Korean Basketball

As many of you know, I - Simon - play a lot of basketball. I play every day unless rain or socializing gets in the way, and it rarely does. I have a basketball court a stone’s throw away from our apartment, and I can check from the window in the hallway if anybody is playing or not. I’ve got in pretty sweet here, I’ll admit, but there are a few things about this scenario that bother me; namely, the state of Korean basketball. If you like to play basketball and plan on coming to Korea, you will find a few things that make you want to scratch your head:

1. Scoring: If a full-court game is going on, I’m pretty sure the rules are: first to 500 points wins. Seriously, the games go on forever here. In Canada I used to play first to 21 points wins. Here the points keep going and going and going.
2. Fast-Break Offence: Essentially, fast-break offence is the only offence everyone seems to be good at. The plan is this: get a defensive rebound, and throw the ball as fast as you can to a teammate on the other side of the court. He will score a layup. If this fails, resort to plan b.
3. Plan B Offence: This is the worst kind of offence. From what I have seen, nobody in Korea likes to shoot from anywhere farther than four-feet away. If they could not get a fast-break layup, then they will pass the ball around to their teammates, over and over again, in hopes that one of them will be close enough to the rim to score a layup. If not, they will continue to pass, and pass, and pass. It’s not uncommon for a team to make more than 15 passes per posession. It’s really painful to watch. However, some people know of a secret weapon in these situations:
4. Secret Weapon: Head fakes, ladies and gentlemen, are golden here. It’s as if someone just discovered them here. If you do a headfake, you’re guaranteed to get your defender off his feet. Every defender here is as gullible as possible, and will bite for your headfakes every single time. You would think that this secret weapon would no longer be a secret after being used so often, but, no no no. Indeed, everytime is like the first time with a headfake.

Of course, I can’t say that this is the state of Korean basketball in its entirety. I won’t be that naive or stereotypical. What I can say for sure is that every time I have watched a basketball game on the courts by my house I have seen these four rules come into play every time without fail. Maybe at the court by my school different rules are in play. Maybe. I will have to see. I will report my findings once I play elsewhere...

Miso: Korean Traditional Music

Martina’s Vice-Principal gave us free tickets to see some traditional Korean music, in hopes that we could better appreciate Korean Culture. It was to be played at Chongdong Theater in Seoul, which is roughly the equivalent of the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto, only smaller. We went with Martina’s co-teacher and her friend, another co-teacher, after spending two hours getting our cell-phones and the internet set up. We’re not joking. It took that long. The co-teachers translated everything for us, but in a very Lost-In-Translation kind of way; the man at the store would talk for a few minutes, the co-teachers would nod and hmm their part, and then translate everything for us in under 10 seconds. “He says that this phone is expensive” - for example, would be all the translation we’d get after seeing the man wave his hands at times, laugh at times, shake his finger, and so on. I’m sure we missed out on a lot of what he was saying, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is this: we have two cell phones and a one-year contract. The cellphones cost us $40 each (though in Canada they go for $325), we pay $12 a month, each, and every minute costs us 10 cents. Text messages cost us 2 cents. Here are our phones! Click on the picture below for the video.

Once we got our cellphones and internet set up we hopped on the subway and went to Seoul. We got off at Seoul City Hall Station, which is right beside Chongdong Theater - where our musical was going to be played. We weren’t really looking forward to seeing this, because we saw a bit of Korean traditional music performed at our weeklong conference. It was alright, but nothing really interesting. This, however, was lightyears ahead of what we saw at the conference. It was far more intense and much better executed. We left the theater with out mouths hanging open - we were floored. We bought the DVD of the performance we loved it so much. Below you’ll see a clip of one of our favorite parts. It’s amazing, and worth checking out.

After the show all of the performers ran outside and performed again, an encore of sorts, only this time with everyone around them. After that they let us take pictures with them. Click on the pictures below to see the full-size versions

Altogether it was an awesome experience. Martina profusely thanked her Vice-Principal the next day, even though he could barely speak English. Martina waved her hands around and got her point across nonetheless. If you want to know more about the musical we went to, check out this link. Make sure to check it out while you still can. And, heck, even if you miss it, it's a great part of the city to get lost in and just wander about.

We Have the Internets!

It’s finally here! Yesterday we spent the day waiting for the technician to install the internets. He was supposed to be here at 10. He came at 5:30. I guess that’s one thing Korea and Canada share in common: technicians who never arrive on time and ruin your day by making you stay and wait at home. It’s really annoying, because Mrs. Stawski’s (Sr.) birthday was on Friday, and we wanted to Skype her on Saturday morning here to wish her a happy birthday. Instead, she waited, we waited, and we never got to call, so she felt hurt. How awful!

