It’s not a big surprise I’m over a week late seeing the year off. It’s been that kind of a year, and I’m kind of glad to see 2015 go. Not that there weren’t wonderful moments, terrifying and vertigo-inducing and lovely and amazing. There definitely were, like this one almost exactly 76 days ago: And we all have a lot to be grateful for. As I write this, a few days behind schedule, our boy has been with us for 75 days, and just turned himself over, pushup style, for the first time in his life. (Mrs. Jiwaku called me excitedly …

The last week is a blur, in part because while this was what we did on Friday, the 23rd of October: That was just outside the ob/gyn office, where we’d just been told the baby had to come out by the due date… which was November 1st, incidentally. He must have been listening, since the little guy decided to show up a week early, on the evening of the 25th of October: As one friend noted, he’s already giving people the side-eye.

We usually try to avoid going to films on the weekend in Jochiwon, because the cinemas are crowded and because of the countrified behaviour of the locals during screenings really annoys us. (It’s not quite as ridiculous as in Saigon, though: I haven’t seen anyone surf the net on an iPad all the way through a film here yet…) However, we decided to go to a film last weekend because it was Mrs. Jiwaku’s birthday, and since the film both looked interesting, and had sold fewer tickets than the other films showing, we decided to give it a shot. In our experience, there’s an uncanny-valley-like effect in Korean cinema: the bell-curve applies on …