Author: Peter

I found General Sherman’s memoir in the library.

Here is what he says of his time at West Point (Summer 1836 to Spring 1840, graduating at age 20):

It was Sherman’s campaigns in Tennessee and Georgia that were decisive in that war, I think, i.e. “Sherman won the war”. Historians say that Sherman’s capture of Atlanta ensured Lincoln’s reelection (besides giving the setting to “Gone With the Wind”). A weak, ineffectual Union general commanding in the West in 1864, who had not gotten anything done, may have cost Lincoln the election. Lincoln’s opponent was in favor of negotiating terms of peace with the CSA government.

Sherman — one of the Civil War’s greatest generals —  having had a non-stellar performance as a cadet at West Point (“I was not considered a good soldier”), suggests that it’s hard to predict real-life performance based on academic performance. Consider the following West Point class rankings of Civil War generals:

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• Lee: 2nd of 46 graduating cadets [Class of 1829]
• Sherman: 6th of 43 [Class of 1840]
• Longstreet: 54th out of 56 [Class of 1842]
• Grant: 21st of 39 [Class of 1843]
• McClellan: 2nd out of 59 [Class of 1846]
• Stonewall Jackson: 17th out of 59 [Class of 1846]
• Pickett: 59th of 59 [Class of 1846]

I see no relation between skill as a general and class-rank at West Point; McClellan and Lee were both second in their classes, but McClellan is widely considered a total failure. He was humiliated repeatedly be Lee, till Lincoln fired him. Grant, with only an average performance, turned out to be a military genius. Longstreet was one of Lee’s best subordinate commanders, but was at the bottom of his class.

Note that the cadet who ranked first in the Class of 1846 never made it higher than colonel during the Civil War!

See Post-166 for an account of my unplanned “visit” to the General Sherman Statue in Manhattan in 2013.

Executive Summary: Public transportation in the USA still can’t get its act together. It took me 30 mins to get home from the bus’ scheduled departure time. Plain-old walking would’ve taken under 20 mins.

You ascend out of the subway station at 6:04 PM. Back to the bus waiting area: Fenced in by towering buildings, a gaggle of loiterers, mostly appearing to be fuddy-duddy federal-government office-worker types, huddle under and around a bus shelter. They, like you, want to get home as soon as possible. Decision time: Do you walk the twenty-minutes home, or do you ride the bus, listed to leave at 6:05 PM? It has certainly not departed yet, as a lot of people are standing in its designated waiting area. It drops-off five minutes’ walk from your home.

As you may guess, this is not a hypothetical, but the beginning of a personal anecdote, which continues right here:

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Around the bus-stop, an African madman paces around, muttering to himself, occasionally exclaiming things — also to himself. His unintelligible diatribe is partly in accented-English and partly in some language unknown to me. The rest of the loiterers stay away. The clock ticks, minute after minute, with no sign of the bus. Now it’s nearly 6:10, and still no bus. Ah, there it is. The bus pulls up. 6:10. Out tumbles the obese Black driverwoman. With nary a word, she waddles away into one of the towering buildings, for reasons unknown to us.

At least she leaves the door open. The bus fills up. Okay, it’s only a five-minute-or-so delay, the loiterers-turned-passengers think. I get a seat near the back door. The madman, still diatribing away to himself, sits way at the back. I suddenly wonder if there’s a hands-free cellphone attached to him somewhere that I hadn’t seen. I don’t want to look too closely.

This possible-madman notwithstanding, the caliber of passenger, I notice, is much “higher” than I remember from when I regularly rode this very bus very often in 2008. The inner-core of the Washington D.C. area has noticeably changed in these six years. It’s gotten more expensive, and has impelled the moving-out of a good many of the more-unsavory characters who accompanied me on those 2008 bus trips.

My mind wanders to the changes in Washington, D.C. itself (which I must point out to those unfamiliar, has borders unchanged from 1790 or so; it has only 700,000 people in it, while another 5,000,000 or so live in nearby counties). The way things are going, Washington D.C. may be a White-majority city by the 2020s. Hardly anyone remembers now, but it was a White city around the Korean War era. (The city of Washington DC flipped from 70-75% White in 1940 to 70-75% Black by 1970. When my father showed up here in the early 1970s, although he wouldn’t have realized it at the time, he saw a city only-recently dramatically-transformed by White Flight. He himself finally settled across the river in Arlington, Virginia. In my boyhood, it was called the Murder Capital, and it famously elected a crack-cocaine-using mayor.)

Back on the bus, any German passengers would be appalled at the disregard for Pünktlichkeit. The enormous bus driver, already running late, remains absent. The minutes drag on. Should I have just walked? Maybe I’m not the only one thinking that. Of course, I’m already down $1.10 for this. (The normal Washington DC Metrobus fare these days is $1.60 [Up from the $1.25 I remember from the mid-2000s], and if transferring from the subway, one gets a piddling 50-cent discount [I think it used to be free to transfer from rail to bus].) Finally, the driver reappears. She tumbles into the driver’s seat and we start rolling. She takes a strange and inefficient route, doing a series of right turns to make an eventual left.

I decided to note down some times in this little affair. Here they are:

6:04 PM I exit the subway station
[6:05 PM, The bus is scheduled to depart]
6:10 PM, Bus arrives; driver disappears
6:18 PM, Bus departs, in no particular hurry
6:26 PM, Bus arrives at my bus stop, I get off and begin to walk home
6:32 PM, I arrive at home

If I’d just ignored the bus and walked straight away, I’d have made it home around 6:22 if I’d pushed it a little, i.e. ten minutes earlier. Even the leisureliest of strolls would’ve beaten the bus. A waste of time; a waste of money.

Some may say that I’m being too harsh here. “This is only one experience”. True, but the thing is, those saying that have probably never ridden Washington-DC-area mass transportation on any regular basis.These kinds of sub-standard experiences with buses and trains in the USA are a regular feature of my experience and many others’. The system is simply not reliable. The best I can say is that it is usually not terrible.

 February 2014 for me involves an intensive “CELTA certificate” course. Intensive does not mean “bad”. I quite enjoy it.

CELTA is a TESOL (“Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages”) certificate. It opens up doors for (better) jobs around the planet and in the USA, though not in public schools. It is the most “prestigious” of the TESOL certificates by reputation. It is designed  by Cambridge University.

The course takes place in downtown Washington DC, 9 AM to 5 PM weekdays every day this month. A great location. And that’s not the only reason the course is great:

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There are six of us “trainees”. Each of the others is a nice, interesting person. Though we were all brand-new to each other last Monday, it already felt like we are old friends by Wednesday or maybe even Tuesday. This is the “jeong” feeling Koreans refer to, I think (see post-50, section entitled “the effect of hew-shik”, and post-65).

