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Wednesday Oct 18th,
Usually on Wednesdays, I teach in Seoul, but the
chogyo (administrative workers) told me, via Jae, that
I should go to the Iksan campus today, as there was
going to be a big dress rehearsal for their huge
concerts next week. Jae and I had assumed that the
chogyo would tell my students as well, but I was kind
of worried about it when I boarded the bus in the
morning. So I texted the one Seoul student who speaks
decent English, and it turned out that the chogyo had
mixed up the times with me. The big rehearsal wasn't
going to start until night, and so I was missing my
Seoul students for nothing! Why can't anyone in Korea
be organized about anything? I ended up wasting most
of the day sitting around doing nothing in Iksan,
taught for a total of 2 hours, and couldn't stay for
the rehearsal, because it was too late for the bus!
And now I will have to teach an extra day next week to
do the makeup lessons. Honestly, even Jae will give
me incredibly vague answers to any of my questions 90%
of the time, which means that I always have to go back
and ask more questions, or I simply don't know what's
going on. Is it so hard just to be even a little
organized? |
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Saturday:
Jae had booked me for an out of town gig this weekend,
so I dragged myself out of bed at 5:30am, to catch a
7:30 am bus to Gangjin (I always thought 5:30 was my
bedtime, not my wake-up time!). Since Jae, Ben and
WonSool had to take all the equipment down, there
wasn't room in the car for all of us. Gangjin is as
far south as you can get-- right on the southwest
coast, it takes about 6 hours of driving to get there.
The whole province is very rural, and while there are
some beautiful sights, like temples, hermitages, craft
villages, etc; the region isn't really geared towards
tourism, and you'd be hardpressed to find anyone who
knows any English, or any feasible means of
transportation to get to any of the sights. Anyway,
the guys picked me up from the bus station, and we
started driving up this mountain, the whole time me
thinking what the hell is this gig anyway? Turns out
that the gig was some kind of a festival that took
place at a Buddhist temple (apparently quite a famous
temple at that). I thought that I had been hired as a
guest on Jae's gig, but as we were driving up the
mountain, we kept on seeing these huge signs
advertising MY name, which was kind of a weird
surprise (especially since it's ILLEGAL for me to be
gigging! What a way to keep it on the downlow, just
throw my name all over a bunch of massive signs, and
put my picture in a brochure) So after we got up to
the mountain, the guys had to go back down to get the
drum set and more equipment, so I stayed at the
temple, and looked around, took a little hike in the
mountains, saw some lovely (sarcasm) creatures such as
snakes and lizards, promptly ended my hike, warmed up
my voice, so on. But it ended up taking a really long
time for the guys to get back, so after awhile, I just
sat myself down and people watched. People kept on
realizing that I was the girl from the brochure, and
kept on asking me for pictures and autographs. Almost
creepy!
Anyway, as it turned out, we were sharing the bill
with several other performers, including two
traditional dancers, a soprano, and three really
really really lame Korean pop singers. I was the only
one with a live band, the rest was canned music (Korea
seems to have such a thing with canned music. Doesn't
anybody ever get a band? What's the point? It's like
watching karaoke, except the singing is usually
worse!) There was this young guy singer, who we
learned was the "new big thing for young girls", kind
of what the New Kids on the Block were to my
generation. He performed, and of course he was
terrible, and sang the same old sugary and really lame
ballad kind of stuff that Korean male singers seem so
obsessed with. What was funny was watching the
crowd's reaction--they were screaming and screaming.
While he was performing, a huge crowd was building
behind the stage area, all waiting for autographs.
When he left the stage, they actually swarmed him!
His manager and some police officers had to escort him
away (in my paranoia, I had initially thought that the
police officers were there to bust me and my visa-less
gig!). Ben and I almost got trampled in the rush of
people running after him. He escaped in a van that
almost ran over several people in the process. Makes
me really glad that I will never ever be that famous,
or at the very least, my audience would probably be a
little more sophisticated.
After the show, we drove down to a seafood restaurant
on the shore, to have a celebration with the concert
promoters and some of the performers (Oh Kyoung was
one of the promoters; that's how we got the gig in the
first place). Raw fish, grilled fish, fish covered in
hot sauce, spicy fish soup-- that was the menu for
tonight! It turned out that one of the staff
volunteers was my former private student from last
semester, Ji Eun. She was so cute tonight, turns out
that she has really missed studying with me, but she
is a student at Seoul National University, which is
the Korean equivalent to Harvard, and she just doesn't
have time for lessons right now. After the meal (and
lots of soju and beer) Jae, Ben and Won Sool left to
go back to Seoul.
Oh Kyoung had reserved a bunch of rooms at a hotel for
the staff volunteers, the promoters, and performers,
so I stayed on. After we dropped off our stuff at the
motel, we went to another bar for more drinks. I was
kind of bored, because there was only one person there
who could speak English-- Song Il is a professor at
Seoul National University, and he was one of the
promoters, focusing on the tourism aspect. I felt
kind of awkward, because he was fairly obviously
hitting on me, and it can difficult to subtly avoid
situations like this, when the man is twice your age,
and in a position of some power, and also likely
married (I'm getting quite sick of the inapropriate
hitting-on by students, men twice my age, so on. I'm
tired of being told that I'm beautiful just because
I'm white). Fortunately, all of them were pretty much
lightweights, and the outing didn't last terribly long
before we all went back to our separate rooms. Of
course, as I've probably mentioned, most hotels are
"love motels", geared towards, uh, "coupling". My
hotel room featured a round bed with mirrors on the
base board, and a red light. There was some seriously
loud sex going on in the room above me, so I turned on
the tv to provide some white noise to aid my sleeping!
So all in all, an extremely weird gig, but guess how
much money I made off of it? $800 frickin dollars!
Oh yeah, baby, I'm rich! Since I only had to sing two
songs, that means I'm going at a rate of $400 per
song? Of course, if I get fined by immigration, it'll
cost me all that money . . . |
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