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Notes From the Land of the Morning Calm
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Howdy
Down below are links to the latest pictures of Hailey.
I'll try to get new ones up every week or so...
Also down below are links
to pages I put together while I was in Korea, some 3 years ago now. These older links are also up in the tool bar.
About the Sections:
From My Notebook has a journal of what I've been up to as well as poems, essays and "gibblets" I've written.
Audio Letters has audio files you can listen to over the internet with a Real Audio Player or the Windows Media Player. If you don't have a Real Audio Player you can download it for free from the Real Player site directly. I've put links to the Real Player site on the pages with the "Audio Letters Home." You can download the Windows Media Player from www.microsoft.com. Just go to the downloads section and search for "windows media player." The first two "Audio Letters Home" were made last summer. "Grandma & Grandpa" was my first attempt at working with sound on my own computer. I thought recording a "letter home" would be a nice way, especially for my grandmother, to get a letter. The recording quality is poor, and the many hours of fighting commuter problems comes through in my voice. I sound a bit like I've been hit over the head by a big cabbage. The second letter, again made last summer, is to Aggie out at KWMR. It was suppose to be the first in a series of monthly audio letters home. However, since it's taken me nine months just to figure out how to get it home, I haven't produced a sequel yet. Now that I have discovered a method of "sending" these letters, I hope to make more. The next one on the docket is about a trip Suk Ja and I took down to the southern part of the peninsula for the millennium. I brought my recorder along. Although these first two letters were made for specific people you are all welcome to listen.
Pictures of Korea Starts with about 60 pictures taken when Michelle visited in August (2000). They include shots of both of us, as well as Suk Ja and Hahoe Village near Andong, Ju Wang Mountain, Kyoung Ju City, and Nam Hae Island.
Korean Course is really "Big Brother's (un-Orwellian) Super Quick Korean Course." It's a group of pages I made so Michelle, my sister, could learn some Korean before she came over to visit (Aug 2000). It includes an ugly attempt at writing the the Korean alphabet in Photoshop as well as audio files containing some basic some Korean phrases.
Translations and Favorite Lit in English are just what they sound like. I'll post favorite passages, poems, and short stories I find in English as well as attempts at translating some of Korean favorites.
Papers in Korean (your browser will need to be able to read Korean) These pages have essays I have written for school or for fun in Korean. A big thank you to Suk Ja for making them as close to coherent as possible.
Links has links...(go figure) to sites I think are interesting or relate to research I've been doing for my thesis...or just for "fun" (I know, I know, lock me up). There also links to places where you can listen to good "Internet radio."
Here's the story about the Chinese characters at the top of the page.
A couple weeks ago I went to "Insa Dong," with Suk Ja. Insa Dong is an "arty" neighborhood in Seoul where you can find galleries and traditional tea shops, antique shops and fortune tellers...great "mockolli" (a traditional Korean liquor). We stumbled into a tea house and it turned out that the owner was a poet. We ended up spending a good part of the afternoon talking him and drinking tea. At one point he asked me what my name meant and, with Suk Ja's help, I explained "Wayne" comes from "wainwright." He told me the Chinese character for wainwright is "sohn." Then he told me he wanted to give me Korean name. He wanted to call me "sohn," but Korean given names are always have two Chinese characters. (At this point, I bet some of you are wondering why Korean names would be in Chinese. It's kind of a long story, but here is the really condensed version: Like Latin in Europe, Chinese was used as the official language through much of Asia for a long time. Therefore, the Koreans, along with many other people in Asia, still use Chinese characters in their names.) Anyway, the poet decided "Gah-jong" was as close to "wainwright" as he was going to get using two character. So the Chinese characters at the top of the page is my most recent given Korean name. Actually an old friend from Pyoung Taek, where I taught English back in 1996, called me "Hae-song," which means "comet." In a way, these names seem to be attempts to "let me in," to give me an identity that isn't quiet so foreign. Hoping to "let you in" on my life over here I thought the characters would be a cool thing to include. The reason "Gah-jong" appears and not "Hae-song," is simple. I don't know how to write "Hae-song" in Chinese yet. When I do, I'm going to put them up there as well.
I miss you all very much, Wayne