In the morning, the six of us are students, studying this or that about what Cambridge says is right (some of which I am slightly skeptical of to be honest), and other general good things to know. For example, one lesson was on “a” phonetic alphabet (“a” because there are many).

It’s an exciting time.

As I previously mentioned, my Korean course in January was a success. I feel that my final project was especially successful. We had to come up with a five-minute “speech” to deliver to the class, and all in Korean of course. Some students used powerpoint slides. I did.

The speech and slides are below, in Korean (with an English translation I have done just now; it was not part of the assignment). Be not deceived by its simplicity! This speech took me many, many painstaking hours — About eight hours in a coffee shop, then several more revisions, and helpful suggestions from many along the way. Others in the class told me that they enjoyed my presentation a lot. Here it is:

안녕하세요!
제 이름 피터입니다. 미국에서왔어요.

무슨 운동 좋아해요? 저는 등산을 좋아하는데요. 저는 오늘 한국 등산여행에 대해 이야기 할 거예요.
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Hello! My name is Peter. I am from the USA.

What kind of outdoor activities do you like? I like hiking. Today I will tell you about a hiking trip I did in Korea.

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작년 구월 중산부터 십월 삼십일까지 등산 했어요. “백두대간”은 남한남쪽에 있는, 지리산부터 강원도설악산까지 이어진 길이에요. 저는 지리산에서 월악산까지 걸어 갔어요. 그런데, 오늘 저는 백두대간여행 이야기 중에 하나를 이야기 할 거예요.
__________________________________________ Last year, from mid-September to October 31st, I completed hiking trip. It was on the “Baekdu-Daegan Trail” in South Korea, which extends from the Jiri Mountains in the south to Gangwon Province’s Seorak Mountain in the north. I walked from the Jiri Mountains to the Worak Mountains [halfway across trail]. Anyway, I will tell you today about one part of this trip.

제가 간 산중, 이름이 “백운산” 이라는 산이 있어요. 백운산은 영어로 “White Cloud Mountain” 이에요. 이산은 아름다웠어요! 이 산은 경상남도 함양군에 있어요.

오, 나는 이 사진들 찍었어요. [학생들: 우와!]
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One of the mountains along this trail is called “Baek-Un-San”. In English, it means “White Cloud Mountain”. This mountain was beautiful! It is in Gyeongsang Province, Hamyang County.

[While changing slides: “I took all these pictures”. Class: “Oh, wow!”]

산옆에 “중기마을” 있어요. 중기마을은 조요하고 평화로워요.

백운산에 어떻게 올라갔을까요? 중기마을에서 “중재”로 갔어요. 그 등산길은 힘들어서 피곤했어요!
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Below the mountain is “Jungi Village”. It is quiet and peaceful.

How did I get to the top of Baekunsan? From Jungi Village, I walked to Jung-Jae Pass. The mountain trail became difficult, which tired me out a lot.

중기마을은 해발 오백미터쯤에 있지만, 백운산정상은 천삼백미터쯤! 그러니까, 힘들어요. 네 시간 동안 등산 했어요. 그래서, 땀이 많이 났어요. 마침내, 정상에 도착해서 행복했어요!
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Jungi Village’s altitude is about 500 meters above sea level, but the summit of Baekunsan Mountain is about 1,300 meters above sea level! As a result, it an arduous hike. It took four hours of hiking. There was a lot of sweat. Finally, when I arrived at the top I became very happy!

정상에서 모든 것을 볼 수 있었어요. 아름다웠어요. 백운산 보고, 저는 기분이 너무 좋았어요. 백운산정상은 다른 세계 같았어요.
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From the summit, it was possible to see all things below. It was so beautiful. It really made me feel great. Being on Baekunsan’s summit seemed like a different world.

천 개의 구름을 볼 수 있었어요.

백운산 정상에……
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It was possible to see thousands of clouds. [I pointed out the clouds].

Also on the summit was……

……..비석이 있었어요.

비석 앞에서, 야영해도 됐어요.
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……..was the Baekunsan Stele. [I point to the stone].

In the area around this stone marker, camping is allowed.

거기에서, 야영했어요. 다음날 아침 여섯시에 일어났어요. 아침에, 정말 너무 추워서, 기분이 안 좋았어요.

하지만! 아침에 천 개 구름을 볼 수 있어서, ….
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I camped there. The next morning I woke up at 6 AM. That morning it was truly cold, which made me not feel too good.

But! That morning the thousands of clouds were visible….

…내 기분이 좋았어요. 저는 “하늘에” 있었어요. 아름다운 해돋이를 볼 수 있었어요. 아침식사 했지만 아직도 추웠어요.

저는 거기에 혼자 있었어요. 오전 여덟시쯤에, 한 아저씨가 왔어요. 우리는 십분쯤 이야기했어요. 한국말으로 하고 영어로 말했어요. 그 후에, 아저씨는 갔어요. 이십분 후에, 저도 출발했어요. 덕유산으로 걸어서 갔어요.

작년 구월 하고 십월에 산을 많이 봤지만, “백운산”은 특별했어요.
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…which made me feel good anyway. I was “in the sky”. A beautiful sunrise was soon visible. I ate breakfast but it was still very cold up there.

I was alone. At about 8 AM, a middle-aged man arrived. We chatted for about ten minutes. We used Korean and English. Soon the man left [to continue hiking]. Twenty minutes later, I also departed. I began my hike again, towards Deogyusan National Park.

Last year in September and October I saw a lot of mountains, but “Baekunsan” was particularly special.

백운산 또 보고 싶어요!

여러분, 등산이나 자연을 좋아하면, 백운산에 가세요~!!

[질문 있었어요. “Tent-cover 어디엤어요?”]
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I want to see that mountain again!

If you like mountain hiking or nature, I recommend all of you go to Baekunsan!

[Q and A]
    S.B.: “You said it was so cold! Where’s your tent cover?”
    Me (flipping back to the proper slide): “It is on the stone, there. See?” (pointing)
    S.B.: “Aha”.
    Others: “Ahh.”

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백운산 비디오 보고 싶어요? [안됐어요].

Do you want to see my Baekunsan video? [Not able; We had run out of time and were nearly late for the “all-level completion pizza party” in the other building, so were not able].

[End of Speech]

That “video” link, on the last slide, led to a video of my descent from Baekunsan (“White Cloud Mountain”). Here it is:

This is one of a series of videos from my “trek” that I posted to Youtube.

I’ve posted other videos from that journey, here:

• Post-162 (“On a Foggy Mountain Top”), and
• Post-158 (“Peering Over the Ledge”), and
• Post-157 (“Where Three Provinces Meet”).

