I started off Lunar New Year's Eve by having dinner with an Irish girl and a man born in Argentina to Italian parents who then grew up in Australia. We ate Indian food in Korea at a restaurant that was full of drunk Nepalese construction workers boisterously singing what I assume were Nepali Lunar New Year songs. Some experiences, frankly, are only available in Korea.

We actually have a foreigner bar in Gimhae now. It is a mere block from the aforementioned Indian restaurant and is owned by Pakistanis. The barmaid, however, is Thai and the clientèle consists mainly of the usual medley of western teachers co-mingled with groups of Paki construction workers. Occasionally Koreans wander in and stand in the doorway looking like deer caught in oncoming headlights. They have a free pool table and a temperamental dart board. What more, really, can one ask for in a bar? Apart from decent beer that doesn't cost an hour's wages but, being Korea, that goes without saying.

I've not written much lately, not because I haven't been doing much but mainly because I haven't been doing the sort of things that necessarily make for interesting reading.

I have, however, silenced the ceiling voice.

I first heard it a week or so after moving into the new apartment. I was awakened from a sound sleep at around 8 AM by what sounded like someone yelling on a bullhorn just outside of my apartment. Being that my apartment is on the 6th floor and there are no ledges outside, this implied a terrifically powerful bullhorn. It stopped before the higher functions of my brain were able to full engage, as this generally requires a few hours and multiple cups of coffee, so I was unable to fully investigate the source. At the time, the Korean elections were impending so I blearily adopted the notion that it had been an overly enthusiastic campaigner doing some early morning speechifying, filed it in the 'only in Korea' bin of my life experiences and went back to sleep.

When it happened again a week later, again while I was sleeping, I began to feel there was some sort of conspiracy afoot. The second time, the amplified yelling was preceded by what sounded like vigorous microphone tapping. This provided enough of an adrenaline rush to make it impossible to resume sleeping. Consequently, when the incident repeated itself five minutes later I was able to determine that the voice was coming from somewhere within my apartment. To be precise, from a small, previously innocuous looking grill in the ceiling. I'd assumed it was some sort of ventilation thingie but no. It was a speaker.

I tried to think of reasons why someone might feel the need to yell over a speaker in my apartment early in the morning in a language that I don't tend to understand unless it is accompanied by finger puppets.

Was I late on rent? Was it the police telling me to stay inside the building due to rampaging delivery scooters? Or worse, perhaps they were telling me I was surrounded? An opportunistic salesman exploiting a building intercom?

I consulted with my coworker the following day at work.

"Do you, ummm...hear loud yelling Koreans from a speaker in your ceiling early in the morning?"

"Yes!" he yelled. "It's something about the parking garage I think. Telling people to move their cars."

This was far less interesting but ultimately a more plausible explanation than anything I'd come up with. It made it that much more irritating, however, as not only could I not understand the announcements but, being as I don't have a car, the announcements had absolutely zero relevance to me.

The next time the speaker sent me flying out of my chair I was inspired to perform a close inspection of it. The speaker plate was held up, unsurprisingly, by screws. I did not happen to have a screwdriver but resolved that next time I was wandering through the screwdriver store I'd be sure and pick one up.

This of course, didn't happen.

Fortunately for the absent-minded procrastinator in me, the speaker managed to time one of its recent announcements to occur as I was getting ready to head out to meet a person of interest for dinner. A reminder when one is actually on the way out the door is far more effective. It was reaffirmed 5 minutes later when, apparently due to a lack of a response to the first announcement it was repeated at a much louder and angrier volume. My coworker sent me a text message. "I'm going to kill this guy". Yes indeed.

A quick stop obtained a screwdriver. I dropped it back off to avoid spending the evening at dinner with a large screwdriver sticking out of pocket, figuring it would pose a slight threat of impalement to anyone that came near me, most notably my dinner companion.

When I returned home, the deed was accomplished quickly enough that it seemed a wonder that none of the prior tenants had gotten to it. Four screws to remove the plate, two to let the speaker drop, satisfying destruction of flimsy speaker wires and then, a mere two minutes later, everything was replaced in such a way to make it impossible to tell that anything was amiss.

The next morning as I was sipping my coffee I heard the voice again. I was actually hearing it faintly from the apartment across the hall. Sounded like the parking guy was really angry about something. Sometimes one can't help but smile.

I have run into a curious circumstance that, insignificant as it may seem, has provided some insights into the overall psyche of Korea. This circumstance has to do with tomatoes.

Now first off, not that its overly relevant, I am not a tomato fan. I by this I mean fresh, unaltered tomatoes. Ketchup? Pizza sauce? Spaghetti? All fine. Fresh tomato? Pulpy, nasty and vile. There is no more effective way to ruin a sandwich than by throwing a slice of tomato on it. Fortunately, unless they have have achieved arch-viledom by being so mushy that the slice leaves small gelatinous globs behind when removed, tomato slices are easily removed from sandwiches unlike, say, mustard. The slices also tend to be somewhat aerodynamic and, due to their semi-mucous like inner consistency, will stick to things in amusing ways when flung with sufficient force.

Barring this, however, the question we are concerning ourselves with at this time is this: Fruit or vegetable?

Now, if one were to ask a child, the answer given is almost inevitably vegetable. When learning about our world we tend to classify things by how they are used and the tomato is used and cooked with as if it were a vegetable. Generally it's not until high school or so that we discover that the tomato is, categorically speaking, a fruit. A fruit is a plant ovary. Bury a piece of fruit and, if conditions are right, it will become a plant that bears more fruit. The fact that we use it as if it were a vegetable is more of a testament to their taste qualities.

Attempting to maintain that a tomato is a vegetable, rather than a fruit, simply on how it is used is a plan doomed to fail. My lousy analogy off the top of my head would be someone living in a van.

"Hey, that's a van."
"No, I live in it. It is a house."
"Ummm...it's a van."
"I live there. It is a house."
"You may live there but it is still a van."
"It has sidepanel to sidepanel shag carpeting. It's a house."

It has become apparent to my co-teacher and I, wildly and illogically extrapolated from a sampling of a couple of dozen teachers and students at my school, that the entirety of Korea believes the tomato to be a vegetable and that they hold to this belief with near religious fervor.

This first became noticed during a free-talking class my co-worker gave. The students came running out of class and went straight to the computers. He rolled his eyes at me.

"They're trying to prove to me that tomatoes are vegetables."

After a few minutes, it became obvious that the two girls were having to visit multiple websites in order to find one to justify their beliefs. Finally they proudly stood back and pointed at the screen which was full of Korean.

"Vegetable!" they proclaimed.
"Ummm...find it in English. Try an online dictionary."

We punched it in for them.

Tomato:
1. Any of several plants belonging to the genus Lycopersicon, of the nightshade family, native to Mexico and Central and South America, esp. the widely cultivated species L. lycopersicum, bearing a mildly acid, pulpy, usually red fruit eaten raw or cooked as a vegetable.
2. The fruit itself.

They seemed agitated and scrolled down to the next dictionary.

Tomato:
1. A widely cultivated South American plant (Lycopersicon esculentum) having edible, fleshy, usually red fruit.
2. The fruit of this plant.

Waves of angst and hostility now radiating from them, they went to the next definition.

Tomato:
1. Mildly acid red or yellow pulpy fruit eaten as a vegetable

"See!" they pointed. "Vegetable!"
"Uh...no. Eaten AS A vegetable. Not a vegetable. It's a fruit."

In frustration they turned to one of the Korean teachers walking past.

"Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?"
"A vegetable," he answered.
"See?" they yelled.

We showed him the definitions. He scanned them over and pointed to where it said "...eaten as a vegetable."
"Vegetable."
We pointed to the dozen places on the page that said "fruit". We pointed to the words "as a" that preceded vegetable.

"In Korea it is a vegetable," he responded.

Now, I have personally seen a cherry tomato arrive atop a cake that is adorned with fruit. Korea is a world leader in cloning research and hi-tech electronics. I have to imagine that the botanical definition of 'fruit' has to apply somewhere in the country. Polling of further teachers and students revealed a firm conviction in all of them that the tomato was a vegetable.

"If it is a fruit," he went on, "it means our entire education system is wrong."

Well, yes, though that's a bit of a leap from a single incorrect data point. There are many other reasons why the education system is wrong. It does, however, bring me to what was illuminating to me about this conversation. In fact, it suddenly clicked quite a few different pieces of the Korea puzzle together for me. Koreans do not tend to question information from an authority. I imagine this to be a quality of a Confucian based education system. You sit in a classroom and endlessly repeat information until it is carved into your brain. This information is NOT wrong. You will not question this information. Japan is evil. Black people steal things. Korea is number one. Tomatoes are vegetables. Repeat 5 times a day for the rest of your education.

This is a contrast to my own experience of learning new things-when I find something out that goes against what I had previously learned, I relish it and love to spread that new information. I imagine this to be the case of anyone with curiosity and knowledge acquisition as inherent drives. We hear something that goes against what we've been taught, have it explained, and, provided it makes, sense, adopt it as our new model.

The teacher began to scuttle away, fleeing from the light of knowledge back into darkness.

I called after him.

