it doesn't get any better than this

OK, so I just hit the high point of teacherdom: my first letter from a former student. Probably my only one, being as we are now subject teachers and I only see the students for 90 minutes a week each, rather than having them all week long, so not much time to form any sort of bond. (Not that I'm complaining - subject teaching makes far more sense with our constantly changing schedule, and is much more manageable.)

So this letter is on the traditional cutesy Korean paper decorated with flowers and hearts and nonsequitor, nongrammatical English ("Today is happy day." "Good things might come to those who wait." "Welcome to Flower garden"). Korean products, including clothes and stationary and mugs, tend to use English letters/words as decor rather than for meaning, and some of it is pretty funny.

The letter is from my one student, probably about 12 years old, who cut her finger in art class (no more big scissors). Her English name is Tracy, and she plays a traditional double-reed Korean instrument sometimes written as "piri." Apparently her brother plays it, too. It should give you some insight into how fantastic and cute the kids can be, and how they tend to talk very dramatically for humor and emphasis. I've tried to preserve the spellings, capitalization and spacing in typing it here.

Hello, Kristin marsh teacher?
I'm Tracy. How are you? I'm fine.
I want to see you. My finger is ok. Teacher, thank you. I'm crying. And I'm sad. Because, I miss you. I'm crying every day. I miss you, teacher!
Oh, dear. Soon, my brother's concert. It's the Pili. There is Donga shaping [shopping] 10thfloor.
Good, bye - Kristin marsh teacher!

- Tracy -

I'm prety. You are prety.
I'm kind. But. You are very kind.
I miss you.

Isn't that the best thing ever? :)

the holidays a la Asia

I'm sitting in my dorm room on a cold December night, looking out on our resident fuselage, listening to some mellow blockbusters on MySpace music, thinking about careers and tomorrow's lesson plans, and trying corn ice cream. It's not as weird as you'd think - kinda like frozen creamed corn.

We've got our first official batch of five-day kids - about 45 from a private school or schools in a more rural region northeast of Daegu. That's 4 or 5 kids per class. Last week it was 18 in each class, and we've had all manner of daycamps, overnights, half-days and three-day sessions, so we've really seen the gamut. They're all awesome, though, and what makes everything worth it. Tensions have been high recently over various things, but these kids are the best part of everything, and what make me thankful every day, if not quite every class (We are considering getting "I Survived Group 12" T-shirts after one particular crew), that I took this job. They're just fun and creative and goofy and crack themselves up with these jokes that aren't even funny, but it totally cracks me up that they find them so hysterical.

The holiday season has fallen here, too, which I'm coming to find means giant anime-style Santas and who knows what other Christmas creations parading the streets, a plethora of cooked-batter streetfoods, and the traditional merchandise explosion you find back home. Oh and the karaoke version of "White Christmas" is about the best thing I've seen yet - one long string of pictures of Korea's verdant hills and Buddhist temples. Not one flake of snow.

Mostly it's been cold and dry and rather sunny, but this weekend was one miserable long drizzle ... the perfect kind for curling up in a downtown coffeehouse with a new book (or three) and watching civilization scuttle by outside, and I definitely indulged. It's strange finding myself reading again - entranced by the bookstore and perpetually in the middle of about six books, just like when I was a kid. I guess that lifestyle of eight-hour days of staring at words is finally relaxing its grip. Now I've just got to figure out what to do with the library I'm amassing.

I get pangs for American holidays and family time every so often - like the other day when I saw pictures of the Iowa Mills' Thanksgiving, or tonight when I told a Korean friend about last year's holiday outing to Kansas City's jazz district. But I'm also looking forward to trying out this whole island holiday thing this year, spending Christmas and New Years on the shores of Bali with good friends from college, now spread around the world.

Oh but I never did quite get my Thanksgiving story put up here ... so the 20 of us Americans at the Village (with the very important help of certain Korean staff) coordinated as traditional a dinner as we could muster the Sunday after the holiday, and I volunteered to do the last-minute shopping, thinking I was being smart to avoid the chaos of climbing over everyone else in the kitchens with all their Korean machinery. Well, the short of it is that I ended up being very much the turkey and having my most fabulous "weird foreigner" moment yet in this country, loaded down with a ridiculous amount of food, answering relentless phone calls and trying to navigate Korean public transportation.

