This has been the hottest summer I can remember here in Korea. Many of the Koreans says it the hottest for them, too, which represents a much longer memory. We’ve had our air conditioning on every night and even some days since mid July. Thankfully, it’s no Texas summer, in which it is  all AC all the time for five months straight.

I haven’t been riding my bike as much as I’d like to partly because of the heat, but also because of my schedule. Last week I finished teaching at short course at the university and that kept me busy in the mornings. I finished that on Tuesday and on Wednesday I finished my vacation at my regular school. Essentially, no vacation for me this summer as I spent it doing the part time gig.  I didn’t get to ride the bike for almost two weeks because mornings are best for that. Once its dark its just too frickin dangerous to ride here in Korea.  Anyway, now that I have my mornings off again, it’s just too frickin hot, even at 9am to ride.

Meanwhile, back at the hogwan (that’s what private after-school English schools are called), the owner used the one week vacation we had to remodel the bathrooms. Apparently, sometime recently the government made new regulations regarding bathrooms. It was a single door for both boys and girls with separate stalls for each but with a  urinal outside the two stalls. I always hated that bathroom and would wait until it was empty of boys and girls and go in alone and lock the door while I peed.  I hated the thought of standing there at the urinal while some grade school girl or one of the teachers was in the room with me.  So now we have two rooms and I don’t need to worry about girls in the room while I pee. The first problem is that the light switch is outside the bathroom (almost all Korean bathrooms are this way) so when a girl finishes and leave the girls’ room she’ll turn off the lights for both. That happened three times while I was there last week.  The second problem is that while only boys would be in the room, the re modeller didn’t bother to put up a screening wall around the urinal and it’s directly in front of the door. So, if I’m standing at the urinal and a boy walks in, everyone in the main lobby will see me.  So, I still wait for it to be empty and I lock the door. I’m not overly embarassed about nudity or anything but around little elementary school girls and female teachers its jut not cool. It’s always something here.

A new thing I’ve started here is a shopping service.  With western foods like cheese and bacon nearly non-existent in most Korean grocery stores, it’s a challenge getting to Busan or Daegu where Costco is. Costco has a lot of those western foods and a great number of the foreigners here have no car.  Since I already have most of the English-speaking population reading my ulsanonline.com website, it seemed a no-brainer to build a shopping cart application for it and let people order food. Me and my partner in this venture, Lee, will makes trips to Busan to the Costco and bring back their orders. – with a 30% markup on items.  We’ve only been up for two weeks and it’s been a little slow, but its summer. A new crop of English teachers will arrive later this month for the beginning of the fall school term, so hopefully we’ll have a lot more orders.

Which brings me to my last point. This website.  I’m not stopping it. Although I (and a lot of other people) use facebook to keep up with each other, it has two flaws that for me don’t work. First, it’s somewhat limited in how much you want to write and be readily visible to “All.” Second, “all” is simply one’s friends. I like having this website be as wordy as I want and available to everyone, not just friends.  Having said that, though, I’ve realized that I don’t update it as often as I used to. I’m lucky to get one article a week.  But that’s just here. If you want to know more about what I’m up to, you can find my name all over the articles on ulsanonline.com and my newest website, which we hope to turn into a glossy magazine, ShillaNow.com. This last one will be a lot less daily news oriented and more travel/food. Check it out and see what you think.  It is still under construction but ready to have people read.

Ta ta for now.