Let me here echo what many Korean students lamely-but-cutely write at the ends of essays: “Thank you for reading.”

 
My Full Speech in Korean:

백운산 여행
[Slide One] 안녕하세요~! 제 이름 피터입니다. 미국에서왔어요.

무슨 운동 좋아해요? 저는 등산을 좋아하는데요. 저는 오늘 한국 등산여행에 대해 이야기 할 거예요.

[Slide Two]  작년 구월 중산부터 십월 삼십일까지 등산 했어요. “백두대간”은 남한남쪽에 있는, 지리산부터 강원도설악산까지 이어진 길이에요. 저는 지리산에서 월악산까지 걸어 갔어요. 그런데, 오늘 저는 백두대간여행 이야기 중에 하나를 이야기 할 거예요.

[Slide Three] 제가 간 산중, 이름이 “백운산” 이라는 산이 있어요. 백운산은 영어로 “White Cloud Mountain” 이에요. 이산은 아름다웠어요! 이 산은 경상남도 함양군에 있어요. [Slide Four] “나는 이 사진들 찍었어요.”

산옆에 “중기마을” 있어요. 중기마을은 조요하고 평화로워요.

백운산에 어떻게 올라갔을까요? 중기마을에서 “중재”로 갔어요. 그 등산길은 힘들어서 피곤했어요! [Slide Five] 중기마을은 해발 오백미터쯤에 있지만, 백운산정상은 천삼백미터쯤! 그러니까, 힘들어요. 네 시간 동안 등산 했어요. 그래서, 땀이 많이 났어요. 마침내, 정상에 도착해서 행복했어요! [Slide Six, three clicks to reveal yellow circle and name]

정상에서 모든 것을 볼 수 있었어요. 아름다웠어요. 백운산 보고, 저는 기분이 너무 좋았어요. 백운산정상은 다른 세계 같았어요.

[Slide Seven] 천 개의 구름을 볼 수 있었어요. 백운산 정상에 [Slide Eight] 비석이 있었어요. 비석 앞에서, 야영해도 됐어요. [Slide Nine]. 거기에서, 야영했어요. 다음날 아침 여섯시에 일어났어요. 아침에, 정말 너무 추워서, 기분이 안 좋았어요.

하지만! 아침에 천 개 구름을 볼 수 있어서, [Slide Ten] 내 기분이 좋았어요. 저는 “하늘에” 있었어요. 아름다운 해돋이를 볼 수 있었어요. 아침식사 했지만 아직도 추웠어요.

저는 거기에 혼자 있었어요. 오전 여덟시쯤에, 한 아저씨가 왔어요. 우리는 십분쯤 이야기했어요. 한국말으로 하고 영어로 말했어요. 그 후에, 아저씨는 갔어요. 이십분 후에, 저도 출발했어요. 덕유산으로 걸어서 갔어요.

작년 구월 하고 십월에 산을 많이 봤지만, “백운산”은 특별했어요. [Slide Eleven] 백운산 또 보고 싶어요!

여러분, 등산이나 자연을 좋아하면, 백운산에 가세요!

[질문 about tent-cover; answer that it was on the stone].

백운산 비디오 보고 싶어요? [안됐어요. 시간이 없었어요.]

The designation “one of the best decisions I’ve made in years”  is one I have happily applied, these last few weeks, to my decision to complete an intensive Korean course in Seoul. It’s over now. It took place in January 2014.

I write this a week after I returned to the USA on “Chinese New Year’s Day”, Friday Jan. 31st 2014. (What I’m doing now — I will explain in a future post — is even more intensive and is another good decision, and for similar reasons.)

Why was the intensive Korean course a good decision?

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The simplest answer is that the class left my satisfied and optimistic at the end of each day, despite its difficulty. Every day of the Korean course was fun; the teachers were great and professional; I feel the course improved my Korean (it was my first-ever formal class; all my previous knowledge was just picked up “somehow” from living there); it gave me the opportunity to be a student again and in the unique context of a half-EastAsian/half-White class (six Whites [three USA, three Europe] and six East-Asians) which was interesting to observe; it let me met many interesting/fun people from all over the world; it gave me a window into Korean university life. I’m really glad I did it.

It left me wishing it were not ending. Alas, it ended. The future is wide open.

Note: I labelled this post under several categories, including (naturally) “Korean language” and “Korea“, and also, less self-evidently, “Purpose of Life“. One could criticize my decision to go back and do this course as a  “waste of time”, or something. But….Well, to spare this entry from becoming bloated by hundreds more words, I’ll say that I disagree, and the reader of these words, if inclined, can make his own conclusions about my use of that category here!

Yesterday, a pollution sign in Seoul implied that breathing-in too much was not in your best interest:

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I’m staying in Seoul’s Guro District in January 2014. The above sign reported that my temporary place of residence had, on the afternoon of January 16th, a “PM-10” pollution level of 139 micrograms per cubic meter of air, which is very high. Later that evening, it exceeded 150 (the orange in the chart), and stayed over 150 for twenty-one hours.

I don’t know why this pollution spike occurred.

The above sign also asserts that 100 is the “safety limit”, though the USA and EU say that anything above 50 is harmful to human health.

I frequently look at these real-time pollution signs in Korea. It may be that 139 is the highest PM-10 level I’ve ever noticed, except of course for “yellow dust” season, the pollution spikes of which I wrote about way back in post-12 [“The Sky Betook an Awful Shade”].

To compare with home, the Washington DC region’s PM-10 air-pollution yearly average is 18 micrograms per cubic meter, according to the WHO. Seoul rarely sees levels that low, maybe only after vigorous rainstorms clear all the junk out of the air.

Japan defeated Russia in a war in 1904-1905. Educated Westerners, it seems to me, think of it along these lines: “Japan sucker-punched an increasingly-backwards Russian Empire. Japan fought solely to assert itself and challenge the European powers for the first time”.  In fact, I’ve learned that the war was primarily about the fate of Korea. By the early 1900s, either Russia or Japan was going to end up taking Korea. Japan got it.

The famous American adventure writer, Jack London, visited Korea during the war, I just learned. He was there immediately after the early fighting ended in spring 1904. Jack London is, of course, most famous for The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both also written in the early 1900s. He was 28 at the time of his sojourn through Korea. He died at age 40, the same year that my grandfather was born.

