videos of koreans dancing

neither are very good. the first is of two "narrator models" dancing in front of an adidas store. they tell a story with their dance! and sell shoes. the second is a (cellphone) video of a korean club. if you look carefully you might be able to make out the steps of the much practiced "daegu dance." (1)

(1*) how to learn the daegu dance:

1. raise arms in the air, elbows bent at a 90 degree angle to the sides. curl you hands into a fist and leave them slightly limp. you should look like you're about to lift some kind of wimpy childs weight. or maybe holding a couple of shopping bags up around your head for some reason.

2. now its just a simple 2 step, hiking in motion type maneuver with your feet. but make sure to put some hip and shoulder action in there. the strong the shoulder pumping the better.

3. meanwhile, your limp, imaginary-shopping-bag-holding hands should be moving from side to side with your head. now it might resemble someone who is flossing incredibly hard so that each tug of the floss jerks their head with it. if you're the type to lose all abandon, now is the time to do so.

4. now find 30 of your closest friends, or just anyone, and stand in rows, everyone doing the same dance like robots in a chorus line. congratulations! you're doing the daegu dance.

philippines

i made a philippines post, but i guess because i started writing it before the last 3 posts, it positioned it down the page underneath them. so, in case you missed it, and are too lazy to scroll down, here's a link: the adventures of jerjer and loklok

and this is my boomstick

you can't own firearms in south korea (unless your part of the military or law enforcement), but if you have an itchy trigger finger you can always go to the shooting range. which is what i did this weekend with another epik teacher. the daegu shooting range (대구 사격장 - located near chilgok in northwest daegu) is a pretty large complex with both indoor and outdoor ranges. i imagine it was a large-scale, 'new deal,' public works type project because its fairly new and seems way too nice for the type of traffic it was getting on a saturday afternoon.

i'm not sure what the full gamut of their services are - we only explored a small section of their grounds but i could tell we were only seeing a fraction of it - but there are three main categories: clay pigeon shooting, pistol target practice, and airsoft pellet guns. the pigeon shooting is the most expensive (22,000W), with the pistol shooting slightly less so (15,000W), and the airsoft being practically free (3000W). in each of these categories you have different options, such as how many meters you want to shoot at, straight on pigeon shooting or from the side, multiple targets, etc.

we started off doing the clay pigeon shooting with a japanese made 12-gauge. it being my first time i wasn't exactly annie oakley (maybe i should say wild bill) but i hit the second one and about half of them after that. still, my shooting partner beat me. probably because he was from texas.

after the 12-gauge, we downsized to pistols at the target range. when the guy was explaining to us the different caliber's he pointed to the .22's and said, "cop" and then to the 3 different 9mm's and explained, "fbi and cia!" when he got to the .357 i wondered aloud, "dirty harry?" but i guess he never saw that one. we went with the fbi option, a glock 9mm. i just assumed i would be a natural when it came to shooting off a pistol. i mean, it's so easy on call of duty, right? so it came as a bit of a surprise when i didn't take to it like fish to water. i think the hardest part to get used to was how deep you had to squeeze the trigger. the first time i shot it, i felt like i was squeezing, and then squeezing some more and then i wondered did i still have the safety on? but then i squeezed past what i assumed was the end of the give and finally it went off, like a fish catching a line. i was way off. in the white. after some adjustment i think i got used to it but there were no bullseyes on my target. not even close. again, my shooting buddy got the best of me.

finally, we tried the airsoft guns. the best part about these was the chance to use a scope. it made me appreciate the steady nerves snipers must have had pre-rifle stands. compared to the pistols, the triggers on the airguns were a joke. i sometimes accidentally shot off a round as i was putting the gun up to my shoulder (yeah i know, don,t keep your finger on the trigger). i think we were shooting at 10 meters but directly across the hall was a 50 meter range. i'm guessing that wasn't for airsoft guns.

hank "deadeye" featherston iv

kyle "young guns" raum

seong-tae "crackshot" kim

whose boat is this, whose it is it?