"Hey, did you know that bananas are actually berries and strawberries aren't?"

Irony is often something that one is well aware of while it is occuring but can only fully appreciate it once it is a fading memory. No sooner did I finish my last post, about late night mogi hunting, thatn I went home to my screened window apartment and went to bed. Just as I was drifting off...once again, bolt upright in bed waving my arms around in reaction to the teeth clenching whine of a mogi fly-by.

I can only assume that the it sat quietly on my shoulder, reading my last post as I made it, snickering to itself and tagging along until I arrived home and it was bent on revenge. How else could it have come to be there? Possibly it was even the one from my prior apartment, and had tagged along on the move.

The revenge aspect was made obvious by the nature of its attacks. It was not content to merely deprive me of sleep with a few buzzes and then bite and wander off to sleep somewhere. No. This one bit and THEN did the fly-by to make sure I was awake in order to appreciate the itch.

Repeatedly.

Six times, as a matter of fact, all on the same arm. More, in fact, than I'd ever received in my screenless apartment.

This, combined with the absured nighttime noise levels of my new place made for a rough night. Apparently on this block it is the custom for large groups of Koreans to leave the bars precisely 10 minutes apart and then scream and laugh as loud as possible until about 4 AM. At this point the bars close and for the next hour comes the sound of large plastic bags full of empty glass bottles being dragged across the sidewalks. Then, at 6, come the trucks to pick up the bags. Add to this the perpetual sound of overly loud motorcycles, the chirps of car alarms being set, the inevitable wail of them being set off by anything and everything apart from an actual car thief, blaring horns as cars try to run down the aforementioned groups of hooting Koreans...

It makes sleep a bit difficult.

I have discovered part of the problem at least. One of my windows has a bent bit and wasn't closed properly, leaving an inch wide gap to allow sound in. This still doesn't explain how the mosquitoes are getting in. I did find and kill one the next day, but then found and killed three more over the course of the day. It seems that in addition to being able to turn themselves invisible, the Korean mogi can phase itself through screens at will.

Last week I'd dropped a bit of a hint to the esisting apartment resident, veiled in an off-the-cuff joke, that I hoped he would leave his apartment clean when he moved out. He responded with the assurance that the apartment ajima would take care of the cleaning. Indeed, I suspect that is the usual case. One person moves out and an army of ajima descend and scour the place within an inch of it's life and then the next person moves in.

Of course, this is not what happened. He may have adopted this notion in order to spare himself any cleaning efforts but, as far as the building was concerned, no move was taking place as the apartment was remaining in the same name. Additionally, as I moved in as he moved out, there was no time for any 'tween people cleaning to take place anyway.

Consequently, I got to spend the weekend cleaning. I make no pretense of being a neat freak but it is quite one thing to live with one's own grime and quite another to live with the leftover grime of someone else.

He was not much in the way of housekeeping, at least as far as the kitchen and bathroom were concerned. The kitchen counter, stove and walls were liberally coated with the spatter of the grease of a thousand mandu, colorfully accented with red splotches of dried soup broth. The kitchen alone took up my entire efforts of the weekend; the bathroom still awaits, apart from the bathroom drain.

See, while I was cleaning I did a few loads of laundry. Stepping in mid-washer cycle at one point, I was a bit alarmed to find the bathroom floor covered in a half inch of water. The alarm changed to bemusement when I realized that this was by design. My last place had a drain hole in the floor for the washer and a drain tube leading from the washer to it. This bathroom, however, has no drain hole. Instead the floor drain for the shower is set just behind the washer. When the washer drains it simply spews all of it's water straight out the hole in the back. Whee!

This would work just fine were the floor drain operating well. Peering behind the washer at it, however, revealed that it appeared to be wearing a toupee. A bit of teeth gritting was involved, but that part of the bathroom, at least, is now clear.

I had the dubious pleasure of moving apartments this week, and under rather mysterious circumstances to boot. I was initially informed during the last week of October that I'd be moving in November, no specific date given. I managed to get a few more details during the first week of November-apparently they were moving one of the Korean teachers out of his apartment to a different one and I would be moving into his apartment so that they could sell mine. I was also informed that the move would be "next week".

Monday rolled around and I was told that the move would occur Wednesday. Ms. Choi, the school principle, was moving to a new apartment for unspecified reasons. David, the aforementioned Korean co-teacher, would be moving to her place and I would be moving to David's place. They would then get rid of my apartment. The logical questions, of course, were: Why don't you just sell Ms. Choi's place and let David and I stay put? Or, if you're determined to sell my place, why don't I just move to Ms. Choi's old place? Curiously, these questions were met with vague and utterly information free responses. There's an additional element at work here that David and I are out of the loop on.

In any case, David came to me Tuesday and said that the move would be at 10 PM wednesday, after our last class. This seemed reasonable enough to me-we're all on swing shift schedules. Inconveneint as it was to move on a workday evening was going to be the best time for everyone.

Tuesday night I went out to dinner with friends and came strolling to bed at around 4:30 AM. Naturally, at 10 AM, my doorbell began to ring. My little security screen revealed a chipper looking Mr. Kim and a disgruntled looking David at my door. See, mr Kim had somply told David 'at 10 o'clock' and David had made the assumption that it was PM rather than AM.

Yo avoid, or possibly add to, the confusion, I should make clear that the Mr. Kim involved is not the same Mr. Kim as my school director. He is actually the school math teacher and David and I usually refer to him as 'vice-Mr. Kim'. In any case, the man is a machine. In spite of the fact that he wasn't the one moving, he was of far more use than David and I put together. He started the proceedings by hoisting my refrigerator on his back and setting off down the street with it. It's not a full sized refrigerator but still the sort of thing one might find impressive when one is a mere five minutes out of a sound sleep.

We spent the next two hours moving the heavy stuff-the bed, the washing machine and the wardrobe. The new apartment was only two blocks away so apparantly it had been decided that we wouldn't need anything as bourgeois as a handtruck.

We followed this with a Korean style breakfast-kimchee and spicy beef and rice soup. This was accompanied with a few shots of soju-apparantly it's a Korean tradition to follow any moving with some soju for good luck, regardless of the fact that it is morning and one has classes later. Granted, the soju did do a bit to improve my mood regarding the lack of sleep and bleary eyed moving of heavy furniture.

I spent the evening moving the rest of the small stuff. David, naturally, was moving out of his apartment at the same time as I was moving into it which made for some entertaining moments with competing pieces of furniture in the hallway.

The new apartment is owned by the same company and so, adding mystery to the reasons behind the move, is virtually identical in every respect. It's on the corner of the building which means that it has an extra bank of windows-a dubious selling point which results in the apartment being much louder at night than my previous one. The windows do have screens, which will happily prevent any reoccurence of 'The Incident of the Midnight Mogee'.

'Mogee' is the Korean word for 'mosquito'. Granted, the incident actually occured at about 5 AM but that didn't have quite the same ring to it. In any case, I was attempting to go to sleeep in my old apartment with screenless windows when I heard the unmistakable whine of a mosquito doing a fly-by past my ear. It was then that I discovered that, when half asleep, I have the curious reflexive response to this of instantly waking up and swinging my arms wildly about to fend it off. The catch with this strategy is that it works in waving the mosquito off but is utterly ineffective at ending it's heinous little life. Granted, being in bed in the dark at 5 AM with a mosquito splattered on your hand might not sound like the greatest moment of one's life, but somehow it seems preferable to the alternative.

The mosquito, apparently annoyed by my arm flailing, began the classic late night mosquito game. It would wait until I had just started to drift off to sleep again then perform another whine-by, one again turning me into a flailing babo. After 45 minutes of this, I finally got up and turned the lights on in order to perform a mosquito hunt; at which point it effected to render itself utterly invisible. After five minutes of searching I had found precisely zero mosquitoes but had managed to acquire a fresh mosquito bite on my ankle.

Mogee: 6
Babo: 0

This effectively ended the conflict, however. Now that it was full it had little further interest in me and allowed me to finally go to sleep.

So, theoretically, that won't happen in the new apartment. That's about the only plus side. My old place was a more convenient location in many ways, was quiter, and had a better view. Win some, lose some.

One interesting aspect of having been away from my school for 7 months is seeing how some of the kids have changed in the interim. Some of them have improved quite a bit in the English department; others not at all. Some have hit puberty to the degree that I'm not quite actually sure that they're the same kid. They LOOK familiar, apart from being a foot taller.

Some changes fall on the amusing side. One of our middleschoolers, a novelty among Koreans in that he enjoys rock music rather than sappy ballads, has changed his english nickname. I had heard a rumor regarding this but wanted to doublecheck with him in person to be sure.

ME: "Hi, Samuel. How have you been?
SAMUEL: "Good."
ME: "Do you still go by Samuel or have you changed your name?"
SAMUEL: "Changed."
ME: "What is it now?"
SAMUEL: "Zeppelin."

One should, perhaps, be glad that his favorite band wasn't The Pixies or, save us, Iron Maiden.

