LATENIGHT - KOREA

Saturday, January 25, 2003

The lights are on but nobody's writing anything...

Here's a little update on what's been going on over the past week. Basically, the winter schedule at our school sees me teaching a couple of classes in the morning, then sitting around on my hands for a few hours, while I wait to teach four more classes in the early to mid-evening. The computer in our new office is off limits and the ones in the other office are sporadic in their availability. I am proud to report that to pass my days, I am almost finished reading "Callahan's Key" by Spider Robinson, which aside from marking papers is the only thing I have to do. When I get home at night, I have time for my supper, I read a few emails but skip replying, and then I try to get to bed early since I'm waking up at 8am now.

I did spend some late nights working on that newspaper request but I swear it's the toughest thing I have written in a long time. Every time I put a sentence down on paper I tell myself, "No one will believe this". Nothing around me in Korea would pass the suspension of disbelief inherent in small town Canada. Maybe I should lie and write what people expect to hear: "The alliance between the U.S. and South Korea is stronger than ever due to the threatening posturing of the evil, communist, nuclear-weapon-aspiring North Korea-- to which the South has vowed to regard with eternal vigilance after years of incursions, military confrontations, and an only modest and lingering ceasefire."

Hell, that's good. I would have believed it two years ago. Who would imagine South Korea viewing the North Korean nuclear crisis as a product of American manipulation, or as domestic interference while at the same time proposing that any outbreak of war would be between the U.S. and North Korea only?-- and South Korea would be able to sit it out this time and remain neutral. Regardless of the "sea of fire" threats against the "citadel of the imperialists", North Korea doesn't honestly mean they'd attempt to breech the D.M.Z. (again), do they?

If I wrote that a million people had gathered to demonstrate against the U.S., could people back home even envision it, or would they simply suggest I was just being hyperbolic? I mean honestly, that's more people than the entire population of Nova Scotia-- all crammed into a space the size of a city block! Preposterous! Who would believe me when I write about the removal of mines on the D.M.Z. based on the naive perception of a two way trust between people who share only a common blood?-- but that it's a good enough reason for them. South Korea is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Korean War armistice by denying the North could ever be capable of inflicting harm or grief on the south.

If I told them the sky was blue here too, they'd believe me-- but I'd be lying.

In the news...
Kim Jong Il has turned into a 70 foot tall robot! I know this story's from the Onion but in light of what I just wrote, it might as well be true. Kudos to them folks who have found a way to make sense of this whole thing. This story reads about as realistically as any of them and with the apparent sanity possessed by North Korean press agents, I suspect I will see the same story appearing on something like the Pyongyang Times any day now.

I am as close as I have knowingly been to being an accessory in a "crime against humanity".
The Joong Ang Ilbo reported that the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child is reviewing the South Korean education system, largely in response to the extreme stress that students here are under in preparing for high school and university entrance examinations-- but including things such as workload, and corporal punishment in school. The hagwon system, to which I am party too and benefiting employment-wise, is a direct extension of this academic overkill which may amount to a form of torture for South Korean students, against the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The frightful coincidence is that just this week, one of my Grade 5 students began speaking in much the same language as the boy whose letter was posthumously quoted. This led to me calling a rather quick huddle with his other, Korean teachers, whom he had not mentioned this too.

And remember those evacuation documents for Canadian nationals that I linked to in my sidebar? I just received another copy from the Canadian Embassy by email, who have decided to inexplicably mail them out to all Canadians in South Korea. Now it's not an official order to get out. It's no different from what I received previously. It has left a few Canadian teachers wondering as to motives and reasoning over the timing however.

"Foolish is he who frets at night,
And lies awake to worry'
A weary man when morning comes,
He finds all bad as before."
- The Havamal

Thursday, January 16, 2003

Nowon, opposite Lotte Department Store

Does anyone get the feeling that we're living in an episode of Dallas?

