The Soccer

The Crew of IBC English Town celebrating another week of work in the books.

Since Halloween and the Templestay, there have been a lot of changes, traveling and more of the best sport in the world.

First things first, it has been back-to-back road trips for the Daegu Devils the past two weekends. November 15 and 16 was the Ulsan Cup in the beautiful city of Ulsan, which brought me back to the traveling tournament days with Ballistic United in the great Northwest. We did manage to take 2nd place after falling 1-0 in the final, but the highlight would have to be the tournament setting. The tournament was the first time these two turf fields were used and they were a new kind of turf that plays more like grass (no matter how hard they try, they will never come close to replicating grass), so that was an event in itself. The fields were placed marvelously along the Taehwa River with the hills rising along the other side. Ulsan is located on the mouth of this river and is a major port city.

The tournament began in righteous fashion for the dude after finishing on my first touch of the first game after coming on as a substitute. It was a deft touch from the left shinguard after whiffing with the right from a perfect cross from the right. That was enough to buy me 12th man considerations for the rest of the tournament and I came on in the next 3 games as the spark plug in the center of the midfield. From the outset, the tournament was marked by confusion and frustration from the organizing staff. The only team from Ulsan was an hour late for the first game, which totally destroyed the schedule. The substitution rules were ridiculous and unaccomodating at best. There were no rolling substitutions which means that once you come off the field, you can't go back on. This is a ridiculous rule when you are playing 3 games a day with few subs. Next, for each substitution you had to go to the tournament HQ table (not on the sideline, but in-between fields) and fill out a little form expressing who you will be going in for, your number, etc. After that you were to give the form to the sideline referee who would usually reject it and send you back to the main table who would then in turn tell you to go back to the field and sub in. Our team can get a little fiery and I think we took all this the worst. Two players received yellow cards for leaving the field after being prompted to substitute by the head ref. This resulted in half-full beer cans being thrown on the field by our manager and fans and exorbitant cursing at the Korean referees (who got a free English lesson that day). Eventually things smoothed over a little and we finished Saturday with two wins. After that we headed back to the hotel for a $2.50 buffet which made more than a few of us sick in the morning. Our Michael Bolton look-alike (also known as Jesus) would complain of food poisoning the next morning after devouring several plates of eel at the buffet. He also pissed off our lead goal-scorer with his snoring after sharing a room with him for the night. Reid and I shared a room and we all got 50% discounts being with tournament. The next day was back to business with two more wins and Jesus being sent off with a red card after running into the goalie in the semifinal and standing chest to chest with him after the play. We faced our biggest rivals in the final - Busan United - and there's not too much to say about it, really. I didn't get into the game and they scored one on a defensive mistake. So after that we had the award ceremony - we received a nice trophy and $250 for our efforts. The entire thing was put on by the city of Ulsan, so we didn't pay anything to play in the tournament. It was another great Korean deal.



I'll give you a soccer break right here and discuss the new changes at school. Reid and Joyce arrived three weeks ago and have melded into the rotation like the Sonics in Oklahoma City. I have finished my stint as tornado engineer in the classroom and am now the gym teacher. I work with Joyce in the gym to teach the kids how to play Twister (most have played before). We begin with a short warm up and stretch (we had a pulled muscle in the first class) and then we go over the rules and body parts. After that we split the class into two or three groups and have each play. The first and second place finishers from each group then compete in the championship round in which the winner receives a mini tootsie roll pop. So the stakes are high here and the competition gets fierce at times. Reid is in the video shop with Cathleen where they act as video store employees as the kids come in and pretend to rent a video. It is interesting to find out what movies the kids know about here. For new movies, Mamma Mia, 007 and Harry Potter are big. Most also know I Am Legend, Titanic, and Scream is the well-known horror flick. Of course there are a slew of Korean and Japanese movies that we have never heard of. Many say that Death Note is there favorite movie (this is not a movie but a Japanese series and almost no one has actually seen it). The other current stations are the Doctor's Office (for which I fill in as doctor a few times a week) and the Flower Shop - which switches to the Pet Shop next week.

