Vietnam Here We Come: Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is most definitely on the itinerary.
To all the dedicated readers out there (read: Mom) I’ll be taking some time off from the ol’ blog to spend my all too brief summer vacation in Vietnam. Why Vietnam? Why the hell not. My friend Derek and I will arrive in Hanoi and be traveling southward via train until we reach Ho Chi Minh City. We hope to visit many cities and sites along the way, especially Ha Long Bay and Nha Trang. From what I’ve heard it’s an incredible place to visit and it is rapidly becoming a must-see tourist destination. Plus there’s Pho – need I say more? I’m sure there will be some amazing stories, and I’ll be sure to share them all as soon as I get back (not that you’ll be waiting or anything, but still). For now, enjoy this list of other post-conflict travel destinations courtesy of Pro Traveler.
So This Is Retirement?: Jordan hangs out in a PC room stairwell.
Yesterday I wandered up a random set of stairs because sometimes random sets of stairs need to be wondered upon, and lo and behold what did I find staring back at me on the second floor landing but a life-sized replica of Michael Jordan. Actually, there’s no way of knowing for sure if was truly Michael Jordan because the number was inverted and the name replaced on the jersey, but let’s just call this one a hunch.
Once I got over the initial shock of seeing his slightly terrifying visage frozen forever in shiny plastic, I couldn’t help but feel the slightest bit of sadness tugging at me. After all, Michael Jordan used to be one of my boyhood heroes. I used to go down to the nearby school yard and pretend we were playing on the same team, even calling out fake play-by-play just like Marv Albert. I never actually pretended to be Jordan himself (that would have done him a great disservice) but rather the guy that was partly responsible for his great games and massive success; more like a Pippen than his Royal Airness. I would make ghost-passes to myself pretending to set up ghost give-and-go’s or fundamentally sound ghost pick-and-rolls. When I missed, fake Jordan got the board, when fake Jordan missed I was there for the put-back. It’s what little boys do, and I did it exceedingly well. Sometimes when I was all tuckered out after a few hours of shooting I would just sit on the steps near the rusty hoop with the chain netting and imagine what I would say in the post-game interview. “My shot was a bit off, but thankfully Mike was there to bail me out,” I would think to myself. “He really knows how to take over a game.” I was always gracious, but I knew he’d say the same about me. In reality, time spent down at the schoolyard was really less basketball than it was a highly choreographed form of daydreaming.
And now here we are some 15-odd years later, standing face to face outside a forgettable PC room in a dusty stairwell in a backwater town in South Korea. We’re surrounded by beaten up old sofas, junk boxes and other assorted garbage; it’s like we’re stuck in the middle of some permanent garage sale. Unflattering florescent lights buzz away in the background. My one-time hero has become someone else’s afterthought. I used to to imagine what it would be like to meet this man – to shake his hand, to play some one on one – but I gotta say, I never pictured it like this.
When I first arrived back in March, I was a little surprised to see a huge empty field sitting right smack dab in the the middle of city. Well, 4 months later, that vast sea of soil has transformed into something quite different. Green as far as the eye can see. Needless to say, it’s quite a relaxing route to walk through each day on my way to work. Check out the before and after.
A rainy day in Seoul brought out lots of umbrellas. Kind of mesmerizing if you ask me, but then again I get distracted by squirrels and shiny objects so maybe I’m not the best one to consult on this matter.
This fried chicken restaurant is located directly across from my school. It’s called Syndrome Chicken, which is never a good choice for a country still dealing with a serious Avian Flu outbreak.
Spotted this guy on our way home to our hotel during Mudfest. Apparently he was a volunteer who had a bit too much to drink and decided to take a nap on a table. That’s when things got a little weird…
In a follow-up to yesterday’s translation-complication post, here’s an interesting article courtesy of Wired magazine regarding the evolution of English. According to author Michael Erard, the entire world will be speaking some variation of the English language within 100 years. A variety of interlocking factors has created a vast sub-set of English dialects (Spanglish, Chinglish, Konglish, Singlish, etc) that allows it to spread out in multiple directions. Pretty soon English might not even sound like English.
Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it’s escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.
I gotta say, as far as job security goes this is pretty encouraging. Read the full article here. (Big thanks to Shaun for the heads-up).
There’s a good reason why I tell my students not to rely on their dictionaries. Technology is fickle, and the resulting mistakes can be pretty unfortunate. Point in case: the above photo. It appears a restaurant owners somewhere in China went to a computer, typed in something like “Super Delicious Food,” pressed enter, and then… well, the results speak for themselves. Failure has never been so hilarious.
To illustrate the undependable nature of online translators and their ilk, I have taken the above passage and translated into Korean via Yahoo’s Babel Fish application, and then back again into English. Here’s what happens:
There’ Why go out and the student s where under will in order not to be, say the advance of them good reason: Technique fickleness, the origin mistake is very a possibility of being unfortunate. Photograph above in case. It some Chinese restaurant owner probably ” Like went to the computer which from the silence comes to hit the hitter, appears the thing; Top delicious food, ” Presses and if enters, after that… Well, the result says for their oneselves. Until the now when comes off quite assuredly there was not failure.
It’s a well-known fact that everything in our galaxy is goverened by the laws of gravity, but lately I get the feeling that if you are between the ages of 7 and 13, gravity seems to impart a much greater affect. I don’t know how they do it, but if there is something that can possibly fall off a desk my students will somehow find a way to knock it to the floor. Throughout my lessons pencils, pens, books, rulers, and erasers are constantly clattering to the ground, like there’s some unseen force field that is pulling them downward. Chairs and desks are not immune either, nor are the kids, who always seem to come in with gnarly looking scrapes and cuts due to tumbles and spills of one sort or the other. Here’s a thought, but if you want to save yourself some band-aide money maybe you shouldn’t be rollerblading down stairs while trying to unwrap a popsicle. And furthermore, maybe it’s not the best idea to hold a face-punching contest before class. You can save yourself a lot of heartache and trips to the hospital if you just slowed your pace down a touch.
If you think about it, it’s a little ironic how falling down is such an essential part of growing up. Kids are constantly trying to act bigger and tougher than they actually are, and yet gravity is constantly keeping them in check, literally pulling them back down to earth. Thinking back, I did my fair share of stupid stunts back in the day – playing full contact football in a cluttered basement in the pitch dark comes to mind – but I made it out alive, and surprisingly with no broken bones to boot. I can also recall falling out our backyard apple tree on a few occasions, and also that one time where I attempted to jump down our basement staircase in one fell swoop. I got busted up pretty good on more than one occasion, but it was worth it. Gravity may be one law that can never be broken, but as a kid, it sure is fun to try.
Out to dry: Locals really know how to capture the authentic spring meadow laundry scent.
File this under things I miss from home: the dryer. Though my place comes equipped with a washer, its best buddy Mr. Dryer is nowhere to be found. That’s like peanut butter without the jelly, or a hot dog without the bun, or an episode of American Idol without the blatant product placement. A dryer is the epitome of a you-don’t-know-what-you-got-till-it’s-gone item. You really don’t realize how many socks you have until you have to spend fifteen minutes laying each one out on the drying rack. Sometimes I question whether I want to wash something based on the fact that I will eventually have to spend time pinning it up later. Also, if you hang your clothes and you accidentally forget to collect them promptly a few hours later, you can be sure that they will have become unmoving and stiff, a little like Paula Abdul’s face. Basically you end up wearing clothes that are one step removed from colored cardboard. And oi vey, don’t get me starting on the chafing. Fabric softener is futile and the fresh-out-of-the-dryer smell non-existent, but looking on the bright side, at least you don’t have to clean out the lint trap anymore.
