Bay Area Renaissance Festival 2014

Yesterday I went, with my father and brother, to the Bay Area Renaissance Festival in Tampa. We went together last year, although apparently I didn't blog about it. Last year, I discovered (and rather fell in love with) Sirena, the best act of the faire in my opinion. They put on a performance within five minutes of our arrival at the faire, and it was excellent. Seriously, they were the main reason I wanted to attend and their performance alone was worth the price of admission. I took a bunch of photos of them, as well as a few short video clips (below) - if you like that sort of thing, I definitely recommend buying their albums.

Sirena might have been my favorite performance, but they weren't the only one I enjoyed. Below are a few photos and videos from other acts that I enjoyed:
Crannog
Crannog
Crannog
The Bawdy Boys
The Bawdy Boys
Demzarah Gypsies
Demzarah Gypsies
Of course, one of the best things about any renfaire is the opportunity for people watching:



My brother and I
My brother in the stocks.
I like posing with trees.
Lastly, remember Molly, the Christmas Puppy that my dad adopted? She's gotten a lot bigger! She's full of energy and incredibly sweet.
Watch Molly playing :-)

Things to share with my students (or not...)

I was watching the 2009 Star Trek last night, and the scene where Kirk meets Uhura for the first time is just so bloody brilliant from my point of view. I would love to share it with my students since it mentions so many of the things we've been discussing in class (albeit from the point of view of xenolinguistics, not plain old bound-to-earth linguistics), although Kirk's quip at the end makes it a little less than appropriate for class. As such, I'll share it with you guys instead (until youtube takes me down for copyright violations, anyway).

And in the category of things I will actually share with my classes, here's my next powerpoint. Kind of annoyed that SlideShare eliminated my Arabic script :-(

Hiatus!

Well, I'm off to Kyrgyzstan tomorrow, and this blog will be closed while I'm gone. When I return at the beginning of August, I'll be posting all about my trip over on my Kyrgyzstan blog as well as resuming posting over here. In the interim, please enjoy the absurdly obnoxious Returning to the Former Soviet Union Playlist:

Native vs. Non-Native English Speaking Teachers

Do you remember back in January when I asked anyone who had ever taught English in Asia to help me out by participating in a survey? Well, our proposal to present our research project at the 2013 Sunshine State TESOL was accepted... unfortunately, the conference is May 16-18 and I leave for Kyrgyzstan on May 9th. Ooops. The other two members of our group are actually presenting at the conference, and I'll be participating via youtube video. Haha. Since some of our survey's participants expressed interest in our results, here's my absurd youtube video and our results. The results of the survey were divided up between native speaking English teachers and non-native speaking teachers.

Question 1: What are the STRENGTHS of native-speaking English teachers?

Question 2: What are the WEAKNESSES of native-speaking English teachers?

Question 3: What are the STRENGTHS of non-native speaking English teachers?

Question 4: What are the WEAKNESSES of non-native speaking English teachers?

If You Must Choose, Choose Wisely

I teach three ESL classes in the mornings, Monday through Thursday at a private language school. Every day, when I’m teaching my second class of the day, this is what I think of:

Only I wasn’t the one who chose poorly, and neither were my students. The poor choice was made by the previous teacher, who also happens to be the person in charge of choosing textbooks at this joint.

Choosing a text for an ESL class is different from choosing one for your middle school or high school language arts class. You need to take into account the level of language of your students, their reasons for studying English, and whether or not the text will be useful to them in any way. It also doesn’t hurt to choose something that they might find interesting. You should also keep in mind that foreign language skill level does not in any way equate to US school system grade level. Just because you read a specific book in the eighth grade does not mean that intermediate level ESL students – whose level-appropriate grammar text has them learning how to form sentences using “used to” while learning vocabulary such as bicycle, summer camp, subway, and quiet – could gain anything from attempting to read this book. I’m all for challenging my students. I love the concept of i+1 – giving students content that is just a little above their current level – but there’s a difference between challenging your students and, well, torturing them.

The words that I listed above (bicycle, summer camp, subway, and quiet) all come from the grammar-text that my intermediate level students in my second class are using in their grammar class. It’s pretty spot on level-wise. It might not be i+1 (it’s a little more like “just i”), and it certainly isn’t interesting, but it contains incredibly useful vocabulary and useful grammar that will be, well, useful to new immigrants to the United States. I wish I taught from that text book.