My personal effort this last week to broaden the musical horizons of Korea was woefully stymied. The owner of our Tuesday night haunt, in an effort to please the crowd of foreigners that spent copious amounts of money at his establishment every tuesday, asked us to write down songs we wanted to hear. He'd take the song titles, download them and play them. The kiwi girls we were out with promptly demonstrated that they had equivalent tastes to much of Korea by requesting a bunch of Beyonce songs.

I, however, decided to shake things up a bit and potentially drive the Koreans screaming from the bar by requesting AC/DC's "Thunderstruck", which currently sits as one of my favorite rock songs of all time. Five minutes later my efforts were made horribly manifest when a techno remix of the song came blaring over the speakers. Foiled again!

In other news I've managed to get sick again. Midway through an evening which saw both a birthday party and a going-away party I began to feel extremely tired. I ended up drifting out and going home where I fell asleep for 12 hours and woke up with a fever. I managed to stay awake for a grand total of 7 hours then slept for 4 more, up for two and then back to sleep for another 10. During this last stint the fever finally broke. In the aftermath, however, I feel like I've been on the receiving end of an LAPD arrest. Even my eyeballs are sore. I'm a bit annoyed by it as I was supposed to attend a tae kwan do tournament today. Having no phone yet, I was unable to inform the folks I was attending with that I wouldn't be there so I suspect that they may be a bit miffed.

The light had been red for several seconds. I saw the white car coming-he was hard to miss. He was at least doubling the theoretical speed limit and his car was tricked out with blacklight runners and blinking red diodes. One of the rules that I have come to recognize as a universal truth is that anyone who owns a vehicle with black lights on it is a git of the first order. This particular git came screaming through the intersection, horn blaring to tell any pedestrians to get out of the way because he had no intention of stopping. Really, the scream of tires and the massive crunch of metal came as no surprise...

The day had started out well enough, in that the stroke of midnight found me amid a rather large crowd at Orange Bar. Tuesday night is the traditional poker night around here and, as Wednesday was a holiday, the turn out was big. There were only about 10 people playing in the actual poker game-the rest of us had taken over the middle of the bar and pitchers of soju mixed with fruit juice were scattered across the tables. An amateur game was in progress at one end of the table. They were playing for 1,000 won (1$) stakes and using Q-Tips as poker chips. Later these several hundred Q-Tips were apparently deoposited by the devious Kelly into Martina's purse. The rest of us sat around on plush couches trying to talk some of the newbies into trying one of the silkworm larvae we'd received with our side dishes. We almost had Kira convinced-she had one in her chopsticks, poised in front of her mouth. I commented "ooh, that's a big one. It'll be a squirter" and that pretty much nixed the chance of anyone actually trying one. At one point someone laid a napkin over them in order that they might rest in peace.

Eventually the crowd of 40 dwindled to 30, then 20, then 10, until finally Kiwi Dave and I were the only remainders. We were kicked back, talking about travel and discussing the woes of our friend Mark. Finally we called it a night and strolled outside only to discover that the sun had come up at some point. We were both due to meet up with a bunch of people at noon so this wasn't exactly a welcome sign.

If one considers the 'start of day' to actually be the time one wakes up then my day actually started pretty rough. I dragged myself out of bed after three hours of sleep and wandered over to the local Lotteria where everyone was due to meet. As one might expect when having a bunch of people meet at noon, actually arriving at noon guarantees that you will be the only one there. Dave wandered up 10 minutes later-ironic as he was as short on sleep as I was. By 1:00, however, we had assembled 8 people and were taxiing our way to Chingay. Martina was grumbling at Kelly-she'd had to abandon her bag at home after discovering how impossible it is to find anything in a bag that also contains 400 Q-Tips.

We met up with still more at the grocery store in Chingay where we wandered around with no plan whatsoever, trying to accumulate the makings of a picnic for a dozen people and terrifying the locals. Ultimately, the menu consisted of somgyupsal (pork belly) sandwiches, chips and assorted beverages. We also grabbed some cheap ham for when the somgyapsal ran out and a small camp grill to cook it on.

The picnic took place in a park next to a pool at the base of a small waterfall. We had a grill shooting fire out as the pork fat dripped on the burners, warm drinks, swimming, mosquitoes, a leaky inflatable boat and many bemused Koreans who considered us the best entertainment in the park that day. A smashing success, in other words.

Returning was a bit less successful as we were well out of the area that the taxis patrol. We ended up walking 3 kilometers or so down a narrow 2 lane road with no shoulder as dusk was falling. There was a constant stream of cars tearing past us with inches to spare. One of Dave's sandals broke about a third of the way into the walk, leaving him to make the trek barefoot. I now refer to this event as 'The Chingay Death March'.

Most of us reconvened in Gimhae at our favorite chicken place-a place that serves piles of boneless roast chicken or piles of boneless roast chicken dripping with chili sauce. Losing still more people along the way, we stopped for a coffee and then made for the movie theater, arriving about 5 minutes after the movie we were going to had started. We were down to 5 now-myself and Dave, maintaining our reputations as inexhaustible social dynamos, Matt and Jenny, a couple from New Zealand, and Mr. Kim, an older Korean man whom we'd managed to pick up when we briefly poked our heads into the bar along the way to say hello to the crowd of regulars there.

The movie we were seeing was "The Bourne Ultimatum". It was pretty much exactly what we were anticipating. Short on dialogue-long on over the top action shot with a shaky cam in order to make it seem realistic and edgy. I liked the film but, seriously, the shaky cam fad has got to stop. I propose that any director making use of this device in the future should be allowed to proceed only after having the camera forcibly inserted into his mouth.

Mr. Kim came to the movie with us. He was 65 and had no idea what the movie was about. I have no idea how well he followed it but he claimed to have enjoyed it and did at least grab a copy of the pamphlet on the movie that Korean theatres provide in order to read what the story had been about.

It was down to just Matt, Jenny and I on the walk home, Dave and Mr. Kim having peeled off along the way to get to their respective apartments. We were just about to cross the street by Lotteria when the accident happened. White car, black lights, etc. etc. It is a simple matter of survival in Korea to always pause after you have the walk light ino order to make sure you are not about to be run down. Red lights and speed limits are generally considered to be merely suggestions by most Korean drivers. He came tearing up, swerving around the car he should have stopped behind and shot into the intersection. He was evidently trying to make a left turn and went into a squealing slide in that direction. His cunning plan might have even worked had there not been a car stopped at that light as well. He slammed nose first into the passenger side, bouncing off and spinning to cross two lanes and T-bone a parked car for his grand finale.

To spare you any suspense in the blood and guts department, everyone in the involved vehicles was able to get out of their cars and walk around. This is not the purpose of my recounting this. My observations reside primarily with the aftermath.

Our set-up: three car collision at midnight in one of the busiest intersections in Gimhae. Several Koreans in the immediate vicinity with cell phones quickly pressed to their ears.

Feel free to cue a soundtrack of circus music in your head.

There are always quite a few people out and about late at night and the crowd quickly began to gather. Large numbers of people now completely ignoring the traffic signals, crossing whenever and wherever, wandering across the intersection or simply standing in the middle of the road and watching. Add a perpetual stream of traffic in all directions, all of them crawling past the accident in order to stare at it rather than where they were driving. Pedestrians almost getting run over, more near accidents. The traffic from behind the wreck was splitting and streaming around it on both sides simultaneous with people attempting to gather around the cars.

Amidst the festivities, a procession of about eight scooters came pulling through. Sensing the mood of the intersection they decided to start driving in loops around the intersection to add to the merriment.

After about 5 minutes, a tow truck arrived and pulled off to the side. It was followed shortly thereafter by another tow truck. Finally, an ambulance. It was, however, a block away and headed in a different direction and we never saw it again. A third tow truck arrived. Then a fourth, perhaps in order to tow one of the other tow trucks should it prove necessary.

Finally, a full fifteen minutes after the accident, a single police car showed up. Allow me to recap. Midnight. Busiest intersection in Gimhae. Holiday evening. 15 minute response time. Here's a tip-should you ever be in need of immediate assistance in Korea, call a tow truck.

My two notable events of the week involved receiving a Chuseok present and becoming diseased.

It is a sad fact of the ESL teacher's life than upon relocating to a foreign country one is exposed to a plethora of viruses making the rounds that weren't available back home. A veritable smorgasbord of pathogens lined up, eagerly waiting to inflict themselves on you. It does not help that I spend six hours a day with small children who, when sick, can be counted upon to enter the room and stand, spinning in place and spraying mucous in circles like malevolent lawn sprinklers.

I felt my first symptoms thursday night and, by friday, was a caricature of misery as I dragged myself through my classes. The only vaguely applicable medication I'd found in my first aid kit was an anti-allergy medicine which did put a dent in the runny nose symptom. It was obvious, though, that in order to maintain sanity I would need an actual cold medication. I asked one of my Korean co-teachers how to ask for flu medicine at a pharmacy.

"Oh, they will understand enough english to help you," she said, which, I felt, ranked pretty high on the useless answer scale. Maybe that would be the case, but what if it wasn't? She did, however, bestow upon me one of the viler tasting nutrition drinks I've yet encountered-sort of like beef broth mixed with chamomille tea.

