Happy New Year!!

Say hay boke-mahn-e pah du say oh!!

That’s Happy New Year in Korean.

Well, here we are in 2010.  Time flies.  A nice first day of the year it was too.  Nice and sunny:

That’s the view outside my place.

I kind of miss snow a little sometimes–Korea rarely gets any this far south–but when it does happen here it is a disaster because there are no services in place to cope, and everybody uses summer tires.  I remember we got 10 cm here one night a few years ago, and the next morning when I opened the window you could hear the cars crashing together all over the city.  Some crashes were faint and others were loud and close.

We had a barbecue last night at The Olive (our private club) before going to Mindy’s to ring in the new year.  I think it was Gihyuk’s plan, but in retrospect it wasn’t a good idea to do it inside.  A couple of the guys went by today and said there is grease from the meat everywhere.  The floor is slippery.  We’re going to have to clean the whole place from top to bottom.

Strange grill.  It is a propane tank with a burner on it.  The stainless steel plate was brought separately.  It worked well; actually almost too well.  But better ventilation was definitely needed.

My New Year’s resolution is to eat more healthy dried squid:

And clean out our fridge:

Not much room for anything in there right now.

Mindy just got home and she’s making ou-dong (a kind of noodle soup):

It’s pretty good stuff.

Happy New Year everyone!

It’s a rabbit.

해맞이 그린빌 Haemaji Greenville

This is just a short cultural contrast post on Koreans and their ongoing love affair with apartment buildings.  I am hoping to be able to put together a New Year’s post.  We’ll see how that goes.

In Korea, perhaps even more so than you find in other places,  life is all about keeping up with and surpassing your neighbor and people are much more overtly competitive than you would expect.  A parent who doesn’t put their kid through hell with extra lessons after they get home from public school is low class.  So, there is a lot of snobbery and superficial nonsense when it comes to putting kids in good private schools,  and living in affluent areas of town.

It is in the definition of affluence, however, that things start to get strange.  Here we have a typical modern apartment complex, Haemaji Greenville:

I just snapped this when I went to teach a lesson there.  At this one complex, there are about 20 buildings like the one pictured here, each 25 stories high, containing about 150 apartments each.  The apartments–though new and nice–are not very big, averaging perhaps 25 x 25 feet.  But this is considered high living.  You could own a house of your own that was 3 times that size with an accompanying piece of land, but you would still be likely to be viewed as not-very-well-off.

Koreans don’t want to live in houses.  They want to live in apartments.  Ask any kid and they will give it to you straight.  Apartments are the way to go.  Given a choice, they want to live in apartments when they grow up, not houses.  Strange huh?

It seems that Korea’s shortage of land led to the apartment trend in cities a few decades back, and most of the old neighborhoods containing traditional housing had to give way to complexes such as this.  Everyone wants to live in the city, because living in the country means you are a farmer, and no one wants to be a farmer.  Farmers are poor, and maybe dirty.  Living in the city also means living in apartments because, even if you wanted it,  land for a house is unobtainable.  So apartments were built and designed to cater to the classes, with apartment size and location being everything.

What seems odd to me is that many of the families that live in rather small apartments in complexes such as these are financially capable of buying a good-sized plot of land on the outskirts of town (which would likely increase in value fairly quickly anyway) and putting a nice, comfortable, comparatively big house on it.  But they don’t, usually.  It’s not common.  I wonder why.

It’s not about money.  Often people who live in these places drive ridiculously expensive vehicles, and foreign teachers who go to these  cramped apartment complexes to teach kids typically get paid 50 dollars an hour.  Go figure.

For dad (if you want to know where this place is exactly):

It’s only 2.54 miles from my place, but it seems pretty far away.  Maybe that’s because of all the traffic lights you have to pass through (click to enlarge).

It’s a rabbit.

천북펜션 A trip to a pension in Cheonbuk

Looking at the title of this post, some of you (especially Canadians) are possibly confused.  How do you take a trip to a pension?  Isn’t that something you pay into and get back later in life?

