soots me fine ...

nope, we haven't had the baby yet.

and that's just fine by us since we haven't exactly finished shopping yet. i want to buy a baby bathtub but my endearingly frugal husband believes that this will suffice. we are currently at [unspoken] war over this minor detail, and i have my doubts that it will be resolved anytime soon. i may have to start whinning.

so, my official due date is in 4 days but Mr. Lee and i are highly sceptical that our Little Chopstick will be appearing so soon. i still feel so good! two examples: i can still touch my toes and hike up a hill carrying a book-laden backpack and two lattes (which i did today). and, i can still roll from bed, get dressed, grab my passport, my shoes, a wet towel and flee a burning building without experiencing a single braxton-hicks contraction (as i did last night; story to follow). are those the actions of a woman about to have a baby? i don't think so. now, this is my first child-bearing experience but it seems to me that women rarely go into labour until they're SO uncomfortable and sleepless and swollen that they start longing for the contractions to begin. and i'm not anywhere near the point of wishing for that. yet.

so, on to the fire, which i know is immensely more interesting than my inability to produce a baby on time ...

in brief

: the teacher's dormitory building caught on fire last night, the fire department came and put it out, nobody was hurt but there was a lot of smoke and noise, and quite an interesting cluster of people hanging around campus at 6:00 in the morning.

some interesting tidbits about the fire though: the foreign teachers here live in the Design Building (on the 6th & 7th floors) while the students work and study on the 1st through 5th floors. however, being healthy & robust university students, they don't always study and work. they also play soccer and drink in the classrooms - and many of them actually don't go home but prefer to sleep on campus. last night, for example, the fire was started on the 5th floor by a student who forgot to put out his cigarette after he had finished smoking it. now, i don’t want to jump on the ‘slay the students’ bandwagon that has been pitching around campus all day – but i do rather wish that they wouldn’t smoke inside the building, near all the flammable paint supplies, at a time of night that could cause even the shrewdest among us to make daft choices and forget to do the most obvious of things. natch?

also:

!%&@, can I ever SLEEP these days! i’ve never really been a heavy sleeper, and in fact i've often considered my daily slumber to be something of a chore, so my recent ability to ... just pass out ... and stay asleep for 8 or 9 hours in a row is amazing! last night i actually snoozed through a shrieking fire alarm, a building full of smoke, and my neighbours pounding on doors. i only regained consciousness when Mister Lee (really my better half) woke me with a jostle that rattled my teeth. once awake, i was perfectly fine, but it took an awful lot of commotion to get me there. i actually slept through a fire.

ergo, in honour of our small (well, big-ish) fire last night, i've changed the musical line-up for today. i had originally intended to post a few songs written about korea, and to blather about the music scene here, but i guess that'll have to wait til next week. for today, i give you:

Arcade Fire - wake up
Firey Furnaces - tropical
Sarah Harmer - i am aglow

and to prove that i have NOT lost my sense of humour:

remember in elementary school you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file from smallest to tallest? what is the logic in that? what, do tall people burn slower? Warren Hutcherson

and that's all for me on this loverly monday. hope everyone has a good week, - and hopefully this time next week i'll be sausage-like swollen, achey and ready to go!

til then ...

The Delgados - keep on breathing

...

the last daze ...

well, Mr. Lee and i went to immigration today in an attempt to change my visa status from an E2 to an F2. for those of you who are not in korea, or (understandably) not hip to immigration lingo, this means that i tried to change my employment status to that of a person who is a) not a korean citizen but is b) legally employed in korea and c) married to a korean man.
the benefits of an F2 are simple: i can work at as many jobs as i want (for example, at the university and at a bait shop or whathaveyou) and also it wipes out the redundancy of having to renew my employment status every february. it's not a big deal - but we figured: the baby will be korean and canadian, so it would be in our best interests to make my position in korea more secure, wouldn't it? we figured: how hard can it be?? so we went online, downloaded a few forms, made some phone calls, stopped by the bank, photocopied our papers, stuffed our passports in a bag and hiked off to immigration. the sun was shining and the temperature was a perfect 19 degrees. birds were singing and EVERYTHING! it felt like an auspicious beginning to a normal, errand-filled day ...