Instead, I’m teaching Call of the Wild, by Jack London. Not an ESL version of Call of the Wild, but the original. Like I said, this was not my choice. And the chooser chose poorly. Putting aside the fact that this book is depressing as hell (seriously, it’s all about dogs suffering and dying slow, painful, graphic deaths in forty-below temperatures in the Alaskan wilderness), there are some major problems with this choice of text. 

Remember my short list of vocabulary words from my students’ level appropriate text? Well, compare those to primitive, fang, primordial, mastership, and toil. And I just picked those out of Call of the Wild’s table of contents. Every chapter is bursting at the seams with very advanced level English vocabulary, the kind that students studying for the GRE would study. These words are way out of the league of students who are learning how to say “I used to go to summer camp by bicycle.”

Additionally, not only are many of the words used in this book very advanced, but they’re also pretty archaic. I don’t know how many times I’ve said, “Now, this word is very, very old fashioned. We don’t normally say this nowadays. Nowadays, we would say ____________ instead.” I’ve had students ask, if no one uses these words, why are we studying them? And that, my friends, is my point. This book was written in 1903, and I’m sure the language was spot-on for its time… but this isn’t practical language to be teaching ESL students in 2013.

Call of the Wild would be useful for ESL students who are at an advanced level and who are interested in studying American literature. For recent immigrants – especially those at an intermediate level of English – this book is a waste of time. And I’m stuck with it until April 18th.

Reading ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ in Orlando

The first time I read Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran was in 2008, near the end of my stint in Kyrgyzstan. This being the pre-Kindle period, my friends and I read whatever English language books came our way, from dry histories of Central Asia, to entertaining mysteries, to bizarre works of soft-core porn allegedly categorized as ‘romance.’ We read whatever we could get our hands on, simply because our supply was so limited. Some of what we read was pretty awful (the sci-fi story about the aliens and the grandmothers, the aforementioned ‘romance’ that utilized the term ‘pearly essence’ in a way that has scarred me forever, that horrid ex-pat bio I nicknamed Boobs in Bishkek, etc.), but others stood out as really well-written, entertaining and/or educational (numerous Nevada Barr mysteries, Colin Thubron’s Central Asia travel memoirs, tales of reindeer herders in Siberia, etc.). Reading Lolita in Tehran fell into the latter category. I absolutely adored it. Not only was it incredibly well-written, but it provided incredibly in-depth insight into the lives of women in Iran – insights that went far beyond the stereotypical limitations of OMG THEY WEAR VEILS! that permeates our media today. As I was, at the time, living in a predominantly Muslim country, I had so often been asked by friends, family, and acquaintances back home: ‘Do all the women wear veils?’ ‘Do they all hate Americans?’ ‘Is it safe for non-Muslims to go there?’ etc, etc, etc. I can only imagine that these types of questions increase exponentially if one were to go, not to an obscure country like Kyrgyzstan, but instead to a well-known and well-vilified country such as Iran. Additionally, Nafisi’s teaching style (encouraging her Iranian students to connect the events discussed in Western novels to the events in their lives) was something that I wanted to try. While it wasn’t something that I could use in the classes that I was teaching at the time, I had visions of creating a reading list based on the one included at the end of Nafisi’s book and incorporating it into a class of advanced EFLers who were interested in English language literature. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Instead, 2009 happened.

Fast-forward to 2013. One of the courses I’m taking is on dealing with different cultures in the ESOL classroom. The course really seems to be designed for people who have never been out of the country before and who have never had to deal with people from different cultures before. To be honest, I personally am getting very little from the course. We were given a ‘suggested reading list’ from which we were supposed to select a book about which we were supposed to write a report. (Don’t even get me started on how lame of an assignment this is. A book report? Is this grad school or elementary school? Yeah.) Anyway, one of the books on the list was Reading Lolita in Tehran. Remembering how much I’d enjoyed it the first time around, I decided to go with that. (Hey, I’m working two jobs and taking four classes – cut me some slack for working with a book I’d read before!) I enjoyed the book as much as I did the first time around, and I got to actually formulate my thoughts into a paper on how I would use what I learned from the book inside an actual classroom.