London produced an essay about his time in Northeast Asia. His observations and thoughts about Japan, Korea, China, and Manchuria are in an essay semi-ironically entitled “Yellow Peril“. I came to read this essay recently:

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London had a very pessimistic view of the Korea of 1904. This was a low point in Korean history, and London spares no verbal expense in utterly lambasting the Koreans, in words I’m embarrassed to republish (and I’m not shy about criticizing Korea, myself). There is one interesting excerpt in the essay that I want to comment on, though:

This word, “upso”, was easily recognizable to me as “없어”. It’s a common word. London’s translation of it is good. What I find interesting about London’s use of this word is that this form of the word is “low speech” (banmal, 반말). Among strangers interacting in today’s Korea, this form of speech is used to children and animals, and can be used “aggressively” to someone you want to disrespect. Older people can use it to much younger people, but often don’t.

So, Jack London heard “upso” so often that he discussed the word itself. As I say, the word is banmal, or low-speech. It immediately made me think that these Koreans of 1904 were surprisingly rude to this poor foreign sojourner.

This use of “low-speech” would most likely have gone along with condescending/rude behavior, which may explain London’s wildly negative opinion of Korea.

In fact, though, as always, it’s hard to judge the past by the standards of the present. It is. In the old days, when it was called “Chosun”, I’ve read that low-speech was used much more “rigorously”. Any yangban (a member of the old Korean aristocracy, 10% of the population) had to to address members of the lowest Korean social classes using this “low-speech” I’m talking about, regardless of relative age or social achievement. This led to the ridiculous and sad situation of even yangban *children* using low-speech to address grown men, even elderly men, of the lowest classes. (Members of the lowest classes had to address yangban in the most-polite form of speech.)

What kind of Koreans did Jack London meet? He was inquiring about supplies during his horseback trek through Korea to report on the war. Were they all village elders? If so, they still would’ve felt compelled by the then-fading Chosun social system to address a younger man (and a foreigner, at that) using low-speech. This is understandable.

On my halway-across-Korea hiking trip (September-October 2013), I ended up with a group of three Korean men in their 40s for two days. They were doing the same hike I was. None spoke English more than a few words. They used Korean most of the time, though my Korean skills were likewise not very good. In Korean, they addressed me in low-speech at times, being twenty years their junior, but usually stuck with a more polite form of speech.

I remember the last sentence I heard from them. It was a friendly but certainly-low-speech form of bidding farewell,“Jal Gah!”  [“잘 가!”]. I heard it after I’d said a polite goodbye [“안년히 가세요!”] as I was walking off onto a side trail and they were continuing on the main trail. I didn’t mind hearing low-speech from them; as I say, it’s more natural in a situation like ours of hugely divergent ages. They were all very kind. They were well-prepared with food and drinks (even alcohol) and shared with me generously.  There was never any “upso” with them.

One of the Norwegian students in my Korean language class introduced me to “GeoGuessr“. (I have to say “one of” because there are, incredibly, two Norwegians in it, of twelve total students.)

Geoguessr is a game. It drops you at a random spot on the planet Earth along a roadway (using Google Street View). You have a certain amount of time to make your best guess about where you are, based on whatever clues you can gather around you in “Street View” mode. You can move along the roads a little, looking at signs, scenery, buildings, plant types, whatever. The closer your guess is  to the actual location you were “dropped”, the more points you get.

Here is the result of my first attempt:

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For “D”, I saw a building labelled “Richmond Butchery” on the road. It was a dusty road, looking something like Nevada, but I plopped my guess-marker down near Richmond, Virginia. That was about as wrong as one can get without exiting the Earth atmosphere, as you can see above.

The subject of this game came up in an interesting way. I was talking to the Norwegian, J., at some length, after the class one day. The subject of Iowa came up. It’s where my father is from, and is also where I spent a fair amount of time in my childhood: Over a year of my life was there, I suppose, if all the visits are added together. I was telling him that a lot of Norwegians settled around there (including some of my father’s ancestors), which he seemed to already know. (He had explained, earlier, that one of my grandmother’s special dishes, “lefse”, is still eaten a lot in Norway, sold in convenience stores, as “not quite a snack, not quite a meal”, which is about how it was eaten in my grandma’s household as well.) Anyway, I said something like “you can’t imagine how Iowa is; it’s so flat and almost completely farmland”. He said something like “Actually, I think I can imagine it — I think I’ve been through Iowa…..on the computer.” Then he explained this Geoguessr game.

I am currently in the middle of my intensive Korean course, and I’m very pleased with it.

At the risk of embarrassment at my relatively low skill, I will publish a recent assignment I did. “Imagine you are on a trip, and write a postcard to your friend”.  Here is the text of my postcard (after a handful of teacher’s corrections):

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내 친구에게!
나는 방학이라서 여행을 왔어요.
하와이에 왔어요. 여기는 더워요…!
요즘 한국이 시끄러워서 슬퍼요.
여기 안 시끄러워서 재미있어요!
내일 날씨가 좋으면, 모든 사람
행복 할 거예요. 주말에 날씨가
좋으면, 수영 할 거예요. 그럼 너도
와야 돼요! 재미있을 거예요.  / 피터

Translation:

To my friend!–
It’s now winter vacation, so I went on a trip.
I came to Hawaii on my trip. It’s hot here…!
These days, Korea is so noisy that it makes me sad.
Here it’s not noisy, so it’s really enjoyable!
If tomorrow’s weather is good, everybody
will be happy. If the weather is good this
weekend, I’ll go swimming. Anyway, you
ought to come here too! It will be fun. / From x

The teacher chuckled as he read the text of my slightly-ridiculous little postcard.

[The sentence structures I used were what we’d been covering in class; especially causes for things (A so B) and conditions (if).]

Now here is an amazing story. The amazing part is down below. The first part, above the divider, isn’t so amazing.

I was sick for about ten days, straddling New Year’s Day 2014. I mentioned this in post-176. The sickness was  unpleasant at best. At worst, thoughts of Death began to creep into my disoriented, pain-addled mind.

It will pass. It didn’t. It got worse. Swallowing became an intense, body-jolting experience. Breathing got more difficult, and that’s scary. An endless headache, concentrated in one spot (also scary); sleeping all day, either shivering under the blankets, or waking up with everything drenched in sweat. On January 2nd, I finally went to the doctor, in Seoul’s Guro district, where I am staying during my month of intensive Korean studying. I was diagnosed with tonsillitis. I got a bag full of pills to take. The pills helped. My friend J.A. gave me called “propolis” and it also helped.

Now here is the amazing part:

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As a total foreigner in South Korea at this point, with no insurance at all, on a tourist visa, paying in cash…you’d think that I wasted a lot of money on this doctor visit. No! Visiting the doctor, without insurance, was refreshingly cheap. Let me tell you exactly what I spent:

A measly 10,000 KRW in cash, or around $9.00 USD, got me an examination by the doctor, a shot of some kind of medicine (administered, embarrassingly, in the rear end by the nurse, a practice out-of-fashion for decades in the USA for adults, I think), and a prescription from the doctor for pills to take for the next few days to relieve my symptoms and kill the bacteria (or whatever it was).

