Dujeong-Dong

2009-11-26T15:32:00.004+09:00

this blog is dead

2009-10-28T03:42:00.001+09:00

You can look at new photos over here:

fletcherchancey.tumblr.com

It's Over

2009-09-15T19:38:00.002+09:00

I'm terrible at saying goodbye. All day I've been getting choked up, muttering something about fond memories and kindness and before I finish speaking I sidle away in a flutter of bows.

I feel like I should write something.

Sindang

2009-09-14T19:39:00.002+09:00

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Hey

2009-09-07T22:16:00.006+09:00

I'm getting home in a few weeks and I'll be needing a place to live and a job. If you can help me find one of those, email me or something. Thanks!

Also, I think I'm going to switch over to fletcherchancey.tumblr.com pretty soon. I'll be posting here for a while longer though, at least until I leave Korea.

Korean medicine

2009-09-07T19:26:00.002+09:00

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what koreans are reading

2009-08-31T16:11:00.001+09:00

From koreabeat:

Top 10 in life and culture.

1. People are being advised to be vigilant about hand washing.

2. An article divining women’s fashion trends for this fall by looking at what three celebrities are wearing.

3. A look at some allegedly trendy fashion accessories.

4. Laser surgery can supposedly make you look younger by thinning your face.

5. 10 tips for cutting down on things in your home which cause allergies as the season changes from summer to fall.

6. An article on home gardening.

7. A piece on men with woman-like chests.

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Naofumi

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typhoonalopolus

2009-08-12T02:25:00.006+09:00

440 e state

2009-08-10T15:29:00.005+09:00

fishing in jeju

2009-08-08T01:09:00.005+09:00

Heed a Fall

2009-08-05T16:30:00.008+09:00

We got to Jeju Island Friday night and met up with Wayne and Emily and Moondang and Taeyoon. We grilled burgers at the hotel and saw a huge spider and climbed this little mountain to look inside of a crater where we think we heard wild hogs. The island is beautiful, but it's totally overrun with tourist attractions like "minilands" where you walk around and look at mini-Eiffel towers and mini-White Houses and places you go horseback riding dressed up like cowboys and indians. Ugh. After a day of bullshit like that plus dudes forcing us to pay to lay on the beach (!), Marci and I took a ferry to Udo Island and met up with an Irish guy we met in Seoul a few months ago and his sister (whose name was Darbhla?). Udo turned out to be way more legit. No taxis or Family Marts or wax museums. We got a cheap room and rented mopeds and rode around the island, stopping every 30 minutes or so to drink beers on the beach. Marci ran into a parked truck and its owner yelled at me for letting her drive. We also went snorkeling, which turns out to not be that gay at all.

Welcome to North Korea

2009-07-28T21:28:00.000+09:00

Deadbeat Summer

2009-07-28T17:39:00.000+09:00

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2009-07-27T17:41:00.005+09:00

Our new apartment building in Seosan.

I went camping with some friends at Mongsanpo Beach on Wednesday. I didn't get a picture of it, but at night the waves were glowing with phosphorescent algae. It was probably the coolest thing I've ever seen.

These dogs hated me.

I've been spending my days going around to different towns on the coast near Seosan trying to find a good place to fish. This is in Anheung I think. I caught a few really small fish but that seems to be all that anyone is trying to catch, which is fine I guess, but everyone uses these things called "sea worms" for bait and they scare the shit out of me.

2009-07-23T17:52:00.003+09:00

Dogs and cats

2009-07-21T20:47:00.002+09:00

In 1906 Korea.

Reputable language is hardly adequate to the description of the Korean dog. No family would be complete without one; but its bravery varies inversely as the square of its vermin, which is calculable in no known terms. This dog is a wolfish breed, but thoroughly domesticated. Almost every house has a hole in the front door for his accommodation. He will lie just inside, with his head protruding from the orifice and his eyes rolling from side to side in the most truculent manner. If he happens to be outside and you point your finger at him, he rushes for this hole, and bolts through it at a pace which seems calculated to tear off all the hair from his prominent angles. Among certain of the poorer classes the flesh of the dog is eaten, and we have in mind a certain shop in Seoul where the purveying of this delicacy is a specialty. We once shot a dog which entertained peculiar notions about the privacy of our back yard. The gateman disposed of the remains in a mysterious manner and then retired on the sick-list for a few days. When he reappeared at last, with a weak smile on his face he placed his hand on his stomach and affirmed with evident conviction that some dogs are too old for any use. But, on the whole, the Korean dog is cleared of the charge of uselessness by the fact that he acts as scavenger in general, and really does much to keep the city from becoming actually uninhabitable.