In Korea, the word pension is used in the French and general European sense of the word, meaning a small hotel or boarding house.  These are nicer than motels and, I would argue, 95% of hotels that you find here.  Here’s a picture of the one some friends and I stayed at for a holiday a few months back:

Really it is just a fully equipped, well-maintained western style house.  I took what I thought were a lot of great pictures of the interior as well, but at the time I had a new camera and didn’t know how to use it well, so most of them were blurred.  Yeah, I’m awesome.

The guy in the gray shirt sitting on the swing is Travis, and he owned that red scooter.  We rode our bikes from Pohang to Gyeongju, where this place is located.  The big guy on the far left rode with me on my 125cc Hyosung.  That was fine for me, but the 30 minute ride was hard on him because the seat is pretty hard in the back.

Here she is:

I love this thing.  It takes me everywhere.  In Pohang, parking is difficult or impossible to find during the day, so it is the best way to get around by far.  Dangerous in heavy traffic though, as I have experienced directly.  Last summer a van came out of an alley too fast and t-boned me from the side.  I saw him coming at the last second and got my leg up, otherwise it would have been crushed.  I was thrown about 20 feet out into traffic and bounced off the side of a car.  Luckily all of the traffic was stopped for a red light, so I wasn’t hurt badly, just shaken from the close call.  I did twist my back a little when I straight-armed the hood though.

I was less lucky in September of this year, when I strayed too close to a rail separating the sidewalk from the main street in a tunnel ( I was forced into it by an indifferent passing truck).  At about 60km/h my front brake handle clipped one of the uprights of the rail and, of course, it smashed my fingers.  The top of my middle finger was crushed, and the bone broken, requiring surgery and a couple of days in hospital.  The other fingers had only cosmetic damage, so it could have been much worse.  The amazing thing is that I managed to maintain control of the bike, and didn’t fall off.  The nail on my middle finger still hasn’t grown back fully.

So the bike is dangerous, admittedly.  But I haven’t been able to bring myself to sell it.  And now I’m off topic.  So, back to the pension.

I did get a couple of passable pics of the interior:

We really did have a great time at this place.  Later in the day we had a big barbecue outside.  It started to rain, but that was no problem.  The owner brought out a huge portable canopy that covered the whole thing. The sound of the rain on the canvas made for a good atmosphere.

Good times.  We plan to do something like this again after Christmas.  Hopefully sometime in January.  It probably won’t be the same though since we will have to stay inside to escape the cold.  Fall and Spring here are the best seasons; not to cold and not to hot.

It’s a rabbit.

The strange case of the disappearing cancer

Mother-in-law’s amazing medicine.

As some of you may know, my wife’s mother was diagnosed with stage 3 terminal lung cancer about a year and a half ago.  She refused chemo, and decided instead to focus on organic treatments and various traditional oriental medicines.  At the time, I remember thinking this was not a great idea, but since the illness was terminal, I didn’t really see the point in chemo either, since that would have made her sick, and she didn’t have any pain or sickness at that point.  She began burning mugwort (below) on her stomach and chest, which I’m told kills cancer cells with heat, leaving other cells intact.  Hey, I can guess what some of you are thinking, and  I wouldn’t have thought so either, but here we are a year and a half later and doctors are unable to detect cancer anywhere in her body.

It bears repeating:  a year and a half ago, this woman had tumors that had spread through her lungs and then beyond into her other organs.  Doctors said it was malignant, aggressive, inoperable and terminal.  She got a couple of different opinions confirming this.

Here is what the mugwort looks like:

This is what it looks like in its raw form, but then a thing that looks like a bottling machine is used to compact it and make it look like this:

Strange looking stuff.  This is burned directly on the stomach and other areas, and it burns like tobacco, slowly.  Weird,  but it smells and looks a lot like the oakum people used to use to waterproof boats back home. It gets hot too, and I’ve seen the burns it leaves sometimes.  A little crazy I thought, to be burning yourself but if it gets rid of cancer who am I to judge?

A lot of sick people have been coming to the in-law’s place recently to get info on just exactly what resulted in, or at least coincided with, the remission of such a grave case of cancer.  I’m still wondering about it myself, but mostly we are just counting our lucky stars.  My wife still has her mom, and that is all that matters.

It’s a rabbit.

