October 19th

I'm pretty out of touch with a lot of things  happening in America, but I have been keeping up with  my favorite TV shows.

That being said, my very favorite show comes back today (Well, tomorrow...damn you, 14 hour time difference).

October 16th: now on February 7th.

If you don't already, start watching Community. Now. Go. I'll wait.





Update: in case you were wondering, here's the full list of TV shows I've been keeping up with:
The Office 
Parks and Recreation
30 Rock (moment of silence...)
Smash
Homeland (omg)
New Girl (omg for a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT REASON)
The Mindy Project
Grey's Anatomy
Modern Family
How I Met Your Mother

and now, of course, Community.

A Musical Interlude

Korea has many.. ahem.. unique features. Some might call them quirks. Whatever you call them, they're little details that sometimes have a big(ish) effect on your day.

My personal favorite is the bathroom music. At my school, there's a speaker in the bathroom. It's motion-activated so when someone walks in, it starts playing a selection of classical music. I have no idea where it gets the music (radio? endless tape loop in the main office?), but it's always something classical. 

Occasionally this has a very strange effect on me. My years of playing in various symphony orchestras have gifted me with an intimate familiarity of a significant number of popular classical pieces. So when I go to the bathroom and a piece of music comes on that I've played, it immediately triggers memories that I generally haven't accessed in years. All of a sudden, I'm not standing in the girls' bathroom of a Korean elementary school. I'm practicing the tricky rhythms of  "Hoedown" from Rodeo by Aaron Copland with my high school symphony, blasting through Beethoven's 5th during my apprenticeship with my hometown professional symphony, or agonizing over my tiny solo in Dvorak's New World Symphony with the community orchestra I played with in Boston. The effect is immediate and sometimes leaves me shocked that I can even remember those days.

So far, I haven't recognized any of the music I've heard in the ladies' room today, but it's only 9:30am. The day is young and ripe for a flashback. 

Urban Mountaineering

The picture below is the view from the hallway window at school. If you look very closely, there's a small pagoda on top of that little mountain in the distance. On Wednesday, I decided to try to go there.

My quest took me through increasingly narrow streets that slowly wound uphill.

Eventually, I reached a dead end. There was no way to keep going up on the streets. I could see the hilltop looming just beyond these stairs, so I took a deep breath... and started to climb.

and climb...

and climb and climb.

Eventually I came to this: A quaint, tree-filled park perched at the top of the hill.

It was a little oasis smack dab in the middle of northeast Seoul-- which is otherwise not very pretty.

I followed the path for a few minutes before I rounded a corner and saw this:

I had reached my destination! I looked out at the city below and low and behold, there was my school nestled among the hanok roofs and dilapidated buildings.

Mission accomplished.

On Our Northern Neighbors

There's been some chatter in the news recently about Seoul's grumbly northern neighbor.

Here's the prevailing feeling here about North Korea.

NOOOOOOO

So I've been whiling away my deskwarming week by bringing episodes of TV shows to school on a thumb drive to watch. I'm almost done with season 1 of Homeland.

This morning I accidentally left the thumb drive in my apartment.

K-Mystery Solved! (Caution: Science Ahead)

I think I've solved the mystery of the other hot water problem.  A lovely reader pointed out to me that I had neglected to account for the flow of water through pipes-- specifically the idea that pipes have a threshold for how much water can flow through them at any given moment (at least, for our purposes they do).

This is the missing piece to the puzzle! If I turn up my water pressure higher than the maximum rate at which hot water can flow through the pipe from my heater to the shower, the plumbing is going to add more cold water to the flow to make up the difference. This is assuming that the maximum flow of cold water is higher than the maximum flow of hot water, which is a pretty safe assumption since cold water is essentially an unlimited resource here.

Conclusion: If I drop the shower pressure to be at or below the maximum hot water pipe capacity, I can have as much hot water as I want.

Not nerdy enough for you? Fear not, I also graphed it. The top graph illustrates the theoretical ideal water pressure for a lukewarm shower (equal parts hot and cold water). The bottom one illustrates the theoretical ideal water pressure for a VERY hot shower (much more hot water than cold water).

*drops mic, walks out*

K-Fail: The *Other* Hot Water Problem

This isn't really a K-fail, more of a K-mystery.

For months, I was dealing with a strange phenomenon. When I turned on my shower, I would have medium-hot water for approximately two minutes, at which point it would turn cold. You can imagine how unpleasant this was in an unheated bathroom in the dead of winter. My hygiene may have suffered slightly. I found myself showering at the gym a lot-- choosing the stares of old Korean women over the inhumane conditions of my own shower.

It wasn't until about 3 weeks ago that a friend of mine let me in on what is apparently an open secret in Korea: When showering, don't turn the water pressure on all the way. Only turn it about 80% on. I tried it, and was treated to a scalding (seriously: face-meltingly hot) shower that lasted (seemingly) forever. I was appalled. I still am. There is no logical reason for this to be happening.

First of all, my apartment is heated by hot water. It's pumped through the pipes under my floor that make up the ondol system I have gushed (pun intended) about frequently. My floor heats up approximately to the temperature of the heated seat in a car. This is no lukewarm rubber water bottle. That water is hot.

It stands to reason, therefore, that there would be enough of the stuff to give me more than 2 minutes of a  moderately hot shower at full pressure.

But say there isn't. Let's say that there is a limited quantity of hot water, and the pressure at which I run my shower determines how long I can take a hot shower. The math still doesn't add up. By reducing my water pressure by about 20%, I figure I should be able to extend my shower by about the same amount. Along those lines, the more I reduce my pressure, the longer my shower should be. But so far, I haven't found a significant difference between, say 50% water pressure and 80% water pressure. They both result in a very hot shower lasting around 40 minutes. Yet, if I turn the water up to full pressure, it turns cold in mere moments.

Let's keep my carbon footprint out of this for now. It's been really cold here, ok? Like... really, really cold. Also remember that I was taking 2-minute showers for months.

This is so baffling to me that I even tried to figure out a mathematical formula to illustrate the relationship between water pressure and length of hot shower. Seeing as I haven't taken math since junior year of high school, I obviously failed miserably.

The only theory that works is one posited by my more mathematically-inclined friend. She suggested that the lower pressure gives the heater time to heat up more water. While this makes sense, it doesn't explain the giant discrepancy between 80% and full power, or the fact that the water coming out is SO BOILING LAVA HOT that it should take much longer to heat up than the few moments a slight change in water pressure can give. Water has a high specific heat, meaning it takes a long time and/or a  lot of energy to heat up.  (How you like me now, Mr. Borland*?!) We've established that my water heater is powerful, but it's not a miracle worker. Moreover, if it's so powerful, how come it just can't heat up water fast enough for me to take a shower at full power?

Anyway, this is an ongoing conundrum for me, albeit one I thoroughly enjoy testing now that I can take gloriously hot showers.

K-mystery.

*Mr. Borland was my high school freshman science teacher. We loathed each other despite the 95% I got in his class.