Problem Solved

This seems easiest - all my pics are now on the right-hand side, arranged by topic/location.

Photo problems...

Okay, the great flickr experiment is over. Flickr sucks. I can only create three different 'sets' or albums, and have a very limited number of photos I can upload per month. This is with a free account, mind, though I have absolutely no intention of paying for something on the internet (I mean, really!). So I'm looking around trying to find a new host - one that offers unlimited storage/uploads, unlimited number of albums, and for which I can send a link to family and friends. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know!

But went to a ballgame with Michelle last week - good stuff. I was impressed with the calibre of play. It's not MLB, but was damn good, and a nail biter, too - went to 12 innings, over 5 hours, only to end on a terrible called out at first base. Have pics, but (see above).

Has been a beautiful last few days - sunny, temps in the low- to mid-twenties. Was out walking along Cheongyecheon yesterday afternoon and have quite a good bit of colour already.

Start my Korean language class this Thursday. It's twice a week, Thursdays and Fridays from 10am to 12pm. Will be nice to finally (eventually) be able to communicate with people.

That's it for now - realized I hadn't posted in ages so thought I'd throw something on. Photos will be online at some point. Hang in there, kids.

Fotos on Flickr

Okay, I've moved all my pics over to flickr and will try to make that a permanent link on my page here so you don't have to search through posts looking for the Facebook links. It should be on the right-hand side.

And FYI - that "AccuWeather" widget? Not even close.

Footie fotos

More photos online, from yesterday's football match with Michelle. FC Seoul went down in a heartbreaker against Suwon, 1-0.

Oh, snap!

Finally have some photos online. Click here.

Report Card time...

And I'm looking forward to writing most of them. The vast majority of the kids are great - some... well, if we're being completely honest:

Mrs. 백, your demon-spawn Phil has me contemplating a vasectomy and vow of silence before I beat him to death with my unabridged copy of Strunk's "The Elements of Style". My recommendation is that you tie him up in a burlap sack and chuck him into the Han River, before he drives the Seoul ESL teacher suicide rate to an OECD high. Perhaps Japanese lessons? Phil must stop sticking things up his nose. He draws well.

Fun with journals

Two posts in one day. Will wonders never cease.

I was just marking some journals and thought I'd share. All the writing classes have a journal with various topics/questions and the kids are assigned two or three a week as homework and the writing teacher collects and corrects them every so often. The most recent topic from 2C writing was to write about your favourite story character - why do you like him or her, what would ask if you ever met, etc.

William (10 or 11 years old) was telling me about Tom & Jerry: how Jerry is smart to always take the cheese and escape Tom's traps. And what would young William say to Jerry?

You're smart to escape Tom's pit. I want to study your secrets, because I run away from mother's useless talk.

Sometimes these kids have me in stitches.

Serious lack of posting

Cor, this blogging malarkey is hard to keep up on.

Let's see, let's see... off to the footie next weekend (next next weekend - April 8th) with Michelle, one of the Korean teachers. Looks like my local is FC Seoul. Here we go here we go here we go! First match is against Suwon, those dirty bastards. Manchester United is coming into town for a friendly against FC Seoul on July 20th. Will be trying to get tickets, but it's on a Friday night so will most likely be stuck at work.

Local baseball team (out of the several based in Seoul) is the Doosan Bears, who play at Jamsil Stadium, a few subway stops or a 30-minute walk from home. First game is also coming up in early April - against the SK Tigers, I think it is.

Tickets for the sports are quite reasonable - they top out at 15,000 won for football, and infield tickets for the baseball are only 12,000 or so. Between $15-20.

Speaking of sports, what in God's name is going on with the Leafs?? Tenth in the standings? Come on.

Having an adventure in haircutting on Friday - and no, I've not been able to find an old half-blind Italian barber in Seoul. I may come out looking like an anime character. One can only hope.

Happy White Day!

March 14th is White Day in Korea. February 14th was Valentine's, of course, only with a Sadie Hawkins twist - women give men chocolate. White Day is all about the ladies, who are supposed to receive candy from male admirers.

I'm holding out for April 14th - Black Day. Yep, that's reserved for all we singletons to get together and commiserate while eating 짜장면 - jjajangmyeon, noodles with black bean sauce. Hence the name of the day - nothing to do with one's mood thereon. And jjajangmyeon is quite tasty, so needs must, I suppose.

