The Convalescent Critic Top Ten

Yes I have a cold. I'm pretty sure it's a cold and not H1N1. First cold in a long time for me. I suppose it's better that I should get it when I'm not working, (I'm on holidays now), because although I like missing work, if I don't miss exactly a week it's a real hassle trying to get everybody back on the same schedule. More of a hassle than dragging my sick arse in there.

But even so it's not such a bad thing. I don't mind so much having a cold. I haven't tasted food in a few days. There are positives to that. I bought some pretty disgusting hamburger patties from Costlyco last time I was there. And, of course, since it's Costco I had to buy about 18 hundred of them. Since I can't taste them and I have to eat them to make room in my freezer I've had burgers twice in the last three days. I used lots of the crappy Yoshida's barbecue sauce on them of course because I bought about 9 gallons of that at Costlyco too. I also made some leftover vindelou. Just used veggies that were getting old, added some meat that had been thawed for a while and some packets of boil in the bag curry and voila: getting rid of leftovers in a healthy way. It's too bad though cuz I think it would have tasted pretty good, that curry. It might have been spicy too but who can tell when you're breathing through your mouth while eating?

Still, try as I might, I just can't eat a lot of food. This too is a plus for a guy like me. I have what you might call a few extra pounds that I'd like to pare away if I could. Loss of appetite is a bonus. Only it's kind of offset by the loss of energy that goes along with it. I don't do a lot of exercise when I am convalescing.

However, I DO get LOADS of ab work. And when I exercise abs are never a target area for me any more. So this cold is really making me feel the burn. No kidding! Wake up, cough for an hour. That's a great ab burn! Eat a meal, cough for another hour. I'm blasting my abs three times a day! At least! And then to keep the burn going between workouts I blow my nose every 10 minutes or so. I washed clothes today. ON MY ABS thank you very much!

I haven't left the house really in 3 or 4 days. That forces me to get some tedius stuff done that I just haven't wanted to do since last cold. I fixed some of the error messages I've been getting on my computer. Actually going into safe mode and deleting stuff from the registry! I am pretty proud of myself for that! And I upgraded to a gig of ram. It has sped up the old computator a little bit. I scanned for spyware, defragged and cleaned disks. But the thing that probably helped the most is when I blew a small, grey tumbleweed of dust out of my computer. It's UNbelievable the dust that builds up in this place! That's another thing I've been doing is dusting and vacuuming areas that I usually don't. Like under the bed, behind the computer and such. The dust in this place is the reason why I'm always at least a little stuffed up in the sinuses.

But I don't want to give the impression that I was as energetic as all that. The main thing I've been doing while recouperating has been downloading and watching about 20 movies. Maybe even more. Some old classics like Treasure of the Sierra Madres, Doctor Strangelove, Cool Hand Luke, The Philadelphia Story, Old Man and the Sea, The Public Enemy, The Eiger Sanction, The Revenge of the Pink Panther, The Omen, The Meaning of Life, The Maltese Falcon, High Noon and some others. And I've seen some fairly new movies that might be classics in 10 or 20 years like Son of Rambow, Appaloosa, Felon, Resurrecting the Champ, Superbad, Cashback, Food Inc., Ghost Town, Wall E, Couples Retreat, World's Greatest Dad, Paper Heart... how many movies is that?

This has got me thinking. Not about what it is that makes a good movie. No that just wouldn't be me. I got to thinking about what it is that makes a real stinker of a movie. Things that if I saw them in the movie trailer I wouldn't even bother going to see it because, much like shopping at Costco, you go into a movie pretty much blind. And it's usually a pretty big investment. Those burgers and that barbecue sauce looked good enough. They were attractively packaged. I had heard no negative buzz about them. Now I wish I had. That was probably about 40 or 50 bucks I'll never get back.

