Last night, I went to the local market to buy some bread and other groceries. As I got to the checkout counter, the clerk—whom I’ve mentioned here before as having invited herself over to my house for dinner, as a way of hinting she would like to do so—invited me to cook dinner for her. She asked why I was buying 떡 (ddeok, which is a kind of rice cake), and when I explained it was because I was making 떡만두국 (ddeok mandu guk, which is rice-cake and dumpling soup), she asked if I am good at making that soup. …
Month: October 2004
Rumors of an Office Facelift
Well, why don’t a bang a little dent in that list of things I wanted to post about? The other day, while Kathy was the only person in the office, the President of the University apparently came in, talked about the foreign instructors’ office needing a facelift with his crowd of assistants, and then walked out. The figure I heard was pretty surprising, as it was expressed in terms of each employee. The reaction to this news was mixed. Some people were very excited about getting new desks, furniture, computers, and whatnot. Others seemed to think it’d be silly to …
Isn’t It A Medieval Writing Technique to Say, I’m Not Going To Talk About, and Then List Off in Brief All The Things You’re Going To Talk About? That’s Something I Recall From My Class on Chaucer and His Contemporaries
As a few people said lately, when it rains, it pours. I have so many things I’d like to blog about: a wonderful evening I spent with Lime over in Insadong (a couple of weeks ago, a post that will be complete with photos of some really cool things); the fact that it was recently my sister’s birthday and we had a good talk; the crazy novel ideas that have come to me in the last couple of days—I literally have enough creative ideas to be writing for two or more years solid, and that would be if I was …
Korean Readings
Now, now, don’t get excited. I’ve not yet read all of my Korean comic book, 놀부가 기가 막혀!… The grammar’s still a little hard for me at this point, and I stumble on the occasional chunk of archaic language, though I am nonetheless puzzling my way through the first part bit by bit. No, the title of this post refers to other readings I’ve recently completed, and there have been a lot of them. Korea: Tradition & Transformation—A History of the Korean People, By Andrew C. Nahm First and foremost is Andrew Nahm’s Korea: Tradition & Transformation—A History of the …
Test Week, Day #2
Today was pretty uneventful. I tested two class groups on the first 7 weeks’ worth of study. For some of the students, this was a moment in which they could show how hard they’d worked. There were a few, especially one student named In-Soon (who bears a shocking resemblance to my friend Joleen in Canada) who did amazingly well. In-Soon’s responses to questions were not only grammatically perfect, but also very polite. I was shocked and pleasantly surprised, and I told her so; I also showed her the perfect score she got on the test. But of course, for every …