Then, four days before the paper was due, I saw a poster advertising a speaking event in Winter Park – Azar Nafisi would be speaking that very night! Free to the public! I had a splitting headache that wouldn’t go away no matter how much Excedrin I fed it. I was so shaky from taking too many Excedrin that I actually felt dizzy. Normally I would have celebrated the arrival of such a headache by curling up under the covers with a pillow atop my head. Instead I forced myself to drive over to Winter Park. I am very glad I did. Nafisi was incredible – and surprisingly hilarious. Reading Lolita in Tehran is such a serious work that I really didn’t expect her to have such a sense of humor. I video-recorded part of her presentation, and audio-recorded the rest. I missed the very beginning, as I was having trouble getting my audio-recorder to work (which was why I ended up videoing the first segment), but I did get most of it. Sadly, despite the fact that I could have met Nafisi at the end of the program, I had to leave – my headache had reached the point where it was going to try to do me in if I didn’t take it home immediately. But at least I was able to record her for your listening pleasure:

What will you be doing this summer?

It feels almost like summer already down here in central Florida, which makes it hard for me to grasp the fact that it is, in reality, several months away. I am very ready for summer to get here. Not - like much of the rest of the world - because I'm looking forward to warmer temperatures, but because I will be going back to Kyrgyzstan.

As many of you know, I spent most of 2008 in Kyrgyzstan, and it was a wonderful, life-changing experience. I often wonder why I left, especially considering the shit-spiral my life fell into upon returning to the US.

(While my old blog, where I faithfully posted about my life in Kyrgyzstan back in the day is no longer online, I am working on pulling out the Kyrgyzstan posts, editing them for anonymity, and uploading them to Cat Lady in Kyrgyzstan. So far I've only uploaded posts covering January through mid-April 2008; I'm incredibly busy this semester, so I'm not sure when I'll get the rest of the posts online, but I'll do my best.) Feel free to watch this rather absurd video I compiled to get an idea of what my life in Kyrgyzstan was like:

The last time I was in Kyrgyzstan, I worked as an EFL teacher at The London School in Bishkek. (If you look closely at their website, you can see a lovely picture of me, wearing leopard print pajamas and stuffing my face.) This trip will be a little different.

The first part of my trip, several of us from Desolation Travel are meeting up for a two week jaunt around the country. We plan to start from Bishkek (the capital) and make our way through the nature reserve at Sary Chelek, the nuclear waste dumps at Mailuu-suu, the walnut forests of Arslanbob, the southern 'capital' of Osh, the town of Kazarman (about which we know essentially nothing), the lake Song Kol (if we have time), the wonderful village of Kochkor (one of my favorite places), and the fabulously desolate fishing village of Balykchy. After our two week whirlwind tour around the country, my travel companions will return home, and I will get to work.

I'll be spending June and July volunteering (arranged through The London School) in two different villages, where I will be teaching English. One of these villages will be Kultor (which is too small to rate a link on wikipedia), located about an hour's drive south of Lake Issyk Kul (the big lake you can see on every map of Kyrgyzstan). I'm not sure yet which village the second one will be. I am incredibly excited!

For those of you who don't know where Kyrgyzstan is located.

Our destination goals

Google Earth's view of Kultor.

A dreary sort of day

I am back in Orlando, ready to get the new semester started... although that doesn't kick off for a few more days. Ideally I'd be enjoying my few days in limbo before the work kicks back in, but as it's unpleasantly dreary outside, I've done little more than get dressed and work on some of my computer-related projects. (I hate to complain too much about the weather, as it got up to 66F today, which is not cold at all - but with the omnipresent clouds and the continual drizzle, it just isn't the sort of day for doing things that involve leaving your house unless you absolutely have to do so.)

I posted two stories written by my friend BS (and it never fails to amuse me that his initials are BS) to the Desolation Travel website:

Holiday in Abkhazia and Elista: Desolate Disappointment

I added a new video to The Inhumane Society - although if you haven't been keeping up with the posts over there, you might want to read the first one hundred pages in one stretch... which can be done by clicking here.

And lastly, here's a video I shot before leaving Georgia of the current state of my mom's 1906 Bungalow. Enjoy!