And when I watch a really bad movie I often wish somebody had warned me about it so that I wouldn't spend money on it. Or even if it was free, the time spent watching it was 2 hours I'll never get back. So here comes another of Dave's Top Tens. You may disagree. I know some of these there will be people who COMPLETELY disagree. Maybe even a majority of people. These are just MY hints.

The top ten things in a movie that give you a strong feeling that it's not going to be good. I'm not going to list actors or actresses because even the worst like Keanu Reeves has been in some good movies although they would have been better with almost anyone else cast in his place. Rene Zellweiger, same. Never absolutely necessary to a good movie but often the cause of bad ones. The stinker movie/stinky acting royalty in my books would be Vin Diesel and Paris Hilton. I don't think either has ever acted well or been in anything good. (that wasn't filmed with a night vision camera).

But that's not what this list is about. It's about scenes, cliches, situations, characters that we see quite a lot and almost never in good movies. These are not necessarily in order but I'll do my best to save the best for last.

Top ten things in a movie that give ME a strong feeling that it's not going to be a good one.

10: The Mexican Standoff- When two macho characters or more are pointing their guns at each other waiting for someone to flinch so that somebody can blow somebody away and remove all doubt about exactly how UNmacho they are! This is becoming very popular in modern movies about gang violence in the hood. Only diff. is the guns are tilted 45 degrees. A "good guy" who "heroically" blows people away just doesn't do it for me very often. Exception: Dirty Harry.

9: Singing- Now I know some great movies like Rocky Horror Picture Show, Little Shop of Horrors, The Blues Brothers and a few good Disney flicks had singing but that's why this is only number 9! GENERALLY, Chicago, Dreamgirls, West Side Story, Cabaret, Moulin Rouge, faaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrttt!!!

8: Martial Arts- Take a movie like Kung Pow. Compare it to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I don't see a difference. I am not sure which got more laughs from me. Martial arts movies are COMEDY, people! If you take it serously when people spin around in the air kicking 5 or 6 guys out cold, fly through the treetops, do a horizontally spinning drill move that knocks over several people, I have some very cheap but high quality electronics and some pills that will increase penis or breast size to sell you! These movies are Oriental musicals. The fights are choreographed and augmented with a soundtrack. Nobody can really fight like this. And if they could, it sure wouldn't sound like that. But it IS much better than people singing and dancing if you approach it as comedy.

7. "I'll have a beer."- Now I now a lot of people are going to think I'm nitpicking here but this has become such a pet peeve of mine that it distracts me to the point where I can no longer appreciate the movie. And it's not just the ordering of "a beer" like you're at a fraternity kegger and there's only one kind, it's the fact that 9 out of 10 beverages in movies, alcoholic or not, are rarely touched much less finished! It takes me half a reel of film before I forgive the characters for this. And the director? Forget it. Most movie heroes are from the world where people buy specific beverages and finish them. Maybe the Hollywood cinematic elite don't, but in the interest of realism, get this right, will ya?

6. Two beautiful people who hate each other- Come on! Though I think a lot of love scenarios are lame and often out of place, this has to be the worst. Okay, maybe only second to the superhero who messily kills 15 heavily armed and trained warriors and then in the arms of his girl turns into, "Hi Honey, Poopsi, Sweetiepie! Mwuh mwuh mwuh I weely weely missed my girlfwiend!" Alright so these two will share number 6. You can pretty much bank on the characters who hate each other the most hooking up by the end of the movie. If they're both attractive. Simplistic movie making and it needs to be accompanied by ingenious, Taming of the Shrewesque character development if it's to be at all stomachable. And usually it ain't.

5. A friggin vampire!!!- Just exactly how are goths and vamp kids obtaining the cash to support all these damn vampire movies? It's often true of kids in middle school and high school that intelligence is directly proportional to amount of black worn. Eye make-up, nail polish etc. But if these kids are so smart then they will have to realize sooner or later that the vampire genre has it's limits and they were eclipsed sometime WAY before stupid movies like Blade or Underworld. I think after Interview With a Vampire I was pretty much finished. But I'll probably get my blood sucked for saying this.

