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."