This past weekend (22nd and 23rd) three North Kitsap graduates - Reid, Thomas and I took the bullet train down to Busan to meet up with our Korean friend from the Nevada Conservation Corps. Busan is the second largest city in Korea (it is huge) and the largest port city. Many of the cargo ships coming into the Port of Seattle come from Busan. We met her getting off work on Saturday night and tried a new Korean dish for dinner down by the beach. Then we met up with two of her nicest friends, Rachel and Min Jae, and went to the Long Life Bar. We had a good time catching up with her and getting to know her friends. They met in Kendo class, which is a Japanese sword fighting martial art. We were more than a little surprised to learn that our short Korean girl friend knew Kendo. We discussed Obama, they showed off their knowledge of the show "Friends" and we learned some interesting Korean games. After that we played some pocket pool (Korean billiards has no pockets, we do not entirely understand the rules) on the 9th floor of a building overlooking the bay and then retired to our hostel.

The next day we met up with our Korean friends for breakfast and a tour of Haeundae - the most popular beach in Busan. There is a small peninsula there where a magnificent conference center was built for the 2005 APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) meeting. We saw the conference room and pictures of George Bushy wearing a the traditional Korean robe. Hilarious! I had my soccer game on the outskirts of Busan, which Min Jae was very nice to drive me to. I told him that I owed him one, but he said that this was not the case as it was only his second time ever meeting with foreigners and he was thankful towards me because my laugh made him feel comfortable with us. I was more than a little surprised at this and laughed at everything for him on the half-hour ride to the game.


World Leaders in Korean dress. Bushy is back center.




Korean Breakfast with Min Jae and Hannah.

I met up with the Devils in Hwamyeong at what might be the only grass fields in Korea. What a special treat it was to be playing on grass! My game prospered as I scored one of my best goals of all time on a half-volley from outside the penalty box to beat the keeper far post side netting to go up 3-2 early in the second half. To be honest, I didn't even watch it go in I was so thrilled, I turned and celebrated with the lads. After that I had several runs down the right wing that should have been assists but for poor finishing. Finally, we got the insurance goal on one of these and I added an assist to my account. We had a little celebration outside the convenience store for our last road trip of the season and drove the 90 minutes back to Daegu. There are two more games left in the season, both home games against Daegu FC and our rival Busan United. To win the league, we have to win both and Busan United have to drop points in their game next weekend. Everyone hates Busan United, they are the overly organized and motivated team that doesn't party with the other teams and practices a lot. They also thrash teams instead of letting up after going ahead a few goals. This last weekend they beat FC Daegu 12-1. So everyone is hoping that we can beat them, though unless they drop points in their other match, they will destroy us in the goal differential tie-breaker.

Alright, so that is the scoop. Hope the soccer language wasn't too difficult for you. It is getting colder out here as Thanksgiving arrives. Not surprisingly, though disappointingly, we have no break for Thanksgiving.

I bid you all a Happy Thanksgiving, be thankful for your family!!


Me, Hannah, Reid and Thomas in front of the big Busan suspension bridge.

The Enlightening

"Why stand when you can sit?" asks Winston Churchill.

Obviously, Churchill never spent time at a Buddhist temple. After just under 24 hours living with the monks, I have never been so appreciative of the freedom that many of us take for granted - the freedom to stand.

On October 18, I packed out of Daegu with 100 other foreigners on three tour buses to a distant Buddhist temple up in the mountains. After stopping for a free lunch and tour of a historical site and museum, we arrived at the Golgusa Temple in the early afternoon. After various orientational speeches, we had a walking meditation in which we walked silently, double-file up the hill to the site of the old temple. These temples seem to always be built up high in precarious places (I am, of course, an expert as I have seen two of them), so they are pretty spectacular and worth the steep hike. This one was no exception, with a giant Buddha carved into stone sitting a couple hundred yards above it. They know that the carving was done by and Indian monk from the swirl patterns surrounding the Buddha. This monk likely was with the party that brought Buddhism to Korea over a thousand years ago. Today, the carving has a large, glass overhang protecting it from the elements. It is a fun little rock climb up to the carving and a great view of the surrounding rural lands.



