop me a email or a comment if you’re interested in emailing with a Korean youngster.

Whether it’s due to the rambunctious nature of kids, poor engineering or both I can’t say. I have seen evidence of both.

The new playground they built across the street from me is rapidly falling apart.  They just finished remodeling it in June and in October its not only falling down it looks dangerous. Sharp edges protrude from the fencing and chain link hangs open, waiting to poke and scrape.

I first noticed the net was torn back in August. Some of it looked like it was cut on purpose, but I had also witnessed many of kids pull it aside to go in and out of the soccer field rather than walk 20 meters to the gate. At first it was a few holes here and there. Now its so shredded it  as to be worthless.

The interior fence, the one that keeps the play away from the spectator benches came down early last week. I don’t know how it started as I just noticed it one morning as I walked the dog. Over the next several days I watched several kids climb on, sit on the bent portions and even pull it down further so more could sit. I  shoo’ed several kids off when I saw them destroying it, but as soon as I was gone they were back. Although the kids are respectful to adults and shoo easily, they are like flies; a wave of the hand gets them off your picnic basket, but immediately back when you stop.

The gate on the outer field is coming off the hinges. This is an example of poor engineering. It’s not as if someone unscrewed it or took it off the hinge – this is a welded piece that simply snapped. Perhaps it was the weight of children who did it, but one would think metal of this gauge would stand up better.

This is my first experience with actual, willful  vandalism in Korea. It’s more than a little disheartening. Since the park is so new, I doubt there’s going to be another remodeling soon. There might be some repairs coming, but my bet is on a further decline.

hurts like a mo-fo!

I walked into a shop yesterday to buy a little take out lunch to bring up to the mountain for a climbing trip. I wasn’t paying attention to where my feet went and I walked right into a stone step. I hit it right on the end of the toenail on my left big toe and lifted it off the nail bed. I said a few bad words like “gosh” and “darn,” but I don’t think the locals understood me. Probably a good thing. Today it hurts like a beotch and looks like the whole nail will come off soon. Dang! That hurts.

It probably didn’t help that I went climbing anyway, but I’m not just a man; I’m a manly man, so pain doesn’t get in the way of doing my manly things.  Whatever guy ever thought that shit up ought to be whupped.