First Day of My Life

February 16, 2012 1 Comment

January is, by definition, a month of firsts, but for me, February has been much the same.  Here are some firsts that I’ve experienced in the past six weeks.

My First Sick Day  I’ve avoided taking sick days for three reasons.  First, my Korean co-workers never take them.  My supervisor had a car accident, while pregnant and she didn’t take a full sick day.  She came in and worked a half day.  Granted, it was a fender bender, but still.  In North America you’d go home just to mellow out after that.  Not ’round these parts.

Secondly, it’s a pain in the ass for my co-workers.  There are no extra bodies to cover the work load when someone is off sick or on vacation.  We all just have more work to do.  This means either teaching more classes, having groups of kids combined into totally unmanageable super-size classes, or both.  Usually both.  I’ve hated doing it so I avoid putting my colleagues through it if I can help it.

Lastly, we’re supposed to bring a doctor’s note.  Besides the fact that when you’re feeling sick enough to stay home, the last thing you want to do is haul your ass out of bed to go to a doctor, the language barrier is also a potential issue.  Fortunately, for the most part, doctors here speak some English because many medical text books use English terminology.  Also it’s very competitive in med school so most of them try to stand out in other ways, like being impeccable English speakers.  However, before you get to a doctor you have to run the gauntlet that is dealing with the nursing and admin staff.

Till now all my doctor’s appointments here have been in Seoul at the International Clinic where everyone (admin staff included) speaks English. But that’s a 4-hour round trip trek (by transit) and not feasible on a sick day.  So last week I took myself to the doctor’s office on the fourth floor of the building where I work and made enough hand signals and grunts at the receptionist that she was able to figure out that I had a cold and I wanted to see a doctor.  Once that was figured out, she got me to the blood pressure machine and then was horrified when I almost took off my jacket in the waiting room to reveal…a tank top.

It’s a funny thing, Korean women will wear booty shorts and skirts that are scandalously short, but they will never show off their chests.  I don’t think of a tank top as showy, but I have a much bigger rack than the average Korean woman so it sort of immediately looks scandalous if I’m not dressed pretty conservatively.  In any case, it was amusing how many times the nurses sought to cover me up during my visit.  Eventually I managed to leave with my doctor’s note in hand.  Surprisingly, it was not as stressful as I had imagined it would be.

Club Hopping  I have never been one for clubbing.  I have long refused to contend with coat checks in the winter so that nixed clubbing from about October to May in Toronto.  And in the summer months I just sort of found other reasons not to go.  Not wanting to feel like a slab of meat on sale, being the main one.  But something about being in Korea has changed all that.  Maybe it’s that all my friends here are younger than I am, but I doubt it.  Some of them have told me that they refused to club at home too.  I think it’s just this thing all we expats get caught up in where we feel free and so we do stuff we just didn’t do at home.  Like taking up a martial art, visiting art galleries, cutting our hair in weird styles, wearing things we’d never wear at home, and, apparently, clubbing.

Not only have I been willing to club in the dead of winter (though admittedly the dead of winter hasn’t been that cold here), I have worn scandalously short skirts and dresses while doing so and I have let a strange man grind up against me and just kind of laughed it off rather than being mortified. In a total change of form I decided that for my 29th birthday (version 7.0) I wanted to go dancing.

Let me back up here.  I need to tell the next story, in part, because it will explain how I met my new friend Kim, but mostly because I think it’s an awesome story.  There are few places to get plus size clothing in Seoul and one of the most popular ones is called OK BT.  OK BT has a communal dressing room.  Actually, to call it a dressing room is to overstate matters tremendously.  It’s a stock room that doubles as a communal dressing room.  Necessarily, you bond pretty quickly with the other women in the dressing room if you speak the same language.  I’ve met a lot of really lovely women in that dressing room but often they live nowhere nearby.  Foreign women come from far and wide to shop there.  A couple weeks ago, however, I hit the jackpot in that I met a really cool girl and she lives in Seoul, which, while not super close, is close enough.  And we hit it off.  She said to me:  “Can we keep in touch, because you’re the first woman I’ve met in a long time who isn’t bitchy.  That’s rare here.” I love her to death.

Kim is a fellow Canadian who has taught in Korea for years.  She is older than me but is wonderfully young at heart.  And she’s really social which is great.  She turned out to be game to go dancing with me for my birthday, so she and I and another friend, Tracy, headed to Hongdae (the club district) this past weekend, in search of some places Kim had been to before.  As it turned out, it’s been a while since she went dancing in Hongdae so most of the places she’d been to were gone.  We ended up trying out a few places to find one that wasn’t a complete let down.  Hence, my first time club hopping.

One of our stops was a place called Ska 2 which featured stripper poles that you could dance on if you felt led.

The actual picture of desperation?

Tracy and I commented that we found it odd/horrifying.  Kim said “Am I weird, I don’t find it odd at all.”  She’s been in Korea for nine years.  Enough said.

At the beginning of the night we asked a couple foreign guys for directions to a club called Hodge Podge (which turned out to now be a bar rather than a club) and they told us they were heading to another club if we wanted to join them. The fella who told us this had an accent so we all thought he’d said a few different things:  fiat, Kia, fear, among others.  We opted to keep searching for Hodge Podge though.  Later that night we strolled past a place called Via and finally cottoned on that it was the same joint.  We checked it out and I liked it.   I only regret that we didn’t join them in the first place.  They were cute.

Sexual Misadventure  No I’m not pretending that I was a virgin before I got here, but when I arrived, sex just wasn’t initially a priority.  Also I have turned avoiding eye contact with strange men into an Olympic event, so it’s really hard for me to get picked up.  Not that men in Incheon are trying to pick me up anyway.  I have to go to Seoul for that.

