True Story - Pics

We have a writing book for the kindergarten kids. In it, there are some story sequencing exercises that consist of two pictures (with lines next to them for writing sentences), and a panel for a third picture and sentence. The point of the exercise is to write a short blurb for the first two pics and complete the sequence by drawing the last panel and writing the last sentence.

In this morning's exercise, the first panel had a picture of a lone ant trying to roll a ball of dirt up an anthill. The second panel had a picture of four ants rolling the ball of dirt up the anthill, and the last panel was blank.

There's a girl in my class who's pretty much one of the smartest girls ever. She's about five and pretty well behaved. For her first sentence, she wrote "The ant rolled the pooh pooh". Next to the second picture she wrote: "Then ant's family helped her to roll the pooh pooh." And for the last panel she drew the ants sharing a meal together and wrote: "The ant family was very, very happy then they ate a happy dinner".

As I was correcting, I was somewhat perplexed because she didn't specify what they ate together. So I asked her: "Are they eating the poop?"

This little girl looks at me dead in the eye and a tiny smile creeps on her face and she says: "yeah".

Truck-Chicken - Now with more pictures!!!

What's up?

I just finished dinner and now I'm blogging again. Bringing you the latest news about what I'm doing in Korea for all you curious cats.

Big news: I had chicken for dinner tonight!!!!


^{Mmmmmm...chicken necks!}

Okay, okay. I know what you're saying: "Big deal, I eat chicken all the time." and you'd be right. You do eat chicken all the time.

But is your chicken roasted in the back of a truck??? Is it stuffed with rice and ginseng and beans? Does your WHOLE chicken set your back $6? Is there a two for $10 deal where you live?


<sup>The "Front" of the truck


Deals, deals, deals


There's the chicken. I told ya it was from the back of a truck</sup>

My guess is your answer to all the above questions is "No, man. No."

And this is where my chicken is different than yours.

Scooter Oven Mitts

Hey guys,

Remember the go-anywhere scooters I mentioned? They're used as a cheap form of transportation and the exclusive vehicle of choice for the delivery guy?

Yeah, of course you do.

But I forgot to mention that riding two-wheeled, non-encased for ease for protection against the elements, ride on the sidewalk, machines is a year-long thing for people here in Korea. What I'm trying to say with that convoluted sentence is that, there mere fact that it's winter doesn't stop people here from riding scooters. They just dress up in snow suits to do it. They need to protect themselves from the wind you know?

But! This is a big but. What about their hands? Wearing winter gloves doesn't work with working the handlebars. Mittens certainly will get in the way? So how do you keep your hands toasty when your speeding down the sidewalk at 20kms/hours (sometimes way faster) and you can't wears gloves?

Check this out!



These things remind me of an olde-timey catchers mitt. In the "winter" here every scooter has these. They're like winter tires back home. Also I put "winter" in quotes because here winter consists of temperatures that hover around 0, 0 centimeters of snow, and zero wind. Anyways, back to the oven mitts.

Yeah so it's totally a case of function over form, but in the picture above the oven mitts were the fanciest ones I've seen ever. I think they're from fake Korean Gucci or something.

Sneakers

When I was planning on coming here to Korea, I had crazy visions of multicolored sneakers. I thought I'd have a whole mess of sneaker stores and Asia exclusives to choose from to supplement my collection back home.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Korea has probably the weakest sneaker game in the world. Don't get me wrong, there are some pretty fresh kicks, but they are too few and far between. And there's only one spot in the whole country where you can get SBs. There just isn't the variety you'd come to expect from an Asian country. Plus, everyone just wears Chuck Taylors anyways. I've only seen a handful of Jordans. I think I've only seen two Koreans with New Balances. I'm probably the only person in the country with Super Team 33 Stingrays.


<sup>The Jordan Threes


This shoe didn't kill the Crocodile Hunter, I swear.</sup>

So, if I really wanted to get some sneakers, I'd have to go to Japan or Hong Kong or something.

You know what though? I think this could work to my advantage. So far, in the almost three months I've been here, I don't think there was a single instance when I went out and didn't get my feet stepped on. Koreans don't understand what a no-no it is to step on my feet. This one time, as I was stepping off the subway a lady was getting on. Now understand that I was the only person getting off and she was the only person getting on. You'd think there would be PLENTY of space for us to avoid each other, but no. You know what she did? She stepped on my SBs! Right on the toebox (front part)! And she was on the phone and it's perfectly okay to do this so she didn't even bother to apologize for messing up my beautiful shoes. Man I could have punched her in the ovaries. But I didn't. She was lucky I'm a righteous black man, otherwise she'd be in serious trouble man. SERIOUS!!!



All this to say, that while I'm here. I don't think my grandiose plans for sneakers will come to fruition. It's too hard/expensive to get the sneakers I want and even if I do get them, there's no way I can enjoy them here without getting them broke.