The cat is almost exclusively of the back-fence variety, and is an incorrigible thief. It is the natural prey of the ubiquitous dog and the small boy. Our observation leads us to the sad but necessary conclusion that old age stands at the very bottom of the list of causes of feline mortality.

Jim Odom, Japanese torture devices

2009-07-16T16:06:00.009+09:00

List

2009-07-16T13:47:00.005+09:00

Marci just got picked up and brought to Seosan by a fat Korean man driving a Ford Explorer. Hope she's not getting raped! I need to do these things.

1. Pick up pictures/buy film.

2. Pay bills.

3. Clean the rabbit's shit corner/throw away food that will go bad.

4. Pack.

5. Catch the bus to Seosan.

6. Live.

This list is stupid.

I don't have anything to do for the next month and a week. You're all invited to come do nothing with me. Bring a tent.

mary

2009-07-15T18:17:00.000+09:00

Gagwansa

2009-07-13T11:34:00.005+09:00

People

2009-07-10T08:40:00.003+09:00

baby dick

2009-07-09T12:51:00.009+09:00

This is a random Korean man and Jason (post-dance contest, pre-waking up on the beach surrounded by old women and cops). I'd love to know what they're talking about.

Koreans don't fuck around with dirty feet.

Danny thought that if he caught Mary a live fish, she might do it with him. He told this guy who works at a raw fish restaurant that he'd give him 10 dollars for one if he'd let him catch it himself. The worker wasn't cool with the idea at all, but Danny grabbed a net anyway. The fish was too quick though and Danny's net skills were poor. When the guy wasn't looking, Danny tried to grab it with his bare hands. He missed and we had to run away to keep from getting scolded.

N.EX.T

2009-07-09T08:52:00.006+09:00

We had dinner last night with Jordan Odom's dad and one of the guys in this band. I told my co-teacher about it and she thinks I'm either lying or got lied to. I guess they're a big deal. What's more impressive though? The dude's father invented the Magic Marker.

(Update: Marci says I'm wrong about the magic marker inventor, but we definitely ate dinner with a rock star.)

those were 40 dollar shoes

2009-07-07T08:46:00.015+09:00

The guy in the left of this picture is our friend Karol's friend from college. He got deliriously drunk and stumbled half naked into a dance contest. There were at least 300 people watching. Just him and a 12 year old girl dancing to K-pop in a beachside amphitheater. The girl won, but Jason was given 3 bars of mud soap as a consolation prize. We took one of them. Later that night, after the girls passed out from too much booze and emotion, I went down to the beach alone to have a beer and some hot noodles and found him surrounded by police and old women. After spending several moments weighing the relative value of Jason's freedom compared to the temperature of my noodles, I stashed the noodles and beer in a bush and went to save him. He'd passed out on the shore and the tide was coming in. The cops didn't give me any problems. I grabbed him and brought him to our tent and told him not to vomit on my sleeping bag (he didn't listen). By the time I made it back to the bush, my noodles were still hot.

We made friends with these Korean guys whose tent was set up next to ours. We drank hard with them then went and played soccer on the beach. I made the game winning goal, or I remember claiming I did, and after a while they started throwing people in the water. Mary got thrown in and lost her shoes and started crying. Then I got mad and threw my shoes. Then, when Mary started to calm down, Marci started hollering at Mary about how the shoes didn't really matter. The night became irreparably fucked and I went with the girls up to the hotel room. Later, around 2 a.m., after having a disagreement regarding an appropriate wall for Danny to kick a soccer ball at, Danny called one of our Korean friends a racist. Strangely, the guy's friends all agreed. We never saw them again. In the morning we got up and drank soju and ate hot noodles and samgyapsal on the beach.

i can't feel my throat

2009-07-06T14:31:00.005+09:00

Escaping North Korea

2009-07-06T11:45:00.005+09:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Mike Kim

