i want to tell you about my impression of them in our city when i was still in the philippines.

I grow up in the city that visayan braindoc call his ancestral place.

when i was 19 year old and studying in college i remember there's a lot of koreans in our city. They are all young-17-21 year old.

I never feel threatened of there presence and i never heard of anyone from them who had a fight with natives of the city.

like me they are young, sweet and passionate, and they are easy source of cash to some of my friends for they hire local student who are good in english to teach them written and oral english. to bad my english is poor, i never had a chance to earn money in teaching the language.

often i will see them walk around in the city street in packs and talk very loud and laugh, nobody bother them.

i remember one scene when a group of young koreans fight with another group of young koreans, the fight started in yelling the end up in kicking each other and punching, they soon disperse as security officers of the mall come in, i cant understand what they talkin about but it seem the fight steams up from a girl.

I know one korean guy who marry my cousins friend, they are now living in california for the filipina girl who is a nurse got a job in one of the hospital in cali.

Thanks for that vivid picture-

I don't know why Koreans are settling in the Phillipines-

But I can tell you that there are tons of TV shows here about the Phillipines and about Korean people living there.

Maybe they think it is like a tropical paradise.

It's freezing here in the winter and my students complain about it on a daily basis.

There are thousands of Phillipino people in my neck of the woods- almost all of them work in the local factories-

They work long and hard for not much cash- lots of Russians and Indians with them as well.

Also, in my village there is a Phillipino English teacher, and a very nice Phillipino woman who works as an administrator at the local Police station.

Korea is a rich country, relatively speaking, as you probably know.

11th largest economy in the world.

They hire 30 million foreign English teachers like me.

Well so it seems- Actually I think there are just under 20,000 of us in the country at present.

I secretly believe it's an international public relations ploy, because there's no actual reason for any Korean to learn English.

99 per cent of them will go to University and/or get a job in Korea and never hear or speak another word of English the rest of their lives.

Almost nobody speaks English here. The older Korean English teachers can't even speak English.

They are paying us foreign English teachers embarrassngly high wages, IMO-

I make maybe 30% more than a Korean English teacher, and I'm just starting my third year in the workforce out of University.

My personal experience with the Korean people I've met has been overwhelmingly postive.

Sometimes I have to rough up a few students, but that's "how it's done" here.

<tim> At least they were fighting for something worthwhile ;-) Don't get involved when Koreans are fighting unless you know Tae Kwon Do. Btw, I tested under Master Hong in Manila. He asked me why a Black Belt in karate wanted to learn TKD and I said it was for the kicking techniques.

<i really dont know what there purpose of choosing the philippines as a migration point.>

I know that your into martial arts. when i was in high school i studied martial arts under instructor roldan(base at central philippine university,iloilo city/gym located at cpu).its a shotokan school. i joined local tournament that was held always at depaul college but always loss, from time to time our time though win.

one story that roldan told us is that shotokan win the first world karate compitetion, you remember anything about that? your in martial arts for too long, he showed us picture about it and those founding father of the organization in manila , names i forgot.

theres different kind of karate organization in iloilo city and shotokan belong to philippine karate association, those who belong to PKA engage in competition, other organization had there competition too.

one reason that we always loss is that central philippine university karate team members are very young, 12 to 18 and everybody are student not only that there either studying kung fu( i had chinese friend whos into it)tae kwan doo which i consider an elite discipline then for the instructor fee is very high.most of my friend during karate competition prefer to kick rather than to punch, a kick does not earn big point in karate but punch that connect wins the game, why they kick? because most of them are into tae kwan doo and they most of them say they cant stop the urge to kick.

our instructor is very upset of those tae kwan doo guys i remember that study under him.

meanwhile most of our opponents in other karate clubs are out of school youth, the ones we call tambay, were scared of them, there looks alone can frighten us, lol your fighting guys at the age of 18 to 21 and they look like siga at stambay, i know you understand this zanshin.

i read everything about bruce lee during that time, he is my god, all of my friends are into martial arts.

stories of his tourney exploit inspire us. just like the way i kibitz before during the time wesley so play at corus a,"mananalo si wesley"

roldan will always say we will win.