I'm not sure how much time I'll have for blogging this coming semester. Last semester I had my grading assistantship and three graduate level classes... this semester I'm taking four classes, plus my graduate assistantship, plus a part time teaching gig that will be anywhere from one and a half to four and a half hours a day (not including prep time). I'm not sure when I'll have time to sleep, much less blog, but I'll keep you posted when I can!

Bird-watching with Mochi

Haha. Bird-watching with Mochi.

Mochi loves birds. He doesn't want to eat them, he just wants to run up to to them with glee and say hello. Not surprisingly, we have yet to meet a bird that doesn't misinterpret this action.

I took Mochi to the Little Econ Greenway this morning after our trip to the dog park. He really enjoyed walking down by (and splashing in) the water, as well as attempting to greet the local bird population. Luckily for them, pets must be leashed at the Greenway. Unluckily for me, photographing anything while holding an eager dog on a leash is a bit of a challenge. There were some great potential bird shots that didn't turn out as well as I'd have liked due to either Mochi tugging on me or the fact that I didn't want to get close enough for him to scare the birds. Still, it was a good morning.

I know this isn't the greatest picture, but check out the turtle balancing on his belly with his legs up in the air!
And for those of you looking for some Charlie action, here she is playing fetch, while Mochi looks on.

one down, one to go

Holly, the little brown puppy, was adopted this afternoon, and fingers are crossed that it all works out. This just leaves little Sammy to find a home before I move to Orlando in 17 days. The kitties, of course, need to be adopted, too, but at least they have a decent place to go when I leave. Our land is set up for kitties, not puppies, and mom's house has too many dogs to add yet another. Anyway, I put this video together last night, while Holly was still at my house. It's set to music by The Gossip. I figured the lyrics when you left me my heart done stopped were appropriate for animals, all of whom had been abandoned.

animal madhouse

Holly and Sammy
My tiny little house has gone a tad topsey-turvey with the arrival of the puppies, Holly and Sammy (both female; named after similar looking dogs I had as a child). I took the puppies to the vet this morning for their first round of shots and a fecal test - of course they have worms, and Sammy has some hella filthy ear junk, but in general they're healthy. They are also eating and drinking like little fiends, resulting in mad amounts of puppy pee and poop. Why couldn't they have come house broken?? Sigh. I've got them (and Mochi) baby-gated into my bedroom and the kitchen (sounds odd, but if you know the layout of my house it makes sense), and they seem to be following Mochi's lead and peeing on the pee pads in the kitchen. Most of the time. I want to give their shots some time to kick in before I start taking them out onto the parvolicious south Georgia ground. In the interim... scented candles, baby, scented candles.
Velvet, Mama Cat's only daughter, is getting spayed tomorrow! I can't believe she is already old enough. And no worries - she won't have the potential of doing like her mama and slicing my face open; she refuses to go anywhere near the dogs, and is happily hanging in the living room. The funny thing is, Charlie - who barely reacted at all to the arrival of two puppies in her home - is completely freaked out by Velvet. She had been hopping back and forth over the baby gates at will, although since Velvet's arrival, she's been hiding in my bedroom with the puppies.
And since I love Florence + the Machine, here's a compilation video of some of the dogs and cats in my life this summer, set to Dog Days Are Over. Enjoy!

dogdammit.

I leave for Orlando in three weeks. I'll be renting my friend M's house, where I can have one dog and one cat total - as in Mochi and Charlie. My mom already has eight dogs, two horses, and roughly thirty cats (see here), and she's 68, lives alone, and works full time during the school year. The last thing we needed right now was two more puppies of indeterminate breed. But of course that was what I found sitting in the middle of the road a block and a half from mom's house last night. Ideally I'd be able to find homes for them before leaving for Orlando... but given that these days we have tons of people begging us to take their unwanted pets and no one asking to adopt, well, chances are slim. The current plan is to keep them at my house until they've had all their shots, then to move them out to our land, where we'll start them off in a 4x6 dog pen. Mom will need to start moving dogs and cats out to the land fairly soon anyway, given that her house is creeping ever closer to habitable. Now, if anyone in GA or FL is interested in a cute and super-friendly female puppy, approximately two months old, let me know! Also, spay and neuter your pets!!!

Charlie watches them play.



Watch the puppies playing in all their cuteness, observed by Charlie and Mochi

Pain, Suffering, and... fruit cake?