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Jason Jones in Iran

The other day I had lunch with a teacher who told me about a dinner she had with a group of North Korean refugees. Her daughter had met them through a church bulletin and invited them to meet the family. It was one of the very few times in the 9 months I've been here that anyone would talk openly with me about the situation with the North, so of course I seized the opportunity and asked her questions until I sensed her regret in ever bringing up the topic. She said that the people told her the only food that the government would provide were corn husks, and that though they themselves were farmers, this is all they ate. Any food they produced would be collected by the government. She also told me about their previous attempt at escape in which they'd been caught and thrown in prison, where they escaped again, this time successfully making their way across the northern border of the country, through China and eventually crossing the Yellow Sea to South Korea. My teacher was proud of the refugees, but also of her daughter, who she says is trying to learn to "become strong". She practices taekwondo as well, with the same goal in mind.

Unfortunately though, from what my teacher says, it's difficult to say how much less fucked life becomes for refugees when or if they actually make it to South Korea. The South Korean government gave the refugees she met a one-time 2 million won settlement allowance. But the Chinese merchant who helped them escape charged them 3 million won. To the hopeful refugees, I imagine this 1 million won debt is a minor inconvience. However, they soon discover that despite all they share, South Korea is a country in which North Koreans are largely regarded as second class citizens. Even the teacher I spoke to, who's progressive by any standard, but incredibly so for a Korean woman, says she found herself hesitant to bring North Koreans into her house. What would her family think? What would the other teachers at Sindang High say if they find out? South Korea is a country in which social laws trump political ones.

People here speak of uniting the Koreas "for the children", but in the time I've been here, this is the strongest argument I've heard for reunification. North Koreans are welcomed by the government; they're given a settlement allowance and they attend classes to help them assimilate to the way of life here - anti-propaganda propaganda - and they get jobs in factories making less money hourly than high school students in America make at McDonalds. Despite the open-door policy, as far as I can tell, North Koreans are not wanted.

walks on summer afternoons, three dollar bags of liquor

2009-07-06T09:19:00.008+09:00

a parasite on a parasite.. (UPDATE)

2009-07-03T16:04:00.009+09:00

I found a copy of Vice in Seoul last weekend and it ALSO has an excerpt from Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo diary. Apparently the whole thing was published a few days ago in a book called Conquest of the Useless. Here's my favorite paragraph from the Vice excerpt. To give you some background, the ship they're filming on had just rammed into the side of a cliff causing a cameraman named Mauch to drop a huge camera onto his hand, splitting it between his pinky and ring finger. They rush to the medical tent and find that the anesthesia supply had been used up; two indians had been attacked with arrows the night before. So Herzog, out of options, takes Mauch's head into his arms.

Mauch said he could not take any more, he was going to faint, and I told him to go ahead. Then he thought he was going to shit in his pants from the pain, but he could not decide between the two options, and in the end did neither. On a hunch I sent for Carmen, one of the two prostitutes we have here because of the woodcutters and the boatmen. She pushed me aside, buried Mauch’s head between her breasts, and comforted him with her lovely soft voice. She rose above her everyday existence, developing her inner Pietà, and Mauch soon fell silent. During the operation, which lasted almost two hours, she said over and over, “Thomas, mi amor,” to him, while the patient yielded to his fate. As I stood watching, I felt a deep affection for both of them.

Sheryl Crow, birds, another picture of a Korean kid wearing a Buddha mask

2009-07-03T09:43:00.013+09:00

This is Shiny. He's the owner of the Seoul Underground in Hongdae. Dude is painfully nice. He's building all the furniture in the bar himself and he makes delicious beer cocktails with rum and espresso and other "secret ingredients". He's actually so cool that when he put it on, we started to realize that Sheryl Crow "soak up the sun" song wasn't all that bad.

Shiny convinced this guy to play for us. He sounded like Korean Jeff Buckley.

There were dead fish everywhere.

I love magpies. If I wasn't so sure that they're smarter than us, I'd get one to keep as a pet.

Daytime Drinking

2009-07-02T10:01:00.003+09:00

We watched this movie last night. It's one of the first independent films in Korea to get any kind of international recognition and a really good depiction of Korean culture. It wasn't easy to find a copy of it here, but you should definitely download or rent it if you happen to see it anywhere.

this is my favorite plant

2009-07-02T09:35:00.001+09:00

punks, tricycles, etc.

