One of my main goals is to meet business people while I am in Korea with the idea of doing business to help people and make some money while doing so. I have been actively searching for networking events and learned about the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Korea.  I was happy to find them so I gave them a call.  I found out that they were having a Christmas Party.  Tickets were about $80 per person.  A little upscale but worth making some contacts and finding out exactly what type of people are involved, while having a good time doing it.

The party was at The Plaza Hotel in Seoul.  We were in the Diamond Room on the 22nd floor (top of the hotel).  It was a nice and fairly casual evening and had a great view of the city as well.  The food was good with enough meat for the ‘meatatarian’ in me :)  We met some interesting people from a wide range of jobs and businesses.  Air Canada was a major sponsor and they donated a round-trip to Vancouver as one of the door prizes.  We won two door prizes that night.  A 700mL bottle of Canadian Club and a $100 gift certificate for Antonios Vinoteca Ristorante Italiano.  Looking at the menu there and that $100 will go very quickly.  In fact, we’d be short $10 if I ordered the T-Bone steak!  I’m looking forward to eating here!
While in another country, one of the biggest fears (aside from war) is getting hurt or being sick.  Well we seem to have the possibility of one and just finishing up the other.  Sure North Korea is an important concern and that Seoul just finished doing a simulated ‘North Kore Attack Drill‘ in downtown Seoul.  I was curious as part of the drill  included a couple of fighter jets to fly over Seoul.  When I heard the sirens begin, I went for a walk outside hoping to see the jets.  It was a remote hope as there are a bunch of buildings around me and by the time I may have gotten into the clear, the jets were probably long gone.  Assuming that they were even flying near my point of view.  Oddly, I did see them briefly.  I’m sure many people back home would be freaking out, saying things like “I think you should get out of there.” or “I would leave right away!”  Maybe I should be more concerned than I am but I read a lot and read way past the hype that media plays in their articles.    What I get, and keep getting, from these articles is the same thing I said in my very first post about the topic of war.  North Korea is behaving like a spoiled child.  This exact statement has been echoed in just about every article I read, some even word for word.  I don’t have to be a parent to know what happens to spoiled children who cry wolf all the time.  And that is exactly what is happening to North Korea right now.   The ‘adults” are sitting the child down and telling him to grow up.  Everyone is kind of hoping that the Child won’t need a ‘spanking’ but that’s exactly what he’ll get.  It won’t be pretty but it will be swift and good enough to knock some sense into him, should it come to that.

As for being sick, I rarely am.  Maybe once a year, puts me out for 1 or 2 days then I’m back to normal.  This happened last week.  Some stupid cold got me, all the usual symptoms of coughing, stuffed sinuses and such.  I did the usual stuff, relaxed (even more than usual :) ) and took lots of  Vitamin C.  Their Vitamin C I used came in this lemon-flavoured powered stuff.  You simply open the packet, dump it in your mouth and within 10 seconds it’s practically all dissolved.  It’s really cool stuff.  I was doing 2-3 of those a day and I think it definitely helped.  I just have this kind of lingering dry cough, but that’s because it’s a dry cold here.  Rather annoying but we’re managing.  Of course Bharati got the cold after me, she’s just about over it now.

In keeping with business learning skills, I have understood what causes businesses to fail.  Having a product or service and trying to find a need.  This is completely backwards.  Very few businesses have the know-how to artificially create a need for something that wasn’t there before (think Apple and how it markets).  The best way is always to find a need and then create a solution.  Well I found that the English teachers here need help.  Many of them flounder around with the language and the country without really getting it all.  Sure they survive but having asked a lot of them, they would gladly like some more help.  So I started a new blog/mailing list to help them.  The Korean Cafe was born to help those people, as well as travelers in general.  The goal is to help English-speaking  people learn more about Korea, it’s language, it’s infrastructure and such.

I have also started an English/Korean Club.  The goal is to get people from both cultures and to learn to communicate.  I figured it would be rather boring to do it on my own.  Having the need to meet more people, this was the best way to help everyone and meet new people at the same time :)

And that was all in just the last week :)  Looking forward to next week!

There are many times where most teachers simply want to scream, click their heels together and be back in their respective countries.  They become frustrated by the lack of consistency, the seeming-lack of courtesy, the lack of language comprehension and the lack of consideration given to ESL teachers.  Now that paints a pretty bleak picture but it is merely one side of the coin.  The experience, the culture, the beauty and the sense of accomplishment that a teacher does eventually achieve plays a major balancing act and usually is the winner when it comes to deciding if you like it here or not.