We hiked down just in time for dinner. Dinner at the temple, was of course, vegetarian. Furthermore, you are not permitted to waste any food, though you are able to take as much as you want. Thus, it is a delicate dance to take enough food to last through the rest of the night (which included 90 minutes of martial arts) and not take too much because you had to eat it all. We all agreed that the food was delicious, however, I don't know if it was good enough to be able to eat for every meal as they do.

After dinner it was off to the gym to learn how to bow, meditate and eventually the art of Seonmudo - the Korean Buddhist martial art of self-defense. This is where the pain begins, however, because during and between all of this there are long bouts of sitting cross-legged on HARDwood floors. They give you some flimsy pillow to sit on, but it really doesn't do much. Of course, the monks and the grandmaster have much bigger pillows than us. Anyway, I don't know how you feel about sitting cross-legged, but for me it is okay for the first 3 minutes, then it hurts for about 10 until my knees are numb. After I reach the numb stage, however, extending the legs becomes a painful proposition. Even if you are a competent cross-legged sitter, the hardness of these floors and the lack of cushion in your pillow would undoubtedly have you praying for some standing time.

Whenever you are sitting, though, you can always be thankful that you are not bowing. Bowing is when your knees, legs and backs are really in trouble. A proper bower moves from a standing position down to a kneeling position without using his hands. From there he moves to bow, touching his forehead to the ground with minimal use of hands. He lays his hands out next to his ears upside down, raises them off the ground and them rests them back down. From there he lifts himself back up to his knees and finally back up to his feet. Every third bow is done a little differently once you reach the ground, but the physical exertion is the same.  On the next day, we had to do 108 bows in a row which took 40 minutes!


Seonmudo practice followed, which is an original Korean mix of different martial arts for the purposes of self-defense and mind-body harmony. It might seem kind of odd that monks would need to know how to fight, but apparently the Koreans had lots of attackers throughout their history from China, Japan and the North. There are some pretty impressive Seonmudo moves, my favorite would have to be going from a cross-legged seating position to the splits in mid-air and coming back down to sit - all in one lightning quick move. Unfortunately, we did not get this advanced, but we did attempt some nearly impossible stretches and learn how to kick and punch (in slow motion) up to three enemies at once. Needless to say, I feel much better walking around Daegu at night now. After they tired us out enough, they brought us all together and gave a great demonstration of what Seonmudo really looks like. It was an amazing show and I think a lot of us were in awe. They had a Ph.D. of Korean dance come out and show the traditional Korean dance to us and then it was off to bed at 9pm. It was mandatory to wake up with the cosmos so we had to go to bed early. The cosmos awaken quite early actually, 4am believe it or not.


Upon being awoken by chanting and banging wooden blocks at 4, we made our way into the gym for our cosmos awakening ceremony. After that, we had practice for the breakfast ceremony, which they said would be the most difficult part for many of us. This breakfast ceremony was actually created by Siddartha himself. It is something like 2,600 years old! We sat in four long rows and received a set of bowls and silverware and learned the order in which we lay them out, wash them, are served and then finally are cleaned at the end. I could seriously write an entire blog entry about this ceremony, but I think I will stick to the most important point - the cleaning. After you are served all your food, you have until the grandmaster is finished eating to eat all your food. Then you must begin cleaning. They warn you that the grandmaster eats fast, so from the opening bell you have nothing on your mind but getting all the food down as quickly as possible. I might have taken this a little overboard as I was the first one done eating and sat around for about 2 minutes. But at least I wasn't one of the poor fools shoving everything into their mouth at the last second and trying to keep it in. Anyway, once you get your food you immediately take one piece of kimchi (cabbage) and clean all the spices off it in your soup. Set it aside, this will be your sponge for cleaning. After you eat all your food, you take your hot water and swish it around in each bowl, scrubbing with the kimchi held by your chopsticks until all your bowls are clean. Then you have to drink that dirty hot water and eat the kimchi. It's gross but just throw it down. After that you have to rinse all your bowls with cold water. Hopefully you did a good job cleaning your bowls because the monks are coming around to check how clean your cold water is after you are done rinsing. I don't think anyone's was clean enough, however, and they emptied some of it and made you drink the rest of it. The cold dirty water is the worst to have to drink. There is no waste, so that rinsing water will eventually be used to water plants.


