Archive for October, 2006

My Address 2.0

Having just recieved mail at Gohan Boys’ Middle School, it was made pretty clear to me that theirs was the address I had been given. Seeing as how I do work there, to have given some of you that address is not the end of the world. Mail will get to me. Still, I’m only there once a week, whereas I’m at Gohan Elementary everyday. Here is a new, better address, for your records, if you should have records, and if you should care:

Adam Skory
고한초등학교
233-812 강원도 정선군 고한읍 고한12리

Adam Skory
Gohan Chodeunghakkyo
233-812, Gangwon-do, Jeongseon-gun,
Gohan-eup, Gohan 12 ri
South Korea

For the convenience of everyone, but especially for the sake of those of you whom Bill Gates has deemed unworthy of Korean fonts (if up there, under the first instance of “Adam Skory” is a bunch of gobble-dee-gook [no slur intended!] rather than pretty Hangul characters, that means you) I have made an image of it. All you need to do is click on the image and then print, glue, copy, tape, or whatever it to the big box of presents you’re sending me!

my address

Gohan on Google Earth

I tracked down my house and various places of work on Google Earth, instead of doing something more useful like studying Korean, going to the gym, preparing lessons for next week, going to the market, or cleaning.

Gohan

As you can see (you may want to click on the picture to see it full-size), I apparently live right at the edge of the part of Korea worth seeing in detail. Kallae Elementary School, where I teach on Wednesdays, is about a ten minute walk from the edge of the high-res world into my low-res world. My house, on the Gohan Elementary school-grounds, is another twenty minutes west from Kallae on foot. Finding my house was a matter of inputing the coordinates I measured from my GPS one day. With that as a reference point, and this place being small and squoze into such a narrow valley, it wasn’t too hard to figure out which of the bigger white blobs corresponded to which buildings. The various brand-new ski resort buildings aren’t on here, which shouldn’t be too surprising.

Gohan

Looks like I’m quite close to the ocean, eh? Well, I’m about 35 miles away as the magpie flies but even by car it’s at least little over an hour’s drive. These are some very crazy curvy roads. By bus or train you’re looking at more like two hours. From here express buses pretty much only go to Seoul. Any other destination and it’s a local bus or nothing. Trains, in these parts anyway, are just slow in general – although cheaper, more comfortable, and providing of better scenery.

Speaking of birds flying, the Supervisor of Foreign Language Instruction of the Gangwon Provincial Office of Education (whew! be glad I only gave you his probably somewhat shortened English title) has promised that at our next English teacher gathering we will get a chance to visist that yellow line near the horizon (probably from a safe distance, unfortunately). There we will see some migratory birds doing what probably pretty much everyone else coming from where they’re coming from wishes they could do. And those folk probably wouldn’t be so bird-brained as to return in the spring. He also told us to work here many years and that we shouldn’t worry about getting nuked.

While I’m off doing more useful things and not getting nuked in the process, you should download Google Earth. Then you should click here. (If Google Earth doesn’t open automatically, try saving the linked file and then opening it with Google Earth.)

Kongrishy

Those of you who regularly view my pictures may have caught of few of these already, but I thought it was time for the first installment of what I hope will be a bountiful collection of all the Kongrishy I can point my camera at. In chronological order…

Convorse
Maybe this was on purpose to avoid trademark lawyers? Hm… nope, not in Asia.

Mr. Shit is Death!
Yeah he is.

White Mart.This is where you buy Whiteman.

I love coffee beerOMG! Me too!

They spelled it wrong.They spelled it wrong.

Black PowerGolf isn’t on there. I guess Tiger Woods doesn’t count.
p.s. I’m starting my triletics training soon!

Moon time.Yeah it is.

Yeah you do.

See comes.Ew. That’s gross. I don’t want to see those!

Finally a chocolate bar for the Lil Jon in every Korean child.Finally a chocolate bar for the Lil Jon in every Korean child.

WhitemanAfter eating your Crunky, you don’t have to worry about your mouth being too ghetto. This toothpaste should clear that right up. Available at White Marts everywhere.

