Bread

My son reported on a failed attempt to make bread. This got me to send him my tried and trusted recipe, which is very similar to a recipe given by Mark Bittman on his cooking site for no-knead bread (the video is available on YouTube).

Basically it's two cups flour, one cup hot water, 1 tablespoon oil, 1 tsp salt, 2 tsp sugar, 2 tsp dried yeast, mixed together to form a slightly sticky, wet dough. You cover this in its bowl with a warm damp cloth, let it rise in a warm area for an hour, then either turn it onto a baking sheet dusted with flour and shape it into a loaf shape, or turn it into a baking tin greased and floured, and bake for 1 hour at 180 degrees Celsius, or deep fry small portions for that wonderful SA snack, vetkoek! This gives a bread with a chewy crust, similar to ciabatta, and can be varied by the kind of flour used, or putting in raisins, seeds or even fried onions and cheese folded into the middle.

However, I have found that the success varies with the altitude, the flour (hard or soft wheat) and the oven, so you do need to experiment by adding more or less water, and baking for a longer or shorter time, or even giving it a longer proving time.

But it also made me think about bread generally - the many varieties, the most basic being simply flour and water kneaded together, then baked over a fire, to the complexity of a really good sourdough bread, where the process can take weeks from the moment of getting your starter dough going until your final loaf.

The chemistry of bread is also quite complex, but the final product is almost always great - the yeasty smell of freshly baked bread, the taste of that loaf with some butter and coffee or just the use of good bread in a cheese sandwich must surely rank as one of the most satisfying meals in the world.

No wonder we think of it as the staff of life.

Clothed

On reality TV there are quite a number of shows that have to do with either dressing yourself, some celebrity or your dwelling.

My favorite among these must be Project Runway - a show, for those who don't know, where 15 designers compete in challenges each week until three of them are left to present a collection at Bryant Park in New York. The challenges range from the sublime to the ridiculous, including such things as designing outfits for a character in a TV show, designing for some drag queens, designing an outfit made from edibles or flowers etc.

One of the things, that, however is never taken into account during the judging of the outfits, is comfort. For me, always, dressing has been about comfort first and then how fashionable it is. And, as I'm now realising from watching these shows, fashion is about creating silhouettes and shapes, and that often these are created by tight garments or the kind of undergarment that used to be known as a foundation garment - squeezing you into shape, or at least the kind of shape people think you should have.

All of this got me thinking about our preconceptions as far as people are concerned. It's not enough that they are clean and fully dressed, they have to also be dressed according to what we think of as suitable to whatever it is they do as a job.

And as teachers we really have to consider the preconceptions when we dress - we cannot dress in our own individual style unless it matches what the concept is of professional - covered, rather dark than bright, and very groomed. Once we have settled into a relationship with the kids and our fellow teachers, we can often relax and be more individual, but we still cannot be fully ourselves.

How much of who you are do you give up to match preconceptions? And do you think it is important? Or is it small stuff?

confusion in confucianism

So yesterday we go to a meeting for NET's held by Hwasung Educational Board, and there we receive two very rambling and incoherent books, supposedly meant to help newcomers to Korea survive, and to give us information about the contract, shopping etc.

One of the items stated that, when you have lived in Korea for more than a year, then, in order to renew your visa, you have to have a Korean Police Clearance certificate, which your school is supposed to arrange for you!!! However, Suwon Immigration is waiting for what we believe to be the South African clearance certificate.

So who do we believe?

And, if we now do get our SA clearance certificates, and we got to the Immigration department on the 20th of April, will we be told that we have the wrong certificate?

One of the ideals of Confucianism is harmony in the society by everyone knowing their place and how to act in that place.

One very very important facet to this, which the Koreans seem to have forgotten, is that in order for you to act according to principles and rules, you need to know what they are! Especially if you were not raised in the culture. It's not like we're stupid, we are just acting on the incomplete information given to us.

red tape

Last year the regulations concerning the renewal of the E2 visa here in Korea were changed, requiring updated versions of your health certificate and your police clearance. However, from a lot of enquiries, the information I got was that it would only be needed if you are getting a completely new visa - in other words, when you leave, then apply for a new job.

As it happened, we only took along the contract and letters from our schools, and we got the visas renewed for 2008/2009 February.

However, this year, when we went with exactly the same situation as last year - i.e. we are both staying at the same school, we were told that we do need the documents.

As you can imagine, getting the police clearance is the main problem - the whole getting fingerprints taken here, courier to SA and still waiting for the certificates to return!

Upon returning from the immigration department, where we got another extension until we get the certificates, we were talking about the strangeness of how there is really no reason that this process should be so cumbersome in this day and age of information technology.

What prevents countries from putting together databases on their population where things like criminal convictions, tax evasion and other problems are noted along with their ID number? And then opening that database for queries from other countries?

So that, when someone in SA wants to issue a British citizen with a visa, they could simply call up his or her ID number and either see an all clear, or a problem and deny it then and there.

Now I know there are the fears of invasion of privacy and unwarranted entries, as well as stolen identity - my point is that all of us already have an enormous amount of data entered into a myriad of databases. All I'm saying is that I cannot see why the existing information cannot be centralised and used to check on a person.

Or is my utopian fantasy kicking in?

teach?

I love playing word games - crosswords, anagrams and target, and from the word teacher we can, at quick glance, get teach, reach, ache, ace, tea, her and ta - a slang word that a British friend of mine used for 'thank you'.