Idiot Coffee

In keeping with the long held Korean tradition of misusing, misinterpreting and generally mangling the English language, I present to you, the Idiot Coffee Cafe:

The owner is actually a very good friend of Mindy and I, and we visit the place often.  He recently moved shop and opened this place.  The last place (which mom and dad visited when they came here, incidentally) was more cryptically called “The ID Cafe,” which I thought was better, personally.  At the old place, when asked, Mr. Lee (the owner) explained the name choice in terms of Freudian psychology–the id, ego superego stuff–but when I asked about the new name choice, he told me it was always Idiot Coffee.  In other words the old ID Cafe was a shortened form of Idiot Cafe.

Mr. Lee had to move his shop to a less desirable area of town, and now the shop itself is much smaller, all because his contract with the building he was set up in expired, and the building owner refused to renew.  I think that is the real reason for the name change; that, and also the fact that 99.8% of Koreans wouldn’t know the difference anyway, and those that do will just get a chuckle.  Mr.  Lee’s English is great, since it was his major in school, and he has a flair for irony.   The name choice might not be such a good idea in Canada, but it is just fine here.

Yeah.  That’ s about all I have to say about coffee.  But here’s another interesting picture:

Passed this scene on the way to work a few weeks back.  It is a container box of the sort that transport trucks carry converted into a sort of shed.  You see a lot of them in Korea and they are sort of the equivalent of trailers.  More often though, they are used by construction companies as temporary shelters, and even as small local police offices scattered around town.  This one is on fire, and standing on its end in the middle of the street.  There is a truck crane which you can see part of to the left, and you can see the front end of a firetruck on the far right.  There were a bunch of police cars off to the left, but I had already passed those.  I snapped this with my phone.

It’s a rabbit.

The Last Day (at SLI)

Well, it’s done.  I cleared out my desk, had a quick chat with Kevin about money (not so much fun) and walked out the door.  I had a couple of my favorite classes today, but the rest were canceled.  I didn’t do much study with the kids, since it was the last day.  We just chatted about nonsense (they are in grade 5 after all) and I let them draw pictures on the board, which they always want to do.

This is what I look like in the eyes of Sohae:

I suppose it could be worse.  My nose is a bit exaggerated and I look a little bit angry, but other than that it’s pretty accurate.

MinJung draws in typical Asian animation style:

I think that it’s supposed to be a girl.

Of course the boys have different interests:

This one warrants some analysis.  The writing above the picture is the boy’s name, Jay-hyup.   The person on the far left has two guns.  The one in the middle has a gun and a knife, and the one on the right is missing his head.  It is on the ground in front of him.  Not sure what the boxes above them represent.

Here’s Sohae, ever the devil.  She always tried to get a rise out of me:

I remember thinking she was a little odd-looking at first, with those wide-set eyes.   Of course it’s likely that she thought something similar about me.  Very shy when she first came to our class, she soon grew bolder.  Her interest in just about everything going on around her definitely trumped her interest in learning English.  But she was fun to teach.

It’s a rabbit.

공부 방 Study Room

So, yeah, tomorrow is my last day at Stanley Language Institute (or SLI as it was so loftily touted), as I noted in my previous post.  Naturally my wife and I have been discussing where to go from here.  Luckily I have viable options.

Because I live in Korea and am married to a Korean national, my immigration status is different from other teachers, the majority of whom are here on what are known as E-2 visas.  My visa is an F-2 and the next time I go to renew it I will be eligible for a green card.  Not that that matters, though, because an F-visa (family visa) entitles me to basically all of the same rights as Koreans, and I can live and work here without restriction.

That means I can start my own business, and I would already have done so several years ago had my brother-in-law not started up his own poorly managed and now obviously ill-fated private English school.  When he started it, he had perhaps ten years of experience as a teacher, so he knew the system well.  That gave him confidence, so he went fairly large, investing about $80,000 of his not-very-well-off-at-all parents’ money to get it off the ground.  That money was needed mostly for interior decoration, a few computers, chairs, desks, bookshelves, an industrial printer  etc., as well as to lease a large van to carry students, and hire basic staff such as myself, a couple of other teachers, a secretary and a driver.

