I went to the market today and bought a lovely bunch of greens for $1.

I wanted them for my daily salads but also wanted to cook some, so I threw together some pasta, veggies, and shrimp--yummy!

Korean Street Music Festival

From Sokcho, South Korea, 2007

Laughing Class

This is from a Korean academy I used to work at. One student, a young girl, in the class had occasional bouts of uncontrollable laughter, sometimes lasting 10 minutes or more. The first two times were cute, but then it got to be rather annoying. I think this was the 2nd time, and I happened to have my camera with me.

Trying to Avoid the "Cooties"

When I was a young elementary school boy, maybe in the 1st grade, we little guys believed that we could get the "cooties" if a girl touched us. So we ran around at recess trying to avoid all of the infectious girls. I imagine kids in most countries go through some sort of early gender segregation stage.

Now that I am all grown up (and sometimes even act like it) I feel as if my students sometimes have the cooties. I love my students, but there are days when I want to have no physical contact.

Last Tuesday night, for example, I discovered that 5 of the 12 kids in my middle school class were sick. Present in class, but sick. Two of them couldn't even talk, which, since it is partly a reading skills class, is rather noticeable. Several students in other classes were also ill; one look at them, a question for confirmation, and that was it--sick students don't get to use the whiteboard markers and I double my hand-washing rate (me washing my hands, though I encourage them to also).

I really don't want to get sick right now, since a) I recently got over a two-week cold, b) I will be moving soon and have a lot to do, and c) I will be getting on a plane soon, and clearly don't want to travel sick. (The interesting thing is that I don't know for sure where I am going; I know it will be to another country, to get a new work visa for Korea, but I'm not sure which country it will be.)

Lost Landscaping

What do you think it is? A park? A rock garden? I really have no idea, but someone went to quite a bit of effort to try to encourage people to walk through it.

One of my criticisms of Korea is that there is almost no effort made at landscaping; I think the concept truly doesn't exist here. It's sad, because so many urban/housing areas could look so much nicer with a bit of attention. Instead they are, as in the picture above, quite ugly.

Parks here have no grass, there are no sod farms, I have never seen a sprinkler system, there are no landscaping trucks with people out mowing and clipping . . . indeed, I have never seen a lawnmover in Korea.

This may suggest that I am from a country that has the surplus money/time/effort to spend on such unnecessary endeavors, and that may be true. But other countries, such as Japan, find beauty in small, carefully manicured gardens. It is rare to find such things here.

Korea is actively looking to "rebrand" itself, yet without a shift in consciousness concerning the 'look' of the country I think it will never truly succeed. I have read too many travel postings on the internet of people avoiding Korea due to its ugliness, and while that is a generalization there is some truth to it.

Maybe it comes from being a land that has often been invaded and fought over, a place whose people have had to work hard to survive. But this is a new age and some adjustment is needed.

Putting a roped walkway through an unsightly area and assuming that people will respond only demonstrates this need.

This is an older video of my friends' cat chasing its tail; short but funny.

Science Class Pictures

We finally finished our big, challenging, American science book, and--partly to review and partly just to do something different--I had the students (4th/5th grade) make some pictures. I asked them to choose one or two plants and animals.

I have two boys in the class and three girls. I allowed all of them not only the choice of what to draw but also whether or not they wanted to draw it alone or with another student(s).

The results seemed fairly typical for gender differences: the girls chose to draw as a group of three and to create pictures of flowers, a butterfly, and a peacock--mostly cute, non-threatening species. They made an extra effort to add titles and to balance the "look" of their composite poster.

The boys, on the other hand, chose to work alone and create pictures of carnivorous animals. No titles, no need to balance.

It was interesting to watch them work and to see the clear differences in approach.