Monday I used my bi-weekly, school-wide radio lesson to challenge all students to write a poem in English. I wasn't sure whether I'd get a single response, especially considering the reward: "The best ones," I noted on air, "would be read on the Friday broadcast."

But low and behold two of my students wrote poems, in English and submitted them today (Thursday) in time for me to put them on the air tomorrow. Here they are (unedited, including grammar/punctuation) as a preview.

"Mom"
by Park Jae Uk

I love my mom
She give birth to me
also she bring up me
So I being in Korea.
My mother is greatness.


"Everyday Prayer"
by Kim Chun Gon

In the morning.
just let me sleep sweetly
just be in the bed.
and just hot hear your cry.

In the after noon.
Please let me enjoy the meal.
Please give me such delicious side dishes.
and please do not make dissapointed with the some menu everyday.

In the evening.
Please let me take a rest
Please let me free of the final term.
and let me just go to bed.

The second grade students of Yeongnam Middle School and I went on a three day excursion across Korea. Here are a couple of the photos. You can see all the photos by clicking on this text.

Suffice to say, most Korean food is usually at least a bit salty and a lot spicy. Picture unidentified raw meat grilled in it's own juices and smothered in red-pepper paste. Now add a side of white rice and kimchi (fermented cabbage). Getting thirsty yet?

With all that in mind, I can't understand the way Koreans consume water. There is rarely if ever water initially provided at a meal. In many Korean restaurants, if you want it you've got to go fill your own cup from a water cooler. And the cups themselves are only good for a gulp and a half. Korean people rarely if ever actually drink water during the meal. They'll drink beer and soju (a somewhat syrupy spirit) but not even bring a water glass to the table.

At the end of the meal they'll toss back one glass of water almost like it's a shot.

In my school's special teacher lunch room, I am the only person ever drinking water during my meal. One English teacher even warned me once that older Korean people might be offended if they saw me drinking water at the table.

What gives? This can't be healthy, can it?

A recurrent theme in my Korean experience is the trouble folks seem to have with something outside the norm. This can be difficult to spot at first because it's rarely malicious. It most often manifests in amazement or humor. After nearly 8 months here Koreans still marvel that I can use chopsticks with any proficiency. I'm met with playful laughter anytime I utter a syllable of Korean.

But one bright red example yesterday might throw this phenomenon into the daylight for those of you who've never visited an Asian culture before.

It's gotten warm here; highs are in the 80s F some days including this past weekend. So Sunday morning I went to the beach for the first time this year, where I managed to get a rather crimson suntan.

On Monday, four different Koreans commented on my brighter than usual pigment. They were each embarrassed for me; not because I stood out like a cherry tomato in a field of corn, but because I'd gone to the beach at all.

"Nobody goes to the beach in May!" one teacher said to me. A friend at the gym just kept laughing, again not at my appearance, but because I'd visited a place strictly reserved for summer in his mind. "People go to the beach in July," he explained matter-of-factly.

I tried to arguing, saying that it was plenty warm and sunny for a beach outing, even if the water was frigid. "Why shouldn't I go to the beach if the weather is nice?" I asked.

More than one of my interrogators rebutted, "Were there many people there?"

"No, not really," I answered truthfully. There had been a few dozen people engaging in various beach activities.

But my Korean friends took this as proof positive that I'd managed some terrible social faux pas. In their minds, the sparse beach population was clear evidence that going there during the month of May, no matter the weather, was a radical act, best left to the homeless and senile.

It's kind of sweet in some ways. They wanted to protect me from what they see as me making a fool of myself. But I want a tan, and frankly, I'm happy to have the beach to myself.

As I've noted in earlier posts, many Koreans know at least a handful of English words and phrases, even if they're usually too self-conscience to say them aloud. But when they do expound one of these manufactured, tourist-friendly idioms, it's usually either endearing or uncomfortable. My most recent encounter was the latter.

I was using the urinal at my school when another young male teacher entered the bathroom. In typical westerner fashion, I kept my eyes down and made no acknowledgment of another human being in the room.