I cornered a different teacher later and had him write down the Korean words for 'flu medicine' so that I could attempt to say them and, as a failsafe, be able to show them to the pharmacist. You can't just walk in to stores here and grab the medication you need off of the shelf. In an apparent attempt to justify their training, the normal procedure is for you to enter the pharmacy and be quizzed about your symptoms. The pharmacist will then decide which medication you need.

I prefer, instead, to use the 'waeguk smash' technique-the theory being that in a state of panic over having to deal with a foreigner, a non-english fluent Korean will simply capitulate to your demands in order to be rid of you. I didn't want a pharmacist that would be able to understand enough english to help me as they then might feel they could try to do the old symptom quiz. I wanted a pharmacist that I could walk up to and announce 'flue medicine' and he would promptly hand me some. End of transaction. Remembering from my last stay here that the pharmacy across the street from my house was just such a place I was rewarded with flu medicine without having to name a single symptom. I did sniffle once while there to lend authenticity.

Every teacher received a Chuseok gift Friday. Being that the person buying the gifts was female and given that most of the teachers are female, it came as no surprise that the gift was a set of soaps, shampoos, etc. What was most amusing about this was the quantities. In each gift box was:
1 bottle of shampoo
1 bottle of rinse
1 bottle of body wash
6 (yes, SIX) bars of soap
and 5 (yes, FIVE) tubes of toothpaste.

Within the drawer-
three chopsticks.
Two, fine and sleek
as nyloned legs.
One of pine,
pale and rough
as a stubbled cheek.
O! Lone chopstick!
Where is thy mate?
To what alien vistas
has she chopped to?
Singular utensil,
will you never again
dance as lovers?
Ne'er tap your way
through clustered clumps
of sticky rice
like a drunken mantis,
nor click your wooden secrets
within the kimchee's sultry spice?
Twirl again amongst seeping noodles
adorning yourselves
with steaming ribbons,
coiled about you like amorous snakes.
Within you lies the memory of forests,
spikey pines caressed by yellow winds.
You lie alone
brought by strange paths
to rest here;
your manifest destiny of purpose
forever unfulfilled.
I use you to stir my coffee
and you weep brown tears.

Wonder of wonders, immigration actually managed to get my visa number sent out on wednesday rather than friday and thus, with approximately 12 hours forewarning, I was bound for Fukuoka, Japan. I spent an hour perusing a years out of date message thread on the topic, caught a taxi at 5:30 AM, a subway at 6:00 and subsequently found myself at the international ferry terminal at 7 AM with what would prove to be the bare minimum amount of money in my pocket.

Generally teachers doing the Visa run take one of the two high speed ferries-the Kobee and the Beetle. I paid $113 for the 8:30 Kobee and was given an airplane-like seat in the front of a rather small boat. Curiously, most of the other westerners on the boat were placed in the same row-as if there were some secret doctrine in place amongst the ticket agents. The Kobee has three big runners along the bottom and, once up to speed, rises up on these and skis across the water. All very impressive looking on the in-transit videos we were shown but subtle enough in practice that I was skeptical that the boat had done anything of the sort until we reached Japan and it slowed down, immediately producing the sensation that we were sinking as it dropped back down to the water.

The upside of this was that it took only 3 hours to make the crossing-still long enough for them to subject us to a viewing of 'Happy Feet' and a 'Wonderful Fukuoka' video hosted by a menagerie of nightmarish puppets. They then began showing us "Howel's Moving Castle", a movie I have a curious history with. During my first venture here, Mr. Kim tried using this very same movie to teach Korean to Sam and I-an ill fated notion that was aborted after a single session due to being akin to entering a pair of toddlers in the Boston Marathon. And now, again at the start of a stay in Korea, the movie appears before me again...in the original Japanese with Korean subtitles. The actual storyline of this movie is fated to remain ever shrouded in mystery for me. It didn't matter too much as the remainder of the boat ride was a lesser amount of time than the running length of the movie and they remoreslessly cut the movie off halfway through.

Fukuoka appears on the horizon like a sunset. A prominent feature of the skyline is a sports stadium with a dome covered in brass, or something along those lines, causing it to gleam with a painful intensity long before the dome itself is actually visible. We dutifully filed our way into the series of lines for the Fukuoka harbor immigration and customs officials-a group of people who take their jobs way, way too seriously.

I had only brought a small daypack with me but was inevitably singled out to have it searched. The customs guy opened it and began pulling things out. First was a pair of shorts. He looked at them for a long moment.

"Your pants?"
Out of the myriad of possible answers that sprang to mind I chose "Umm, yes."
"Your shirt?"
"Yep."
"Book?"
"Got it in one" I didn't actually say. He studied the book for a bit, possibly to make sure that it wasn't something that might damage the stalwart moral fiber of the country of Japan.
"This is your camera?"
"Yes." It dawned on me that this was perhaps more of an opportunity for him to practice his english vocabulary than anything else. He eventually finished naming everything I'd brought with, studying my reaction after he'd pronoiunced the name of each item, obstensibly to catch me in a dishonesty. They may, after all, have been someone else's socks, I suppose.

Outside of the terminal the city of Fukuoka baked in a full-on blast of tropics. I banded together with two other westerners who were equally clueless and were were quickly adopted by a friendly taxi driver with a fair command of english. Exactly the sort of cabbie that should lurk outside of international ferry terminals. I sat in the back with Emily from New York, relegating our third party member to the front with the driver. He was from Fiji but had been raised in New Zealand and had one of those sorts of names that I need to hear ten times before having a hope of remembering it. I think it started with a J. Emily and I shared what tidbits of info we'd picked up about what we needed to do to obtain our visas while the cabbie informed J of the merits of various hotels in the area-merits, apparently, being their proximity to brothels and the variety of nationalities of women that might be found at those brothels. He relayed most of this info in an undertone, apparently to avoid offending the tender ears of Emily, but followed each recommendation with a cackle so salacious as to leave no doubt whatsoever the nature of the discussion.

We arrived at the consulate just after 1:00. They were closed for lunch until 1:30 so the cabby promptly announced that he was going to take us sightseeing and started off. Suspecting that the undiscussed price for him driving us around for half an hour was going to be far more than we were intending to part with we quickly proclaimed that we were hungry and pointed at what looked to be a restaurant nearby, mainly in order to be free of him. Had we deliberated on our choice I imagine we would have picked something a little more Japanese in honor of the fact that we were in Japan but it was thus that we found ourselves standing in front of the Fukuoka Hard Rock Cafe. I'd not ever been to a Hard Rock but it was exactly what I expected-food that is overpriced and underwhelming. We ate beneath Sting's fuzzy black coat. One wonders if there are times, on cold winter days, when Sting thinks to himself, "Dang, I wish I still had that fuzzy coat."

The actual consulate visit was as uninteresting as might be expected. Afterwards I picked a direction more or less at random and walked past a nice little park, past the glittering dome, across a river and came across The Twins Hotel. In the process I was nearly run down by at least 30 different bicylists. Bicycles are big in Fukuoka. I paid twice as much for a room that was comparable to what I'd have gotten in Korea and found myself woefully examining the remains of my finances. I had enough, I hoped, for the boat ride back as well as, maybe, just enough for a very inexpensive dinner. This pretty much negated my chances of doing anything overly interesting. I bought some noodles from the store downstairs and spent the afternoon watching a Sumo tournament on TV. There was not a lot of choice in this selection as, of the 9 channels offered on the hotel TV, 4 of them were covering the tournament. I did try to redemm the visit a bit by walking around that evening, looking at the Fukuoka tower and the outsides of several museums in the area.

I did, however, have two strokes of brilliance in the hotel room that I am recording for posterity. The air conditioner in the room was an upwardly aimed vent along a small ledge behind the TV. It felt nice if you were near it but did little to actually bring the room to a comfortable temperature. I took a box of Kleenex(tm) and positioned it between the vent and the window, using it as a base to prop a spiral notebook against. I unfastened the curtain tie which was a long cloith strip with a loop at the end. By placing this loop between spirals in the notebook and then sliding a pen through the spirals and the loop I was able to effectively create a means of redirecting the cold air into the room rather than into the ceiling. I was so proud of this small MacGyver moment that I tried to take a picture of it only to find that my camera batteries were dead. Sadly the TV remote used triple A's instead of doubles. My other stoke of brilliance was to place glasses of the hotel's tepid water on top of the AC vent. Ice cold in 5 minutes flat.

(I did take quite a few pictures on the trip but all pictures are going to have to wait until I find a means to dowload them off of my camera)

Friday morning found me, freshly visaed passport in hand, contemplating the journey back to the terminal. The trip over had cost $113 and I had $120 left. A cab ride would have likely left me with permanently stranded in Japan. I had a map of Fukuoka which was in Korean but I was able to determine that I was near the subway and that, while it didn't exactly go to the terminal, it would get me a lot closer than I was.

The subway ticket machines of Fukuoka are a bewildering array of buttons and blinky lights. There seemd to be an 8 tier pricing system, all helpfully explained in Japanese. There was, however, a large friendly looking button labelled "English". I pressed it. The machine responded by simply saying "Insert money" in English rather than Japanese which was, perhaps, less help than I was hoping for. I was rescued by a subway employee in a manner that involved each of us pointing at many things until I'd obtained a ticket.

