My contract with the school ends todays. In anticipation of that, my director brought my pay to the apartment before work. I got my January salary, my bonus for completing the contract (a month’s pay) and money for the plane ticket home. All told, it’s over 5M.

That’s a lot of cookies – all in 10,000won notes. One day, sometime next year, they are supposed to introduce a larger denomination here in Korea. Perhaps a 50K or 100k note. That would make this stash look substantially less. For now, I’ll have to carry this lump around until I can get to the exchange bank and turn it into US dollars. Currently, those are going for around 945 won to the dollar, making my 5M in won turn into about $5300 which should nicely in a secure pocket. A shame the exchange rate didn’t stay as low as it was in October when it was 903 to the dollar. That would have given me an extra $235 dollars.

I’m bringing nearly the whole deal to America this week. Before anyone gets any ideas, most of it is earmarked already for taxes, TWU, etc.

It’s over. She got her money. Not all of it, but more than she honestly thought she would. More than most, actually. My school directors thought she’d get far less. In the end, she lost around $16K, but having mentally prepared herself for losing $20k, she’s ok with things. Not happy, mind you, but ok with it.

She’s a fairly serial minded girl. Now that that’s over, she can concentrate on the next step. Moving in here with me. After that, she’ll think about actually getting married.

One step at a time.

To is D-Day. The day MyeongHee finds out exactly how much money she’ll lose from the auction of her house. I wrote way back in March of 07 about MyeongHee’s house woes. But to summarize, she put down around $40K in deposit to rent it. Put enough down and monthly rent is free – the owner is supposed to make his money from investing the funds. Well, this guy not only didn’t invest it, he lost it and evidently other assets as well. The bank decided to auction his assets (the place she’s living) to pay the debts.

After a lot of dilly-dallying and whatnot for almost a year, they appear to  have things settled. The auction happened in November and now, the 30th of January, she goes to the government office to find out how much the damage is. The house was auctioned off for a little over $50k, more than enough for her $40k, but there were seven people in line for this guy’s money. No telling what order those people came in or how much they got, but she finds out today at 2pm.  No one believes she’ll get close to her original sum. Most say around half. She’s mentally prepared for half. So, tonight is either going to be a sigh of relief if her expectations are met, or a great wailing and gnashing of teeth if they aren’t.

Stay tuned.

I woke this morning hoping to find a winter wonderland here. It had begun snowing early yesterday evening and it snowed well until bedtime at 1am. Instead, I woke up to find just a thin layer on the cars and playground equipment.

I was really hoping for a snow day, not that any amount of snow would prevent me from walking down the two flights of stairs to work. Nor would it have prevented the majority of kids from coming, as most of them walk. But, it would have been fun to play in it.  SaTang probably would like it.

Today could have been a bad day. Considering I’m leaving in a few days to hit the airport, it could have been a bad week.

This afternoon, some guy with a wireless gadget came around and plugged in the license plate numbers on my car. He quickly found out I hadn’t paid my taxes on the car for 2007. Why not? I don’t actually own it. I do, but the girl I bought it from got it from her former boyfriend before he left the country and I bought it from her before she left the country. There is an owner, but he’s not coming back to Korea. Ever. That’s why it was so cheap.

That’s also why I didn’t get any indication I owed any taxes. They kept sending the bill to some New Zealanders former address. So, when the tax man plugged in my license and found unpaid taxes, he just took the plates.

Young Sook, the school owner’s sister and headmaster took charge and took care of everything. He she not done so, I most likely would have just driven off not even realizing I had no plates. I might have found the pink slip they left on the windshield, but by the time I left work it would have been covered in what now is the first snow of the year. A nice wet, slushy one, too. It would have been illegible, for sure.  Instead Shelley (Young Sook’s English name) went out and grabbed the pink slip, starting making phone calls found out what the deal was and began working deals. Within an hour she had already transferred funds from her account to pay the taxes and had the mobile tax agent bring back and reinstall the plates. I’ll pay her back, of course, but the pain-in-the-ass she saved me was worth multiple times that amount.

This family has always gone the extra mile for me. From finding extra work in the form of private lessons I can bill to building an extra room for MyeongHee’s son to warding off evil tax men, they take great care of me.  I can’t imagine a better set of people to work for.

After only three weeks of enabling Google to place ads on my various pages, I’ve hit the jackpot! Yes, friends, it won’t be long before I’m safely ensconced in a bungalow on a remote beach somewhere, sipping mai tais and wiggling my toes in the sugary sand. Just keep clicking on those ads you see on this page and I’ll soon be on my way. Click enough and I’ll pay your way to come visit me, too.

The gargantuan tally after a three weeks in of peddling bits and bytes in cyberspace?  A wallet-bursting $7.40.    Yup, at this rate my income will be more than enough to pay off those nagging back taxes I owe and send me to the tropics in….about 50 years.