Eventually, however, I decided a little sexual healing might be nice.  I will not get into the gory details, but I will tell you about the most hilarious road block to having sex here:  condoms, or rather the lack thereof.

While men who want to get down have been plentiful once I started looking, men who come equipped with their own birth control/sexual safety devices are strangely hard to find.  I have yet to see a penis that belongs to a Korean man, but rumor has it that foreign men here have a hard time fitting into Korean-made condoms.  In my attempts to break my celibacy streak, I have met two men with this very issue.  Unfortunately one of them did not bother to procure American-made condoms from the air force base where he works.  Epic stupidity.  The second managed to scrounge up some Japanese-made condoms at the convenience store, but let’s just say it was a tight fit.

Apparently, American-made condoms can be had at sex shops in the foreign district (Itaewon) and at some locations of major supermarkets like Home Plus and EMart, but no one I’ve met has bothered to make sure they had them on hand.  What I’ve found amusing and horrifying is that in both cases the dudes asked me if I had any better condoms on hand.  As if I’m the one with the penis in the room.

Joining Everything  After months of fighting the flow, I finally conceded that a reasonable social life is only to be had by being prepared to go to Seoul regularly.  And that’s not necessarily easy.  Even when I’m willing to do the 4-hour round trip commute, the subway system stops running around midnight and it’s about a $35-45 cab ride to get home from Seoul.  But it dawned on me that being in Seoul makes me happy in a way that hanging out in Incheon just never does.  In Incheon you can eat, get shitfaced and go to norebang.  That’s about it.  In Seoul you can do everything else.  So I started joining things.

I’ve been to a book club meeting and really enjoyed the group, even if I hated our first read (1Q84 by Haruki Murakami).  I bumped into one of the girls from the club when I was out for my birthday and we hugged like we’d been friends for years.  It was so neat.  It was incredibly refreshing to have an intellectually stimulating and challenging conversation with a table of people.  And the club is called Books and Booze–you can’t really go wrong there.

I also joined a writing collective but so far it seems like it’s defunct as the organizer is no longer able to organize.  I contacted him a couple times about taking over duties for the next six months but haven’t heard from him.  In the meantime some of us in the group are trying to connect and form smaller location-based groups so we’ll see if anything comes of that.  However, one great thing that has come of joining this group is that I also joined their facebook page where I saw an announcement for a regular open mic night in Seoul.  I went to it a couple weeks ago, read a short fiction piece and got a good reception.  I’ll be going again this Sunday.  While there, I also met a guy who might be able to network me into a good job for next year.  So, win.

As I’ve thrown down about a zillion dollars on cameras since I got here, I’ve also been looking to find a photography club where I could improve my skills.  So far, no luck, but there’s a dude who lives in my neighbourhood who’s agreed to go on some photography walks with me and teach me a thing or two.  Also a win.

Lastly I’ve joined a music appreciation group that just goes and sees live music together.  I’m going to a traditional Korean music concert on the 25th of this month that I think will be really cool.  I’m looking forward to meeting people in that group as well.

As if to repay me for taking this leap of faith, the universe has provided me with two people (Kim being one of them) who are cool with me crashing at their places here and there if I stay in Seoul.  So even more winning.

It’s taken longer than I would have liked but I feel like I’m finally starting to find “my people.”  And frankly, maybe I would have been less grateful for them if I’d found them any earlier.  Should I stay another year here, I feel like I’ll have a good network in Seoul already in place, which is fantastic.

This is not to say that everything is perfect right now.

Cutting My Losses  One thing that’s been a real first for me is to make a decision about cutting my losses a lot more quickly.  The last couple months have seen my job satisfaction take a serious dip.  This was never a dream job, but the shenanigans of management have really gone into overdrive since the beginning of December.

What makes the situation harder is that this is not isolated.  It’s not just one bad hagwon–it’s the hagwon system.  It’s a set-up that is systemically flawed by making parents customers with almost unlimited bargaining power.  Parents get mad if their kids don’t advance to the next level at the appropriate speed, even if advancing is the worst thing possible for their kid.  If they feel like you’re the reason their child is not advancing they just move their kid to another hagwon.  So the management is always at least as concerned with retaining the customer as they are with teaching the child–if not more so.

All that aside, it is simply not a given that your contract will be respected.  In addition, all kinds of shit gets thrown at you last minute with no regard for how it affects the teacher, and thus the students.

I have vacillated between trying even harder to make this work and just phoning it in.  It’s difficult though, in that, if I half-ass this, it’s not my inane managers who suffer, it’s the innocent kid in the middle who does.  I’ve felt enough discouragement about the issue to prompt me to enter a short  non-fiction piece in a contest about feeling like I can’t call myself a teacher at all.  And then today, after having a discussion with a friend about just not giving a shit, I had some of the most engaged and successful classes I’ve had in weeks.  Maybe because I didn’t give a shit?  It’s hard to say.  At this point I just try to take it one day at a time.

One thing I am clear on, however, is that I do not want to live in Incheon for another year and I do not want to work for a typical hagwon.  I’m now starting to pound the pavement in search of a hagwon with 1) low turnover (indicating happy foreigners) that is 2) in Seoul.  If I can’t find a hagwon that meets those two requirements, I won’t stay here another year. That may sound simple and reasonable to you.  That’s a huge change of head space for me.

