By Lee Scott

A little over a year ago, I started thinking about opening my own English academy in Seoul. As the spouse of a Korean citizen, it was relatively easy for me to get an F visa (F-2-1 visas are issued to spouses), and after a couple of years of marriage, it is possible to upgrade that to the F-5 visa (permanent legal resident). Among other things, this visa allows me to permanently live in Korea (even if I get divorced,) vote in elections (haven’t yet) and own a business. There are a couple of different ways you can go about opening your own academy in Korea. I am only familiar with the route I took, but even that route was partially shrouded in a mysterious fog, so typical of this peninsula many of us call home.

“Byzantine” was the word my colleague used at my first job working for a Korean school. We were both sitting in the tiny office we shared, located on the 3rd floor of the relatively new (but ancient feeling) building in what used to be the foreign quarter of a large city in China. This man had worked for the school for about a year, essentially creating their English department from the ground up, while managing a Korean teacher who spoke fluent English, and a New Zealander who was married to a local and had been teaching illegally for a few years. It was my first experience with a culture that would at times amaze me and at other times baffle me. Two years later, right before I left that school, another colleague left me with a rather bleak view about education in Korea: “If I think about all the things I hate about the system, it makes me not want to be a teacher.” Many people — maybe you and I included — have to become quite tolerant of elephants in the rooms we inhabit.

By Lee Scott

In part one; I talked about some of the preliminary steps involved in getting your own (small) hagwon, or language academy, started. This week, I’ll recount the first few months of business.

As I mentioned in last week’s piece, the location I moved into for my academy had also previously been an English institute. I believe it had been closed for one or two months, though.

By Marie Kulik

When I look down from the rooftops, I see people. If you’ve never looked down at this city from a rooftop, I suggest that you find yourself a service stairwell and head up it double step. Have you ever wanted to shoot a snow monkey out of a cannon and down into the groups on the sidewalk below? I have. More than once.

Instead of launching primates and laughing hysterically, I’ve written.

From a Perch in Gangnam

Oh where do you fall, pale girl?
Objecting much to me perching here,
above your doors.
I’ll chill for a while in your patch.
Snowy, I know,
I’ve walked from Oksu.

By J. Lee

Many keen observers today note as the prospect of an expanded war in Afghanistan looms that the United States has yet to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome.” If anything, the recent developments to shift the warfront from Iraq to al-Qaida’s alleged home turf in Afghanistan have led many media commentators and academics to draw what they deem to be “striking” parallels between the present War on Terror and the first war the United States had ever lost on foreign soil. For this reason, an attempt to discern the parallels between the present quagmire and those of Vietnam should be made through a careful reading of Stanley Karnow’s book, Vietnam: A History, to derive appropriate lessons.

By Yann Kerloch

La disparition (Disappearing) 2010 edit – part 2 from Yann Kerloc'h on Vimeo.

By Scoop McDougal

Yes, it has been another big week of news here on the peninsula and so, in this first of an ongoing series of more or less depthless articles, I, dear readers, am here to disseminate and illuminate on all the crap that’s apparently fit to print.
For those uninitiated to the masterpieces of journalistic genius that comprise the South Korean print media, a stroll through the daily newspaper may at first be somewhat daunting, so feel free to grab an English edition and walk through it with me.

The Three Wise Monkeys’ Spring Meet and Greet. Friday March 25 6-10 pm Seoul Press Center. 18th floor (Foreign Corespondents Club) Click Here for Map Other Sharing Services…

By Lee Scott

A little over a year ago, I started thinking about opening my own English academy in Seoul. As the spouse of a Korean citizen, it was relatively easy for me to get an F visa (F-2-1 visas are issued to spouses), and after a couple of years of marriage, it is possible to upgrade that to the F-5 visa (permanent legal resident). Among other things, this visa allows me to permanently live in Korea (even if I get divorced,) vote in elections (haven’t yet) and own a business. There are a couple of different ways you can go about opening your own academy in Korea. I am only familiar with the route I took [...]

By Tony MacGregor

I dream often in the Thong Poon Hotel. It is always the same dream. My father, his frantic face and shrunken body enclosed in a transparent egg, rolls and twists on a riverbank. His maddened blue/gray eyes shriek out to me. He is trying to warn me of something — but he can’t say what it is — and I am floating comfortably on the river, disconnected — while the egg twists and rolls and my father’s face grows more and more frantic.

Video by Yann Kerloch
This is an experimental work of fiction — kind of a poetic essay — I made originally in 2003, following my first journey in South Korea. It was completed with different footage I had previously, and a shooting in Paris with a Korean actress.
I decided to make a new edit recently, cutting some parts (almost one third of the film) I disliked.

This film is dedicated to Pomme, the actress who played the girl we just hear (Alice), who passed away in 2010.

La disparition (Disappearing) 2010 edit – part 1 from Yann Kerloc’h on Vimeo.

By Jake Reed

Amor Fati under a Korean Autumn

The world is dying again.
Its decay crushed under
unknowing witnesses
and the last day of summer
gives back for a future birth of creation.

The night begins to claim its solitaire existence
as it watches the transition
from lush to barren and
the gray area of an eternal cycle
begins to dot the landscape.

By Mizaru

From February 22-27: A week and its perspective at the Seoul Museum of Art.

Monday 22 February 2010.

It was meant to be just a one-night recollection of the Warhol that two out of five of the world’s citizens know and are now blasé about. But Monday night is the museum’s closed night. In the review from the local English dailies and Korean blog land they all mentioned Warhol’s, “In the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes,” but left out that Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA)[...]

By Thomas Reynolds

I almost drowned when I was about ten at Race Point off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, an island just south of mainland Massachusetts where Jaws was filmed. Sucked in by a giant undertow, I was pulled from the safety of the shore to the depths of the ocean. Actually, it was probably only about the distance of fifty yards or so but to a ten-year-old, I might as well have been dropped into the middle of the sea.

By Poison Pen

A wise monkey suggested that I, “blog like you talk to people at the pub.” And also I’m writing this with the same force of hostility that was thrown at me. So, here goes.

Since I’ve been living in Haebangcheon, I’ve twice had the distinct displeasure of patronizing a little neighborhood restaurant by the name of Noxa. I will not waste my time nor my won going back for strike three.

Video by Vincent Sung