well, ha ha ha ha ha and HA, to us. and, in hindsight, what in the HELL were we thinking? i'm, like, 10 days away from my due date and although i still feel pretty spry, a korean immigration office is no place for a pregnant foreign woman and her younger denim-clad korean husband. no place at all!

i'm smiling as i type this but i wasn't smiling earlier, let me tell you. i want this blog to be a happy-ish little collection of oddities so i'll not linger over this rant too long but i will say that we left immigration empty-handed, red-faced, and feeling like we had been caught trying to fraud our way onto a NASA space shuttle. oh, korea.

although immigration policy doesn't formally stipulate this anywhere, we were told to come back when we had: proof of land and house ownership, proof that my officially stamped work visa from a korean university was real, proof that our stamped and sealed marriage certificate from the canadian embassy was real - and official verification from the bank stating that we have at least 30,000 dollars in savings. and those would be 30 thousand canadian dollars.

now, anyone who has traveled anywhere outside, say, Central Pleasantville knows that rules vary from place to place, from time to time, that people have bad days, that people in suits and ties get better treatment than, say, skateboarders and students and that many korean immigration officials are corrupt, small, smelly men who like to insinuate lewd things about foreign women. these things are widely known. i just wish to hell that the man in our immigration office today hadn't sneered quite so much, hadn't referred to me as filipino and russian, while holding my canadian passport, hadn't loudly debabted the authenticity of my work visa - and most of all - hadn't made Mr. Lee feel like an unemployed indigent who was requesting a bit more gruel for his supper with prostitutes. rat bastards, as my friend melanie used to say. rat bastards!

well.

i think i just gave myself a contraction so i'll stop there. anyway, i don't really need to change my visa status, and so that means i don't have to bother with immigration for at least another 7 or 8 months. maybe we can bring the baby with us next time and somehow coax her to spit up on anyone with pinstripes?

or, OR, better yet, maybe we should start availing ourselves of the burgeoning "honour industry", in order to gain more respect and to increase our productivity. for a full story, click here, but basically the honour industry (apparently a very trendy enterprise) allows people to rent snazzy cars, fake secretaries, personal assistants and even classy handbags and designer sunglasses, for a reasonable fee. no wonder our immigration official from this afternoon questioned our marriage licence - since the "korean honour industry" (i can't even type that without smirking) also rents out well-wishers who attend weddings and offer fake congratulations to (hopefully) real couples.

sheesh.

anyway, two songs for today, one in english and one in korean, both, i feel, aptly titled. the korean song is from delispice's first (of five) albums and the repetitive, catchy bit ("nuh rae moksori ga duryuh") just means "i can't hear your voice, i can't hear your voice". and how i wish i could have plugged my ears and chanted that one in the immigration office today.

the english song from tripping daisy (a dallas, texas band) is from their 1998 album 'jesus hits like the atom bomb' and was the first song i listened to when we came home today. power pop= pretty happy feelings.

Delispice - chow chow.

Tripping Daisy - sonic bloom.


also, a couple of new snapshots, both taken yesterday. the one at the top is actually me covering my eyes from the flash, and is not my attempt to look sexy, although Mr. Lee claims that my sexiness is a "ubiquitious" and pervasive trait. and he's SO right!

and this picture was taken last night, while i was out cold junk. it isn't difficult for me to fall asleep, or to stay asleep these days - contrary to what people say about late-late pregnancy. maybe i'll continue to be an exception and will have the world's first-ever painless labour?

sigh. we can only hope ...

i still have no idea how dong jin managed to take this shot with no camera flash, since both his arms are doing their best work (i.e keeping me comfortable). maybe he hung the camera from the ceiling? anyway, here's hoping everyone has a good week, gets lots of sleep ... and stays away from immigration offices and bad, bad men.

ciao-chow...

waddle you do ... ??