Is this all a hallucination brought on by culture shock? One of my old editors emailed me and asked me to write a piece about the recent North Korea troubles for the newspaper back home. It seems a lot of people are worried back in Canada. I've been worried to an extent-- but when I stop and ask any Korean around me, they're not worried. I ask them what they'd do if there was an invasion and they nonchalantly say, "leave the country". If I ask them whether they feel threatened by North Korea having nuclear weapons; they say, "That's good because when we reunify, we will have them too and then Korea will be a superpower." If you mention the sailors who died in the June naval skirmish, the subject gets changed to the United States and how Americans secretly conspire to control Korea. Nobody is even thinking about North Korea. It's like there is some plot to delete the whole affair from the collective conscience here (or could they be trying to save face for their rabid boreal cousins?).

Even the warmongering Northmen are reportedly taking it easy. Amidst vitriolic bursts of Stalinist rhetoric, they've flip-flopped to say that they might stay in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (They have 90 days to reconsider after the initial termination notice so their pull-out is not truly in effect yet) . Furthermore, they've even come out to say that the admission of nuclear weapons was just a myth. They never had any nuclear weapons and they had never planned on making any... we were dreaming.

The United States in turn, has released statements denying that they ever considered stopping shipments of food. American oil shipments are still slated to be halted (though that too is under reconsideration) however North Korea has always gotten most of its oil from China anyway. The plan to build nuclear reactors in North Korea is still toast but then again, nobody actively pursued that after it was agreed to in 1994... so no change there. The U.S. has even sent James Kelly back to Korea, wearing a painted smile, to dissolve any trace of the past personality conflicts that had initially contributed to the U.S.-North Korea diplomatic break-down in the first place.

It's like we're all going to wake up one of these days to find that overnight, Koreans from both sides of the border, working in collusion with the U.S. State Department, have switched the clock back to October. That's a hell of a work of statesmanship.

Roh, Roh Roh... your vote !!!
Someone else who is trying to turn back the clock is Lee Hoi Chang. In late breaking news, the Supreme Court of Korea has ordered a recount of last month's election! Theoretically he would have to make up a half-million votes so neither party figures that an upset is likely... but who knows. These are crazy times.

Tuesday, January 14, 2003

*cough*

One of my GPS1 students came through for me and tracked down some merchandise from the "I Love Virus" collection I mentioned a while back. There are two characters in the series. One is Virus and the other is Vaccine. I forget which one is the boy or the girl though-- but the gist is that they love each other.

It's also not unrelated to some stories that showed up in the news today regarding computer crime in, or rather through Korea. Dong-A Ilbo reports that hacking crimes are up 185% while cyber crimes, in general, were reported by the Chosun Ilbo to be up 80%. Koreans are not responsible for all these crimes. Most of these crimes seem to be trans-border. The high internet connectivity in Korea has made the country a favoured stop for people looking for bounce sites, and the like, for criminal activities that otherwise have no relation to Korea. Maybe it's also fitting that I had just placed my eager order for William Gibson's upcoming book, "Pattern Recognition". Meanwhile, my GPS1 class has moved on from Poe and begun Patrick Waddington's, "The Street That Got Mislaid".

In other news, James Bond fans will get a chance to see 'Die Another Day' for free on Friday. Apparently the distribution company has noticed that Korean's have reacted much more favourably to the film once they actually have seen it. The biggest criticism by activists is that it makes North Korea look evil. Why does anyone need to go to a 007 movie for that? You could just read the BBC highlights from recent DPRK rhetoric. At this point, I'm thinking that a career as a Korean translator must be the most entertaining job in the world. [Quote: "...Molten iron from the furnace is burning with hatred; piles of manure in the fields are fuming out smoke of hatred. Enemy-annihilating songs burst out of the hearts of poets who used to write songs of creation and innovation..." ] On a positive note, Ananova reports that North Korea is distancing itself from it's pledge to "turn the citadel of imperialists [Seoul] into a sea of fire".