2009-07-01T09:09:00.005+09:00

a parasite on a parasite on a parasite

2009-06-30T12:55:00.008+09:00

Here's an excerpt from a diary that Werner Herzog kept in 1980 during the time he spent in the Peruvian rainforest shooting "Fitzcarraldo", which I've never actually seen. But, coincidentally, I did just watch "My Best Fiend" which is a documentary Herzog did about his relationship with actor Klaus Kinski (who is insane) that concentrates mostly on the filming of "Fitzcarraldo", which kind of makes it a film about his own film. It's pretty good though and you can watch it in its entirety on youtube. I'll embed it under the passage.

IQUITOS, DECEMBER 18

I have a snake on my roof again. A little while ago I heard something rustling up there, and then something dark fell into the banana fronds with a thwack. I took a look, and it was a poisonous brownish snake that had caught a bird, which was still peeping. I tried hitting the snake with a stick, but it disappeared like lightning into the grass. Only now and then did a blade quiver, and from the piteous cries of the bird I could tell where the snake was. I did not follow it into the grass, because I discovered that another snake was on the thatched roof, and directly above me a third snake was trying to get from a banana frond onto the platform of my hut. I tried to strike it with the machete, but the snake was too fast for me.

The power is still out. Evening descended on the countryside. What would happen if the rainforest wilted like a bouquet of flowers? Around me insects are dying, for which they lie on their backs. A woman in the neighborhood is suckling a newborn puppy after her baby died from parasites; I have seen this done before with piglets. Outside a bright moon is floating now above the treetops. The frogs, thousands of them, suddenly pause, as if they were following an invisible conductor, and start up again all at the same time. Their conversations come and go in curious waves. Waxy moonlight, as bright as neon, is shimmering on the banana fronds. I was called to the telephone in the house and fell off the ladder that leads to my platform. It was one of very few phone calls that ever get through to us, and a stranger on the line was trying to make it clear to me that I was a madman, a menace to society.

CAMISEA, FEBRUARY 7, 1981

At night I had first the feeling and then the certainty that I was caught in a twilit prehistoric age, without speech or time.

Nature has come to her senses again; only the forest is still menacing, motionless. The river rolls along without a sound, a monster. Night falls very fast, with the last birds scolding the evening, as always at this hour. Rough cawing, malevolent sounds, punctuated by the even chirping of the first cicadas. From all this working in the rain my fingers are wrinkly, like those of the laundresses. I must have a hundred bites on my back from some insect I never did see; all of me is rotting with moisture. I would be grateful if it were only dreams tormenting me. Across the table comes a strange primeval insect, with a thin, lancelike, excessively long proboscis and feelers on both sides. I cannot make out any eyes. It is dragging a dead insect of the same species, and it disappears through the cracks in the bark floor. Then caterpillars crawl toward me from all directions, brainless but unstoppable. I think intensely of the great moment when I showed my son, five at the time, the mountains of the moon through a telescope.

IQUITOS, MARCH 31

Yellow birds laid siege to me. Last night I had to combat a fresh invasion of army ants in my cabin; they overran me with their larvae, but they were easier to fight because they were so unusually large. First I tried spraying Baygon, but that did not work, and finally I swept the raving warriors off my platform into the swamp. Our work is not compatible with nature Amazon-style. The weather is bad, the chickens are not doing well, ditto the rabbit. The vermin in the earth are thriving. They are happy. The Chinese wok was filled with a jellylike, almost transparent mass, sticky and tough, and in its midst was a broken-off lizard tail, as if the poisonous bite of some nasty creature had melted the lizard into a tough, gluey mass. I set the wok to soak overnight, but even with scouring powder and a wooden stick for scraping I cannot get the disgusting stuff out. Tumors form on the trees. Roots writhe in the air. The jungle revels in debauched lewdness.

CAMISEA, APRIL 6

This morning I woke up to terror such as I have never experienced before: I was entirely stripped of feeling. Everything was gone; it was as if I had lost something that had been entrusted to me the previous evening, something I was supposed to take special care of overnight. I was in the position of someone who has been assigned to guard an entire sleeping army but suddenly finds himself mysteriously blinded, deaf, and effaced. Everything was gone. I was completely empty, without pain, without pleasure, without longing, without love, without warmth and friendship, without anger, without hate. Nothing, nothing was there anymore, and I was left like a suit of armor with no knight inside. It took a long time before I even felt alarmed.