The version of me from 2010 would have given this three more years of discomfort to play out.  Maybe more.  Until finally conceding that continued stability wasn’t worth being miserable.  The new me says “fuck that noise” and realizes that if it’s not making me happy it’s not really worth continuing to do long term.  I’m not saying there isn’t a time and a place for sticking it out.  This just isn’t that time or that place.

As I said, I feel like I’ve finally started to find my people and the things I enjoy about Korea, so I would like to be able to stay.  I’d like to pay down more debt and have more of a chance to travel.  But whether I leave here after a year or I stay for five, I will do it with no regrets.  To be thinking that way is an enormous first for me.

As I said, things are not perfect, but for now, it’s really cool to be having so many firsts.

Lastly, click here for some pictures of my birthday dinner with some co-workers.

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Happy Lunar New Year!

January 24, 2012 1 Comment

새해 복 많이 받으세요!

Or “Saehae bok mani badeuseyo!”

Or loosely translated “Have a blessed New Year.”

However you choose to say it (or write it) I’ve never needed a four-day weekend so badly!  But rather than spend all of it sleeping, I decided to get off my duff and go and experience some of Korea (or at least Seoul).  I have noticed that when I get out and do things like this I enjoy my time here a lot more.  Going forward my plan is to go and check out something new every weekend.  So you should benefit from a lot more pictures (or at least more interesting blog posts)!

Lunar New Year was actually yesterday on Monday the 23rd, but I got in my sightseeing on Sunday.  My first stop was Deoksugung Palace because I wanted to see the changing of the guard.  No such luck as it was cancelled due to the weather.  It was only about -6C outside but I guess that’s too cold for it.  Apparently if I had come back on Monday the ceremony would have gone no matter what but with it taking 4 hours round trip for me to go to Seoul I decided I’ll just go back in the spring to see it.

After the palace, I headed over to Namsangol Hanok Village.  Here there are traditional houses that were transported to the site and you can watch or participate in traditional ceremonies and activities.  I had a great time there.

Lastly I headed to Namsan Tower to take in the view.  Unfortunately, by the time I headed over there it was pretty dark and a bit hazy and neither my camera nor my iPhone do very well on panoramas in low light like that.  Also I’m scared to death of heights so I don’t see myself going back to get better shots.  I don’t know why, but I didn’t factor in that I’d find riding up there in a cable car uncomfortable enough that I had to get this done in one try.  It hardly helps that a couple weeks ago I watched a documentary about a fighter jet ripping the cord of a cable car and all of its occupants plunging to their deaths.   So you’ll have to ask your *other* friends in Korea for good pictures from the tower.

Here’s a link to all the pictures I took.  Enjoy and Happy New Year!

 

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Big Girl

January 19, 2012 8 Comments

It’s been a long time since I wrote about anything relating to the actual name of this blog, but a couple incidents in class this week begged to be retold.

Korea is so different from North America in so many ways, it’s impossible to talk about all of them, but I’ll talk about one.  People go out of their way to avoid confronting you directly about issues that could bear some conversation, but will hasten to say things to you that just don’t need saying.  Like the time one of my students intoned that I needed to go on a diet, or the time a random lady walking by me in a subway station looked over at me and made a gesture to indicate the largeness of my belly or all the other entirely un-subtle indicators I’ve been given that I am waaaay larger than the Korean idea of normal.  And I’ve lost weight since I’ve been here.  It’s just always open season here on letting you know that you could stand to drop a few.  Younger, hipper Koreans won’t tend to do it, but the sorta old and the very young will.  With my elementary students, the youngest ones will say things utterly guilelessly.  The ones old enough to know better won’t dare say it to me, but I’ll tell you what they do.

In one of my classes on Monday, we finished the lesson a little early so I let them play Hang Man while I finished some marking.  Usually I control such games in a pretty draconian manner but I decided to relax and let the kids run the game.  One of the boys asked if he could write a whole sentence instead of just a word and I said sure, as long as he could keep track of the spelling.  As the sentence started to materialize on the board behind me, I saw one of the girls’ names, Dina, was part of the solution.  I realized blessedly quickly that it was going to be a disparaging comment about her weight, so I shut the game down and gave the boy who’d started the puzzle a bit of a verbal lashing.

The boys in that class constantly go for the jugular with Dina, calling her pig or just otherwise making comments on her size.  In addition to being a little heavy (not much, mind you) she’s one of the tallest people in the class and is very likely to just lengthen out someday–assuming she doesn’t fall into some death spiral of eating her emotions and actually end up with a real weight problem.  But for the moment, she’s significantly bigger than everyone in that class, male or female.

In another class that same day, I had the kids working on a series of chain stories.  Each student wrote a sentence to begin a story and then left their notebook open on a desk.  All the students then wandered the room adding sentences to every book to create a story.  It’s one of the few times that the kids have an opportunity to be creative so I was letting them write down just about anything that popped into their heads.  I participated as well and, incidentally, a lot of stories centered around my dying, going to hell, farting or otherwise coming off less than positively.  As I wandered over to one book the boy writing clamped down his hands so I couldn’t see what was on the page.  When he finally left, I took a look and it was a long sentence about one of the girls in class and how she is so big, with her proposed weight in kg and some indication that she’s a bad person as well.

This particular girl, Jenny, is one I actually worry about a little.  I’ve had her in at least one of my classes for as long as I’ve been working at the school.  She’s a bigger girl who’s a bit boyish.  She’s got a sweet core but she’s a bit hapless and her way of coping with that is to be overly aggressive.  In an essay about her best friends, she wrote repeatedly that her friends were all pretty and thin and that she was fat and ugly.  Now every girl may feel this way in 5th grade but I get the impression she feels a bit more keenly because she gets that direct feedback from the other kids.  In a bid to be “the teacher who changes her life” I wrote in the comments of that essay that I thought she was pretty.  I’m fairly sure it had zero effect.

