Category: Uncategorized

On Sunday, February 23rd, 2014, the smoke over Ukraine seemed to be clearing, after a wild week.

Some Ukrainians far off in Washington D.C. were apparently celebrating the revolution, in the typical manner people celebrate World Cup victories:

These (presumably-pro-revolution) Ukrainians were walking past one of those new “bikeshare” stands.

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I was in downtown Washington, D.C. to collaborate with my “teaching partner” for our lesson on Monday. I was to teach the first half, and he (M.H.) taught the second half of (what we made as) one long lesson. (We collaborated closely and created quite a great one. I was highly satisfied with the way it turned out.)

I walked around the streets of downtown Washington D.C. (eerily empty on the weekend) after leaving M.H.  It was then that I saw the “flag wearer” above. I got on the Metro and rode off to join my father and some of the church people for dinner (D.L. and the J.D. family).

It was a busy day, in which I entered and exited the District of Columbia twice, a rare thing for me. I seemed to be zipping around all the time the whole day. That very morning — about dawn — I’d gone to the train station to help my mother with her train ride to Connecticut. She will be there helping her sister for a few weeks, at least….

I feel more personally optimistic today than I did in the mid-2000s. The overall mood in the post-2008 world, though, is a lot more pessimistic.

It’s all about falling expectations, isn’t it. Ukraine is a case of this, I think. As of this writing (Saturday, Feb. 22nd, 2014), it seems that Ukraine has just undergone a nationalistic “revolution”, with echoes of 1989. Ukraine wasn’t doing so well in the 1980s, but, incredibly, in 2014 it has a substantially lower GDP-per-capita than it did in 1989! (See post-194).

I saw a poll showing that an incredible five-out-of-six White-Americans say that they are dissatisfied “with the way things are going” in the USA. Here is the breakdown by the various listed demographic groupings:

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Demographic Groups that Think the USA is Going in the WRONG Direction:
          Overall: 32-to-10 [say that the USA is going in the wrong direction]
          Men: 40-to-10
          Women: 27-to-10

          Whites: 48-to-10
          Hispanics: 19-to-10

          Republicans: 133-to-10
          Independents: 46-to-10
          Democrats: 12-to-10

Demographic Groups that Think the USA is Going in the RIGHT Direction:
          Blacks: 11-to-10 [say that the USA is going in the right direction]

Here is the relevant excerpt from the poll:

Gallup also asks this question in polls. It has “mood of the country” polling data for 1979-2014 online. Gallup corroborates the Quinnipiac poll, as it also finds the “mood of the country” today to be about 32-to-10 pessimistic.

This reminds me of a nice song, a lively song of nostalgic-lament, from the mid-2000s, by Guy Forsyth (b.1968):

I first heard this song in 2006. It really “spoke” to me at that time. It still does.

On the line “we used to dream about heroes”: At one point in early 2012, when I was working in Bucheon, Korea, I found and played the Davey Crockett song. An American coworker/friend, C.H. from California (now in China), commented to the effect that the song comes from “a totally different nation” than the USA that exists today.

It’s a “road-goes-on-forever-in-my-mind” kind of song:

These numbers are amazing to me:

          Ukraine, 1989 vs. 2013
            When 1989’s figures are 100

            Ukraine’s Population
             1989: 100
             2013: 88

            Ukraine’s GDP [adjusted for inflation]
            1989: 100
            2013: 67

             Ukraine’s Per-capita GDP [adjusted for inflation]
             1989: 100
             2013: 76
 
Ukrainians under age 35 have no memory of (sustained) good times, and even those in their 40s today have no experience of sustained good times during which they were in the labor market. Falling expectations lead to this:

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Population: Ukraine had 51.5 million people in its 1989 census; today, it has 45.5 million. This is all because of low birth rates. The World Bank predicts it will further decline to 36 million by 2050.

