Who'd ever heard of "Pyeongchang" (평창) before the news came out that it would host the Winter Olypmics? Nobody, I think. Not me. It's a small mountain place somewhere out there.

Here is a billboard I saw about a year ago, while visiting Gapyeong (가평) (see post-15), near Chuncheon (춘천):

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General Park Chung-Hee's May 16th, 1961 coup d'etat was perhaps the single most important event in South Korean history since independence in 1948 (see also post-53 and post-54).

General Park successfully seized control of Seoul in the pre-dawn hours. Victorious, he posed for photographs that very day in front of Seoul City Hall:

See the wooden doors in the back at left, in front of which five soldiers are standing? You can easily stand in front of these same doors, even 53 years later. These were the front doors to Seoul City Hall.

Here it is today. See the same doors?

That black building behind is the New City Hall (2008 to present). The front building, the former City Hall (1928-2008), is now a museum and/or library. The huge grassy area in front of both is frequently used for events.

But why did they make the New City Hall such a weird shape?

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Here is the "The Ballad of Forty Dollars". The song reminds me of the Iowa I knew in the 1990s, when I frequently visited there (my father's place of birth). Lyrics below.

The tune, the lyrics, the "Americana"; all are appealing.

I like that it tells a story. I just can't figure out "the moral of the story" (if any). Can you?

The Ballad of Forty Dollars
The Osborne Brothers [1972]

     Well, the man who preached the funeral
     Said it really was a simple way to die

     Well, he laid down to rest one afternoon
     And never opened up his eyes

     They hired me and Fred and Joe
     To dig the grave and carry up some chairs

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Fate decreed that I shouldn't have even one minute of downtime in the wild month of February 2014, which started for me in an airport (see post-204) and ended at a bus station, where I collected my friend J.S. (of Roanoke, VA)

We finished our post-CELTA celebratory events about 11:20 PM on Friday Feb. 28th (see post-200). To the subway. On to home, for the others. Not me. For me, it was on to the bus station. There, I found a recently-arrived J.S. leaning up against a post, backpack at his feet. It was 11:55 PM. As the clock ran out on the month of February, J.S. and I were maneuvering down into the subway. Back to Arlington. Sleep.

J.S. wanted to see the original U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

Into the Metro again, in the morning:

Out of the Metro. We found the "Clinton Building". There is a Clinton Building? There is. I see that it was named in 2013. "Payback", I'd guess, for Republicans putting in a Reagan Building.

The Archives is (are?) nearby.

This was also my first time seeing the founding documents of the USA, even though I was born and raised just a few miles away. They're right there (at the National Archives, near the U.S. Capitol).

Here is the very romanesque front of the National Archives:

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February of 2014 was a whirlwind month.

It started like this:

I was flying back to the USA. I flew into New York (much cheaper), then got the bus to Washington. The opportunity to spend a day in New York City was there. I saw my friend T.A.

I would stay at a grey, dreary "hotel" (they were actually shared rooms, so it was a "hostel" -- Maybe management ran out of money to pay for that extra letter, S, on the sign).

I arrived on Friday, Jan. 31st (Chinese New Year). Two days later was the Superbowl, an event I beheld with such indifference that I didn't even know that it was being held in New York City till after my arrival.

In fact, grey, dreary, angry, arrogant New York was not quite as grey, dreary, angry, and arrogant as usual: The festive mood of the Superbowl lifted things up,  I think.

The Superbowl! It's not quite super enough for non-Americans to care even the smallest bit, though....

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“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” (E.B. White)

What is "German humor"? I think I can identify it, but I would not hazard to explain it, for a reason something like that "frog problem". Examples are much better. Here is one (a true story):

I read that anecdote, recently, in a famous war memoir called With Rommel in the Desert by Heinz Werner Schmidt. It's a line I think I've heard before, but that exact line, oddly, produces only a single Google hit as of this writing; that google-hit is from a 1951 Australian newspaper's "review of new books"! (The author was Rommel's aide-de-camp in North Africa, later a battalion commander.)

For a war memoir, the book is surprisingly light in tone, peppered with that "German humor" like Rommel's above remark to that Italian major.

Here is another example. Flies were all over North Africa. Schmidt (the author), e.g., tells a general visiting from Berlin that "the unbearable part of the life [in North Africa] is the aggression of millions of flies. They settle on the food in thousands [...]"  [ch.9]. The author relates a farcical scene at the headquarters of one of the Afrika Korps' constituent divisions. Picture this, sometime in 1941 (In the serious context of a German field command center!) --

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It's getting to be springtime, which is a time when Seoul's skies have a way of "betaking an awful shade" of orangish-somethingish, allegedly from dust storms way off in China somewhere. One of my first posts here (#12), about this time last year, attempted to document one of those episodes. I was in Korea at the time.

Having been in the USA since January 31st 2014, I missed the most recent episode of this, which was big, sustained. I saw my friend Jared mention it. The "Air-Korea" website confirms it. Pollution data easily accessible there.

Here is the PM-10 air pollution data for February 1st to today, by hour, for "my city":

The pollution "spike" you see there (yellow and orange) lasted eight full days, from late evening February 21st all the way through till late evening March 1st. (A second [30-hour] spike occurred two days later.)

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Very few people today know the name George Kennan.

He was in the U.S. foreign service in the 1920s-1940s, ambassador to the USSR for a time, a great linguist, and a great thinker; a brilliant man. He was one of the USA's foremost experts on European affairs, especially Russian affairs. His wife was Norwegian. He drew up the USA's "containment" doctrine and the Marshall Plan, essentially laying the groundwork for fifty years of U.S. policy in Europe (which became anachronistic after 1991 but sort continued on in mutated form anyway; I wonder what Kennan thought about the interventions in Yugoslavia? Kosovo? Crimea?).

Kennan was one of the only voices in the U.S. government in 1945 and early 1946 who warned that Stalin was not to be trusted, that Stalin was aggressive and intransigent.

It sounds like Kennan was a "good old fashioned" American patriot. He was not. Recently I read (some of) a book called George Kennan: A Study of Character by John Lukacs (2007). In it, we see that Kennan actually grew to dislike the USA:

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This picks up where post-199 ("CELTA Last Day") left off.

Our end-of-CELTA celebratory dinner was "Himalayan" Indian food (suggested by A.W.F.), which was excellent:

It was various kinds of naan (Indian bread), rice, and various shared dishes, mainly vegetarian and one or two meat (A.W.F. and K.T. don't eat meat).

At right in the picture above, you can see "Taj Mahal beer". It was, surprisingly to me, not bad. (Then again, I considered Korean beer to be pretty okay, an opinion I kept well-concealed from other foreigners there, among whom its popularity was similar to anchovies as a pizza topping. What I really liked, I think, was the price [around $2.50 for Korean beer vs. $5.00 for imported].)

Sitting to my left was the loquacious J.F., whom I discussed in post-199 at length.

This evening, amiable J.F. was excited! When he gets excited, all his sentences end like this one! And this one! Hah. And so it happened that, having gotten some of the "spring" back in his step, J.F. started telling some of his famous stories (like his "How I Came to Fall Off a Hawaiian Waterfall" anecdote):

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On Friday, February 28th, I (we) finished the CELTA course in Washington D.C. Here we were, with the students:

There is a lot I can say about CELTA, but to keep a manageable length I'll limit this to only a description of our last day:

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