Go, Korea!
Korea in the News

Wow, at one point today when I was checking out the news on Yahoo, of the 5 articles prominently displayed under the World News header, 2 of them involved South Korea. One was about the stem cell guy who was full of croddy research, and the other was about high level talks going on between NoKo and SoKo at Panmunjom...the exact building I was in the other weekend. Wow, crazy. Here's a link to the article; it's not too long and I found it fairly interesting: Koreas Open High-Level Military Talks [and Mom, I promise that this time it's actually a link to the article and not a link to a Daily Show clip :)]

Also, just as an Olympic wrap-up, I'd like to give the medal-count of South Korea: They had a respectable 11 medals (6 golds, 3 silvers, and 2 bronze). 10 of these medals came in short track. The other one came in speedskating. In my mind, it's all speedskating; but I guess short track is speedskating on a...shorter track (so it's not just a clever name). I made the mistake of calling short track speedskating and my co-teacher laughed hysterically. Dude, they're not that much different. Korea is obsessed with short track. During the Olympics the short track races were on all the time, and I swear there was at least 1 Korean in every heat. At least. And the Korean announcers would get super excited when a Korean would win, then they'd stick the person's name up on the screen in giant gold letters with a picture of whatever medal they won next to it. It was pretty funny. They also don't do touching stories on various Olympians like NBC does. Not like I could have understood them. I did get to watch NBC coverage of some events on AFN...but I missed the Ladies Figure Skating Long Program on AFN, so I had to watch the Korean airing. Not as good when you can't understand the announcer people, even though the lady announcing figure skating for NBC sounded like a total twat.

It was the first day of the semester today, but I didn't have any classes. Tomorrow will be the first day of classes...and the teacher I'm co-teaching with tomorrow just found out today that she was teaching with me half the time. Koreans seriously do not have foresight or any ability to plan things ahead of time. It's amazing (in a bad way), really.