Demonstrations have taken a 180 degree turn. About 30,000 protestors (from the Protestant church aptly enough) staged a pro-US rally on Saturday, in response to the recent N.K. threat. This comes in sharp contrast to the rallies of last month, which notably included the Roman Catholic nuns wearing "F*cking U.S.A." pins on their habits.

On the other hand, Canada is using this year's anniversaries as a launch to improving relations between Canada and Korea. I can only assume this means the two governments will be sharing more tax information on people like me. Speaking of ambassadorial and embassy-related things, as per my request I received the evacuation orders from my embassy last week, just in case... I'm adding them in .doc, .txt, and .wpd formats to my sidebar if anyone is interested or, the gods forbid, they ever become necessary what with all this "sea of fire" stuff. I'm not planning to go yet, but I figured I'd be prepared and get them early-- that and the fact that I've always been curious about them as I am sure many of you might be too.

DOWNLOAD THE EVACUATION ORDERS: Word Document , Text Document, Word Perfect Format.

After reading those, check out this North Korea story, on Yonhap, which sounds like it came straight out of a porno.

Monday, January 13, 2003

My blogger template crashed tonight and I spent an hour or more rebuilding it. Instead of writing that short story, I opted to stick to my New Year's resolution and do up a cartoon for the website. This one was drawn in response to that amazing photo in today's Globe & mail which reportedly shows one million North Koreans demonstrating against the U.S. in Pyongyang (either that or it's a bread line-up). It just got me to wondering what would happen if someone airlifted in a few thousand soccer balls. Maybe the whole war could be averted.

Red devils with a capital 'R'...
A whole lot of North Koreans, all in one convenient place

Sunday, January 12, 2003

This time last year...

Bored out of my skull without a moment to spare...

We've finished one full week of winter schedule and as you can tell, I don't have as much time to sit at home and blog. I leave for work in the early morning and I arrive home fairly late at night so that I only have time for dinner and a bit of housekeeping before bed. The irony is that every day I have a three-hour break between classes that runs like cold molasses. I brought my "Cultural History of Korea" book to school on Friday and spent the three hours that day reading. It helped pass the time and I feel like I actually accomplished something. Still, it's a long week.

The weekend has been nice. We finally managed to get a seat at Bennigan's in Hyehwa, without having to wait an hour, and the food was great. They have lots of Mexican-style items on the menu which meant I could get a good plate of nachos and other assorted favourites. The pasta and the steak dishes looked good too. Afterwards we went to "The Canadian Club" which wasn't Canadian at all. Basically it was an all black-decor bar that sold Canadian Club Whiskey and not much else. It wasn't a foreigner hang out either as everyone there was Korean. I asked for a Jim Beam but the waiter said they were, "running low" so instead, we had the typical watered-down coffee and left to try out the nearby, "Red Lion : Irish Pub". To make a long story short-- it wasn't very Irish either-- but they did have Guinness on tap for a princely sum. (Note: the price on the website is a bit cryptic-- the 500cc Guiness is 13,000 Won-- the 3800 Won price above the picture of the Guinness glasses is actually for a 500cc �з� - Miller).

Today I've been locked in front of the computer for hours doing lesson plans.

Lots of stuff is in the news but I'm not about to dig into it now (I have an idea for a short story that I want to hammer out tonight so I am budgeting my computer time). Instead, I'll skip the DPRK Missile testing, the cloned babies, the Anti-Americanism, the James Bond boycotts and threats of violence... and I'll just mention the positive news. Seoul is planning the World's Tallest Building. They've actually been mentioning that since September (at least) but this is the first good news story on that subject that I've found to link to.

And even better than that, I read about a new grocery delivery service that stocks foreign goods-- including oatmeal!

As of Friday, I have officially started my second contract too. Today's picture is a bit of a throw back to this time last year. On my last trip around Nowon, I snapped a picture of the Hotel Tiffany, where I lived for my first week in Seoul. I highly recommend it if you are ever looking for a highly secluded place to conduct an illicit affair (just don't leave your shoes outside the door and try to eat out rather than placing your food orders through the front desk).

