Well, the stomach flu epidemic didn't pan out, so things are back to normal. The only trouble now is that the assistant principal went to a workshop on school safety and now everything in my little room is a fire hazard or a violation of OSHA rules. We had to get rid of the lamp that was the only source of light other than the one sickly fluorescent overhead fixture, on account of it's halogen bulb was too risky. Worse still we had to take down the big maps I had hung on the walls because they were partially covering up some dials and meters having to do with the boiler system. Nobody uses these, but they have a sign on them saying the area in front of them must be clear for thirty-six inches. After these purges, the only safety issue still unresolved was the ten foot iron ladder bolted to the wall, leading to the roof. Owing to the bolts, this couldn't be purged, and, pending the investigation of some higher-ups from the central office might be enough to render the room unfit for student use. I wouldn't argue against this, as the room is clearly unsuitable for the purpose to which it is currently applied, except that the next best space they can find for me is on the stage in the auditorium. No kidding. We'll see how this turns out.
1/5/07
Yesterday it was throwing things, today it's vomiting. When I got to work today at 8:55, three puking children were already on their way home, and the nurse was on the phone finding out how to deal with a stomach flu outbreak. By ten, three more had come down with it and things were getting ugly. The custodians made heroic efforts to clean and disinfect everything, the secretary made phone calls to parents and I tried to stay out of the way of any student who pursed his lips or clutched his stomach. One of the nearby county school districts was closed down by this bug before the holiday break, with something like thirty percent of the students and staff too sick to come in. Hopefully we won't see that kind of epidemic.
1/4/07 Is it a full moon?
There was rash of flying objects in classrooms today at work. Three kids from two different classes were in the principal's office for chunking erasers, crayons and pencils at one another. They were all perfectly polite and studious once they made their ways to my room. They were a calm enough group that we were even able to role-play what they could choose to do instead of pitching things across the room. There are some good days here.
11/8/06
This week has gone more smoothly than last, now that I can arrive each day armed with a knowledge of the school schedule, a box of reading books and activities, and at least a general approach to what I'm doing. I've had little direction from my administrators, but little direction also means little interference. I'm able to decide pretty independently what kind of place ISS is going to be, subject to the constraints of being housed in a storage room. I put some maps to cover the cinder block walls, broke the daily schedule up into small segments and added "free reading time" as a modest incentive for completing assignments. I mentioned to some teachers that sending a student to ISS for five hours with nothing to do isn't going to be good for anybody. I want my room to be basically a calm, safe place where kids can get out of the situation that agitated them and start thinking and making decisions that will work better for them than the ones that landed them in the detention hall. Plus we get some schoolwork done, which in some cases has been long neglected on account of the student's other difficulties in class.
11/1/06 Nothing like on the job training
I showed up for my first day of work today, ready for orientation or training or something along those lines. Instead, they told me that the boy I was sitting next to in the lobby was my first student and pointed me towards my room. It had a tile on the door that read "Storage". Despite not knowing everything I might have wanted to (When is lunch?, Where's the bathroom?, etc.), I dove right in and was soon joined by two more students. I worked on missed assignments and homework with the students that had them and tried to come up with things for the others to do. The day mostly went smoothly, but things started to come apart a little towards the end when everybody was getting understandably bored and I didn't even know what time they should be dismissed. I don't know what I've gotten into.
10/27/06
Have you ever wondered after how long a spell of near total inactivity would one grow tired of loafing? I now know in exact terms. For me it seems to be six weeks. Having exceeded that period by about two weeks, today I applied for a job. I responded to an add for an "At-risk Tutor" at one of the local elementary schools and got a quick response from the principal, who wants the position filled by Wednesday. I was a little put off that the position, described in the announcement as a tutor, turned out to be responsible for no tutoring but instead for overseeing the in-school suspension room from nine to two. I want a job immediately though, so I'm rushing around to complete all the paperwork that the school system needs to hire a person. We'll see what this comes to.
9/28/06 Funny thing about the weekends when your unemployed...
Here I am, back in Asheville, just about two years after I left. I've even rented the same house I lived in that year after college. From Seoul, I stopped over in Yardley and Quakertown, Pennsylvania to visit with my family and attend my uncle Mike's wedding. I got some of those meatballs I'd been looking forward to and the wedding was really quite an event. Congratulations, Mike and Melissa!
Now that I'm sleeping again on more or less the right schedule for this time zone and I've gotten over the feeling of strangeness when entering the grocery store, I've decided to devote myself for the time being to a life of leisure. Thus far I've been kayaking, hiking, attended a micro-brew and bluegrass festival, begun to paint my house and spent a lot of time on the couch with good books or appalling television. I even started to exercise regularly. How long can this go on? It's hard to say...
Who cares where I am anyway?
8/28/06 Going
On September 2nd, I'll be flying back to the States. I read that culture shock can be just as bad going back home as leaving in the first place, and I believe it. I'm nervous about what I'm going to do next, and, well, I've been here a while and I'll be sad to go. It isn't that I'm not happy about going home, just that I've liked it here and I'm not sure I'll be back. I'll especially miss my littlest students, who have learned so much this year and generally been a joy to me. I'm really looking forward to a few things like eating meatballs and breathing clean air, seeing my mom, my cat, and my friends and family. I guess I'll have plenty of time to reflect on it all on what looks like it's going to be a twenty hour trip from here to Philidelphia.
8/6/06 Happy Birthday To Me
Yesterday was my birthday, and despite my efforts to keep it quiet, my coworkers caught wind of it and planned an outing. A birthday party can be a risky thing around here, since, besides having to pay for everybody's drinks (instead of the other way around), one is certain to be subjected to mandatory overdrinking and possibly the dreaded "birthday shot". A birthday shot is a mixture of whatever beverages on being consumed, plus whatever's on the table, plus whatever seems gross, like spit, ashes, etc. The nastier it is the more love it demonstrates. I dodged this rotten tradition, not feeling at all bad that no one loved me enough to insist on it. We looked around Jongno for some time trying to find a bar with seating for all of us and draft beer. We found a second-floor place with an outer space theme and twinkling stars on the ceiling. I toasted everybody at the table, one by one, and everybody watched while I drank a whole beer with each of them. Too many beers later, some people went home, and for the rest of us it was time for soju. We moved to a more traditional place just down the street, and began the squid and soju course. I think I've never enjoyed squid and cabbage stirfry so much. Nobody was good for much after that, so Dragos, Andre and I got into a taxi towards home. The driver went a way I wasn't familiar with, but he drove quickly, so I took him to be an expert and dozed off a bit in the front seat. Then he crashed straight into another taxi. We got out and it was clear that nobody had been hurt. So we loitered around amongst the gathering onlookers. When the police came, I felt it was my civic duty to explain the circumstances of the crash. The officer smirked at my elementary Korean, but seemed to write something down, then said, in English, "Are you drunken?" I admitted that "I might be a little", and he said we could go. We estimated that we were very close to our appartment and should just walk the rest of the way. We went about a block before we noticed the red lights hanging outside of some of the doors and the ladies of the night inviting us in. We guessed at this point that this wasn't the neighborhood that we had surmised it to be and caught another taxi. Feeling confident in my Korean ability, I asked the driver "Were those prostitutes?" He immediately perked up, and started to do a U-turn back towards them, having, I guess, misunderstood my utterance. I protested and told him we just wanted to go home. After having a laugh at our expense, he took us back to our neighborhood and I went to bed none too soon. I woke up early today when my dear friends Jamie and Sarah called from the States to wish me a happy birthday. My birthday cheer tempered the pounding pain in my head, but I went quickly back to bed where I spent most of the first day of my twenty-fifth year.
7/29/06-8/02/06 Kyoto
I had a little vacation coming up so I decided to take a trip to Kyoto. It's only an hour by air to Osaka, and from there only an hour from there by bus to Kyoto, so why not, right? I planned to go by myself, but at the last minute, it turned out that my coworker, Andre, had planned a similar trip so we decided to combine them. The more the merrier. My ticket to Osaka was in "Prestige Class" apparently, by mistake, which I took to be an auspicious beginning to my trip. At any rate I availed myself of the better quality food and beer available to travellers of my status (mostly Japanese men in suits) and arrived quite comfortably. Andre got in a bit later and we headed for Kyoto. Nobody seemed to stare, but we were a conspicuous duo. Andre is a little shorter than me, but still quite tall in Japan, and about twice my weight. He's a French-Canadian former offensive linesman and turned out to be an interesting travel companion. More than once, total strangers approached and asked to rub his belly. Anyway, we grabbed some tasty noodles wandered around the vicinity of Kyoto station looking for a guest house that somebody had recommended, then gave up and got a tiny room in a business hotel for about twice what we had hoped to pay. It was after midnight and still over eighty degrees though, and this cramped place to lie down was worth every penny.
In the morning we started sight-seeing in earnest and visited a temple that claimed to be the world's largest wooden structure, and a pretty neat castle with various anti-ninja features like nightingale floors and secret guard rooms. The temple is still active, so I felt a little sheepish wandering around, but nobody seemed to mind. I don't know about the "world's largest" claim, but I've never personally seen a larger wooden structure. There were some artifacts from the temples past on display, by far the most interesting of which was a huge thick rope made of human hair. At the time of the temple's construction, this was the strongest rope available, and I guess you need a strong rope to build a huge wooden temple, so the faithful lopped theirs of and donated it to the cause. The castle was cool too, but I couldn't take pictures of it. Posted signs actually forbade even sketching the wall paintings. I don't know what that was about. Andre and I wandered around, discussed the mechanics of a ninja attack on such a castle, and got interviewed for some students' English class assignment.
