Ambiguballs

In one of my lessons an elderly lady said: 'I don't like English food.'
'Have you had English food?' I asked. (I'd dealt with this situation before).
'No.'
'So what don't you like about it?'
'I don't like it because it's not good.'

I eat Korean food, and I have some favourites, but there's a lot that I don't like about it. Some problems:

Ambiguballs = balls of meat made from unknown animals that turn up in a lot of food. I once got a 'vegetable' meal that still had them in.
Squish = flattened dried fish. It's okay, but terrible to look at. Especially the squid ones. It looks like it's washed up after a chemical spill at sea and been taken straight to the restaraunt.
Kimchi = cabbage and hot pepper sauce doesn't work. They eat it with everything here, and it's attributed with amazing healing properties. When bird flu failed to kill anyone here, as the media had predicted, the government said it was because Koreans eat Kimchi. In my view the food's national effect is most obvious in the sulphurous farts that cling to the walls of the subway here.

There's some good stuff too, but nothing that I'll miss that much. Usually 'good' is just based on the surprise that something doesn't taste bad. It's no way to eat. Pictures imminent.

My walk back from work takes about twenty minutes. I go out onto a main street. There is a hooters restaurant on the corner, and a load of bars on the street. If I'm leaving in a the day time (I usually finish at eleven in the morning, then go back at half four) it's not too busy. Occaisionally there's a man dressed in a big padded costume with a huge fake head - it is the kind of costume that usually represents a rabbit or something like that, but in this case it is a soldier. He salutes me when he sees me. I ignore him.

Flyers are big here. They scatter them all over the streets. They are mostly used to advertise brothels and restaurants. They usually show either a photo of naked women or chicken - sometimes I catch sight of one and think 'I hope that was chicken.' The street near my work has lots of chicken houses, and lots of 'massage' parlours too. Sleazy saxophonist buskers could make a lot of money out there.

I cross a wide road by going through the subway. Maria pointed out yesterday that the fact that the subway is filled with shops/ people browsing said shops is less than helpful. It's like making you walk through a supermarket checkout when you're trying to catch a train.

The rest of my walk back is fairly routine - lots of skyscrapers that seem impressive for the first week, then somehow disappear from your awareness - lots of peeople. Along the way there are pigeons eating vomit from the night before, and street stalls selling food - I've been told that the 'chicken' they sell is in fact pigeon. Then people throw the pigeon up...etc

The last leg of my journey takes me past lots of little convenience stores and beauty salons (they get busy with prostitutes at around five). Sometimes there is a dog tied up outside one of the clothes shops. If the dog is there I'm happy - Maria usually fusses him, and he likes us.

And that's it. My apartment if part of a vast maze of apartments - I have to walk through a creepy, dark carpark on the way in, and sometimes there are noisy cats nearby that I chase away. I'll get you pictures...

Post Sloth

The sloth one went OK. Conversation classes are group based, and I get to choose the topic. The level of students that I teach was recently changed from high level to low/mid. This means that I should be doing topics on things like 'Are you happy?' 'Are you busy?' 'The weather today' - but instead I'm going all out with stuff like philosophy and literature.

It has mixed results, but students don't pay for topic classes, so they're not really in a position to complain. Anyway, if you have any topics that you'd like me to bring up with a class of Koreans then post them to me, and I'll tell you the responses. I'm glad of anything that means I don't have to talk about Sex in the City - it's very popular here, and lots of the buisnessmen claim to watch it in order to improve their English skills. I'm worried that a whole nation is being taught how to be bitchy.

Mr Big

So, the first post was fairly wanky. I should give you some sense of where I am right now. There are two important locations to me: my apartment, and my teaching institute.

I'm currently in my institute. My office is seperated from the rest of the corridor by a thick, glass screen, and a door. I am four floors up in a 13 floor building. I have a window. It looks out onto a carpark. It is dark outside. In the carpark there is a small, transparent booth, where a parking attendent is sitting. He has a heat lamp facing his chair, and a small desk. He is my equivalent of TV. Currently he's talking to a friend, and making lots of poking gestures. He has never looked up from his workspace to the windows overhead, but then neither have I.

My desk is tidy at one end, for the students, and messy at the other end, for me. I have more pens than I need. Some of them don't work. I say 'some'; it could just be one, because they all look alike, and I haven't thrown the broken one away. I have a chocolate wrapper in front of me. It used to have a snickers in it. I wanted to buy a Mr Big, but the shop was all out. Failing to get a Mr Big makes me feel insecure and inadaquate.

I am about to give a conversation class about Sloths. I will tell you how it goes/what it is later (the class not the Sloth).

Beta Movement

There's a vision test, a kind of optical illusion, you may have heard of, or at least seen, called beta movement. An image, say a dot, is projected repeatedly in two different locations at increasingly rapid speeds.

This projection causes an impression of movement, so sometimes for a split second you see a new dot between the two original dots. If you freeze the frame at that point the 'new' dot disappears, because it's a ghost - it's a result of your mind, not your eyes, creating an image to try and make sense of what it's seeing.

Anyway, my mind moves constantly from Korea to other places: to England or the States; to uni; to you lot back there. This means, if my guesswork on google maps is correct, that my mind appears for a split second over Sarybasat in Kazakstan every so often, especially while I'm writing this blog. Though it's never really there.