Mind Garten

Korea, Day 45 Being an engineer by trade, I can't help but notice all the various engineering feats in this city. I've noticed a few things that I don't see in Oregon, where I'm originally from. Let me list a few of these. The cell phone infrastructure is quite startling. Nearly everybody in their dog owns and carries a cell phone. Couple this with the amazing density of people, the amount of people talking, text messaging, and moving around at high speeds at any given time, and it becomes quite amazing. You don't see cell phone towers standing in conspicuous locations in the city. People use their phones at the 30th floor of a skyscraper and riding underground in the subway. The coverage and capacity is truly staggering. Being from an average size city of Portland, I've never seen a subway before. Although I've been to the San Francisco BART, I don't remember the impressive scale of the underground world in Pusan. Trains usually come ...

Korea, Day 44 The other night, I watched a Chinese comedy film on television. It was all in Chinese but with Korean subtitles. As you can imagine, it didn't help very much. I'm also certain that it was in Cantonese since mainland China is not known for its movie-making feats. So the story goes that there's this hot shot master chef who suddenly falls from grace. An evil chef takes all his credit and takes over the business. So the ex-master chef is in the streets where he gets thrust into the middle of a cooking turf war between 2 cooking gangs. There is much knife fighting and vendettas in the midst, but in the end, the good chef invents a knew bouncy and juicy meatball. They market it and becomes a huge success. Meanwhile, the evil chef and his croneys get wind of this, and they try to buy him out. Again there is a battle scene and the good chef refuses to sell to the evil chef. On a business trip on the mainland, someone attempts to murder the good c...

Korea, Day 43 On Sunday I finally bought myself a fan. Not an electric fan, but one of those handheld fans that are common in Asian cultures. It cost me 2000 won at the subway station. The temperature here is not unusually hot, but it is unusually humid. Not terribly humid like South Carolina or Florida, but somewhere in between the deep South and the Mojave Desert. Koreans seem to have a higher tolerance for the heat, but I often find myself sweating in the oddest circumstances. Unfortunately my Pacific Northwest clothing of dark colors and long pants does not go too well in the Korean climate. My back seems to be the part of my body that sweats the most. At the end of each day spent with at least an hour outside, the back of my shirt will be completely saturated. The subways are usually very muggy because there is far too much space to air condition. When it rains, it is usually very warm too. Most of the weather gets blown up from the tropics and hits Japan, Kor...

Korea, Day 42 I want to talk a little bit about Korean pop culture. I've been watching television off and on, and with the help of a translating Korean friend, I've come to understand a little bit about the entertainment industry in this country. You basically have movies, music, television, and radio. These are the standard entertainment forums. However, in Korea there is also the karaoke rooms, video arcades, and PC bangs. I'll neglect these latter three for the sake of simplicity. Movies are partially protected by the government from the overpowering market strength of American movies. I believe, although I have not confirmed it, that all movie theaters must carry a certain minimum percentage of Korean-made movies. This gives local film industry the incentive and the payback to develop an industry of its own. I've actually watched a couple of these movies, one with subtitles and one without. The first was a teen-slasher film that was entirely pred...

Korea, Day 41 I mentioned the sausage situation in this country on Friday. However, I merely described the cheese-sausage hybrid that they try to pass off as a snack food in this country. Little did I know where sausage actually came from. During the Korea War, the American soldiers brought with them foods that the Koreans had never seen before. Slowly, a demand for these foods emerged. Since the only place to get these foods was on the US bases, entrepreneurs began to pop up who specialized in cooking foods directly from the army bases. These restaurants were usually directly in front of the base and they cooked the food in a Korean style. The main food of desire was sausage, or what we know in the West as hot dogs. So this is how the standard for sausage was set in this country in the 50's. Likely this is how the standard of cheese and coffee was set too. Anyway, an entire franchise restaurant grew out of these humble beginnings, and they now exclusively sel...

Korea, Day 39 Koreans can have some really bizarre foods. Some are pathetic imitations of Western food that somehow became extremely popular. One such imitation is cheese. Koreans believe that cheese is only the processed American cheese that they put on hamburgers and sandwiches in the United States. They have no concept of cheddar, mozarella, monterey jack, gouda, provolone, etc. In fact, the only other cheese you can get besides processed is an Australian cheddar in the supermarkets. It's okay, but it's very difficult to find. Koreans have taken the meat and cheese combination and brought them together like that company who put jelly and peanut butter in the same jar (which also exists here by the way). They sell these so-called sausage sticks which is meat and cheese mixed together. The stick itself only looks like cheese but it certainly does not taste like cheese. This might have been a good combination if they had used good cheese and good sausage. Sausa...

