Possible!

I have come to realize that Korean people are very persistent; even when dialing a wrong phone number. This morning my Canadian co-worker got several calls from a Korean man that had the wrong number. He started calling her at 8:00AM and kept calling her and speaking in Korean in spite of the fact that she told him ten times that she does not know Korean. She gets to the office and he calls again, this time I answer... I exhausted all of my Korean vocabulary (excluding all the curse words) in random order with random English words, that most Koreans know because of marketing advertisements, in between. "Possible" is one of those words that my Korean friend Alex over uses and abuses. As soon as I said "possible" my Canadian co-worker burst into laughter and frustration. Primarily because he just did not get the fact that I had no idea what he was saying. I talked his arm off and even had the phone handed to some woman and talked her arm off too. After about three minutes I broke into Bislama, and the laughter of my co-workers continued. I still have no idea what we talked about and don't know what half of the things I said in Korean were, but it was a pleasant 5 minute conversation. I pray that I did not just agree to buy a Ronco Pocket Fisherman or something random like that. ;-)

Would you believe that he called back two more times! The next call was passed to one of the Korean staff that told him that he had the wrong number. Unfortunately he called again. I answered and pretended to be a pizza delivery restaurant and took his order. He hung up and did not call back. That was hilarious!

Picture Day!

So yesterday was picture day for the morning Kindergarten classes. They try to arrange it so there is one Korean teacher and one foreign teacher in every picture. I got to be in two of my morning classes Oxford and MIT. Oxford, initially, was a very messy class. On my first day they pretty much chewed me up and spit me out and the Korean teacher ended the misery 10 minutes early for me as she saw that I had enough. Now that the culture shock is over and I am more relaxed that class has turned into a favorite of mine. The class is just wild and I can't change that, so I don't. I don't challenge them too much, make things easy, and just laugh at them for a half an hour four days a week.

That easy going spirit, that has needed to return, backfired on me today as I was left unsupervised with them for a half and hour and they went nuts and had me backed into a corner praying for the time to be finished. I think my paranoia is a remnant of my days volunteering with a local church youth group where the parents wondered why an unmarried male in his thirties would want to work with youth. I remember on one outing an overly concerned mother cornered me in Utah on an outing and questioning me in private about how I interacted with a girl that splashed me in the river...I only did what every other good leader of the youth group did... Splash back (regardless of gender)! Fortunately for me several of my best friends had kids in that youth group that I had been with on several outings so I could say to her that she needed to speak to them BEFORE accusing me of wrongdoing. She did and apologized.

So to get back to the point, Oxford pretty much had me backed into a corner calling me "Daddy" and dog piling me. There was no lesson planning as it was picture day so I was told to wing it. That class is pretty rough... Four boys and eight girls; you can imagine why I'd be paranoid. Perhaps I need to work on that.

Work and Life Update

It's time to give an update on things going on here. The culture shock is getting better and this is putting me in a better mood. Being in a better mood is helping things out at work too. Most of the challenges I have been having in the classroom are gradually going away. This is in part because I have lowered my expectations and am motivating the students with rewards. This has resulted in significant changes in some of my worst classes.

Surprisingly, I only have one class where the girls are worse than my boys. They started out being a good class then just decided that they wanted to be bad and disrespectful. There will be tears from them on Tuesday. Conversely, one of my former bad classes has transformed into one of my favorite afternoon classes. This is a class that did not start well as my first day the boys decided not to like me as they were rude and I made them stand in the corner with their books over their head. It got so bad in that class that their Korean teacher and I put our heads together and told the director that if they did not change we don't want to teach them anymore.

The director talked to them and they got a bit better. Well that change in them relaxed me a bit so I could have some fun with them instead of managing the challenges. This created a snowball effect where they behaved better and I made the classes more fun. Now all I have to tell them is that we sometimes need to push through some hard and miserable "work" so we can get to the fun part, and the hard and miserable "work" is equally as unpleasant for me as it is for them so let's just get through it together. Yesterday everyone passed their weekly test. The highest grade was 100% and the lowest was one point lower.

On the personal side I understand now why I am here. "The plan," you can say, is coming together. I have learned a lot about myself in the last four months and am now putting a contingency plan together to resolve some things that need urgent attention. For me this journey is about becoming a better person and learning how to feel comfortable in my own skin. I was doing good for a while, but slipped once I got out of my comfort zone. Things are getting better now. Everyday that I implement the contingency plans I begin to feel better and more relaxed.

My leg is doing much better. I have been doing exercises and even go bowling on a regular basis. I walk a lot and that has caused some serious pain; so I have had to do some exercises to strengthen the muscles. Now I can at least live without pain killers most of the week. I was told early on that it would take at least a year to recover, assuming my chances of a full recovery land in the 20% range. I can live with a short leg as long as I can walk and run with a lift in my shoe with no pain. I am hoping that as the anniversary date of the surgery comes closer (February 1) the pain will abide. For now, I remain positive that this will happen.

TV who needs it?

Living so close to the other country with the same name in the North you would think that the military would have a little class. Unfortunately, a friend of mine that did an internship at an embassy in the Pacific was subjected to military tv; he held the same opinion.

I find it funny that the US military attempts to prove to the world that they are the best and baddest military in the world, yet they subject their troops with such stupid basic Kindergarten level propaganda.

Americans must really be stupid if they can be trained to operate ships, planes, submarines, and weapons of mass destruction, but can't buckle their freaking safety belts when driving down the road in their minivans.

OK, in all fairness I have been living overseas for several years and have received some training on cross cultural integration, but some of the propaganda they show is scandalous. Who watches this shit? It is demeaning! OK, in all fairness, it's a carrot and stick routine... I get to watch some favorite tv shows providing I can endure the propaganda... I think I am gonna cancel cable tv. Why have 27 channels when there are only 2.5 you can understand as they are in English; besides I have been living without tv for so long I guess it's the notion of tv that is irritating... Perhaps life without tv is much better?

It's #@$king Cold!!!

Wow! This is the first time I have lived in a place where there are a FULL four seasons and it is not fun. OK, Fall was cool and the colors were very pretty, but we got a cold snap over the weekend and it is now snowing outside. We don't like snow. Thank heavens for the ondol.

There is not much to say on this end. I went to the Techno-mart in Seoul to buy a wireless router; that was cool. I bought that and a hard drive enclosure for about USD$40. One of my laptops died on me so I needed the enclosure to get my data off of it before I formatted the hard drive. Fortunately I had already backed up the data so it wasn't too much trouble to retrieve the new data.

With the wireless router I will now be able to watch my media (news podcasts, movies, ect.) on one computer and surf the web on the other. So far setting it up wasn't too bad. My old Dell laptop is sill kicking, but the WIFI card is an 802.11B card so if I use it with web access I have to reconfigure the setup with a WEP key instead of using WPA to secure the access point.