This travel story can be read in full in the August/September 2008 issue of Outside's Go.

Angry union workers wearing red headbands and banging gongs, surrounded by riot police armed with plastic kendo swords and Plexiglas shields are a common sight in South Korea. From bank employees to illegal migrant workers and even prostitutes, workers have banded together to defend their livelihoods, taking to the streets to make their voices heard.

However one group of workers, currently numbering about 17,500, has so far kept out of Korea’s highly charged industrial relations, although they have reason to be militant. They are English language teachers from Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Some now feel that the time has come to speak with a unified voice against poor working conditions.

The Association for Teachers of English (Atek), co-founded in March by Tom Rainey-Smith of New Zealand and the Canadian Jason Thomas, aims to provide that voice. Described as a union in the Korean press, Atek is careful to avoid that label, preferring to characterise itself as a professional association.

According to Atek’s mission statement, it aims to represent the opinions of teachers, to advance English language education as a profession through ethics and best practices and to improve living and working conditions. It will represent its members across the wide spectrum of Korea’s education industry and provide a community for teachers to advance shared goals.

Rest the rest at the Guardian Weekly.

As the first American journalist to come to the Dragon Moors, I was asked why I wanted to visit this particular region of the demilitarized zone (DMZ). In the entire length of the 154-mile long DMZ, the Dragon Moors is perhaps the most ecologically pure area. It is the only alpine wetland in Korea, and has been designated a “wetland of international importance.” Located 3,900 feet above the sea level on Daeam Mountain, it is composed of two peat bogs that have formed over the last 5,000 years. The wetland holds botanical specimens that cannot be seen anywhere else in Korea: prairie sphagnum, meadowsweet, Siberian geraniums, pitcher plants, sundew, buckbean, rushes, two-flower violet, Arctic starflower, catchfly and Hanabusaya asiatica , an endangered perennial herb.

The story can be read in full in the Spring 2008 issue of the Earth Island Journal.

The beer may be brewed in North Korea but the brewery is British. In 2000, North Korea purchased the Ushers Brewery of Wiltshire for £1.5 million, and sent twelve engineers to dismantle and ship the entire 500,000-barrel plant. Two years later, the state-owned brewery was in production and in 2005, they exported Taedonggang to South Korea.

Named after the Taedong River that flows through the capital city, some of the 500 milliliter bottles are green, others are brown, but they have one thing in common: they have a rough-handled appearance from being recycled many times over after surviving numerous drinking bouts. The bottle caps can be pinched in half, as if the state-owned brewery is trying to skimp on aluminum. There is even a warning on the label—that too much drinking can cause liver problems and that there is a higher accident rate when driving under the influence; an ironic statement coming from a land of empty boulevards where few citizens own vehicles.

For beer connoisseurs, it holds 5% alcohol content and when compared with other lagers on the world stage, it might earn only a friendly shrug but it is not a beer that one would turn away on a hot summer day. With the first drink there is a slight absence of taste but as soon as you swallow, the beery backwash pleasantly reveals itself on your palate. Some American and European expats based in South Korea consider it a step up from the watery domestic lagers.

Kim Jong-il, the dictator of North Korea and a Hennessey cognac drinker, gave the beer his approval after the brewery first opened. According to a report by the Korean Central News Agency, Kim "noted with great pleasure that it has now become possible to supply more fresh beer to people in all seasons."

A far-reaching overhaul of South Korea's English education system announced last week by Lee Myung-bak, the country's newly elected president, has caused consternation among teachers and provoked a major political challenge even before his official inauguration.

The five-year plan to radically change the way English is taught in schools, including a call for all subjects to be taught in English, is being backed by a $4.2bn budget. But even the offer to shift the cost of teaching children from increasingly burdened families to the state-school system has been met with scepticism from parents who see it as increasing competitiveness in the education system.

A month after winning December's election with a comfortable majority, Lee, a former mayor of Seoul and a Hyundai Construction executive, raised the issue of English education to an equal footing with national priorities, such as economic prosperity and peace with North Korea. Announcing his plan, Lee and his transition team said that it was a key to achieving international competitiveness.

Read the rest at the Guardian Weekly

Groups of loosely organized South Korean netizens regularly fire off thousands of emails in an effort to promote their country’s national image and rectify what they consider to be grave mistakes about Korean history, geography, and culture. Depending upon how you view them, these folks are either selfstyled “cyber factcheckers” or hypernationalistic spammers. One such group is the Voluntary Agency Network of Korea (VANK). Originally founded as an international pen pal organization, VANK’s mission no longer involves friendly exchange. Instead, its members scour Web sites for “errors” about Korea, then barrage violators with protest emails. For instance, VANK wages a continual campaign to change the name of the Sea of Japan to the East Sea. “We are aware that some people criticize us as nothing but nationalists who give onesided facts to foreigners. But it is a misconception,” says Park GiTae, VANK’s founder and director.