When I saw the sentence I erased it and told the boy it wasn’t appropriate.  Even when the sentence was erased though, two of the girls hovered over the paper trying to make out what had been there before and as they were deciphering it, read it loudly enough for Jenny to overhear.  She is usually hard to control in a classroom but that knocked the wind out of her sails for a while.  Which just hurt my heart.

In both cases, the boys doing the teasing are not ones I consider to be the worst of the pack by any means.  In fact, the boy in the writing class is one of the brightest, hardest working, most well-behaved, and nicest students I have.  Also in both of these classes, there are boys who are a little fluffy around the edges as well but they don’t catch flack for it  at all–maybe because they lack the height to stand out.

While I didn’t have a full on flashback in the classroom or anything, all this did remind me of the unpleasantness of my teenaged years being around a mother who had me terrified that I might get fat and convinced that nothing in life could be worse.  I was actually a perfectly reasonable size for my age if incredibly buxom, but I managed to think I was fat for all the years that I wasn’t, until I actually got fat.  Now as a fat adult, I deal with North Americans who have a purely aesthetic problem with fatness attempting to render their dislike righteous with a pretense at caring about the health of random fat folks and concerns about the beleaguered health care system that they suddenly have so much concern about, or Koreans who just don’t have any filter.  I know what mental gymnastics I have to do to try to not eat my emotions, to focus on being healthy at my current weight (and not go on crash diets to become “acceptable”) and to like myself as I am.  But I wasn’t equipped to do those mental gymnastics as a teenager, and as 11 and 12-year-olds, I highly doubt these girls in my classes are equipped to do so either.  I have no idea how they’ll be affected by the taunts they’re dealing with right now.  I hope they’ll fare better than I did.  But whose to say?  They are both beautiful girls and I really hope they figure that out if they don’t know that now.

A couple things are for damn sure:  kids are cruel no matter where they’re born and it still isn’t safe to be a big girl.

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Need to Know – #4 This Contract is Not Binding

January 4, 2012 4 Comments

I was told by a fellow who had taught in Korea for about 10 years, that Koreans consider the employment contract the “beginning of negotiations, not the end.”  I didn’t believe him.  I was an idiot.

I’ve heard horror stories of people not being paid on time or at all, unlivable accommodations or a work load that bore only a vague resemblance to their contracted workload.  I know two teachers who are treated shamefully by the Korean staff at their school because they agitated about getting *half* of their contracted lunch break.  I have suffered nothing like that.  The company I work for has a chain of schools and is a multimillion dollar enterprise, so getting paid has never been a problem.  My initial accommodations were fine but then I was moved a few weeks ago (albeit incredibly inconveniently–I was told Thursday at 9:45pm to be ready to move by Friday at 1:00pm) to a much better, newer, cleaner apartment with an eat-in kitchen and heat that works properly.  Definitely a win.  My workload hasn’t ever been out of control (though I can’t say the same for all the teachers here–there’s one middle school teacher, Mike, who teaches a third more classes than almost anyone on staff).  Mostly I don’t have any contract issues but a couple things have come up:  working hours and vacation time.

According to my contract I work Monday to Friday 2:30-10:30.  In real life I now work some Saturdays as well.  The middle school department doesn’t have enough foreign teachers (or teachers period, it seems) and so instead of being allowed to hire another teacher, the director is trying to cut costs by using the manpower he has on the ground.  At first they (I say “they” because our director doesn’t speak any English so it’s never clear who’s making decisions) tried to wrangle one of us foreign teachers into working every Saturday for three months and we all balked at that.  We don’t have much of a social life apart from the weekends and working every Saturday would effectively cut all of us off from most of the other people we’ve met in Korea.  So we managed to push back a bit and say we would rotate the schedule so each of us worked one or two Saturdays a month.  The $15 an hour (or something like that) we’ll be paid really doesn’t compensate for the hole that’s blown into prime weekend time though.

Vacation time is another weird issue.  Contractually we all get 10 vacation days with 3 of those being during the time when the school is closed for summer break.  So essentially you’re left with 7.  But you can’t take any more than 3 days at a time.  So unless you can combine them with a holiday it really doesn’t give you a lot of time to go anywhere far.  One of my colleagues asked to take off her 3 days in conjunction with the Lunar New Year only to have the director say no, based on the fact that the kids would be doing term testing.  I don’t know if he’s been paying attention but that’s actually the easiest time to have a teacher away because we don’t need all of the staff on duty to do the testing.  We actually all got a free day off during the last testing period.  Eventually he reversed his decision and said yes but that took three weeks while the cost of her plane ticket increased steadily.  Watching that craziness unfold I’m not sure if I should bother trying to book vacation time or just avoid the debacle and make sure that I get paid out for it at the end of my contract.

These aren’t massive encroachments but I do fear that the fact that we’ve kind of “taken it” on these issues means it’s going to get worse in the next seven months.  At just under five months in we’ve already been pushed on this stuff and I wonder how much more we’ll let them push on.  It doesn’t feel like we have much leverage though.  If we want to work elsewhere and we break our contracts we do need the school to sign a release to move our visa to another employer.  It doesn’t seem like breaking one’s contract is a great idea unless you plan to leave the country.  At the end of the day threatening to quit does seem to be one’s only recourse and that would be pretty financially risky for me (read: disastrous) so there’s not much point in my making a threat on which I can’t or won’t follow through.