Remember the schizophrenic fellow who hit my mom's pit bull with his bicycle, and then decided to sue us for pain and suffering? Well, the lawyers he hired have decided to drop the case. And the message left for my mother on her answering machine was hilarious. The first part is very professional. Then the lady hung up the telephone... although apparently not completely. Oooops. Take a listen. I love it.

Kittens Love Knees!

Son of a Bee.

I really like my “new” house quite a lot. My favorite thing is the sound of the trains. The Small Southern Town is a railroad hub, and is home to a fairly large railroad hub. My street dead-ends into the last turn a double set of tracks make on their way into said hub. As such, I get a LOT of train noise. This would probably drive some people crazy. It’s probably why this part of town, while not anywhere near as ghetto as my previous home in this town, is still fairly low-rent. To me the sound of trains rumbling along, sometimes squealing along the tracks, frequently blowing their whistles – is an absolutely wonderful, soothing sound. It does not disturb my rest at all.

What does disturb my rest is a barely audible scritch-scritch-scritch coming from my window frame.

At first I was wondering if I was simply hearing things. When I decided that something was indeed making these noises, I though that perhaps a branch was scraping against the window frame. After about a week and a half of being disturbed by intermittent sounds I could barely hear, I finally ventured around to the right side of my house. (The right side of my house isn’t easily accessible. There are all sorts of bushes and brambles on that side. Near the front, access is fenced off; at the back, Viktor’s doghouse sits wedged into the space between my house and the fence. Getting to the window involves climbing over the doghouse.) The first time I went out there, the only thing unusual that I saw was a rather large hole (about the size of my pinky finger), bored into the window frame.

Thinking something must have burrowed in there, being the cause of the annoying scritch-scritch-scritch, I went back inside to fetch the Raid. How I wish I had also fetched my camera! I sprayed the hole full of Raid… and out came a ginormous bee. He sort of fell to the window stoop, and stood there, trying to shake his wings free of bug spray. I should have finished him off. Instead I maneuvered him onto a stick and plopped him into my neighbor’s yard. (The house to the right of me is empty… surely it could have at it over there, right?) I hurried inside to get my camera, but he was gone by the time I got back.

I looked it up online. Turns out it’s a carpenter bee. [See wikipedia.] I wished I’d gotten a photo.

But dammit if that night I didn’t hear scritch-scritch-scritching from the window frame.

(I should mention that it’s been bugging the hell out of Charlie, too. She keeps swatting at the window frame, or sitting on the window sill, cocking her head, listening. Sometimes she tries to climb atop the lower window frame, which inevitably ends in an awkward crash and some feline indifference-pretending-butt-licking.)

The next morning, as I sat on my bed, I saw the bee fly away from my window. I grabbed a paper towel, wadded it up, scurried outside, climbed over Viktor’s house, and stuffed it into the hole. The entrance to the hole was packed solid with paper towel.

And dammit if that night I didn’t hear scritch-scritch-scritching from the window frame.

Sunday afternoon, I was out back working with Viktor, trying to get him to sit on command and to not drag me around the yard when on a leash, when I heard Mochi barking from inside. Mochi is normally very quiet, and only barks when someone knocks at the front door, so I went inside to see what was bothering him.

In the center of the living room floor, Charlie and Mochi had a ginormous bee on its back. Charlie was batting it around. It seemed unable to right itself. Mochi was barking with excitement. I grabbed the nearest scrap of paper I could find, scooped it up and tossed it out the front door.

As it flew off I thought, “That looked an awful lot like my carpenter bee…” I went into my bedroom, and sure enough – it had drilled a hole INTO MY HOUSE. There was a hole, and a small pile of sawdust.

I called my mother for the purpose of saying, “That fucking bee drilled a hole into my bedroom!” and was on the phone with her… when it came in from the other side. I wish I’d grabbed my camera and started filming; as it is, I simply narrated this to my mother as it happened. I could hear it in there, scritching. It began poking its legs up over the edge of the hole. Then (and I kid you not) it stuck its ass out through the hole and sprayed shit into the air.

Time for you to go, bee.

I tried to capture it on video, but it didn’t do much. You can kind of hear it buzzing:

Then I sprayed wasp spray (the scary kind that can shoot for 30 feet and that claims to kill wasps on contact) into the hole from both directions.