But my newly arrived companion for this bladder-evacuation expedition wasn't familiar with these unwritten public bathroom rules. Standing two stalls away from me he unzipped, began his business and then turned to me with a smile.

"How is the weather today?" he asked.
Since he was actually closer to the window than I was and therefore in a better position to judge the weather, I assumed he meant something closer to, 'isn't the weather nice today,' so I replied, "It's very nice," and again diverted my eyes away.

But I could feel his gaze burning a hole in the side of my head. So I eventually turned to look at him again hoping I could give him a smile and a nod and he'd turn back to his own affairs.

Smiling again, although now with a devilish curl at the corners of his mouth he said, "You must be careful." Having finished what he set out to do, he turned and walked out of the bathroom without another word.

Was this a clairvoyance's helpful fortune telling? Or a local crime syndicate warning me to play ball or face the consequences? Needless to say, I washed my hands thoroughly before returning to work.

I've always been sensitive about my weight and in that sense coming to Korea was a huge mistake. Koreans are small people in all sorts of ways -- particularly their waistlines.

Case-in-point, the film "200 Pound Beauty" which we were required to watch as part of our Korean educational training. It was an extraordinarily popular romantic comedy about a large young woman with an amazing singing voice. Because she was fat, the record producer (who she was secretly in love with) has a slimmer woman lip sync the large one's songs. Eventually, the large girl has all kinds of plastic surgery making her just as skinny and beautiful as the lip syncer. Great story, eh? Did I mention that the fat girl is a phone sex worker in her spare time?

But the comedy in the movie is almost completely surrounds this 200-pound girl; a weight unimaginable for most Koreans, especially for a woman. While 200-pounds is heavy, the physical comedy in this film would make you think the character was played by the mother in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape." There are your standard jokes like a chair breaking under the girl's weight, and some really extraordinary moments such as four men failing to jointly lift this woman on a stretcher.

And it's not relegated to the movie screen. Nearly every day my students, the people at my gym or some Korean I know looks at or pats my stomach and either sighs with disgust or asks me, "Why?"

What I want to tell them is that any extra weight around my middle is a product of Korean culture, not despite of it. Koreans gorge at meals, eating what I'd assume are 1000-2000 calories in a single sitting. And they aren't even particularly healthy calories; mostly things like white rice, grilled meat, fried bread and lots and lots of sugary alcohol.

One man suggested that Koreans have a longer intestinal track than Westerners and can therefore process food better. But I know I've read that Koreans also suffer more ulcers than most because of all the spice they consume.

Long story short, one of these days I'm going to deck someone who pats my belly.

I am not the Buddha!

... yet.

Today I was invited to have lunch in what is usually the 'Women Only' room at my school. They had a TV on, turned to what seemed to be a MTV or VH1 knock-off. Here's a recap of what they were watching during the 15 minutes I was there:

1. Ten minutes of footage of a male Korean swimmer taking off and putting back on various shirts.
2. A segment about two pop-music groups bowing before and putting envelopes into a severed pig's head.
3. A scene of children in Africa with a Korean.
4. Back to the pop singers with the pig head.
5. A commercial featuring a beautiful woman with two small children at her side, sexily sucking the juice out of a plastic container of tofu.

I've taken to correcting my students' posture in class. They hunch over their papers like child-laborers picking through coal. I have a thick wooden rod, a coffee table leg I believe, that I'll lightly poke into the curvature of their spines. Then I'll pull back on their shoulders, forcing them to sit up straight or be jabbed.

The amazing thing is that they all sigh in relief afterwords and thank me. Considering how long some of these kids are in school chairs in a day, all that hunching over is likely to shrink their size by age 30.

One strange repercussion though, I've found that the more students' postures I correct in a day, the more pain I feel in my own back.

Konglish vocabulary for the day: When using English to express how one holds his/her body, Koreans replace the word "posture," with "attitude."

Korean students are programmed to forgo any creativity and are consistently rewarded for turning off that part of their brain. This creates an ongoing struggle for right-brained English speaking teachers who want nothing more than their students to speak up and say something self-created, anything.