I’m not up nights worrying about how things will go for the next seven months.  But maybe some nights I fall asleep more slowly wondering what things will be like by the time I leave this place…

That last sentence was actually written about a week ago.  I started drafting this post around December 15th and I still felt the same way on December 27th, even after the text-book writing insanity (producing multiple 25-page texts in a week during Christmas).  But I’m adding to this post because today they managed to finally push enough to piss me off.  Not just annoy me or irritate me, but royally piss me off.

As of this week we start a month of classes during which the kids are on vacation from school.  We start earlier in the day and offer extra classes (the ones we had to write the texts for–oh and the Korean staff just photocopied their pages out of existing books–nice job).  Our schedule for this month is 1:00-9:00pm which I actually prefer.  I find it easier to get to bed at a reasonable hour even if I have less time in the morning to get things done.  I was here for this type of work load and schedule in the summer so I know what’s coming and I’m ready for it.

When I came in today I saw the lead (Korean) middle school teacher, James, talking extensively to the lead (Korean) elementary teacher, Cathy (to whom I generally report).  As soon as I saw that I thought “that’s not a good thing.”  And I say that because James is a manager of the worst type.  He teaches fewer classes than any of his staff but doesn’t seem to make up the extra time doing anything to support his staff.  The one foreign teacher who works full time in middle school, Mike, teaches about 28 classes a week compared to about 20 for all the other–read Korean–middle school staff.  Two of us elementary foreign teachers have had to cover some middle school classes during the week and all of us are pitching in on Saturdays and still, James sees no reason to increase his own workload.  He’s the guy who yells at teachers for letting out students five minutes early when he’s the one who gave you a schedule with incorrect times.  He’s the guy who seems to genuinely enjoy meting out corporal punishment with the kids.  While most Koreans avoid conflict like the plague as a cultural thing, this guy is just kind of a two-faced asshole.  He’s worked for years outside of Korea so he gets foreigners better than most, but he certainly doesn’t act like it.

Anyway, I saw them conversing at 1:00pm and heard nothing so I forgot about it.  At 9:00pm, as we’re all getting on the elevator to leave, Mike tells the rest of us foreign staff that we’re now expected to come in from 12:30-9:00 for the month, as of tomorrow.  This is what that conversation between Cathy and James was about.  Already seething, I asked why.  The reasoning:  we need more prep time.

Really?  See that’s funny because no one asked me about my prep time needs.  I came in early on Monday, of my own volition, to prep because we weren’t given our new class schedule until 9:30 Thursday night last week (we weren’t in on Friday) so there was no time to plan for Monday’s classes.  But I haven’t come in early for the past two days because I haven’t needed to.  For James to suddenly start deciding my prep time needs when it means I have to now work more hours, makes no bloody sense to me.  And the fact that Cathy knew all this at 1:00pm this afternoon but avoided the conflict all day, telling Mike to tell us as we’re walking out the door, utterly chaps my ass.

I think when I wrote the first part of this post, part of my fear was that that I’d never push back on anything; that I’d walk away from this experience feeling as pushed around as I have felt my entire life.  I think I feared that I’d end this year feeling as powerless as I’ve always felt in every conflict situation.  And the first couple times that they pushed on the contract and I didn’t come out swinging, made me feel a little freaked out inside.  I wondered if I wasn’t so much “picking my battles” as much as just avoiding a scary conflict.  But what I’d forgotten was that I have a deep, deep well of rage that tells me when I need to push back.  A rage that sometimes comes in very, very handy.  And one of those times is now.

So my plan is to talk to James and Cathy tomorrow and sort this shit out.  Because that half hour is worth more than $7.50 to me.  One of my foreign colleagues has kind of backed away from the whole thing–ironic, since she’s the one staff member who has commitments every day before work and if the schedule starts any earlier she’s screwed.  But I’ve started to get the impression she likes conflict even less than Koreans do.  The other foreign elementary teacher was screaming bloody murder with me all the way home tonight about this issue and then texted me later to say he didn’t think this was a battle we should pick.  I think his sudden fear comes from the fact that, even though he thinks he led the charge to make sure we didn’t have to work every Saturday, he didn’t, and this would really be the first battle that we’ve picked (though amusingly, he was gung ho about my talking to the Korean lead teachers solo).  I texted back that I’d be certain to mention that I was only speaking for myself.

I’m not sure what I’ll do tomorrow.  Maybe I’ll wimp out or maybe I’ll go in guns blazing.  Ideally I’ll calmly draw a line in the sand and they’ll respect it even if they don’t respect me.  One thing I think I can say with sad certainty, I’m sure this won’t be the last attempt at a breach of contract.

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Dancing Queen

January 4, 2012 2 Comments

This post is about the most epic work party I’ve ever attended.  Now that’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed works parties past–many of them were fantastic affairs, lasting late into the night, during which I got just tipsy enough to have a lot of fun without embarrassing myself too much.  But this party was on a whole different plane.  It was just…epic.

I was dreading this party.  The week had been awful.  It had become clear that while just about every other foreign teacher working in a hagwon (private academy) in my neighbourhood had three days to a week off for Christmas, our school cheaped out and gave us no time off.  In addition, after having been asked about what kind of texts we’d like to use for winter elective classes back in October, it was sprung on us on December 19th that we actually had to*create* said texts ourselves by the next Monday (the 26th).  What followed was a week of being completely stressed out about it, ending with all us foreign teachers working through the Christmas weekend to finish these books.  I’ve never gone into Christmas day quite so angry in my life.

