Caveat: Entre Salvadoreños en Los Angeles

My father, brother and I went to a get-together at the home of my dad's friend, Fidel. I enjoyed attempting to resurrect my Spanish and have conversations about politics, life in Korea, etc. with various of Fidel's Salvadorean friends.

Toward the end, a young man named Marlon brought his hand-refurbished electric guitar, and my dad was checking it out. Now, my father is an excellent guitarist and musician, but his genres include folk and bluegrass – in all the time I've known my father (which obviously is from my own childhood) I've never seen him holding an electric guitar. It seemed momentous, portentious, and strange. So I tried to snap a picture.

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My dad is at left. To the right are Marlon, owner of the guitar, and Hollye, my brother's girlfriend. Note that the timestamp from my camera is Seoul time – so it's in the future.

[Update 2013-07-02: My father's friend Fidel finally sent me a picture we had had taken earlier this same day while at Macarthur Park in L.A., showing Fidel, my dad, some guy, and me. I think it's a good group portrait so I'll add it to this post.

Fidel_phil_someguy_jared
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Caveat: Looking for the right books

Dateline: Los Angeles

I was running errands this morning and drove through Burbank and Glendale. There are a lot of memories attached to the places in these locations, so driving along the freeway is like thumbing through a scrapbook.

I've been trying to shop for books for teaching US style curriculum to lower grades, for several friends of mine. They would be used for essentially immersion-style (ESL) teaching with Korean kids, as opposed to the more conventional (and more popular) EFL, where Korean is often leveraged as the "L1" (jargon from the language-teaching field) to teach about English.

Immersion style teaching is much more difficult, but it's very rewarding when applied successfully.

Finding the types of books used in US classrooms is surprisingly difficult – at least in retail. I'm sure there are ways to order them, online, but there seems to be no retail market. What I've had to settle on buying is textbooks and materials targeted at the homeschool market in the US.

I also found an alligator puppet. How can this be bad? I bought it.

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