Last week I presented my students with what should have been a fun assignment. Each received a worksheet with six photos from my personal vacation adventures but no explanations. They were fun pictures including one of me on a horse, one with me in front of a great bonfire and one with me swinging an enormous hammer. The students' assignment was to write sentences or parts of sentences to create some kind of story with the pictures.

Admittedly, making a cohesive story in a second-language might be a tricky task, but the kids had a full week to work on it and I only expected a sentence for each picture, six total. I told the students, "make and interesting story, or even a crazy story," and of course had my Korean co-teacher explain the directions again in Korean.

But students used the class time I gave them for the assignment to ask (or at least try to ask) what specific things in the picture were, what I was doing in the picture or where the picture was taken. I tried to tell them, "it doesn't matter. Write whatever you want, whatever it looks like." But these kids weren't having it.

In the end, all but two or three students wrote exact descriptions of the pictures; "Tane rides horse," or "Tane on mountain." The concept of using their imaginations to take the vague yet interesting pictures and make something of their own was completely lost.

The system trains students to respond this way. In virtually all classes except mine, students sit silently in rows as a teacher lectures. The closest they get to participating in the class is a call and response or repeating something the teacher says. Otherwise, they're simply expected to memorize the information the teachers provide and spit it back out for the test.

And this isn't just in school. I've met several Koreans my age who are currently applying for jobs. But in Korea, applying for a job doesn't mean interviewing or showing you have experience that prepares you for innovative challenges. To get the best jobs in Korea you must take a test. All the major companies have entrance exams applicants take and based upon their scores they're either hired or not.

On a personal note, I'm getting tired of trying to get my students to think or act 'outside-the-box.' My classes of 30+ students are too large for me to kill myself trying to get a single free thought. If Korea is hoping for 800 more cogs in their machine, this school is ready to help.

I hate when I ask a straightforward question and get a non-answer. For example...

My English classroom isn't ready yet, which posed a problem this morning because the classroom I went to didn't have a working TV or projector for my PowerPoint.

I explained the problem and asked, "When will the English classroom be ready?"

My co-teacher replied, "Maybe you could try one of the other teacher's computers in the classrooms to see if they work with the TV."

One of the joys of working in a school where no one feels comfortable in your native tongue is creating stories for the events going on about you that no one bothers to explain. For example, this morning I looked around the Teachers Lounge and realized everyone had disappeared without saying a word to me. I looked out the window and saw the entire school, 800 students and 40+ teachers out on the dirt-yard we call a soccer field in military-style lines.

Someone began speaking through a bullhorn with a Lou Garrick-style echo as the not-so-catchy Korean National Anthem played in the background.

I can only assume that the principal here is following through on what my high school calculus teacher claimed as the ultimate motivation tool; taking all the F students and shooting them in front of the rest of the school. D students will be instantly motivated, especially if we're grading on a curve; with all the F students dead they just fell below the "fit to live" line.

This morning I had my students tell me about their winter vacations. One small boy, couldn't have been older than 12, was struggling to find the right words. I looked at the small picture he'd drawn, a boat on the open water.

I asked him, "Did you go sailing?"
He shook his head.
"Did you go out fishing on a boat?" I asked painstakingly slowly.
Again, he shook his head.
Likely hoping I'd leave him alone, he took it upon himself to blurt out something, anything.
"I went to sea."

I'm left wondering what adventures this preteen had during his two months out on the big blue.

My school has a copy of Jeff Goldblum's The Fly, I can only assume to show students what happens when ignorant Americans get their hands on Korean technology.

Last Friday was a planning day where all teachers (including yours truly) were required to come to school to prepare for the upcoming semester. Failing to complete my lesson plan that morning, I declined a billiards invitation last night to finish my preparations.

It was a decent lesson for the first week and included two handouts I created with pictures from my winter vacation. Unfortunately, no one at my school has ever been able to hook my Mac (a dazzling, foreign device to Koreans) up to a printer here. So I emailed my handouts to my co-teacher Hee Jin Sunday evening so she could print them when we got to school.

