Lost In Me

I had a very busy weekend, as the number of students I am tutoring suddenly jumped from one to four. My second student is a middle schooler who I am tutoring in spoken English as well as in chess. What little I remember about playing chess from when I was in middle school, that is. My third student is a high schooler whose English reading comprehension and vocabulary I'm trying to increase. I am helping her to read "The Art of Loving" by Erich Fromm, a book which I happened to have on me the first day I met her. I insisted that the book would be too difficult, but her aunt was very pushy and eager for her niece to learn new vocabulary. So now I am spewing out several synonyms to every word we come across that she doesn't recognize, making her head spin and eyes pop out. I never knew learning all those words Kilbourne taught me would come in handy some day.

My fourth student is a junior from Ehwa University. She doesn't seem to have a very clear idea of what she wants to get out of studying English with me, which makes my job somewhat hard. On the plus side, she is extremely attractive, and as my job consists of meeting her in a cafe and having an English conversation with her for an hour, I might as well be getting paid to go out on dates.

So all in all, a busy time. But I can't complain.

I just realized a couple days ago that I had the wrong link for ZNet, off to the left, for the past few months. It is fixed now, and I highly recommend the magazine.

One of the sea critters I enjoyed eating while growing up in a small sea side town on the western coast of Korea was a small, bottom-dwelling octopus-like thing, all tentacles with only a ridiculously tiny body. It is served raw, chopped up into bite sized pieces, and if it is sufficiently fresh your lunch tries to crawl off of your plate, each piece going a separate direction. The tentacles themselves have little suction cups that stick to the roof of your mouth and teeth while in your mouth, and this only adds to the difficulty of chewing as the tentacles have a tough, rubbery sort of texture. The particularly vigorous specimens wiggle slightly while going down, but I've never heard of one choking anybody to death by attaching onto the diner's epiglottis with its suction cups. They are very good with a little hot sauce.

I spent much of this past weekend tutoring a dentist in conversational English. He is studying English so that he might some day move his practice to America, where the market for dentists is, in his own words, much less competitive. He is highly personable and eager to learn, which makes my job both easy and enjoyable; though I think it's a tremendous effort for him to continuously make conversation in a foreign language for three hours. Towards the end of our second meeting on Sunday evening, his hands started to shake from the exertion and his mocha coffee. So while I'm glad to have him as a student, I'm not sure how I'd feel about having a man with shaky hands as my dentist.

Other than my temporary job as an English tutor, I visited an old friend who is now serving his conscription, though he somehow managed to work out a deal where he serves as a policeman for the next two years, instead of joining a combat unit at the DMZ. It's not as good a deal as it sounds, since normal cops are allowed to go home at night, whereas my friend will be making the police station his home for the next 22 months, and all that with negligible pay. At times, I wasn't sure what the difference was between my friend and the criminal being held at the police station. Both have had their freedom taken away by the state.

Soju is wonderful, and so is Motte.

When you look at it while walking around the streets of Seoul, Korea looks every bit the highly developed, trillion-dollar economy that it is, with its affluent people and glittering skyscrapers. Take a two hour bus ride into the provinces, however, and Korea looks very much like the impoverished, third-world country that it was a few decades ago. It's amazing how much the provinces lag behind Seoul in economic development. In some sense Korea is much like the city-states of ancient Greece; Seoul is Korea, and the surrounding provinces are merely its colonies... they exist solely to feed the population of the capital. You could say the Koreans have already built a time machine: it's the bus going from Seoul to Gunsan.

Of course, the difference between Seoul and the provinces is nothing like the difference between South Korea and the North.

There's some kind of old Chinese saying about starting a thousand-mile journey with a single step. So it was that I woke up at seven in the morning to walk 2 miles to the Ithaca bus stop (hung over) to take a 12 hour bus ride to Ohio, where I met up with my mother and got on a 16 hour plane ride to Inchon Int'l. What surprised me was the 3 hour bus ride from Inchon airport to northern Seoul, as the distance from Inchon to Seoul must be less than 20 miles. In an hour, I will be getting on another bus to Gunsan, where my mother will see her own mother for the first time in 5 years or so.