Quite a selection there, and not without some synergy and symmetry to it - after all, what does a teacher do but try and reach 'her' students, which may become quite an ache for some, needing to be soothed with tea, but best soothed by the occasional 'ta' we get from a student.

A while back I had a little mini rant on Facebook regarding the hiring of teachers who then are not expected to teach! I was referring to one of the current and historical situations in Korea - the wholesale importation of English speakers to act as assistant teachers in school classrooms, where the majority of them either end up being frustrated by their Korean co-teachers, or the system, or both.

From the Korean perspective, I am sure there is just as much frustration with a lot of people who have no teaching qualification, who often mangle their own tongue quite seriously (and glancing at the writing skills displayed by some contributors to Dave's ESL Cafe, sometimes criminally so) and who regard Korea as one big party spot.

Unfortunately both perspectives are skewed, and since I can only really speak about what I and some of  the people I speak to have experienced, I will leave it to a Korean teacher to vent their frustrations, and only address those that seem to be common to most people I have spoken to during the last couple of years.

The major frustration is the lack of information - understandable when they cannot really be called fluent speakers of English, but even mangled information is better than none. What tends to happen is that a circular, instructions etc. are sent to schools in Korean. These form just one small, nay, minuscule part of the immense mound of paper that governs the school system - another thing to be read, signed and passed on to someone else to read, sign and pass on. This means that if the school receives a communication from the GEPIK program, say, the administrative assistant has to read it, sign it, file it in a neat folder, pass it on to the administrator, who signs it and passes it to the senior teacher in charge of languages, who then passes it on to your co-teacher who finally passes it on to you. So something could take as much as two weeks before being brought to your attention, by which time the due date is that day or the next, or the changes have already been made and you found out about them the hard way, by violating the new regulations.

Right up there next to this one is the attitude towards English in the country. Policy makers and parents have bought into the idea that learning English is a passport to wealth, either as individuals or as a country, and so have instituted English as a subject in school. However, they have not decided exactly what it is they wish to accomplish. By that I mean that they still do not really know if they want to speak the language, or study it.

If they want to speak it, they are wasting the best resource they have - those foreign teachers who are qualified to teach English as a second language, by shackling them to a curriculum designed for studying English.

The result is a whole generation of kids who can read English quite well, since they do a lot of that, who can translate English phrases into Korean, since they also do a lot of that, but who are unable to speak or write it.

Of course there are schools where the teachers spend a lot of time drilling the speaking skills of the kids, and there are private academies where kids get taught to speak, but by and large the majority of kids end up passing vocabulary and grammar tests, given to them in Korean!

A final word of optimism - despite the drawbacks I know there are kids who do benefit, who do start using the language to communicate in, and who are taking the first steps to becoming bilingual. From them comes the much-needed 'ta!'

baphallhouse?

I'm very fond of public bathhouses - starting with the Turkish baths in Longstreet in Cape Town, and before that places like Warmbaths and the suanas in health clubs - I've always enjoyed steaming, scrubbing and relaxing in a place with lots of hot water.

Since coming to Korea, the onsurol has become a wonderful weekend (and sometimes midweek) getaway, particularly as they are very affordable and each one has its own unique character.

This last weekend, however, I came across one with a rather unique character in this country where the naughty bits in the early morning soft porn movies (don't ask) get pixellated and blurred. In fact, where even the breasts on a dressmakers dummy gets pixellated and blurred.

What was so unique? Well, the various jacuzzi pools all had the water fountaining into them through very realistic, circumcised erect phalli (phalluses?) - ah heck, c*cks! All of them were at least a hundred times life size, but painted a lovely flesh pink.

I could not help but wonder what, if anything, served the same purpose on the male side of the bathhouse?

fragility

One of my favourite songs by Sting is Fragile, especially the refrain - on and on the rain will fall, like tears from the star, like tears from the star, on and on the rain will show, how fragile we are, how fragile we are.

Why start the blog with this?

In the first few months of this year my mom fell and broke a hip (dangerous at age 77) and my father has just had bypass surgery (at age 82). Will I soon be an orphan? They have already lived well into an age where most people don't get, and maybe these are the beginnings of the end. Either way, they will certainly no longer be able to live independently, as they have been doing. They will have to, finally, acknowledge how fragile they are.

For me that realisation came about ten years ago, when I got struck with pulmonary embolism, something you have a 20% chance of surviving. I realised then that I am also fragile, and that no day is guaranteed to me. Maybe that is why I live to the utmost of which I am capable.

This, of course, does not mean that I jump out of airplanes, mainly because I just don't feel the need to. What I do mean is that I get the most enjoyment I can even out of lazing in bed, or teaching a class, or traveling on the subway - I do not allow boredom to be part of my vocabulary any more.

In terms of taking risks - at the age of 55 I still love roller-coasters (in fact, my ideal death would be a sudden stroke or heart-attack on one!), I embrace new experiences and new activities, and despite knowing how fragile bone and flesh are, I treat them with respect and try to do what I can to be in good health.

Most of all, I think, in fragility there does lie strength - when you embrace it and realise that you are not alone, but part of a family, a community and that they can carry you when you need it, you become strong enough to face the one thing most humans fear the most - death.

And once you have died to your fear you become strong enough to see the cycle of life and the role you play in it, and to accept both.