We went a little outside Kyoto, I think, the next day to Arashiyama to see a park where there were said to be more than 150 monkeys running loose. We got off the bus at the wrong stop, wandered into what may have been a temple and got lengthy instructions in Japanese from a very old man selling souvenirs. The most helpful part of his sermon was a grunt and point in the direction of a subway station. It worked and we eventually made it to the base of a trail towards the monkey park. Our Lonely Planet guidebook had told us to expect a moderate hike, which indeed this would have been if it hadn't been blazing hot and if Andre hadn't been a little larger than the average hiker. At the top, before we saw anything but trees, we heard a shriek in English, "Look, mom, a monkey!". The little boy to whom this voice belonged freaked out non-stop for a good half an hour showing an amount of energy that would put even my kindergarteners to shame. For my part I was pretty excited too, if less demostrative. Monkeys are awesome. I watched them fight and pick fleas off of each other, chase around, swim, climb and fall off of things. I took a lot of pictures of them. I learned the hard way, though, that you really can't look a monkey in the eyes. I guess it seems hostile or frightening. When I looked to hard at one monkey, though, he made a horrible noise and charged at me. They're not in cages or anything, just running around, so I retreated pretty urgently and almost fell to my death down a treacherous hill.
Having survived the monkeys we shopped a bit and then toured a small 18th century sake brewery which is now a museum. It was pretty interesting to walk around and look at the old brewing equipment, but the tour wasn't so informative, since it was only in Japanese. At any rate there were sake samples at the end and a little restaurant with tasty tofu dishes. Feeling a bit weakened by the deadly heat we retired to our hotel where we met some university students from Chicago who were studying Japanese for the summer and had been travelling around the country for nine weeks so far. They were friendly and put us onto some useful information like the location of a pleasant rooftop beer garden with an all you can eat buffet and unlimited refills of Asahi. One of them had even been to Knox College.
After some various other sightseeing, we had to go home. The flight was unremarkable, but getting back into Korea turned out to be a little tricky. Andre didn't it turned out have a re-entry permit on his working visa, so they didn't want to let him past immigration. After a half-hour of wrangling they apparently pretended that his round trip hadn't originated in Korea and let him in on a tourist visa. I don't know how that works really. Then when we picked up our luggage, Andre's back had been red flagged for a customs search. The customs folks saw him walking with me and pulled me aside as well, searched his things, then mine and, turning up nothing asked if we had any "weapons or terrorism materials". "No, sir, nothing like that.", came out of my mouth pretty quickly. It wasn't the first time I've drawn attention from airport security and customs, after all. Then, "Swords or spears?" and they called another person over and I listened as they asked the new person in Korean "How do you say ... in English?". I offered up a kitchen knife I had bought and this triggered further discussion in Korean. "It seems like a cooking knife. No there's a ...". I was wondering pretty earnestly what the ... they were looking for was and hoped their attention wouldn't shift to my exceeding the undeclared alcohol allowance when they found what they were looking for in Andre's checked bag. It was some toy throwing stars that had started all the fuss. The customs guys inspected them, found them not to be sharp and sent us on our way. I guess that probably the x-ray person saw them and radioed these guys only that we had ninja weapons or something. At any rate we headed home with no further hassles.
I took a few pictures.
5/30/06 Politics as usual
Tomorrow wraps up an interesting election season in the Republic of Korea. Seats in local government across the country are up for grabs, including mayor of Seoul. That's a pretty big job in this country where nearly a quarter of the population live in this city and close to half live in the metro area. Anyway everybody's been campaigning away and I have to say it's the most irritating political campaign season I've every borne witness to. The supporters of various candidates have turned out it the streets of my neighborhood, entreating us daily from trucks with loudspeakers for our votes. This sometimes begins as early as 7 a.m., but at least they don't hang around for long at a stretch. Later in the day they set up little mini-rallies on the street corners, sometimes making speeches, sometimes blaring pop music or line-dancing in matching t-shirts. This goes on into the evening. It all strikes me a little weird, but you know, maybe the guy who can put together the best dance team really is the best choice for Comptroller of Haengdang. I won't miss the noise when it's all over. Several days ago though, things took a nasty turn when a man with a utility knife slashed the face of Park Geun-hye, a prominent member of the the opposition party, so badly that she needed sixty stitches. Since then, her Hannara party has gained a good bit of popularity and seems set for a huge victory, which is a shame since they are, in my way of thinking, basically fascists. Park is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the military dictator who ruled South Korea between 1961 and 1979. This legacy is more mixed than one might imagine since the elder Park is credited by many with modernizing Korea's economy, which helps some people overlook the brutal human-rights abuses and supression of democracy. We'll see what happens.
5/23/06 Daehan Minguk!
Korea's in the World Cup again this year and the whole place is a fair frenzy about it, even before the group stage of tournament play has begun. Students are attending school in team colors and in classes that are advanced enough, we spend a lot of time talking about soccer. I've taken advantage of this interest to teach these classes where France, Switzerland, and Togo (Korea's opponents in the first round) are. All the excitement is fun for me and I like to see my students getting some time for recreation. Every day I ask each student "How are you feeling today?", and these days I hear a lot of answers like "I'm very happy because I will eat chicken and watch soccer with my father." Today I went with some coworkers to the stadium to watch a friendly, pre-tournament match between Korea and Senegal. It was sold out and all my students were a little jealous that I got to go in person, but happy that they could take a break from studying to watch the game. Nationalism trumps studying, I guess. Thank God something does.
It was a pretty good time. Apparently, beer price-gouging isn't the custom at Korean stadiums, like it is in North America, so we had a few and got right into it. There was even soju for sale at the snack bar, but I wasn't that into it. We shouted "Daehan Minguk" and "pil sing Corea" and other team slogans in poorly pronounced Korean, which drew a little friendly attention from the nearby spectators and eventually from a newspaper reporter who interviewed me and Dragos about our interest in Korean soccer. There could be a photo of me in my Red Devils jersey in the newspaper, but I don't know which one. After that we helped pass a giant Korean flag over the audience and watched a pretty good game. I was also entertained by the couple of ten year old boys sitting in front of me, who vascillated between showing real earnest fervor for the game and beating each other with their giant foam fingers. The game ended in a tie and we headed out for Makkoli and potato soup. The subway was a little crazy, with sixty thousand people all trying to get on each train like it was the last helicopter out of Saigon, but I made it home in one piece.
5/15/06
Today was Teacher's Day, and I made out like a bandit. All the kindergarteners brought me cards and funny little gifts like socks, flowers, and perfume. I got some nice things, too, like a gift certificate for the Hyundai Department store. I don't know when I'll get around to using that, though since the store is located in Coex Mall, which is a vulgar monument to consumer excess, and not really my favorite place to hang out. Teacher's Day is a holiday for kids in public school, but they still show up for English lessons in the afternoon. My Korean teacher said that the government made Teacher's Day a school holiday to discourage extravagant gift giving and the apparent conflict of interest it creates. That may be prudent, but at any rate, staying home from school for a day is a gift I would be happy to accept from my students.
5/4/06-5/8/06 Jeju
I had Thursday and Friday off this week on account of Children's Day and Buddha's Birthday, so with a couple of friends I took of for a holiday on famous Jeju Island. Jeju is a volcanic island, famous for oranges and horses, and the southernmost point in Korea. It is also a wildly popular destination for Korean vacationers. My coworkers expressed envy when I told them my plans and described the place as Korea's Hawaii. By the time I left I was really buying into the hype. Only my Korean teacher said "Don't expect too much."
Anyway, I got up early and got on an airplane. As I was dozing in my seat, waiting for the plane to board, I heard somebody yell "Matthew Teacher" and woke up with a start. It was Daniel, one of my favorite kindergarteners, travelling with his sister and their parents. I said "hi" to the kids and awkwardly greeted the parents in Korean before they hustled off to their seats. The parent's seemed a little embarassed, maybe because they thought they might have to speak English or maybe because Daniel was sort of making a scene yelling at the only foreigner on the airplane. There are twenty-three million people in the Seoul metropolitan area, I don't know how it is that I can't go anywhere without seeing my students. At any rate, I was right back asleep in seconds.
In Jeju I got a taxi to my hotel and met my friends, who had rented a car for the weekend. We got underway immediately, but without a plan. First Kalbi, it turned out at a pleasant-enough seaside restaurant. From here we began a two-day romp through tacky tourist attractions and crowded, but beautiful natural attractions. We checked a park full of miniature replicas of famous buildings from around the world and my friend Matt was outraged that no Canadian buildings were included. We stopped in at a sex museum, which was crowded with a tour-busload of sixty year old women. We saved 12,000 won on the price of admission by sneaking into a quite deep volcanic cave. I was shortly punished by God for this theft when I stepped in a pretty gross looking puddle in the cave. We saw waterfalls, volcano craters and coastal cliffs, all of which were surrounded by tour busses and full to the brim with their passengers. Of course, we ate and drank too much at all the local restaurants. Since horses are one of Jeju's famous features, I decided I'd ride one. That was sort of an adventure. At first a guy lead me pretty carefully around, holding my horse's reins. A little horse was following us and I asked him how old it was. He was surprised that I knew a little Korean and we chatted a bit. Then I guess he figured if I could speak Korean I could ride a horse and he gave me the reins and a stick and told me to whack the horse with the stick. I did and it took off running pretty fast. I had no idea how to stop or steer it, and I wondered if it would stop before we hit the ocean. The man that was leading me just smiled and waved. The horse did stop eventually, and walked back to where we started without any real direction from me.