4.Willful destruction of property- Another of these things that is just a personal distraction. I really feel bad for the bartender whose bar gets trashed in a barfight and nobody pays him anything. At least in the old western movies the hero would likely flip him a couple coins and appologize. No more! Now people overturn fruit carts in the street with regularity and without even so much as an apologetic backwards glance. And car chases. Forget about it! The cops are supposed to be good guys. It is strongly discouraged for cops to chase bad guys in reality. Again, when are movie makers going to choose realism over gratuitous destruction? Car chases don't happen because things get damaged and people get sued. There could be a huge volume of movies about a personal injury lawyer who sues movie characters for all the destruction visited upon the general public. And I'm only talking about the GOOD guys!

3. Hand grabbed over the edge of a deadly drop- How many movies can you name? Heck how many CLASSICS? To Catch a Thief, Cliffhanger, So I Married and Axe Murderer, there are too many. But this is something I've personally tried. The physics of it STRONGLY favour BOTH people going over the cliff or off the roof or into the crater or whatever. The faller has the inertia. Unless the hero is considerably larger than the person rescued he/she will just topple right over the edge with the other person. Furthermore it takes a TREMENDOUS amount of strength to hold someone hand to hand like this for a long enough time to squeeze any drama out of it. I'm talking about world class arm wrestler hand strength. There have been a few movies in which someone was swung over to a safer place and dropped but usually there is a cutaway and we see that the hanger was pulled up by the rescuer. This is another feat of superhuman strength we are supposed to suspend our disbelief and allow. And I'm not even going to talk about all the people who almost go over the edge and grab onto a tree branch, shingle, eaves trough, girder, pontoon or whatever.

2. The gorgeous ass-kicking woman- While I have known quite a few physically tough women, (hell I'm from a land abounding with them), exactly NONE of them have been physically attractive. These days the ideal body for a woman, (and for a man for that matter), is in need of a sandwich, folks. Annorexia does not equal strength! You ever seen a female bouncer? You ever seen a gorgeous female bouncer? Nuff said.

1. The defused bomb with one second remaining- If I'm a bad guy making a bomb I'm certainly not going to provide anyone who might want to disarm it the convenience of a timer that lets him know how long he has. Sure some bombs need timers but why hasn't any bad guy yet set the bomb to go off at 00:03 or 00:04 or if it's not in a movie, how about 10:00 or something? It doesn't have to be 00:00! It probably NEVER IS! Again, how good can a movie be if the director doesn't know this? This is a cheap ploy to create tension. Stop it! It doesn't work any more! Like all the others here I don't want to watch these things in movies any more UNLESS they are being lampooned.

Hope you enjoyed my list. I have to go watch a movie. What are the odds it'll have one of these in it?

Shirts and shoes

It's the Christmas season here. I've sent out some Christmas cards, put up my Christmas shrubbery and done some Christmas shopping. I'm listening to Christmas music, watching Christmas specials and thinking Christmas thoughts. I figured it was high time I started drinking Christmas drinks. At this time of year I like to drink Spiced Rum and O.J. It just tastes Christmassy to me! But I dare you to try to find Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum here in Korea. Or any kind really. I went to Homeplus, E-Mart, Shinsegae. Nothin'

Incidentally, how bad is Shinsegae getting? I went there with a 50,000 won gift certificate. It was a Teacher's Day gift from my Physiotherapy class. I used to like going to Shinsegae for the various items I could get there that were really hard to find anywhere else. Like Kraft Dinner, dill pickles, Japanese sour candies, good spaghetti sauce, Kraft Parmesan Cheese etc. Now they have nothing there I want. Try as I might I couldn't even spend 10,000 won of my 50. I bought a bag of Poco Loco Nacho Cheese chips. Yuck! The little "Sool" store they have there is massively overpriced and has nothing I can't buy elsewhere. Shinsegae used to be pretty good. What happened?