i don't know why i'm just now getting around to this, but i thought it might be interesting to show exactly the types of things these kids are learning in the english classroom. as i may have mentioned in previous posts, the curriculum is heavily standardized and, for the most part, follows a pre-made lesson plan. therefore, my primary role in the program is not to create what goes on in the lesson, but simply to enact it out with the aid of a cd-rom program. i do, however, provide games and activities that correspond to whatever phrase or key sentence we're learning. so in all, my basic function is that of a parrot and a master of games. no wonder we're being phased out and replaced by robots.

the disconcerting reality about korean english education is that they're not so much learning how to use language as they are learning useful phrases that can be sloppily inserted into conversation. kind of like a plug-and-chug math problem, where they might use a certain equation because what they're hearing fits the right formula. it's useful, but conversation rarely plays out like that. what makes it even worse are the laughable videos and songs they use to learn from. the language is often awkwardly phrased or just plain wrong, and when it is right the intonation is puzzling at best. i was looking at some of the section headers for the new books we're getting this coming semester and one is titled "how about a game of baseball?" who says that? how about a spot of tea, govenah? right-o! on with the post then!

enough of my ranting. have a peep for yourself and make your own judgments. here's a "look and listen" video(1) with an accompanying song from one of the 5th grade sections called "whose boat is this?" (because that's something you're going to be asking people on an everyday basis, right?)

look and listen:


let's sing:


bonus let's sing (just because it's a favorite at almost every communal meal):


and then there's this guy (the reactions we get when we play these videos are hilarious by the way, the only problem is i have to watch them also):


*(1) - each lesson is divided into sections called "look and listen" where they watch a video and answer questions based on what was said, "listen and repeat" which is just what it sounds like, "let's read" (obvious), "let's write" (obvious), "let's sing" (obvious), "let's role-play", "let's review", and "let's play" which is what i'm largely responsible for.

ps. i'll be adding a philippines post shortly, i just wanted to wait and see if i could grab some more photos off of my friends first as i didnt actually take that many myself.

i'm a little embarrassed

stolen from someone else's facebook post:

the adventures of jerjer and loklok

as promised, some words about the philippines...

only one night into our trip to the philippines and i knew it would not be the vacation that i had envisioned. i'm not sure exactly what i was expecting, but i think it was something befitting our eco-destination. dirty jeans, muddy shoes, busted-up knuckles and skinned-up knees. something purely non-korean, meaning something without an interior and disconnected from any kind of network, social or wired. but i guess the one general rule applied to expectations is that you can always expect them to be broken (see: seneca's theories on human anger). and sure enough, for better or worse, mine were.

i'm not sure where my initial expectations came from; the very nature of our trip was that it was so loosely stitched together that there would be no room for frustration if some preconceived plan fell through, because there was simply no plan to fall away from. the only thing we planned in advance was a ticket from manila to dumaguete that departed 6 hours after we arrived in the capital city (a decision that was probably pretty wise from all the shit-hole stories we heard about manila), and a ticket from cebu to manila the day before we were to depart (and actually this would be changed later due to laziness and uncertain ferry schedules). we had a vague idea of islands to hit and sights to see, but time frames were non-existent as were hostel bookings or ferry ticket purchases.

sometime after 28 hours of travel we arrived in our first destination: dumaguete. dumaguete is an old spanish fort town that has since been converted into a decent sized college community. its not oppressively big but it has a lot of the comforts and amenities westerners desire and is central to many of negros' eco-attractions. from the combined influence of our lonely planet guide and the buskers' t-shirts at the airport, we decided to book a room at harold's mansion - and with that decision, what we thought we be a couple of nights in this little college town turned into ten days. i guess this was broken expectation number 1. there are literally thousands of islands in the philippines, and to think that we would spend over half our vacation settled on not only one of them, but in one city on one island, would have blown my mind pre-trip. certainly there are plenty of things to do on negros, as its one of the biggest islands in the visayas region of the philippines, but again, there are thousands of islands to explore! thousands!