CAMISEA, APRIL 15

Hunters had gone out and brought back rodents the size of guinea pigs, which the women roasted on a wooden spit, fur and all. They looked like rats but were tasty. During shooting yesterday the Campas were distracted, shooting with arrows at something on the slope. I ran over and saw that they had shot a snake. It was pinned to the ground by several arrows, which it snapped at. We quickly filmed the scene, and once the poisonous animal had been killed we went back to work.

A Japanese doctor operated on his own appendix.

CAMISEA, APRIL 26

Walter arrived yesterday, bringing word that the Huallaga was stuck even worse than before. His plane was loaded almost to capacity with two hogs, which I assume were brought alive, but I did not ask for details because I did not want to have my mental image taken away: of the little Cessna with two massive hogs belted into the passenger seats. The freight also included three large turkeys, one of which keeps spreading its tail for me, gobbling, and putting on a great show of agitation. This turkey, this bird of ill omen, is a pure albino, so it is quite a sight when it fans its great white wheel, spreads its wings with tips trailing on the ground, and puffs up its feathers. Snorting in bursts, it launched several feigned attacks on me and gazed at me with such intense stupidity emanating from its ugly face, which took on a bluish purple coloration and had tumorlike wattles, that without more ado I pulled a feather out of its spreading rear end. Now the turkey’s sulking.

CAMISEA, APRIL 27

Little Michaela was riding the albino turkey today,with her mother, Gloria, holding her on, and the turkey played along good-naturedly. In a tree near me there is a spiderweb, so sturdy and closemeshed that it is filled up with heavy rotting leaves like a shopping net, and all the time I have been here it has not been torn off, even by wind and rain. In the woods I found a fleshy plant that keeps its upper leaves rolled up and pointing skyward, as if praying. There is a delicate vine, resembling a fern, that spreads so flat over the bark of the trees up which it climbs, wafer-thin, lovely, and deadly, that I often thought it was only painted on in dull enamel. Moss grows on lianas, and in the knobby places where the moss is thicker, a leafy plant like slender hare’s ear grows out of the moss: a parasite on a parasite on a parasite.

CAMISEA, MAY 3

An old man, who had been the last person living on a windswept island far from the stormy coast, with the mail boat bringing him onions and flour only now and then, died one evening with the natural casualness of all things out here. Days later a very large fish was caught on the dead man’s fishing pole, still in the water.

CAMISEA, MAY 8

Last night Kinski got little sleep because on the big, swaying liana suspension bridge near his cabina lot of fornicating was going on. One of the ladies from Iquitos had selected the swinging bridge as a particularly suitable spot, where she laughed and joked with her suitors before the panting and groaning began, and the bridge swayed and creaked an accompaniment. Apparently she promptly gave H.P. a social disease. Reverend Father, my fat Dominican, thou who so firmly vouched for these ladies, I would gladly do without the globs of fat in my soup and without the bread for breaking, but please restore my lack of faith! I did not see God today. According to the statistics, 85 percent of all existing species are beetles and insects of various sorts, so where are we on the scale of God’s favorites?

CAMISEA, JUNE 2

Something must be said about the majestic misery of the jungle. I was awakened by a strange, cackling bird I had never heard before and was annoyed that Dagoberto had not recorded it, even though I had no way of knowing whether he might not have done so after all. Our kitchen crew slaughtered our last four ducks. While they were still alive, Julian plucked their neck feathers, before chopping off their heads on the execution block. The white turkey, that vain creature, the survivor of so many roast chickens and ducks transformed into soup, came over to inspect, gobbling and displaying, and used his ugly feet to push one of the beheaded ducks, as it lay there on the ground bleeding and flapping its wings, into what he thought was a proper position and, making gurgling sounds while his bluish-red wattles swelled, he mounted the dying duck and copulated with it.

but japs love it

2009-06-30T08:58:00.001+09:00

beat boxes

2009-06-28T22:57:00.003+09:00

permablog

2009-06-26T08:52:00.012+09:00

She looks cute but she does not care that Micheal Jackson is dead.

This is where I live. The bottom left apartment. If you look closely, you might see an escaped sock on the ledge below the window.

Wayne had a dinner party last weekend. I made chili.

This is the tallest student at the school. He calls me "brother" and he told me once that he prays that he'll stop growing. I used to think of him as a friendly giant like the one in the Roald Dahl novel that Mrs. Washington would read to my 5th grade class. Recently though I've come to realize that he's more like the friendly giant named Lennie in Of Mice and Men.

