Weather Report

     It's wet here. The ground is wet, the trees are wet, the walls are wet, the air is wet, and I am wet. It's the rainy season and the rain has been coming for the last 10 days or so. And it's not letting up yet. Today was a little reprieve and the ownerless cats (a mother and four 3-month-old kittens) came out to sun themselves on the roof in front of our apartment; they looked so content as they worked on their tans. But tonight another load of rain is coming and they will be forced back into whatever sanctuary they came out of.
     The Han River is up too. Korea is a bumpy country so the rain that falls flows down the hills and into the streams that become rivers and the newly formed rivers around Seoul dump into the Han and the Han fills and turns a muddy brown as it flows west. This morning as I biked over the river I thought it looked a lot like chocolate milk.
     Two miles east and I came upon sticks and empty bottles and leaves and mud on the bike trail, a sign that overnight the river had come up to the trail (it normally flows about 2-3 meters below the trail). It had receded by the time I got there, but not by much and I wondered if the rains started again while I was at work would it come back up and force me to find an alternate route home. It didn't, but now I wonder about tomorrow's rides to and from work; of course, if it's pouring I'll take the bus--something I'd rather not do as I prefer to fight the elements than the other commuters, but there is a line and if the elements cross it, I'll suck it up and deal with the people.
     I've not seen rain like this in quite a while. I do remember about 4-5 years ago in California a February-March season in which San Jose got something like 45 days of rain out of the 60 or so, but California is dry otherwise, so the rain would fall and the ground would get wet but in the minutes/hours between rainfalls, things would dry out. Here there is no such drying period. Things get wet and stay wet. I like to take two showers a day during this time of year and my towel struggles to dry in between. I've taken to setting up a fan and keeping it on so that our towels and laundry dry in a decent amount of time; and even then it's still a struggle. Humidity is the enemy during the summer and especially during the rainy season.
     But Korea is certainly a land of changing weather. So it's moments like this that I like to think back to how cold I was a few months ago and how much I longed for the season when I could wear shorts and t-shirts and enjoy a good sweat. Soon those months will be back, so for now, I'll take this.

The Merry Month of May

     So life continues to move along here. Spring has arrived and in a span of about two weeks I went from wearing jacket, hat, and gloves on my bike rides to and from work to wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Things change quickly here and soon it will be downright hot and humid. But with the heat and humidity comes the eye-candy in the form of short skirts and sandals. Can't complain about that.
   
     The North Korean rhetoric has decreased a few notches, although they did launch a few missiles into the sea a little over a week ago. I have no idea what that was about, but perhaps they just had some leftover firearms and decided "What the hell? Let's fire these things off." Sorta like a young teenage boy will do when he finds a pack of bottle-rockets in the garage he put there before the 4th of July and then promptly forgot about.
     And speaking of North Korea, if you haven't heard the story of about the guy who was born in a prison camp and then escaped from both it and the entire country, you might want to read the book. It's called Escape from Camp 14. It's an easy read and a really interesting story. In fact, it's one of those stories that if Hollywood had written, you wouldn't believe.
   
     In other news, if you haven't heard about MOOCs, you are about to. MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Courses and there are a few different websites that run these things. The one I like is Coursea, which has dozens of classes in different fields. They are free and run similarly to the way a college class runs--lectures, readings, homework, tests. My favorite part, as was the case when I was attending real college, is the lectures. Usually they are broken up into about 10-15 minute segments (the professors break them up by the topic) and you watch and take notes. I take notes in a word document that I reduce to about 1/6 of the screen to so that I can keep one eye on the video lecture while I type.
     The two I'm currently taking are "Sports and Society" and "The History of Rock". The former is run by an anthropology professor at Duke and the latter is done by a music professor out of the University of Rochester. Both are really interesting and while they do take some time and effort, neither requires nearly as much work as anything I took while getting the master's degree. Lectures probably take about two hours per week total and the S&S class has some readings to do. And then the homework and quizzes take very little time as they are in the form of true/false and multiple choice questions. The other aspect of the classes and the one that takes the place of classroom discussion is the forums. They are run just like any other online forum where someone starts a topic/thread and others respond. These can turn into quite interesting and fun discussion or not, but it's good to be able to see what other students have to say.
     If you are looking for a real college experience, I wouldn't recommend MOOCs, but if you are looking for something to keep the mind active and are interested in the world around you in more than just a click-to-the-next-page sort of way, they are great. I've already signed up for more spanning everything from personal finance to evolution to the music of Beethoven.
   
   

Rainy Day Haiku

Land of Morning Calm
Turned quite wet this afternoon
Rainy season starts

Hour ride in rain
Drenches both my bike and me
Tomorrow the bus

Kimchi pancakes go
Well with makgeolli and rain
Say the Koreans