so why did we seemingly waste so much time in dumaguete? well, i guess there's a few reasons. the first is because, as i said, there's a lot to do in the area. between the world class diving, waterfall exploration, twin crater lakes, cockfighting arenas and, obviously, beaches, you can easily spend a good week in the area. and a lot of our time spent there we did just that (including all of the things mentioned above). the second reason is the weather. for the first week of our trip the weather was perfect. the winter winds from the north blow down on the philippines ever so slightly to create a nice gentle breeze in these late/early months of the year. unfortunately, this is also part of the rainy season, so whereas our trip started out beautifully, the second half was plagued by showers on and off throughout the day. even when it didn't rain it was overcast. it didn't spoil the trip by any means but it ruined those picture perfect beach photos i was hoping to send into conde nast traveler (have they folded yet?). more importantly it made for unreliable ferry schedules. twice we tried to leave and twice we were turned away due to large impassable waves. the third, and probably most influential reason, were the people we met at the hostel.

harold's mansion is an iconic hostel in that it's a melting pot of nationalities, personalities, and sexualities. there we met, among the often friendly philippino staff (including harold himself), guests from the four corners of europe, parts of asia, french from the hat of america, post-and-currently-serving peace corps volunteers, and even fellow teachers from korea. the main players were the two peace corps volunteers who would become our unofficial guides to the area, two bleached-blonde girls from california who were living in harold's beach house for a month, harold (a late 30's philippino who lived in california for a stint), and eventually some french canadians and a (really lovely) tv journalist from sweden. initially i was skeptical. i saw all these people as an affront to my enjoyment. boys with european accents and dusty tans just meant one thing to me, that our party of four was about to be whittled down to a party of me, and the hospitality of knowledagble peace corps volunteers was only a thinly-veiled strategy to get into passing tourists pants. how am i so jaded at such an early age of my young life? anyways, this was my quickly formulated expectation of the rest of our trip which just goes to show how big of an ass i am.

as it turned out, our motley crew grew into a surprisingly comfortable close knit group of friends. the hostel hostilities that i had imagined turned out to be all in my head. people were generally nice. they invited us to communal events. they shared their food and...other things that weren't food. we bummed with them at beach houses. we marvelled with them at cockfights. and in moments of self-reflective clarity we sometimes even talked about people who stay at hostels and what they talk about. and by the time a 29 year old girl from sweden came into the picture, i wasn't exactly in a big rush to leave dumaguete either. i guess you could call that broken expectation number 2. even though my original expectation wasn't really met, what replaced it was just as good, if not better. i mean, what's more important? the places you've seen or the people you met and shared those places with?

speaking of experiences...hostels are an interesting microcosm of society much in the same way an episode of the real world can be. at the same time, whats the most you can learn about someone when you're both just transient occupants, there one day gone the next? all people generally provide are snapshots of their lives, like presenting a social resume in which we can decide whether they would make a good facebook addition or just someone who might be a question mark in a photo down the line. in fact, most conversations at a hostel are similar to the conversations i had at orientation for epik. where are you from? where have you been? where are you going? what do you do? okay nice to meet you and on to the next one. its all experiential. what have we done, what have we seen? rarely do we talk about ideas. about what we've learned from these experiences. afterall, what's the point of gathering experiences when you take nothing away from them? they're about as good as a snapshot, but deterioate even quicker because they're based in memory, not celluloid (or whatever it is). how much nicer would discussion be if someone just said, "you know, what i got most from my trip in india is that regardless of economic circumstances and incredible adversity, it is possible to not only rise above what life casts you, but to embrace every hardship with grace and dignity." what sort of conversation would that evoke? what would your experiences contribute then? more than just a snapshot but maybe something significant.

so, to loop back around, seneca basically said human anger arises from an illogical stance that our expectations should be carried out to their most perfect potential, and that any unforseen problems along the way are peculiar and ill-gotten, when in fact the only absolute thing about life are these unforseen problems. in order to not be angry, or rather to be happy, we need to give up these unrealistic expectations and simply accept that things are not always, and in fact often, not going to go as planned. and this trip was a shining example of just that. it may not have been exactly what i was thinking it would be, but in the end it turned out being exactly how it should have been - aside from the rainy days. those still kind of sucked.

anyways, here are some photos. i'll add others as i receive them from my travel compatriots. oh! and the title of this post borrows some visayan slang: jerjer means to have sex and loklok means to masturbate. this is the full extent of my visayan language education. enjoy!