Bharati’s school put on a performance of various english skits.  Most were modified fables and stories to suit the number of students in each class.  Her school is in the outskirts of her town. It really should be classified as ‘rural’ as the immediate area is surrounded by ‘low end businesses’, to put it politiely.  Small farms, what looks like scrap yards and a convenience store.  Overall it looks like a part that has yet to be taken over by the urban sprawl.  Maybe I’ll get pictures of it some other time.

In order to get to her school, Bharati normall takes this little ‘school bus’ (meaning something slightly bigger than a mini-van where 40 kids + her gets squeezed into).  There is a public bus that runs ‘close’.  Close meaning dropped off then a 20min walk.  So with me going to see the performance we had to take the city bus.  Short enough trip (45mins including the walk) but there was this cool little stream that ran beside the road we walked along.

It was neat to see some ducks but they were severely skittish.

What I really love about this country is the scenerey.  The landscape has real character, unlike southwestern Ontario.  And the Hamilton ‘mountain’ is a real joke compared to something like this:

Nothing does wonder for the soul like a good scenery.

We arrived at the school and I got the customary tour and introductions to many people who understand I was Bharati’s “남편” (pronounced nom-peyong) husband.  All the little girls kept saying I was ‘handsome’.  The teachers were very polite and the principal smiled a lot (I don’t think he knows anything beyond hello and some other rudimentary english but I am sure he’s learning more each year).

Bharati has a very nice classroom, spacious and quite a number of computers for the kids.

Bharati’s room also includes the Library.

And here we have Bharati at her desk:

I’ve done the rest in an album slideshow, lest this post grow to 18 pages long :)

All-in-all, the kids did an amazing job.  They were funny and many of them spoke incredibly clear.  Bharati was also given to judge them with a sheet.  The Korean culture is very big on academics (another point in the Korean favour as Canada doesn’t seem to care at all in comparison) and it was interesting to see one of the parent check out Bharati’s sheet and the scores she was giving each grade level.  We got an invite for dinner from one parent, I am looking forward to that but also concerned that they will miss my strict ‘meatarian’ diet.

There are some many things people take for granted.  Shelter, transportation and food.  With food, if you need something to prepare a meal you simply go to the store and buy it.  So what happens when you are in a completely foreign country and have yet to learn anything more than ‘hello/goodbye’?

After my hot dog experience with Kraft Dinner, I decided that using the extra hot dogs in spaghetti would be a bad idea I immediately thought of ground beef.  Great, so I’ve decided what to get…..now how do I get it?

A lot of english words are made more difficult by the Koreans adding a vowel at the end of a word that ends with a consonant.  For example ‘finish’ becomes ‘finishee’.  It is slightly less odd when a word like ‘village’ gets turned into ‘villagee’, which at least makes more sense by trying to pronounce a letter that is there but subdued when vocalized in english.  So I toyed with the idea of trying to make ground beef sound foreign by waling over to the store and asked for ‘groundee beefee’ but I just couldn’t bring myself to sound that dumb.

Being the geek that I am, I went to the tools I knew best….the Internet.  Specifically I used Babelfish.  Some of you might wonder why I didn’t use Google Translate, being a bit of a Google Fan.  Well, Babelfish has a bit of a geek history so there is a fondness for using something related to HHGTTG.

So I simply typed in ‘ground beef’ and choose to translate it to Korean and I’ll simply write it out to bring with me.  In case you haven’t seen the Korean written language (called Hangul), it’s related to Chinese/Japanese.  A lot of lines and slashes and circles arranged in some sort of order.  I was kinda hoping it wasn’t an overly complicated bunch of lines that I would be able to easily copy and bring with me.  Turns out I was right.

So, armed with this, I headed over to the store.  First I decided to just look for it.  Ground beef is pretty easy to find.  I found nothing.  Ok, time to whip out the note.  I held it up to one lady and said ‘ground beef?’, opting for standard english.  She said ‘yeh’ (which is yes….oddly, so is ‘neh’…I think it’s kinda like yes and yeah….) and then she proceeded to look for it.  She couldn’t find it and directed me to another lady behind the meat counter.  She said she had it (well, in Korean but I got the meaning) and finished with her current customer.

Well, what she did was get some beef out from the big freezer behind her and cut off some pieces.  She was going to grind it right there.  I asked her to do a bit bigger/more beef.  She ground it up and handed me the bag.

I brought it to the cashier, paid the 8130KRW (about $8) for 328grams (I think??  Not sure if I’m reading the package right).  Probably the most expensive beef I ever bought but at least I can say I did it all on my own and now can make some food with better meat for dinner for us tonight.

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped  to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer  be part of the alphabet.  The only kase in which “c” would be retained  would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2  might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the  same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with  ”i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear  with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12  or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi  ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud  hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.