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Week 7 - Y2 (Apr 16th to Apr 22nd) |
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Sunday April 16th,Today I went to Deoksugung, which is a palace downtown
Seoul. It used to be a much larger complex, but much
of it was destroyed in a fire. Initially, it was used
as a secondary palace, but during the Japanese
occupation, the king moved here instead (the other
palaces were being destroyed). From there, I walked
to the Seoul Museum of Art. There were two special
displays: one was an exhibit of chairs from the past
hundred years, on loan from the Vitra Museum in the
US. There were a great number of really interesting
post-modern designs. The second special display was
the work of Robert Indiana, a pop-art painter and
sculptor. The regular exhibits were also good,
featuring Korean artists from about 1950 on. I'm
quite surprised at how cheap everything was today. To
get into the palace-- 1 dollar. To get into all of
the exhibits at the art gallery: 6 dollars. I can't
remember how much it is at home, but I'm sure that the
Art Gallery of Toronto is a lot more than 6 bucks!
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Tuesday April 18th, Today I had to cancel my two vocal jazz ensembles
because I had to attend a meeting for all of the
professors of PaekChe. Of course, the whole damn
thing was in Korean, but fortunately, I had Ben
sitting beside me translating the important stuff, and
just letting me ignore the unimportant stuff. Nice to
have a filter . . . Apparently there's more politics
going on at my school than I realized. My department,
the Applied Music faculty is pretty much carrying the
entire school. Our student enrollment is about half
of the entire student body. This is apparently why we
pretty much have to let anyone who auditions in-- the
school needs the tuition money that we generate to
sustain the other (obviously less useful) programs.
Here's the catch: once a professor has tenure, it's
very difficult to fire them. So there are several
professors who are just eating up the school's money,
but don't have any students. This was a nuch bigger
problem last year, so I missed the really big
fireworks already, thank god. One thing about the
meeting: as the newest professor, I had to be
introduced formally to the other professors. All the
other professors (with the exception of Kenji, Ben and
Jae) were all ancient, and wearing suits. We came
rolling in jeans and hoodies. I was needless to say,
a little self-conscious. But . . . we did get a fancy
meal out of it, at the expense of the dean.
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Wednesday April 19th, I had to go to the doctor today, to attempt to hunt
down a new prescription for an Epipen, which is a
needle used in the event of an allergic reaction. The
reason why I needed another one is that I had an
allergic reaction last week (who on earth would put
peanut butter on a tuna sandwich?), and used the only
Epipen I had that hadn't expired. So I went to the
international clinic in Itaewon, where I could be sure
that they would understand me. Here's what I learned:
epinephrine is not available for prescription in
Korea. But, the doctor, looked online for a company
that could ship an Epipen to his office special
delivery, and managed to find one. Unfortunately,
it's going to cost me, since it's not covered under my
health insurance.
While I was in Itaewon, I found a really cool used
bookstore, first I've seen in Korea, and featuring all
English books. I was pretty excited. Very Toronto
vibe . . .
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Friday April 21st, Today I went to Sanbon, a suburb just south of Seoul
for a friend Justyna's birthday party. I was
absolutely shocked at how many foreigners work around
there! I had seen some of them before, with Justyna
and Caroline, but I met a lot more people this time.
But, it kind of made me homesick. I miss having a
real consistent group of friends. I'm tired of
transitional, or "party" friends. I'm also tired of
being hit on by incredibly lame, desperate foreigner
guys, who never seem to understand that you're not
interested unless you're outright rude to them. I'm
tired of people looking at me with the curiosity of a
science project when they hear about my job (you're
not an English teacher? You can SING?) It's a good
thing my vacation's coming up in two months, cause I
really feel like a good dose of home.
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