ClinxAnd for the ancient Greek (or math major) in you, another excellent toothpaste option.

Another MP3 Player

New pictures. Check back in a week or so and some might even be explained.

This week is the Korean autumn harvest festival of Chuseok. Because of eccentricities of the lunar calendar that I have no desire to understand, Tuesday is a holiday, as are Thursday and Friday. Should one get out of work on Monday and Wednesday, that’s a solid 9 days off, and a good chance to go somewhere cool. So let’s rewind to two weeks ago when I politely inquired if I would have class on this, what has become a true Monday among Mondays. My coteacher said, let me ask the supervisor. Asks supervisor. Answer is yes, but no class on Wednesday. I figure I can’t complain – that’s still a 6 day holiday.

Ffwd: today. I show up for school, deposit bag, iPod, usw., at desk. Material for 2nd grade in hand, I head towards the classroom. I knew my coteacher had a meeting in the morning, so I would be flying solo today. I glance at the big class schedule on the wall and… wait! something looks terribly different. Where’s the 영 (yeong [English])? There’s no 영 (yeong). I trade some of my broken Korean for some of the Math teacher’s broken English. Turns out the schedule “is changey.” I have no class. So I pack up my stuff – feeling very bemused that I had to spend 5 hours on busses yesterday to get back to Gohan just to not work today rather than feeling happy to suddenly not have class. I oh-well and pack up my stuff. Having had it drilled into my head to profusely and politely greet my coworkers at every possible chance, I head out with a bow and an 안녕히 계십시오 (anyeonghi gyeshibshiyo) – only to have the science teacher start desperately explaining something to me in Korean. I got the gist that I had to stay until after lunch, what I did not get was why! They’ve never made me stay around when I didn’t have class before! Reportedly many other EPIK teachers are struggling with being stuck at the office until 5pm whether they have class or not. A huge plus of teaching at so many different schools and not having any one main-school is that I have unto this very day never been forced to hang around an office upon finishing my classes. I’m pretty sure I also have to thank my predecessor for this, as a few others I’ve talked to who teach at many schools have said even they are stuck in the office sometimes. My predecessor, one Sam Parker (“미스터 파커”), was teaching both in Gohan and the next town a few clicks over, Sabuk. Now he’s teaching only in Sabuk and I’ve taken over his Gohan operations. I don’t even want to think about how many schools he was teaching in, except to be happy that it meant he couldn’t possibly be forced to sit in an office for no reason, and now such is not expected of me.

Until this morning. I should have just slipped out, I’m SURE they would never have even considered my absence. Being stuck here right now is, however, not what bothers me. I’m at least two weeks behind on blogging, so I can use this time. What bothers me is that my coteacher said I had class today! If it was clear I would not have class today, whether or not they wanted me here, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be somewhere awesome cuz a 9 day vacation is worth going somewhere awesome. A weekend and a subsequent 6 day vacation is nice, but inot truly somewhere-awesome worthy.

I have two complaints about this job. The one I thought I could deal with but which has really bitten me on the ass today is lack of communication. It appears to be quite the Korean style to have all these suit and tie meetings and plan everything in minute detail, and then not tell anyone about it until the absolute last minute. Since I’m usually just hanging around Gohan and don’t have much else to do, being told at the last minute that this class is moved or canceled or I have to go to this meeting at this place or whatever isn’t a big deal. Bifurcating a potential 9 day vacation just so I can sit at a desk and bitch on the internet is a big deal. And just now, as I’ve been sitting here writing this, my coteacher called and started making noises towards the supervisor wanting me here on Wednesday! Having been very explicitly told I had Wednesday off, I quickly said I had reservations and lots of travel plans, thank you very much. This was not entirely true, but if they can lie to me, or, to be fair, change their story at the last minute, I feel no trouble lying about that. Aaaaaaaah! In the end, I do realize that of all the potential trials and tribulations I exposed myself to by taking on a new job in a new country this is pretty low down the list, still it’s annoying, and what better place to bitch about it?!