All in all, I found Jeju to be a strange kind of place. It was beautiful, crowded and tacky. Some of the attractions really seemed like they belonged on the side of the American interstate. It's no South of the Border, but sort of brought that to mind. If all the people would go away and if each view didn't charge a separate admission fee, it would be a great place to do some hiking. I was glad to have visited, but i wasn't really broken up when it was time to leave.
Leaving wasn't in the cards, though. High winds kept my plane from taking off in the morning and all the other flights were full on account of the holiday season. I went to the airport to figure out how I'd be getting back to the mainland, hoping that maybe there would be a seat on a flight to Daegu or Incheon. No such luck, all the flights had been cancelled so there were no seats to anywhere. When I asked about my options the ticket agent said "Standby only. Go there." and pointed to the standby counter and a winding line of would-be passengers that was easily 300 meters long. So I got in line and waited. When I finally got to the counter, I got my standby number: 1845. The agent told me to come back at three and they'd see what they could do. I hung around and entertained some kids in the waiting area. They stared at me and ran away when I waved, but came and said "hi" and I talked to them a little in Korean. Their dad came and talked to me a bit about the delays. His number was 1932. Sucker. I heard the kids tell their grandmother in incredulous tones "Dad is talking to that foreigner in ENGLISH." I went back to the counter at three, was rebuffed, drank a beer, went back and four, was again turned away, chatted with strangers, and watched as the gathered crowd got increasingly drunk and rowdy. The crowd from Pusan was going to have to spend the night and after hours of sitting around with nothing but soju for entertainment, weren't the most pleasant customers. I decided just to hang out at the counter until somebody gave me a boarding pass. After forty minutes I got one, to Incheon, and was on my way, only about eight hours late.
4/14/06
Dragos and I went out looking for food tonight after work and met up with his friend Dan, another Romanian-Canadian who he plays soccer with. Dan got a phone call as we were walking from someone speaking Romanian and wishing him a happy Easter. He wondered out loud who it was and why somebody was calling to wish him a happy Catholic Easter, since, like most Romanians he's Orthodox and celebrates Easter a little later. He hung up after a minute or two and said "Oh, It was my mom." I don't know what that was all about. In the mean time we found a restaurant and I had ordered all-you-can eat, self-service mystery barbeque for all of us. When Dan ordered soju, I protested weakly that I hadn't eaten since lunch. He rejoined "But since when have you not drunk soju?". I found this logic undeniable, so with a "gum-bae, cheers, noroc", we got underway. At this kind of place, there's a bar of various meats and vegatbles which you bring back to the table and grill on a gas burner. We sampled various parts of chickens and pigs, until sometime well after the first bottle of soju, when Dan came back to the table with a marinated eel on his plate. Basically from start to finish, this thing was awful. When he put it on the grill, it curled and uncurled like a still-living thing. If it had still had a head, I might have been convinced that it was alive. The waitress chopped it up and, as it cooked further, what I can only guess was the spine oozed out of the pieces. As we stared at the eel, the waitress tried not to stare at us. Some ideas were floated about how to dispose of the eel unnoticed, but we figured that we'd taken it and now better try it. I had a bite, dipped in sesame oil, and it was every bit as bad as it looked. It tasted like what I imagine a tire would taste like if it sat on the floor of a fish shop for a year and were then dipped in sesame oil. Having been the first one to try it I said "Not bad. Try one.", so that my friends could share this experience. They liked it almost as much as I had. Suckers. Next we were off to a crowded, unremarkable bar which was pleasant enough until a group of curfew-breaking American servicemen came in, acted like louts, and made an obnoxious scene. They came and went, but when I was headed home, I bumped into them again outside, kicking taxis as they passed by. I can't help but think that my country's image abroad doesn't need this kind of help.
4/13/06 Peeps
My lovely friend Sarah sent me a big box of goodies recently, and included a large number of marshmallow peeps. Since peeps are pretty godawful things and eating them makes me kind of nauseous, I did the only right thing and passed them out to my students. I did so strategically, at the end of my class periods, so that when the sugar and artificial color began to course through the children's veins, I would be well out of the way. The students reactions to the unfamiliar toxic snacks were mixed. Most were happy that I was giving them something, and a few thought they were cute. Some nibbled them carefully, while others shoved the whole thing in their mouths. A few showed a troubling degree of enjoyment while biting the heads off. The younger kids seemed not to have had marshmallows before or at least not to care for them, but understood when I said it was the same stuff as the center of a choco-pie. I explained the things a little better after the first class, in which I handed them out and one student said "Teacher, eating?", another told the girl next to him, in a self-assured tone "It's an eraser", and a third actually erased the whiteboard with one. One class of particularly sassy ten year old girls (and two timid boys), broke into an uproar when I declined to eat a left-over peep myself. They suspected I was playing a trick on them by handing out such a strange snack, and I guess basically I was. Next time I'll choose something normal and tasty like squid jerky.
4/9/06 The dust is back
I should have known from my sore throat and poor health. It's yellow dust season again. I looked out the window and thought it was just a really smoggy day, but no. This airborne crud comes all the way from Mongolia. So we'll all be breathing in grit and heavy metals for a while, until the sandstorms to the west calm down. I guess this stuff even makes it all the way to the States sometimes and makes a mess around Colorado. You can read all about it here.
3/25/06 Paying Taejeon a visit
I haven't been to Taejeon all that often since I moved to Seoul, but this afternoon I hopped on the bus and headed down that way. I called my friend Pooh and told him I was on my way and we should go get a drink. He said "Great, I'll make a schedule for you." I said "Oh". I wasn't quite sure what he had in mind, but whatever. I got off the bus and met Pooh at his university and we headed off for phase one of his plan, samgyupsal. Samgyupsal literally means, "three layer flesh" and is bite-sized grilled pork which is usually dipped in some sauce and wrapped in a lettuce leaf. That's pretty good stuff, if you don't mind eating three layers of the flesh of an unclean animal, which lately, I guess I don't. Next we were off for martinis, which might not be the best follow-up for barbeque, but which Pooh remembered I have a preference for. Additionally, Pooh seemed to have a preference for the bartender. She believed Pooh to be Thai, or something rather than Korean. I don't know what that's about. A few drinks in we took a taxi downtown and walked a bar Pooh was pretty excited about where all the customers were salary men in cheap suits and all the servers were young women in bikinis. I wasn't sure what to think at first, since I didn't know just how sleazy this place was going to turn out to be. Aside from the attire of the employees and the lascivious quality of the patrons, I think it was just a normal bar. We drank a few drinks and one of the bartenders painted "Playboy" on Pooh's face. I'd had enough of this, but Pooh's plan wasn't finished. He said we had go to another place which he said "matches your style". It turned out to be a basement hip-hop club with an excellent DJ, interesting paintings on the walls, and somewhat grimy clientelle. I'd been there a few times before, but wouldn't have expected anybody to pick this place out as perfect for me. Must have been the grime. Before we even got down the stairs Pooh and I were both recognized, and I got yelled at a little for coming to town without calling anybody. Pooh danced and I drank and caught up with some old aquaintances. Turns out Taejeon is about the same as it was a year ago, right down to the same people drinking the same drinks in the same bars. The crowd thinned out and so did we, finally heading to Pooh's parents' apartment to crash on the floor.
When I woke up, Pooh's mother, father, sister, and nephew were there waiting to meet me. I didn't feel my best. They asked me the standard questions about where I'm from, how long I've been in Korea, and how long I'm staying. It was a funny conversation, with Pooh and his sister translating their father's remarks to me and then mine back to him. Pooh's mom served some lovely food, which I tried feebly to eat. The difference may be cultural, maybe even genetic, but in any case kimchi stew didn't work for me, as it did for Pooh, as cure for the previous night's crapulence. His father suggested that next time I visit, maybe we shold go hiking instead of drinking. That's a good idea from a wise, wise man. Then his dad was off to work. He drives a train for the national railroad and has had a tough go of it lately. Pooh tells me his union went on strike, and lost. A lot of people got fired I guess, but Pooh's dad kept his job on a probationary basis, which means his salary is reduced by something like fifty percent for three months. He's worked for this company for what must be more than twenty years and it strikes me as outrageously abusive to treat him this way. I guess the right to unionize here doesn't include the right to strike. Things are changing a bit these days in terms of corporate accountability, but I get the impression that the major companies and jaebol do just about whatever they want, justifying themselves with reminders of how far Korea has come economically in the last forty years.
