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.

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.