I went to Phuket, again.

I love Phuket. I love the food, the massages, the people, riding a scooter, watching people train Muay Thai and of course, the beaches!

After a long overnight ferry ride from Koh Tao, I stayed in Phuket for 5 days.

I have a lovely Thai friend there and a friend that I had in Mokpo is living in Phuket for 6 months so I caught up with them and enjoyed many days on the beach, snorkeling, eating, shopping and getting massages.

Paradise.

I went to Koh Tao and now I can scuba dive

My good friend Erin and I decided way back in September that we wanted to get our Open Water scuba diving certification. The long process of which dive school to choose begun.

We ended up heading to Koh Tao which is apparently THE place to go scuba diving in Thailand (aside from the Similan islands) and stayed at Asia Divers where our instructor was this very colorful hippy from a small town outside of London.

I started off in the pool ok but then when we started doing some skills involving taking off our masks I started to freak out a little.

I didn't think that I was going to make it through the rest of the course and was pretty down on myself.

Long story short, I made it through the course and am very happy that I did.

I knew that I would be a little scared but I got through it.

Erin and I went on 2 more dives when we got to the Philippines. One was absolutely beautiful and was the best dive I had been on (out of the whopping 6 that I've done haha) and the other was a night dive which wasn't as cool as I thought it was going to be and I got a little bit of vertigo which wasn't cool at all.

Anyway, I can now scuba dive, Koh Tao is awesome and I will check out some diving this summer here in Korea on Jeju-do island.

Studying Under a Desk in Seoul By Jason Lim

In the 1970's, elementary schools in South Korea were called the ``National People's Schools" and the curriculum consisted of equal parts academic subjects and anti-communist propaganda.

The Korean War was still fresh in our parents' minds who had suffered through it when they were teenagers, and everyone had several uncles or cousins who had been killed by the dreaded North Korean People's Army.
The South Korean government told us constantly that the big bad North Korean bear would soon come down to devour us once and for all and subject us to the dreaded Red Communism, which was the closest you could get to hell on earth. Therefore, going to elementary school in South Korea in the 1970s had inevitable consequences. Not only were we subject to anti-communist diatribes and over-the-top signs warning against North Korean spies, but we also had to practice escaping the school grounds and forming cadres of Homeland Defense Youth Corps in case of a communist invasion; our homeroom teachers were also our Homeland Defense Corp captains, giving a whole new meaning to classroom discipline.

But the most fun was when we had the weekly air raid warnings. The piercing siren would go off and the race would begin. Like Olympic finalists for the 100-meter dash, we would all bolt from our seats and run down stairs into the basement as quickly as we could and crawl under the wooden desks that lay in neat rows. Under the desks, we would squat with our heads hunched over and our hands holding one another tightly, as we were taught.

Although the teachers always yelled at us frantically to be quiet and calm, these exercises always involved a lot of giggling and outright shouts of joy. This was our chance to break the monotony of the classroom and temporarily escape from the suffocating despotism of the teachers. Even better, this was our chance to crawl next to that pretty girl from the class that you had the big crush on and hold her hand for a while until the all-clear siren sounded, which you couldn't hear because of the delightful pounding in your head.
You almost wished that the air raid was for real because you could get to hold on to her hand a little longer and even become her knight in shining armor against the invading communist hordes. I still remember the name of my air-drill princess in the third grade at Kyungbok Elementary School: Kim Ji-hye. Boy, was she pretty!Then reality intruded and it was time to go back to class. But we always made a stop at the school bank after these air raid warnings.

Every kid had a personal bank account and we had to deposit 10 won every week after the air raid warnings, beaming with youthful pride at the sight of the growing balance while our ears still rang with the echoes of the siren. Our teachers told us that we were the future heroes of South Korea, entrusted with the sacred mission to pull South Korea out of its miserable poverty and surpass North Korea at all costs.
Armed with such exhortations and driven by paranoid fear and manic industry, South Korea went from the second poorest country in the world to becoming the 11th largest economy in the world today, leaving North Korea in the dust heaps of history. But I guess we can never really leave the past behind, even when we were raised in such an atmosphere of hate and fear.

Certainly not when you are connected by a bond of blood and 5,000 years of history. So, we will soon mark the beginning of the second summit between the leaders of South and North Korea. The situation in Northeast Asia is as complicated as they have ever been, with the six-party talks trying to move forward amidst existing geopolitical dynamics and nuclear technological complexities.But behind the present complexity seems to lay the inevitability of the brotherhood that connects the two Koreas, a connection that will ultimately define the future of the Korean people, despite the current obstacles and past hatreds that seem intractable at times.
And that's where the hope springs eternal. Best wishes to the leaders of South and North Korea in healing this division that continues to echo in our collective soul so powerfully. Hopefully, our children won't have to hold hands crouched under their desks.