음식쓰레기

It's summer time in Korea, and that means the street smells are blooming. Sewers and trash piles are becoming hot and pungent. This is as fitting a time as any to write about the on-going miniature debacle that is food waste disposal.

The system is pretty simple, but really foreign to how things work at home. You don't just throw food out in the trash. You either put food waste in a big neighborhood compost bin or you put it in individual buckets. My neighborhood uses the individual bucket system. You have to buy tickets to put in the buckets to get your shit taken care of. I got my bucket at the neighborhood office when I moved in, and they wrote my address and apartment number on it so everyone would know it belonged.

I used to keep my food bucket inside, but it got too gross, so I finally got the bright idea of keeping it outside and bringing out my food waste in a bag like most people. I don't know why it took me so long to figure that out.

There's a little cluster of the buckets outside my building's door. In winter, you hardly notice them with the cold slowing down the decay of the food, but you can't miss the stench now. People come by early in the morning three times a week to empty the buckets.

I don't leave my bucket on the street anymore. I put it in the parking area by my motorcycle because I was sick of random people throwing their nasty food into my filthy god-dammed bucket. It's annoying to bring out a stinking bag of food rot to get disposed of, setting loose all the flies that gather on the buckets when you open it, and finding some jackass already filled it with their own disgusting rot, and having to force yours in, and then sticking a ticket in the bucket to pay for their shit to be taken care of.

Sometimes I put my food in the bucket, and stick the ticket in the lid because the handle with the special ticket-holding slot broke off, and the next morning my food is still there, but the ticket is gone. I can only assume some clown comes by and takes advantage of the fact that they can steal my ticket.

Once I went around the back of my motorcycle to get my bucket to find it missing. Someone had not only put their shit in my bucket, but gone through the trouble to finding the damn thing, and then bringing it out to the street full of their rot. They didn't even have the decency to put a ticket in, I had to do that.

Once, I saw an ajumma rooting around the cluster of buckets by my door one day when I was coming home. She was poking around to see which one would be best to put her rot into. This immediately pissed me off. Why didn't she get her own bucket? It's so cheap it might as well be free. It probably has to do with some sense of Korean community-entitlement, but I don't have that, so I didn't care. She shouldn't have been dumping her rot into someone else's bucket.

Fortunately my bucket was out back. If I had seen her dropping her rot into my bucket, I would have probably been forced to break out my weak Korean to tell her to get that nasty shit out of my disgusting bucket. What's this world coming to when someone can't even take responsibility for her own food waste?

A Belated Sports Day Report

Sports Day was a month and a half ago. I like Sports Day, I think they should have one in the American school systems; maybe some schools do. I remember Field Day when I was a kid, Sports Day is different though. It involves a full day of all the classes dancing and competing in various running activities and games. Parents and grandparents come watch their kids, and even are expected to participate in some of the dances. It's a big picnic, which is pretty nice.

Here is a video of a lot of photos I shot during my school's Sports Day:



I teach at an elementary school. Last year, I taught at a middle school. As much as I like my current school better overall than my last school, I have to admit that the Sports Day at my middle school was more fun. The kids at the middle school are obviously older, and thus more ridiculous, though less cute. At the middle school, the students bought matching class T-shirts and made a lot of elaborate signs, with some in English that said things that didn't make sense, but were a hoot to read. Overall, the middle school students were a lot crazier, and as a bonus, there were a lot of really pretty student teachers who were doing some in-school training at the time.

Last year's sports day wasn't all entertainment and beautiful women though. I remember distinctly that it was game 7 of the playoff series between the Carolina Hurricanes and Boston Bruins. I kept running inside to catch pieces of the game on a choppy internet feed, and then running back outside to take pictures and generally be seen during intermissions. The Bruins lost on that fateful day, but all the students out on the playground didn't seem to mind. Weird.

Why I Hate the Flyers

I know this isn't the most timely article. The Stanley Cup Finals wrapped up last week and the World Cup is now under way and rightly demands full attention as the most important sporting event there is. However, I still think about the Flyers losing in the Cup Finals last week and feel warm and fuzzy, so lend me your ears a moment, and let me tell you why I hate the Flyers.

1.Phil likes them.

We lived together in a tiny apartment at UNH and it turned out that he loves the Flyers and I love the Bruins. Naturally, acceptance of the others' team was out of the question for the sake of entertainment in the form of shit-talking. Thus, I grew to despise the Flyers. Phil is a great guy, make no mistake about that. I'm proud to say I would have grown to hate any team he liked.

2. Chris Pronger.

Chris Pronger is just a complete dickhead. I've never liked him since watching the playoffs a few years back, I guess, when he was on the Ducks. He's a dirty player and gets away with stuff that others don't just because he's good. He's likes a smug, over-privileged rich kid that you fantasize about punching in the face in front of his girlfriend and busting his nose on his new white shoes or something. Plus he looks like a gap-toothed ape and his haircut sucks. I hope he got really mad when the Chicago Tribune ran that picture of him in a skirt. Chris Pronger is a goon which leads me to a more general grievance:

3. They're goons.

The Flyers are a bunch of dirty bastards. Look what they did to Patrice Bergeron in 2007. And they took some other players out for awhile too, but I'm not gonna go dig up a bunch of old facts. They're dirty.