Thursday, January 09, 2003

The beast of the balcony...

Frightful things...
I posted Molly's picture today as a bit of a change. You might remember that the last time I showed her, she was literally a handful... and now she's only figuratively a handful. Picking her up requires both hands and a "bend at the knees" motion.

Indeed, she has more news than I do right now. For starters, the cold weather has brought her back inside the main part of the apartment for the time being. Her water dishes on the balcony are freezing with this cold snap we've been experiencing. For much of the time she's been relocated to warmer accomodations. She's not entirely happy about that however (as the two teeth marks on my hand will attest to)...

... And in a change of scenery for my furry little sparring partner, I have a new clothes washer! The control panel on the old one had burnt out and the machine was too old to fix. To my boss's credit, he spared no time in getting me a new one and had it delivered and installed yesterday by the time I came home from school.

Meanwhile...
It's been tough to find time to gather my thoughts for the blog this week. I'm up at 8am each day to get ready for school but don't really have time to think about much of a post then. I come home around 8pm at night but after I have my supper and check my email, I find myself trying to get to bed early now. It's after 1am and I know I should be sleeping but if I don't publish something here soon, I will run the danger of hypocrisy. You see, I've gotten my middle school classes to begin work on their own blogs in lieu of written, hand-in, writing journals. Not only does it allow me to check up on their progress 24 hours a day, but it's a bit edgy and cool too *smirk*. With their permissions, I may post some links to their sites in the future so that you can get an idea of the English level of some of my upper level classes. Their current writing assignments have to deal with fear.

It began with the choice between studying Nathaniel Hawthorne's, "The Ambitious Guest", or Edgar Allan Poe's, "The Cask of Amontillado". With a shared love for scary stories, they opted for Poe. I had studied that story in school when I was their age, and with my extra writing timeslots, I want to present them with some of the material that their Western contemporaries would be reading.

Fear is the most basic human emotion. While I warned them that academic or journalistic writing is supposed to be free of emotion, they could still harness it's power by paying attention to their choice of vocabulary and their presentation style while writing-- alluding to, or subtly fostering emotion without coming out and overtly expressing a feeling. It's a dirty trick but I'm not teaching them to be saints. My goal is to encourage them to effectively communicate and sell their ideas, on paper, in any way acceptable.

I pointed out the title itself, and the author's choice of "cask" over something more common, like "barrel", prevented the mental image of a "barrel of fun" or a "barrel of monkeys" (hardly frightening). The similarity of "cask" to "casket" was a much better fit for the story. We did similar breakdowns with "Montresor" (My treasure) and "Fortunato" (Fortune as both wealth or luck, the latter leading the reader into a false sense that Fortunato was not actually as doomed as he was). And for a couple of hours, I was transported back to fond memories of Grade 8 English class, myself.

But the students weren't scared. Part of the reason was that by the time they understood some of the difficult vocabulary, the shock value wore off. Nevertheless, the main reason they gave was that in comparison to the horror movies they are used to, it lacked the ghosts and monsters that they have come to expect from the genre. Feeling creepiness at delving into the mind of an unrepentant killer appears to have gone out of fashion in the 19th century. They wanted ghosts, however most admitted that they were surprised at how scary a story could be, even without them.

So today, we got to the actual spooks-- but with a twist. I gave them a newspaper story about a ghost from South Africa. This story had a frightening ghost, but it was devoid of emotion or bias on behalf of the writer. She was simply reporting the case as factual, at least as far as the claims of her witnesses went, but with no conclusion of her own save that which was tangibly provable or directly quoted. That is not to say the newspaper story is ineffective. It's well-written. The introduction is clear, the main body is informative, and the conclusion is well-chosen to leave a bit of a chill in the reader, without sacrificing the conventions of journalism. But this still made for a less than spine-tingling tale.

