Go to early Korean apartments and marmots to learn about other marmots in Korea.
Category: KOREA
Koreaaaaaaaaaaaaans in Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!
The Digital Chosunilbo has a piece up: Space exploration appears to be a field of great interest among Koreans. As evidence of this, on Friday alone more than 600 people expressed hope of becoming the country’s first astronaut. According to officials at Seoul’s Science and Technology Ministry and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, the number of potential candidates for the job reached over 200 just two hours after online applications became available at 9 a.m. on Friday. The screening process has four stages through which two finalists will be selected by the year’s end. After a rigorous 15-month training program …
Spiders and Marking and a Maddening Cabbie
This is a general update of blather. The other night I had a horrifying dream that I was in a hot apartment, and sleeping, and awoke to see a huge — I’d say four-foot legspan, tip-to-tip — spider descending on a thick line from the ceiling. No possible way it could have gotten into this room that I was dreaming, but I yelped in horror and it ascended and escaped. Then, in dream-time, what felt like about twenty minutes later, another spider descended. This one was furry and striped black and white, and I tried to kill it with a …
North Korean slaves in Russia
North Korean slaves is an interesting article by Alain Devalpo about North Korean workers exported into Russia. “There were three waves of North Korean worker immigration during the 20th century,�? explained Larisa Zabrovskaya, a historian who is based in Vladivostok. The first started with the end of the second world war and the liberation of Korea, when Soviet fish-treatment factories called on North Korean manpower. In the 1950s there were about 25,000 of these workers and their families living in the Soviet Union. “The second wave took place after a secret meeting between Leonid Brezhnev and Kim Il-sung (3) in Vladivostok …
Looking to Learn Chinese?
Try Chinesepod. I wish there was a good one of these for Korean. In fact, it’d be a great project for someone like Kangmi. (via A Glimpse of the World.)
Worthwhile EFL Geekery
Two rather interesting posts on EFL Geek: Krashen on “English Villages” I Speak No English — The Kids in the Hall have no idea just how realistic this comedy skit is! I keep telling students not to memorize their speeches for classes, and while my Public Speaking class gets it, I keep meeting others who think outright memorization is useful. They often agree it isn’t so useful for becoming more fluent or skilled in using a language in real life, but, you know, it gets them better grades than impromptu speech with errors, so… well, that tells you something about …
Single? Unemployed? Need Someone to Take Care of Mom?
What disturbs me about this article Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) is the mater-of-factness by which the whole “buy-a-bride-in-Vietnam” thing is handled. This guy picks a couple of possibles from a room full of women, all there basically to sell themselves off as brides in the hope of living in, as one girl describes, a “concrete house”. He all but admits to the women he interviews that he needs someone to take care of his mom, and then, after an AIDS test and a quick Vietnamese ceremony, they’re married. And it’s only then that he realizes body language isn’t going to …
The Asia Pages: In Defense of the White Boy
Jodi’s recent banning from some kind of alleged racist message board is discussed at great length in her post (and the comments appended to it) titled In Defense of the White Boy. I’m not going to get into my opinions of the specific case, but just say that I’ve been frustrated with the kind of thinking that runs behind this. Young guys, mostly, who like to think themselves political, strong, militant, and so they get all vocal about racial issues without thinking, without reasoning, without seeing that what they themselves have adopted is racism. I think people have a right …
The Memory Hole > CIA Films at the National Archives
I noticed a line in a post at The Memory Hole about CIA Films at the National Archives that grabbed my attention: US Germ Warfare in Korea Anyone out there interested? I don’t think the Freedom of Information Act extends to Canadians in Korea, but any American who wants to check this out has the legal right. I’d love to know more, for one.
EFL Geek: ESL & EFL in Korea – Teacher Dude’s Grill and BBQ
I quite like The Die Hard Lesson plan, which is a lesson plan posted at Teacher Dude’s Grill and BBQ. He explains the inspiration for the lesson plan here. If you check out the comments section to the latter, you’ll see me going on about related lesson plans I’ve used in the past: terrorist plots, terrorist hunting, bank heists, and alien-invasion-planning. Via EFL Geek