So that was the lead up to the party.  Now, I’ve heard that at the end of every year, the teachers usually put on some inane talent show for the kids that is both humiliating and exhausting. We were lucky; instead we were given a day off and told to be at the office dressed in our finest by 5:00pm on Friday, the 30th for a booze cruise.  While I had no desire–zero, zilch, nada–to do a talent show, I can’t say I was much enthused about hanging out with my co-workers either.  There’s been a fair bit of static between the Korean middle school staff and us foreign teachers of late for utterly stupid reasons and I’m feeling less and less love for our esteemed director every day.  As such, I just really didn’t want to spend more time with them, especially when I was being forced to dress up on a crazy cold day.  The only thing that took some of the edge off was that I figured I might meet some other foreigners at the party, as it was a company wide event.

So we get to the office and of course we leave late so all that rushing I did to be on time–yeah, unnecessary.  And as if Murphy’s Law had been waiting for weeks to strike, I got my period as I headed out the door.  Now I had cramps to contend with for the evening.  Eventually we boarded a bus to head to the pier and it was so hot on that vehicle I thought I would be ill.   It seemed the evening was going from bad to worse.  But then we got the pier and things started to look up.

First of all we got off the bus at this seaside boardwalk deal where there were rides and food stalls.  The food stalls were all open for business and the rides were lit up, but the place was deserted.  It felt like something right out of the prologue of a Stephen King novel.

(This is a tiny album but I put it on facebook because wordpress nearly made me throw my laptop across the room tonight trying to load these pictures as a group–so click here).

There was a bit more action further along but it still had this utterly creepy fun house feel to it.  We were then ushered into one of the stores that doubled as a waiting room until the boat was ready to be boarded.  And my what a boat it was.

The boat that time forgot

It reminded me a bit of the casino boat from the video for Karma Chameleon.  The boat has clearly been in use since at least the 80s.  The underlying decor and design of the boat was decidedly old school but then there were LED lights *everywhere*–just everywhere.

Lights

The same lights, but from another angle

Even better lights

Some of the design elements were so out of this world I just had to take a picture.

I didn't even really understand the point of these...

We boarded magical mystery boat and were seated at our tables by school.  We never really left those tables except to get food so any chance of mingling with other foreigners pretty much disappeared after we left the holding area on the pier.

As most banquet-type parties go, the first part was mind-numbingly boring.

Part 1 of the evening

The evening opened with pledging allegiance to the Korean flag which felt vaguely weird since it’s not, you know, my flag.  Then the CEO gave an awkward speech. “Best teacher” awards were given out and that took a dog’s age.  One of the Korean teachers from my school who got one was sitting next to me.  I asked her later that night why she got the award to which she responded “I don’t know.  I got it last year too, but I don’t know why.”  There’s a morale booster for ya.

In one moment of cool, the directors cut a cake with a sword.  That’s where the cool of that part of the evening began and ended though.  And of course, all of this was done in Korean.  About one sentence was translated into English in all of this.  Kinda felt like a normal work day.

The Remembrance Video turned out to be a failure of hilarious proportions.  The name evoked visions of something that would be  a sober, yet sentimental reminder of a year of teaching gone by.  Instead there was ominous orchestral music with an intro that made you think you were about to watch teachers in a gladiatorial match.  Then pictures of kids doing work in sterile classrooms started to roll by.  It was so off kilter we couldn’t help but laugh.  Then the orchestral music cut out unceremoniously to be replaced with some sort of trance track.  And more pictures of kids doing school work.  The video looked like something a 12-year old boy would put together if he’d never been introduced to the internet.

Finally, as most of us were starting to get light-headed from hunger and my colleagues were into their second glasses of wine, they let us get up and partake of the food on the buffet tables nearby.  And then began the second, and epic, part of the evening.

First there was a terrible female duo on keyboards and guitar.  They were really, really awful.  I figured the rest of the night would be filled with such eye-rolling bad entertainment but I could not have been more wrong.  Suddenly three women and two men appeared on the stage.  An aside, when we first boarded the boat we were greeted by four white folk.  And while it may sound a bit odd to point out their race, I do so because it was so out of place to see someone non-Korean working in that capacity.  It didn’t really make a lot of sense as foreigners tend to come here for pretty specific jobs and those jobs do not include being greeters on random boats.  Well it turned out those greeters were part of the entertainment team.  They were Russian dancers.  I use the word “dancers” loosely because they were really bad.  They’re the kind of people who wouldn’t make it onto the televised auditions of So You Think You Can Dance because they had neither the talent nor the funny factor to be TV-worthy.

What they did have going for them was skimpy outfits.

It's hard to tell but there are ass cheeks hanging out

It was a bit like finding yourself at a bachelor party with your grandfather and then a stripper shows up.  It’s highly embarrassing for everyone except maybe the stripper.  I don’t know who booked this gig but I don’t think they knew what kind of entertainment “Russian dancers” entailed.  From the signage on the boat that we saw later it seemed that the troupe came with the vessel.

My colleague standing in front of the sign advertising the dance troupe

The dancers did a few terrible dances that were simultaneously amusing and horrifying.  I wanted to take them aside and tell them that they really didn’t have to move to a foreign country to hurl away their dignity so forcefully.  They could do that just fine at home.  I hope they were paid really, really well.

As awful as they were though, that definitely marked the point in the evening when things got really funny.  After the Russians finished their dances of ignominy, an mc and a dj (whose turntable really never really got the kind of use it warranted) got up to introduce the talent show.  Earlier in the evening one of the Korean teachers had asked everyone at our table, who would be willing to get up and sing later.  Ever the exhibitionist I said “sure” assuming that there would be a group of us.  Not so much.  It turned out that this was a norebang (karaoke) contest and each school entering the competition would send one lamb to the slaughter.  In  our case that lamb was me.  Well I got up there and did my level best (click here for video).