Keep clicking.

Twice now, MyeongHee has tried to give me a perm. Not a huge curly-ass thing, just some waves. Whatever perm goo she uses on the azummas here to give them the low-maintenance, piled high on top look just doesn’t work on my Caucasian hair.  The best I’ve gotten is a couple of wings around my ears.

The first time she tried it, she left the goo in for about 30 minutes. Almost nothing happened. Just a small lift over the left ear. The second time, she left it in for over an hour – almost twice as long as the normal Korean head. Now I have two wings. Big deal.

Either Asian hair is much different and responds to their goo better than my fine hair, or my hair just doesn’t go perms well. When I got one in Texas, the goo didn’t stay in long, but I got some short-lived waves a la Patrick Swayze in Point Break.

Good thing my girlfriend owns the hair shop and her work doesn’t cost me anything.

Over at MyeongHee’s house, we were playing with the dog and one of her balls. That’s her favorite toy (except for this week, when she’s humping the pillow.) She loves to play fetch, but she’s pretty good at playing catch, too. She’s able to toss it back and forth, sometimes with a nudge of her nose, sometimes her paw or even sometimes she’ll chuck it out of her mouth at you. And sometimes, she’d just rather chew on the ball and not give it to you at all.

I filmed this a few days back and thought I’d share. In you’re wondering, “Chuseyo” is Korean for “please give me” and usually follows the noun of what you want. You might hear either MyeongHee or myself say “ball chuseyo” or “gong chuseyo.” She knows both words for ball as well as just plain old “give me the ball.” She’s a hoot. She’s got quite the little personality.

I thought it was over. It’s not. Apparently, SaTang is going to continue bleeding
profusely. All I got was a two or three day respite from the gore that is my life.

What’s more, she’s begun humping a large pillow when she’s out on the veranda. She needs to get laid, I think. After spending the evening at MyeongHee’s apartment,  we came home and the first thing she wanted to do was go back out to the veranda and hump the pillow again. She’d already humped most of the morning, and probably most of the afternoon while I was at work.

MyeongHee is almost 42 and yet she’s never driven a car. Never really needed to. Taxis are only a few bucks to cross town and buses to other cities are plentiful and cheap. She decided she wanted to learn how to drive, so yesterday we spent a few hours out in the stadium parking lot doing driving lessons. She learned pretty quickly, especially considering my car is a stick-shift. She got the clutch/brake/gas thing figured out quickly enough and was able to change gears up to 3rd. Luckily, there were no other cars around, for staying in her “lane” was a challenge. She tried parking and if there really were other cars in those spots we’d be in for some serious damage payments. Luckily, there’s no hurry, so we’ll continue teaching as long as we need to.

Next will be bicycle lessons. She’s never learned how to do that, either. Neither has her 16  year old son. That blows me away.

For the past two weeks my dog, SaTang, has been going through her first estrus. I’ve had several female dogs in the past and, for them, it was only a small matter. Just a few small spots of blood here and there. It never seemed to be a big deal. Not with this pup. Enormous flows of blood threatened to stain all the furniture. A few days into the mess I went to the local pet store and bought her a set of doggie pads. She hated them. She got to where she’d roll over for me like a baby so I could put them on, but she hated them. Once on, she acted as if she was crippled and would stay in the same spot for hours. She would want to play with her ball, but she’d just watch it go by, pretending she was unable to move. When MyeongHee would come home, however, her emotions betrayed her game and she would run to the door to greet her.

They did a good job of keeping the blood from staining things while she had them on. But every night while I was sleeping she would either have slipped out of them or undone the velcro and pulled them off. I’d awaken to what looked like a Quentin Tarantino movie scene; blood everywhere. I covered the sofa in old blankets and have washed them a dozen times. The blankets on my bed didn’t escape the carnage, either. I washed the outside cover of the comforter almost as often.  For a while, it was so bad I thought I was going to have to take her to the vet to have him stitch up that horrid gash she had between her legs.

This weekend, it seems as if the nightmare is over. She’s stopped bleeding.  I can go back to sleeping without worrying about the movie crew coming in the night and remaking my apartment. She’s happy because she can play ball inside again. The neighborhood dogs aren’t so happy, because they’ve stopped howling every time we go outside for a walk. The people of Isla Nublar are safe once again.

And homey wants a cheeseburger.

Of course, I’m very much looking forward to seeing my family and friends and spending quality time with them. I envision the smiling faces and warm hugs that await me. I look forward to talking with everyone about what’s been happening since I left, and seeing how everyone has  grown and changed. But am I dreaming about it? I mean really dreaming? Night-time dreaming? Of course not. I’m dreaming about big-ass bacon-cheeseburgers,  dripping with grease and melted cheese. I’m talking about waking up in the middle of the night still smacking my lips.