This morning was a bit crazed, as you'd expect for the first day of classes. Poor Hee Jin was running around like a Leprechaun who preparing to report a lost pot of gold. So I was thankful she found time to print my handouts, even though the text and images printed to be about 1/4 the size they were supposed to be.

I'd faced problems like this before and had solved them by blowing up the sheets on the copy machine; a cumbersome project, but it had gotten the job done in the past. But this morning when I reached the copy machine, I couldn't seem to find the correct series of buttons to enlarge a copy. Readers should remember that the copy machine buttons and display are completely in Hangul (Korean) so this does not reflect my technical prowess.

Although she was busy, I asked Hee Jin on one of her hurried walks by if she'd have a minute to help me with the copy machine. She stop quickly, looked at me and the copy machine and said, "I think that because today is the first day for new students you will not have class."

"Oh, okay." I replied.

"Actually," she added, "I think you will have no classes this week."

"All week?" I asked, somewhat taken aback.

"Yes. I will tell the other teachers," she replied.

And that's how I found out ten minutes before I was set to start my first class of the new year that this week will probably be pretty dull.

I've yet to make my copies.

It's approximately 8:30a.m. Monday, March 2; the first morning of the new semester. I walked into the building about ten minutes ago and so far I've seen three cases of abuse that would make a Catholic school teacher cringe.

• After climbing the stairs I looked back to see a female teacher wailing on a students' head with her hard-sided three ring binder

• In the teacher's lounge, a male instructor with bad teeth slapped a kid's head with at least half his total force.

• After I finally sat down I heard a light moaning and turned to see an older male teacher pulling a student by his ear and hair, apparently because the student forgot his name badge.

Last week I was discussing Buddhism with one of my older Korean students. He revealed that he'd attended a Buddhist preschool where they taught him valuable childhood lessons. These are the things ALL preschoolers should learn.

• How to sit in Zazen
  
• How to open and close doors quietly
  
• The proper way to drink and pour tea, again quietly
  
• To think things three times before speaking them aloud
• The art of speaking quietly yet clearly

Forget learning to tie your shoes or color inside the lines, here is a blueprint for the education of toddlers. I for one am willing to help a tiny monk tie his shoes if he's busy practicing Zazen.

Homosexuality is generally frowned upon in Korean culture. But when you first get off the plane and walk the streets here you'd think basically all guys under 30 are out and proud. Your average young Korean fits all the western stereotypes: thin, clean, well dressed, high-maintenance hair. Plus, many facets of Korean life lend themselves to gaydar alarms. Take for example the popularity of bathhouses which I discussed at length in an earlier post.

But after a conversation with a Korean friend, I've learned that Koreans have their own stereotypes about what's gay and what's straight, they're just seemingly counter to those in the west.

As a public service, I've complied a gay/not gay list about Korean stereotypes. I've found lots of examples of things you'd think would be gay that are in fact considered quite heterosexual here and a few things that are just the opposite.

The list is exclusive to male stereotypes because that's all I've learned about thus far. Perhaps some day I'll be able to create a second list of Lesbian myths.

(Note: I use the word 'boy' as a general substitute for male, not to imply age).

Gay:
Boys watching a movie together.

Not Gay:
Boys holding hands while walking in public.

Not Gay:
Boys sitting on each others' laps.

Not Gay:
Guys buying each other jewelry, including 'Friendship Rings' which look a lot like wedding bands.

Gay:
Two guys living together, even as roommates with separate bedrooms.

Not Gay:
Boys bathing together and scrubbing each others' most private areas. I was told bathing your friend is a "sign of loyalty."

Last Friday was a school day; the first official school day in a month. Why was it a school day? Because the Korean Federal Government mandates a certian number of days middle school students must attend classes. Students at our school were short of that number of days so Friday and Saturday were technically "school days." All the students and teachers were obligated to show up. When I showed up, my co-teacher told me I'd be teaching classes that day, which was news to me.

But five minutes before class time, after I'd scrambled to put together a lesson plan, I was told, "No, you don't have to teach. Maybe you should just go home for the afternoon."