Read the rest at Foreign Policy.

Read the rest at
Guardian Weekly

It's one of the better getaways in South Korea.

On Friday morning, December 7th, the Hebei Spirit, a Hong Kong-registered single-hulled oil tanker was at anchor when it was struck by a tugboat powering a barge that held a massive crane atop its deck. It punched three holes in the tanker's hull and the result would be the worst oil spill in South Korean history.

View the photographs and text at Asia Sentinel.

They range from the river city of Wuhan, the lake district of Hangzhou and Chengdu, the panda capital of China. Don't forget about Tianjin. And the centerpiece, of course, is the massive metropolis of Shanghai, home to the tournament's opening and closing ceremonies and the Cup finals.

Here is a traveler's overview of host cities as the World Cup comes to China Sept. 10-30:

Read the rest at ESPN.

Yes, semi-snowless could be an adjective to describe the countryside of PyeongChang county. Most sorely lacking is snow, and snow is needed to make a mountain town that people want to visit. South Korean winters are dry and precipitation is scarce. Snow comes in spurts and there are a few good dumpings a year and then the white stuff quickly melts off.

I was fly-fishing a stream in the PyeongChang region this winter. I wore a light shirt in the afternoon and mayflies hatched from the water. The ground was barren, brown and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) inspection team was arriving the upcoming weekend. The only snow to be seen held tight on the upper reaches of north-facing mountain peaks. It was one of the warmest winters on record.

There are some regional snow festivals in Korea (in Taebaaek and Naejangsan) and because of the lack of regular snowfall, festival activities often risk being canceled. There is one account of organizers resorting to rituals offering cow heads as a sacrifice for snow from the sky. Now and then there is a heavy snowfall, which usually put roadways into total chaos, and just before the IOC team arrived in PyeongChang last February, they luckily got the snow they prayed for. If the IOC team had arrived a week earlier, they would have laughed and returned to the plane.

Read the rest at Asia Times

The latest frontier in the country’s quest for robotic supremacy? Its border with Kim Jong Il’s Hermit Kingdom. The state-run Agency for Defense Development is spending $35 million to develop three types of robots—one each for mine detection and removal, surveillance, and combat—which it hopes to begin deploying to the 155-mile-long demilitarized zone later this year.

Read the rest at Foreign Policy.

The 2007 market status report of the South Korean wind power industry can be read in full at Windpower Monthly.

Lady was her name and, with big eyes and honey brown tresses, she was the cocker spaniel that entered American consciousness in 1955. Her owner: Walt Disney. She was the co-star in animation film Lady and the Tramp, and whether the Disney crew knew it or not, they were glamorizing a breed that had already reached a height of popularity no other breed has matched since.

The American cocker spaniel held the number one spot for A.K.C. registrations from 1936 to 1952. Later they were at the top of the list from 1983 to 1990 for a total of 23 years as America's most popular purebred.

The popularity of the breed translated into many things over the years: because of their undeniable cute looks they excelled in the show ring and were bred likewise. The popularity meant market demand, and the American cocker breed became associated with unscrupulous puppy mills that bred cockers with little regard for conformation, health concerns or hunting abilities.

Among bird hunters, the prevailing sentiment was that American cockers were diminished as sporting breed because of the emphasis of being a home companion and a show ring star. In his book, A Rough Shooting Dog, Charles Fergus wrote, "The American cocker was once a superior grouse and woodcock dog. Today it is a pop-eyed lap pet with a penchant for pissing on the carpet." This sorry sentence is a biased cheap shot on American cockers in an otherwise brilliant memoir of upland hunting.

The American cocker spaniel has a long history as a hunting dog, and while they have been looked upon as an over popularized house pet, handfuls of bird hunters across the United States continue to train and bred the American cocker for their field abilities.

Read the rest at Outdoor Library

And when it comes to crows, neatness isn't the only concern, as dive-bombings have been known to leave Singaporeans smarting.

But the birds aren't the ones drawing blood.

In 2006, at the invitation of the government, volunteers from the Singapore Gun Club culled approximately 1,025 crows—down slightly from 2005's tally of 1,650. The club's highest annual tally was 14,370 in 2001.

The official culling program began in 1973. When traps and poison failed to work, shooting became the preferred method for controlling the crow population. At first military marksmen were used, but in 1982 the Ministry of the Environment invited Singapore Gun Club members to take their best shots at the birds.

Due to strict gun regulations, few Singaporeans own firearms, so club members were the only private citizens in the country that authorities could turn to for help.

Read the rest at National Geographic News