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Thursday, September 6th, 2007
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Okay, so whatever the issue was seems to have resolved itself for now. *fingers crossed* Other Livejournal sites are still slowing my computer down like crazy, but the actual interface for posting blog entries is not. Upgrade!
So, it's raining outside right now. In fact, it's been raining outside right now for about the last two weeks. This is most irregular.
One of the things Korean people are most proud of is the fact that their country has Four Distinct Seasons. Every guidebook, every pamphlet; there's something in the first paragraph about Korea's wonderful Four Distinct Seasons (I've had people react in amazement when I tell them that lots of other countries also have four seasons, and that they are often pretty distinct). All this rain we're having so late is screwing up this year's FDS in a big way...it's only supposed to really really rain in July, basically. That's "The Rainy Season", which is of course NOT one of the FDS, but a specific and reliable part of summer. But now we're almost a week into September and it's still raining all day every day. WHAT'S GOING ON, PEOPLE? Autumn is supposed to = NO rain, at all.
Of course, I shouldn't be complaining too much. Even if the rain is still distinctly summery, the heat is entirely gone...it's a mere 17 degrees Celcius right now according to Yahoo.
Still. Global warming, I tell you.
[I'll post some pictures and stuff from our recent trip to Japan soon. Yay, Japan!]
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Saturday, August 11th, 2007
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Argh! For some reason my home computer has decided that it HATES Livejournal. There's only so many times you can write out a blog, hit "post to journal", and have your entire FREEZE and CRASH before you just give up entirely. So this thing is going on hiatus for a while until I can figure out what the hell is wrong. In the meantime, I've set up a flickr.com account for photos: click here to check it out. There aren't all that many photos there yet, but I'm working on uploading more, and obviously as I take new ones I'll be putting them on there too.
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For the last few weeks, we've been repeatedly saying to each other, "Well, at least the exchange rate's not as high as it was when we first got here". Well, no more:
It's broken the mythical 720 won/dollar mark. I distinctly remember it being 580...not that long ago. God.
I guess we're not sending any money home for a while, then. To employ one of my very favorite Koreanisms...OTL.
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So a little while ago we were at a baseball game, watching the local Hanwha Eagles get thrashed by the Samsung Lions (baseball teams in Korea are all corporate-owned; Hanwha was orginally founded under the name "Korea Explosives Corporation" but now deals in chemicals of all kinds, plus about a thousand other little sidelines). We were sitting down the front in the outfield, right by the little walkway that goes along the front of all the seats. In a situation like that, it's pretty common to get a constant stream of "Hello!" "Hello!" "How are you?" "Where are you from?"-type comments from the little kids wandering past--they like to "practice" their "English" by having "conversations" with foreigners.
And then these little girls came by and stared at us for a while, and then went away. A few minutes later, they returned with a paper napkin along the top of which had been written What Are Your Name? and Where Are You From? So we passed the little napkin around and wrote Greer, New Zealand; Dan, New Zealand; Trey, USA; Mark, Canada and so forth, and gave it back to them and they went away.
A few minutes later, they came back along again, this time with a camera, and started taking pictures of us sitting there watching the baseball. They went around and took individual pictures of each of us with them (which we will never see! I'm so curious about this mystery photo of me that's out there floating around now), and a few group shots...it was a regular paparazzifest! So Becca got out her camera and started taking pictures of them, which they seemed very amused by. Crazy foreigners!
Eventually they had had enough photos, so they went away again, only to come back a couple of minutes later with a gift for us: a yellow balloon on which they had written Have A Good Day, and which had inside it some pieces of candy and a few shreds of dried squid. So sweet.
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Thursday, June 21st, 2007
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Sigh. I'm just kind of...over it all at the moment. Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's the "middle-of-the-contract doldrums", maybe it's that some of my kids keep churning out English writing like this:
I now a many many woould then i leave a korea but my hunben leave a new york then i like a new york. but in the new york a many thing then i watch the statue Liblitey then i watch the new york city i want ot saw the new york city and i leave a bilding. i want ot the new york city i by to the picture. and i now the england a bacom the bacon com to the korea team i now the many would.
no matter how often I go off-curriculum to give an impromptu writing workshop. Maybe it's a combination of all three, plus poor nutrition and not enough sleep. But whatever the reason, I'm not in a very great frame of mind regarding work at the moment. Add to all that the fact that our summer vacation isn't for another 6 weeks, and...yeah. Hence the lack of communication in any form lately.
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Today is a teachres day. Teachers day means the teachers is rest.
I am so happy. because the school is resting time. I like to rest the school.
I like to play. [Greer's hagwon] is didn't rest at teachers day. I am so sad.
