Today talked politics over a very smellerific lunch of bean paste stew and bean paste stew (one very stinky, the other not quite as much). Myung-soo, Woongil (the 32-year-old with a five year old son) and another fellow whose name I didn't catch decided I should try the stinky bean paste stew, chong gook jang. Very good for the health. But very stinky. Myung-soo said that when she was a child, she wouldn't even go into a house where it had been cooked, it was so smelly.

The day after tomorrow is the presidential election. According to Woongil, it's the second presidential election that doesn't feature a candidate from the military (who could presumably take over the country with the military if he didn't win the election). There are three candidates, Mr. Gwan (liberal), Mr. No (moderate) and Mr. Lee (conservative). The moderate candidate is ahead by about 5 percentage points.

Mr. Lee, the conservative, wants to cut off aid to North Korea, saying that all the rice and food is going to the military anyway. The other two don't want to do that, wishing instead to pursue a relationship.

I interjected: "But isn't it true that the rice IS going to the military?"

"I don't know," said Woongil, and Myung-soo followed with: "Nobody knows for sure. But we shouldn't cut off all aid."

I was about to point out that humanitarian organizations have complained of this problem, but decided not to press the point. I think people in general, when thinking with their hearts, don't really care about the facts. I was talking to my dad about the two high school girls who were killed by a U.S. army tank earlier this year in Seoul, and when I asked him what exactly happened, he said, "It doesn't really matter. The fact is that they are dead and a U.S. army vehicle killed them, so people are angry."

Angry they are. Lots of protests, especially after the military court found the two soldiers innocent.

Have you all heard about this? It's a big deal in Korea, and I do remember reading about it in the U.S. when the deaths first occurred. I've wondered what exactly happened, so on the last day of class, when I had the opportunity to ask a U.S. army officer who was in my Korean language class, I jumped on it. This is what I found out: U.S. soldiers were moving a tank from one location to another (off-base, in Seoul). The driver of this particular type of tank has no peripheral vision, so there is another soldier who serves as his "eyes" and is in communication with him. Unfortunately, there was an equipment malfunction.Tragically, there were two high school girls walking down the street whom the driver did not see.

The officer I talked to said that this kind of equipment malfunction has happened before, and that his questions would be for the soldiers' commanding officer, who should have made sure that the tank was preceded by a car or something that the driver could see.

I didn't get a feeling of too much sadness from the officer, just a kind of matter-of-fact investigatorial sense from him. On the reverse side, I don't get the feeling that Koreans really care too much about what actually happened. Like my dad said, they see two dead girls and two American soldiers, and the soldiers going free when they clearly were responsible for the deaths of the girls (that is not in dispute).

Protests these days center on SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement), which Koreans feel completely favors the U.S. army and completely puts Koreans at a disadvantage. Under the SOFA with Korea, U.S. soldiers accused of misconduct or crime are tried by a U.S. military court, not the host country's legal system. In the past, according to the officer who was in my class, U.S. soldiers have definitely abused the terms of SOFA, getting into trouble with Korean locals, for example, and running back to base, where Koreans have no legal recourse. The area around the U.S. base, Itaewon, has long had an unsavory reputation, he continued, but many of the problems in Itaewon are the same in areas around bases in the U.S.

"It's just a lot more loaded here," I commented.

"Yeah," he replied, with an expression that said: "And how!"

The officer also said that the reason that SOFA conditions are the way they are in Korea is because the Korean legal system is corrupt and doesn't observe the same civil rights as the U.S. (for example, he said, the police can come and take you away to jail without giving reason. I don't know if this is true.) and that SOFA conditions in Europe are different because the legal systems are not as corrupt. I really don't know anything about this, but it doesn't seem outlandish that a military outift would keep the right to punish its members. I mean, I remember the whole scandal several years ago about the American tourist who was caned for chewing gum in -- Thailand, was it? -- but he wasn't employed by the government. Ambassadors have diplomatic immunity, don't they (for better or worse)?

All this doesn't matter, of course, to the protestors, who want the terms of SOFA changed. When I was walking along a market street last weekend, several vendors had "Change SOFA" stickers on their carts. As I've mentioned before, there is an undercurrent of anger about the U.S. presence here that I feel ambivalent about. I wonder how much of it could be solved by sitting down and trying to understand the other point of view and how much is simply irreconcilable.