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Before marrying my wife I made her promise that she'd shoot me if I ever had to wear diapers. Screw the money, the assets or the non-compete clause, but I insisted on this one being in the pre-nup. In the last year, though, I've become less committed to this premise and, as a result, now spend my time running away from a shotgun-toting spouse. This, as you may know from experience, makes changing one's own diapers damned difficult.

If I were Korean, I'd now be speaking at the level of a three year-old, such are the skills I acquired in my first term of Korean language studies at Seoul National University. Given that I was barely at fetus-level in early March, this isn't bad and at least I can ask people to change my dirty diapers now, whereas before I just sat down and cried and waited for the first woman in a nurse's outfit - though she didn't have to be a nurse - to come and change them.

Today, in a fresh pair of Depends, I took the last of my final exams for this spring semester, putting an end to ten weeks of time frittered away. At the lowest levels of language study, you generally learn just enough to make you realize how much you, in fact, don't know, and I'm not sure I even learned that much over the course of this term. I am a master of not taking advantage of the opportunities at hand and at no time was this more evident than the spring of 2007. How else to explain the fact that, even with a Korean wife and Korean in-laws who don't speak English, I didn't have a perfect score on my final exams. No excuse for that.

And anyway, explanations don't excuse and excuses don't explain.

But...

I've had to overcome the fact that unlike Scarlett Johansson when I first met her, the Korean language hasn't charmed me yet. That most irritating element of Korea - hierarchy - is built right into the language, such that you can't, for example, refer to your grandfather's house as his "house." No, you have to use a different word for house, one that translates best into English as "silver-guilded igloo in the sky." Nor, come to that, can you say that your grandmother eats. No indeed, she merely thinks of food and thereby finds sustenance, after which she sleeps, though, in the Korean language, she doesn't actually sleep. I'll stop there but the list, to my daily chagrin, goes on. Oddly enough, though, there doesn't seem to be a special noun for my grandparents' toilet or a verb for their actually crap-taking. Nice to know that Grandad can still drop a deuce like the rest of us.

Fortunately, my wife has guaranteed me that I will pull perfect marks in the upcoming summer term, but if not, she's promised to shoot me.

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The Genetics of an Idiot

As I headed into Seolleung Station in Seoul today there was a group of three women carrying on a friendly conversation - in the middle of the blasted stairs. Blind to the mobs of evening commuters trying to get around them and catch the next train, these three smiled, laughed and earned themselves two more Supersized orders of Bad Karma. Too bad, then, that Buddhism in Korea is fading fast, otherwise these women would've have been rightly reincarnated as one of the hundreds of people in the scrum forming behind them.

There has long been a theory that Native Americans, Japanese, Chinese and Mongolians have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, that their bodies lack a certain gene that protects against heavy drinking. While being skeptical of theories that substitute genetics for individual choice, I have nevertheless developed a hypothesis of my own over the past five years: Koreans have no goddamn concept of spatial relationships. I don't mean that all Koreans suffer from this affliction but, like male baldness, it is all too common.

I've based my findings in this area on several observations. First, there is a widely-held belief amongst Koreans that two objects can occupy the same space simultaneously, such that a driver who stops his car in the crosswalk will present no impediment to a pedestrian crossing the street. As well, the top and bottom of escalators seems to be a favorite place in Korea for scheduling appointments, changing baby diapers, or for just pondering the slings and arrows of a cruel world. When I first arrived in Korea, I put these problems down to lousy driving or rudeness on the part of the people creating the obstacle, but after much research I see that I was being harsh. It's simply inborn and they can't help it.

In addition, I've documented numerous cases of what I call "directional blindness." Most societies observe the "out-before-in" rule of subway trains - that is, the passengers wishing to exit the train are allowed to do so before those entering rush in and jostle for the last remaining seat. Again, though, not in Korea, where the fact that two bodies cannot pass through the same space at the same time without one giving way to the other is in notable absence. Lucky for me, then, that my Scottish genes gave me 15 cm and about 10 kg on most Korean men, making my exit from the subway easier for me, if not for those trying to push their way in. That same Highland DNA, as you might imagine, makes clearing the grandmothers out of my way even easier.

Other supporting evidence for my latest theory include:

• There is, as the name implies, a direct relationship between sidewalks and walking: sidewalks are a space designed for pedestrians, not for motorcycles.
• When the train pulls into the station, you don't have to jump the queue and make a mad dash, against exiting passengers, to get into the train. Just calm down: there's enough space for you inside that subway car.

Either we're dealing with a genetic preponderance here or there's a school somewhere in Korea devoted to the art of being an obnoxious son of a bitch, and a search of the local yellow pages has turned up no such listing.

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