There’s even better video that includes my other foreign teacher colleagues, but one of them begged me not to post it so I refrained.  For a nation full of people weaned on norebang, our fellow Korean teachers sure were stage shy.  Instead they forced all the other foreign teachers on stage with me.  It was hilarious in the end and I even won second prize, a ₩50,000 (about $44 Canadian) gift certificate.  I kinda hoped with all the hearty congratulations I received that night, that it would garner me some sort of grudging respect/friendliness/fair treatment from the Korean staff going forward.  But as you’ll see from my next post, that was not to be.

After the winning norebang contest there was a dance contest.  I don’t want to post video of other people without their permission so I’m once again refraining, tempting though it is.  Besides I don’t have any good footage of my colleague doing this sort of strange, semi-sexual, flopping chicken dance with one of the admin staff.  Take my word for it though, it was funny as hell.  Oddly, they only won third prize.

After the talent show the mc and dj left the stage.  Again, total under-use of a turn table.  We then headed up to the deck of the boat for a fireworks show that was pretty cool.

And then we were back at the pier.  It was only a three-hour party, but between the crazy norebang and dance contests, the depressing Russian dancers and the most surreal vessel on earth, it was really a lot of fun.  Which goes to show, even when the shine has come off your work place, it’s worth showing up to the parties.

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Right Here, Right Now – Part 2

December 20, 2011 2 Comments

I have a rare break between classes and I should really be working on the 25-30 page student text I’ve suddenly been asked to whip up in a week (uhm, colour me stressed out), but it’s impossible not to write about current events here on the peninsula.

Unless you’ve had your head firmly lodged in your behind for the past couple days, you know that Kim Jong-il, the illustrious “Dear Leader” of North Korea, died on Saturday (though the news was not reported in North Korean state media until Monday).  When friends from North America asked me what the mood was like here yesterday, I wrote back basically “seems like no one gives a shit.” But I was dead wrong.

What was actually happening was my lack of Korean rearing its ugly head.  How do you know if you’re missing water cooler talk if you can’t actually understand what’s being said around the water cooler?  If I was at home and something like this happened, I’d be able to understand snippets of conversation around me and I’d get a much better sense of the “vibe,” but here I can’t get a vibe at all.

Also, I haven’t plugged in my TV since I got here.  When I was back in Toronto, the news on TV was the background noise to my getting ready for work in the morning or fixing my dinner at night.  Sometimes I’d even catch a few minutes before Letterman.  Without news being pushed to me by way of the TV, I forget to go looking for it.  And when you don’t check the news you miss a lot.

I realized this morning though, that I can ask pointed questions and when I ask enough questions of enough people I might start to get a vague sense of the mood here.  And the vague sense I’ve gotten is one cautious relief/low-level anxiety.

People are not running  in the streets freaking out and I actually saw a soldier calmly enjoying a meal yesterday while I was out at lunch.  There is a sort of happy relief that Kim Jong-il is gone.  But there’s definitely a little bit of anxiety about the unknown quantity that is his son Kim Jong-un.  Maybe the passing of the father will leave the son free to throw open the doors of the isolated nation, or maybe it’ll just be same old, same old.  Or, and this is where the anxiety comes in, the son will feel the need to rattle his sabre hard enough to cause a real conflict between the two nations.

To a certain extent none of these questions are likely to get answered until after the funeral on the 28th of December.  Right now North Korea is ostensibly in mourning for their Dear Leader.  After that though, it’s anyone’s guess.  For my part, that second year of teaching in Korea I was planning on suddenly seems a lot less certain.

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Back in the U.S.S.R.

December 16, 2011 6 Comments

Every time I think about the fact that I’m living next door to North Korea, the Beatles tune Back in the U.S.S.R. pops into my head.  It never fails to blow my mind just a little that there is a full-on communist country just a little to the north.  Whenever I’m reminded of the proximity it makes me feel like I’ve fallen into some weird Cold War rabbit hole.  Going on a tour to the demilitarized zone or the DMZ took that feeling to a whole new level.

The day of the tour dawned bright and crisp and I woke up just late enough to get really damn worried about the tour dress code.  In order not to agitate or offend anyone there is a strict dress code for the USO-run DMZ tour.  This dress code is set by the UNCMAC–the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission.  The no-nos included:  sleeveless tops, tops exposing the midriff, shirts with “insulting, profane, provocative or demeaning representations,” short pants or skirts, sheer clothing, “sports uniforms or athletic clothing of any kind including track pants or other stretch pants or warm-ups,” flip-flops, “high hill [sic],” (snicker, obviously no high heels), sandals, “items of military clothing not worn as an integral part of a prescribed service uniform,” and my favourite, “oversize clothing, commonly referred to as ‘gangster’ clothes, including oversize baggy/long pants, t-shirts, or sweatshirts, and ‘biker’ dress such as leather vests and leather riding chaps.”  I want to meet the dude who’s coming to a DMZ tour in riding chaps.

The friend I went with on the tour had also said jeans with frayed bottoms might be a problem (this is her second DMZ tour), but in my morning stupor I managed to forget that I owned a pair of perfectly new jeans and put on the jeans with the frayed bottoms.  Then I spent the entire cab ride into Seoul freaking out about being late (we had the slowest driver in all of Korea) and the prospect of being sent home because of my jeans.  In any case we made it to the USO office in Seoul with enough time to even make a bathroom stop and it turned out that my jeans were okay.