I walked here once.

These are the things I share my apartment with and this is how they spend alot of their time.

we went fishing

2009-06-23T17:10:00.006+09:00

I don't think I'll review this

2009-06-22T16:16:00.007+09:00

Remember when that band Outclassed played at my house? It was some time last summer I guess. They were touring with another band called No Babies and they both smelled completely awful and played that super-loud, super-fast, screamy hardcore that bands were so fond of playing at that house, but they ended up probably being some of the nicest dudes that ever slept on my living room floor. So I was kind of bummed to see that Terminal Boredom gave them what must be the worst/deuchiest review a band has ever received.

Outclassed “This Could Be Coincidence” 12” EP
Whoa. I find it baffling that in the harrowingly expansive, uber-derivative state underground music exists in today that more people don’t catch onto it being as much about what you don’t do as what you do. And that those who don’t catch on send this tripe over to fucking Termbo. Good call! I don’t think I’ll review this. But here’s what I will do. I’ll leave you with a sample dollop of their beautifully pretentious upward-reaching scarf-wrapping prose they’ve set atop erratic, emotional math-metal tinged nu-hardcore: So consider this my letter of resignation, of slurred word on cracked concrete, life cannot be defined by these lines of symmetry, this sterile pulse, this silent motive. But we keep searching the sky for answers, when will we realize they are held firmly in our hidden wispers (sic) locked deep in the silence of our greatest fears and dearest friends… Oh, okay. My friends almost graduated high school. Now they make fun of kids like you from their bar stools upon returning from the mill and warehouse. Sometimes I wish I could fool myself into believing in the sincerity of this schlock, as I’d estimate they impress more babes with their ability to turn a supposedly damaged psyche into a an extroverted quest for a hug than say, oh, I don’t know, Black Flag did with their relentless masochism. Life is tough, y’know? But it’s not a lost cause. Keep on keepin’ on. Keep dreaming. Girls always buy that shit. GO STEELERS.
(Forcefield Records // www.forcefieldrecords.org)

What Koreans were reading last week.

2009-06-22T09:06:00.007+09:00

From Korea Beat:

Overall top 10 ranking.
1. A long look at how much Real Madrid will be paying its players this year.
2. A guide to relieving stress, losing weight and improving your health through the proper selection of fruit smoothie.
3. More Real Madrid stuff.
4. Speculation on how Park Ji-sung will perform in the next World Cup.
5. Park Chan-ho recorded his third win of the season, this one coming against the Boston Red Sox.
6. North Korea qualified for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
7. Manchester United announced its intention to sign “world class players.”
8. Park Ji-sung injured a toe.
9. A bird in Cardiff, in the UK, managed to eat a 1.2-meter snake caught in the water.
10. Choo Shin-soo recorded his ninth homer of the season against the Milwaukee Brewers.

korea

2009-06-20T17:53:00.002+09:00

it was a silent fall

2009-06-18T14:14:00.002+09:00

Gweongju

2009-06-18T13:14:00.004+09:00

tea fields

2009-06-16T19:35:00.001+09:00

sweeter than any tongue could tell

2009-06-16T11:34:00.003+09:00

cool biased spring palette

2009-06-15T19:17:00.008+09:00

I'm like a real teacher.

2009-06-12T16:33:00.002+09:00

a lackadaisical attitude

2009-06-12T09:20:00.002+09:00

Korean papers are always printing these stories about foreign teachers being drunk and stupid. I want to say they're exaggerated but the majority of non-Koreans I've met here have been obnoxious assholes.