On the map, the subway station looked reasonably close to the ferry terminal. No scale was provided, however. I had no notion of which was the ocean was once I emerged, blinking into the humid and 95 degree heart of the city. I saw a river nearby and reasoned that if I went to it and followed the current that it would lead me to the ocean. Common sense, yes, but not necessarily something that would leap readily to mind. I chose to give myself a third ingenuity point to help make up for my bumbling idiocy at the ticket machine.

The distance turned out to be more along the lines of 3 miles. I had decided to take a different boat back to save money-the catch being that boarding ended at 12:00 and the boat left at 12:30. I arrived at the terminal with a mere 20 minutes to spare, drenched with sweat, sunburned and experiencing what I believed to be the first signs of heat stroke. Chills in 95 degree weather are not necessarily a good thing. On the bright side, I got to see a fair amount of Fukuoka in the process and, since all of the other passengers had boarded, I zipped right through a completely line-free experience and was on the ship just before they closed the gates.

I don't actually know what the technical difference is, if any, between "Boat" and "Ship". I tend to use "boat" to mean something small, like the Kobee I'd ridden over on. My return was on the "New Camilla". It was a ship. It was a 29,000 ton behemoth with 6 decks, a restaurant, lounge areas, duty-free shops, karaoke rooms, vending machines and arcades. It took 5 1/2 hours instead of 3 but offered the full experience of sea travel rather than the airplane like experience of the Kobee.

The thing about sea travel is that, much like air travel, it's really quite boring when you come right down to it. Once you are out of sight of land, you are offered a huge vista of water in all directions, a view which maintains its fascination for about 5 minutes. This is the precise view offered by the majority of the surface of our planet, ironic in that it is a view most of us see the least of. My ticket included 2nd class accomadations which consisted of a room with 6 mats on the floor and a cubbyhole to stick your bag in. I glanced in the room as I walked by but never actually set foot in it, choosing instead to sit in a lounge chair by a window on the deck below and read the entire trip.

I did muse for awhile, however, on the fact that I was crossing the Sea of Japan. The Koreans call it the Eastern Sea and are perpetually annoyed that the rest of the world doesn't do likewise. As far as stretches of water with a couple thousands of years of history behind them go, the Sea of Japan is right up there at the top of the list. Like other stretches of sea between two countries, most of that history involves people killing each other. I can only imagine the number of barnacle encrusted ship skeletons that we passed over.

In comparison to Japanese immigration and customs, returning to Korea was refreshing. Most foreigners return on one of the high speed boats-since I'd been on the New Camilla I was one of only two foreign passengers out of several hundred. Busan has a seperate line for non-natives and I barely had to break stride passing through. Customs showed little interest in examining my pants and, upon stepping from the terminal into cloudy and rainy Busan I was struck with the odd sensation, though entering a foreign country, of being home again.

Gimhae's first Christina Aguilara look-alike teacher did not last long. After two weeks in the country she pulled a friday night 'midnight run'-flying back home unbeknownst to her school. In many ways she was a page straight out of a psychology textbook. I think each time I saw her at one of the teacher get togethers she broke down in tears at some point over various perceived ills, so I imagine she's better off not being here.

I was ambushed on the street the other day by a Korean Jehovah's Witness. Somehow they all seem to speak better english than pretty much any other Korean in the country. I had the misfortune of being caught right as I was about to enter my apartment building. While she was still doing her friendly, 'get to know the foreigner' routine prior to whipping out a copy of Awake! she asked me if I lived there and I told her 'yes'. Of course, after going through the rest of her spiel she asked me which apartment was mine, so that she and her husband might drop by and deliver future issues of Awake! and maybe 'come in for coffee'. I hope that whomever actually does live in apartment 902 will forgive me.

It reminded me of an incident when I was here last time, showing Wes, the new teacher, around town. We were standing on a street corner when we were approached by two Westerners wearing suits and ties. Now, there are few situations in life in which a white guy in a suit approaching you can be construed as a good thing and this was no exception. They were Mormon Missionaries. The amusing this was that he, an obvious westerner, walked up to us, two obvious westerners, and greeted us in Korean. I have a fairly fine-tuned Mormon radar and had already nonchalantly turned away, having little interest in hearing about the Angel Macaroni, or whatever it is they call him. Wes was therefore left to field the approach. As he'd been in the country for a mere 24 hours at that point he was a bit mystified by the Korean greeting.

"Ummm...I'm not Korean," was, I believe, the gist of his response. One would have thought it self-evident as Wes was near 6 feet tall, caucasian and had curly brown hair-three factors that generally might be construed as immediately apparent evidence against one being Korean. It was revealed that this was the Mormon guy's first day on his first 'Mission' and, after however long he'd been learning Korean, he was raring to use it and just assumed that anyone he met in the country was going to be a native Korean speaker. This bumbled start threw him so far off of his game that he was utterly unable to bring the conversation back into his pre-coached series of responses and counter-responses, allowing us a fairly easy escape.

My overnighter to Japan will happen either tomorrow (thursday) or have to wait until Monday. Mr. Kim is of the opinion that we will recieve my visa approval at any moment and that I should have a bag packed and ready and check in with him often in case it has arrived. I am of the opinion that immigration is pretty up front about it taking 10 days to process these things and that, as Mr. Kim submitted it last Tuesday, Friday is when we're going to see it, mandating a Monday trip.

Friday was my day of celebrity. I dropped by the school to hand off some of my paperwork and you would have thought that I was The Beatles arriving to tour. I spent the whole hour there mobbed by students, much to Mr. Kim's amusement.

Later I made my grand entrance to the friday night westerner hang out and had the pleasure of a lot of dropped jaws and blank looks of astonishment. It's not often that someone gets to make an unnanounced appearance in Korea. The drawback is that, after my 7 month hiatus, most of the people that I knew from last time are now nearing the ends of their contracts and will soon be gone. Naturally there will be a wave of new faces to replace them. Teaching ESL is a constant pattern of hellos and goodbyes.

In an attempt to convey some of the variety of people here, I present some of our cast of the Gimhae expat characters. This is more for me to try and keep straight the barrage of people I'm meeting rather than a necessarily interesting read:

Chris, Lois, Blakey and Crystal: A family of colorful characters that have made a life of travelling and teaching. Chris is a barrel-chested Brit of 62 with a jowely face, full of vinegar and a never ending supply of crazy stories about adventures from all over the world. Lois is his wife, an Australian with a sharp sense of humor whose primary duty, it seems at times, is to keep Chris in check. Blakey is their son. He's about my age and was apparently born and raised in Wales making them a truly varied trio. He has a Korean wife and is basically a non-stop stream of dirty jokes and innuendos. He and Chris are like a comedy team when together, each maintaining a non-stop stream of accented patter, talking over each other and often becoming annoyed with each other to the point where they step out of the bar to have a bit of a yell at each other in the street. They patch things up quite readily afterwards and go right back to providing the entertainment. Crystal is Chris and Lois's niece. I don't know her particularly well and, due to a series of problems with her shcool I believe that she's leaving fairly soon.

Angelina: Or maybe Angela. I think she told me her name was Angelina but everyone else seems to call her Angela so either I misheard or everyone else did. She's brand new in the country, apparently having decided that she needed a year long break from her long term boyfriend. She recently appeared on whatever Regis Philbin is calling his show nowadays as a celebrity look-alike, having been selected out of 3,000 as the best Christina Aquilera. She fits the part to a tee, right down to the cultivated 'bad-girl' look. She also, apparently, was one of the featured models in one of the Axe deoderant commercials. She's a former bartender and singing coach.

The two Amys: A pair of tiny cute blond girls, fresh out of college and best friends since middle school. Amazingly enough, they were born and raised in Ferndale, Washington which is where most of my family lives. Cue 'It's a Small World'. They are two small towngirls just off the farm and have never been away from home before. I'm kind of curious to watch over time how the experience of living here might change them. They had heard that Gimhae was a rural community and arrived expecting it to be the Korean version of Ferndale. Snicker.

Kate (I think): From Washington DC she and the Amys and I joked about how people always mixed one Washington for another. Just met here and haven't really had a chance to talk much yet.

Gardener and Apple: Gardener is a long termer from Seattle having been here for 5 years now. He just got a black belt in tae kwan do. Apple is his Thai wife. She has found it impossible to find a job here since she's neither Korean nor a native english speaker so Gardener has to work pretty insane hours to support the two of them. He's about to visit the US again but she won't be going with-her visa being denied, apparently, because of the fact that she's married to an American which seems to me to be the opposite of how things are supposed to work. Maybe they think it's a marriage of convenience just for her to obtain citizenship?

Dave: A Kiwi with red hair, causing everyone to assume he's Scottish or Irish when they first meet him. He's a Nirvana and grunge rock nut and envies enormously the fact that I was in Olympia and Seattle when grunge exploded.

Tocho: A young businessman (businessboy?) from Nigeria. Apparently a complete soccer fiend. Just met him last night but he seems a fun kind of guy.

Matt and his wife-who's-name-I-don't-remember: An Aussie couple just recently arrived from Thailand. They seem the classic backpacker sorts.