An hour later, I swear I heard it scritching in there. Not to mention my bedroom now smells like scary poisonous wasp spray.

Three thoughts following my last day of work:

I just staggered home from my last day of work hwaeshik/going away party. Not really in a state for writing, so instead I'll give you three videos that pretty much express how I feel. Enjoy!

Because every blog needs two Olleh posts, right?

Yesterday I brought you Darth Vader in Seoul, courtesy of Olleh KT. Now, pre-Darth (and back when I had a TV), you couldn't go a single commercial break without seeing a 'do do do OLLEH!' commercial... specifically this commercial:

The tune's pretty catchy, and I can't see or hear 'KT' without singing 'do do do OLLEH!' to myself... although I never got what the very non-Korean black guy running around Seoul had to do with cell phone service. About as much as Darth Vader and his Trek universe WARP, I guess. Anyway, it never occurred to me that the tune wasn't actually created for KT advertising purposes. I never would have guessed that it had a life anywhere outside of Korea. Then it popped up on my friend G's Pandora station. So now we know: the Olleh KT 'do do do OLLEH' song is Chelsea Dagger by The Fratellis.

That whole Darth Vader in Yeouido thing...

So, you remember back in December when my supervisor saw Darth Vader and a whole herd of Storm Troopers marching around Yeouido and didn't call me right away? Well, I now have the answer to why they were marching around Seoul (and I suspect that if I had a TV I'd have known about this ages ago): They were filming for the Olleh LTE WARP commercials. Olleh is Korea Telecom's mobile service.  

My problem with this has nothing to do with Darth Vader seeming like a pansy (although, really!) - it has to do with the whole WARP thing. I mean, I understand that WARP can be made to look like WARS in the Star Wars font super easily. But there was no warp in the Star Wars universe, dammit. Warp drive is a Star Trek thing. 

Weird shit seen every day

Every day when I'm riding the number nine train from Dangsan to Yeouido, I get treated to what I consider a rather odd thing to be in regular rotation on city public transportation: The Korean cartoon 'Larva' - a combination of cute, disgusting, and gruesome. Very Korean. You don't have to know any Korean as they're silent. The ones below are just a few of the first ones that popped up on YouTube - there's plenty more where that came from if you're into it. I personally have mixed feelings.

stereotypical shock value korean food and noraebang post

I'm not a particularly big fan of seafood. Being from the American South, I prefer my seafood battered and deep-fried on the rare occasion that I eat any. However, as I've been popping in and out of South Korea since 2001, I've had plenty of occasions to eat a variety of seafood that is decidedly neither battered nor deep-fried. I now actually enjoy various fish products that I once would have found abhorrent, and I've even braved a variety of foods that even a year ago I would have refused to try. For many of my readers here in Korea this might be a typical reaction, and as such nothing in this post will come as much of a surprise. I'm posting this mainly for those of my readers who have never been to Korea, and never had such an experience.

We had another hwaeshik (회식) on Friday night. This time went much better than last time, as I insisted on taking the subway to our destination. This hwaeshik was a going away party for our intern, as it was her last day. (Sadly, this means I'm back to being the only chick in the department. Oi.) We went to 마차회집, a seafood restaurant in Mapo, which put a lot of effort into attractive displays of the various raw seafood products they served. I was also introduced to the Korean version of the Irish Car Bomb - a shot of soju in a glass of Hite. Oi. Anyhow, here are some photos and videos from the evening:

Toasting our former intern with Soju + Hite

Snail. I really do not like the texture.

Goldfish. Haha.

Sea Anemone. Again - not a fan of the texture; too crunchy.


I don't know enough about octopi nervous systems to understand how the legs continue wriggling after being disconnected from the body, but there they are. I even tried a piece, and it wasn't bad - although again, not a texture that I'm a particular fan of. And I was rather paranoid that it might suction itself onto the back of my throat. (I'd actually picked up a piece with my fingers, and it wrapped itself around my index finger and suctioned on, so I'd say that's a valid concern; I chomped it the instant it went into my mouth.)
True to hwaeshik form, we went to a noraebang (singing room) afterwards. You haven't lived until you've seen your coworkers boozily belt out The Lion Sleeps Tonight.