GDP: According to this graph (and this one from the World Bank), Ukraine’s real-GDP today is only 67% of its 1989 level. If it had remained exactly the same on a per-capita basis, we would expect Ukraine’s real GDP (“real” meaning adjusted for inflation) to also be 88%of the 1989 level, but it’s a lot lower.

If the average Ukrainian in 1989 made 100 units of money, today (adjusted for inflation) he makes only 76. (=.669/.88).

Everyone knows about the major contraction in the ex-Communist-bloc in the 1990s: I see from the historical data that Ukraine’s economy by 1999 had sunk to a pathetic 39% of its 1989 level. Then there was a period of growth (2000-2007), but the 2008-to-Present worldwide economic problems have caused zero GDP growth since 2007 for that country. In terms of Ukraine’s GDP, 2014’s is about equal to 2006’s. (This is true of a lot of countries.)

We got bad news on Thursday.

I walked out of the elevator and into the institute at 8:50 AM, to find the main room deserted. Where is everybody? I put my bag down. Something felt “off”. Down the hallway appeared A.F. (an effervescent veteran of musical theater, and one of the six CELTA candidates in our group). She said something that truly stunned me:

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“[S.R.]’s brother was killed!”

“What!?” I said. 

A.F., for the first time ever, looked sad to me as she spoke those words. She beckoned for me to follow. I followed. Down the hallway, I soon saw S.R. The others were huddled around. (I was the last to arrive this day).

S.R. is a kind, talkative, motherly type, in her late 30s, from Indiana. She’d b(r)ought me coffee the day before. I’d asked for “just coffee”, but she’d insisted on “caramel chocolate latte” (which I’d never had). She went out, paid for it, brought it back up, handed it to me, smiling. That is the kind of person she is. “Christian-Charity” ought to be her middle name.

For about twenty minutes, we stood around, listening, and trying to console S.R., as she talked about her murdered brother (age 21, the youngest of S.R.’s eight siblings). At that time, he’d been dead for only seven or so hours. As she was leaving, she informed us that we could “look it up on google” using the keywords of his name and the town. It seems surreal that news of a death, including all the full names, would already be online so soon.

Thus, S.R. had to abruptly leave our month-long intensive course. By our lunch break, she was on an airplane. She will deal with the funeral and all. She won’t finish the course with us. I hope they let her finish at some later time. She has done so much work for it so far… She was actually due to teach that day. She and I, in fact, shared a lesson. I would cover the grammar part, and she would come on after and do the “productive task” (speaking/writing).

In the moments after A.F. gave the news, my mind jumped to Ukraine. As it happens, S.R. has spent a few years in Ukraine. She had to leave in late November 2013 to escape the political crisis. She has been teaching, as part of a church mission organization, in the eastern (pro-Russian) part of Ukraine, but she told me that the anti-government side is totally in the right, in her view. She loves Ukraine.  I can only wonder if I will ever see her again.

An anti-government barricade, in Kiev, in one the past few wild days in that city:

This is a still from the 2:05 mark in this video (graphic content), from the Russia Today world-news service. If you look closely at the video footage, you see a red-and-black flag, flying high and clear, at the center. A closer shot (top left):

What is this red-and-black flag? I wondered. I searched. I found it:

It belonged to the The Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UIA]. The UIA was a radically-anti-Communist, nationalistic paramilitary group in the 1940s, whose goal was the elimination of Communism and the overthrow of Soviet rule. The UIA was the “military wing” of a Ukrainian nationalist political party. They were actively pro-German in WWII.

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It’s an oddly-untold story, which I first learned when in Estonia in 2007: An enormous number of non-German Europeans volunteered to serve, under arms, “with the Germans” in WWII (i.e., to fight against the USSR). There were entire Ukrainian divisions in the field, outfitted and supplied by the Germans. (Most European nations had at least one full regiment (thousands of men), I’ve learned; there were even a couple of Norwegian regiments; Norwegians formed the core of a division nicknamed Nordland . In my time in Berlin, I came across the dramatic history of Nordland’s last stand in the April 1945 Battle of Berlin.

