Category: Korea Stories

  • 30 Days of Biking

    I recently began participating in a great online group called 30 Days of Biking. The goal, to ride your bike every day during the month of April.

  • What in the World is Kimchibilly?

    In 2001 when Tiger, Velvet Geena, Eddie Tarantuala, Roy, and Jack “The Knife” burst onto the Seoul club scene as the Rock Tigers. The self-described pioneers of Korean Rockabilly call their aggressive, up-tempo music, Kimchibilly. The bad throws a show each month to showcase Kimchibilly, and this month, it will bring in a Rockabilly group…

  • Dispatch from the Classroom: First Grade

    Don’t Pick the Flowers “Don’t pick flowers,” was the immediate response when my first grade students were asked recently to imagine that our class had been whisked away from our room in Ilsan, South Korea and plopped down on an isolated island with the challenge of governing ourselves. “Don’t pick flowers,” was among the first…

  • Perhaps The Grammar Lesson Could Wait: “Teacher he ate too many soju.”

    Hearing amusing thoughts in the classroom is standard practice when you spend each day hanging out with kids. There’s rarely a week that goes by without hearing something that makes me scramble for a pen so I can recount it later. Maybe the heaps of holiday candy went to their heads, maybe all their witty…

  • Snow Day in Ilsan

    After a week spent in the crunchy snow and shiver-inducing temperatures of the Midwest, my winter boots got plenty of use. When it came to packing them for my trip back to Goyang, South Korea, I nearly left them behind, thinking of the snowless streets I had left behind only days earlier. Over-packer that I…