The other complaint I have about this job is of a very different sort. It’s one that is really a mixed blessing: that I teach so many different levels. Something like 12, depending on how you count. This is apparently enviable to some teachers with the experience, organization, and resources to prepare all the necessary lessons and material. I do see why; it most definitely never gets boring! As a matter of fact, by far my favorite classes are at the two extremes: the kindergarteners and the advanced high-school girls’ (extra-curricular) conversation class. But goddamn does it exhaust me! I barely manage to summon all the energy I have left after teaching to go to the gym, so please understand why I haven’t been writing the wonderful novels you expect each week. And now my supervisor has offered me the chance to teach an adult conversation class for 30,000 won (US$31) /hour, 4 hours a week in the evenings. I said I’m interested because that’s damned good money, I think I could enjoy a class like that, and I can work the schedule out myself (including, I will mandate, time off during winter so I can snowboard!). But with the trouble keeping up I’m having now without that class, I hope I can handle it! It feels like I should be able to adapt with more experience, practice, good organization and time management. Of course those last two things have certainly never been my forte, as many of you probably know. But I can learn. I do that sometimes. I can learn things.

Like Korean. It seems that all of a sudden, about two weeks ago, I actually started progressing with my Korean! I have hardly done any actual and regular sitting down and studying Korean, despite many intentions to have started doing that a long time ago. See above. On top of that, I’m teaching English all day long. This means not only am I not speaking Korean, but in all but the younger elementary classes, I have been actively trying to not speak Korean. This is something I’m finding more and more to be somewhat unwise, not just for my sake, but also for the students’ sake. Only real experience at the individual level can show me what the right amount of translation is in class, but I’m finding out that in most of my classes it’s not none. Aside from “out”ing my Korean abilities with some of my classes, there are some other factors I suspect in what I’ve perceived to be the recent upturn in my Korean progress. It’s strange, and I know I’ve certainly had agency in this, but it seems like kind of all of a sudden lots of different people just stopped either trying English with me or, more commonly, not talking to me, and started actually speaking Korean to me. I don’t understand much, but it’s been great! The final factor is my electronic dictionary.

At first I was thinking about waiting for a trip to Seoul to get one cheap, but my paper dictionary was absolutely driving me insane! The Korean-English section of it is ordered alphabetically by transliteration, and the transliteration they use might be regular, but it certainly isn’t always logical to me, nor representative of how the words actually sound or are written in Hangul. I decided I need to get an electronic one right away so I could start using it, right away. So, I headed to the local “metropolis,” Taebaek, since there’s no where to buy one here. I was directed to one shop that might sell one. Closed. Finally found another, a “Digital LG” store. I always assumed these stores sold only LG products, and mostly home appliances, since that’s what’s obvious from the outside. Turns out they have a small selection of personal electronics, not all of which are made by LG. Having seen what things are like in Seoul, I was simply astonished. They were selling old model MP3 players and digicams at what would be high prices Another MP3 player.back home. They had three electronic dictionaries. I bought the cheapest one. $220.00! That was about $70.00 more than they seemed to be, on average, in Seoul. But I was tired of waiting and in the mood to just buy one of the damned things so I just bought the damned thing. It’s actually pretty cool! And I saw it for $200.00 in a major store in Sokcho this Saturday, so maybe I didn’t get ripped off too bad! According to the box, it has 24 functionalities! Among these are the following dictionaries: Korean, English (Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary – good enough for me! I even used it already), Hanja ( means Korean written with Chinese characters), Korean-English, English-Korean, Japanese-Korean, Korean-Japanese, Chinese-Korean, Korean-Chinese. For all these languages, as well as German, Spanish, French and Italian, it also has an extensive Korean-to-that-language phrasebook. You can even add words to the dictionaries yourself, and save words as flashcards. It has a memo pad, a date book, an address book, a class schedule, a solar calendar, a lunar calendar, world time, and a few games, including a decent tetris. All of these extras, of course, are clearly added-on and they don’t really expect you to use any of them except the dictionary since they’re all truly horribly designed. To add a space, when writing, one must press the shift key first, just to name a particularly lovely design element. They use spaces in Korean too, so that’s not just crappy for writing English. You can set it into funky English, and it even changes most of the menus! Out of the little speaker on it, it will pronounce Japanese, English, and Chinese vocabulary for you. You’re already supposed to know how the Korean sounds. It come with a 128MB SD card. It will play MP3’s off that SD card on it’s little speaker, and even has a headphone jack, together with headphones with a remote control on the chord. The MP3 player interface is pretty crap. My favorite part is that it can’t access anything else on the SD card while playing MP3’s. The other thing to which I refer is text files. Far into exploring the dictionary’s menus, I discovered that it has an “ebook reader,” which is really just a text file editor, but thanks to the page up and page down buttons, makes it into an effective ebook machine. That was a really cool surprise, since I starting to miss having a palm pilot on which to read ebooks. I wouldn’t really call it a proper ebook reader, since if you switch back to dictionary mode, it doesn’t remember where you were in the text file. The only option to avoid pressing page down a million times is to split your ebook up into a bunch of smaller files. Annoying, but doable. I have plans to write a program to do that for me, by chapter.