But The school is resting time. I am so happy to rest my school.
I like May, because the rest time is very many.
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Thursday, April 26th, 2007
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...well, not ALL of it. This is what last Sunday looked like around here. This is what happens in Northern Asia in spring, when sandstorms in the Gobi desert spread the much-feared Yellow Dust over everything. Mmmm, hazy. All the Koreans broke out their little white SARS-guard facemasks, but we toughed it out, mask-free, at a soccer game at the World Cup Stadium around the corner from our apartment. That was probably, in retrospect, a mistake--everything tasted distinctly dusty for the rest of the day.
It's gone away now, and this week has been full of blue sky and fresh breezes, but Sunday was probably in the top 3 worst Yellow Dust days I've seen since we've lived in Korea. Hopefully that's it for the rest of spring.
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Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
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Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
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Cameron Diaz once famously lamented in a movie the lack of variety in the "Meat on a Stick" genre of food. Well, next time she has a break from her busy Shrek-related schedule, maybe she should come out to Korea, because Meat on a Stick is something of an art form here. We have thousands and thousands of street vendors, and while many of them sell hair ties, earrings, puffed rice snacks and chestnuts, the vast majority seem to specialise in the Meat on a Stick area. You can get chicken on a stick, hot dog on a stick (well, what we call a hot dog, fish-and-chip-shop style, back home; I believe Americans know them as corn dogs), dumpling on a stick, fish on a stick, and now, as we recently discovered, Pikachu on a stick.
For the low, low price of 400 won (that's 60 NZ cents), you too can partake of something that appears to be this:
run over with a steamroller, crumbed, and coated in delicious red sauce.
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We finally have internet back at the apartment. I'm still not entirely sure what the problem is, but it's something router-related...it seems to be manageable as long as we turn everything off at the wall overnight, though.
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Thursday, March 15th, 2007
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As soon as I got all gung-ho about actually updating the blog occasionally again, the internet decided that it HATES me. Livejournal, Tinypic, Myspace, Gmail to an extent...all are refusing to comply except very, very sporadically. I guess it must be a problem on my end, although my internet isn't out entirely and lots of other websites are working fine. Weird.
Anyway, don't think that I'm just being lazy or anything (I know you were thinking it!). I have a bunch of entries I want to post...I just need pictures to go with them, and my picture-providing-system is being uncooperative. But soon!
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Thursday, March 8th, 2007
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So, okay, the first in my proposed series of posts about the little things about Korea that initially made me go "Hmmmm" (or "That's awesome, we should have this at home", or "What the HELL? Why would you even do that?"). These will be all the things that I probably ever forgot to tell anyone about back home, because when asked, "So, how was Korea?" the first thing I thought to mention was probably not toilet-paper disposal habits or whatever.
First up, a question:
Based soley on this label, which fruit would you say this tasty beverage was based on?
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That's all...just incorrigibly lazy. That's my whole excuse for completely ignoring that this blog even exists for weeks and weeks at a time. Sorry.
Okay, that's not my WHOLE excuse...part of it is also that it's been winter the whole time up until now, and we haven't really been doing much of anything wildly interesting that's inspired me to think "Blogworthy!". And also, I guess, because this is our second time here a lot of stuff that I am sure would actually be very interesting to you is just so normal and day-to-day to me now that I don't even think of blogging about it. And that sucks, because it's the minutiae of life anywhere that's actually interesting, not the big stuff.
So, I have a plan for spring: I'm going to start rolling out a...hmmmm, let's say...ten-part series of blog entries on (Hopefully) Interesting Koreana. Just random little details of Korean life that I don't even think about most of the time any more, but you might find interesting/amusing/horrifying (maybe, if you're an ex-waeguk sonsaengnim, they might even provoke a pang of nostalgia...perhaps. Haha.). And this ten-part series is going to be done in...hmmm, how about six weeks? That's not even two H.I.K. entries per week, which shouldn't be too taxing.
Expect the first one on Thursday. Email me to complain if it's not done by then. I need inspiration (read: a poke with a sharp stick) to get on with this thing. It's never really gotten off the ground this time around, and we're already three months through our year. I promised a bunch of people that I'd keep blogging, so I have to do it.
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Thursday, February 1st, 2007
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The "fighting" thing is not as random as it may seem, actually. "Korea Fighting!" was the catchcry of the Korean soccer team's fans (which is to say, every single person in Korea) during the World Cup, and "Fighting" seems to have now become a general term of encouragement to go out there and kick the ass of the competition. So this cookie is basically saying "Give it your best shot in the new year", I think.
(PS: Postal worker admits defacing exams).
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mmm_kimchi's journal
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