Complaints aside, we should be updating the site more often now that we’re online at home and don’t have to go to cafés to steal weak internet signal. Hooray!

Class Control

I had to take a movie of this, even though it’s not that exciting. I have a class of students who are rowdy as all hell. Sorry, I meant to say I have 22 classes of students who are rowdy as all hell. And so this is a video of my crowning achievement as a teacher in Korea: getting everyone to sit down and shut up. Click here if you'd like to learn my secret and see just how I did it. It's much easier than you probably expected.

Student Glasses

This is a student in my - Simon's - class. This student has something special about him that I felt I had to share. He's a trendsetter. What he has started has been copied by many students at my school, so kudos to him for being so cool. Why he started this trend I don't know, and I tried asking him about it, but neither of us have enough language in common to figure it out. One of these days I'll make a weird fashion trend of my own. Anyhow, click here for the Student Glasses video and see what I mean.

Korean Busrides

Before we climbed up Palbong Mountain on Saturday we had to get there. And so we took a fancy pants bus. What impressed us most about the bus wasn't the big LCD television at the front of it, or the really comfy chairs, or the speaker system wired throughout the bus. No, ladies and gentlemen. What impressed us most about the bus was the alcohol consumption. Everybody was drinking. Everybody was sharing drinks. In Korea they drink on buses; in Canada we would get arrested for doing so. It’s a shame that we were the only Canadians on the bus, because we had the overwhelming urge to sing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. As well, this bus was hooked up with a karaoke system, which - unfortunately - wasn't put to use. What would be better than singing R Kelley's "I Believe I Can Fly" while doing 120 on the highway and drinking beer? Anyhow, click the picture above for the movie, or just click here instead.

Palbong Mountain

The weekend of July 5-6, 2008, Martina and I went on a retreat with her teachers to celebrate the completion of exams, which is why we couldn’t update the site this weekend. Anyhow, we were told that we would be doing a bit of hiking on a small mountain. It turns out that this was the steepest and most dangerous mountain we have ever been on, Mount Palbong - which sounds intimidating and Lord of the Rings-esque. There were parts that were so steep that we had to drag ourselves up with rope. It was intense, and the sweatiest workout we had in years. We were panting, huffing and puffing, but by the end we got atop the 350+ meter mountain and took some really, really pretty pictures. We took a lot of pictures, so click here to see pictures of Palbong Mountain or the picture above, and click here for the movie.

We Met a Celebrity

On the last day of our stay at the conference, we met a celebrity. Know who he is? Click the picture to find out:



We saw him when I (Simon) noticed a bunch of people walking into the conference building’s cafeteria wearing Nike Korea Basketball shirts. Then I noticed that they were all very tall. Then I noticed this guy who was absolutely ridiculously huge; I mean, he could barely fit in the room. His head nearly touched the ceiling, and surely would touch it on his tippy-toes. Martina took this picture with him, and it doesn’t fully show how tall he is. Martina is standing up straight and he’s crouched over nearly in half. When he walked past me once I saw that I didn’t even make it to his shoulders. It was the smallest I’ve felt in years.

Gyeonggi Provincial Museum

We were really upset on Wednesday after hearing a presentation by one guy who we thought was cool. We spoke with him beforehand and he seemed like a nice guy. When he had his presentation yesterday we were thoroughly upset. He lived in Vancouver for a while, and his dislike of Canada fueled many of his jokes. The audience loved how Canadians are non-committal in their conversations, how most of them do pot, and how they always have a stupid glazed look on their faces. We spoke with other Canadians after the presentation and we were all furious about the speech. If we ever see that guy again we’re going to thoroughly scowl at him, and mutter and point.

Luckily, on Thursday we didn’t have a big presentation day. We went to Gyeonggi Provincial Museum instead. It wasn’t really fun, but it was relatively awesome compared to the boringness of this week. We drew self-portraits (Simon’s is exceptionally awesome, by the way), learned how to make proper shadow puppets, learned about famous rodents, and much more! Apart from the silliness and the fun and games, we saw some really really cool ancient Korean papers. We love books, as you all know, and even though we couldn’t understand a word of what we saw we still knew that these books, with their browned pages, were awesome. We made a movie of our adventures and took a lot of pictures as well. Check it out.

Happy Canada Day!

Happy Canada Day to our Canadian families and friends! We were the only people here at the Gepik Workshop who wore our Canadian shirts with pride. Anyhow, while we’re here, we took a few pictures and made a mini-movie about a pair of weird doors we found. Yes, we took the time to make a movie about doors. You don't want us to video tape the lectures, do you? Click here for our video of Korea's Weird Door.