Tonight's writing homework assignment and the first serious use of their blogs is to merge the storytelling style of Poe with the basic facts and events of the relatively colourless newspaper report, by substituting words that carry more emotional weight. They can do such simple things as changing words like "house" into "home" or they can draw minor extrapolations such as changing "fireplace" to "the darkness of the fireplace" since the fire would have obviously been out at the time someone reached inside. They can also rebuild the events leading up to the original placement of the letter in their own narrative if they want. In the end, I hope they have some spooky little tales.

...and speaking of fear, you should have seen the way that one of them began clutching his thesaurus.

Saturday, January 04, 2003

Snowfall in Changwon, quite a long time ago

It snowed today in a serious way. All day it alternated from light flurries to full galeforce onslaughts, and then back to a sprinkle by the time you got to the window to close it. There have been lots of changes this week now that the new schedule has begun in earnest. We started Thursday with three new teachers. One of them is already missing in action and I took over her classes today-- the school is hoping to find a replacement if necessary by Monday. The whole office is a hive of activity from 9am until well into the evening. During one afternoon break, we solved part of the overcrowding problem by changing office space. The elementary teachers and I are now stationed in the president's office. Where I once sat at a desk in the corner of a big room, away from the single small window, I am now in the center of a half dozen desks occupying a smaller room with a much bigger window. It afforded a fantastic view of today's weather... including an eerie moment when the Seoul sky turned bright orange from some effect of the pollution, and the snowfall became almost blinding (not to mention more transparent in its toxicity. Short moment later-- I watched-- and the clouds broke before my eyes.

Probably a more important change of perspective is the lack of anything cluttering up my face. I lived up to some of those resolutions. I visited the hair stylist for a major renovation to my exterior. The beard is gone. Furthermore, my glasses are also tucked away for now. New contact lenses, a trim, and a trip to the dentist ended up becoming a $180 CAD makeover.

But it's the weekend. We actually managed to score tickets to Lord of the Rings, but I will have to stay home to meet the repairman who is coming to see about the clothes washer tomorrow. We had to cancel. In the morning, however, it's back to Mokdong for another try at the find-the-Immigration-Office-before-it-closes game.

In the News...
In contrast to my last Mokdong trip, there's no danger of encountering a demonstration. In a surprise twist, the government has declared the candlelight vigils illegal and to that end, even arrested a few organisers temporarily. The government pointed out that the original meaning of the vigil has been lost and that the last couple demonstrations or so have been becoming somewhat "Anti-American"-- which all of a sudden is a bad thing for Roh for some reason.

Thursday, January 02, 2003

So I was thinking to myself, in the broodish way I do, how unexcited I was at the prospect of the new year dawning. January 1st marks the end of the Year of the Horse and the advent of the incoming Year of the Sheep. Last year, I was vacationing in Canada for New Years, which let me fill the time with revisiting friends and family back home. The year before, I found myself in Seoul and it was that night that I met my current girlfriend. Before that was the earth shattering Y2K.

I was spending New Year's Eve 2003 at home, kicking around the same funk that's been following me for the last couple of months, and contemplating how the turning of this year was absolutely unmemorable for me. And then it happened. At 11:58pm, I knocked over an ashtray, which fell onto a cup, which landed near the balcony door where the rabbit had been playing. I spent New Years with a rag, cleaning up a mixture of cigarette butts, ashes, spilled coffee, and rabbit dung. I will never forget New Year's Eve 2003. It can only get better from here on in.

I poured myself a glass of scotch from my private stash-- almost as a deliberate attempt to prove that I am not going to give up drinking in 2003-- even though I can almost count the number of times I went out to a bar this year on one hand. If anything, maybe I should resolve to drink more. I went from over-indulgence my first year to virtual teetotaling sobriety this year. My bank account thanks me for it-- but maybe I can afford to loosen up a bit more.