4. They eliminated the Bruins.

They not only eliminated them, they did it in a highly embarrassing fashion. Sure, I can get mad at the Bruins for blowing a 3-0 series lead and a 3-0 game lead in game 7, or I could just hate the Flyers more; I hate the Flyers more.

The World Cup!

The World Cup is about to start; you should know this already! It's the most important sporting event in the world, and that fact should get anyone exited. Apparently, Korea has been pretty crazy over soccer ever since they hosted the tournament in 2002 and Korea surprisingly made it to the semi-finals and ultimately finished fourth place.

Korea plays Greece on Saturday at 8:30PM. It's their first game in the tournament, and I think it will be a great match-up, but I don't really know much about soccer so that assessment really means nothing. I'm going to Daegu's World Cup Stadium to watch it on the big screen on Saturday. Eric is finally getting his lazy ass down from Seoul, so I'll watch it with him and Miju. I hope they open up the field for people to sit on, rather than in the seasts, 'cause then we can get there early and play cards and drink beer and have a picnic.

America plays their opening game against England. This is at 3:30AM Sunday morning here in Korea. I'm gonna watch it. I feel like I have to. My English friend Chris thinks that America will probably beat England, and I want to believe him, but I know that England is usually pretty good. We'll see. I think they should call this match-up "The Revolutionary War: Part 2".

After playing Argentina in their second game, Korea plays Nigeria on the 23rd of this month. It's their last game in the opening round, and I'll have a Spanish couchsurfer staying with me when that game is on at 3:30PM. I'll probably watch it with the projector in my classroom if I can find a decent Internet feed.

This whole thing is perfect timing, too. With the Stanley Cup Finals having just wrapped up (thank god those fucking Flyers lost), I'll have a solid month worth of high quality, high stakes sport to watch in my free time. It should be great. Maybe not as great as four years ago when the World Cup was in Germany, and I could listen on the radio while I was landscaping, or wake up on the weekends at Chad's apartment and watch games, but still, I'm pretty pumped.

Photo Album Updates

I have finally updated and uploaded a couple more photo albums onto my Picasa gallery. The two albums range from my post-Australia winter to last weekend.

Click on the link on the sidebar to check them out!

Bosintang: I get it!

A lot of people think eating dog is weird, if not downright disgusting. I tried some dog meat a while back just for the hell of it. It's just the butchered and cooked meat of another animal, right?

I only had a couple bites and thought it was kind of weird tasting, but my slight aversion might have been more psychological than flavor-related. Paul and Eric sure didn't like it though. Paul was the one who kept demanding we travel to the farthest side of town to find a dog restaurant for weeks on end. He was in a frenzy that could only be satisfied with dog meat, and after he saw a heaping plate of cooked flesh he was a different man. "All I could think of was all the dogs in my life who were nice to me," he said. They both nearly puked with the thought.

Anyway, I get it now! After listening to the infernal little creatures mindlessly barking at all hours of the day, I realized that coming up with this dish was just an excuse to kill annoying dogs! Think about it: the senseless barking keeps you up when you want to sleep at night, and wakes you up early when you want to sleep. Dealing with this long enough will surely drive a man to murder his neighbor's pet, and way back when, when Korea was a poor country without much food, making a soup out of the dog was a perfect cover story!

It's much easier to save face by saying that your family was hungry and you had to kill your neighbors dog than by saying that the pocket-sized runt was driving you into a murderous frenzy. And even then, if someone questioned you further, you throw in the baseless claim that it helps with virility and stamina.

Knee Arthroscopy!

Last Thursday, I went to an orthopedic clinic. Ever since the ball hockey tournament, when I was alternating between running and resting all day long, my knees had felt three times their age. This wasn't nearly as bad as the sharp pain I had in my right knee last fall, but I was feeling creaky and weak, and I didn't like it.

The x-rays didn't show anything, as expected. The doctor suggested two options to me. An MRI for W350,000 or arthroscopy for W150,000. Those estimates are about $315 and $135, respectively. I went for the arthroscopy because it was cheaper. The doctor said it was more accurate too.

I got it done immediately. No waiting, no appointments. They propped me up on a table and a series of nurses and doctors came in and out and did various things to my right knee. It got shaved, then injected, then swabbed with iodine, and repositioned. The camera looked like a small shiny grease gun.

Obviously my knee was all numbed up. I could still sense pressure, though. And I could feel them pushing and popping the camera around my knee as I watched the video images on a TV on the wall in front of me. Getting to watch the inside of my knee was totally worth the discomfort of having a camera jammed up in my kneecap.

It turns out I had some inflammation of the cartilage behind my kneecap. I think some of the other cartilage was a little worn too. Anyway, they popped the camera out after about twenty minutes and cleaned me up. The doctor told me I shouldn't run or climb for 2-4 weeks. I went to the pharmacy and walked home feeling fine.

Here's the worst part though! I don't know what the pills I got at the pharmacy are, but I can't drink while I'm taking them! One week with no beer. It doesn't sound that bad, but last weekend when I was in Busan to watch, because I couldn't run, my friends do a 10K by the ocean, I couldn't enjoy a fresh Hite in the evenings. No drinking on the train ride, no drinking in the sun on the beach, no drinking in the evenings. It was rough. But it did save me a bit of won, and it proves that I'm no alcoholic. At least that's good news!