The show on Saturday was excellent. Think a cross between West Side Story and Run-DMC's video for "It's Like That", with some traditional Korean music tossed in. This article has a pretty good synopsis of what went on. Let me just add that "the quiet zither girl" was gorgeous. Probably the most beautiful girl I've seen since I arrived. The whole "b-boy" culture is really big over here - there are many different troupes performing all over the city (we nearly ended up at the wrong theatre - the one right across the street also had a b-boy show scheduled), and apparently Korean b-boy groups have won the international Battle of the Year in three of the last five years: 2002, 2004, and 2005. Hippity-hop.

Finished "20,000 Leagues". Poor old Captain Nemo. I blame the French.

Should be finishing Robert Graves' "I, Claudius" tonight and picked up the sequel, "Claudius the God" at Bandi & Luni's yesterday. I've never been able to find that in Canada - thought it was out of print. But lo and behold, there it was staring me in the face in the foreign section of the great bookstore at the COEX Mall.

Oops - saved this as a draft rather than publishing. So, Happy White Day +1.

No Panmunjeon

Meant to mention - our field trip to the DMZ was postponed. Despite Mary's insistence that we take the tour visiting Panmunjeon (or else why bother, really!), the agent stuck us on a different tour. So we'll try again in the Spring - will be nicer one it's warm and things are in bloom, anyway. It was actually a bit of good fortune - when I went to immigration to get my Alien Registration Card, they 'borrowed' my passport for a week, so I wouldn't have been able to go to anyway.

Since Saturday, which was a lovely day, overcast but around 13-14 degrees, the temperature has plummeted. Minus 7 on Monday and Tuesday with a vicious wind, and we've gotten about an inch of snow today! Coldest it's been since I arrived, by far. One might think Al Gore was in town. Hopefully it'll warm up by the weekend. We're (the teachers) all off to see a 'b-boy' show downtown. Think breakdancing. Lots and lots of breakdancing. Boss.

Finished V.S. Naipaul's "Half a Life" over the weekend - I highly recommed it. So went up to the Kyobo Bookstore (they claim 2.3 million volumes in stock; I counted 2.4 million Koreans trying to buy them) which has a great English-language section. Picked up Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" for about $6 which I've nearly zipped through already. It's a great little romp.

One more class to teach tonight and then it's home sweet home. Was marking journals earlier - you can really tell when a kid has been using a Korean-English dictionary. It's just not natural for a 9-year old to write about what he eats with sentences like this:

I eat nutrients to assimilate nutritious substances.

Or to write that one of his household chores involves "burnishing" the floor by "shove [sic] a cleanser". Of course, when a pizza joint on its front window promises a meal with "a satisfactory ending" (does that cost extra??), who can blame the sprogs. One girl's mother seems to have put her in charge of "footwear arrangement". Sanitary engineer, indeed.

And congratulations to April and Mark on the new addition to the Family Jones!

Ceci n'est pas un pipe

Looks like we're in for a bit of rain the next few days, so I think this weekend I'll pop up to the Seoul Museum of Art - they've got a René Magritte exhibit on through April. Belgian surrealism seems the perfect way to while away a dreary day.

The picture here is one of Magritte's more famous paintings, The Son of Man (1964). A self-portrait with his face obscured by an apple, Magritte had this to say about it:

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well....

Unfortunately, the piece is privately owned so won't be on display. But the painting I allude to in the post title, La trahison des images (1928-1929) should be - it's owned by the LACMA, so hopefully part of the show. It's a painting of a pipe, looking like something one might find on a tobacco ad of the period (Magritte actually co-founded a Belgian ad agency with his brother after his first Paris show was a failure), with the caption "Ceci n'est pas un pipe." written underneath. He's right, of course, despite the apparent contradiction - it isn't a pipe, but merely an image of a pipe. No matter how perfectly we capture the image of a thing, we never capture the thing itself. As Magritte said, "Just try to stuff it with tobacco! If I were to have had written on my picture 'This is a pipe' I would have been lying."

Allahu freakin' Akbar

Sorry the lack of posts since I arrived in sunny Seoul - blogger was defaulting to Korean and it took me a bit of trial and (much) error to figure out how to find the English button. But it seems we're now a go...

Everything is going fine over here - classes are good, kids are amusing. Pretty attentive and eager to learn, at least compared to our lazy North American kids. After regular state school, nearly every student goes to a variety of private academies ("hagwons") for everything from English to math to science, and a lot of the kids also take taekwondo. The program director here was telling me that many kids as young as 7 are either at school or hagwons until midnight or even later! That may help to explain this.

