A nice weekend

Friday

Taekwondo was a hard workout but I am gettng more conditioned these days. I have weights for my legs and hands that I practice with in my room. I have 3 more poomsaes (forms) to learn before the black belt level. Then I am planning on finding a hapkido studio to practice a style more similar to my philosophy of harmony. Some day I want to study tai chi in China with some old master or join a large group in a park. I want to have peace in my emotional mind and confidence in my physical skills.

Saturday

I temporarily fixed my bicycle: the rear tire bolts were loose and my banging on them with a hammer made them worse, so I finally got some pliers. It's embarassing riding down the street when your back tire is rubbing noisily against the wheel-well, while people pretend they aern't looking at you. Later, I rode the bus almost two hours to Daegu and spent the day there with two lovely Korean (English-speaking) lady friends. They took me to a large Kyobu bookstore where I bought a large stack of language and teaching books. I am going to learn Korean and (some) Chinese and become a skillful teacher before my adventures here are over. We also went to some nice restaurants and had bibimbap and a braised chicken stew. Later, I found a hotel for under $20 that was decent and slept there after drinking some tea with them. Daegu is the third largest city in Korea, and it has a US Army base, which we drove past.

Sunday

The next morning, one of them picked me up and took me to Dunkin' Donuts and then the bus station. Her and I have a nice connection and we'll see where that may go. The bus ride home was calm. I read about the opening up of Korea to the West in the late 1800's. Japan, China, US, France, America, Russia and Britain all wanted to impose their own unequal trading treaties on Korea and make Korea modernize after their own models. Korea had its own enlightenment movement and diplomatic efforts, but it struggled against the neo-Confucian orthodoxy of the entrenched aristocracy, under the weight of foreign domination. I thought about these things while I looked out the window at the beautiful mountainous blooming scenery; the countless and unknown lives who have built this country. When I got home, I met with my friend Kim Ho and his mom and uncle. We ate bbq pork wrapped in lettuce with peppers at a restaurant. Then we went to his mom's farm and collected some edible greens in the forest nearby. Later, at home, I wasted an hour or more moving furniture around in my apartment; finally I ended up back almost where I started, but with simply less stuff. It is easy to collect other people's junk when it is free, but it feels better to have more space to live in and just the essential furniture. Hopefully my current arrangement will be OK for a while. I am finding my couch more comfortable than the floor with pads, and even better than my bed, which had a dip in it.

News

Last weekend I set up my slack-line down by the Namwon theme-park and I had lots of Koreans watching me in amazement. Afterward, I went and watched a children's play with puppets and fell asleep because it was all in Korean - something about an ogre that gets his wart removed and lives in a dream, then realizes that life is better with the wart for some reason.

I got some new glasses last week and I updated my wardrobe. Koreans are very fashion-conscious, so it isn't hard to make a good or bad first impression depending on the way you dress. This week I taught a lesson on clothing vocabulary and basic sentences to my middle school kids and they loved it. The last game I played was saying "I put on my" or "I take off my" and some random vocabulary; the boys were embarrased when they had to say "bra" and the girls "underwear." It was all in good clean fun and the lesson went well.

My last fourth grade class was going smooth until this emotional kid flipped out over me taking his tape dispenser. He threw an eraser and hit me in the face and started kicking at me. My co-teacher restrained him and his peers drug him out of the class. We had to lock the doors, but I had to open them when he was pushing against the glass and going to throw a large phone at them. I restrained him outside until they called the big guy around to deal with him. Whew. Earlier, my co-teacher had to tell a sixth grade class that they could never come back to the English classroom because they were so naughty.

I am finding it easier to walk around the city and not be self-conscious. The secret is not making eye contact with strangers. Koreans show great hospitality towards friends and family, so they don't have time or energy for interacting with strangers. This may be a hold-over from the Confucian ethic of relationships and loyalty, but I think it makes practical sense.