Last week I went on a day trip to Muju to go skiing.  No great pictures of that event – you’ve all seen snow and people so bundled up you can’t tell who is who.

One souvenir I brought home, though, was a sprained ankle.   I had fallen a couple of times during the day, most of them no big deal. Once, though, I was coming down pretty quickly and took a hard fall. It hurt just a tad, but I got up and kept on skiing. When I got home that night and had a chance to relax, my ankle swelled up like a dead dog in the summer sun.

I limped around on it on Sunday and Monday and then on Tuesday decided I’d better get it looked at.  Since I knew nothing was broken, I went to the acupuncturist. They are plentiful and cheap here in Korea. I walked right in – no appointment needed and was immediately dealt with by nurses and the Dr.  I’ve been going to see this guy for a few years and his English has gotten quite good. He explained exactly what I’d done and how he would treat it.

First, he stabbed me with a half-dozen needles. Most were in the ankle, but some were even up around my knee. The idea behind accupuncture is that the body channels energy along pathways and the needles help focus the flow and the body’s healing power to a specific area. The red tint to the picture above is the heat lamp he placed to warm the leg. The needles stayed in for about 15-20 minutes.

Then he put on a couple of spongy suction cups that sucked, writhed and pushed my ankle. These too, help focus the body’s energy, but also massage the muscles and tendons. This was actually damn relaxing. They felt like little hands kneading and massaging. That lasted another 15-20 minutes.

When that was finished, I got the Bu-Hong treatment. That’s actually the most medieval part of the ordeal. The nurse attached a suction cup to my ankle and pulled on it a couple of times, giving me a small hickey. Then she pricked the skin with a mini knife and applied the suction cup again. The idea here is draw out the bad blood around the injury. I suppose this was the same idea of the European surgeons using leaches back in the olde days. I tried to take a picture of this, but my squirming knocked off the suction cup and spilled the few tablespoons of blood in it out on the table and floor. They weren’t real happy with me.

Then they put a hot pad on me for 10 minutes and then put me on a hot-water jet massage bed for another 10 minutes.  I could live on that thing. It felt wonderful to have two hard jets of warm water massage my back, neck, butt  and thighs. Because it’s all inside the rubber mattress, no mess, no fuss.

Then they sent me home. I went back the next day, too. My ankle feels not perfect, but damn good. A lot better than if I’d done nothing.

My wallet feels a lot better than if I’d have injured it back in the good ol’ US of A, too.

Total cost for this fine-ass treatment? US$5 each day. No insurance needed.

The US Congress could benefit from a look at how Korea does their health care.

I simply couldn’t help myself.  It was just too easy of a target. The Republicans have done a great job the past several years of simply jacking things  up. Of course, becoming more and more conservative, morally and fiscally, even claiming to be the moral compass of America.  As one famous saying goes, let he who is without a glass house cast the first stone.

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The music to this video, by the way,  is by the Austin Lounge Lizards and if reading the subtitles I placed on the video is a little too boring, the lyrics to this song are precious. They’re a funny group and if you’re planning a trip to central Texas anytime soon they’d been worth making arrangements to see. I hope they don’t mind me commandeering their song, “Jesus Loves Me (but he can’t stand you)”

Oddly enough, I used to consider myself a Republican. But that was back in the days of Reagan and I believed all that rattletrap about trickle down economics. I’m no Democratic, either. I suppose I’m more of a Collapsitarian. Google it.

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Last week my brother-in-law and his wife came over. While they went out to dinner with some friends, we got to babysit their daughter, GaEun.  She’s now 6 months old.  She liked SaTang, who didn’t really return the like, but tolerated it mostly. She tried once or twice to use her teeth to brush off the kid’s grabbing fingers, but didn’t really bite. While MyeongHee, her mother, myself and GaEun played on the floor, DongHyun was content to hid his face behind a pillow on the sofa and watch TV.  It didn’t seem to matter what the dog did, GaEun would squeal with laughter.  Now that SaTang is (we think) pregant, my brother-in-law wants a puppy.  That was a big surprise to his wife. This should turn out well.

Not sure what ?? (pronounced babo) is? If you’ve never been to Korea, you may not know.?? is silly, crazy, stupid, dumbass, or any of several other similar epithets one might throw around.

I wrote an article a few months back about the ??English I was seeing in the classroom. It seemed like every pencil-case a student had was chock full of poorly spelled, ill-formed sentences in English. For whatever reason, English on a pencil-case, book, bag is a selling point, whether it’s crap English or perfectly formed. It’s a little telling as to how effective teaching English is here when the parents who buy it and the students who use it typically have no idea the English is so horrible.