Brian: An older Canadian who is a die-hard 9/11 and Zionist conspiracy theorist. He has yet to find a good response, however, to my argument that the US Government is so obviously incompetent at doing anything sinister without it being front page news that a conspiracy of that magnitude being pulled off without gaping leaks and evidence is akin to a group of Kindergarteners building the Louvre with blocks and crayons.

Mr. Kim (not my boss): An elderly Korean man who's family escaped from North Korea during the war. He's a massive George Bush fan and we quickly came to the unspoken agreement to not discuss politics when I managed to convey that my opinion of George Bush ranks just below my opinion of an incontinent monkey.

Martina: An Irish girl with long red hair-frequently stopped by random Koreans to pose for pictures with them. Red hair is quite the novelty here.

Mike and Ben: From the UK. Their contracts are up soon and they're going to take the trans-siberian; the same trip I'm intending to take when my contract is up.

There are a handful of others I've met as well but I've already managed to forget their names. No worries. I'll see them again. We're a pretty close-knit community here in the wilds of Gimhae.

I've successfully arrived alive in Korea which is about the best one generally hopes for when travelling. Twelve hours is entirely too long to spend wedged into an airplane. Around about hour 7 or 8 you find yourself watching the inflight Ninja Turtle movie out of sheer desperation.

The hiccup on this particular journey was that immigration wasn't happy with my visa status. Way back when I first got my visa I had requested a multiple reentry visa, based on the notion that I might actually leave the country now and again. When I registered for my Alien ID card they mysteriously did not carry over the multiple reentry status. When I left back in February they informed me of this and I paid 30 dollars for a reentry stamp. Coming back I made the naive asssumption that since my ID card was still good and I had a reentry stamp that all would be well. Turns out that reentry stamps expire after a while. Who knew? And when it expired it also automatically expired my ID card. This resulted in the joy of arriving in Seoul after about 40 hours with no sleep and being diverted into a joyless little office of uniformed Koreans giving me stern looks.

I spent 20 minutes or so examining the 'Jesus is love' graffiti on the table as they discussed my situation with various telephones. Ultimately they decided to give me a 30 day tourist visa rather than barring me from the country. Mr. Kim and I will have to pay a visit to Busan immigration to sort things out on Monday and then I'll have to make an overnight trip to Japan to visit a Korean embassy and get my status fixed. All of this means that I won't have to start teaching on monday-likely it will take at least 2 weeks to get things sorted out. Blessing in disguise! It's more hassle for Mr. Kim (he has to cover my classes during that time) so I will dutifully commiserate whenever I discuss the situation with him but I'm not overly broken up about it.

I managed to get a free 1st class upgrade on my flight from Seoul to Busan in order to allow a large family to all sit together. It was only a hour-long flight so I didn't really get to experience any of the first class amenities other than having a chair that was not designed by the Spanish Inquisition but I'm not going to complain.

The previous teacher left under rather mysterious circumstances-mysterious in that Mr. Kim isn't really sure why he left. I'll probably see some of the other western teachers tonight and I'm going to see if I can obtain some more interesting gossip. Based on how he left the apartment it seems like it was a rather abrupt departure so my current theory is that he was possibly being chased by a team of international assassins. Why else would he have left a drawer full of clothing? I'm hoping that the actual reason turns out to be just as interesting but I anticipate disappointment.

Some of the changes he made to the apartment are a bit on the bizarre side. The apartment has a very nice reddish hardwood floor. For reasons unfathomable to me, he chose to cover one corner of the floor in the room with large colored tiles of the sort one might expect to see in a playroom in a budget daycare. They seem to be stuck on with just some adhesive so I'm looking forward to an afternoon of peeling them off of the floor and scrubbing glue off of the wood.

It's a bit surrreal being back. Due to being in the same apartment it, in many ways, feels like I never really left. Apart from a few nearby shops having changed things are pretty much the same. I did notice that one of the two cell phone stores that flank the entrance to my building had closed up shop. It is, of course, being replaced by another cell phone store.

Current weather: hot, overcast and muggy.

This blog has been a bit idle of late, largely due to the fact that it's called 'jeff-in-korea' and, for the last 7 months, I haven't been in Korea. I thought about starting a 'jeff-sitting-around-at-home-in-his-underwear-playing-computer-games' blog but ultimately decided against it.

However, as of tomorrow, I will be back in Korea. Well, on a plane to Korea at least. Getting there takes a bit of time. In anticipation of this I upgraded my camera. Sort of. I still have the same camera but, see, I still was using the 16 meg joke chip that came with it. I now have a 2 gig chip. After sticking it in my camera and setting the camera to its highest setting I was informed that I had space for 3,000 photos, give or take a couple hundred. I believe this to be an amount greater than the sum total of all pictures that I've taken in my entire life. Possibly even if I included all of the pictures taken by people that I know.

So, this blog is going to resume semi-irregular updates and will presumably contain thousands of photos. The catch is that I won't have a computer for some time once I arrive so I will have to store the photos on the camera for a bit. You may end up getting all 3,000 photos at once.

For my flight back I was privileged enough to receive the Wonka Golden Ticket. The Golden Ticket is the one that, for whatever reason, when shown to any of the many people one must pass in various airports, immediately causes you to be redirected into the "special line". Rather than being on the "no fly" list, the Golden Ticket puts you on the "we don't like you very much and we're pretty sure you're up to something" list.

My checked baggage was the first to receive the treatment. A lady with rubber gloves proceeded to spend ten minutes digging through every nook and cranny, squeezing clothing, examining souvenirs, etc. She seemed to have a lot of fun discovering all of the various little zippers and pockets on my backpack and, mysteriously, didn't even bat an eye at the hard drive and power supply that I had in my luggage. Apparently small heavy metal boxes with circuits and wires don't fall in the suspicious category.

From there I went to the metal detectors where, of course, they spent ten minutes going through my carry-on bags. They were slightly annoyed that some of my souvenirs were gift wrapped and spent some time poking at them and holding them up to their ears and shaking them. This was followed by the x-ray machine and someone giving me the once-over with the wand. So far, though annoying, none of this seemed necessarily excessive.

It was when they felt the need to search my carry-on bags again before I got onto the actual plane that I begin being amused by the process. Granted, I may have purchased some weapons or drugs or something in the duty free shop I'd passed after the prior search. We reached the level of farce, however, when I got to Tokyo and stepped off of the plane to immediately get to go through another metal detector and have my bags searched again, apparently to find whatever bombs or contraband I'd managed to acquire during the actual flight.

The bags were, naturally, searched yet again before boarding my plane in Tokyo. Upon reaching the US I was reunited with my checked luggage just long enough for me to present all of it to customs and have all of it searched again. Rather than letting me leave at that point my checked luggage was whisked away again so that I could repeat the pleasure of being reunited with it at baggage claim. I can only speculate on how many times it was searched and x-rayed during the process.

In any case, I have arrived in the US, safe and sound. By my count I was awake for about 32 hours straight, all 32 of which managed to be on friday.

So in typical fashion I have begun courting minor disasters in my preparation for heading to the states. My alien registration card, which has sat peacefully in my wallet for a year now, suddenly decided to abscond and see the sites. The catch is that I need this card in order to be allowed out of the country. It's expiration takes the place of the expiration on my passport visa so, without it, ny passport makes it appear like I've been in the country illegally for the last month. I think the fine is about $300 a day. Fortunately it seems that replacing a lost card is pretty easy and can take as little as five minutes if you successfully communicate to them that you need it RIGHT NOW. I will see if this is true when I hit the immigration office on monday.

My second disaster was almost to be expected. My computer curse seems to have returned. Was doing one last e-mail check today before dismantling the computer when suddenly the whole system locked up. I reboot and hear an ominous clicking noise from the hard drive. "DISK BOOT FAILUR. PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK."

The humor of having this happen literally five minutes before taking the computer apart after a year of great performance is not lost on me. I'm still bringing the hard drive back in hopes that if I hook it up as a secondary drive I can whack it a few times and recover some data from it before it explodes.

Successfully wired most of my money to the states. I am told that it was a much larger amount than the bank was used to receiving by wire and that it was amusing watching them nervously stumble around and consult archaic dust covered regulations tomes. In spite of Moneygram's assurance that the "money is available 10 minutes after it's sent" the bank has placed a hold on it for a few days, apparently in case south korea decides to ask for it back for some reason? Who knows. Red tape just isn't able to keep up with electronic data transfers. Fortunately half of it will be available whn I arrive and the other half shortly thereafter.

The rest of my money is in neatly bank bundled stacks of cash and, let ne tell you, 3,000,000 won looks a bit impressive when you hold it in your hand. About like having 300 $10 bills. The lady at the korean bank assured me that on my last day here she would happily convert whatever I had remaining into Yen. Of course, this assurance was made to me through an intermediate with dodgy english so I have to operate on the assumptions that both my question and her answer were successfully relayed. Assuming so, this was a brilliant move on my part as US banks want nothing whatsoever to do with Won but will happily accept Yen. Korea will happily give you Yen for Won but won't give you any US dollars above what you arrived in the country with. And thus the circle of life is complete. South Korea has the 10th largest economy in the world so it would be nice if someone would get their act together and do whatever they need to do to graduate the won's "soft currency" status to "hard currency". While we still don't have the promised flying cars, this is 2007 and having to juggle money like this is a bit absurd. Of course, the bank gets it's cut each time so maybe they're quite happy with the system the way it is.

