So Long Korea and Thanks For All the Squid

It's almost a month now since I left behind life in Korea and resettled myself on the sunny coast of southern Mexico. Settled might not be quite the right word as I shifted to Huatulco after a few weeks in Zipolite and will probably move back there tomorrow even though a nice young lady offered to help me find an apartment here.

These will be the last of my Korean Youtube vids. The first was a fun collaborative impromptu lesson with some of my afternoon students just horsing around in the schoolyard. For reasons that were never explained, the first few of my afternoon classes in the second term were canceled. Meanwhile I had motivated students showing up at the teacher's office door, asking when classes would finally start. They were just as bored as I was so five of us took the trusty little Canon outdoors to make a vid. Everybody was allowed one minute to record whatever they wanted to stitch together later with Windows Media Maker. We were having so much fun that other bored students, just hanging around, who weren't part of my afternoon classes, ended up joining us and our numbers more than doubled. We learned lots of verbs like: "zoom"; "focus"; "cut"; "edit"; "mute"; "fade" and so on. My students are natural hams and I knew we had tapped into an effective interactive educational tool but suddenly it was regular class time again and my new co-teacher had provided us some quality texts and cds to use.

Ah well. It was all quality time. We showed our finished product to the the regular classes and everyone had a good laugh. Fun.


Vid number two is of Science Day at our school. That was loads of fun. Several parents from the community volunteered their help. The students of Jinga and Moga are very special young people and I think this vid captures their infectious happy energy. They were so great to work and play with and I hope their future lives will be just as full of fun and discovery as when I knew them. Goodbye everyone. I'll never forget you.

It's alive

By sheer stubborn will, the little Canon works again. I had given up on it after more than a week with no sign of life and was just off to a place that recycles these things when I pressed the power button on impulse and saw the dimmest glimmer of life. The screen read E-something error. I took my shoes off and hit the internet.

On the advice of some website, I took out the battery and tapped the camera on my desk. White powder, mineral deposits from Cheonggye Stream, fell out like dandruff and we were back in business. If only I had stopped there, I could have saved myself another week and a half of experimental tinkering.

I wanted to make it better than new so I took it apart with a mini-screwdriver set. I was careful, just not careful enough. It all became more complicated when a tiny part below the power button, apparently an important one, tinkled out of place. A lot of trial and error to figure out where it fit and how to get it to stay put while putting everything else back, besides taking the entire apartment apart to find a tiny screw I only thought had rolled off the table, and it was fixed for the second time. If only I had stopped there.

I went to Seolbong Park early next morning for some exercise before the heat wave drove me back to the air conditioning. A lot of people had the same idea. 7 in the morning and people were already working out and descending from the trail. I brought the camera along for a shot of the compressed air hose people use to blow dust and sweat from their shoes after a hike. The laptop gets this treatment once a month and it does wonders for performance. A good blast should have taken care of any deposits the desk taps had missed. It probably did but another essential part, apparently attached by just a microscopic dab of solder, fell off. I could still focus the lens but the shutter button wouldn't move.

There was no sense in quitting now even though I had two loose parts to finesse into place and hold still while reassembling the casing. I was in over my head but there was no stopping. I sat on one of three benches under a sun shelter and got to work.

I had been experimenting for almost an hour with the new broken piece when a random scary guy came by with his wife to hassle me. He didn't speak English. I don't speak Korean. Normal people just let it go with friendly smiles and move along. This guy kept talking away in a tone I didn't like while his horrible wife threw back her head and laughed at everything he said. I was not getting a good vibe from them at all. I would have loved to just ignore them but the man had no intention of allowing that to happen.

He pulled the hair on my arms and compared it with his smooth one. Children do that at school. They find it pretty fascinating. It's not something they see too often. But this guy was at least approaching my age and it was a total violation of personal space. There was nothing lacking in his non verbal skills as he offered several times to take my camera and smash it under his foot. His loud wife found that so funny. He reached through the buttons of my shirt, pulled my chest hair, grimaced and fanned his nose in disgust. The second grab for my arm hair confirmed I might be in for serious trouble when he showed me the gang tattoos, some kind of Asian characters, on his left arm.

I've been warned that if you get in a fight in Korea, all parties are arrested, even if you only acted in self-defense and that it is unheard of for the court to decide in a foreigner's favour. If you manage to gain the upper hand, you still owe the other guy blood money. It's a lose lose situation for everyone involved and besides all of this, I'm not a fighter at all while every man in this country has at least had a few years of military training. Of course, even with all these good reasons to play nice, fights still happen. Too much rage, alcohol, stupidity or plain meanness is all it takes for reason to vanish. The best advice is to get away from the situation. Run. And that goes double if you encounter a gang member.

Outside of the gangs, no one wears real tattoos in Korea. It isn't considered cool or attractive. I would have loved to get off the bench and walk away from this guy right then or run if he started to follow me. He was menacing and there was no telling how far he might go. But my camera was in pieces. Eventually he got up and left me alone after pulling my chest hair one more time and raising his shirt to show me his belly. I got lucky. Either by design or out of boredom, the woman walked away down the hill and he decided to follow, leaving me with a hand not quite steady enough to tinker with tiny camera parts so I packed it in and left soon after, once he was well out of sight.

Days later, I finally figured out that shutter button piece. In the right place, it looks upside down so it took a while. The camera works.

Here are some of the pictures taken on that fateful day at Bukhansan and Cheonggye Stream. The Youtube video from that day stops about 15 seconds before the Canon slipped out of my pocket.

Nobody needs two cameras and I found a great home for my personally refurbished Canon. From now on, I'll be playing with the water proof Olympus. It all ends well.