3/19/06
Today I went hiking around Namhan Fortress, where I sometimes go to (sort of) get out of the city and walk around on dirt and rocks for while. It was a nice day, and even just being on the outskirts of the city makes it a bit easier to breathe. It wasn't quite as relaxing as in the past, though since there was a helicopter flying around for some reason and about one in five of the men walking on the trail had a radio strapped to his belt, tuned into the World Baseball Classic. Korea has been doing really well so far and today is playing Japan, so it's an unmissable match, even if you're in the woods. At the top of the ridge, there are some guys with tents selling various snack foods and I couldn't resist some fish on a stick. I got a really friendly reception from the vendor, who first asked me about America's poor performance in the World Baseball Classic and then served me some complementary silkworm pupae. He spoke in Korean, so I wasn't totally on top of the conversation, but I could at least understand "America...World Baseball Classic...What's the problem?" I couldn't say much about that, but the old guys who were now gathering approved of my ability to eat the boiled bugs. Then the vendor told me his son studies English and went into a nearby building to get him. I could hear the boy protesting vigorously even before he came around the corner. He was probably dragged away from his gameboy, to meet me on the only day of the week he doesn't have to study English. I sipped my fish broth while the boy whined and whined for a good two minutes. He finally turned to me and grumbled "Where are you from?". I told him North Carolina and everybody looked confused. I couldn't really explain where North Carolina is except that it's between New York and Miami, but the guys laughed when I said "I'm a country person." in Korean. The boy took this opportunity to sneak away, back to his video games. I paid for the fish and got back to walking. Even in the woods, I guess I can't help torturing children by making them learn my language.
3/14/06
I was sitting around watching TV with Dragos today and when an old episode of "Dallas" came on he told me a pretty good story about living in Romania. I guess he and his family stayed in one of the big communist-built highrise apartment buildings and there was never enough hot water for everybody living there. One big boiler for all the workers turned out not to be such a great idea. Anyway, folks had to resort to washing dishes and taking showers in the wee hours of the morning to be guaranteed enough hot water. That all changed after the fall of communism, though. Not because the boiler was fixed, but because "Dallas", one of the first American programs available on TV there, was so wildly popular that as long as it was on not too many people were in the shower. So a person could take a leisurely shower and not have to jump out when the water turned cold. There's capitalism improving life in the former Soviet bloc for you. I don't know if it's a stranger thing to stumble upon an old episode of "Dallas" while watching TV in Korea or that doing so reminds my roommate of life in Romania.
3/6/06
ECC just got a new crop of kindergarteners, about a hundred of them in all, and today was their first day of school. The youngest ones are five and six years old. This is by the Korean reckoning of age, which differs a bit from the Western. In America, these kids would be four or even three. However old they are, we had a little reception for these students and their parents in the morning. The kindergarten teachers divided the students into what would be their classes and sat them on the floor in the front of the cafeteria. The parents sat on chairs in the back, and we teachers sat in the front facing the parents and students. I guess I'm used to being displayed like this by now. There were speeches by our President and Academic Director, and one by one the teachers stood up and took a bow. I ignored the speeches and watched the assembled students, trying to figure out which ones would be mine. The littlest children were pretty confused, and I watched as they rolled around on the floor, cried, and tried to wander off looking for their mothers. These wouldn't be my students, though, my new class was to be composed of seven (5-6) year olds. I was glad not to be teaching these babies, since I don't think I'd know how, but mostly I was glad that nobody sent me to foreign language school when I was three. So I eyed the older students and tried to size them up. There were four classes that looked to be about the right age. I paid close attention to two boys who were taking turns punching each other in the arms in the back row and to a little girl who made a face at a younger student and then sprawled in a full recline right in the middle of everything.
The administrators finally finished talking and we split up and went to our classrooms to pick everybody's English names. I had produced a list earlier of what I thought were appropriate names for the students to pick from. I had watched Malcolm X on TV the night before and my selections were heavily influenced by my ensuing Wikipedia readings on historical African-American leaders. They were, one by one, rejected by the assembled mothers. So I have a whole new round of Danny's, Julie's, and Jenny's. There's nothing wrong with those names, of course, there are just so many people using them. Maybe I'm reacting to having been one of four Matthew's in my fourth grade class at Asheville Catholic, but I had hoped to see some more interesting choices. I introduced myself again to the class and Chris, the Korean teacher who shares this class with me, translated my remarks. Everybody got a name, wrote in on their books and their lunch box and went home. The three misbehaving youngsters that I noticed in the assembly all turned out to be in my class, which made me a bit nervous. It turns out though that they have bad attitudes of just the sort that I can respect in a young person. You just can't trust somebody who doesn't act up a little.
2/28/06 New faces around the office
There's usually a lot of turnover among teachers at schools like mine. I suspect it has something to do with the bosses' preference for cheaply hiring new people instead of giving the experienced people a raise. This month is the end of our school year and so a lot of contracts are finished up and a lot of teachers are leaving. My housemate, Matt is one of the departees, and his replacement is a fellow named Dragos, who until today I knew only by his passport photo. A random new housemate is always a wildcard, but Dragos seems alright. He's a Romanian-Canadian, and seems to have a pretty laid-back attitude towards life. That's a good sign, I think. His first day here was kind of funny. He went out and successfully met up with some friends from Canada, but got drunk and lost them and didn't know his way home or even his phone number. He got a taxi, but didn't know where he was going or how to say "Please take me to...", so emptied his pockets, looking for something useful. I had given him a note with the name of the subway station nearest to our apartment written in English and Korean, having half-way anticipated a situation like this. I guess Dragos forgot that he had such a note, but the taxi driver grabbed it, drove him to the station and hustled him out of the cab. He showed up at seven a.m. without his jacket and fell asleep in a spine-damaging position on the couch, from which he didn't move until well into the next evening. There were a few phonecalls from Romanian accented people, concerned about Dragos's whereabouts. I assured them he was safe abed. Quite a first day for ECC's newest English teacher. It turns out that heavy drinking isn't really the best treatment for jetlag. I'm not one to judge, though. Having been lost, drunk, or both a time or two myself, I know well enough that these things happen.
Besides this weekend debacle, things are pretty chaotic at work, too. We foreigners depend a lot on our Korean co-teachers to give us messages from parents and administrators, let us know about schedule changes, and generally tell us what's going on. Four of these teachers just quit, though, and so we've got a bunch of new people and pretty much nobody knows what's going on. People are even asking me. I'm pretty much the last person to ask about organizational details. Our boss is just as clueless, I think, having pulled such shenanigans as scheduling me for two classes at once and making all the kindergarten classes five minutes longer without telling anyone. The bells that usually rign to signal class changes also suffered an electrical malfunction and now ring pretty much whenever they feel like it. I'm waiting for the copy machine to burst into flames. A week or so ought to straighten everthing out. In the mean time I'm smiling as much as I can and promising my new coworkers that it's not always like this.
2/23/06 Kindergarten Graduation
It's the end of the school year for our kindergartners, so today we had a graduation ceremony for them. This was a serious event. There were four mini-plays, Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and The Three Little Pigs, put on by the second year students. The kids have practiced for weeks, and they were awesome. After the plays, while Pomp and Circumstance played, the first year students got some certificates and the second year students got diplomas and awards. The older group was dressed in gowns and mortarboards and everything. Proud parents were everywhere and even though the lights were off in the audience, a person could probably have read by the light of camcorder displays. Everybody got an award, but some of them sounded more prestigous than others. I know I'd rather be recognized for "Best Writing" or "Best Pronounciation" than as the "Most Pleasing" in my class. "Best Smile" seemed like the most insulting award. After all this they called the teachers up on stage to take a bow. My students interupted the school president's disingenuous thank-you speech by yelling "Hello, Matthew Teacher" from the audience, and I've never been more proud.
2/18/06 Michelle's Wedding
One of my coworkers, Michelle, got married this weekend, so I got to attend my second wedding in Korea. It wasn't too much different than the last one. It was about twice the size, but the food wasn't as good. Also, this time I could understand enough Korean to hear the folks around me commenting that "There are a lot of foreigners here." Anyway, when I showed up with Matt, Shawna, and Adele we were immediately issued with lunch coupons and ushered right to the front of the church, just behind the bride's family. This put a quick end to my visions of eating and leaving quickly, but I had a pretty good view of the proceedings. In general it was a fairly casual affair, but the immediate family members were pretty done-up, some in hanbok, some in suits. The mother of the bride had glitter in her perm.
The ceremony lasted just long enough for vows, one song, and some brief preaching. There was no kiss afterwards, which my Korean coworkers tell me is normal. For what I consider to be a pretty marriage obsessed culture, Korea conducts weddings in a pretty straight-to-the-point businesslike fashion. There were at least three professional photographers and quite a few amature documenting it all. They got right up in the faces of the bride, groom, and preacher, even during the vows, which gave sort of a paparazzi feel. Right after the ceremony, photos were taken with bride, groom, and guests in every conceivable combination. I was in the coworker photo. There was a funny gender segregation between the bride's side and the groom's. His coworkers, architects and engineers, were all male while hers, teachers, were all female except for me. Matt had ducked out early. Jerk. Further pictures were taken after Shawna caught Michelle's bouquet. Next was lunch. We traded in our tickets and lined up for a buffet of pretty unremarkable Korean food. There were still no English-speaking men around, and during mealtime I was pretty quiet while the ladies discussed their fantasy wedding plans and gossiped about the bride and each other. I think this was continued over ice cream later, but I went home, so I'm not sure.