I remembered a little alcohol shop I used to buy Canadian Rye from when I taught at Chonnam University. It was in the Chun Dae Hoo Moon area. Expensive, but a good little place to find something other than beer and soju to drink. I decided that since I'm on holidays and have nothing to do, why not walk? It's a good hour and a half from Seokang to Chonnam the way I go. I do a LOT of walking and I love a nice LONG walk from time to time. And it's perfect fall walking weather these days. So I slipped on my trusty Reebok runners, the heels of which have been reinforced with duct tape. I've had them for 2 1/2 years and they've been ratched for about a year. The soles are gone so I put in an insole. The heels are always the first thing to go on my runners because I usually don't tie them tight so my shoe slips around a lot. Hence the duct tape. Don't chuck it, duck it, right?

The reason I don't buy a new pair is because they are size US 11. The only places that have this size are shoe stores located near army bases. I bought them in a shoe store in Eui Jung Boo. There's a US military base there. I've been looking for over a year but still haven't found a pair of runners that fit. Pretty sad. We'll come back to this recurring sadness.

So I'm in Chun Dae Hoo Moon looking around at all the brand new stores that have gone up since the last time I was there about a year ago. The place changes every day! It's crazy! But I get to the Miller Time/Bob's Noraebang corner. This, unfortunately, is where a lot of my evenings in Hoo Moon ended up. I say unfortunately because of the caterwauling at Bob's that usually punctuated those evenings with vocal finality. The little alcohol shoppe was just around the corner from Bob's. I walk around the corner and to my mild surprise there is now a restaurant there. A spicy food restaurant with an English name something like "Willy Nilly Chilli" but not quite as good as that. Heh heh. I just made that up! I like it!

Anyhoo, that was disappointing because I knew that if I didn't manage to find some spiced rum there, I could always get some rye and I had just run out of Crown Royal. In fact that bottle of rye may have been what had brought me to Hoo Moon the last time I was there a year ago.

To cut a long blog post short, I ended up settling for Smirnoff Ice. It's new to Korea. I've always liked it especially over ice after a bit of exercise in the summer. It was awesome after a ball game! They also have this tasty new product they call Smirnoff mule? It's vodka with ginger ale. I like that too. And they have T-shirts in every 4-pack! T-shirts! Extra LARGE T-shirts! Tee shirts are not easy for me to find.

I think I paid about 20 bucks for a 4-pack of each but considering I had expanded my wardrobe, the booze was a bonus. So I got home and opened up the cases. There was a bottle-shaped extra inside. THAT was the T-shirt. After unwrapping it and unfolding it, sure enough, it was a wrinkly white t-shirt and on the tab it said, "XL," so I put it on.

My head barely fit through the head hole and my arms barely fit through the sleeves. The wrinkles don't look like they'll ever go away and if this shirt doesn't expand after washing then I'd say it's an XL for kids. And kids really shouldn't be buying Smirnoff Ice.

If you look in the picture I am holding the OTHER tee shirt in my hand. That's how it comes. If you zoom in you can see all the wrinkles in the shirt I'm wearing. Even though it's stretched pretty much to its limit. Disregard the belly hanging out the bottom.
So on goes the adventure of finding good booze and big clothes. If anyone has some shoes that are too big for them I'll trade you for two T-shirts that are too small for me.

Kids time

Now that I'm off work for a while it's kids time! I'll probably be teaching at a kid's camp for a while and I'll be visiting the Jacksons which means Alex and Justin will be my play buddies for a while.

I don't like kids. I LOVE them! I don't like teaching them because it doesn't take them long to realize that I'm a pushover and they can take advantage of it. THEN I have to do something I hate: I have to play the bad guy. And after showing them how much you love them, discipline is tough. I'm like a big, purple Barney to kids. They usually love me! But Barney is only a half hour show, isn't it? There's a reason for that! It's make believe. You never see one of Barney's little buddies having a temper tantrum. They never punch him in the nads or pull his tail on the show. They never cry when he shows another kid more attention than them. And Barney never gets tired. He never says, "Go away kids I don't feel like singing right now." They never bug him while he's chowing down on the carcass of a sabertooth tiger or a caveman. He never growls at them when they bother him while he's dropping a Barney bomb in the woods somewhere. Barney is make-believe.

