We’ve gotten 3/4ths of a typical monsoon season’s rainfall in the past 24 hours, and the 12 students that got killed in a landslide were in Chuncheon (that’s about 45 minutes by train east of me).
When I walked home yesterday, the water was past the high water line and the water was up to my ankles on the road to my house.
Hell kitty peed on me last night. There’s no water to take a shower with, so I had to spray myself with Nature’s Miracle enzyme cleaner. Hopefully there is water at school, so I can wash my face, brush my teeth, and have some coffee.
I had to give Momo barley tea in her water bowl this morning, as I had nothing else.
A very grumpy me is going to attempt walking to school in a half hour. I will wear shorts so my legs get showered by God…
Last night the rain was beyond torrential and even Momo, who doesn’t give a rip about what goes on outside, was taking notice. It was actually quite windy – almost as much as the last tropical storm? and I had to rescue the chives sitting on the ledge, as they were totally drowned. Thought it would let up, but it’s about 18 hours later and it still hasn’t let up. And the word is it won’t let up until Thursday.
So the road outside my apartment is often like the photo above (well, not THAT high) and if it’s raining, even my 3″ platform PU zorries aren’t high enough to keep my feet dry. It’s kind of a steep incline, so where I live the storm-sewer grates, instead of taking IN water, are gushing water OUT. The trip to school was a bit unusual today, though, as much of my path was strewn with rocks that had been picked up and carried with the runoff, along with lots of silt. Road crews were scraping the stuff up like snow. There were some surprisingly big rocks in there! The size of a football…Then, walking to school was interesting because the water was only one foot below the high water mark and the entire thing was a rushing churning river of milk chocolate.
And people were telling me the monsoons had officially ended a week ago…
I think this rain business is really fun. I like monsoons. I will miss them in Vegas…
The source image I’d posted no longer exists. For those who didn’t get to see it, it was a triptych of sexy mouths saying the syllables of a word in “correct” formation. About four foot tall mouths…pronouncing Chevrolet as shae vo Rae, complete with IPA phonetic symbols so you don’t get it wrong. (cough) Part of the floor to ceiling Subway advertisement for Chevrolet's new line
This, my friends, is part of Chevrolet’s huge advertising campaign lining the subways of Seoul. Now I know why my co-teacher called Chevys Shaebis, ’cause some numb nuts spelled it 쉐비 way back when GM and Daewoo first started their partnership. What I’m confused about is the phonetization of the sign above: Shouldn’t the last one be [leɪ]???
To be honest, I don’t have the International Phonic Alphabet memorized – I didn’t even KNOW there was such a thing as the IPA, and was totally shocked (during a university job interview) when the phonics I’d learned from the back of the Random House dictionary in grade school no longer served me adequately. The foreign language students here all have to know this, though, since there are sooo many versions of English they are exposed to: Commonwealth, American, Canadian, Indian…
Interestingly, the vowel chart shares a lot of similarity to the hangul vowel chart – it’s all based on the locus of the sound formation within the mouth. The problem with hangul, though, is it doesn’t have vowel or consonant combinations or blends, which is fine for Korean but presents a blunt tool for dealing with foreign languages. Take “vo” for “vro” in the above Chevrolet example.
So I corrected the situation and taught my co-teacher that it is pronounced 쉐브로레 in America. 브로 (beuro) is the closest one can come to the consonant blend VR. So it can drive a westerner a little crazy living here, as sometimes the western word is introduced with attention to detail and care not to just eliminate R,L, T, N, etc. sounds from consonant blends, and then sometimes, as with Chevrolet, somebody just decided that extra R wasn’t worth the bother.
You get used to it. You accept it. But I guess I was just floored by the amount of money spent here on getting the public to pronounce it wrong when they had an open opportunity to do it right! Boo on you, Chevrolet!
The monsoons have been over for a couple days now, and it’s beastly hot and still humid.
I quit my Korean lessons – in large part because they weren’t netting me anything useful, but also because being gone 6+ hours in addition to my work day once a week was hard on the cat and upsetting any gains I’d make. Each time I think I’m making head-way, each time I think we’re going to be just fine, I get knocked back in place. It’s just sooo hard to sustain having a happy sing-song voice when she’s thundering from wall to wall, nipping me in transit, unapproachable for petting or bonding until worn out, which takes HOURS. It would all be good, except our fragile relationship can’t seem to weather ANY changes at all, such as me coming home at 9pm due to having to chaperone a school field trip to see a movie in Seoul.
