Adventures in Aclimatization…

I now feel as though I’ve officially passed two very important milestones in my Korean adventure.

1) I must now have the right amount of kimchi, fermented soybean paste and tofu in my system to be attractive to Korean mosquitoes. This is my first year noticing multiple bites.

2) It’s 31 degrees outside, and I wore a cardigan to class because I want to save my summer clothes for when it gets hot.

Adventures in Pyrotechnics…

The nice thing about living on a Korean campus is that there are fireworks to celebrate everything. This happens to be the 50th Anniversary of Daegu University, and celebrations kicked off tonight. Around 10:20pm, Catticus and I were sending off a couple of e-mails and getting ready to turn in for the night. Around 10:21pm, Catticus nearly fell of her perch as my windows rattled and the echo of the first boom faded away. I turned off the lights and headed for my balcony. My balcony has a perfect view of all campus fireworks displays. Tonight’s display lasted about 15 minutes, and included some that I’ve never seen before. Some were shaped like hearts, and some just twinkled like gold dust. Next week is the student’s festival, and there are usually fireworks both to open and close the ceremonies. I love fireworks. Catticus doesn’t.

Adventures in Politics…

As you may have noticed, I don’t blog about politics very often. It’s usually because I have a tendency to tirade against idiocy – and then find out my facts are either incorrect or incomplete. I don’t want my tirades against idocy to wind up being my own idiocy recorded for posterity. That being said, I think the connection below is pretty clear:

In 1998, hard-core Republicans were doing their best to oust Bill Clinton, by any means necessary. When asked “…why the Republicans would persue a course that was neither right nor constitutional, [Newt] Gingrich replied, ‘Because we can.’ “.*

I think there are thousands of folks in Afganistan and Iraq, thousands of folks who have had their phones monitored and thousands of folks who haven’t seen an increase in mimimum wage since the Clinton Administration (…insert any other examples you can think of here) who illustrate exactly what happens when a group of people that act unconstitutionally when they’re not in power are granted power. They wind up consistently ignoring both international and domestic laws…because they can.

*Clinton,Hillary. Living History. New York: Scribner, 2003.