I usually find the little foibles of childhood to be the reasons I like them so much. Kids haven't learned to be fake yet. That's mostly what I mean by "foibles". When they say things like, "You have stinky breath." Or they stroke your arm hair like a pet. Or they want a red crayon but another kid won't give it to them so they cry. They say what they feel; fart when they need to; get angry when they're pissed off; and they show extreme joy and happiness at things that please them because almost every pleasure in life is pretty new to them. This is the kind of non-regulation of nature that makes me love kids. And so often I will smile at behaviour that would anger other grown-ups they know. I guess it's because I don't want to discourage it. Especially if they're really young kids. I want them to be kids for a while. Maybe even retain some childish behaviour throughout their lives. But I know this won't happen. Also, I have vast reserves of patience because I don't have kids of my own. So I tend to encourage them to be kids more than to behave.

Now the negation phrase: Having said that; however; that said; on the other hand; buuuut; you choose your favourite, adults nowadays aren't doing ourselves any favours to make dealing with kids easier. In fact we're making it more difficult all the time. We try very hard to create these consequenceless, sterile, safe, morally neutral environments that are pretty similar to Barneyland. I think we're just setting our kids up for a bigger crash when Barney finally shows his teeth.

What is Barney anyway. He's a T-Rex, right? Not a creature I'd want to make angry! Just imagine one morning Barney's baby wakes him up three hours before the alarm clock and is teething. He tries for a few hours to calm the kid down and finally it gets back to sleep. Beep beep beep beep! His alarm goes off and wakes the kid up again. Now Barney has to go to work. His wife is grumpy too from lack of sleep and now they have a crying baby to deal with during their morning routine. Not only that but Barney didn't wipe the scum ring off the bathtub after draining it last night. Mrs. Barney says she can't understand how the bathtub ring could be so red in colour when they live in the brown soil part of town. Unless he had business over on the red soil part of town with, umm, hmmm, his young, sexy secretary, who lives over there! So they have an argument over breakfast. Barney is late and the boss gives him shit because it's not the first time this week. His secretary ignores him as he arrives because he WAS visiting her and THEY had a fight too! Then during the taping of the "I love you, you love me" song one of the kids steps on Barney's tail. He turns on the kid, opens his toothy mandibles of death to snake-like capacity and utters a gutteral blast of sound that blows her hair back and makes her face wet with fang slime!

THAT's how a kid feels when I finally have to put my foot down and discipline them. I hate to do it. I try to keep my exposure to children short enough so that it's not required. But it's getting tougher to do. Camps are getting longer and kids are getting so shut in and overprotected that this eventuality comes much sooner in the relationship.

I've said many times that if I don't have kids of my own I won't be disappointed because I don't think society will allow me to raise them the way I want. For instance I think of myself and one of my best friends growing up named Grant. We were both very sickly kids. My friend's family doctor said he was allergic to everything. I'm not sure what the doctor said about my symptoms but I was always sick. My Mom says I was always underweight and it was impossible to keep any food in me. Hard to believe but I'm not kidding.

Both my friend and I would be overmedicated and maybe living in plastic bubbles if we were kids today. But our parents decided that if our bodies couldn't build up immunities, we'd die. Either was preferable to a life in a sterile, germless environment. NO WAY they'd even have that option today. That's tantamount to child abuse, isn't it? Maybe even manslaughter or murder!

I'm happy to say that both Grant and I are healthy as horses today. I can't remember the last time I had any health trouble that wasn't a cold or hangover. Same with Grant. We found the cure, folks! You know what it was? It was "Get the hell outside!" That's what it was. Both Grant and I LOVED sports, camping, hiking, swimming anything we could do in the germ-infested outdoors with other germ-infested kids. More often than not we did it UNsupervised! Though I didn't know Grant until high-school, our childhoods were spent outside naturally increasing our antibodies and white blood cells.

