Two questions for my readers in Korea: Do you know where I can get DAT tapes copied to CD? I have several Digital Audio Tapes which I was told could be converted at my University’s Audio/Visual services division, and I got excited about the prospect of hearing some of my old compositions from my undergrad days. It’s especially interesting to me since I’ve discovered the manuscripts were all lost in the post to my parents’ home. These are the only extant traces of my musical history, and I’d like the content copied to audio CD as soon as possible… but …
Category: KOREA
My Jeonju Sori Festival Writeup
I recently mentioned the Jeonju Sori Festival and how much I was enjoying it, and how I wanted to write about it, but had been asked to write a piece for translation and inclusion in a Korean magazine. I decided to simply write the magazine piece and post it here — for the time being, unless maybe I can submit it somewhere else — in one shot. Some of the people who attended the festival this year had some pretty negative things to say about it, and I can understand some of their disappointments — although the complaints tended to …
Mayomi
Also via Lifehacker, here’s a very cool site called Mayomi that offers a utility that lets you create a mind map. Useful for self-organization, as well as for teaching writing in the classroom, if you do that sort of thing. Something tells me Cuccu would like it. :)
News From Up North
Found this among a pile of old links I planned to blog. Source unknown, but I’d guess it’s from the Marmot sometime back. North Korean TV really sucks. Trust me. Or see for yourself.
Nice Things I’ve Heard Lately (Via Lime) and What I Really Think Earns An A+
So my girlfriend Lime told me some really nice, happy news the other day. Here’s the story: She went for lunch with one of her friends whose younger sister is a freshman student where I work. Now, the friend has never taken a class with me, but even last semester she’d heard good things about me. Well, this semester she has her Freshman English class in a room next to the room I’m teaching in during that particular hour, and apparently her classmates who study with me have said positive things about the class. Well, what they actually said was …
For Chapter Two of Inside English…
This is one of the first teaching resources I’ve uploaded in a while. I got used to emailing them to myself and downloading, and now that I think of it I should upload a bunch of those files in a batch, with a list of what kinds of resources they are. But I’ll start by trying to cultivate a habit uploading new things as I create them. This quizlet deals with the passive, and with holidays. (That’s book themes for you.) If you want to check it out, please read the rest of this post.
You’d Think
You’d think that, after I told my students that their absence from class tonight would be excused on account of it being so close to Chuseok, as long as they sent me an email before 5:00pm, in English, informing me that they would not be attending, it would have sunk in. You’d think that my saying, “Write badly in English, okay, write in Korean, not okay,” would’ve had some impact. You’d think that considering I’m teaching them English, they might think to email me in English… or at least to attempt it. Or at least babelfish it, though that’s a …
It’s Chuseok,And You Know What That Means
It means tons of hours-long traffic jams—even on the nation’s highways— grocery stores basically full of people, bank ATMs running out of money, and general craziness till sometime next Tuesday. For me, Chuseok isn’t such a special time. I mean, I can grasp how it means a lot to people here; though it’s more like Thanksgiving in North American culture in terms of the content and practices of the holiday, it’s an event that matches Christmas on the Western scale… the biggest holiday of the year. I understand that. I just don’t really feel it. For me, it’s more like, …
Foreign Fiction About Korea
I don’t often get a chance to stick something in the two categories Korea and Lit, so I’m excited. Here’s a list of short fiction about Korea in English. It’s mainly by non-Koreans… and the list also includes a link to a similar page for novels in English about the Korean War. That’d make an interesting area for some Korean lit major in which to draft a doctoral thesis, I bet: foreign depictions of Korea through the lens of war.
New Korean Expression
같은 값이면 다홍치마. It came up in conversation the other night, and Lime and her friend couldn’t explain it to me, so I asked Chullsung here at work. He explained that it was something like, “If the two skirts are the same price, I’ll take the fancy royal red one!” Something roughly like that. 다홍 is some kind of word for red, which I could perhaps have guessed knowing that 홍차 is “red tea”. Apparently this means something about choosing the better of two options, given that each one comes at about the same “price”: the nicer of two men, …