After a successful breakfast ceremony, it was time for a short nap and then the tea making class. We used Oolong tea leaves and learned how to make three different teas using the same leaves. Then we had a session of monk yoga/taichi/stretching and finally were on our own. A compatriot and I hiked to the top of the mountain - no easy feat after all those martial arts, but a great stretch of the legs. We got on the bus finally at 2pm and every one passed out on the ride home.

The next day I returned to work to find the whole place decked out in Halloween decorations. We are currently in the middle of our two week Halloween party that we throw for the kids every year. We all dress up in costumes - I am a Grim Reaper/death kind of character and am pretty much the scariest teacher ever. My station for this is the ball on spoon relay race and it is a brutal one. The first three days saw a student leaving class with blood. The first day a kid was tackled by another student and came up with blood pouring from his forehead and a concussion. The next two days there were two bloody noses, though I am not exactly sure what from. There is also a bit of crying from students that are too scared (the race occurs in a pretty dark room with a strobe light and myself and Brad trying to scare the students so they drop their ball off their spoon). The fourth day there was a girl who left crying to her teacher and then yesterday (in my absence) a girl peed her pants and then proceeded to cry. So yeah, it is brutal work bringing the Halloween spirit to Korea, but somebody has to do it?

Halloween costumes. I am the tall mask in the middle.

That should be enough for now. Upcoming we have two teachers doing their last days today, so Reid and Joyce (the other new teacher - from New York) are needed ASAP and will probably be coming in Monday next week. Coming up this week is the start of the Korean Basketball League, so I am going to try and see the opening game of that in Daegu. Sunday, I have a big game with the Daegu Devils, so should be a fun weekend.

Take care at home everyone and get your votes in! (I did not)

The Haps

Two weekends ago, we had another 3 day weekend due to a Korean holiday (I believe it was some kind of flag holiday as there were some flags out). We had friday off, so four of us, Adina, Chelsea, Nathan and myself took the bus down to Jinju for the Jinju Flowing Lantern Festival. Jinju, which is thought by some to be the most beautiful Korean city, has a large ancient castle on the Namgang River near the center of the city. It was attacked a few times by the Japanese some time ago and held it's ground at least once, so there is some Korean nationalism attached to this spot. The Korean forces used lanterns which they floated down the river to signal the arrival of the Japanese to forces outside the castle as well as to signal to the well-being of individual soldiers to their families. This festival is a stylish commemoration to these Japanese invasions and the lives lost. We reached the city in the late afternoon, scrambled to get a place to stay for the night (it was insanely crowded), and headed to the castle for the free bi-bim-bap dinner courtesy of the city of Jinju. It was the largest dinner party I have ever been to. We waited in line for over a half hour to be served a heaping handful of bi-bim-bap which is a rice and veggies mixed together dish. It's kind of good. It was just a spectacle to see something over 1,000 people be served (by their government) in about an hour. Oh also the bi-bim-bap is a regional delicacy in Jinju and was served of course with kimchi and some pepper soup. After that, there was a phenomenal firework show and some unimpressive women's choirs. We spent a few hours being pushed by the mob up and down the river, occasionally catching glimpses of lanterns floating on the river. I don't know what to say about the lanterns except that they were big and colorful and kind of strange (see ET).