Now that I’ve written more about my dictionary than anyone but my brother and my dad could ever want to read, there was another gadget on my shopping list two weeks ago in Taebeak to geek it up about. I needed to buy a cellphone. My coteacher was supposed to help me buy a cellphone. But, after waiting two weeks to get my alien registration card, I didn’t want to keep waiting for my busy coteacher to have enough time to go to another town and help me buy one. Besides, I hate being dependent on other people, and going and doing it on my own was a challenge I just had to take. I figure I probably ended up paying about $50 over what I could have for my phone. Buying a phone as a foreigner, at least here in the boonies, is a real bitch. A guy in one store just told me he wouldn’t sell me one and asked me to leave. I found a store where they would sell me one – one of five. Out of the 40-some cell phone models, so far as I could understand, only for five of them did the offer pre-paid minutes. As a foreigner, she would only let me pre-pay minutes, rather than buy a monthly plan. I’ve since learned that with a $200 I can probably correct this situation if forceful, or if I have the help of someone forceful and who can speak Korean, which would be lovely since the prepaid minutes are a truly extortionate deal! At least incoming calls are free.The 5 phones they would let me buy were all the same price, so I picked the best looking one with the most internal memory. I was actually kinda iffy on the phone at first, an LG-KP4700, but it’s actually really grown on me.Another MP3 player. It’s a sleek slider phone, rather than a flip-phone, which I really like a lot better, although it’s shape is a little funky. It seems like it should actually make a nice MP3 player, the speaker sounds fantastic for it’s size. If I find a decent-sized TransFlash card I could see myself using it for music, if only I can find a different set of headphones (the ones that came with it can ONLY be used if you wear the phone necklace-style – popular with the Korean kids, but not with me – and it does not have a standard headphone jack) and a workable Windows XP running PC with which to load it up with tunes. Asid from that, it does everything a modern phone should, although just how well I’m still finding out. It even has an IR data port. For syncing with other LG phones? I dunno. I even figured out how to set most of it into English! Frighteningly this brings my current count of present and potential MP3 players, here in my Korean home, to 7 ([broken] computers included).

Gadget proliferation is a dangerous thing.

And I have an income and I’m going to Seoul tomorrow. It’s a small town here. I said I had plans to leave for Seoul tomorrow so they didn’t ask me to be here Wednesday, so I’d damn well better leave tomorrow, or it will be known. I already have plans to buy at least one piece of electronics: a new laptop hard drive. Lady fortune blessed me this weekend when Mike, the Australian EPIK teacher in Taebaek, revealed he was a mac technician for many years, and offered to fix my Powerbook for me!!!!

What with writing this, the TV on (they let me leave school after lunch), and finding a hostel to reserve in Seoul, I’m about 2 hours later now for going swimming then I’d hoped. But you all cared SO MUCH about my new gadgets so time was not wasted!