Seoul itself is great. Weather's been beautiful so far - one day of rain and not one below about 5 degrees. Today it's sunny and 12. Just lovely. The Koreans are still cold, and the Aussie who just arrived last week is freezing his marbles off, but I'm going about jacketless and sitting on patios with my newspapers. Not as big a culture shock for me as it was for the other foreign teachers, having lived and worked in Toronto's Chinatown for a couple of years, but I'm having some difficulty with the language. Up to perhaps half a dozen phrases, enough to competently order my morning coffee and ask pardon when I run over those meandering ladies taking their sweet time on the sidewalk, but don't feel I'm progressing quickly enough, though the people I speak to are more amused that a round-eye can even spout a word or two than insulted that I'm butchering the language. Still haven't conquered the alphabet, which is two letters shorter than our own. Though it is amusing that I know I should be speaking something other than English so find myself lapsing into either French or German, which is really no help at all! Was learning some colours today, and couldn't for the life of me say the Korean word for red - it's roughly transliterated bal gang, only the initial letter sound is a cross between our 'b' and 'p' to make a sound that doesn't exist in English at all. Of course, the kids here have a hard time with several of our digraphs and plain old letters ('z' is a bit tricky - getting one of my early-year classes to say 'zipper' rather than 'jipper' took a while) so I don't feel so bad.

We had a long weekend the weekend before this one - both the Friday and Monday off - for Lunar New Year. Year of the Pig, it is now. No big celebrations, parades, fireworks or anything like that - that's still the calendar New Year. Lunar is mostly for leaving the city to visit family. Another holiday tomorrow - this time it's Independence Movement Day, commemorating the proclamation of a Korean Declaration of Independence from the occupying Japanese on March 1, 1919. The public reading in Seoul quickly turned into a huge procession, which the Japanese police attempted to suppress with their usual tact, killing 7,500 and wounding a further 16,000. To the Koreans' credit, it took the Japanese military nearly a year to finally put an end to the burgeoning movement. I think we're supposed to wear red, but don't quote me on that.

But I must get to back to - have a 2B writing class starting in ten minutes! Now that I think I've finally cracked the secret of how to get English on a Korean computer, should be posting with much greater frequency. Greater than 'never' won't be difficult to top.

Oh, and I'm not really sure what to write about, not really, so if you have any Korea questions you'd like me to address or find out more about, please leave them in the Comments.

Safe and sound and having fun. Miss you guys!

One more sleep...

Back up again at 4am to make my way to the airport. Catch a 7:45am American Airlines flight to Chicago O'Hare where I connect with an 11:40am Korean Air flight. Land at Incheon with MacArthur-like panache 7 Feb at 5:45pm, Korea-time, or 3:45am in Toronto. Fire up a sweet, sweet Dunhill at 5:46. Seek out Mr Kim, who is to meet me at the airport. Then it's off to Seoul to find my new home and get settled in.

More once I get there and see what's what. The good news is, there's very little chance of the Soviets doing this to any more Korean Air flights. Annyeonghi kyeseyo!

First field trip

Thanks to Mary, a fellow Canadian teaching at the same school I've been hired by, I've already got my first day-trip in South Korea sorted. We, along with another teacher, Robert, will be visiting Panmunjeom on February 18th, during the Lunar New Year long weekend.

The actual Panmunjeom was a tiny village located in the middle the DMZ (the four kilometre-deep demilitarized zone bisecting the Korean peninsula along the 38th parallel) and was the site of the armistice talks between the United Nations Forces and Communists that dragged on for nearly two years until the end of open hostilities in July 1953. The village itself was destroyed during the war; all that remains is the building where the negotiations were held, renamed by the North Koreans with typical Communist irony as the "North Korea Peace Museum". Where we will be visiting is more accurately called the Joint Security Area (JSA).

It's one of the last remaining vestiges of the Cold War, somewhat akin to Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie, though on a much, much larger scale. And it remains the dividing between two countries technically still at war.

Apparently I'll have to sign a waiver before entering the DMZ stating:

"The visit to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom will entail entry into a hostile area and possibility of injury or death as a direct result of enemy action."

LifeinKorea tells me "all visitors must observe the rules against photographing certain places, refrain from any gestures or actions that might antagonize the North Korean guards, and follow a strict dress code. Blue jeans, shorts, or any other provocative clothes are not allowed..." (my emphasis)

Excellent!