“I heard the teacher sometimes uses words like ’shit’ and ’shut up’. When the teacher is in a bad mood he tosses out the book. I heard one day he had the children write ‘I don’t want to study’ 100 times. It’s just so bizarre.”
40-year old Ilsan housewife Ms. Kim, a mother of two, didn’t know what to do.
With native-speaker English teachers increasing in number doubts about their character remain. There qare of course teachers who take a lackadaisical attitude to lessons or end them when they feel like it and others who have forged credentials.
According to the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology on the 11th, there were 2,456 native speaker English teachers in public schools nationwide at the end of September 2006, and that increased to 3,693 in 2007. Last year that increased by over 1,700 to reach 5,417 by the end of September.
The increase of 3,000 people in two years is part of the rapid expansion policy, but there continue to be cases of native-speaker teachers who have poor credentials or characters.
Yonhap News learned from parents and teachers of middle school D in Jangan-gu, Suwon, where a native-speaker teacher from the United Kingdom came to school drunk and caused a disturbance.
The drunken teacher began teaching sex education to the students in words they could not understand, saying “the reason I’m not married is I don’t want to have kids like you,” and “Dokdo is Japanese.”
An English teacher named Choi who works at a high school in Jeollanam-do said, “they don’t know the basic purpose of education. During lesson song times they just sing songs over and over, 10 or 20 times. I totally fail to see how you can learn English through pop songs.”

beach

2009-06-11T17:32:00.002+09:00

The English Garden

2009-06-11T14:00:00.010+09:00

I gave them a picture and told them to list ten taboos that they see they see portrayed in it. But instead of writing about the picture, they seem to have just added ten more taboos to it. I think my favorite part is the nice round ass they gave me. The drawing on the board of stick figures doing it doggy style is pretty good too. And look at the little black kid. Is he getting spat on and flipped off simultaneously? Why is his dick so big? And why is the fat-headed sex addict's hat so pointy? My students are awesome.

marci

2009-06-11T07:43:00.002+09:00

I miss these things

2009-06-08T16:58:00.001+09:00

Accidents

2009-06-06T10:39:00.002+09:00

Lazy

2009-06-03T18:46:00.001+09:00

Most-read

2009-06-03T08:44:00.006+09:00

Last week was pretty eventful in Korea - the former president comitted suicide and the North fired five short-range missiles into the Yellow Sea and tested a nuclear weapon (successfully), after which they announced their withdrawal from the armistice that ended the Korean war and that the inspection of any of their ships would be considered an act of war. But Koreans say fuck it. Five of the ten most-read internet articles on Naver (Korean google) last week were about Park Ji-Sung, the South Korean who plays for Manchester United and by all accounts is completely mediocre, and though there are several articles in the list about President Roh's suicide, completely missing is an article about the nuclear test, missile launches or the threats of war.

Golden Phone

2009-06-01T17:30:00.004+09:00

1234

2009-06-01T17:23:00.001+09:00

It's like 60 minutes on acid.

2009-06-01T13:52:00.001+09:00

paparazzi

2009-05-29T20:27:00.001+09:00

Korean Indietronic

2009-05-28T20:42:00.001+09:00

Got my mind messed up.

2009-05-28T20:39:00.002+09:00

If James Carr isn't badass enough, the guy in the yellow makes up for it.

Danny

2009-05-28T20:32:00.003+09:00

On his decision to not teach at high schools:

"Those girls say they're not women, but I know they are."

Horses

2009-05-28T18:41:00.001+09:00

Field Day

2009-05-25T16:42:00.008+09:00

David Lynch's favorite things.

2009-05-25T14:34:00.005+09:00

These ain't raindrops in my eyes.

2009-05-24T13:10:00.003+09:00

Sunday in Hongdae

2009-05-22T10:02:00.004+09:00

We met these guys who'd been at a "psy-trance party" the night before and hadn't slept and were pretty much out of their minds. They kept disappearing and coming back with fake hammers and masks and Mardi Gras sunglasses. We drank beer with them in the park all afternoon and watched them piss off every Korean in earshot.

Luxury

2009-05-20T07:39:00.003+09:00

The last pictures from Speedo's broken camera

2009-05-19T18:10:00.004+09:00

American

2009-05-19T12:49:00.006+09:00

An excerpt from French writer Charles Dantzig's "Liste des Américains," in the May Harper's Magazine.

Americans consider themselves polite, but they stick their hands in their pockets, drink from the bottle, speak in raised voices. Someone ought to train them how to behave in museums. Not only do they converse as if they were in their own houses; they do so in order to give educational lectures. With all their terrible goodwill, they wish to learn and to make all things serve this purpose. It is an American vice to believe that a work of art must teach something. In the same way, they were persuaded to drink red wine because they were told that wine was good for them, without consideration of pleasure. Their passion for learning is naive and honorable.