2/6/06 The Super Bowl in Korea
American football doesn't get typically arouse a lot of interest in Korea, but this year it was on the front page. Hines Ward, the game MVP, turns out to have a Korean mother, so all of a sudden we care a lot about football around here. It's worth a couple of days of news coverage anyway.
Korean elementary school students have pretty much the whole month of January off for winter vacation. The lucky ones get to go to ski camp, or visit their grandparents, or just hang out and play computer games. The unlucky ones get sent to English school for a month-long "intensive session". They come for three hours per day instead of the normal hour and a half, every day instead of the normal two or three days per week. We cover a three month curriculum in one month, which means that all but two or three kids in the class are totally left behind. It's frustrating for the teachers who, I can say from experience, feel pretty ineffective and brutal on the self-esteem of the majority of the kids who just can't keep up. Parents pay a lot of extra tuition for this mistreatment of their youngsters, thinking that the more someone studies, the more they will learn. Of course, effort does pay off if the class's pace and level are appropriate for the students, but they too often aren't at all. I have one class with a reading and writing textbook, which none of them can read. So we do what we can. A lot of wishful thinking goes into the decisions about what level students should be placed in. Most harmfully, the boss pretty much lets parents tell her what level their children should be in, disregarding their tests and interviews and befuddled looks. For the last four weeks I've had between eight and ten classes per day of this nonsense, and I'm glad it's almost over and it's time for my vacation. I'm going to China, suckers.
1/10/05 Santa Pictures
A co-worker just emailed me these. That really is me in the costume.
At a staff meeting a week or so ago, it came up that a pretty large number of foreign teachers were just arrested, and presumably deported, for having obtained visas using forged university documents. It's no problem for me, of course. My student loans remind me monthly that my diploma is real. It touched off something of a scandal, though, and now the immigration office is cracking down on illegal teachers. Every E-2 visa holder in the country is now required to take their original univeristy diploma, in person, to the immigration office for verification, and attend a seminar on immigration law. Mihye, my supervisor figured that she could get away with sending only a few of our school's teachers, and when she asked for volunteers, I guess I was last to say "not it".
So, along with one coworker I set off at 8:30 on a lovely Saturday morning to learn about immigration law. I had more than a few harsh words for the person responsible for the timing of this event. There were more than four hundred other "native" teachers in attendance, mostly North American, but some Chinese and Japanese. We piled in to an auditorium and were introduced to a number of business-suited officials. Then we watched what seemed like a tourism video about Korea. It informed us of Korea's rich cultural heritage and the health benefits of kimchi. Then came the portion of the program dedicated to immigration law, fifteen minutes of a woman reading, less than fluently and in monotone, about required documents and potential fines and such. I would have dozed off, but there were a couple of rudely loud (possibly drunk at 9:30a.m.) teachers sitting behind me making a scene. Maybe it's good that I didn't, since there was a lady lurking in the wings snapping photos of the assembly. I wouldn' want to be immortalized passed out and drooling on my shoulder. And if I'd slept, I may never have learned that obtaining a visa through fraud is illegal. After the bit on immigration law, an American gave a speech about good teachers and bad teachers, which was funny, but a little light on content. If he'd just read out loud, "Some teachers are good and some are bad.", he could have gotten just as much across. This concluded, an hour into a five hour program, the informational segment.
Next was, no joke, the karaoke portion. The MC announced that there would be no more speeches, but that the program was not over, and then introduced a trio of Chinese women who gave a shrieking redition of a Korean pop song. Then a couple more semi-prepared performers went on, singing in English or Korean, and the MC invited everybody and anybody from the audience to participate. With the exception of a stand-out performance of "Brow-eyed girl" by a fellow from North Dakota, the quality was pretty low. The guys behind me cheered noisily every time someone from an American city was introduced. They cheered the most violently, I noticed, for Myrtle Beach, SC. Things went on like this for an hour and a half showing no sign of stopping, until I slipped out during a performance of "I'm a barbie girl". I wasn't thrilled to have spent my Saturday morning this way, but I did learn one thing: I'd better be quicker to think of an excuse next time Mihye asks for a volunteer.
11/19/05 "Open" Classes
This week at work was a lot less fun than usual. Our kindergarten classes were opened up for visits from the students' parents, so each classroom had four or five mothers sitting in the back, watching and judging. Teachers and students alike were feeling a bit of performance anxiety and everybody was noticably stressed out. Some kids clammed up, some acted out, some just made sure they raised their hand to answer every single question. I did my thing more or less like normal and tried to ignore the mothers video taping me from the back of the classroom. These visits are really a big deal for the school from a business standpoint. After all, there are plenty of other academies if the parents don't like what they see at this one. The Korean teachers worry about it especially. They are signed for one year contracts, just like foreigners. Since they live here, though, they're more likely to want to stick with this job for a while. But if parents don't like them, their contracts aren't renewed. It's a tough situation, especially considering how capricious some parents can be when it comes to how their children learn English. So everybody spent a week laminating new flash cards and practicing new songs. As far as I could tell, everything went off without a hitch. "The mothers" had a lot of nice things to say about me, so for my part, I feel alright about it. I even got a rare compliment from my supervisor who said "Success. They loved it." Still, I'm glad it's over.
11/9/05 Some out of context photos
Here are a few pictures of my environs that I previously overlooked.
10/27/05-10/28/05 Halloween
In general, Halloween isn't really celebrated in Korea. It's pretty much a Western thing, I guess. At ECC English Academy, though, we celebrated the hell out of it this week. Normal classes were mostly cancelled for two days, everybody dressed up and we played Halloween games. Even the Academic Director, wore a set of green Shrek ears. We had relays, made carmel apples, danced, sang and rampaged around chaotically. I was in charge of relays and the "mystery bowls". Mystery bowls are bowls of cold spaghetti and peeled grapes and stuff that kids have to put their hands in. The noise level was pretty high all day and, for the most part I rarely knew what I was expected to do until seconds before I was doing it. Basically, I spent two days showing kids how to crabwalk and telling them that there really could be snakes or eyeballs in the mystery bowls. The younger kids liked all this stuff quite a bit and were really cute in their costumes. Sometimes, all the clamorous fun was too much for some of them, though. A boy from one of my classes had a little meltdown when he was eliminated from a game of pass the sock. Really, though, what's a game of pass the sock without a little screaming and shoe-throwing.
Later on, there was a costume contest where kids won prizes based on how much time their mothers had spent helping to decorate the school. Spiderman was a popular costume theme for boys, as were pirates and Zorro. The girls were mostly witches or princesses. I wore a set of big hairy werewolf hands. My kindergarten classes cracked up about is since they already think I'm a "gorrilla teacher" on account of the hair on my arms. I'll get some pictures up eventually.
The older students that come in the evening were a lot less impressed with everything. One class totally rejected all the activities, whined, and wished out loud that we could do something fun. These students know enough English to complain pretty well. I can sympathize, though. I remember being in middle school and how basically nothing was fun, especially if it was organized at school. Besides, I was about eight hours into Friday's Halloween party at this point and well past enjoying relay races and myster bowls myself. So we gave up on relay races and had an impromptu lesson about the word "disappointed" which these students didn't know yet, but which they needed to describe their feelings at the moment. I stopped short of another useful vocabulary lesson about the colloquial meaning of "lame". At the end of the day, teachers and students alike were pretty burned out on Halloween. If nothing else, I think these kids got a good feel for how goofy, frantic, and stressful Western holidays can be.
10/21/05
About a week ago, some rampaging students at ECC broke the door knob to one of my classrooms while goofing around between classes. Nobody noticed much, since kids break stuff all the time. Today, though when the secretary came to give a note to one of the students during class, we couldn't open the door from the inside or the outside and were pretty much stuck. Every student (there are twelve in this class) jumped up to tug on the door at once. One boy offered his plastic ninja knife to pry it open. I got everybody to sit down and carry on class pretty much as normal, aside from frequent glancing over their shoulders at the stuck door by the students. This worked alright until the locksmith got there and started hitting the door with a hammer. When the bell rang to go home, the students got really tense and started to ask me "Teacher, no going home?" One boy in a tae kwon do uniform was pretty sure he could kick the door down. This class can't speak English all that well, so my assurances that we could go home as soon as the man with the hammer knocks the doorknob off weren't much help. We played a distracted game of hangman until we were freed and the students charged off home maybe a little faster than usual. We were only really a couple minutes late, and I went to my next class on time, thinking a bit about how horrifying the prospect of being stuck in English class was to my students.