People are all paranoid nowadays about their kids' health. They are too often given medicine that is supposed to help but I believe it only prolongs the health irregularity that the body would naturally eliminate if it were untreated. I'm not going to say that it's a massive money-making conspiracy by doctors and drug manufacturers, but I do so love a good conspiracy theory!

And worst of all there just aren't many kids whose parents prescribe the tried and true medicine known to me as "Get the hell outside!" The fewer parents that send their kids outside, the less fun it is to be out there. And the more of an outcast the kids are going to be. While they're talking about playing soccer and trading Pokemon cards, most other kids are talking about playing FIFA 2K10 and trading magical items online.

The worst thing about this in my opinion is the social growth the kids are missing. In video games if you cheat, you win more easily! In a person to person social situation if you cheat there are consequences. This is just one of many very valuable lessons that kids can't learn in the classroom. They need to be learned in social interaction with REAL other kids in REAL life, not real time.

And think about the parents! Or at least the supervisors of the kids. It gets them out of their hair for a while. It allows the kids to expend their energy in more productive ways and it gives the supervisors and kids time away from each other. This increases guardians' patience with the kids and vice versa. It just makes it easier for everyone!

I have to admit I'm seeing a few more kids in Korea playing outside but not as many as there should be. Parents just don't trust kids outside on their own. Germs, child abduction, traffic accidents or other play-related injuries - these are smaller risks than robbing your child of the chance to develop personality. In MY opinion.

But rather than tell their kids to go outside and play, parents here tell their kids to get out of the house and study. That's what they want out of the kids camps. What I want is to try to infuse as much desperately needed PLAY into the camps as I can. I just hope I can find a camp at which I'll be able to let the kids play without having to growl at any of them. I think two weeks is the magic window for this situation. But the camps all seem to be a month now. This has me worried.

Anyhoo, here's hoping kid season will be a success this year.

Finished!

Another semester comes to an end! I turned in all my marks and filled out the unbelievably tedius attendance sheets for all my classes. Now it's time to concentrate on finding a good camp or intensive program to teach sometime in January or February. Preferably January because I'll be watching Olympics all Feb. Hopefully.

A lot has happened since I last posted but I wanted to come to the end of the drama before posting about it. It's over now I think. Not yet sure if I'm better off or not but... Jung is no longer my supervisor. I now report directly to the director. It's been a stunning lesson on the futility of face for me. The events that led up to the loss of Jung. Stunning! I can't get into the details and I'm sure nobody thinks I understand what went on. But I probably know better than everybody but Jung why and how he gave up his position as advisor to the English Language Department. Maybe even better than him. He did a LOT of crazy things and when I asked him why he could only say, "I don't know." Maybe this is another. This is directly related to my topic today.

It bugs me when people think I'm dumb. It riles me when people think they're smarter than me. It really pisses me off when I can tell they think they're smarter than me. Even if they ARE! I believe lying is only done when one assumes the person lied to is stupid enough to believe the lie, which means stupider than the liar. In this way lying qualifies as extreme arrogance. It especially burns me when I know people are lying as the words come out of their mouths. I will never like this or get used to it and I will never accept culture or tradition as an excuse for this arrogant behaviour. I don't think I'm alone in that.

This behaviour is at the heart of Korean society. Almost every day almost every Korean has some other arrogant Korean lie to their face. The Korean who is smarter than the liar has to act like he/she doesn't know it's a lie if the liar has seniority, position or age. But that's not all! He/She has to bow and give some fake signs of respect to the prevaricating scumbag. This would be excruciating for me. It has been the source of almost every problem I've had in Korea. I DON'T accept this as reasonable behaviour. I don't care if you're my boss, filthy rich or if you're 100 years old. If you lie to me, you insult me and in most cases I won't just ignore it or act like I don't realize you are lying.