One thing about Americans that I always forget and that always strikes me when I arrive in their country—or, rather, step onto the airplane—is the bad cut of their jeans. And also their taste for muscle. Whether this is one practical manifestation of a taste for brute force I cannot say. Also the soft drinks, which come in bottles twice as big as anywhere else, and the power lines, which instead of being buried underground encumber the edges of the sky. And that it’s a country of blonds. And their obsession with the weather, forever plastered on the screen by NY1 and printed at the bottom of the back page of the New York Times along with the temperature, humidity level, and wind speed. In the end, what we forget about countries is everything banal that we want to call characteristic. Isn’t this what goes by the name of sociology?

They are overly fond of brown.

They eat all the time. What anguish must be theirs!

Charles Olson—or was it Melville?—said that America has replaced history with geography. What makes for boredom, which in America can be so violent, is the unfilled urban space. In contrast to Europe or Asia, which are stuffed to overflowing, in the United States the population density per square kilometer is very low. Whence those depressing suburbs, depressing because one can always find a parking place. In America one feels not solitude but isolations. They are a people without balconies. Yet they cannot help interfering in other people’s business, according to the Protestant custom. And on courthouse steps one sees people brandishing signs that say, as if they knew, GOD HATES ABORTIONISTS. It is a country fascinated by lust.

Americans spend less time arguing over things than over the right to speak about those things.
They go to court over everything. This is a way ofmaking money, of course, and of causing trouble for one’s neighbor, but more deeply it points to the fact that, for them, nothing follows from itself. One good quality of the United States is that here common sense is never taken for an established thing. These litigious people believe more in reason than in fatalism.
It is the only country in the world where no one remains a foreigner. A person can go by the name of Zgrabenalidongsteinloff and no one will raise an eyebrow. "In New York there are no impossible names," as I was told by a novelist whose name raised the eyebrows of elegant racists in Paris. This is what makes everything possible. They walked on the moon because they are the moon. One admires their courtesy.

Naked Rock Paper Scissors

2009-05-17T14:02:00.010+09:00

2009-05-16T15:56:00.001+09:00

Dead people gifts (Part 3)

2009-05-16T13:01:00.005+09:00

I guess the counseling teacher's pawpaw died. She came around giving everyone organic seaweed. This made me wonder which unpolluted ocean it is that produces organic seaweed. Or is it all organic? Or is someone just growing the shit in bathtubs somewhere?

I found these things in the mud.

2009-05-16T04:01:00.000+09:00

Seoul

2009-05-16T03:36:00.001+09:00

Our rabbit has a cleft pallet.

2009-05-12T17:27:00.000+09:00

Flogged

2009-05-11T12:23:00.003+09:00

These poor kids. A friend of mine has started planning to move to America so that his children (which he does not yet have) won't grow up in schools where teachers regularly beat the shit out of them.

A 17-year old high school student in southern Kwangju City committed suicide by hanging after being punished by a teacher, JoongAng Ilbo reported Saturday.

The male student was flogged on his foot for about 110 times along with another classmate Thursday evening for being "absent without notification" for two hours during self-study session, by a 28-year-old female teacher.

The teacher is known to be a daughter of the school principal. She began to work full-time this year, after teaching part-time for a few years previously at the same institution.

The school, just like many other Korean high schools, requires students to study in school until 10 p.m. on weekdays.

After the punishment, the deceased told some of his classmates that he would kill himself "in a joking manner," the police said. After returning home that night, the student chatted with his friends online and watched television, before he went outside.
Students in the school told the investigators that the degree of punishment the student received actually "wasn't too harsh" compared to the "usually very harsh punishment." The police are further investigating the case, focusing on how much influence the punishment had on the student's decision to kill himself.

2009-05-11T07:55:00.001+09:00

Muchangpo

2009-05-09T13:31:00.003+09:00

Dismissed

2009-05-07T14:56:00.003+09:00

As many as 17 native English speakers _ or 12.4 percent of the total 137 _ have been expelled from primary and middle schools in Ulsan for alleged poor teaching methods, demeanor or other reasons, the local education office reported Wednesday.

The office said that it has not renewed their contracts after judging their methods to be inappropriate for teaching students in English.

A written survey was conducted to determine how many acted decently, how faithful they were to their duty, how well they guided students and how well they taught English.

Among the dismissed were those who often yelled at students, argued with Korean teachers assisting them and wore indecent clothes. Some had to visit hospital too often for weight problems and some refused to teach after school, according to the survey.