With considerable effort, I had dragged my overladen bags down to the bus stop near the local Costco (a Sam's Club-style warehouse of mostly Western things), but the bus pulled up before I was quite ready with my fare. But I leaped on anyway with all my cargo, much to the amusement of the onlooking passengers and the bemusement of the surly driver. The next bit all sort of happened at once - me fishing for change, one of my bulging bags tumbling down and various Thanksgiving offerings rolling out across the floor of the 739, the bus jolting forward and my shoe sliding off my foot into the stairwell and just barely slipping out the closing door. I don't think anyone else saw the shoe go, and I was quite the wild-haired freakshow there, still digging for a darned 100 won piece and debating the worth of a Size 12 shoe, laden down as I was and sock-footed, two busrides and one walk from home in Asia. To top it all off, my phone started ringing again.

The shoe won out.

Seven blocks later, I had found the coin, collected my things and finally managed to hit the stop button, and all the wide-eyed Korean "aunties" watched me clamber off the bus. I then hobbled back the direction I came, at one particularly poignant moment passing a true bag lady (a rare sight here, but you just can't make up the stuff that happens in real life - no one would believe you). And even in the middle of my "I am ridiculous" haze, I did realize that my lot even at that moment was something to be thankful for, because I was strong enough to huff and puff it back, rich enough to afford a taxi for the last leg of the journey when I had missed the right shuttle, and lucky enough to have an amazing, nostalgic feast waiting for me when I got there.

And I got my shoe, dadgumit.

changes, chicken feet and cute children

No time for a full-on post, but a few notes from Daegu:

1) In the lastest string of changes, we are not, in fact, getting our public school kids until at least March. Classes between then and now will be on a week-by-week or day-by-day basis depending on which schools we can schedule, and will probably be entirely daycamps. We start this week with 4 days of different grades from a prestigious private school in Daegu and one day of a kindergarten class from Yeungjin's academy. Definitely keeps us on our our toes, but we're also getting pretty good about adapting to curveballs.

2) I've realized that my friend in Sudan, where people live in huts and goats wander around in the streets, is eating less exotic food than I do. I'm pretty sure I had chicken feet tonight in town.

3) I hung out with the first- and second-grade classes yesterday to prepare for this Wednesday and Saturday when I'll be teaching youngsters, and they sure are cutie little bundles. Cutie little bundles who speak about 10 words of English. And apparently not all of their parents have impressed on them why they go to this place with the strange people who babble nonsense, because some of them feel it's their duty to teach us to speak properly. One little girl resolutely repeated "Han bon do" each time I said "Another one, please," and one of the boys had the following conversation with me:

[6-year-old scribbles what appear to be a boy monster and girl monster on his paper.]
Me: Oh wow! Two people - one, two.
6-year-old [pointing to each in turn]: Namja, yoja.
Me [pointing to each one]: Yes ... "man," "woman."
6-year-old [pointing]: Nam-ja ... yo-ja.
Me [pointing, nodding]: Yes ... "ma-an," "wo-man."
6-year-old [perplexed ... decides to take a different tack, points to a boy across the table, then a girl next to him]: NAM ... JA ... YO ... JA.
[We go a few more rounds of pointing at different people and pictures, with him first getting more emphatic, then patiently slowing down for this simpleton who just can't get it, and finally giving up to go bang on the drums.]

I HAVE RENTERS!!!!

Five months later, I finally have income back at the condo in the Springs. Whew - major relief! The new renters move in on Tuesday, even. I'll still be paying a little each month, but I can finally start getting to some of those financial goals - fun and boring - I came over here with instead of just scraping by. Here's to renters!

an interesting read

So my vagabond reporter friend, Megan, has had some amazing stuff on her blog, but her latest post is a particularly interesting story about a math teacher she met in Vietnam. Check this out: http://gypsyscribbler.blogspot.com/2007/11/hey-mccain-youve-got-friend.html.

where I live

I'm finally getting together at least some pictures of campus ... check out my web album by clicking here (click the "Slideshow" button for the best way to see them all big one after another). It will probably be updated somewhat over the next couple months, and this just covers some of the areas, but you'll get the idea of what an amazing facility it is.

