the year in question

I'd spent a greater past of last year in South Korea, as the director of an educational institute. Since there aren't many resources for students to learn English in many parts of the rural areas, I had discovered that implementing a strategy to progress learning in an area where there was a lack of guidance was a bigger challenge than I had originally envisioned. Although South Korea is very much a modern country, with internet cafés on every corner and a producer of semi-conductors, the morale of the younger generation seemed lost in their inability to conform completely to their fast-changing nation. Hence, many students find schools a stifling presence in their lives and the only outlet for their collective despair is online gaming and being dulled by the distractions of their ubiquitous television programming in which families are more aware of pop culture references than what is going on inside a student's head. Television in South Korea isn't merely entertainment or infotainment, but a complete way of life.

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Although its architecture has been rapidly changing, I found something quite subversive about the landscape. Despite its name, "the land of the morning calm," I found underneath the surface was a kind of chaos and instability of a proud nation that was conflicted between two different eras: on one hand, the traditional mindset of the generation before the separation of North and South, and on the other, the overwhelming poverty in cross-generational flux.