Soccer with the Students

One thing I do enjoy about teaching here is the students, especially the foreign exchange students.  Since I teach in English many of them take my class.  I have students from France, Germany, and China as well as Koreans.

One night they invited me to go with them to a soccer match.  They had received tickets from the embassy of Senegal through a Senegalese student.  We went by bus to the stadium, and everyone had to sing a song from their home country (I sang "California, here I come" since some French guy had already sung the "Star Spangled Banner").  Oh yeah, did I mention that there was much beer involved?

The game was Korea vs Senegal, and it was basically boring.  However the stadium was interesting and the crowd was fun.

As you might imagine, there aren't an awful lot of Senegalese in Korea so we were a big part of the rooting section.


Final:  Senegal lost.  Tears for "our" team.

The "most interesting" dinner I'll ever eat (but only once!)

 I've made a couple of good friends here in Seoul.  One is Simon (behind me at the table).  He and Mr. Kim (across from Simon) have adopted me as their "hyong", or big brother.  (Mr. Kim is too Korean to have a first name yet.).

We had many, many bottles of sake, which were necessary to both get us in the mood for (and to wash down) the dish that we had come to the restaurant for:  Live octopus !

One night they invited me to join them (and the other gentleman, who is not my brother) for a traditional Korean "delicacy" of live octopus.   It actually isn't alive when you eat it (kind of).  They cut up the live octopus and serve the tentacles while they are still squirming.  Here is a picture of the dish.

For the less squeamish of you, you can see what it looks like when it is still moving:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiJkdOZEjXU

Seoul.... a VERY large city

Seoul has somewhere between 10 and 20 million people, depending on how you define the limits of the city. The subway system for getting around is excellent, and there are a lot of great parts to the city.






This was one of my initial excursions, and one of my first Korean friends.












Gyongbokgung Palace is one of the oldest and largest in the city.
















The guards haven't changed much in the past few hundred years.


















There is an artificial river running through the downtown that is a good place to relax and cool off in the summer.










And th Koreans LOVE flowers... all over the place.

Greetings from the Land of the Morning Calm

Unlike my other blogs, for the moment I just want to get some pictures up of Korea.

I arrived in Seoul at the end of August to teach business at Konkuk University. The university has about 20,000 students. My classes, of course, are in English. Some of my students even understand me.

Oh, why the name Kim Chee Chronicle? If you have ever had Korean food you know that it is always served with a number of side dishes. Kim Chee is the most popular, and is served with EVERYTHING. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, toothpast... you name it, it has kimchee. So welcome to the KCC.




The university is quite modern, and for the most part quite attractive.















The lake in the middle helps
















International Trade building where I work















My office is, unfortunately, bigger than my apartment !