I also don't know that I mentioned the Korean language class that I am taking at the YMCA in downtown Daegu. Well, now you know. The class is two hours every saturday until Christmas and starts at the very beginning. The Korean language is called Hangul and was created by a King from way back in the day that wanted to take all these crazy Chinese and native words and symbols and turn them into a coherent language to increase literacy in Korea. Thus, the language is largely adapted from Chinese, with its own alphabet. At first glance, Hangul is pretty overwhelming (though not as much as Chinese is). It looks like a series of wingdings, however there are letters that are not that difficult to learn, but can be difficult to pronounce. The vowels are shaped to represent the three components of the universe - man, earth and the heavens. Syllables must be written with both a consonant and a vowel to maintain balance and harmony (even if only the vowel is pronounced). Also, the consonants are shaped like the body parts and the shapes they have to make to pronounce them. For example, the consonant sound 'ng' is written as the letter 'o' or the shape of the throat - where the sound is made. The letters are grouped together to form syllables that become easy to read with practice. I am currently at that stage. Reading is becoming easier for me, I am learning a few words at a time and am putting together the simplest of sentences.

This next weekend, the city of Daegu is sponsoring a trip for foreigners to experience Buddhist culture through a templestay at a nearby Buddhist temple west of Daegu. A group of us from the YMCA are attending the all expenses paid for trip, which leaves Saturday morning from city hall and returns Sunday evening. We stay overnight at the temple (there are 100 of us visitors in all), and we practice the Buddhist martial art of self-defense, wake up at 3 am to do the 108 bows with the monks and have the breakfast ceremony, there is also a tea ceremony and Q&A with the grandmaster - the enlightened one. This whole operation can be arranged anytime, though at a cost of about $50, so cheers to the Daegu government! Unfortunately, I am missing my soccer team's big match down in Busan against league leaders Inter Busan.

I have been playing with the Daegu Devils for about a month now. It is a team of almost 20 foreigners who play in a tight five team league (two teams in Daegu and three down on the shore in Busan). There is also a 16 team tournament in Ulsan that we will be playing in mid-November. Anyway, the team is pretty competitive and tight knit, so it is a little difficult to break into the rotation, but things have been going well. I have been to two practices (which are 5 v 5 futsal matches) and one game which we won 6-2. Most of the guys are Eastern Canadians and late 20's - early 30's. They are kind of like an image of what I might become should I decide to make Korea home for a few years. Several are married to Korean women. They all love it here and are pretty decent at speaking Korean. After spending over 5 years in Korea, they also know the best jobs here and are able to make great livings while having 4 months of vacation a year! Back to the league: there are only two teams with a shot at winning the league, those being us and Inter Busan, so it is a little disappointing to be missing the game this weekend. I am, however, really looking forward to staying with the monks for a night and picking the brain of the enlightened one, so it should be a great experience.

It has been great getting your comments, keep em coming. Sounds like things have been exciting?! back home. Looking forward to the start of the NBA season. Chelsea sits atop the Premiership table and the Phillies are looking good for the world series!! We'll just stick with the positives for now...

Looking down on my corner of Daegu.  Looks kind of polluted?

The Gig

So, if you are like most people, you've probably always wondered what it's like to teach young Koreans to speak English. Well, fortunately for me as a teacher, teaching English is a huge industry so that it is not only well-paying, but also the kids are pretty well-versed by the time they reach elementary school. As I think I mentioned in a earlier post, I am working for a private school that teaches only English. Kids come to these private schools after public school which makes for a long day of schooling. Much like charter schools in the United States, these schools are run as a business, with making money the priority and teaching English second. There is a lot of controversy about the educational system of public and private schools in Korea because families will spend up to half of their income on their kids' educations and yet not see a major return on their won. These private institutions are much like colleges in the U.S. where the most prestigious are the most expensive and most sought after. Parents will sacrifice a lot to get their kids to the most prestigious after school programs. Thus, as a native English speaker in Korea, I am being used more as a selling point for a private school than as a bonafide language teacher. Anyway, I try not to dwell on the big picture as the day-to-day work is actually pretty fun and quite stressless compared to other teaching jobs.