Most foreigners share my feelings. They may not believe them as strongly but they agree. Foreign teachers are difficult for Koreans to deal with because they're difficult to lie to and it has become an issue that the Korean "education" system is planning to take action on. First the geniuses in the Korean "education" system decided to call it a problem of underqualification. They spread word throughout the highly suggestable populace that foreign teachers are not qualified. But because of the abysmal state of education here that causes me to put that word in quotes so often even the least qualified foreign teacher here is vastly overqualified for what we are doing.

So now there have been suggestions made that foreign teachers in Korea need to take "cultural sensitivity" classes. This is just another colossaly idiotic idea to come out of Korea! For so many reasons!

These courses will no doubt be disguised as opportunities to teach foreigners about Korean history, traditions, geography, maybe some language, and things like that. These are things that every last Korean thinks he/she knows everything about and is trained to be fiercely proud of making it literally impossible for any foreigner to walk among them without being thoroughly informed in like a week!

Nobody comes to Korea without learning about the culture. Ignorance of the culture is probably NEVER the cause of the problems Koreans are having with foreigners. But because of our education and healthy skepticism that comes with it, we have the ability to weed out the propeganda and we actually have a better idea of the TRUE Korean culture than most Koreans do. But most Koreans are too blindly convinced of the wisdom of their ways to accept that anyone who understands them would NOT believe them and act in accordance with them. Because they've been systematically programmed from childhood to be that way. The people who want to run these stupid training courses may or may not be aware of this. Either way, the courses will be nothing more than attempted indoctrination and there is no reason to believe they will be successful. We foreigners are too old, too smart and we already know Korean culture, we just choose not to practice certain aspects of it that are absurd.

Aye, there's the rub! Koreans don't see any aspects of their culture that are absurd. I have been lied to with regularity here in Korea and while I'm still not desensitized to it, it doesn't upset me as much as it used to. Maybe that's bad. But I can't think of a single time when the lie made things easier. Lying invariably causes more work for everybody, disorganizes, confuses and makes things remarkably LESS efficient. Koreans don't see the absurdity of perpetuating dishonesty, even being PROUD of it as part of their culture! It'll take some pretty strong mental re-programming for them to see it. Likewise it'll take some pretty strong mental re-programming for foreigners to espouse constant deceit as a necessary part of living.

So the end result is that these courses will be a waste of time and money that could be SO much better spent trying to legitimize the "education" system they have here. But this is the familiar catch 22. They don't know their "education" system sucks because they are trained to believe it's just another thing that's superior about Korea.

It could be much more accurately said that Koreans need to be educated in Korean culture. That's how bad it is. There are so many things they are trained to believe in that just aren't true!

Or what about a program of sensitivity to foreign cultures taught to Koreans? Or even basic concepts about us like we are NOT exactly the same or as same as Koreans. I've had so many students who have shown interest in my culture! They ask me things like, "What do you like better, chicken or pork?" I say, "Chicken." So it's not long before I hear that student telling someone else that all foreigners like chicken better than pork.

Foreigners are not a new thing in Korea. We've been here a LONG time. Given the lightning speed at which Korea's economy developed you might expect a speedy attitude of tolerance toward foreigners to develop. Not the case. It's been shamefully slow. In fact I believe it's going backwards. Every year they make tougher new laws with flimsy reasoning at best that seem to just be attempts at making things more difficult for foreigners here. And now they have the gaul to suggest to people from countries like America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England etc., countries where we really don't even USE the word "foreigner", to be more culturally sensative when we come to Korea.

OINK!

The cartoons at the top are taken from Korean newspapers. I don't know why but I can no longer move my pictures around on my blog. The Korean words in two of the pics mean "unqualified". The other pic is of a stoned teacher. We now have to be tested for AIDS and drugs EVERY YEAR. Cuz that's what all us foreigners are, right? Sex crazed, druggies.