Half a million non-Germans served in foreign divisions to fight in the East. “Better dead than Red”, they said.

These thoughts occur to me, as I hear news that seems very much like war coverage:

Spotting the flag of this “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” suggests that things are not quite as the U.S. media wants/is-able-to report. The hard-core of the anti-government side probably doesn’t want some kind of soft-bellied, free-market, “gay-rights” liberal-democracy. No; no. They don’t want that, at all, I’m thinking.

The excellent Korean politics and history blog, Popular Gusts, found this image from 1990:

This attitude remains strong in South Korea even into the mid-2010s.

The entire Left and much of the Right (except its leadership) share this attitude. It may be the most-vigorous strand of Korean political thought that I noticed. It may “come from” the left-wing, but as its real appeal is on nationalistic-racialistic grounds, the right-wing “doth not protest too much”. There thus being little opposition, conformism takes care of any stragglers who didn’t get the memo (the apolitical, not-particularly-racialistic bloc).

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There are so many examples I could cite, from my time in Korea. One is the U.S. Beef Ban. Many may not remember this, but American beef was banned for years in Korea, and it is still, in some ways, defacto banned, after a phony “crisis” was manufactured a few years ago about American beef allegedly being tainted.

In reaction to that “crisis”, they passed a law requiring that all restaurants and markets post their meat-products’ countries of origin. In my time in Korea, from 2009 to 2014 (not all consecutive), never once did I ever see any restaurant selling a beef-product from the USA, from the cheap “분식” [minute-food] places to the “meat buffets” to even American chain restaurants like “T.G.I. Friday’s”. Some had American pork, but none ever had American beef.

I saw this at a Lotteria fast-food restaurant:

On the wrapper is an official-seeming seal certifying that this burger has Australian beef, which is “clean and safe”

The full phrase in Korean is “호주청정우”. I recognize the first word as “Australia”, and the last word as [an abbreviated way to say] “Beef”. My dictionary translates the middle word, “청정”, as “pure, immaculate, clean, spotless, stainless, unsullied, undefiled, unpolluted.” By implication, U.S. beef is the opposite of those things.

Korean-grown beef is way too expensive to be economical. Lotteria now sells a “Hanwoo burger” — Hanwoo means “Korean-grown beef”. It’s far-and-away their most-expensive menu item.

Here is another part of the 1990 cartoon distributed to students:

This cartoon’s pictures are self-explanatory. “If we open our market to foreign foods, all the Korean farms will fail, farm babies will starve, and we will be dependent on foreigners for food”. The last box features a man in a traditional Korean outfit pleading for “A bit of rice, please”. The White man in the boat (who is smoking a pipe in the style of the famous photos of General MacArthur) mockingly glowers down at him. “How much ya got?”

Translation
White Man: [Scheming] “Let’s make it expensive”.
Korean: [In Panic and Despair] “How can we survive if it costs so much?”
White Man: [Haughtily] “If you think it’s expensive, then don’t buy it!” [Whistles]

(But thanks, anyway, for the trillions in net aid [in today’s dollars] you’ve given us, for your ongoing military protection, for liberating us from Japan, and for saving us from Communism….)

Today is the holiday commonly known as “Presidents’ Day” (a confusing holiday). I still go in to “work”.

A funny thing about Presidents’ Day is that more than one presidential birthday is being celebrated, i.e. Washington’s (Feb. 22) and Lincoln’s (Feb. 12) — formerly two separate holidays in many states.

However, states have all different names for this day, including the formerly-Southern state of Virginia. (Formerly because in the mid-2010s here, with Northern Virginia’s millions of people, Virginia is tipping into being something else.)

Virginia calls it “George Washington Day”, excluding old Honest Abe.

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Virginia also celebrates “Lee-Jackson Day” (two Confederate generals), instead of “Martin Luther King Jr. Day”.