White to move. Krammy has a lead in development and will be looking for a way to trade down into a deep sleep, right?

click for larger view

Yes, yes- it is not time for <Kramnik> to retire.

Even <Woody> would have had to eat crow on this one.

Deffie uncorked a howler at twinlark chessforum.

<I fully intend to bring the fight to Magnus in my White game>

So the question is "Who was that masked man?" Those testosterone injections must be working.

In Scrabble, you are permitted to "pass", which is why there is no <zugzwang> in Scrabble.

My demented friend <Jim> in Montreal was a regular at our Scrabble games.

He'd often be needed to fill in the fourth spot-

But in all the countless games we played, he passed on every single turn.

Sometimes he'd pass straight off.

Sometimes he'd pass and exchange some or all of his letters, as per the rules.

Sometimes he's study the board purposefully for up to ten minutes, before lifting his head and announcing

"I believe I will pass".

Nobody ever got any kind of actual explanation out of him for his Scrabble strategy.

At the legendary Last Exit Cafe, there were some world class Scrabble players. One of them was World Champion. I loved all games and watched them play a lot. I noticed that they rarely played more than 3 letters at a time. Defense was the name of the game.

<Jess>!

heh

I'm studying a very interesting chapter from Aagaard's TECHNICAL CHESS - and pawnweaknesses are discussed, and I thought of your infamous <FAWN PAWN> series! - which Aagaard is just about to address - heh

I posted some at the Center, if you have time to check out.... speaking of:

How are ya? When is the most hectic period from work over?

Including at least three visits to my Chess club.

However, I was so thirsty to play that I played chess today- very rusty. Took me a while to get up to speed, but I was pleased to perform to my satisfaction.

I was especially pleased that I'm noticing tactical shots and opportunities much more quickly and easily than before I started training on the <Majnu recommended Training Site>.

This is very encouraging to me.

It's no joke- if you put enough work in to tactics training, the patterns really do get "imprinted" in your brain.

It's like magic!!!!

I just replied-

I found myself agreeing with you, as you'll soon see.

Really, really agreeing.

I was busy too this past week, and even fell asleep today from noon to 2am!!

Geez did I need it...

The reason I asked about work is wether you'd have some time off after school finishes, <before> you fly the Mighty Negev, but it sounds like you will catch a plane very soon after school finishes...

I'll send you an emu tomorrow morning here, as I wondered wether you do have some time to "get up for some air" before you "take to the sky..."

(My sense of wordplay is back to like in the old days, hmmm)

Michael - I'll Be There

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCWk... - The finished article - Bucharest 1992

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehal... - a capella - voice harmony extracted

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4Qy... -- 1972

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEgG... - slideshow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ABd... 1987

"I'll be There"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2nt... -- Human Nature

Good series I thought; what a standard!

MAJOR inspiration - Black Or White

SWING IT BABY!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_z3...

Talk about tearing up the pitch....

First time really I took to POP music. (I was a late bloomer ;))

(There's much hiding behind the old face of former boxing champ <Euwe> eh??)

Rightly so.

Shockingly, I used to perform better in Scrabble championships than chess tournaments. This was a source of some embarrassment, so I quit.

There's also a big stylistic gap - a *fissure*, even - between the American and British versions of the game. US Scrabble has always been about game points and winning games: better to win by 99 points to 97 than score ten times that and lose. The Anglo game was about accumulating points (this may have changed since I last played competitively) -- losing a game with 700 points to 750 was a good result.

In my last tournament I got the scrabble version of the brilliancy prize - the highest score on a single turn. It was, I think, 'scumbled' across two treble-word squares, roughly 225 points, with bonus etc.

A typical sequence of scores in this style of game goes [2, 7, 0, 16, 4, 185, 3, 96 ...] rather than the [20, 20, 21, 18, 16 ...] pattern of the recreational game.

I'm glad you did. He has injected some actual human dialog into the otherwise mechanical team game page.