In Which the Alien Fiancee gets a Job!

BPU2 has hired the lovely Fiancee --

a cabbie and her bad Korean almost nixed the deal - in trying to pronounce the name of BPU2, she actually pronounced the name of some other University entirely and was thus, with 20 minutes left before her interview, "Lost in Seoul!"

But another cabbie got here here in time, and now she has a non-hagwon job!

Coming Soon: Straight Outta Gyeongju...

LOL...

Two names my charmingly stumbly Graduate Education student call me..

1) Mona Angry
Which should amuse anyone in the family.

and

2) Mr. Mongo Marry
Which I feel is even better!

This and or that...

With week 10 of classes done the finish line is starting to come clear.. which is a darn good thing as they continue to pile the editing on.. not a bad thing, just a bunch of work at just the time I'm trying to get three book reviews, two newspaper articles, and a paper out of the way so that I can concentrate on the photo-essay that is due in early December. ;-o

Oh yeah, I still have to grade the big essay my Academic Writing students gave me as well as the midterm for the Graduate English Teachers Convo Class.

Consequently, after work today, I bailed on anything productive and instead headed over to Gyeongbokgung Palace to take pictures with my boy Adam from Daejeon. At Gyeongbokgung Station I stopped to take a snapshot of this arch. The arch isn't anything particularly grand, but right next to the arch is the punchline - the metal 'stone' with the inscription:

This gate was made of monolith in imitation of PULLOMUN in CH'ANGDOKKUNG.
It has a legend that once one passes through the gate, he would not be old forever.

That always cracks me up, since I'm pretty sure the Grim Reaper is also out there to make sure I don't stay old forever.

Anyway, Adam and I and a guy from Australia cruised around, took pictures and drank coffee. Later Adam and I headed into Itaewon to eat some kind of Middle Eastern food and Adam sucked on a Shisha like a half a dozen hookers looking for a big paycheck.

After we ate at this restaurant we headed around the corner from Noksapyeong Station where Adam stopped at Instanbul and had "Second Dinner" (I think he might be a Hobbit?).

Now home, waiting for Yvonne to get here. No celebration yet, but her hiring at BPU2 moved one step closer yesterday. BPU2 may find a better English teacher than me, but I think they're decided they are unlikely to find a better editor. Part of the deal is that I will stay at least one more year after the next one and they will lobby for a year after that if our grant goes through.

I've left the possibility open, but we'll see about that. At least if Yvonne gets hired we will have shared winter and summer vacations and will be able to come home a lot more.

For the few of you who do not know, we'll also be getting married (anyone know a good pre-nup lawyer??????!!!) when we get back to the States in February. As you know, the Korean tradition is to put money in envelopes and give it to the couple.

WE NOW DUB YOU ALL "HONORARY KOREANS!"

;-)

Oh yeah, that last picture is of the smaller pagoda in the smaller lake at Gyeongbokgung. It's a pretty place and I hadn't been there since my first trip to Korea with the BKF.

Had to scope it out in prep for the fambly landing later this month...

Tomorrow it's off the the prettiest garden in Korea..... more pics..

One Down, Two to Go...

I just signed my letter of understanding for my second year here at BPU2. Without even looking at a potential contract. ;-)

Now that has to be a job I like!

Now, tomorrow, I go in an try to nail a job down for Yvonne here at BPU2.

If that works out, we are beyond golden.. except for my age, hairline, waistline, still cracked rib..

well, ok.. our jobs will be golden...

Tardy Updates, Lynyrd Skynrd style - "Gimme Back my Bullets"

Many things have happened and I have been an uncertain poster her. So I resort to bullets

• BPU2 is considering upgrading my position to include work as a liason between the school and English-speaking Unis. More pay, of course. My teaching would be reduced to official load (9 hours) and I would be working on some cool projects. Not to get any hearts in a flutter, but this might include some work in Texas - "might."
  
  
• We are also working on a totally cool project to create a rubric by which to pre-screen fiction that is being considered for translation into English. More about this will pop up on MorningCalm very soon, but for now it's a fun project
  
  
• I still need (even more if my load is reduced) to find BPU2 a second English instructor. Someone has to know someone with an MA in English Lit or ESL who wants to come over and have some fun in Korea?
  
  
• The BKF tells me that KLTI will be moving us onto their lists as a translator/editor team. That is, as we vernaculate, splendiddest. And has promise of more money attached to it.
  
  
• Gecko's is the place to be in Itaewon on Sunday - Queen on the stereo, Yvonne mopping up the bits of calimari that she mysteriously spat onto the table, bookshopping complete, and the wireless working flawlessly and fast.
  
  
• Next week? Two days of instruction!!! Deal with that biaaaaaatches!
  
  

Korea Imposes its Ferocious Will

I meet with the Chair last week to demonstrate that my knee is relatively healed up and that she can stop bugging me about going to the hospital.