Week 2 down

Our second batch of kiddos has just left and I'm finally getting to that "I haven't written in awhile ..." post.

Life here is divided between the chaos of herding 200 children and the quiet of rural isolation - it's really an odd deal. For the past three days I've been going nonstop from the wee hours to the wee hours, and now I'm sitting here wondering what to do with myself for the rest of the week. It's like in three days I've forgotten how to have hobbies. Never fear, I'm sure I'll remember by tomorrow. :)

I've now taught two three-day weeks and one Saturday session, and although we still have all those startup fiascos popping up, it seems like we've been here forever.

Last week's class of 11- and 12-year-olds (Korean age) was wonderful - full of sweet, fun kids and eager students, and even the rapscallion boys' ringleader was nothing more than a minor discipline problem who responded really well to direct commands. I was sad to see them go.

I figured I couldn't possibly be so lucky with this week's group, and when I walked in and saw it was a group of 13-year-olds, I braced for a tough session. Just in the year's difference, you can see the kids slipping into teenage diffidence - guarded eyes, self-conscious shrugs, baggy clothes, dramatic eye rolls ... and that one kid in every group who always slouches under a black hood.

But then lo and behold, by some cosmic fluke these kids were even more amazing and full of surprises - in fact, the one with the hood turned out to be my most interactive and helpful student. And their grasp of English was incredible, which meant we got to move past basic vocabulary into more fun cultural lessons (they were perplexed that adults don't ask each other their ages within minutes of meeting, for example, because in Korean that's mandatory to know what form of language to use). To a kid, they were earnest participants and really put themselves out there. The weirdest part was that although all my girls were great, it was the boys who were the ones first in line, volunteering the most answers and helping turn out lights and close doors. Like I said, cosmic fluke. But I'll take it.

These first two groups were a PR move - free for 200 selected from hundreds of participants, I think largely because they scored well on a test, and a lot of them were from well-off families who invest in private English academies. Next up (and from here on out) we get general public school kids for weeklong sessions, which will undoubtedly be an entirely different ballgame.

Now back to remembering how to read, run, study Korean ...

the plane has landed

We're here ... whew. At the Village finally, and the first round of kids come Monday. In the meantime, another set of Korean machines and panels to learn, another round of faces to meet, another room to unpack. Our time here has been like three jobs, three homes, so it's nice to finally be able to live out of furniture instead of a suitcase and really be getting on with the job we were hired for.

The past week has been a flurry of moving and shaking hands - Tuesday was the big opening ceremony, and all the local politicians were there plus UCCS and Yeungjin representation and a slew of reporters. (Sidenote: The mayor of Daegu speaks great English and even in Korean proved that charisma is a major political selling point worldwide; also, Korean journalists are quite snappy dressers, contrary to their American counterparts.) The thing was broadcast on all three national news networks and it was quite the affair. And everyone was appropriately wowed by the grandiose architecture including the major selling point - a retired jetliner suspended 20 feet in the air, used to simulate the flight experience for students - so it appears to be a promising start. Now comes our part ... wish me luck! :)

Oh and belated happy Halloween, everyone. Hope y'all enjoyed my favorite holiday back there for me - they don't celebrate it on this side of the world, and what with everything else happening, our crew didn't do anything to mark it, either.

digital supernova

Going abroad this time around is an entirely different experience than my first venture - in many many ways, but particularly because the world is so much more wired now ... or at least I am more hip to it.

In Spain, six years ago, I spent cold hours at telephone booths, fumbling through a flip book of numbers and punching in phone-card codes about as long as pi. I occasionally sent mass e-mail updates, but my regular contacts back home dwindled to the handful of folks who were willing to correspond in lengthy e-mails or phone conversations. I found my housing and language buddies off bulletin boards, and hoped to make friends off of chance and dicey Spanish skills in buses or classes or bars ... which didn't work very well. I spent many an hour and peseta - then Euro - in Internet cafes and on phone cards. And it seemed like I spent even more time in transit to get to those cafes and phone cards.

Before going to Spain, I scoured my music collection for the precious couple dozen CDs that would remind me of home, I lived in silence for the few weeks before splurging on a small boombox, and I listened to those songs - even the dubious ones - so many times that I can't hear them now without being whisked back to Madrid. Any television I watched was Spanish, and although I found some information about events and such online, I seemed to spend most of my life there tracking down details. (Though that could be more of a cultural thing ...)

