All Sorts

My band had another performance yesterday. The Andong Volunteer Association (AVA) held another event of carnival games, a bake sale and live music (my band, The Band From Out Of Town) to raise money and awareness for a local orphanage. The AVA is a great organization and one in which I plan to participate when I move to Andong next month. The organization is composed of foreign English teachers and Koreans who meet and act in their free time to do charitable volunteer work, such as organizing activities and game days at the orphanage, picking up trash along the river and the like. SO that was really fun last night. Jonno, Ryan and I played guitar for a solid four hours. The music drew many people to the event and we helped entertain the volunteers as well. I love playing at their events because of the energy. Most of the volunteers have heard us play quite a few times and now sing along with some of the songs. It's a great time.
Foreigners get a bad wrap in the media most of the time.

We are depicted as unreliable alcoholics who prey on innocent Korean women on MBC (Korea's equivalent of FOX News). To a small degree, this image has merit and is shared by foreign English teachers and US soldiers stationed in Korea alike, mostly in cities like Seoul, Daegu or Busan. However, participating in the AVA improves our image.

About two weeks ago, some of the foreigners in Yecheon were given the opportunity to shoot some arrows at a nearby archery field. Yecheon has actually produced an Olympic medalist and she was shooting right next to us for a while.

Yecheon is famous for archery, hence why our bridge is shaped like two lit bows and arrows, as you an see. I suppose these are the kinds of events I never really think to put up on my blog but would be the kinds of stories people would find interesting.

In another thrilling episode in my pursuit to gross out my family with exotic foods, I ate 되지 막창, pig intestines, with Zach and my coteacher, Mr. Do. I emailed the picture to my dad to which he replied, "what's it stuffed with?". To his dismay, they were au naturale. They were quite good. As we sat there eating, I tout about the meta nature of ingesting an animal's intestines with my own. How much further up the food chain can a species get?

This last week, students prepared for final exams, scheduled for next week, which means I have been deskwarming, sitting in the office eight hours a day doing nothing. One might think that this sounds like a dream job but it gets really monotonous. But it beats the hell out of a cubicle job wherein I wouldn't be able to get up and walk around at least. While I have be deskwarming, I have watched a few movies, started editing my novel I write last November and read the first book of Game of Thrones. When my novel is finished, I plan on self-publishing it to the Amazon Kindle store, Barnes & Noble Nook store and the Apple iBooks store for about $3. However, I will offer a PDF format of the novel on my blog for free. Boom.

In other news, my plans to go to Jeju island for summer vacation were cancelled due to extenuating circumstances and I will remain in Yecheon for the duration of my vacation. I'm okay with this for a few reasons. First, I will be able to save money. Secondly, I have had plenty of opportunity to travel with my last three vacations (Philippines, winter 2010, Jeju, summer 2011, China, winter 2012). Thirdly, my brother and a Peace Corps friend are coming in late July and will be able to spend part of my vacation with them!

New Song From Vicious Delicious & DJ Grandalf (me and Zach)

Note: This music is intended as satire. Bad language.

Another year, another dollar

Well, it looks like I haven't blogged in quite some time. Most recently, I have signed a new contract and will be staying in Korea another year though this time around I'll be in the nearby city of 안동 (Andong). This new city is only about 35 minutes away from where I currently live. But it seems so much further when I have to go to justify her and cheese. Indeed, I'll be living about a 10 minute walk from what is equivalent to a Walmart. This and the fact that there is a bowling alley and two movie theaters make this city a very different experience of what I have here in Yecheon or what I had in the Peace Corps, in the Philippines. My new contract will start August 26 so wish me luck with the move!
In other news, I'm still playing music pretty regularly with my band. We have a performance at a bar this coming Saturday in the city I'm moving to. I have also been working with my friend Zach creating some music with the aliases of MC Vicious Delicious and DJ Grandalf. As much as I've been practicing guitar and fingerpicking in particular, I've been working DJ skills in a range of genres. We're now working on a song called "The Coffee Song" and the music uses only percussion and mouth noises.
Here is our most recent finished track, called "Pork Attack (Samgyeupsal Song)". I made all the music with original samples and Zach wrote all the lyrics. I actually made the beat. By recording cooking pork at my house :-)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7xAYxhyJzo?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
Working on music has kept me very busy. It's something I've never really had in my life and something I am immensely enjoying. I have never had a band that has stuck around this long and I'm getting a lot out of it.
I have also been very involved in photography. The DSLR that I bought after Colin visited me last August is probably one of the best purchases I've ever made. The camera has given me plenty of excuses to go on walks I never would've gone before and see my town here in ways that I never looked at it before. Above are some pictures that I took while on a mountain hike to catch the sunset here in my town about a week ago.

I'm still enjoying the hell out my iPad. As a matter of fact, I wrote this whole post using voice dictation :-)

Open Mic in Andong

As part of a running series of performances to benefit the Andong Volunteer Association (AVA) and those the organization serves, an open mic night was set up at the Life Cafe in the old downtown of Andong. Along with some poetry readings and a song and dance performance, my band played a few songs. Below are some videos taken of our performance. The video was shot using the new iPad (iPad 3rd gen).
The first couple songs we played were "The Weight" by The Band and "End of the Line" by The Traveling Wilburys. We decided to open with "The Weight" and dedicate it to the late Levon Helm, lead singer and drummer for The Band who had passed the evening before the performance.
"The Weight" - The Band & "End of the Line" - The Traveling Wilburys
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOvtO73DTKU&w=560&h=315]
"Hotel Yorba" - The White Stripes
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5DBWcrf1MQ&w=560&h=315]
"Rattlin' Bones" - Kasey Chambers
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDjLLdNn49c&w=560&h=315]
"The Cat Came Back (Medley)"
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNEjofKmznI&w=560&h=315]
"Wagon Wheel" - Old Crow Medicine Show
note: the first 30 seconds or so are pretty quiet for some reason; feel free to fast forward.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2Cxqy1k6vM&w=560&h=315]