Sure, there’s hamburgers here in Korea, but only in the strictest sense of the word. There’s a bun with some type of meat, perhaps even a little beef, inside it. But there the comparison ends. They just ain’t nuttin’ like what we got back home.

I find myself thinking about other foods I’ve missed, too. Mexican, Italian, Chinese (yes, I know back-home Chinese food isn’t anything like what real Chinese people eat in China, but neither is it here in Korea. In China, they’ll eat anything with four legs except the table.) I miss sushi and steak, of course, Texas barbecue, too. Oh, and salad with real ranch dressing! Damn, I’m getting hungry all over again just thinking about it.

I’ve gotten accustomed to the wealth of fresh fish, fruits and vegetables here, but for two weeks I’ll survive just fine without them. The real problem will be after slogging down so much of the good greasiness I crave I’ll still fit in my pants before I come back here.

I took my dog out for a walk today and came across a nice hurl-pile in the park. It never fails: once every week or so, someone gets hammered in one of the many pubs here in the neighborhood and ends up having a nice technicolor yawn, spewing out his dinner. Last night was the night, because this morning, there was a huge pile. Sometimes, if you’re vigilant, you can catch the poor sod who drank too much. I’ve seen them a couple of times. Once, a guy was face down on the curb just in front of my apartment. He laid there for what seemed like hours, groaning and spitting before he finally moved on and made it the rest of the way home.

I ordinarily wouldn’t take a picture of stuff like this, but its a nice little way to encapsulate something that came up (pun intended) in class. We talked about zoning laws with the middle school kids. They don’t have many laws about zoning, but there’s a few. You can’t, for example, have a “love motel” (a hotel for illicit trysts) near a school area. But little else is disallowed.

In my little corner of America, zoning laws are everywhere. You can’t have a business in a residential area. Makes for nice, quiet little neighborhoods with row upon row of houses. Somehow, that made sense to folks at some point, but the end result is you have to drive nearly everywhere – stores, restaurants, gym – resulting in the car culture. Here in Korea, since businesses and residences intermingle, you can walk to the grocery store, banks, gym, restaurant, pubs, etc.  Its very convenient to walk to everything you need. And since a pub may be just around the corner, you needn’t worry about drinking and driving.   Walk, and if you need to puke on the way home, there’s no need to stop the car, roll down the window or even ask your taxi driver to slow down. Just bend over and  laugh at the ground. The end result is hurl. And people seem to be ok with it. I’ve seen kids simply walk past it in the park without muttering a word.

I snapped this picture later this morning of a young couple in love on one of the park benches . Its not like they could be oblivious to the hurl. It’s too damn big to say you just didn’t see, not to mention smell the horrid pile. They just carried on, hugging and cooing with each other as if this enormous pile of Korean rice wine and undigested noodles didn’t exist mere feet from them.

So, the conclusion I’ve drawn from zoning laws is that they contribute to the car culture: traffic jams, green house gases, global warming and urban highway blight. A lack of zoning laws creates hurl.

Let’s see…hurl? Or traffic,  global warming and endless highways?   Hmmm…..you decide.

The good news is that I get to upgrade my cable TV.  When we got the new TV, it left me wanting for more. I was getting a few digital hi-def channels, but I like that stuff. Once you get used to watching things in HD, going back just looks grainy and small. So color me spoiled. The premium channels are cheap here, too. For basic, I was paying the equivalent of US$6 a month for about 45 channels. I only watched a half dozen or so since most of them are all Korean. The  others,  CNN, Discovery Channel and a few channels that play movies (Korean and English-language) were just too limited. Now I’ll get a boat-load. For a mere $US30 a month. I even get four months free for signing up. I was paying close to $90 a month back in the states. While I type this, the guy is here installing the works. Maybe I won’t have to be such a pirate anymore and download so many movies and shows.

Now, the bad news. My Fedora-Linux hard drive finally went feet up. That wasn’t entirely unexpected as the drive was close to 5 years old. Fortunately, I didn’t lose any of my files. Those are safely on another drive and backed up regularly. I might have lost a few emails – if anyone sent me any email on 1/4/08 between 9am CST and 5m CST, its gone.  Send it again.

For now, I’m using my Windows-XP (yuck! Or, as they say here in Korea – weck!) until I can download another load of Fedora and reinstall. Being a geek has its benefits – a catastrophic disk failure with minimal, if any, data loss and still able to operate. Others, I’m sure, would likely be buying a whole new system by now.

In case any of you readers had noticed, I recently started allowing Google to place ads relevant to the content on this website. There’s no reason to hide the fact that I get paid for clicks on those ads. So, help a brother out. Click on an ad or two. There’s no Caribbean vacation in store for me if you do, but it might help defray the costs of maintaining this server.

Shit, it’s cold. And the wind is fierce. It’s been this way for a couple of days. Happy New Year