In Korea, I now have an Internet connection in my bedroom AND office AND classroom ... and go a little crazy when it goes out. I have two computers and ridiculously cheap phone service right from one - though I don't tend to use it much (sorry!) because I'm generally chatting online with folks back home at both ends of the day and occasionally in between. Subsequently, I've (thusfar) kept a far wider net of regular contacts than last time around.

And let's not forget this blog, which lets me post any old thing without cluttering your mailboxes, and services like Blogarithm, which let you clutter your mailboxes all you like. Plus there are blog readers that help me keep up on the latest from my blogging friends and other news and newsy sites ... not to mention that now there's just a ridiculous amount of information out there. I'm not sure how people lived before they could look any old thing up on Google. I mean, really, how did we survive without being able to instantly figure out:

• the Billboard Top Ten,
• how long pi really is,
• how the Korean pension system works,
• the lyrics to Dar Williams' "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono,"
• a map of the Korean rail system,
• the name of that artist who makes the hyper-real human sculptures,
• how to create a "tornado" in a bottle,
• whether there really are flesh-eating amoebas,
• the Korean word(s) for "older brother,"
• where Arkansas City is in Kansas,
• rapper Mos Def's biography,
• who's behind that silly "I've got a crush on Obama" video,
• that silly "I've got a crush on Obama" video,
• the spelling of the new French president's name

... to name a few of dozens of searches I've done in the past couple days. Such info was around six years ago, but it was nowhere near as cataloged or accessible. Plus I had to make lists of things to look up at my next Internet cafe outing, rather than just walking into the next room to check ... so I think most of my wonderings tended to go unresearched.

Forums for expats here offer a scattershot of advice (or misadvice), how-to's (or how-not-to's), insight (or lack thereof), happenings and other information for the hapless foreigner (that is, me). More and more academic studies are going up online all the time, and news sources are getting better systems to deliver targeted news to those who go searching for it, so it's now easier to back or kill some theory I've formed about the culture.

I pick up bits of Korean for free through a particularly great podcast on Apple's iTunes, and I brought over something close to my entire music collection without adding an ounce to my luggage. Not only do I have all my tunes at home, I can take them out and about for runs, long bus rides or any other time I'd rather keep the world at a distance. Occasional NPR podcasts keep me somewhat up to date on U.S. politics and culture of the day, and YouTube and other video-sharing programs keep me abreast of the latest pop culture phenomenons. Some of my TV-phile co-workers have hookups to get American television delivered to their computers (or scour the Net for illegal streams), and good old iTunes dishes up a smorgasboard of shows to buy by episode or season - I've caught an episode of one of my old standbys and one of the promising newbies. There's also the photo-sharing programs that I haven't made much use of yet, but eventually I'll get there.

But perhaps the biggest benefit to this digital age: making connections in the real world. The majority of my non-work friends here are from that whole social networking phenomenon - MySpace and Facebook and others - or connections of people I met that way. I know this idea probably freaks some of you out a little, but the Net can be a fabulous tool for someone as persnickety about friends as I am because it gives you a chance to survey all sorts of folks at a deeper level than seeing someone sitting across the way and guessing (1) that they speak English, (2) are even remotely compatible with me and (3) are open to making a new friend. I've definitely been off the mark a time or two, but mostly it's worked out really well.
(And don't worry, I have no intentions of ending up in someone's freezer, so I take all the usual precautions of limiting personal info, meeting in public places with friends, etc.)

Each generation has its defining things: wars, protests, big hair ... I'd say my generation's defining characteristic is that we were those who grew up with the Internet. We're old enough to remember a time without it (foggily) and are now its main consumers - young enough to have adapted fairly wholesale, old enough to have freedom and buying power to use it relatively unhampered. (These are of course generalizations.) Tomorrow my little cousins will be calling us old fogies as they pass us up on those virtual highways, but we will have been the forefront, and it's an interesting position, no doubt. I wonder what it says about us.

interesting link: right brain or left brain?

I don't know how valid this is, but it's kinda fun ...

Which way is the dancer spinning?