After leaving the doctor’s office, down I went down to the first-floor pharmacy to buy the pills I’d been prescribed. There were a total of 75 pills, five pills with each meal for five days. (This was problematic at first as I wasn’t eating meals much due to pain in swallowing.) The price for those pills, in total, came to 19,340 KRW (around $17.50), or 23 U.S. cents per pill.

More details about my doctor’s visit:

1. I had only a few short minutes’ waiting time.
2. There was no need for an appointment. It was a walk-in-walk-out thing.
3. From walking in to the doctor’s office to walking out of the pharmacy was not more than thirty minutes.
4. The medicine was effective, and I was 80%-recovered by January 5th and 100% recovered by January 7th.
5. I paid $26.50 for the whole deal (doc+pills). Again, this was with no insurance at all and on a tourist visa.
6. [Note: I did actually pay into the Korean healthcare system for two of my three years of legal employment in South Korea (my first job did not pay into it), usually about $90 a month, but I never used it.]

“They can put a man on the moon, but….”

Sadly, my native land, the USA, with its tiring and endless “health care problems”, looks a little like a third-rate clown show in comparison to the above. I’m sorry to say it. I mean, even with “insurance” from a U.S. insurance company, I’m sure my $26.50 wouldn’t even cover the “deductible” just to see the doctor in the USA, to say nothing of buying the medicine. For someone without insurance, the same visit in the USA might reach ten times the price I paid, or $200-$300, rather than $26.50.

I have no idea why we Americans, most of whom still think that the USA is the richest and most-powerful political-entity in the history of the world, can have such a nightmarishly-expensive, confusing, oppressive, intimidating, headache-inducing health care system. Why? As Homer Simpson once said, “Did we lose a war?” (See post-60).

Back around Christmas 2013, I had a meal with my new Korean friend, H.

We ate Dong-Ji Porridge [동지죽]. Dongi-Ji is the Korean word for “Winter Solstice”. Here it was:

The taste of the porridge was as thick as it looks. Kimchi and fresh beef are side dishes, with some kind of sweet juice….

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That sign says “12 – 22”, referring to December 22nd, the day of the solstice. I write in January, a time when this dish is no longer served. (I took a break from writing here due to a lengthy sickness, now gone, and then starting Korean class, which has gone very well so far).

I wrote more about the solstice in post-168 (“Yuletide 2013”). I brought up the solstice issue in a conversation which included H., and he invited me to eat this. We met on Christmas Eve for it. (That is the sleepiest of evenings, generally, in the USA and Europe, but a very active one in Korea; Christmas is more of a “fun” day for Koreans.) The small restaurant, “Bon Juk” near Bucheon University, was packed; most of the people were eating this dish.

I was pleased to meet H., who is recently arrived back from some years in France. He sings the praises of France and Europe. I sympathize. Speaking of France, I speculated that the “Bon” in the restaurant’s name, “Bon Juk”, is an attempt to make a cross-lingual pun (Juk means “porridge” in Korean). The name sounds like “Bonjour”. H asked about this, but the hapless young woman behind the counter had no idea the origin of the name of the restaurant paying her salary.

I found this to be funny, from Dave Barry:

It’s part of a longer year-end review:

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Previous Post: Part VIII, Asian New York

This will be the last post about NYC. Whew!

Here is a question for you. Does the below look like an “upper middle class neighborhood” to you?

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As the yellow sign says, this is “Rego Park”. I mentioned visiting it in Part-VIII, “Asian New York”. Some Wiki writer calls it “upper middle class”. It seemed on the run-down side, to me. I was only in the subway station vicinity, though.

According to City-Data.com, it may be an expensive place (I’m not sure if “NY” here means city or state; Manhattan apartments cost $3,400/month today, on average):

Here is the location of Rego Park, anchored on the subway entrance (the red marker). You can zoom in or out:

The subway ride from Manhattan took around 45 minutes, as I remember.

I was amazed to learn that Rego Park was a Chinese area around the time of the Spanish-American War. I wrote:

Here’s the rest of the story, which I find both fascinating and emblematic of NYC generally:

• 1600s: The area is settled by Dutch and Germans, who farmed there for over two centuries.
• 1870s: Chinese immigrants begin buying up the farmland in the area. The Chinese start farming, “[selling] their goods exclusively to [Manhattan’s] Chinatown“. (Note: I’ve come to see that this kind of action is stereotypical of the Overseas Chinese, especially in Southeast-Asia [e.g. Malaysia]. They often seem to attract the reputation of “scheming to take over” via ethnic-networking, etc. And who likes that?).
• 1882: “Chinese Exclusion Act” passed by U.S. Congress, banning further Chinese immigration (lifted in WWII).
• 1880s-1910s: Rego Park farmland is solidly occupied by Chinese farmers.
• 1923: The “Real  Good Construction Company” starts residential development of Rego Park (giving it its name).
• 1920s: Germans, Italians, Irish, and Jews begin to buy the newly-developed houses/apartments of Rego Park.
• 1930s-1940s: Neighborhood attracts more and more Jews; Non-Jews begin to leave.
• 1939: Rego Park Jewish Center opens. (It still stands today, imposing, near the subway station.)
• From 1940s: Rego Park is “defined by its large population of Jewish immigrants.”
• 1970s-1980s: Rego Park becomes “a haven for Jews emigrating from Central Asia in the 1970s, when thousands of Bukharian Jews fled Uzbekistan and Tajikistan”. The neighborhood thus stayed Jewish, but shifted to one with a predominantly Soviet-Jewish character, which it maintains today.
• 2010: Rego Park is predominantly Jewish, heavily ex-Soviet-Jewish. Other groups: 15-20% East-Asian (mostly Chinese); 16% Hispanic; 7% South-Asian; 2% Black-American (+1% Black-Hispanic).

Sources:

• U.S. Census 2010;
• “Rego Park: A ‘real good’ neighborhood” by Michael Lanza  in the Queens Chronicle [Nov 12, 2009] [Link]
• City of New York Parks and Recreation history [Link]
• RegoParkNY.com history synopsis [Link]
• “Rego Park, Queens” article on Wikipedia [Link]

Today, in this 45,000-person community of Rego Park,

• There are several Jewish synagogues.
• There are zero Episcopal churches.
• There are zero Methodist churches.
• There are zero Presbyterian churches.
• There are zero Baptist churches. (All this is according to Google Maps.)

I am surprised to find one Lutheran church in Rego Park. Unlikely enough, it’s of the conservative “Missouri Synod”.