The school I am at is unique in that we do not have the same students regularly. Our owner also owns a ton of other private schools around Daegu that send their students over to us at IBC English Town. There is a rotation that each school sends its students to us once every eight weeks so it is kind of like a field trip when the kids come to our school. The IBC English Town covers the fourth floor of the Daegu Bank building which is about 5 minutes walking from my apartment. There are six of us native speakers that work on this floor, they include: Nathan and Chelsea, a couple that met in college in Boston and now seem to travel the world working and backpacking. Chelsea is from Snohomish and has dreadlocks, which the kids call "snake hair". There is Adina, who is quite religious and also an avid hiker and explorer of cultures. Brad and Brendan are your fun-loving Ohio State graduates trying to get back in shape after a few years of inactivity. Last there is Cathleen who is from the City and attended Princeton. She finds the nightlife to be a bit dull here, though that is not surprising considering she is from NYC. Nathan and Chelsea will be the first to leave IBC Town as their year ends in late-October. Kingston-natives Reid Ammann and Thomas Grout are scrambling to get their paperwork in and take their place (oh and I get a commission if they do).  We also are supposed to dress nicely with dress pants and shirts, so my ironing skills have gotten some practice.  They say that the nicer you dress as a teacher, the more respect you get.

The job is like this: We get to work at either 12, 1, or 2 during the afternoon and work 8 hours. This 8 hours includes a 1 hour lunch break (usually taken soon after arriving to work), either an hour or half hour of voice recording (recording sentences into he computer through a microphone), maybe one speaking lesson (1 on 1 private lesson for an hour) and finally at the end of the day, teaching anywhere from 2-4 one-hour classes. Classes never begin until 4:20 at the earliest. Unless they come up with some other side job for you, you can pretty much surf the net or read for 2-3 hours everyday. Not only is this the easiest job I have had (with the exception of game room attendant in college), it is also the best paying. Since we do not have the same kids everyday, we have to teach the exact same curriculum everyday for 8 weeks. There are stations at IBC Town, including: Cafe, Classroom, Bank, Gym, Theater, Hotel and Flower Shop. For this rotation I am working in the classroom with Chelsea and we are teaching the kids a science project. We instruct them in building a "tornado in a bottle" from two plastic bottles with the tops taped together. We also are trying to teach the kids to be able to talk about tornadoes and other natural disasters, but obviously they are most interested in playing with their tornadoes.

The kids range from quiet and shy to hilarious and annoying. Most of the girls have crushes on the male teachers and most of the guys want to wrestle you or each other. They also have some great names, including Im So-Young, Park Duh-Bom and Yu Suk-Bum. They do not wear uniforms which I think they should because some of these shirts they wear are totally inappropriate. Everything with any English on it is totally golden and stylish, so everyone wears English shirts, but it is obvious that no one has any idea what they say. There is one particular line of shirts in which there are insane sayings in big letters covering the whole front of the shirt, they say things like: "I'm a f@#$%%^ Canadian!" or "Yellow men can't rap" or "I'm drunk take me home". These are shirts that you don't want to see your 12 year old daughter in.

Hopefully that gives you some idea of what my job is like. For a quick update, last weekend was the harvesting holiday Chu seok, so we got monday off from work. We all got great gifts from the school president - cases full of 10 cans of spam. Spam is huge out here! Anyway, I politely declined. On Wednesday of this week, we hosted the King of Quiz, which was a competition for all the top students from each school. The organization went pretty poorly I thought and we finally arrived at an undeserving winner in our opinion, but the best part was that at some point in the middle, for the purpose of deciding something, all the teachers from all the schools and us engaged in a soccer juggling contest. I guess that it was to decide how many kids from each school would be let back into the competition. As the women were all in high heels and probably poor at soccer anyway, the schools with female teachers were utterly screwed while the other schools got a much better chance. Sadly, I could only muster two touches on the stupid little piece of plastic we were juggling, while the top score was 11. On that low note and the impending financial doom, I will leave you. Have a great week, see you again soon!

