Since time immemorial, as far as I know, Lotteria has been "the only game in town" for shrimp burger fans,

But, lo, McDonald's has announced its own shrimp burger to South Korea, and Lotteria, worried, held a "buy one shrimp burger, get one free" in the last week of October to rally the faithful. I carefully investigated.

That's the Lotteria I found. In I went. This Lotteria, like many others, is multi-storey. You can see the second level of seating above. The inside of the ground floor was interesting in several ways:

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From my experience in international travel since 2007 (I left the USA for the first time on Jan. 1, 2007), I'm led to believe that no other rich country on this planet is anywhere near as unpleasant to fly in as the USA. The only airport I've ever been in that was less pleasant than the USA's airports tend to be today must be Manila, designated the "World's Worst Airport". (If you go through it for any length of time you will see why. I did.)

I discovered a stinging and incisive travel essay that captures the feeling of air travel in the USA today. Who among us can't echo most everything the essay says (those who have traveled by air in the USA in recent years)? The writer writes specifically about New York City, a place I've been in and out of several times lately. His social commentary about NYC in the quoted excerpts below I can also agree with.

I find it to be good, engaging writing, which can be hard for travel writing to achieve. Here:

Read the Essay

Our teacher's usual whirlwind style whirled on as she handed out papers filled with small boxes, and let me try to approximate by using the written word what her speaking style feels like to listen to by which I mean lots of words without many breaks and accordingly you can hardly keep the logical flow of what's going on and thus it gets confusing whereupon despite the strain you may feel somehow you've got to keep up since walking out and leaving the room is not possible and so when all is said and done you've got to figure something out. See what I mean? Hah. (If you read it quickly you can get some idea of what the class tends to feel like to me). But I digress.

There I was with my two sheets of paper full of boxes on them, puzzled. Han Teacher starts talking something about mistakes foreigners make in Korea, but as it sounds a bit to me like the previous paragraph may sound to you, I figure out what's going on more through logical deduction than true understanding of the fine points of the instructions. We were to write about our own experiences making (humorous) mistakes in Korea.

In each box, there could only be one Korean character, or a space, so we were limited to a certain number of characters, 400 to be precise (closer to 300 if counting spaces). It was implied that we had to more-or-less fill in all the boxes and be done with it. Not less, not more.

Here is my essay in Korean (after corrections) and then a translation into English.

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Recording of "Seven Seas" (Rocking Chair):

"The Seven Seas" (Rocking Chair) Lyrics
By Jack the Lad / 1975

Sitting by the fire
In an old rocking chair
Like my grandaddy taught me to do
Listening intently
To the words he had to tell me
Because in my mind
I knew they were true
He said he'd sailed the seven seas
In ships, with tall masted sails
And he'd ridden, from London to Leeds
In one day-!

[Lyrics Continue]

The tedium of our Korean reading class was broken for a spell on Tuesday September 30th.

I will, below, do my utmost to reliably re-create (in translation) the dialogue, as it happened:

Cast of Characters
Nine Students Present (born between 1985 and 1994): Seven Chinese [two absent during the below episode], one Singaporean, one Russian (Siberian ancestry) [absent], three White-Americans. (Those absent this lesson have a habit of disappearing during reading class.) Two of the present Chinese and one American (not me) are featured in this episode.

• [Featured Students]
  
• D.D. : Chinese Female (from somewhere around Shanghai) born circa 1992
  
• J.R. : Chinese Female (from near Xian) born circa 1991
  
• L.A. : American Male (from Texas) born 1985
  

One Korean Teacher (born 1987, I'm told): She is from Gyeongsang Province, the region that produced the generals who ruled South Korea from 1961 through the early 1990s. (Sidebar: I am proud to say that I was the one who figured out her region of origin. It so happened that her Seoul Accent veneer at times slipped away when she got annoyed at students, and Gyeongsang shone through. I later asked her if she was from that province, and she confirmed it). A graduate of Ewha University, the number-one women's university in South Korea. She teaches our class reading.

We sat in a kind of modified semi-circle, with the teacher at the center, and the white board behind her.

Episode 1: In Which the "Obama Origin" Question is Discussed (Yet Again)
One of our reading passages dealt with Kenya. It talked about safaris; wild animals; coffee. The main comprehension questions were knocked out without much difficulty. Then this:

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"Speedy Gonzales" is a song I heard for the first time fifty-two years after it was released. I heard it on satellite radio in my uncle's car in Connecticut, August 2014. It is based on the old cartoon of the same name.

It is a lively and fun song. It would also never, ever, be allowed by today's "gatekeepers of acceptable discourse" in the USA. No way would a major pop singer be allowed to release anything like this today. There are still plenty of acceptable cultural targets of mockery, but this one would today be verboten.

Lyrics below:

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