Strange, yes? That's Korea!

Since my last post I've been to Seoul and back and I'd like to say without apology that the food was probably the best part. We indulged in Indian, Greek, Middle Eastern, pseudo French and great Italian; things which are either impossible or an epic challenge to find in Busan.

Many things were closed on Monday for the Lunar New Year, but we were still able to see some of the sights. I've always been bothered by the notion that vacations must include a certain number of photographable events and trips to fulfill their mission. While I've never been one to sit in a hotel for a week and call it a holiday, a vacation should not mean checking boxes of tourist accomplishments.

So while we may not have done as many things as one might expect for a first-time trip to such a notable destination, we did have a good time.

In mild contrast to my previous statement on vacations, allow me to share some photos of the trip to prove what a great time we had. The photo here is the view from the Namsan Cable Car, which took us up a mountain to the base of Seoul tower. This is about the widest view of Seoul my little camera could capture, which is probably only 1/1000000 of the actual city. The human eye can't view this whole city at once, or even in a year-long stay. You can see further photos from my Seoul trip collection by clicking this hyperlink.

This weekend I am heading to the South Korean Capital, Seoul. When we first arrived in Korea, our employing government agency EPIK (English Program in Korea) held a ten day orientation in Seoul. But they kept us so busy with classes and training on a small college campus, we had no time to explore the city.

But this weekend I'm heading up there with little agenda other than exploration. Danny went there several weeks ago while his parents were visiting, so he'll play guide to some degree for Brandon and me.

Here is one photo I took that first week in Seoul of a street just beyond our college-campus lodgings.

As an added variable, this weekend holds one of the biggest holidays in Korea; the Lunar New Year. I know very little about this holiday. As opposed to the traditional, solar New Year in the West, people don't go out partying and dropping large glowing orbs. Rather, they spend the day with their families and pay homage to their ancestors.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia page describing Lunar New Year.

In a local cafe today, I was looking through a recent issue of Newsweek which featured a host of stories and photos from the Israeli incursion into Gaza. A Korean high school student from the neighborhood happened upon me and struck up a conversation -- he's always interested in practicing his English.

He noticed my magazine so I offered him a look through. He stopped on a picture of three Palestinian boys, probably just his age, in ski masks hurling stones at something outside the frame.

Before I had a chance to ask about his opinion on the conflict, he pointed to something in the photograph. I leaned over and he said, "Nike." He was pointing to the name brand on one of the boys' hat. He then pointed to the shoes of a different boy in the picture and said, "Nike." This was clearly a sign of approval.

Later, when I did ask him what he thought of the situation in the mid-east, he replied, "I'm too young to have an opinion."

Apparently not so when it comes to choice in name-brand apparel...

I'm sorry to have neglected this blog for so long; there's really no good excuse. But I'm on a holiday and have little to occupy my time for the next few weeks. If I manage to stave off insanity from lack of purpose, I should be writing with some regularity.

Rewinding back to Christmas, the holiday season here was largely enjoyable. While lonesome for family and tradition, friends here, both American and Korean, made this Christmas a happy memory.

We spent both Christmas Eve and evening of Christmas Day in Brandon's apartment. He lives in a wonderful three-room abode with a glorious view of the ocean. We performed many of the typical holiday rituals including exchanging gifts, eating Christmas cookies (my parents actually mailed a batch) and listening to Christmas carols. Here, our friend Mila is decorating a small artificial tree that Brandon's grandmother sent.



Here is our friend Rie from Japan with one of the gingerbread men my parents sent.









And here I am with my friends Danny and Brandon next to the finished tree.







On Christmas morning, a friend from my health club took me to his church. In this photo, Mr. Park and I are sitting in the church basement, enjoying some instant coffee after the service. Afterwords, about 50 people from the church went out together for a lunchtime feast of raw fish. Not your father's Christmas Day, perhaps, but festive nonetheless.





Finally, on the evening of the 25th, we all returned to Brandon's apartment where Danny and Brandon made vegetarian chili and we drank Champaign, again a gift from my parents.