Archive for April, 2010
There it was on my door: another warning from the power company about shutting off my electricity. This is probably the fourth time in nearly two years here that this has happened — months of unpaid bills leading to threats and annoyance from my faithful power provider. Why I always let it slide, I don’t know. [ READ MORE ]
Recently one of my favorite hobbies — counting the porn cards on the ground while walking to work — has been all but impossible. For about a month (almost exactly within cherry blossom season) these sexy little trading cards hadn’t been beautifying the streets or providing little boys with fantasies beyond their age. At first I [ READ MORE ]
“Hi, can we have a room for the night please” we asked in broken, but understandable Korean. The old woman, pleasant and courteous, deliberated on the question for a few seconds before declining. She was standing two feet shorter than the smallest of three western men at the reception desk in her dingy little motel. [ READ MORE ]
If somebody told you Korea had a successful transsexual pop singer and actress would you be surprised? Introducing Harisu (or Ha Ri Soo), the stage name for the woman (and former man) Kyung-Eun Lee. After a talent agency discovered her singing at a nightclub in Japan, Harisu (it is a play on “hot issue” — say [ READ MORE ]
Mentally put yourself in a bar having some drinks with friends, when some drunken foreign dude, clearly just out of college, grabs a microphone and announces that it’s time for everybody to line up for a chance to drink from a beer bong. An exceptionally large line of people — almost all non-Korean — forms [ READ MORE ]
OK, this is the story. I teach one of the lowest level 7 year old classes in my school, and one of the highest. The contrast between them is noticeable. From spending the morning explaining the difference between ‘his’ and ‘her’ to an afternoon of nouns and adjectives. Sometimes you gotta wonder what went wrong. There [ READ MORE ]
I firmly believe Stuart and I have given a very favourable account of life in South Korea so far. This is not likely to change anytime soon since we are both in the process of at least examining the possibility of staying on beyond our current contracts, which expire in June (Stuart) and August (Andrew) [ READ MORE ]
Authors Note: This entry includes a slide show – a new feature to our website. It has been said that you can’t polish a turd. Generally this is an acceptable, perhaps nearly universal axiom. However, I would argue that if you put a turd amongst a bunch of cherry blossoms the turd would start looking pretty [ READ MORE ]
It snowed on Wednesday. It was baking on Saturday. It has been lashing since. Almost the same latitude as North Africa, ey? Whatever they told you about Korean weather is a lie! [ READ MORE ]
I was thinking recently about my first ‘contact’ with people from the Far East. It may have been in the Autumn of 1991 when Japan came to Lansdowne Road in Dublin for a Rugby World Cup game. My memories of the match are (i) that a poor Irish team laboured before eventually seeing off their [ READ MORE ]