Two things Koreans love: their cell phones and their rice wine.
I'm convinced that cell phone companies run this country - or at least this country's economy.  Cell phones are huge business here.  It seems like every second T.V. commercial is advertising some type of smart phone.  And the stores are everywhere.  I've mentioned this earlier, but in case you've forgotten I'll say it again, there's a place in town where you can stand on one corner and see 11 cell phone stores, no kidding.  And everyone has one, even my kindergarteners.  Heck, my kindergarteners have i-pads!  Albeit, Poly school seems to attract the wealthiest of Pohang.
Rice Wine: On Saturday we went to GyeungJu where the annual Traditional Wine and Rice Cake Festival is happening.  It was another lovely autumn day - we've been having a lot of them lately - and we had a great time.  When we got there, we bought a small, one-dollar, traditional looking cup and then we walked through the 40ish stands filling up our cup with all varieties of soju and mokali (Korean rice wines).  The best was the bamboo soju.  This is another big difference that I see between Korean and North American culture: alcohol isn't regulated in Korea.  All this wine was given out freely to whoever offered their cup, children included.  Toward the end of it we really did run into a middle school boy who was much happier than he should have been.  There certainly are less regulations (or at least enforced regulations) in Korea.

In other news, I recently bought a bicycle.  This makes me happy.  I don't need it for transportation, but I missed riding a bike.  Getting back on one made me realize this.  It's not an amazing bike, but I'm happy with it.
Another purchase that I've made, which might be even cooler, is a biker vest... a real leather biker vest with awesome patches.

pretty sweet

Those of you thinking, "that's not something I would have thought Mike would buy."  It's true, it's not something I normally would buy.  But there's a story... not a long one.  So a lot of the foreigners here have scooters or some sort of moterbike, and one day, Teddy (who's great and who is the type of person who'd own a leather biker vest) had the idea that we should make a biker gang, with leather jackets, and biker names.  My biker name is 'Yoda'.  I really like the vest and I'm excited for our first biker gang bike trip.

Crab update: Sadly, my kindergarten class's two pet crabs has become one pet crab.  Here's the story: one of the crabs (Usain Bolt) was bigger than the other (Usain Boldia - the female version of Usain Bolt apperantly).  My kids thought they were male and female, but I'm pretty sure they were both females.  Anyway, crabs molt and shed their outer layer once in a while.  And you're told to leave the skin in the aquarium with the crabs because they eat it - it's good for them.  So these crabs eat parts of themselves.  And, at times, our crabs would fight with each other, or at least the bigger one with fight with the other.  It often happened right in the middle of class, which was quite distracting for me as I was teaching - science class: "So the scource of energy is the sun.  Plants need the sun's energy to... to... to...  um... plants need... the sun's energy to grow... [something like that]).  This past weekend Chavie took the crabs home and she came back with only one.  In her somewhat broken English she told me how it happened.  From what I gathered, Usain Bolt had gotten hungry - not surprising to me considering they pretty much eat only rice - and he/she got a hold of Usain Boldia's leg and started chomping on it.  Chavie said Usain Boldia didn't put up much a fight...  I'm not sure how the rest of it happened, but Usain Boldia is no more.  I'm actually surprised how long they've lasted.

Sorry for ending on a bit of a depressing note.
Thanks for reading,
Michael