My girlfriend called me the other night about a big internet scandal that had her worried for the safety of foreigners working with little kids, such as myself currently, now that I’m working at an English Camp for elementary schoolkids. She said the Joongang Ilbo had been publishing stories about nasty and pedophiliac foreigners who posted things like guides on how to molest elementary schoolkids, and asked me to, “Be careful,” I suppose simply to avoid anything that could be misconstrued as improper. Not ever being alone with any child would be a start, for example. Well, I was so …

You know, from the discussion you see online, you’d think the Koreans in the TV show “Lost” are central characters. Well, I can’t say for sure that they aren’t, since I’ve only watched as far as Episode 3 so far—everything else is still just an incoming file, for me, but the first thing to remember is that these characters are not any more central to the story than others, and actually seem quite peripheral. It’s not as if a main character is an evil Korean guy. He’s not a villain, he’s just a guy among many on the island. The …

What’s this? Oranckay reports that North Korea has pledged US $150,000 to the tsunami relief fund. Thanks to a link provided by the Marmot, to an article at North Korea Zone, I just watched a video from North Korea, which is online at the Joongang Daily you can see it here, a direct link that should open it in Windows Media Player—if not, paste the link into WMP or whatever you like to use). You can also see some interesting NK photography here. Why doesn’t North Korea use that money for a North Korea relief fund? Look at those kids. …

From an old archived post at Phil Cotsford’s locomote site, I found a link to a speech by Kim Ku which is somewhat interesting in its discussion of the relation between Confucianism, fascism, and modernization.

There’s a good comparison of Sogang and Yonsei Universities’ Korean language programs here. Worth checking out for anyone who is interested in studying Korean seriously. Found on the Korean practice-blog that I should be posting on tonight, but which I’ll probably not get to until tomorrow. Waaaah.

Sometimes foreigners complain about life in Korea. Sometimes their complaints are valid, and sometimes their complaints are ridiculous. Let me give you an example. I just had a ridiculous conversation on the phone with a woman who told me, “No there’s no problem! No problem!” when I know from recent phone calls that there is indeed a problem. I had gotten a month behind on my internet/landline bill, and die to misunderstandings with the text-messages that the telecom company sent (and my own carelessness reading the bills) I had been perpetually one month behind for a long time. Finally, I …

Been working on a list of recommendations for foreigners new to South Korea. They’re available in the extended entry of this post. Comments and refinements welcome. Thanks!

Jeff, over at Ruminations in Korea, has a very interesting and informative (and saddening) post about the pressures on kids writing the Uni entrance exams in Korea, and the suicides related to it. All I have to add to it is that not only does the nature of this form of University admission create a ton of unnecessary pressure, it also atomizes students and forces them to reject the idea of cooperative learning, a pattern that stays with them for a long time (I see it in my Uni classes all the time). Not only that, but it (along with …

Yesterday I was taking a taxi downtown when I encountered a big chip on a cab driver’s shoulder. We were passing a group of cops who’d formed a Sunday afternoon traffic trap near the bridge downtown. Well, someone woman had just been stopped by a cop (for speeding in a busy downtown area, a rare example of enforcing laws which save lives) and was calling someone for aid—perhaps her father or uncle or something, I don’t know. Anyway, the cop tried to get her to cut off her phone call, and she simply turned her back on him and kept …

Well, I learned a couple of very strange little bits of Koreana today from Lime, and thought they were interesting enough to post about: 삼신 할머니 (SamShin Halmeoni, or SamShin Grandmother) is some kind of midwife-deity to whom old grannies would pray in the early morning, beseeching that their grandchildren would be born healthy. The SamShin Grandmother is the spiritual midwife of Korean babies, and it’s her job to whack little kids on the bottom when it’s their turn to pop out into the material world. This, they say, is why Korean babies have a Mongolian spot on their backsides. …