I’ve made it a point in my classrooms since to broadcast poorly selected classroom accoutrements to all the students. I read the sentence and explain the errors to the class, but I don’t forbid them from bringing them. These days, the number of ??English articles has dropped dramatically. Not because of my feeble efforts, but because of the marketing machines out there. I see a lot of the Simpsons, SpongeBob Squarepants, and classic Disney, and usually, the English is minimal, consisting only of the character’s name and perhaps a short phrase. Tie in an article with a popular animation and you’re guaranteed a sale.

Still. there are those companies that continue to pump out gear with ?? English thinking they have the marketing genius to sell. Here’s is the latest installment of my classroom’s??English gear.

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This one, from Fancylobby.co.kr, is typical. They can’t even be bothered to put the .kr on their web address (clipped from the far left in this image.) Maybe they are ashamed of their products and don’t want the kids trolling there. They should be ashamed. Because English so good.

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While the majority of this pencil case’s text of actually quite good, I really whish they had used a spell checker on the enormous title. They’d have learned that while whish is indeed a word, it is an onomatopoeia, a word created to suggest the sound it describes. But that was probably too big of a word for them to understand. But hey, it’s in the dictionary, and bigger is better, so they kept it.

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When I read this I hear Smeagal muttering about his precious ring. “My precious! We knows! We knows! We knows we can use better grammar.”

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I did a poor job of focusing my camera on this picture. But I think it makes a nice point about how poorly they focused their words towards a single theme. Nothing spelled incorrectly or grammatically in error, but I get the impression they simply scratched around for English phrases in some book, much like a chicken would scratch around for specks of grain or bugs in a barnyard. Just what a transparent man is in soccer I fail to grasp.

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This gem was on a notebook. If the English doesn’t kill you, the butter milk and sugar recipe will. But how one shakes with shake escapes me. Ice tubes are an invention I have yet to come across. But what the tubes possess, as evidenced by the apostrophe, I haven’t a clue. I suppose that’s left for the reader’s imagination. And then one must enjoy too drink. This one seems a perfect example of the designer having used a spell checker, but has little English comprehension beyond that. I hope he choked on his recipe.

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Now, who can resist a cute panda? Perhaps they thought the cuteness would overshadow the fact that neither sentence is correct or completes a theme. This designer is a idiot and has about as much English sense as a apple. I wold fire him if he didn’t unchanges his mistakes.

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I saved the best for last. You knew I would because it hopes that wait. Wait…what? This pencil case, made is China, is the absolute worst I have ever seen of any of the classroom ?? English. I don’t have the faintest idea of what it means to say, if anything. I think the Chinese designer, having been told that English sells, took his English/Chinese dictionary outside. He let the pages flutter in the breeze while he snatched random words from the pages. Those words when phonetically spoken in Mandarin made a lovely poem that earned him both high praise from his overseers and an extra bowl of rice.

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When one goes skiing, one must have proper attire. I needed a new hat, and this one caught my eye.

I’m planning a short ski trip on Saturday this week. Just a day trip: I’ll leave with about 10 other friends at 5:30am on a large bus and return around 7:30pm. It’s been raining the past few days, but on the mountain it should have dropped a bit of fresh snow.

I haven’t been able to ski since early 2007 when I first arrived. Back then, MyeongHee was still going to her family gatherings alone and we weren’t engaged yet. All my big holidays since then I have been with her family. I’m really looking forward to cutting some trails on the slopes.

Among this sea of apartment windows and lights stands a single symbol of western Christmas. Sure, its early, even by American standards to have it up so soon. But the lack of others is not because it’s early but because its not a common practice. Despite the fact that somewhere around 50% of Korea is Christian, the whole tree and other decorations is a little on the rare side.

I haven’t put up a Christmas in my home in the nearly 3 years I’ve been here. I can’t even remember if we had a tree when I shared a house with Circe. It felt nice to put it up, even if I won’t actually be here on the holiday itself. But maybe that’s why I put it up; since I’ll be home for Christmas – first one since 2006 – having one here put me more in the mood.

Koreans aren’t totally consumed by the Christmas bug that America is. It’s a national holiday but nearly all the stores, restaurants, bars and nightclubs are open. It doesn’t feel much like a holiday here.

So now, my little tree, less than $20 for the tree and the lights, will stand as a single reminder of the holiday I’ll be sharing with family back home. I like it. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!