About that funk. I must come up with a plan to kill it. Impending war notwithstanding, I need to cheer up. From talking with other foreign teachers in Korea, it's not uncommon for one to have their emotions here rollercoaster every couple of months. You go through phases where you are jumping up the steps of temples like a mountain goat, full of unbridled glee. Two weeks later, you find yourself sitting with chopsticks, counting every single grain of rice that you eat; 7,984,628... 7,984,629... only a few more bowls until you hit 8,000,000... 7,984,6... For me, this recent bout has gone on TOO LONG.

I usually avoid New Year's resolutions (at least I can honestly say I avoid following them). Last year's goal was to have functional command of Korean by year's end. What happened to that one, I don't know. There are definitely some changes in store for this year.

Appearances can be conceiving...
I'm going to start from the outside in. First off: the beard is going. If I am going to try to cultivate a less cynical outlook, I need to stop looking like Charlie Farquharson on Hee Haw. With that will go a trip to the dentist for a teeth cleaning (smoker's prerogative... I'm also going to try and quit smoking but I'm not about to promise it on this blog yet). I'm gonna spend a small chunk of my bonus on a new wardrobe (and fight the temptation to buy all black clothing which I normally do) and lastly, a trip to the optical store will furnish me with new contact lenses.

Happy News Year...
I'm changing some formats on my blog too. I'm going to compartmentalize the news links a bit more. I won't omit them entirely though. They represent the big picture around me and watching stories develop gives me a few hunches on what my future in this country might look like. Although I'm not that old, really, I understand how younger readers get put off a bit by politics and such. I've spoken to people in their early twenties who won't have anything to do with it. Then I am reminded that these are the same "youth voters" who don't bother to turn up at election polls anymore... or if they do, complain that they don't know enough about the issues to vote. There's only a few years difference in age between us but the dividing line seems surprisingly solid. Everybody I know, close to my age, sits around over beer discussing Paul Martin's dagger collection or who would win in a fight between Sheila Copps and Deborah Grey. Switch your clock forward by a few years and you get Moby, rave's, and Nintendo (a lot of them think Kurt Cobain is retro). Covering news stories also gives me a unique voice amongst local bloggers, and it encourages me to learn deeper things about the political and cultural history of Korea.

Drawing on my experiences...
Instead of deleting the news (blog conformity states that I have to link to something for this to be a true blog)... I am going to repackage it. My latent depression has robbed me of virtually all creative output over the last couple of months. To this end, my main resolution for the blog (please hold me to this one if I lapse) is to do a political cartoon at least every week.

I almost cancelled coming to Korea two years ago when I was interviewed for a job as an editorial cartoonist (around the same time I was applying for my passport). I didn't get the job. There was a far more accomplished cartoonist in line for it and since I only ever did these sorts of things as a hobby, my portfolio was pretty much empty on up to date stuff (I have worked as a T-shirt designer, and as a sketch artist at a museum, but I have only ever freelanced political cartoons). I am going to remedy that with this resolution. With one cartoon a week, I will have my portfolio back in order and with it, I'll have something else to consider as an option when I get back to the Great White North.

Light reading...
The simplest of all my resolutions will be to purchase a new reading lamp. I haven't been writing hardly a thing over the last two months (save for my blog posts). But as I tell my writing class, the best way to perfect your writing is by reading. To this end, I need to reorganise the apartment to give me the proper light and mood to sit down with a good book (including my Korean history books and language manuals). About 90% of my reading comes from the net. I even downloaded Tom Sawyer for God's sake! This changes. I am going back to real paper and I am going to rekindle my love of reading for enjoyment above information. I hope that a byproduct of this will be the end of my current writer's block-- and with output, comes pride, and with pride I thereby vanquish my demons of despair.