10/18/05
I finally started taking proper Korean classes last week. So far I've been having a pretty good time at it. My roommate, Matt, convinced our boss to offer lessons at our school for the foreign teachers. The school covers most of the cost, so I end up paying only 10,000 won (about $9.50) per month for eight hours of instruction. Our instructor, Kelly, is one of the Korean teachers from our school, so everybody knows each other. At this early stage, class is pretty much a mess, since four out of the six of us students don't know the alphabet yet. I do already, pretty well, but it's not like I couldn't use the practice. In Korean there are stressed and unstressed, aspirated and unaspirated consonants and a couple of vowels that all sound the same to me. The differences in the words they make are big though, which can be funny. "Dog" and "crab" sound pretty similar, a peril at some restaurants, as do "rain" and "blood", and "eighteen" and a popular expletive. Class is pretty relaxed though, so we have fun and laugh a lot at our mistakes. I do feel for my own students, since, by most accounts English is an even bigger jerk of a language than Korean. Also there's a lot more pressure on them to learn. I'm pretty much lauded every time I speak even a mispronounced word of Korean, whereas my students tend to be punished or deprived of their Children's Day presents if they fail an English test. Last year a group of elementary school boys pointedly informed me that their holiday presents were contingent on their grades in English. That being the case, one might have expected that particular group to study a bit harder than they did. Still, it strikes me strange sometimes, how I'm expected to know pretty much none of the language of the country in which I live, but the folks around me are expected to know a great deal of the language of the country where I'm from. Sometimes people who know some English don't want to speak to me in Korean, which frustrates me a little, but of course I know where they're coming from. I got an excellent opportunity to practice on the way home from class, though, when a stumbling drunk old man stopped me and my coworker and asked us to have a drink with him. It was a funny scene. He talked to me, since my Korean's better, but stared at her, since she's tall and blond. Not surprisingly, I didn't catch everything, on account of how badly slurred his words were and how I didn't know most of them anyway. He had money and wanted to drink though. I got that. I think he was a little offended when we declined his invitation. He said something involving "bad feeling", but I figured as he tottered off that he wouldn't remember to hold it against us for long.
10/8/05 Sports Day
At the last staff meeting at ECC, we teachers were informed that we would be working this Saturday at an event for our kindergarten students and their parents, described vaguely as "Sports Day". This was as bizarre as I could have imagined and more. Teachers arrived at noon and students started to show up at 12:30 on a big sandlot belonging to the local elementary school, presided over by a big bronze statue of Yi Sun-Shin. We greeted everybody and posed for a few pictures with students before being hastily divided into ten classes and two teams, Red and White. I chuckled about the Reds vs. Whites bit, but I'm not sure that jokes about Communist revolutions are funny in Korea, so I kept that to myself. The Red team did win, though. A professional event MC, wearing a sunflower on his head, called us all to order and we formed up into columns and marched through an arch of balloons in the middle of the yard. I lead a column of ten students and held a flag that read "Venus", the name of our class. After passing under the arch, all the columns formed into a big rectangle and an enourmous Korean flag was carried out. Next was what seemed like a pledge of allegiance and national anthem. Really though, I had no idea what was going on. None of this was rehearsed or even described beforehand. The only words I could understand in Korean were "Korean Flag" and "God". After this came some ridiculous group dancing, lead by the guy in the sunflower hat. When this was over, teachers and students alike were pretty much sidelined and the parents participated in various events like tug of war, piggy back races, and a relay where a group of four fathers has to carry their children on a mat around a parking cone at a dead run. The competition was intense. People were screaming and cheering and pushing themselves to the limits of athletic endurance. One couple wiped out on the piggy back race, and the woman seemed kind of hurt, but a bloodied elbow wasn't enough to stop her from jumping into the tug of war fray. All of the parents seemed to have a great time. The students participated off and on, but mostly wandered around. I wondered why I was there, except to be seen by parents. Feeling a little bit grumpy about spending my Saturday as a piece of window dressing, I mostly hung around the donuts. The festivities finally ended with gifts for the students. Some presents were bigger than others, but I'm not sure why. Almost nothing was translated all day. Clean-up was a surprisingly efficient group effort. I guess the team spirit was still in effect. Everybody spread out under the glower of Yi Sun-Shin and picked balloons and confetti out of the sand leaving hardly a trace of our presence.
A big event like this calls for dinner afterwords and the ECC staff were treated by our school's owner at, of all places, Outback Steakhouse. It's covered floor to ceiling in the same tacky crap as in the States, but the steaks are a little smaller, I think. There were more than thirty of us, so we made a big commotion. I ended up at the side of the table far from my boss drinking beer with the secretary, switching freely from incompetant Korean on my part to incompetant English on his, having a merry old time. It all must have cost the boss a fortune, but I suspect she does pretty well in the English business. After dinner, the more fun members of the staff went out for more carousing. What time we lost on Saturday afternoon to sports day, we made up for in the early hours of Sunday. Going out in Seoul is worlds different than in Taejeon. There are a lot more people, a lot more places to choose from, a lot more foreigners and cerainly a lot more curfew breaking American soldiers. Anyway, I had a good time with the folks from school, but was struck with a mysterious head and stomach ailment the next day. Hmm...
9/23/05 Class Pictures
Today late morning classes were cancelled for class pictures. This was an awesome event. We herded a hundred or so kindergarteners into the cafeteria to be photographed for our yearbook, first alone and then with their teachers. It was bedlam. The foreign faculty mostly sat in the back of the room waiting to have our pictures taken with the kids, but the frustrated Korean teachers had to try and get all the kids to smile and look in one direction. The process took about forty-five minutes, well beyond the length of time that I think children that age ought to be made to do anything at a stretch. There was a lot of yelling "Don't talk", "Stand up straight" and "Look at the ajoshi", all in Korean, since this age group doesn't know a lot of English. Ajoshi literally means uncle, but is a polite way to call any older man who doesn't have a specific title. In this case, the ajoshi was the photographer, and he was getting very little attention from the congregated students. They shouted, pushed, pinched and made faces. They called him "ajuma" (aunt)and acted like a crowd of brutes. I tried to look serious. I'm sure a good many of the final pictures depict misbehaving students, outraged teachers, and me choking back laughter.
This was also the last day during which my classes were observed by the principal. She had generally nice things to say about me, so I feel pretty good. She did seem to like the way I conduct elementary school classes better than the way I conduct kindergarten classes. One thing is that I have more experience with the former than the latter, but I suspect that another is that a class full of older kids just looks more like the kind of class many Korean parents want to see their kids in. There's more sitting still, writing and raising of hands. Kindergarten is, and I think should be, more, er, kinetic, than what is traditional around here, or really most places. I'm a bit surprised by how much I really like the little ones. They yell and scream, but they do it in English and when I wave my arms like a symphony conductor, they all stop at once. Nearly always. I figure that at least they're excited about what we're doing, and if all that energy is channeled into our lessons and activites and not, say, swinging from the ceiling, things are going pretty well. Nonetheless I do make concessions for the folks watching on closed-circuit from the office. Everybody has to hand things to me with two hands, a sign of respect, and no one can speak Korean, even when saying something I can understand. Anyway, I like the way these classes are going and the period of evaluation by my administrators is over. Now we can get down to learning English. From now on, I'm mostly only subject to the scrutiny of parents who drop in to watch their kids on the video monitors, which watch all of our classrooms all the time.
9/21/05 If you've got a minute and are bothered by union busting...
Monday is Chuseok, so this is a big holiday weekend. School will be closed Monday and Tuesday. Chuseok is a described as Korean Thanksgiving, and most folks go to visit their parents or granparents. This means that Seoul is unusually quiet and unusually smoggy since so many people got into their cars and left the city. On Friday the kidergarteners at ECC came to school in their hanbok and made crescent schaped rice pastries, a traditional Chuseok snack. Other teachers handled that so it was a shortened workday for me, but I dropped in to see the students all dressed up. The older kids came dressed normally, but a little squirly on account of the upcoming holiday. A hanbok is a tratitional garment from, I think, the Joseon era. Everybody has one for special occasions like weddings and holidays. During this holiday, kids put them on and bow ceremoniously to their elder family members who, in turn, give them money.
So, I spent Friday working, Saturday and Monday loafing, and Sunday at Gyeongbokgung, "The Palace of Shining Happiness". Gyeongbokgung is a place I have visited and written about before, but for the holiday there were special festivities to see. Also, from a little further reading I found that the place where the police stopped me on my first visit was, in fact, a few hundred yards from the Blue House, the residence of Korea's president. I also noticed and found it interesting that some accounts of the burning of many of the palace buildings during the Hideyoshi Invasions of the 16th claim that they were burned not by the Japanese invaders, but by disgruntled palace slaves. They explanatory plaques around the palace just tell us that these buildings were burned during the invasion. There was dancing and drumming to watch and a pretty cool demonstration of Joseon martial arts, where men in period soldier outfits fought with spears and swords, waving their weapons dangerously close to the young people in the front row. In addition, the reenactment of the changing of the palace guards was done with a larger compliment than usual and more elaborate props, right down to fake beards and mustaches. I also checked out the National Folk Museum which was hosting special events, like mask painting, for kids. I headed home with a moderate sunburn and a few pictures.
9/10/05 Busted
I was catching the subway today on the way to the bookstore and as I passed the ticket clerk yelled at me "Hey, sir. May I see your ticket?". So I stopped to show it to him and he told me in pretty competent English to step into the office. There he told me I was holding a child's ticket and since I'd passed the turnstile I'd have to pay a fine of thirty times the normal fare. That's about thirty dollars, so I wasn't happy about it. I explained politely that I'd just gotten to the city and must have pressed the wrong button on the ticket machine. Actually, I embellished a bit and said I'd only been in Korea for a week. I've only been here for a week this time, so I didn't feel totally like a liar. At any rate, he said unsympathetically "That's terrible. It happens to foreigners all the time." Then he showed me my fine and asked me what I'm doing in Korea, I assume to make a report. When I told him I'm an English teacher, the mood changed and he told me that hoped to compete in his company's English speech contest and maybe win a trip to Canada. The fine was apparently forgoten and he described the contest to me, took some pointers and sent me on my way with a thank you and no fine. I patted myself on the back for wriggling out of that situation and headed to the bookstore. The rest of my day was pretty uneventful, but I was pleased to find a respectable selection of books in English, a luxury I never enjoyed in Taejeon.