My last day at the hogwon was nice. Kinda drove home how much a teacher can come to mean to the kids. I had many, many hugs, a few kids in tears, and 6 going away presents, 4 of which turned out to be notebooks. Stationery products are like a fetish here. Whether it be Christmas, birthday or children's day, kids generally receive and give school supplies almost exclusively for presents. Considering that they soend 12 hiurs a day in classrooms I guess this isn't too surprising. I gave all of the kids my e-mail and have already received one letter in response (mike is the new foreign teacher, although I changed his name to protect his secret identity) My interpretation follows each line:

Jeff Hi I'm julie. (Hi Jeff! This is Julie)
Nice to see you again. (I'm glad I get to write to you)
jeff mike is very laugh. (Mike is funny)
but I'm not laughing. (but I don't laugh at his jokes)
Because I see meet you. (because I'm sad that you're gone)
I'm only we're class teaching. ([I have no idea-ed])
where are you. (where are you?)
Our academe is very chilly. (Mr. Kim is a cheapskate with the heater. It's too cold to sleep in class)
oh! you give me a pecture live in now. (Send me a picture of where you're living in the US)
I'm very wonder. (I'm curious what any part of the rest of the world actually looks like)
And you not cold? (Is it cold there?)
This Kim-hee is very cold. (I'm freezing. C'mon Mr. Kim, turn the damn heat up!)
You carefulness cold. bye bye (Don't freeze to death. bye bye!)

christmas is actually a pretty relaxing holiday when near everyone you know is on the other side of the planet. Mr. Kim invited me to lunch on Saturday. I managed, however, to sleep until 3 and he'd already eaten when I called him so we made it dinner instead. We were accompanied by the construction workers who are finishing up the new school facility and went to their favorite duejigogi place (grilled pork). Apparently they like it because one of the side dishes was chunks of raw liver. There was also a dish of, if I understood correctly, pig spinal cord. I decided to stick with the edible food-the grilled pork and salad were really, really good.

My Christmas celebration consisted of going to see 'Casino Royale', which finally opened here. There are big pluses and big minuses to korean movie theaters. Buying tickets is easy-you take a number like you would at a deli or at the DMV. When your number is called, you step up, repeat a dozen different variations of the movie name until the ticket lady figures out what you're saying and she sells you a ticket for about 6 and a half dollars. The seats are assigned, allowing you to stroll in to the theater 3 minutes before the movie and sit right down.

The bad part is that the seats are auto-assigned by 'best seat'. So, even if the theater is half full, everybody will be sitting in a giant cluster in the middle. The front row is actually quite a ways from the screen so I may have to see if I can manage to convey a front row seat request next time rather than sitting amidst the pack. In any case, I quite liked the movie. They basically eliminated all of the camp from the Bond franchise and had a touch more focus on realism. I mean, Bond actually gets hospitalized. Can you recall that ever happening in any other Bond movie?

Returning to school on tuesday, I discovered that we have thursday through tuesday off, which nobody had thought to mention to me. Two day notice of a six day vacation is rather lame as it pretty much eliminates any chance of you being able to land the tickets to do anything interesting. On the other hand, I'm going to make a point of not complaining too much about having six days off.

Tomorrow or friday I get to have my immigration office adventure to renew my visa. I'm crossing my fingers that it all goes smoothly. Apparently the canadian guy Mr. Kim had hired vanished into thin air so he's still looking for another foreign teacher. Consequently, my month off is now going to be the month of march.

I've written quite a lot on Korean foods in my time here but touched only briefly on the "Koreafying" of western foods. The inexplicable national adoration of sweet potato and avocado mush pizza is one I've mentioned that readily springs to mind but it certainly doesn't stop there. It's only natural to combine local favorites into new foods but the results can be a bit alarming to the non-locals. Green tea, for instance. A healthy beverage and, also, a flavor of cake. It's also a popular flavor of ice cream and McDonalds even offers a green tea McFlurry which looks quite a lot like a broccoli milkshake.

The first time someone offered me a piece of green cake I can only describe my reaction as being, "Hmmm...". In case you are wondering, it tastes quite a lot like the fish flakes you drop in the aquarium. At least, it tastes the way that fish flakes smell so I've admittedly made an assumption about how the flakes might taste. Quite a lot like green tea cake, I imagine. I expect the ice cream has a similar flavor. In any case, the cake looked a bit like something you'd clean your kitchen with. It's a color I associate far more with a sponge than with a dessert. Cake innovation certainly does not stop there, however. Many cakes have a decorative assortment of fruit on top. Orange wedges, strawberries, melon, cherry tomatoes... Yes, tomatoes. After all, they are a fruit, no? We just never quite made the natural logical progression to include them in our fruit dishes. There could be a huge untapped market for this. Tomato flavored candies, for instance. Exactly what would take a bag of Skittles from 'yawn' to instant fame.

Part of this, I believe, comes from having no preconceived notions of what so-called "proper" modifications to a recipe might be. Korean fast food is a prime example. Lotteria, the big hamburger chain, offers octopus rings instead of onion rings and hamburgers with slices of bell pepper, deep fried cheese patties, kimchee and olives. Their current special is a burger with a disc of compressed rice replacing the bun. I haven't tried one of these yet but it looks for all the world like the entire thing would disintegrate about halfway through your first bite.

Sam and I made a western food stop after class today at the TGIFriday's in Seomyeon. We always feel a bit guilty going there, not because it's western but more due to it being the veritable poster child for soul-less corporate dining via marketing committee. They had a new appetizer there that consisted of deep fried squares of macaroni and cheese. We ordered them primarily to see if that was really what they were.

Chips and snacks are another area that must be tread with caution. I know I've mentioned the shrimp flavored chips before, but believe that I neglected to mention the chocolate covered hunks of dried squid. The latter item can come as quite a surprise when one of your students offers you what appears to be a benign piece of chocolate candy. An easy item to add to the Monty Python "Crunchy Frog" candy sketch.

"First we take a magnificent hand caught pacific squid, lovingly dried benath an asian sun, diced into the rubberiest of bits with a consecrated silver blade then immersed into a stream of the finest of cambodian chocolate..."

...but some parts of the world might deport you for thinking so.

Two friends of mine, Chris and Steve, are facing almost certain fines and possibly even deportation all on account of a theatre performance. Unfortunately, due to the "disease of the week" syndrome that many teachers here experience due to effectively being employed in a giant petri dish, I didn't actually make it to the performance. In a nutshell, it was a collection of sketches satirizing life in Korea from the perspective of foreign teachers.

In hindsight I'm sorry to have missed it and should have dragged my headachey, mucusy self out for the hourish commute to Busan. It has manifested all of the fallout of having been a notable event. On the surface, it received both positive responses as well as extremely negative ones from various audience members. Any time people storm out of your show you're receiving an indicator that you're doing something right, as long as being edgy is one of your goals. The negative reviews I've seen haven't amounted to much more than verbal poo flinging so it definitely seems that the right sorts of people were offended. Saying a show wasn't funny is one thing. Seething rage against it is indicative that it hit a nerve.

In any case, what it is rapidly becoming truly notable for is the reaction from Korea. Free speech doesn't actually exist here, at least in the way that we're used to defining it from a US perspective. Koreans evidently don't take kindly to foreigners satirizing Korea onstage. Ostensibly the flak from the Korean federales is due to them not having procured the required permits before staging the show-making money on anything apart from teaching is a visa violation. Never mind the fact the the show DIDN'T make money-ticket prices went only towards inadequately covering production costs, as well as the fact that a prior production that didn't satirize Korea but also lacked said permits went unremarked. Makes it rather indicative that it was the content of the show rather than the staging of it that ruffled the feathers. Koreans cheerfully make fun of other cultures but apparently aren't quite so happy when the lens is turned the other way.

The Korean press has gotten hold of the story but, as one might expect, tends to write their stories in Korean so I'm not sure what angle they might be taking. One might expect the press to champion the issue of freedom of speech but, well, maybe not.

The silver lining is that there are a certain amount of bragging rights to be had over being questioned by the international crimes department and getting deported from a country for a theatre performance. And if it makes some Koreans question the free speech issue to themselves then it will have served a greater albeit unintended purpose.

It hasn't come to deportation yet. I expect this will largely depend on press/public reaction and whether it is decided that an "example" needs to be made. In any case, there are plenty of other countries out there with ESL opportunities so if Korea becomes a closed door I expect they'll land on their feet after an understandably uncomfortable kick. In any case, it does reaffirm my original notion that two years is my intended stay in Korea before checking somewhere else out. Chris! Know that if you end up having to switch to another country that, come next winter, I may well come wandering along to check out the new scene. I hear that China is pretty cool. And they're pretty clear up front about where they stand on freedom of speech.