It turns out this church is a holdover, an anachronism we might say, from the time when Protestants actually lived in Rego Park in any numbers. The congregation was organized in 1926 under a Pastor Kuechle (and If you fit this date into the above timeline, it makes sense). Here is a history of that church.

By the way, one page in that history of Rego Park’s Lutheran church lists the members active in 1936. Several people surnamed Goetz are listed.

I’m reminded that the famous “Subway Vigilante” of NYC in the ’80s was also a Lutheran named Goetz (Bernie Goetz). Amazingly, I see that Bernie Goetz was born and raised only two miles away from Rego Park! He was born and raised in Kew Gardens, Queens in 1947.

The Rego Park Goetzes in ’36 very plausibly could’ve been relatives of his.

I only took one other picture in Rego Park:

They are selling kosher falafels. Surprisingly to me, Wiki implies that falafels may have been introduced to the USA by Jews. (Incidentally, I’m not sure, really, what either of those terms mean. As far as I know, falafel is a Middle-Eastern mystery paste, and kosher refers to food “approved by a rabbi” [what the approval process involves is beyond me].)

To return to the theme of Part-II (“Feeling Provincial”) and Part-VI (“The Ghost of Sherman McCoy”): In my time in Rego Park, I experienced a dearth of sights, sounds, smells, and people, with which I could identify in the slightest. Every storefront, just about, proclaimed itself “Kosher!”  (except the Chinese restaurant, which I am pretty sure served pork).  The streetside was peppered with Cyrillic, too.

In my seven months in Germany (as a student, in 2007), I felt a lot more at-home than I felt (could feel) in a place like Rego Park, or even (“White”-)Manhattan. It’s amazing how that can work. I arrived speaking quite poor German, too.

It is time to put the subject of New York City to rest. To close it all up, below is a picture of me with my friend T.A. from Kazakhstan. T.A.’s financial dealing with an Uzbek resident of Rego Park is what brought us there that evening. She was a strictly off-stage villain in this drama. I didn’t see her; I only heard what T.A. relayed. She herself may or may not have been Jewish, but when the phone conversation between her and T.A. turned negative (due to her own mercurial arrogance), she threatened T.A. by informing him, in Russian, that her husband is “powerful in the Jewish community” (her husband is a Russian-Jewish emigree from the ’70s or ’80s, I think T.A. said, i.e. a typical Rego-Parker). More ethnic aggressiveness! Poor T.A., the Kazakh-Gentile. I think he was genuinely a bit intimidated by this implied-threat. Setback notwithstanding, he recovered his optimism soon when we returned to Manhattan.

I thank T.A. for his hospitality! He took the day off to show me around, and I appreciate it a lot. What a good guy.

Next Post: None

Previous Post: Part VII, Modern Art

Two East-Asians, well dressed, passed us by. A man and a woman. They spoke a foreign language. Half a moment swirling around in my brain, and it registered. It’s Korean. Korean, a language I’d heard near-daily for three years (with mostly no understanding).

It was a little disorienting, somehow, but not as much as encountering this a moment later:

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The above is a sign for a nightclub which advertises (in Korean only) that it offers soju (a terrible drink similar to vodka); beer; and yangju (양주), which I long thought was a super-special Korean alcohol due to its high price whenever I saw it on a menu, but it turns out it just means “Western liquor”.

We can tell with certainty that it’s a genuine-Korean affair, you know, because even with only five English words on their sign, they still manage a mistake (no space between ‘7’ and ‘Days’). Haha. Sorry, Korean readers, if any. ^_^

Here is another marker of Korean presence in NYC that I immediately recognized:

“Caffe Bene” is everywhere in South Korea. It’s one of the more-successful of the many, many coffeshop chain stores.

This Manhattan Caffe Bene I saw may be something brand new. From the Korea Tourism organization:

It’s news to me that there is a “Koreatown” in Manhattan. (At left is a photo of it that I found. We didn’t visit it.)

The Census reports that there are 200,000+ Koreans in the NYC Metro Area. I already knew that there were two million Koreans in the USA — Allegedly, up to one million in Southern California and one million in the rest of the USA. I have rarely encountered many, leading me to conclude they are invisible.

Maybe the USA’s two million Koreans are, mostly, invisible, because they cluster around each other. You won’t see any most of the time, but when you see one, you’ll see many. My impression. Koreans’ group-orientation is among the strongest I’ve encountered…

My friend B.W. stayed at a Korean guesthouse in Manhattan for his two weeks there in 2010. I had gently discouraged him from that (being in the cocoon of Koreanness abroad). See Part-III for comments on B.W.’s impressions of NYC.

Koreans are not the only East-Asians in New York, of course. There are many more Chinese.

My friend T.A. had to go to the “Rego Park” neighborhood of Queens on an urgent errand. I went along. We ate at a typical American “Chinese-takeout”-style restaurant there.

It all fit the bill: the greasy food, the utter minimization of all costs (crummy styrofoam plates and plastic forks), the poor grammar and mildly-sour attitude of the Chinese woman taking the order, and the fact that all the cooks seemed likely to be family members. Here was our meal:

It was a filling meal, cheaply had, the raison d’etre of these kinds of places. Here was the restaurant:

Surprisingly, I read that this “Rego Park” was dominated by the Chinese in the late 1800s. At that time, it was farmland. All the farms were bought-up by the Chinese and they sold “exclusively” [naturally…] to Manhattan’s Chinatown. 

This should give a clue as to the timeframe of “Rego Park” Sinicization. Today, the neighborhood has a predominantly Soviet-Jewish character, with a 20% East-Asian minority, mostly Chinese.

The history of this neighborhood is so interesting to me that I did some research on it, which I’ll present in Part IX, and finally put the topic of NYC to rest.

Next Post: Part IX, Rego Park and Its History

Previous Post: Part VI, The Ghost of Sherman McCoy

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This bizarre sculpture is called “Moonbird” by a Spaniard, Joan Miro.

The sculpture looks like a cow to me, not a moonbird, but I must confess that I’ve yet to see an actual moonbird. Perhaps this is a faithful representation of moonbirds, whatever they are. On second thought, the words “faithful representation” are almost-certainly banned from the lexicon of Modern Art.

The Museum of Modern Art features in Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut, which I’ve recently read. The main character, artist Rabo Karebekian, rebels against the realistic painting style of his mentor, goes on to create thousands of Modern Art paintings, but because of a certain chemical in the paint he uses, each and every one of them spontaneously disintegrates and is lost forever. It’s a symbol of the shallowness of Modern Art, as I read it, but Vonnegut also criticizes the super-realist style of the mentor, so who knows what he’s saying.

Next Post: Part VIII, Asian New York

Previous Post: Part V, “Under the Christmas Tree Like It’s 1999”

A Manhattan street scene:

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Notice that most people are stylishly dressed (except the dark man in blue). Typical Manhattan, I guess.