I get into her office and she's giving off a nervous vibe..

She says.. "You know, until last Friday you DID NOT have health insurance. Someone forgot to enroll you in it."

I say, "well, boy howdy, but it's good news that I have it now, eh?"?


She says, "well, that is good news, but there is bad news also."

"What is that?" I inquire in that cat contemplating a hot stove-lid way that I have.

"Well," she responds, "you owe six months worth of paycheck deductions for your health insurance."

That would be the health insurance I have just been told I DIDN't have.

I ponder. I am being charged for a service I didn't have. And yet, since it is Korea, there is nothing to be done about it.

Lo and Behold(en), I am docked nearly 600,000 won on my next paycheck...

Bastids!

Team Building Weekend!

It started far too early – just after 6 am on a Saturday. Unless you are still grinding the surface off your teeth in a crank frenzy, this is a time to sleep. But the alarm clock comes without mercy, and so it did to me. I cleaned myself up as best I can, and grabbed a cab to the Uni. Got there a bit early, which was in fact spectacularly early, since the “departure time” had been calculated based on “Korean time” (which is something similar to “Mexican Time” if you live near the border). Everyone showed up, and we headed off just about 8:15.

I really could have used that extra hour of sleep, but made up for it the best I could by napping on the bus. Sleep was impossible after we stopped halfway through the trip and heard that ex-president Roh had killed himself, apparently on account of the corruption probe into his presidency and family.

We took a quick stop at a kind of shrine to a Korean Movie which showed North and South Korean troops living in peace in an imaginary semi-utopia.

We arrived in town and walked through the market, which was nice, but nothing really unusual for a Korean open market. Lunch was adventurous. Seundae (an intestine based sausage), So Mori kuk pap – which is Cow-head soup and rice, and some extra bits of cow head and liver (the only thing I didn’t touch, based on horrible memories from my childhood) and Makkeoli. Not a bad meal, if you forget what’s actually in the thing.

Then it was off to rafting. As we drove up the river, it looked pretty lame – flat and regular. But the rafting was quite fun – the river was very tame, tame enough so that the guides actually crashed us into things for fun. Two of the slenderer girls were on the verge of hypothermia by the end of the trip and the guide kept splashing them with water and pushing them into the river (this was part of the game), despite the fact he had given one of them a heat-blanket type thing, and had the other huddle in the bottom of the raft to get out of the wind. This didn’t make sense to me, but it must be one of those Yin versus Yang things that no occidental tourist can understand. It also began to rain on us, which added to the coldnessosity.

Then back to the bus and off to the hotel. Our lovely office planner snagged me a room with a bed – a giant room, for only 60k won, which I was happy to pay for the solitude and control of the TV!

Then a truly brilliant dinner. Fat-ass Sam Gyap Sal, real sausages, thick mushroom strips, bean soup, rice and beer and soju flowing like beer and soju. Lots of cool chatter with the students and the kind of public good feelings that Koreans are so splendid at. Some folks headed off to a casino after, but I retreated to my big fat Korean room and am watching TV and preparing to go to sleep early.

Word is we aren’t expected to leave until 10 tomorrow, so I also should get a bonus sleep-in type of thing.

Re-unification

Had an interesting talk with the Chinese and Korean students in my conversation class. These are pretty articulate and pretty smart kids, and a couple of things they said quite suprised me.

First, ALL the Chinese students thought that not only should Korea unify, but that it would. Second, the Korean students were split. Half thought there would be re-unification and the other half thought there shouldn't be.

The short explanation of this is that the Chinese kids believe in re-unification as a general notion, and are clever enough to generalize it. When I said something like "WTF you OWN North Korea, why would you give it up?" they responded with "countries should be unified." And then made an exactly parallel argument about China and Taiwan.

The Korean students, on the other hand, were split between fuzzy racialists (we are all one) and people who were afraid that the economic failure of NK would mean a re-unification would economically destroy SK.

The Chinese students found this interesting, as they identified a similar problem as the main reason that Taiwan had steered away from re-unification with China. That is, they thought Taiwan's historical aversion to China had been economic, and now that China was a tiger, this problem had gone away. Some of the Korean students were politely sceptical that this was the ONLY fear Taiwan had about Chinese rule, but I was amazed at both the depth of thought (I heard some things I hadn't considered) and their willingness to try to express it in English.

On the Amazing Ability of My Students

So,

There is a strong narrative, both from Koreans and outsiders, that Korean education is broken.

Just, I would say, like education in every country is broken. ;-)

And Korea is far, far TOO oriented on passing the "test" rather than achieving knowledge. The problems of the system are well known.