That was a Richmond decision, though. Typical Northern Virginians of the 2010s here would cringe at “Lee-Jackson Day”. I remember when I was at college in Northern Virginia, the local college authorities had to decide to give only one Monday off in the spring semester and axe the other: MLK Day or Presidents’ Day (i.e., “George Washington Day”). They decided to retain MLK Day and have classes as-normal on Presidents’ Day. (I remember Arlington Public Schools similarly refusing to touch MLK Day when snow-days called for one holiday to be cancelled.) The move by the college prompted a professor of Geography, one of my favorites, a part-AmericanIndian from Oklahoma, to criticize their PC decision: If you’re deciding who is more important to the history of the USA, how can MLK possibly take precedence over George Washington?

It snowed a lot in Washington, D.C. and shut down most things on Feb. 13th in 2014 (see post-188) and also on one of the Feb. 13ths in the 1980s. The snowstorm notwithstanding, that Feb. 13th back in the ’80s was my most active day in life up to that point….as it was my very first.

I don’t know how, but someone in the CELTA group found out that Thursday was my birthday. They insisted on having a ‘party’. Pictured at left are J.F. (standing; going to Japan in March), A.F. (blue striped shirt), and S.R. (semi-hidden). In the center are bottles of orange and apple juice presented as gifts, which we shared. (In the background is the white board. Nametags of “practice students” are to the right of it. Lot of chairs, with those impossibly-small foldable-desks attached, are all around.)

The balloons were yet to come:

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On Friday, Feb. 14th, back came the “practice students”, adult foreigners of an “upper-intermediate” English ability (they had not come on the 13th, see the very end of post-188). To my surprise, they, too, had presents for me, in the form of six or seven balloons and a small cake (at left). Also, a card signed in various languages by most students.

I’ve only seen these students for two weeks, and I’ve only taught them five times, but they seem to really like me.

The cake was excellent.

Four of the balloons survive, as I write this.

I got good wishes from many people via Facebook, though as I avoid logging into Facebook, I haven’t acknowledged them. I also got a book-collection of Washington Post newspaper front pages from the 1940s, an excellent present, from my mother.

February 13th, 2014’s big snowstorm in Washington cancelled most things, but not my thing. Out I went.

I was delighted, in a way, to be able to walk along the roads (note the vantage point of the photo below).

The two human figures above are firefighters. One is using a snowblower. The other is by the door. I heard the snowblower tell the other guy that he could “go back in and watch the [Olympic] hockey”.

I arrived around 8:30 AM and descended into an empty subway station:

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The station was almost empty, at a time when the platform is usually teeming with people. I heard the statistic later that AM ridership was at 6% of the normal weekday morning level. There normally are around a hundred people in one subway car during rush hour; on Thursday Feb. 13, mine had eight (I counted). Here was my subway car:

By late morning, the temperature got above freezing and the roads looked passable in downtown Washington:

Only three of the six of us studying for the CELTA certificate made it in on time by 9 AM. One other (J.F.) did make it in, but well past 11 AM. He was stuck in New Carollton after several cars skidded and crashed ahead of him. Those behind (J.F. included), now stranded, spent a long while trying to extricate the stuck cars to open the road again. The other two (M.H. and K.T.) didn’t come at all, despite being told they must. Their vehicles were wedged-in by ice.

The lessons here are two:
(1) It’s a better idea to not rely on a personal automobile in very many cases, and this is one. The three who made it on time [myself included] relied only on their two feet and on the subway (to its credit, the subway ran normally, at least the Orange Line did– however, all local buses were cancelled). The three who didn’t make it all had cars involved in their commutes (all drive to, or are driven to, subway stations) to come downtown.

(2) Things are cancelled for a reason during inclement weather! (Look at what happened to J.F., as described above).

We couldn’t do our afternoon practice teaching, because of the sixteen “practice students”, only the Slovak and two Russians said they would come, an insufficient number. Being unaccustomed to snow, every last one of the many Latin people “threw in the towel” (as well as the Japanese woman). We went home early.

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.
____________________________________________
……..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, ….
____________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________
…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?”]
__________________________________________
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.”

__________________________________________
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.