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Week 40 - Y2 (Dec 3rd to Dec 9th) |
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Sunday Dec 3rd,
Today, I went to Daegu, just for the day-- Mike is
leaving on Thursday, and I wanted to have the chance
to say goodbye in person. Too many goodbyes . . . I
hate goodbyes! He will be missed greatly. I ended up
taking the last train back to Seoul, in other words,
the slow train, which takes 4 hours! It left at
11:30, and I got back to Seoul at 3:30. The train
sucked . . . it was loud, uncomfortable, filled with
fluorescent lighting and bad air circulation.
However, it was worth it to spend the day in Daegu!
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Monday Dec 4th,
So I woke up this morning to a shower absent of hot
water. Thought it was just a onetime fluke . . .
until I got home from Iksan and realized that I didn't
have any heat AT ALL! To make matters worse, my
superintendant is a lazy SOB who hasn't done any of
the required maintenance work on the plumbing in ages,
and had to turn off the water entirely for the whole
night and following morning to do emergency work.
This week is NOT off to a good start.
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Tuesday Dec 5th,
Well, I had a shower using a bottle of water this
morning. It was delightful. Even better, when I came
home from school, I called the super back in to look
at my boiler, and he seemed unconvinced that anything
was even wrong with it. It took me hours to convince
that it wasn't working! Meanwhile, I'm trying to get
ready for my stupid regular gig that I hate with a
passion . . .
Tonight at the club, there was a new act-- Bong Won
hired 2 Filipino girls and a Filipino guy to replace
the singer that quit. They do all cheesy pop songs to
a karaoke tape, and are actually quite terrible, but
the girls are really pretty . . . Anyway, apparently
Bong Won is all up in their face for not doing more
jazz stuff, which interestingly sounds like the exact
opposite complaint he had about my tunes! What the
hell is wrong with this place? Junko, Awee and Andy
have only been there one night and they already want
to quit too.
As far as them being from the Phillipines, I learned
that there's actually quite a lot of Filipino
musicians in Korea-- they get hired by recruiters the
same way English teachers get hired, to work in hotels
or specialized bars, so on. Apparently they can make
a lot more money entertaining in Korea than they can
at home.
In any case, it gives me some comfort to know that
they hate this club too!
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Wednesday Dec 6th,
Final vocal exams in Seoul today. Again, dealing with
the incredibly bitchy vocal teacher who is a minor
Korean celebrity, and shall remain nameless. She was
in fine form today . . .
Finally a repair man came today, to fix my boiler.
Three days of cold showers and freezing at night has
made Kari NOT a happy camper. Downside-- I had to pay
$60 to have it fixed. I mean, it's not like I don't
have the money these days, but still, isn't the super
supposed to deal with stuff like this? It's not like
this is my house; why should I have to pay for it's
maintenance?
Anyway, it's fixed, and that's all that matters.
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Thursday Dec 7th,
Best shower ever this morning . . .
More vocal exams at the Iksan campus today. I
consider myself a very fair marker, and that means
that I very rarely give out A grades. Unfortunately,
when we went to calculate the final marks of the
students, I discovered that there is a big problem
with the marking from the other vocal teachers-- they
were boosting their own students' marks to try to make
them unjustly higher! Our school actually has marking
guidelines where only a certain number of students can
receive A's, B's, so on. Then when I posed the
question of whether some of these students actually
earned an A, I was met with a tirade about how this
and that student was a really nice person, and how
could we change their marks, and blah blah blah. All
of this took 2 hours. 2 hours of arguing back and
forth, of things being only half-translated for me, of
political MESS! Honestly! This cannot happen next
year . . . I'm going to have to be a bitchier boss if
I want things to be even remotely fair to our
students.
After this huge debacle, we attended a party for all
the vocal students at a local restaurant, and that
cheered me up some-- it reminded me of why I like my
job so much. These students are so sweet, and it
kills me to have to say goodbye to so many of them.
I'm losing a lot of students not only to graduation,
but a lot of my 1st year male students have been
called to do their 2 year military service. So many
of the kids cried today and made me promise to
remember them-- I spent most of the night trying not
to cry as well.
At 9:30, we took the express bus back to Seoul to meet
up with the rest of the vocal teachers, which of
course I really did not feel like doing considering
the previous events of the night, but I couldn't
really think of a way out of it. (It's not like North
America, where if you don't want to go out, you just
don't go. Things are done in groups here, everyone or
no one mentality. Nobody leaves on their own,
everyone leaves together. Work events, ie
parties/dinners, MUST be attended whether one wants to
or not). So I sucked it up and spent the next boring
4 hours drinking beer and not really understanding
most of the conversation which most of the time was
not being translated for me.
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Saturday Dec 9th,
Horrible irony of ironies . . . I went to school today
to drop off my final improv marks, and my favourite
Seoul student, Moon Young was there looking through
the Christmas fakebook. She called me over, all
excited to tell me that she had just been hired for a
regular gig at . . . I'm not even kidding, the same
frigging club. I was so in shock, I didn't even know
what to say. I'm utterly horrified. My favourite
student, of all the people to hire to replace me! I
hate him, hate him, hate him! Now I'm in a very
awkward position-- do I tell Moon Young about how
ridiculous this gig is, and risk having it look like
I'm just being kind of weird and jealous about her
taking over my old gig, OR do I let her walk into a
crappy situation without any warning? It's one of her
first real gigs, and I don't want to discourage her,
but I don't want this gig to end up discouragin her
more . . . OH MY GOD, could this week get any worse?
I'm definitely having an "I hate Korea" week (maybe
even an "I hate everything" week).
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