The Crib

(Beautiful view from my window)

Ahn-nyong-ha-se-yo, I have been in Daegu for 5 days now and am still baffled by the fact that I am in Korea. I have been getting along fine and had a jovial journey over here. Most of the trans-pacific flights seem to leave late at night in the U.S. and get in early in the morning in Korea, thus it is night time the entire trip and much easier to sleep. I was met at the train station by my schoolmaster, Lana, who is married to a Bostonian, and she zipped me over to the school to meet all the teachers and the high-master and owner Mr. Kim. After that I got some much needed sleep and came in the next day, friday, for training and medical exams. I guess the training went pretty well because they had me teaching the last class of the day which was difficult but certainly not over my head. The main problem I am going to have is using words that the kids understand, as I have no idea how big their vocabularies are. The structure of the school is pretty confusing, but I think I understand it now and will write about it next time. This time however, I thought I would introduce you to my living situation:

I have been put up by the school in a studio apartment in the southern outskirts of Daegu (though it still feels like the middle of a city). My pad is about a five minutes walk from the school and is just off a major road and subway stop, so it is a great location. There are about 100 restaurants, 20 cell phone stores and 5 English language schools within a 5 minute walk. Unfortunately I do not live in the same building as the other teachers, but they are not too far away either. The apartment is a linoleum shrine with 3 rooms. The main room has the bed, dining table and refrigerator. The kitchen has the washing machine, stove and sink. And the bathroom is a just a bathroom. Though, bathrooms are totally ridiculous here as they also double as a shower. Just turn on the faucet and you're taking a shower right there where you would brush your teeth and the water drains through a grate in the floor. Though the system does encourage water conservation, the problems with it are that it is difficult to take a shower without soaking your towel or toilet paper or other bathroom goods, and the bathroom floor is usually wet, depending on how often you shower. Thus the floor would seem a good breeding ground for mosquitoes, bacteria or other foul (yet important in their own right) life forms.   

While my stove doesn't work and I don't have a drying rack to do laundry yet, I do have cable TV which is a completely ridiculous entity in Korea. The good news is that there are always lots of sports on the tube, however, they are always centered around Korean teams and/or players. So, if I am watching Premiership highlights, I am pretty much only seeing the teams that have a Korean player and that player's most significant contributions. Oh and every time I check the stations, at least one channel is showing the Korea vs. Cuba gold medal baseball triumph. Also there are two channels that show video games 24-7 (either Starcraft, Warcraft, or CS) and yes I do know who the current Starcraft champion is (I just can't make out his name). Oh and for those Food Network fans, the U.S. can't even touch the outrageousness of these food shows. All the seafood is usually alive and moving and some strange breed that is unrecognizable. It is thrown in a stir-fry and then is still moving as the ingredients are sprinkled on top of it. Then it is piled on to a serving plate as it crawls and wiggles around and is then devoured by the hosts as they go wild explaining something in Korean.

Friday night, I was taken out to a traditional dinner by my fellow teachers and we feasted on pork that we cooked ourselves on our own hibachi and a million side dishes. Side dishes are the main attraction for most of us foreigners as they are free and are brought out until you can stomach no more. Oh and vegetarian food is hard to come by, but hopefully I will have it figured out in a few weeks. After that, two guys and I hit the subway and went downtown to see the late-night scene in Downtown Daegu. We met and raged with most of the young foreigners in Daegu who are either English teachers or study-abroad students. One of the main differences between living in Seoul and in living in a different Korean city is the number of foreigners. I have heard that the number of foreigners in Seoul is pretty formidable compared to the number in Daegu, so it is much more likely that you will see the same people out at the bars and clubs. I guess it is similar to the whole large vs. small-college debate. So, once again I am at the small college.

On Sunday, we took a hike up to the top of the 3,000 foot Mt. Apsan which is just south of Daegu. Korea is a very mountainous country, though the mountains are not that high, though a lot have temples at the top, so that makes up for their lack of elevation in my mind. Anyway, there is a cable car to the top but we opted for the almost 4 hour round trip hike. I am impressed by how fit the older Koreans are (younger Koreans seem to be more interested in fashion or video games). Many of them would hike halfway up the mountain to where the city has outdoor weight lifting areas and then workout. Also, we would often see large families hiking to the top and stopping for a picnic in the woods. From what I've seen and heard the Koreans are ambitious and on-the-move people. I have heard about five times now how they have built their economy from scratch in the last 30 years.

OK, so it is off to class for me, I will try to explain what it's like to teach young Koreans next time after I get a few more classes under my belt. Oh and no, I haven't hit any students yet.