Since my arrival in South Korea my dad has been a tid bit panicked about this whole situation with North Korea. In fact, he emailed me this article today:

North Korea Warns Of Live-Fire Drills Near South

It is a little disconcerting, I have to agree. No one likes to be sitting a mere 300 miles away from one of the most reclusive possibly combative countries in the world. I doubt even the Big Mouse in the Sky knows exactly what's going on beyond the DMZ...

A word about that statement actually. My roommate has this creepy mouse (I call it a rat) puppet that she talks with using an equally creepy voice. She's quite the eccentric thing. Anyway, whenever something is going badly she'll say "Oh, please Big Mouse in the Sky..." (in her funny Kiwi accent) before asking for what she wants. Like last night, when our toilet was overflowing (the plumbing in this dorm is horrible, and they failed to inform us that we're not supposed to flush our toilet paper) she screamed "Oh please Big Mouse in the Sky don't let this poo-water flood all over our room!" Amazingly, it stopped. Maybe he's listening, I don't know. Regardless of who intervened in the potential flooding, this nice Korean janitor fixed the pipes after giving us a stern Korean talking-to about what I would assume was toilet paper use....

Anyway, if you read that article, it was written Friday, and talks about North Korea test firing some kind of artillery near the South Korean borders from Saturday to Monday. Here in Korea, it is now Tuesday. When I googled this, it appears that CNN, Reuters and the BBC all saw this as a big deal and were a bit worked up (and therefor must have gotten my dad worked up). Surprisingly, here in South Korea, no one ever said a word about it. Not on the news, not in our classes, not in the bars, nowhere. We even took a Korean history class yesterday where we discussed the North and South division from a historical perspective, but it appears that when it comes to contemporary issues people just don't talk about it. In fact, our presenter spent more time lamenting about how much Koreans hate Japanese people (their largest cultural and economic trade partners) than talking about the military-driven communist nation to the north. Why? I'm not really sure. But since I can't answer to the complexities of North/South Korean relations, let me instead present your names in Korean that I doodled during a particularly boring lesson about... ready for some irony?? LISTENING!