I KNOW you’re lonely kitty, but IT WASN’T MY FAULT: they MADE ME be gone that long. We had a lovely time the night before and you barely bit me at all, and we had three days without you peeing on my bed, so come on, give me a break! Please? Maybe after being gone 12 hours I’d really like to sit down for five minutes before being attacked, did you ever think of that? No. It’s all about you. 24/7. And did you have to pee on the nice guy I’m seeing when he was sleeping? Was that really necessary? And you know what? teeth marks all over my wrists and ankles is NOT sexy. It’s irritating. My skin is sore and looks like it has a rash. And you KNOW it hurts me, couldn’t you be a bit more careful? Boo…
Anyway, the guy turned me on to this new t.v. series that totally cracked me up: Is that Seattle in the background? (ADDED: no, it’s LA – when did LA become green? Not the concrete jungle I remember – oh wait, these look to be yuppies on this show…)
Oh Jackson Galaxy, I wish you were here in Korea to help me out! I’ve done everything under the sun and cat people on several support boards are also stumped. She’s a morning person – and wants to go crazy the second I wake up, and when I’m too groggy to appease her, then she lets me have it. We all think having some cat company would do her good, but I can’t afford to fly a second cat back to the states so am looking into pet sitting as an option. Calming pheromones just arrived and I have to purchase a power converter for the diffuser and have also just sprayed my bedding. I’m also going to reformat my DVD player to all zones and purchase a Cat TV video.
It’s a little premature to say so, but yeah, I think I’ll be heading back to the states in March. To a new job helping out with construction management in Las Vegas. Sin City. Artificial Oasis, adult playground, land of strip malls. A once boom town on the decline with temperatures not unlike a blast furnace. A challenging place I imagine to have very little charm, a transient population, and families that must make peace with their environment: surrounded as they are by entertainment, excess, temptation, and the lure of easy money. I’m hoping to find some counter-culture there that strives to make community out of all of the above. I’m hoping kitty will have grown out of some of her boundless energy by then so we can start a happy new life there. Teaching high school English in the public schools as a profession has about reached its shelf life anyway, as the province has cut its subsidy and funding is up to each individual school now, so many positions are being liquidated.
I don’t know what these next few years will bring or if I want to continue writing or working on adoption issues at all. Probably not! I’m glad I came, but I’m glad I’ll also be leaving all this behind me. Seven months, eight days to go…
Just got finished watching some of the worst Korean movie ever, Dragon Wars or Dwar.
According to IMDB, it cost an estimated $70,000,000 US to produce, making it the most expensive movie in Korean history. And, it’s so bad it’s not even bad-good. It’s actually incredible how bad it is! It’s similar to Water World in that respect. Like the Costner movie, its director is famous and talented (as a comedian and actor) so everyone gave him carte blanche as a director. Huge mistake…The dialog and acting was so simple and, just BAD, I was shocked when I found out the movie was made in 2007 (though the CG seemed way too sophisticated for a film from the 90’s)
Imagine how many starving kids in Africa and how many unwed mothers you could help keep their babies with $70,000,00! Hmmph!
Decided to make some waraji (Japanese woven straw zorries) because I want new zorries NOW and there’s no Korean instructional videos for jipshin (Korean woven straw shoes) on youtube like there are for the waraji.
This is because the regular flip-flops always give me blisters, the awesome tough black PU platform ones I have have ribbon thongs which have quickly come to smell like year old sneakers. (Unfortunately, that is the only place on my body where I sweat) So what the hell, I’m in Asia, I’ll weave my own, damnit!
This idea was inspired by my daughter’s cloth ones she ordered, made of scraps. Unfortunately, its’s damned near impossible to find a fabric store in Korea and I haven’t the constitution to take on the football-field length of Dongdaemun’s fabric market just to get fabric I’m going to walk on. I ended up buying some second hand clothes I’m going to rip up instead. But that’s for later.
Right now, I need zorries to wear outside: something more robust than fabric. I went to the hardware store and found some rope, but all they had was the plastic kind. I asked if they had any natural (some Koreans know what that word is) ropuh and they didn’t understand, so I had to ask for ahn PVC. (they call all plastic PVC, except plastic bags, which they call vinyl – I have no idea what they call vinyl!) and the answer was anniyo. In a land of rice fields, in a place full of rice paddies, there’s no straw rope! Well, OK, straw would rot soon enough in these monsoons anyways. Hopefully I can take a jipshin-making class in the fall, after rice harvest.
So here is the result!
synthetic materials + cute kitty - (note the shower curtain covering my mattress)
and the aftermath of ignoring cute kitty…
That WAS a plant in the window...
Have to psyche myself up to make the other foot… As you can see, my life’s a little different now that I have this cute, cute kitty…
Ooooooh God, I’m just laughing hysterically, in tears right now! Kitty is sleeping peacefully, resting up for her midnight foot attack…
Hello Korea ! 