Korea, Day 38 Yesterday I kicked out a total of 2 students from my 5 classes. The first student's transgression was that he was hiding behind a desk for a half hour during class and finally poked his head up. I kicked him out of class on the spot because I'm sick and tired of having to search for students. Additionally, I figured if a child does not have the will to participate in class, there's no reason why I should have to deal with it. Besides, I don't get paid enough to be a baby-sitter, and the education of the other students suffers when I have to spend time disciplining someone. He spent the remainder of the class standing outside the door. The second student I kicked was for being generally disrespectful. He did nothing really big like being loud or fighting. Instead, I kept asking him to pronounce a word, but he continually refused to do so. I asked him about 20 times, and every time he said a different word than the one I was asking him to repe...

Korea, Day 37 This is the first 5-day week I've worked since I got here. I'm wondering where the holiday is already. It's Wednesday and I still have 2 days to go before the weekend. I'm wondering if I can make it for a full five days. I have a bit of an advantage since I only have 5 classes now because it's summer session, but I'll be getting a 6th class eventually. Last night I watched some obscure action movie starring William Baldwin and Cindy Crawford. Some terrorist gang gets really pissed off at Ms. Crawford and decides they want to kill her. The trouble is, the bad guys don't know when to cut their losses. Mr. Baldwin keeps killing them all. So the movie continues this way with Baldwin dragging Cindy around for the whole movie with the bad guys trying to kill her over something really stupid. In the end, they go to the bad guys' base which is a boat out at sea parked over a trunkline. You see, the bad guys wanted to tap the tru...

Korea, Day 36 I should have never started playing Warcraft. I've since played 2 days in a row, and I fully expect on making a trip to the PC bang today and getting my ass kicked again. I have not yet won a game, but the last 2 games I played were team-oriented, and we lost because we didn't work as teams. Silly us. Speaking of PC bangs, while I was there some Korean guy came up to me and talked to me in English. He invited me to have a beer with him, and I thought that wasn't such a bad idea. Of course I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time. We went to the bar, had some beer and squid and talked about things. He is actually a professional slacker. He is a younger son of 6 sons to a rich father. He's probably in his 40's, and he's spent all his time traveling to different countries and studying. I could tell he was of the privileged class because he said he really liked Japanese culture. Most Koreans wouldn't say such thi...

Website Fix My website wasn't properly showing the archives to the left, but now they've been fixed. Enjoy.

Korea, Day 34 I'm getting absolutely sick with all the happy noises in this country. I'm sick of the elevators that thank you for using them. I'm tired of the beeps and boops, the boings and bangs, the screeches and scratches in everything from consumer electronics to television programming. I despise the laughing and ahh-ing soundbytes and the pop-up bubbles and superimposed text commentary that accompanies nearly every popular TV program. I brood over the cell phones that play a Mozart trio concerto or the Star Wars theme song whenever someone calls. Why don't I ever hear the sweet simplicity of a normal ringing noise? Of course, I could just be exaggerating my annoyance with something so trivial because I've been sick lately. This is also why I haven't made a journal entry for 3 days. It's not all bad. Though I was in an atrocious and horrible state, I quite enjoyed the experience of being a patient in Korea. Here's how it happened. ...

Korea, Day 31 Yesterday was Constitution Day, and we had the day off. I took the opportunity to go on a road-trip for the day. This is the first time that I've been in a car for any extended period of time in Korea. This was actually the first time that I've been on the highways too. This is the way it basically works. Highways are operated by a private corporation and as a result, are actually well managed and designed. But the catch is you have to pay for your drive on the highway. When you get on to the highway, you take a ticket and drive for miles without any exits or merging lanes. There are rest stops along the way that operate a lot like malls. We stopped at one of the rest stops and went to a cafeteria style restaurant to eat. Very noisy and busy, but it could have been magnitudes worse if things weren't so streamlined and well organized. After lunch, we had a bathroom break and got some beverages from the vending machine. Then it was back o...

Korea, Day 30 You may remember from yesterday that I was waiting in my work office waiting to be taken to the immigration office. Due to their complete incompetence, I sat there until 1pm and my first class was at 1:45. I still had to go to the immigration office. I then made a decision that I had to go by myself regardless of the consequences. Likely, I would miss my first class and maybe the next. I told my manager what I wanted to do and it was amazing how many things he said to dissuade me from leaving. The reason I had to go to the immigration office was to renew my visa. It expires on the 18th and yesterday was the 16th. The 17th was a national holiday so offices are closed. I was not going to the immigration office like a chump trying to renew my visa the day it expires. What happens if something goes wrong? Does my visa expire on the 18th or after the 18th. These are fuzzy questions that I did not want to answer. My manager tried to convince me that we ...