The school staff had a celebratory lunch on Friday due to the school secretary being promoted to the school vice president. She seems to have always kind of acted in this capacity anyway, as it seems she's always had the power to dictate to the teachers what needs to be done in their classes. She doesn't teach herself, speaks no english and is never actually in the classrooms, yet can tell the teachers changes to their teaching that must be made. Which sounds, really, exactly like the role of a vice president pretty much anywhere.

The restaurant we went to purported to be a Japanese place. The only discernible difference as far as I could tell was that the art on the walls depicted geishas and that less of the food was cooked. The big fish tank in the kitchen was probably my first warning sign-this was to be a raw seafood experience. On the plus side, we each had a little dish of soy sauce and wasabi. Regardless of what you were eating, a quick dip in the sauce and it's flavor was immediately replaced with the flavor of sinus searing pain. As far as I can tell, virtually all raw seafood tastes like wasabi and brings tears to your eyes.

We started off with a glass of celery and kale juice which actually tasted a bit better than one might expect. This plus a tiny dish of rice with some sort of mucus-like brown sauce on it that tasted far more unpleasant than one might have expect. My suspicion is that this brown sauce was some sort of evil sea goo that was to be considered a delicacy. We also each had a tiny plate with some green onion shoots artfully providing a bed for what appeared to be two small slices of some whitish root vegetable. I crunched them down, primarily as a way to appear to be enjoying the meal while not partaking of anymore of the mucus rice. I was informed after I'd eaten it that the sliced vegetable was 5 year old ginseng, expensive and treasured. I might have tried savoring it a bit more had I known in advance, or at least crunched it with a little more respect.

We proceeded to pieces of raw manta ray (tastes like wasabi), followed by sea bream (wasabi), and raw tuna. The tuna came with little bits of gim (dried seaweed) to wrap it in and had it's own sauce to dip in. This sauce turned out to taste exactly like the sauce they'd used on the raw beef at the last staff lunch I was at, so tuna tastes like raw beef instead of wasabi. I avoided the sea snails this time, as I'd tried them before and felt that with some foods you only need to experience them once.

Our next selection was raw abalone, slices of a purple tentacle complete with sucker pods and slices of something that wasn't identified to me-it looked and tasted quite a lot like cartilage. And yes, I even ate one of the slices of tentacle. As another plate of raw fish came out it occurred to me that much of our food was actually being killed in the room next to us as we ate. Obvious from the presence of the fish tank, yes, but not normally the sort of thing one has the motivation to consider while eating.

This was driven home by our next course-nokchi. Nokchi is baby octopus. They pull it out of the tank, chop it up and serve it immediately, while it's still moving. It is one thing to hear about and quite another to expactually experience someone setting a plate of moving food in front of you. Writhing moght be a better term-a platter of wiggling, twisting, writhing tentacles. Still moving enough that some of them escape the plate and head off across the table. This plate was immediately pushed in my direction amid a chorus of "Try! Try". Koreans can be a sadistic and malicious lot. I did indeed try a piece, but confess that I ate it "pill style", figuring that eating something that was moving was credibility enough and that tasting it was a technicality easily overlooked.

Next came a plate of fermented fish, reeking of ammonia. I'm guessing it was kind of a Korean equivalent to lutefisk. I passed on that one as did pretty much the entire rest of the table. Mr. Kim ate a piece, however, later complaing that it gave him ammonia flavored belches. He said "That was special, even for me" confirming my theory that Mr. Kim uses the word "special" to mean "So vile it's hard to eat". This seems to be a quality actively sought after in Asian cuisine.

And then came a plate of pieces of dark meat with large chunks of what appeared to be fat. There was only one seafood that I could think of that matched this description: gorigogi. Whale. Sam is fond of relating his experience with eating whale, describing it as the single vilest thing that's ever been in his mouth. "Rancid corned beef" was the closest descriptor that he could give. I believe that he may have actually had fermented whale meat whereas what we had was fresh whale. Whaling is currently illegal in Korea, though the Korean government allows whales that are killed accidentally to be eaten. 100 times more whales die "accidentally" in Korean waters than anywhere else on the planet-enough that Ulsan is building a whale meat processing factory to handle of the accidentally killed whales. This goes to show that Koreans are either extremely careless fishermen or that Korea doesn't actually give a rip about its whaling treaties. Considering that whale meat restaurants are pretty common and that Korea has been fishing for a very long time, I'm guessing that the latter explanation is most accurate. It tasted kind of like beef with a strong fish flavor, and, contrary to my expectations, no Greenpeace symbol spontaneously burned into existence on my forehead when I tried a piece. By way of restitution and guilt management I'm going to donate some money to Greenpeace Korea-I hear that they are actively working against the Ulsan whale factory which is probably for the best.

US candy manufacturers could learn a lesson or two from their Korean counterparts. I found it amusing back in February/March that the candy industry had successfully divided Valentine's Day into two seperate holidays. On Feb. 14th, women buy hard candy for men. A month later is White Day, when men buy chocolate for the women. See how two seperate candy types divided the market to each gain full benefit? Supposedly a month after that is "Black Day", on which everyone he received no candy on the prior two holidays goes out and drowns their woes in soju, allowing another industry to capitalize.

But now I have seen the crowning stroke: Nov. 11th. Pepero Day. Pepero is the Korean word for what is possibly better known in the Western world as Pocky Sticks, due to Pocky being the Japanese name. Take a long, thin crispy breadstick and dip it in chocolate. Voila! A Pepero stick. They come in a pack of 20 and are compulsively munchable. Due to the date, 11/11, having a vague resemblance to Pepero sticks, Nov 11th has been declared Pepero Day in which children buy the things by the bagload and hand them out to everybody. Teachers are popular targets and I received pretty much a lifetime supply of the things over the course of the day.They don't only come in chocolate. There are also chocolate almond pepero, strawberry pepero and, my favorite, the cafe latte pepero. There are also "nude" pepero, where the stick is hollow and the chocolate is on the inside. Also "waffle pepero", where instead of a breadstick it's a tightly rolled waffle cone dipped in chocolate. Most are about as long as a drinking straw, some of the "deluxe" ones are up to a foot in length and as big around as your finger. Walk through the candy section of an Asian grocery store and you'll probably be able to find them. I know that Uwajimaya in Seattle has several shelves of them.

Big doings at my school of late. Apparently the school is moving to a different building next month, to a space that's quite a bit larger than our current one. Mr. Kim has been running in a fancy suit, measuring things and having meetings with bankers. The catch with this is that it has thrown a kink into my personal plans. My intention, all along, has been to finish the contract then try to take 2 months of before starting back up: 1 month to visit family and frineds in the US and eat a lot of non Korean food, and 1 month to blow my savings doing some Asian travel before going back to work. I'd hoped to be able to do this and come back to the same job. Upon discusssing this with Mr. Kim, however, it was made clear that this wasn't a possibility. He wants me to resign and continue teaching with no break at all as they don't have anybody that could cover for me for any time at all, much less two months. He also made it clear that, due to the stress of handling the moving of the entire school, the last thing he wants to add to that is the stress of finding a new foreign teacher

Which gives me a bit of a dilemma. As much as I'd like to accomodate Mr. Kim's stress levels, I'm having trouble reconciling with the notion of going straight into a new teaching contract with no break. On the one hand, it would be quite a bit easier-keep the same apartment and job, no interviewing stress, etc. On the other hand, I want a break, I'm tired of being in Gimhae (which is a bit of a backwater area), and I have some increasing frustrations with my job that are unlikely to magically disappear if I re-sign the contract. The frustration lies in that for the last couple of months and for pretty much the forseeable future, they've pigeonholed me into the role of pronunciation teacher. I go to a class and read their vocabulary list out loud. After each word, they repeat it three times, theoretically attempting to closely match the way I say the word. In actuality, they doodle on their desks, sleep or surreptitiously do homework. After the vocabulary list, I read portions of their textbook out loud and they again are supposed to repeat along afterwards, trying to match how I say it. These are the same vocabulary lists and sections of textbook pretty much every day and it bores the kids out of their skulls having to do this for half an hour each day. They think they've got it bad. I do it for 6 hours every day. I am an overpaid tape recorder and it's pretty mind numbing.

I have, however, had jobs that were worse, so I'm trying to take this downside with the proper perspective. My other option is to not re-sign, take my two months and try to land a different contract, preferably one in Busan, rather than Gimhae. The plus side here is that the school year starts in March so all of the public schools will be doing their hiring around that time. The downside is that during the job search I'd be homeless in Korea and hoping to find a position before the money ran out. The other possibility is that Sam, the foreign teacher at the Busan branch of the school, is leaving at the end of February-possibly I could negotiate simply transferring straight into his job. Now I'm aware that Sam secretly wants to actually leave at the end of January, a month earlier, so that he can do the same travelling that I want to do. I'd need to negotiate the March 1st transfer before Sam dropped the January 31st bombshell. Regardless of which, the Busan school is going to need another teacher and, as their school director is the wife of my school director it might be a pretty easy transfer to manage, apart from Mr. Kim's annoyance at having to find someone new for Gimhae. The downside here is that the Busan school is a bit less of a smooth operation, from what I'm told, and that the apartment Sam has isn't as nice as my Gimhae digs.

So I'm trying to decide what exactly to do here and any opinions or insights are more than welcome.