Another stylish thing to do is to buy Apple products, of course. In front of the enormous underground Apple Store, we saw yet another group of people recording some video footage. Look in the center rear of this photo:

A closer angle:

For a TV show? For a movie? A commercial?

Even Manhattan’s unexpectedly-elegant cathedrals, as below, seem lifted from a movie (a European movie, even):

Sherman McCoy (of Park Avenue), in the novel Bonfire of the Vanities, described attending one of these Protestant churches. He sent his daughter to its daycare program. I read it in 2013 (bought in a used bookstore in Itaewon, Seoul).

I couldn’t help but think of that novel frequently, strolling around “White Manhattan” (as author Tom Wolfe calls it).

Bonfire of the Vanities is a tragedy. It comes to pass that everybody calls for Sherman McCoy’s blood. (It may as well have been, “Crucify him!!”) A multi-ethnic feeding frenzy. The various antagonists’ “vanity” lead each to pile-on poor ol’ Sherman, for all different reasons. All are united, but only to the extent that Get The Wasp!  can unify. Sherman’s entire world falls apart. Nearly everyone deserts him. He ends up in the prison system for a crime he didn’t commit.

Bonfire of the Vanities is a clear allegory, as I read it, for the dispossession of the once-dominant WASPs of New York City (Wolfe usually renders the word as ‘Wasp’). Sherman McCoy represents WASP-New-York, or WASP-America. Wolfe makes clear, in the novel, that their ‘dispossession’ is partly their own fault, as Sherman is a flawed man, too.

Walking around Manhattan in the 2010s, one sees of ethnic assertiveness all around. From all groups, it really seems, except any White-Protestants. Just like in Sherman McCoy’s universe, they are a group disallowed from collective identity, only defined in negative terms!

One could be forgiven for thinking there are no “WASPs” left.

Are there any WASPs left in NYC?

The 2010 Census has it that Manhattan is 48% White Non-Hispanic, a rate that been steady for decades. Manhattan is probably only 5-10% White-Protestant [Whites of at-least-nominal Protestant affiliation/background). (Wiki says Manhattan is 20% Jewish alone; there must be at least an equal number of White-Catholics there, and 48-20-20=8).

This low ‘WASP’-share must rise substantially in certain neighborhoods, including ol’ Sherman’s Park Avenue. Likewise, it must plummet in the “outer boroughs” of today (except Staten Island, where my mother went to college many years ago). I see that New York City as a whole, all boroughs, is down to 33% White today, of which a large share are Jewish, and so on. NYC as a whole is probably <5% WASP, then.

My friend T.A. (from Kazakhstan) described to meriding subway trains in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx and his surprise at the trains being bereft of a single stereotypical ‘White-American’ face.

Bonfire of the Vanities is a brilliant novel. I’d call it the Great American Novel. It seems to me that it catches the quintessence of what today’s USA, as I have know it, is all about. It was written around the time of my birth.

Next Post: Part VII, Modern Art

Previous Post: Part IV, “Paying Up”

Another post about cruising around Manhattan in Dec. 2013:

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I was inside Radio City Music Hall once, but not in 2013. It was back in ’99. That was the first time I went to New York City. It was on a school trip. The school rented a “charter bus” and we left at 4:00 AM, arriving back after midnight. I remember walking up the inner-stairs of the Statue of Liberty in ’99, and being amused by the substantial amount of graffiti on every square inch of that staircase, written over many decades.

I have another ’99 memory: In the evening, we watched some kind of singing-and-dancing thing inside Radio City Music Hall. Our English teacher who was chaperoning us 8th-graders — a brash, humorous, selfconsciously-Irish, native-Chicagoan — decided that she was bored and wanted to see “the tree”, so conspicuously bailed out on the dancing down below. I was among the defecting grouplet. (Mrs. Brown later got a talking-to by somebody about that stunt). This was the same tree, I think:

Next to this Rockefeller Christmas Tree were white flags, regally swaying. Ice skating below:

Guess what a 90-minute session of ice skating there costs. — Per person, including skate rental, it’s $39! Geez, I say.

Next Post: Part VI, The Ghost of Sherman McCoy

Previous Post: Part III, “Up the Empire State Building”

Just like Greenland doesn’t have much “green”, Times Square doesn’t have much of a square, that I could tell. Here it is:

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This “Times Square” place may fit some people’s definition of “gaudy”.

If you are that kind of person, I recommend you avoid East-Asia, the neon-dominated public spaces of which can make Times Square look like the little town of Bethlehem…. (Just do an image-search for neon+Seoul or neon+Tokyo).

Now for a Times Square anecdote.

T.A. gets a phone call and I wander into a nearby drugstore to wait till he’s done. A rack of NYC tourist magnets catches my eye. I pick one out. Price: $2.99. I’ll get it. Behind the counter, a South-Asian woman. Down goes the magnet. Beep goes the scanner. I hand her three pictures of the Man Who Couldn’t Tell a Lie. Glowering back at me, she blurts out, “It’s $3.17; There’s tax!  Don’t you know that? There’s always tax…..” 

Tax? (I’d actually forgotten that U.S. retailers exclude tax in stated prices! I’d been away too long.)

Now, that woman seems rude in my telling of it, above. In fact, precipitating her mini-lecture on the subject of sales tax may have been the fact that, somewhere in there, I’d gently pointed out to her that the label said “$2.99”, not “$3.17”.

Maybe this seems “much ado about nothing”, but it’s actually much ado about 18 cents. Haha. No, there is something wrong with these kinds of “hidden charges”. They really add up sometimes. I’d vote for any candidate who campaigns to eliminate the following sort of velvet-glove thievery: “$39.95, plus service charge, plus sales tax, plus local tax, plus state tax, plus eat-in tax, plus 20% mandatory gratuity”.  Tell us from the get-go that the price is really $55, all included, so we know what we’re paying! In other countries, in my experience, tax (etc.) is always included in the stated price. Prices are easily-understood, with no surprises, and no need for lengthy calculations. Imagine that!

I was compelled to fish-around for, and surrender, another picture of the man who defeated Cornwallis back circa 1781. (I learned recently that after the surrender at Yorktown, General Cornwallis [of British imperial service] found his way to Malaysia. I learned this while in Penang, Malaysia. “Fort Cornwallis” still stands. We circled the entire thing trying to find a way in, before giving up.)

Chastened, as I’d seemed ignorant of the existence of sales tax, I emerged from the store, with T.A. alongside.

Moments later, would you believe it? A gang of cute hustlers materialized. Here are three (there were others):

In what way were these costume-wearers “hustlers”? I’ll tell you.