Korea, Day 29 Yesterday I was kind of sick. Although I stuck it out long enough to finish teaching my classes. I didn't really have food poisoning or any sickness like that. Instead, my body seemed to have flu symptoms such as full body aching and a little bit dizzy. I am feeling better today which is really a good thing since I was supposed to go to the immigration office today for some business. If I didn't do it today, tomorrow is a holiday and I would have had to wait until Thursday. Yes, tomorrow is another holiday. I think tomorrow is Constitution day or something like that where they celebrate the first day their constitution was inaugurated back in the 30's or 40's by the government in exile. This would make 3 holidays in the 3 weeks. I haven't worked a 5-day week since I got here. The first holiday was a nationally declared holiday to celebrate Korea's accomplishments in the World Cup. You may remember that the foreign teachers had ...

Korea, Day 28 Yesterday, I passed an elderly man standing on the subway steps playing a harmonica. He was begging for money and he had no eyes. I mean the eyes were gone or removed at some point in time. There are very few beggars in Pusan, but the few I do see are always elderly people. That may make you ask why the elderly, of all people, end up begging for a career. I don't know really, but this may have something to do with them not having any extended family to take care of them. These people may have emerged from the Japanese occupation and subsequent civil war with no kin left alive. This also raises my suspicion on how that elderly man really lost his eyes. This also makes me wonder where the rest of society's undesirables are. Where are the mentally retarded? Where are the physically deformed? I have seen people missing limbs, but I have not seen the latter which are essential to every society. Perhaps they are kept hidden away at home, or perhaps t...

To Work in Korea, Part I In an attempt to add some adventure to my life, as well as preventing myself from totally wasting my summer in some loser job, I found myself an English teaching position for the summer in South Korea with no teaching credentials. I have been keeping regular diary entries of my adventures which have received a lot of positive feedback. Under suggestion, I have written this as a guide and introduction to life in Korea. The first of two parts is a HOWTO on employment in Korea. The second will cover Korean culture and lifestyle. People in Korea badly want to learn English, and as a result, thousands upon thousands of private schools called "hogwans" have popped up offering language courses for those who want to pay for them. A common feature for nearly every hogwan is native-speaking English teachers. They are usually intended to supplement the standard grammar education with instruction in conversation and pronunciation skills. They are...

Korea, Day 27 Right now in Korea, it's a lazy Sunday morning which gives me a chance to slow down and reflect upon the things I've seen and learned. So what do the Korean people value? That's a really tough question that I don't think I have the ability to answer. However, I can reiterate the important contemporary issues that are visible to me now. One thing to note is that Korea has a serious inferiority complex due to its 35 years of enslavement by Japan followed by 10 years of serious instability. Things like international sports are taken very seriously and any scandal involved is viewed as a national insult. Take for example, short-track speed skating during the olympics. A Korean skater was in the lead but disqualified for something dubious. In his place, an American, Anton Ono, won instead. The Koreans have been brooding over this one for months now and they have kept talking about it up until the World Cup. The government actually bought the...

Korea, Day 26 Earlier today I went down to Kyobo bookstore to pick up a better Korean-English dictionary. I didn't really have to go to Kyobo, but I did anyway. You may remember about 2 weeks ago I talked about Kyobo vs. the small local bookstores. Kyobo, the large chain-store from Seoul, has been the scene of protestors complaining that Kyobo is going to crush the local bookstores. When I arrived at Kyobo, I saw a very interesting state of affairs. First off, the front of the store had a dozen or so canopy tents to shelter the protestors from the rain. However, there weren't that many protestors. It was still early in the day so only a few hard-core folks were there to manage the sound system. Sound system you say?! Indeed, the protestors were playing some traditional Korean music which sounded a lot like Native American tribal music. However, I couldn't understand why, with all this elaborate sound equipment, I couldn't hear the music very well. ...