You can by now begin to imagine that this was a fairly involved operation that required management skills that our Kevin (the brother-in-law) didn’t necessarily possess.  With so many private schools in the area–and they really are a dime a dozen all over Korea, especially when it comes to English–what a manager needs most of all is to be a talker, and a proper car salesmen would be  ideal.  He or she needs to be able to bluff and bluster and make parents believe that this school is special, unlike the others, possessed of a profound and mystical system of enlightenment that will magically elevate their overworked and stressed out kids’ standardized test scores,  so that they will eventually be able to apply for and attend a high-class university, and thereby secure a worthwhile future, and a meaningful life.

But Kevin is no talker.  He is introverted, awkward and socially inept, often saying things inappropriate to the situation, or the topic of conversation.  His ideas are also often overly simplistic,  poorly thought-out, or just plain wrong.  He doesn’t fool many parents, and so while I’ve seen quite a lot of parents come to the school to inquire about lessons, much fewer of them than you would expect actually enrolled their kids.

Months before the school opened, I  learned from my girl that the whole thing was likely not going to turn out well because  her brother had a poor track record.  He had already tried his hand at managing English departments at a couple of different schools, with discouraging results.  This added to my reluctance, but I felt pressured because it was a family thing, and if I didn’t work there he would have to hire a stranger, fly that person into the country, get them set up with immigration and secure living quarters, all at the school’s expense.  That would have meant resentment because I had no good reason not to work there and help him out.

When the school opening thing was being tossed around at the in-law’s place a few years back, my wife–who knows her brother all too well–was dead set against it, prophetically declaring that it would fail due to her brother’s incompetence in management.  Never known to pull punches, she was rebuked for this strongly by her parents, who were desperately looking to set their son on some sort of career path (he is 40 now, by the way), and felt that the whole family should be supportive.  And so they backed him 100%.  A little more than two years later, my brother-in-law has gotten married (about 6 months ago), has a newborn baby (since about 6 weeks ago), and is facing a failed business, and about $100, 000 debt.  Not a great way to start a family.

What am I going to do for work now?

Well, it’s not as bad as it seems.  As I say, I wanted to work for myself here years ago, because it’s relatively easy to do, and you can make a lot more money.  I will start a study room (Gongbubang) business, which is just a classroom and a small office/reception area.  There are a couple of different ways I’m thinking about doing this:

First, I could get out of the city and go to the countryside where there are no private schools and rent an apartment or some office space, and convert it into a classroom and reception area.  It would mean a short daily commute (30-45 minutes) but it would be worth it.  There is a particular place I know of that would be perfect for this because one of my best friends here grew up there and he knows the area.  There are a bazillion students looking to take private English instruction but they have to commute into town to get it.  I can provide it on their doorstep.  Cost of start-up would be in the area of  five to seven thousand dollars.  The advantage of this plan is that demand for my time will definitely always exceed supply, and I will eventually have to implement standards, and therefore ultimately end up dealing only with bright and motivated kids.  A plus, trust me.

The second option is in-city.  My wife’s friend knows a guy who owns a new building with office space that is already set up as a study room, and so would require no changes whatsoever.  It is also in a great residential area with no other private schools in the immediate area.   To get it up and running I will have to deposit about $5000 to start, and then pay an additional $400 monthly.  I get the 5 grand back after the 1 or 2 year contract period expires, if I don’t sign again.  The advantage here is that there is relatively little commute, and the facilities are already in place.

Both options are very stress free.  And very difficult to mess up given the demand for private instruction from native speakers.  Added to that is the bonus that my Korean is now good enough that I can consult with parents and meet kids directly.  I may have to hire a secretary when things get busy in order to manage the classes, take calls, and field questions from parents and kids, but the cost of that is very manageable.  Those kinds of jobs pay very little here–maybe $1000 a month.  I’m not joking.  That’s the going rate.

With a study room going at full capacity, minus expenses, you would expect to clear about $8000-10000 a month, teaching five 50 minute classes a day, with a maximum class size of 8 students.  Of course you could teach more classes, if the demand is there, and if you don’t mind putting yourself in an early grave.

Anyway.  I will be checking out both areas and making a decision on which avenue to pursue on Friday (December 19, 2009).  Next week I will make the necessary arrangements and get this thing started by the end of the month, with a little luck.  There are a couple of legal hoops to jump through with the Department of Education, but that’s just paperwork–my wife’s specialty.

Wish me luck.

It’s a rabbit.