9/9/05 So many new names
My first week of classes is over, and I guess I made it pretty well. It's a bit overwhelming at first, but I'm pleased with how everything went. It's hard to learn everybody's names and I'm confused by all the new paperwork. The class schedules are especially cryptic, but after a week, I'm showing up to the right room pretty consistently. I was worried about teaching kindergarten classes, since I've never done that before, but it turns out that I really like it. They're a lot of fun and I get caught up in their enthusiasm. Also they really do know something noticably new after each class, even if it's just something like how to write a "C". There are a couple of older classes that are used to walking all over their foreign teachers, which is sort of a pain, but they're already starting to realize that that's not going to work this time around. After the first two classes, they've more or less stopped screaming and hitting each other. At least while I'm looking. All in all it's been a good week and I'm excited about getting into the swing of things a little bit more.
9/2/05 Settling in a bit
I've more or less moved into my new apartment, which is cool. The teacher I'm replacing doesn't move out until Monday, so I'm on a mattress in the living room in the meantime. It beats a plane seat, though. This is officially my orientation period at ECC, so I've observed the odd class here and there over the last couple of days. Today, I spent over three hours at the immigration office trying to get an alien registration card. The application turned out to take about five minutes, once I worked my way up to the counter. Of course I've got to come back on Friday to get the thing. God bless the buereaucracy. I had to get some new headshots taken for my ID card, so yesterday I went to the local department store to get than done. That only took an hour, and when I picked up the pictures, I found that they had given me some sample wallet sized prints of myself grimacing with various tacky patterns in the fore and background. I had hoped to use the one with splashing water and cherries for my ID, but no such luck.
8/30/05 Here I am
Well, I've arrive back in Korea after what seemed like a thousand hours of travelling. I left my hotel in Atlanta at 4:45 a.m. on Monday and arrived in Incheon at 4:25 p.m. local time on Tuesday. The Atlanta to San Francisco leg was the most entertaining on account of a ten or so year old boy who kept shouting things like "We're going down", "God save us", and "Rice-a-roni, the San Francisco Treat". In Korea, customs gave me a few sideways looks, but no particular hassle. I was met by a friendly, but not fluent, employee from the recruiter's office who held up a sign with my name on it and (eventually) dropped me off at my new school. The trip from the airport to school took almost three hours. These two points are, by any reckoning, not three hours from one another, but after the traffic, stopping once at the wrong school, and getting repeatedly lost that's how long it took. I took a brief spin around the school, groggily introducing myself to everybody and then went out for some dinner. Since the school was paying tab for my first days dinner, there were several tag-alongs from the office and we had a grand old time. I finally put my head down at around 11 p.m. It was as long a day as I ever care to have.
7/8/05 Rain
When I hear the word "monsoon" Korea isn't really the region that jumps to mind. Or, I guess, it wasn't until recently. Turns out, though that this particular weather phenomenon has a pretty profound and unpleasant effect around here this time of year. Supposedly, fifty percent of the peninsula's annual rainfall occurs during June and July. I could believe it. A few days ago after a particularly heavy rain, the drainage canal through Yuseong overflowed its banks and flooded the street. Day to day we seem to see three types of weather: heavy rain, drizzle and oppressive sticky heat. It's uncomfortable for me, but the mosquitos ("mogi" in Korean) are thriving. I believe there's a different species of mosquito here than is normal at home, maybe in addition to the familiar kind. It's called Aedes aegypti and its special features include a tendency to bite indoors and a preference for human blood over that of other animals. They're pretty nasty. To combat the exploding mosquito population, there are these terrifying trucks that drive up and down the street gassing the whole neighborhood with pesticide a couple times a day. When I first saw clouds of the stuff floating down the road I figured there might be another exciting street fire, but no such luck. All I found was a flatbed truck carrying a noisy, poison-belching black machine. Now that I know what they are, I try to stay out of the drifting toxic clouds. Call me old fashioned (or uniformed about the risks of Dengue Fever), but I think I'd just as soon take my chances with the mosquitos. Anyway, it seems like as good a time as any to take a vacation to the States, which I will do in ten days or so.
7/4/05
The Fourth of July in Korea is a bit like the weekend when you're unemployed: not that different from other days. I didn't get to look at any fireworks, get burned by sparklers or eat potato salad. Not much celebration around here at all, on account of not too many Americans. I taught the boy I tutor on Mondays a bit of what American history books have to say about American Independence, but he wasn't all that interested. He was still basking in the glow of his perfect score on his most recent English test. I figure he'll start paying attention to my lessons again when the next English test is around the corner.
Canada Day, July 1st, fell on a Saturday and was marked with a party that wasn't that much different from the parties that mark every Saturday. I had not, until this Saturday, realized that there was such a thing as Canada Day, and felt a little ignorant. There were plenty of Canadians on hand to fill me in, though. Canada's struggle for independence was, I learned, not the sort of flashy and militaristic affair that America's was, and was achieved largely by political means. I'm told they still have fireworks, though. It's funny how I never knew anything about Canada, or met so many Canadians, until I came to Korea.
6/18/05 Kumdori Land
My friend, who is Korean but goes by the name "Pooh" with foreigners, called me this morning and said "Let's meet at four." I figured I'm unemployed and it's Saturday, so my schedule's pretty clear. I hopped in a taxi, not knowing really what the plan was. When I met Pooh he said it was a gloomy day so we should do something "joyful". Our joyful activity ended up being a visit to Kumdori Land, a local amusement park where we met another friend of his and spent the day riding nauseating rides and eating nauseating carnival food. A Korean corn dog is a lot like an American corn dog: a pretty bad idea. I had a great time, but experienced occassional moments of, um, deep regret related to the soju I consumed the night before. Pooh was like a little kid and jogged excitedly from the Viking Ship to the rollercoaster to the flume ride for the first hour of our visit. I must have met half a dozen different children who came up to me, said "Hi. Where are you from?" and then ran away.
After a few hours, we adjourned from the park and had some intensly spicy stew for dinner. Then we visited a norae-bang, or singing room. Singing rooms are everywhere in Korea, owing most of their patronage to heavy drinking. In these establishments, two to six people crowd into a little, semiprivate room and take turns singing Korean or western pop songs and making fools out of themselves. It's an embarrasing and unavoidable part of Korean social life, I think. In the name of cultural diplomacy, I stepped up to the plate and dazzled everybody with my John Fogerty impression. Maybe dazzled isn't the right word, but I've already used "nauseated" twice in these short paragraphs. It turned out to be a pretty goofy, and ultimately pretty joyful day.
6/17/05
It's official now, Mr. Friendly is bankrupt and the Love and Peace English Academy is closing its doors. We teachers got all of three days notice about this development before hand, although Michelle and I, the cynical Americans, had suspected for a while that the business was not financially solvent. We're all a little bit shocked, though. We finished out the week of classes more or less as usual. Students had mixed reactions when they (today for the most part) found out that the school was closing. Some were happy, because this means that they get a few study free afternoons before their parents find another institute to send them to. Some were pretty sad about separating from their friends and teachers. I got a couple nice letters from older students saying good bye. I felt a little choked up when one elementary school student burst into tears when she found out. Some students figured that on the last day of school they ought not have to study and some seemed to feel more comfortable with the usual routine. Some didn't show up at all. Those of us that were there studied a bit, ate some cookies and called it a day. I think the official story that the parents heard is that the school is not closing, just moving to Seoul. This is hogwash, but we're in Korea and it's important to save face.
At any rate, I'm now on vacation. Let's not say unemployed. I'll be in Korea for another month, giving some private lessons and lining up a new job. Then I'll have to return to the States, since my visa will be expiring and my presence here will start to be illegal. I'll be in the US for a month or so, and then, I think, back to Korea. On one hand this is all a big hassle, but on the other I'm feeling pretty good about visiting home and eventually extending my stay in Korea by a bit. We'll see about how it all stacks up. Tonight I'm meeting my boss and coworkers for dinner and soju to mark the passing of our little language academy.
6/12/05 Hyeongchungsa
I woke up eary this morning, a rare thing on a Sunday, and visited the city of Asan. Asan doesn't have a lot to recommend it, as far as I could tell, except for Hyeongchungsa, which is a shrine dedicated to Yi Sun-Shin. Yi Sun-Shin was an Admiral under the Joseon Dynasty and is maybe the most important hero in Korean history. He is to folks that favor military history anyway. In the Seven Year War of the Sixteenth Century, he is said to have defeated a fleet of 133 Japanese warships with a force of only twelve of his famous turtle ships. The shrine is a pretty interesting sight. You can see the Admiral's sword and his war diaries, as well as a replica Geobukseon, or turtle ship. The sword is 195cm long compared to the average height of 155-165cm of a man of the Joseon dynasty. The war diaries, I'm told, describe the Admiral's innovative tactics and portions of them are required reading for public school students. The turtle ship is the coolest thing in history. Maybe not quite, but it's a really cool type of boat. It's basically an early ironclad battleship, powered by sail and oar and full of nasty cannons. It looks like a really mean turtle dragon. I was almost ejected from the musuem for snapping pictures, but here's somebody else's picture of what a turtle ship looks like in the water. The shrine is at the site of Admiral Yi's family home, which is now open for tourists to walk around in. Of course, I did. It's a pretty modest affair, considering the status it's late occupant was eventually to command, but I guess a fellow's not born a big hero. The whole place is beautifully landscaped and is a pretty nice place to spend the day.