Korea, Day 25 Yesterday was Chobo, or the first hottest day of summer. During Chobo Koreans eat special things such as dogmeat or the famous samgyetang. What is samgyetang? It's basically chicken, stuffed with rice and boiled with ginseng to help revitalize the body during energy-zapping hot days. Yesterday I had samgyetang. Overall the meal was pretty good. The chicken was boil-cooked, so the meat was pretty tender and the skin was soft. At first I freaked out because I thought they didn't clean the chicken out, but it just turned out to be rice stuffed in the middle. During the meal my arm started to cramp up because of the intense work-out I've been giving to my long neglected chopstick muscles. Picking apart and eating a whole chicken with only chopsticks and a spoon is very tricky. It requires sheer strength and subtle manipulation of the chicken bones via the 2 metallic rods. The side dishes included kimchi, garlic stems, mushrooms, spicy pepper...

Korea, Day 24 This morning I got up earlier than I normally do at 6am. I was out the door by 7:30. On my way to the subway I heard a rhythmic clicking noise with a tempo of about 1 second. I wondered if it might be some sort of machine Korean's use to do God knows what. Then I saw it. It was an old woman clapping together a pair of wood blocks while either praying or singing. She stood in front of her place of business, a small fried-food shop, looking into the street and sang with a calm melancholy to the beat of even clicks. This is actually the first PDR (Public Display of Religion) that I have since I've come here. This is excluding the proselytizing of the Jehova's Witnesses because since I don't think it takes religion to be a salesmen. As I stood on the subway platform waiting for the train, I watched the subway channel on the small televisions evenly spaced along the tracks. The TV showed me beautiful people singing beautiful songs. It tried...

Korea, Day 22 Now, I have mentioned that the coffee here sucks, but the tea is absolutely divine. Compared to the Lipton tea bags we have at home, Korean tea completely blows us out of the water. Often times, Koreans will serve cold tea with meals and strangely enough they'll call it "water". The best place to get tea, however, is at the tea houses. Tea houses in the ancient Confucian world were a general hang-out for noble landowners to spend their money in the city. Today, anyone who wants to relax in a Korean-style environment away from the commercial madness of the big city patronize these small tea shops. I have only been to 2 so far, and they're notoriously hard to find. They're usually situated several floors up in a typical restaurant building. Most all restaurants are in multi-story buildings which can be anywhere from 2 to 6 stories. Probably one of the reasons they're difficult to find is that their signs are in Korean. Many establ...

Korea, Day 21 Yesterday, I was walking through the mall, casually sipping my Starbucks coffee and looking for an electronics shop, when I saw a Korean girl wearing a shirt that said, "Love you long time." I nearly burst out laughing and am kicking myself that I didn't take a picture. Carrying a cup of coffee through the mall is a dangerous proposition. It was Sunday and the mall was very busy, and people are apt to run into you. In large groups there isn't a terrible amount of courtesy, so I became instantly afraid when a fast-moving Korean headed in my direction. Though I did not spill my coffee, it was definitely worth the effort. Finding good coffee in this country is a very difficult thing to do. Starbucks coffee is, hands down, the best coffee I've found in Korea. The second best coffee I've found is Folger's crystals which I drink daily at work. So why does coffee suck in this country? A couple of reasons. The first is that servi...

Korea, Day 20 I think I've finally figured out the bathroom situation here in Korea. It took me a while, but I had to answer questions like, why is the floor always wet, and what is the bucket and scooper for? Most bathrooms I've gone to here in Korea have western-style toilets. This is in contrast to the floor pots that you normally squat over which I have only seen once. Plumbing is a source of difficulty for Korea since I've seen so many bathrooms with ad-hoc plumbing systems, no water, and incompetent sewage systems that don't keep out the smell. Generally, they're better than I expected, so I don't let it bother me. Bathrooms at people's homes have been a source of mystery for me. There are many features that I didn't understand up until now. Firstly, there are no showers or bathtubs in the common Korean household bathroom. I myself am lucky because I have a bathtub in my yoegwan, but many people do not. Instead, there is usually a...

Korea, Day 19 I went to the movies last night. Star Wars just came out here in Korea, and I resisted all temptations to go watch it. I personally boycotted that movie in the States and I have every intention of boycotting it here. Instead, we went and saw Resident Evil on the 10th floor of the Lotte Department Store. Lotte Department Store is a very fascinating place. It's 10 floors of megamall madness followed by 16 more floors of hotel goodness. The sheer number of people in this building and the claustrophobic elevators you use to navigate from floor to floor makes the place even a little bit frightening. One wonders if the exit facilities are sufficient to handle the deluge of people in the event of an emergency. I'd hate to be in this fancy place should there be some kind of natural disaster. Putting these morbid thoughts aside, (which I've learned to do while riding taxis) Lotte is enormously fancy. 10 floors and each floor is specifically devoted to...