...And there you have it. This year is a bit momentous for me. One has to remember that Korea is not just 13 time zones ahead of home, it's also a couple of years. As of January 1st, my Korean age has become the big three-oh. I still have a year and a half before I have to deal with my Western age reaching that point but as of this moment, whenever someone on the street stops to ask me, I will be forced to tell them I am "thirty-years-old". *cringe*

I hope that everyone reading this has a fantastic 2003. Oh heck... I even hope people not reading this have a pretty decent year. Last year was truly a phenomenal year to be in Korea. It's definitely not the same Korea as it was when I came here... nor even as it was during 2001. The World Cup, the demonstrations, the election, North Korea... all of these things have combined to give Korea a monumental place in the history books for 2002. The Year of the Horse had legs. Here's hoping that the Year of the Sheep turns out to be warm and fuzzy.

Apartments in Saggye

HAPPY HOGMANAY !!!

I made it through yesterday with no life-threatening events. The demonstration didn't seem to reach the million person mark but so far there aren't many news stories out yet about it and I wasn't going to stick around last night to verify it myself. The subway stops around Gwanghwamun were busy but not overwhelming. Instead, my complaint about yesterday falls back on the same sort of complaints I always have when I go to Mokdong. I got lost and when I finally found the place, it was closed. I spent three hours riding the subway and an hour walking around... for nothing.

This is really starting to bug me. I've been there, what? four times or something. I should be able to find the building by now. This time was even worse. I got out from the subway station and I physically saw the building-- with my own eyes! THEN I spent an hour trying to reach it. I circled the block 3 times following roads that create fantastic optical illusions as to direction and destination. Eventually I felt like I was in some grotesque Dungeons & Dragons adventure-- knowing that I would wander aimlessly until some grand Dungeon Master in the sky decided, "Okay, you come upon a building which says, 'Immigration'." I mean I *SAW* the building and still couldn't get to it. I eventually ended up surrendering roads and following muddy trails between apartment buildings, up ancient stone steps, stopping on high ground to take readings with my compass. (Yes, I carry a compass).

I finally saw a familiar billboard from where I had caught a taxi one time and by making my way there, the Immigration Office revealed itself to me down the block. I got up to the steps and... it was closed. The immigration workers had apparently cut out at 11:30 (probably to get ready for the demonstration). I met another foreign teacher there from Australia who was in the same boat as I, and there were also some people from Japan, a man from Pakistan and a few others who had also arrived to find a darkened office with only a single security guard in the lobby. More people were inside "working" but they wouldn't come to the door. Probably the most interesting thing was a guy I assumed to be Fillipino. He spoke perfect Korean but his physique was massive (which is why I concluded he must have some South Pacific blood). The guy had apparently come from a lot farther away than the rest of us, only to find a locked office, and he was angry. I opted to see how he managed with the security guard before accepting my own defeat. As a credit to him, he did manage to get the doors of the office open. Various other foreigners (me too) rushed in to pick up forms and such. The big guy left and went to the washroom. I suppose that after the rest of us had left, they would probably serve him and calm him down. Like I said, there were a few off-duty immigration officials there. I hope so. In spite of being mean and scary today, he had a lot of laugh lines on his face and I had the impression that on less taxing days, he was probably a pretty nice guy.

No luck for me though. I have to go back again. Since I will be starting daytime shifts on Thursday, that doesn't leave me a lot of space. The office closes at 1pm on Saturdays so it looks like I will be up early again this weekend-- to face the rush hour subway traffic. I think I will plan to stand/sit near the back of the subway car. I did that on my way home and had some very pleasant conversations with some of the senior citizens there. Most confrontations seem to come from the middle aged men, but the differences between generations are profound and older Koreans, as I have said before, are very polite, warm, friendly, and welcoming. I still get nervous talking to them though, because I am conscious of the fact that by learning my Korean from kids, I tend to pick up informal language. I have to do my best to remember to add "so-yoh"s and "sumneeda"s, et cetera, onto the ends of all my verbs when speaking to older people.

Arriving near home, I stopped for some groceries at the next door Save Zone Hypermart. (They have some new Konglish signage up which also mentions how you can "Lay fresh vegetables" and states that their beef has "Large amounts of marine products".) I really love the term "hypermarket" though.