i've lost count of the number of people who have asked me if my husband is disappointed because we're having a girl. or the number of people who, upon discovering that i'm not having a boy, try to show their support by saying something like:

that's ok, better luck next time!

or, even funnier:

well, it's good to have a girl first. you'll have someone to take care of you when you're older.

and so on. but what's worse, and not AT ALL funny, is that i'm actually starting to feel like i'm giving people bad news when i tell them that we're having a girl. i'm pretty sure this is because most koreans feel disappointed for me - and think i must be lying when i tell them how happy i am. afterall, who wouldn't prefer a boy baby?

this is not just a rhetorical question. a quick look at the stats (WHO, SNU, MOGEF - for those of you who want to practice your acronyms) all agree that even though the ratio of girls 2 boys has stabilized somewhat in korea - girls babies still are not the preferred choice for post-confucian families. in fact, they don't seem to be the preferred choice for anyone in korea, except Mr. Lee and myself. no wonder people look pityingly at me when i say "no, really, no, no, we're happy. we wanted a girl".

According to Sang-yong Song in Bioethics in Asia:

For first births, the sex ratio ... remained within the range of 105 to 109 (boys to every 100 girls) throughout the period 1980 to 1994. By contrast the sex ratio of second births jumped from 106 to 117 in 1990. While the proportion of third and higher order births in Korea is not large, the sex ratios at these orders are shown to be markedly distorted. For example, since 1990 there has been about two male births for every female birth at these orders.

not surprisingly, korea also has very advanced ultrasound equipment as well as a stunningly high rate of sex-selective abortions. even though the use of screening technologies for sex identification was banned 1987 - doctors are obviously still talking and still telling. my own doctor, i would like to say, did not actually tell us that we were having a girl, but, after two months of my wide-eyed pleading, finally relented and rather ingeniously found a way of communicating that the Wee Unborn did NOT have certain body parts. like a penis, for example. of course, since my korean friends and work-mates (and my in-laws and my students and virtually every stranger who encounters me in the street or a grocery line) aaalllll ask me if i'm having a boy or girl - i assume that the legality of sex identification in korea is a mere technicality. in fact, i'm surprised that my doctor was as reticent as he was.

my philosophical stance on this issue is not very sophisticated and i'd rather leave debate to keener minds (my friend Alexander, for example) but i will say that i wish sex identification screening were only available for nice people who don't care about how many girls they have, and/or for the neurotics like myself, who just like to feel prepared for EVERYTHING. the idea of giving birth is freaky enough - i can't imagine not being able to know what would come out at the end.

like i said, not very sophisticated.

but, one sure thing that this pregnancy-in-korea experience has clarified for me is HOW WONDERFUL MY HUSBAND IS. and i really mean that. not only did he break about a million rules by wooing and marrying me - but he continues to shock and amaze the masses by doing the most profound things. like: buying a baby sling with the very real intention of wearing it, coming to my doctor's appointments with me and talking to his mother about breastfeeding. and, of course, by proclaiming to the world that he's happy about having a baby girl. these are not exactly feats of awe inspiring rebellion by north american standards - but in korea he's a real bona-fide-twenty-four-karat rebel. i think i'll keep him.

this declaration of nuptial love is rather timely, actually, since i've recently been informed that i should be uploading some korean music into the blogsphere. and so i should be! Mr. Lee, who knows how much i cherish music, has been wooing me with songs for a few years now - and so today's musical gems are some of my favourite results from his salacious efforts to win my heart. among other things ...

switchpod (the wonderful site that lets blunt-fingered morons like myself upload mp3s) crashed horribly last week and i couldn't upload songs - but it should be all better now. so enjoy!

and finally, all is well in korea, all is well with the king-murphy-lee contingent ... and we really miss everyone back home ...

Fortune Cookie - ba ram ah rae (under the wind).
Fortune Cookie - hut so dong (much ado about nothing).
Ja Woo Rim - ma wong (hell's king).

tune in next week for more juicy-happy tidbits and unnecessary ellipses ...