Still, my kidz are monster little rockers. They are writing in a second language and doing really complicated thinking ("Interrogating" as the lit crit crew would say) cultural issues across races and countries. And the little weasels are sly! If I leave any .. any open space in an assignment, they will take that little crack, bust through it, and write to exactly the question they want to.

Then there are the two students who approached me about a grant (of course the 20-page proposal is due this Friday! Farking "Korean Time!") to go to Europe and study problematic areas of Korean literature translation. They approached me and their concept was so clever that I was rendered stupid.

Duh!, this was how to connect the Korean international marketing problem with literature. Literature is a strong vector of cultural contact and Korea simply does utilize this vector well, for a variety of complicated reasons, some of which these two super-geniuses have identified, and some bits I added in from a crassly marketing POV. And their proposal ties in to Korean obsession with Hallyu (also known as the "Korean Wave" and largely overestimated in Korea) and their bad translation approaches. Both things of which I was completely aware.

It is inspirational and humbling, to have these two kids walk into my office and lay on my table the approach that I hadn't thought to look for! I gave them the 30 minute lecture on research and surveys, and they went off to work. I'm certain I will be presenting, with these kids, at several conferences, and I can see a publication in the offing as well. I also hope they get their paid trip to Europe!

So, I dunno... I've only been at BPU2 for a bit over a month. And the uni cost me a million in fines by not getting me a contract. And the uni can't figure out my pay rate (on the first paycheck I got the bonus that Koreans get for lecturing in English!), so we're trading off electronic transfers of funds. And the uni does essentially no communication to Waegukin.

But the uni is a bunch of 50 year olds (alas, so am I!) and these kids are 20 year old hotshots.

They remind me of the expat Koreans I met in California, except when I talk to them they plan to stay in Korea, work for Korean companies, and use their English in a Korean context.

It's too small of a sample size for me to make any grand assumptions. So I'll just say; "I'm more than pleasantly surpised by how these kids think, and the things they think of."

Oh.. and this is only slightly affected by their good responses on my first informal assessment. ;-)

Woot - Upcoming Three Day Weekend

On of my little kiddies informs me that next Friday is "Hiking Day" and that all the students of the college are required to participate in a hike on Mt. Namsan.

Crusty old perfessers get the day off..

I'm heading me, to Busan!

Getting the Reins

Walked home from work last night and had a brief, but convincing, bout of the Bubonic Plague. The walk home was pretty boring, I was briefly surprised that the route that goes over the top had been walled off with big sheets of metal. Several Ajummas were ignoring that wall (which was pretty easy as you could walk right around it), but I wasn't taking chances with my limited Korean on any kind of kerfuffle.

So I walked a different path and other than a torturous roundabout (the Castle Wall Walk) that lifted my high, high in the sky and then deposited me back about 200 meters above where I had originally been, it was a breeze. About 45-50 minutes, including my partial ascension to heaven.

Got home, started working on some classes, and my bones started to melt. This melting was a direct result of my joints achieving temperatures found in steel mills, burning tungsten, and journeys to the center of the sun.

I drank as much water as I could, gobbled half a pain pill, and turned the Ondol up to a zillion. I rolled sadly on the floor for about an hour, then headed into the bedroom and crawled into bed with the window open. I had a series of weird dreams about attempting, in various ways, to smuggle packets of heat.

But sometime in the early AM, I woke up and felt a lot better - even as if the cough that has been dogging me since the US would go away. Well enough, in fact, that I walked to work. With the advantage of not getting lost this only took 40 minutes and I'm still confused why my landlady-ajumma and Mrs. Kim were so astonished when I told them I planned to walk to or from work at least once a day. I suspect their fear is on account of my Western corpulence.

But got to work early and worked more on the classes. I've found the cafe, so now it's coffee powered as well. Got to a point I think I'm ok in all the classes and also think I've connected with the students. There were a few days there, where that did not seem to be happening, but now I've more or less figured out the room, and adopted a couple of strategies for the less English-savvy student. Primary among these is that I'm letting students take their questions home, and I'm posting all the sound files and videos to my website. That way the slower students can play and replay them as often as they want.

As a bonus, in my convo class a worried student came up to me to discuss how he would do in the class. I gave him my usual rah-rah and reminded him that a Conversation Class includes the possibility that he ask for clarification, repeats, slower speed, etc.

Somehow this mini-conference turned into a conversation (nearly unheard of in a conversation class but, to be fair, this did happen afterwards) and I discovered that he is a big fan of filming and photography. He showed me the world's most awesome video camera and we talked a bit about lenses. We walked to the subway together and discussed possible plans for film projects.

Plans, it is certain, that will fall through!

But he also mentioned he has a bottle of bourbon, so there's a plan that might well work out.

It comes with an echo...

This is looking from in front of my desk towards my office door (Note sink and mirror - all I need is a cot and I've got an Officetel!)



And this here other one is looking from the other side of the table..