Upgrading My Life: iPad and SSD

There have been a couple major upgrades to my tech life lately. As it is, I'm sitting in my favorite cafe typing this on the newest generation of iPad (essentially the iPad 3). I don't have much to say about the product as much as I can speak on the way the product has affected my life even in the past few days. I like to sit on my deck every morning drink coffee, drink coffee and read the news in aggregate on my iPhone. There are some spectacular apps for news aggregation that work so well with a larger screen, such as News 360, Flipboard and Zite. These apps exist on the iPhone but their layouts for the iPad's larger screen is commendable. I have also downloaded Photoshop Touch and have rendered some shots of the river in downtown Yecheon into a neato kinda dealy (attached above). I finally decided to get an iPad because it seems as though it is coming into its own as a device for production, which is opposed to consumption. I wanted an iPad to be productive and not just read and watch movies and tv shows. There is a way to manipulate the USB camera connector into letting me use my MIDI Akai MPK mini keyboard with music production software. I can also use the iPad as a touch-based MIDI control panel for Ableton. There are so many possibilities.
I have also purchased an Intel 320 series SSD for my two year old white unibody MacBook. I now get a 24 second boot time. I can probably get another 2 years out of this thing. It is so snappy; applications launch in just two bounces versus the three minutes it took to launch iPhoto or iTunes. I even found a way to enable TRIM support for it via http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/
The beauty of having SSD's in everything now is twofold: the speed and durability. My old platter hard drive was starting to make some disconcerting sounds. Jostling HDD's too much is quite bad for them. One of the funny things to get used to is the fact that my laptop is completely quiet now aside from when the fans spins up every once in a while. It's like driving a hybrid car in low-gear...is this thing on?
Just had to kvell.

The Food I Couldn't Eat

I finally have been confronted with a food I could not eat. Faithful readers, meet 빙어 (bingeo).

The small minnow-like fish are eaten live, dipped in chili sauce and wrapped in a leaf.

It all started one afternoon my co-teacher took me and my friend Zach on a drive through the country and had asked if we wanted to eat some, what Zach and I heard as, "raw fish". We thought this wouldn't be a problem as we had eaten sushi with him in the past.

Anyway, after a series of hilarious and awkward circumstances detailed in Zach's excellently written blog, neither Zach nor I could eat the food. I have eaten some weird things in the past but I have finally met a food I could not eat. I've had hard-boiled duck fetus, pig brains out-of-the-skull, raw cow intestine, horse pot roast and a myriad of other exotic foods, I simply couldn't eat these little bastards. While squeamishness had the better of Zach, I couldn't fathom taking something's life inside my own mouth. Congrats, 빙어, you got the better of me.

As Zach so elequently wrote in his blog,

Since then I've sometimes regretted not eating it when I had the chance. Granted I could go back there sometime and try again, but if I went specifically to order it I know that I'd have to keep going until the bowl was pretty much empty this time, so I really don't think I will. It was that one time situation that passed me by and I wonder what I missed. I can't say I've actually eaten every unusual new food that's been offered to me now, and for that I am regretful. I hit my culinary wall, and just hope I'll get my second wind someday.

Another Semester, Another Day, Another Americano

I am two weeks into the new semester and it has come with some unique challenges as well as some really fun opportunities. I am teaching four D level classes, the lowest level of learners. Some of the students have a loose grasp on Korean, let alone any kind of command of English. This makes my job a little difficult, teaching English as a foreign language to low level learners. However, after spending two weeks with them, they have quickly become some of my favorite classes to teach. Let me explain.

The first week was a challenge. I knew that conventional teaching methods and lesson planning would not work for this class (Mr. Bean to the rescue!) and I had to come up with a way to teach varying degrees of low levels in the same class without isolating some kids or boring others. The first week I was terrified, especially since I taught the first class completely alone! Despite the low level of English, the students have a natural curiosity about me and a genuine sweetness that makes teaching them a pleasure. They do not talk and they try their damndest, which I absolutely cannot say about many of my higher level classes.

I have come to realize that these students are not trying because they want or even need to speak English but because they want a chance to succeed. It would be presumptuous of me to assume that they seek my approval. Instead, it seems to me they are seeking the feeling of success, of being told that they did a good job, that they completed a language task, no matter how basic it may seem to a higher level learner, with confidence and pride.

My second week in the classroom, I wrote at the top of my daily calendar "today is a day I can actually make a difference by teaching English". I cannot tell you the confidence boost that gave me which was obviously reflected by the students. I now look forward to those classes; not only do the students want to be there, but I do too. That makes a huge difference.

I am also leading an English club of extremely bright students, nine all said and done. They are very enthusiastic about learning English and picking my brain for any snippet of culture they can. They're a blast. Today, I showed them a Korean subtitled version of Abbot and Costello's "Who's On First" routine, which they loved.

One of my students brushed off the clip before I had a chance to play it, saying, "it looks so old." I told him to wait and give it a chance. The clip was eliciting belly-laughs from otherwise jaded high school boys.

We meet every other Friday for about two hours in the afternoon.

Otherwise, my B and C classes are causing me a lot of stress. How Dae Chang got its reputation for being a respectable school in general is beyond me. I find new students this year to be aggrivating and disrespectful, far beyond even the worst headaches my students gave me last year. Every incoming year gets worse and worse. There is a lot of politics behind it and my blog is an inappropriate place to speculate on them.

In other news, I pre-ordered an iPad 3 which should be arriving at my Dad's work in less that 24 hour, according to FedEx. Pretty excited about that.