6/11/05
Well, today the street caught fire. I was walking to the grocery store and noticed a plume of smoke rising from down the street. When I went to check it out, I saw that there were five foot flames coming out of the storm sewer. I stayed for a while to gawk and pretty soon a crowd of folks with a similar idea gathered on the scene. A few minutes later, we were joined by no less than eight fire trucks and a brigade of confused looking firemen. By this time the fire had spread underground and three more holes were smoking. One at a time, the firemen sprayed water down them. When they stopped flaming, the holes were tested for continuing danger by a fireman who held his bare hand over them to see if they were still hot. I waited to see if they would make a cadet trainee stick his head in the hole, but they didn't. It seems like the oil change place next door might have dumped something in the wrong drain and then a cigarette butt set it off, but who knows. Nobody was hurt, so I enjoyed the whole incident.
Afterwords, still on the way to the store, I bumped into a Korean culture festival. There was traditional music, a children's art show, and best of all some people making rice cake with a huge wooden mallet. I was recruited to carry around a plate of green rice cake and hand out pieces to the kids, who were learning how to decorate paper fans. My reception was funny. A few kids hid behind there parents. Some seemed scared of me, but still wanted some rice cake. Still others wanted to ask me questions about America. A couple were students from my school, so had gotten over being scared of me and asking me questions about America, but were interested to find that I do exist outside of school. I stayed for a while, eating rice cake and watermelon, then headed home. I never did get my groceries.
5/15/05 Buddha's Birthday
Today is the eighth day of the fourth month on the Chinese calender and that means it's Buddha's Birthday. It is a holiday in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Macau. Since this year it's on a Sunday, folks in Hong Kong and Macau get a day off on Monday. No such luck for us suckers in hardworking Korea. Buddha's Birthday is also a holiday in Japan, but they put it on the eighth day of the fourth month of the Gregorian calender.
I decided to check out the festivities at Donghaksa, the temple located on the eastern slope of my favorite local mountain. There were more people than normal, and the whole place was beautifully decorated with paper lanterns of different shapes and colors. There were pyramids of watermelons, oranges, and avocados laid out for the birthday boy. I was a little shy about taking pictures, since it's a holy place after all, until I bumped into a nun with a video camera, who was recording the whole event. There was drumming and chanting and praying, and they rang the enourmous bell. I think they ring the bell everyday, though. A portly and jovial nun gave me a bead bracelet and shared some dok. Dok is a little hard to describe if you've never had it. The closest thing to it is maybe a gummy bear, but it tastes like rice. It's pretty common. I think the tastiest version is dokbokki, which is smothered with super spicy hot pepper sauce and is a popular food for drunken students.
I wanted to see the lanterns after dark, so I passed the time hiking towards Gyeryongsan's peak. In Korean, Gyeryongsan means "Chicken-Dragon Mountain". I spend a lot of time there. The last kilometer or so to the top is a scramble up some loose rocks, and today I failed to get there, like I always do. I did get the bejesus scared out of me by one of the temple cats when it rocketed across a lonely part of the trail after a bird. I got back to the temple just before dark and bumped into some friends who were checking out the decorations. We gawked for a bit then stopped for pajeon on the way back to town.
5/5/05 Children's Day
Around here, May 5th is Children's Day. It's a national holiday and kids get the day off of school. Many of them get presents, too. It's a bit like everybody's birthday. Some students have been informing me for weeks, in supplicating tones, that they will only get presents if they get good marks in all their classes.
For my part, I celebrated the day in the most appropriate way I could think of, by jumping on the late train out of town with some friends to go see Boy George in Seoul. The music wasn't much to my liking, but I enjoyed the mission. KTX, Korea's high-speed rail service, is new and comfortable and takes a person from Taejeon to Seoul in about an hour. Drinks and conversation make it a short hour, at that. Michelle, Kori, and I stood out pretty noticably from the sleeping business men that made up the rest of our car's ridership. We arrived just a bit too late to ride the subway, and had to take a bus from Seoul Station. Getting around Seoul on the subway is pretty easy, the busses are a different story. We got on one, more or less at random, believing without reason that it would take us where we were going. It didn't, but the driver got a big kick out of Michelle, whose Korean gets more fluid, if not more fluent, after a few beers, and decided to help us out. He stopped the bus in the middle of the road and yelled at another bus driver to stop and let us on. We ran from one bus to the other and hopped on, looking clueless but determined. Some friendly university students laughed at us for a bit and told us exactly how to get to the show. The intermodal oddessy finished in a taxi and we showed up just in time for the main act. The show was, to me, nothing special but I had a good time. We bumped into some other folks from Taejeon and stayed out eating and drinking until the subway started up and caught the first train back. We arrived in Taejeon at around 9:00 A.M. and spent most of Children's Day catching up on our sleep.
4/16/05 It turns out I don't have a cold.
It's the "yellow wind". Every year in the spring, the peninsula gets hit with the nasty stuff. It comes from the Gobi desert, where high winds kick up sand and dust which blow across China, then the China Sea, and then Korea. Sometimes it makes it all the way to the American west coast. In addition to the sand and grit, this wind contains trace minerals and industrial pollutants. It's pretty bad for a person's health, being blamed for all sorts of ailments, most notably respiratory problems and hair loss. I'm a bit stuffy, but not yet bald. Some folks are going around wearing surgical masks and the news has yellow wind advisories. I guess school has even been closed on account of the stuff in years past. Here's somebody else's picture of it.
4/14/05 Mr. Friendly Day
Today at the Love and Peace English Academy, we celebrated the birth of our mascot, Mr. Friendly. Normal classes were cancelled in favor of celebratory activities, singing and snacks. It was fun to put away the books for a while, even for something silly. We made birthday cards for Mr. Friendly and the students that can write wrote on such topics as the meaning of "love and peace", family and the environment. I don't think it'll change your life, but if you're curious, you can read more about Mr. Friendly here.
Mr. Friendly day provided an interesting contrast to what I've been seeing in the news. Nobody seemed put off by the fact that Mr. Friendly is Japanese, but attitudes towards Japan have been increasingly unfriendly around here lately. National pride has been inflamed recently as Japan has reasserted its claim to some islands also claimed by South Korea and approved some nationalist history textbooks which are believed by Koreans to gloss over atrocities associated with Japanese imperialism in WWII. Folks are pretty stirred up. Japanese flags are burning in the streets of Seoul. Things are much worse in China, where mobs of angry citizens have vandalized diplomatic buildings, cars, and even Chinese-owned Japanese restaurants. I imagine it's all in the news back home. It's pretty ugly, and all on Mr. Friendly Day.
4/5/05
Today was a national holiday and so I had the day off. I'm not sure about the exact nature of this occasion, but I asked my students, and what they described sounded like Arbor Day in the States, only taken a bit more seriously. My students said they would observe by planting trees or flowers, removing harmful plant species from the woods, mowing the lawn, or playing video games. Incidentally, this is the last year that this will be a government holiday, as the recent adoption of a five-day work week has provoked some complaining (I suspect not by workers) of too many days off.
I took advantage of the free time to do some sightseeing. Michelle and I traveled by bus to Songnisan National Park, about an hour and a half from downtown Taejeon. At the entrance to the park was a very small town where we sampled the local specialty foods. Almost all of these had something to do with mushrooms, although acorn flour pancakes and jujube wine were also featured. The mushrooms and pancakes were spicy and easy to eat too many of. The jujube wine was cloying and wretched. Now I know. I won a couple of cheap toys at a roadside stand, by being an expert marksman with a BB rifle.
Inside the park we visited a big Buddhist temple. It is still the largest in this province, but not as populous as in the past, when it housed over 3000 monks. These monks used to be fed out of an enourmous iron ricebowl, according to the signs, the largest in Korean history. It is now on display for tourists to snap photos and throw coins into. I liked this ricebowl the best, but the most famous items at this temple are a 100 meter goldplated statue of Buddha and a five story wooden pagoda. The statue has a long history, even though its current, er, incarnation was only completed in 1988. The pagoda is distinguished by the fact that it is one of a very few such structures to survive the destructive Japanese invasions of the 16th century. I snapped a few pictures of both.
On the way out I walked barefoot down a well-tended trail of yellow Ochre pebbles. According to a placcard, this will cure everything from athelete's foot to arthritis and also facilitate the absorbtion of infrared by the feet. Of course, I always believe placcards so I took the plunge. It hurt a little bit, actually, and after a hundred yards I observed no marked improvement in my medical condition. It did turn my feet orange, though.
After a relaxing dinner, Michelle and I ambled back to the bus station, remarking on the way that the town seemed rather dark and quiet. Our pace picked up when we got there, enquired about the last bus out of town, and found it to be leaving in two minutes. No worries, though, we made it with a good thirty seconds to spare and didn't have to sleep in a ditch.