At left, you can see a picture of me with the “Minion” (which is from a movie called “Despicable Me”). The small woman in the costume approached us, and essentially forced us to take pictures with her. She was making some kind of muffled, Minion-style noises from inside. After taking the pictures, she produced a sign with the words “Tips, Please” and began making whiny sounds a bit similar to a hungry dog’s. Aha: So it was a bit of a shakedown by the cute cartoon characters.

I didn’t appreciate this, as it was implicitly a bait-and-switch; she forced us to accept a service, and then coyly demanded we pay for it. I implied that I didn’t have money. Suddenly I decided to give her some of the change from the magnet purchase, not more than 50 cents, including several pennies! (A good way to get rid of those pennies, anyway.) She may have been insulted by this “tip”, but that was partly the point. She made some more muffled Minion mumblings of despair and confusion, hoping to sucker us out of more. Not us. We made our escape at a brisk pace, before Minion could call in Minnie Mouse or somebody else to enforce the debt.

Next Post: Part V, Under the Christmas Tree Like It’s 1999

Yesterday being the solstice (see Post-168: Yuletide 2013) reminds me of something I ought to record here, a recollection of my time as a hagwon teacher in South Korea. I once taught about the equinox. Let me tell you about it.

[Beware: This runs long When drawing words from the honeyed recesses of a cherished memory, it’s not hard to do so.]

Here it goes:

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In March 2013, I happened to read that the vernal equinox would occur at 9:02 PM Korea Time on one particular day that month. I was to teach five or six classes that day, from 4:30 PM to 10 PM. I decided to introduce, explain, and discuss the concept of the ‘equinox’ (the moment the Sun hits the equator) to my classes.

I made a point, at the start of each class, to inform the students “the first moment of spring” was imminent, and of the time-of-day that the crossover would occur. I talked, drew pictures, and wrote on the board to explain. They may already have known this stuff in general, but they really wouldn’t have known it in English, I figured. I explained the Latin origin of the word ‘equinox’ (equal+night). I (half-)feigned personal excitement about this movement of the Sun, trying to create a “buzz” in the class about a single moment in time (i.e., the Sun crossing the equator) that would have hitherto had zero relevance to any of them.

I kept up the pace with softball questions to get students “in on it”. “How excited are you that spring will start in 48 minutes? Very excited, a little excited, or not excited at all?”  I went around the room, having each student choose one of those excitement-levels (easy answers). Occasionally I’d ask for elaboration. (Of course they should’ve been happy for spring. Twenty-thirteen’s winter was long. The cold lasted even through April for some reason [see post-34].)

As I say, I half-teasingly encouraged the students to celebrate this event. I even created a “countdown” on the board, which I periodically updated as the class went on.

I was with a class of mid-level ninth-graders when the “equinox moment” hit. As soon as the bell rang to mark the start of class at 8:30 PM, I wrote “32 Minutes Till Spring” in large letters on the board. This was the countdown. I went into my little explanation, soliciting information from them (some vaguely knew the mechanics of the Sun’s movements, but none could manage it in English). We went into the discussion about what this statement that “spring begins in 32 minutes” meant. I modified the number of minutes on the “countdown” as 9:02 PM approached.

I used a handheld stopwatch/clock in classes for various purposes, and when it was 9:01:30 or so, we stopped everything and did a proper countdown with that clock. It was a true New-Year’s-Eve-style countdown for the last ten seconds. I was, I’m pretty sure, the only one actually saying the numbers aloud (“10…9…8…”), but that was okay with me. A few students’ giggles accompanied. When the time hit 9:02, I said “Welcome to spring!” and wrote that same in enormous letters on the board. I asked the students some more questions, similar to the above. A couple of students were rolling their eyes and so on at all this, but the class was more engaged than it otherwise would’ve been, and that’s certain. They were listening.

Students who were following all this highbrow clowning-around were actively using their English skill to understand what the heck I was talking about, and taking in new words like “equator” (for which they learned my second-syllable-stressed pronunciation, eQUAtor, not the first-syllable-stressed version of the U.S. South), all while simultaneously being “entertained” (in a manner of speaking). This beats their usual M.O. of two parts spacing-out, one part rote-memorizing. (Come to think of it, as I recall, that particular class was probably a “three parts spacing out” group.)

I have not even the foggiest recollection, nine months later, of what the “book work” we did on that day was (and they did, most of them, do some; I wouldn’t waste a whole period on a diversion like this). I do remember this “equinox discussion” vividly, though, something which was of no relevance at all to any English test of theirs.

I don’t know how much any of the teenagers in that room remember of me, of what I tried to teach them in my time there, but I’m willing to bet that at least a few of them remember this “equinox discussion” and got something from it.

I’ve described above an example of one of the teaching habits that I developed and found effective. (A similar example: I remember on a Friday the 13th, pretending to be very scared about that date and telling the students so. I think I started with “Today is a bad day. Can anyone tell me why?” They tried to guess, but were all way off. I explained. I got around to telling them, further, that when Friday the 13th falls on a full Moon night, it is the unluckiest possible day in the world! I think most students believed my show, that is to say many believed that I believed this (at least at first) — and those who were unaware of these superstitions learned about them. None “agreed” that Friday the 13th was anything bad; just like White-American students wouldn’t care in the slightest if they were assigned Room #444, a very bad number for Koreans due to the influence of Chinese-superstition.) In some classes, a mischievous student or two teased me by claiming to believe that Friday the 13th was actually lucky.

So to repeat: I’d sometimes introduce unexpected or irrelevant topics, like talking about solstices and equinoxes, despite these things being nowhere in the textbook. I’d try to be at-once serious and lighthearted, explaining and discussing and so on for a few minutes, usually (but not always) before we started the day’s real work. Some days I’d try to connect this “warm up activity” with the real work if possible. The topics I chose are ones that amused me. Amusing oneself may be the best way to amuse students. Amusing students is the key to it all.

Winter has begun, if you follow that clumsy system for determining seasons by the solstices and equinoxes,

The solstice was at 12:11 PM EST on December 21st this year. The Sun was “moving south” at 12:10, and “moving north” at 12:12. It briefly “stood still” sometime in the minute of  12:11. That’s what a solstice is.

Ancient people figured-out the mechanics of this back in the Stone Age and attached special religious meaning to it, to that mystical moment of the reversal, the beginning of the “days getting longer” (as we say). The ancient Northern Europeans developed this into a major holiday. They held elaborate celebrations, which they called Yule or Yuletide, and their descendants continue to celebrate “the holidays” at the same time.

I wrote about the summer solstice in post-92.

2013’s is the first Yuletide during which this weblog has existed, but hopefully not the last!

Thanks for reading.