The first thing that struck me as I got on the tour bus was that I hadn’t seen this many non-Koreans congregated in one spot in four months.  It actually felt really weird at first.  And then when I realized that I understood nearly every conversation going on around me I came to realize the blissful state that it is to not understand anything being said in your environment.  It’s like this protective cocoon that allows you to always be in your own head no matter where you are–it’s no wonder that I feel like I’ve done years of therapy in a few months.  I have tons of time to think.

We started off promptly at 9:00am heading towards our first stop on the tour, the Third Tunnel.  Since November of 1974 South Korea has discovered four incursion tunnels made by the North attempting to cross the DMZ.  The direction of the tunnels is proven by the blast patterns which the South takes pains to make sure you know.  The North has claimed that the tunnels were for coal mining but no coal has ever been found in them so that’s pretty unlikely.  While four tunnels have been turned up so far it’s believed by most that there are more yet to be discovered.  A small museum and DMZ Welcome Center has been built at the site of the Third Tunnel.

The DMZ Welcome Center

When we arrived we watched a brief, cheesy video about the DMZ and how it’s some massive buffer for peace and home to so much wonderful wildlife including that “prehistoric animal, the goat.”  We all had a good giggle about that one.  Then our Korean tour guide led us on a quick walk through the wee museum where there were old artillery shells and models of the Joint Security Area (JSA).  After that we were taken to the entrance to the third tunnel.  We were warned that it’s a long walk back up (the tunnel slopes pretty steeply) and anyone with medical issues should not head down there.  Then they gave us hard hats (at which I scoffed) and off we went.

Pictures aren’t allowed in the tunnel but there’s not much to take a picture of to be honest.  You head down a steep incline which is all nice and padded and comfortable with high ceilings and you wonder why in the hell they gave you the hard hat.   And then you get down to the tunnel proper and realize you have left the comforts of a tourist trap.  In the part of the tunnel that was obviously blasted away one painful metre at a time, the ceilings are low enough that I bumped my protective hat (and thankfully not my head) really hard about 5 or 6 times and I’m only about 5’4″.  It’s damp, hot, and with all the tourists, really crowded.  When you get to the end there’s a wall that the South has erected that blocks the actual military line of demarcation or MDL that runs through the DMZ.  It’s a touch anti-climactic but I still felt a real frisson of excitement about the fact that I was in a freaking tunnel built by one country in order to invade another.

Then there the was the climb back up.  I’ve been exercising pretty consistently for the past couple months but that climb back up made me look like some sort of poster child for sedentary living.  I literally told my friend at one point “leave me!”  And eventually she did (she’s 10 years my junior and has nearly a black belt in taekwondo–she’s in much better shape than I am).  Then I trudged the rest of the way back up, huffing and puffing.  I realized eventually that our tour guide never actually went all the way down into the tunnel.  Smart lady.  Koreans are funny breed and so they have no qualms about pointing and laughing which some of them did on the way down watching me struggle my way back up.  I hope they suffered as much on their return trip.

It actually took a relatively long time to get in and out of the tunnel because of the number of tourists and I guess this made us late for the next stop on the tour which was the 도라 (Dora) Observatory.  There you can stand on a landing and take pictures of North Korea but you can only do so from behind a certain line.  If you were to stand closer than the photo line the South Korean soldiers patrolling would snatch up your camera and make you delete the pictures.  The thinking is that you might inadvertently photograph a weakness in the South’s defenses that could be exploited by the North.  If you want to get a close-up look though there are those stationary binocular viewing deals that you put money in.  I didn’t get a chance to use one as we literally were hustled back onto the bus in 12 minutes.  In any case, I was pleasantly surprised by the shots I was able to get seeing as I just stuck my camera up in the air and hoped for the best.

That's North Korea right there

The next stop on the trip was really saddening.  There has been a rail line between North and South Korea since 1929 but it has obviously been out of use since at least the division.  We visited a train station, built by the South, that sits idle awaiting the day when there will be train service between the two nations.  It was this massive monument to the hope of reunification that managed to also be one of the most depressing places I’ve ever visited in my life.

Going north?

After a very quick lunch, we headed to the crowning jewel of this trip, but first a bit of background.  When the armistice was signed at the end of the Korean War the MDL was set at the 38th parallel–the point to which the North’s forces had been pushed back.  In the armistice agreement one of the provisions was that each side’s troops had to move back 2000 metres from the MDL, and that total 4000-metre buffer would be known as the demilitarized zone or the DMZ.  The line is shown by markers that are set every 110-220 yards with the south-facing side of the signs written in Korean and English, and the north-facing sides written in Korean and Chinese.

This is as close as I got to a marker

No fortifications can be built within the DMZ and there are specific rules of engagement for the zone.  Within the DMZ there is what’s called the Joint Security Area (JSA) which was long the only connection between the North and South.  In the JSA there are several conference buildings (referred to as Conference Row) and the MDL runs through the centre of each of those buildings.  There, representatives from North and South Korea can meet with the border running right through the middle of the room.  If you’re lucky, when you go on the tour you get to visit a conference room and step into North Korea.  Outside the rooms military personnel are not permitted to cross the line.  Unfortunately on the day I visited, the conference room shown to tourists was closed for construction.  Having said that, if you go on a DMZ tour someday, make sure you go on one that includes the JSA because that is by far the most amazing part of the trip.

Excuse my friend's arm but this was the best shot I could get of Conference Row as a whole

So before we entered the JSA, we first had to get off our tour bus and move to a USO bus.  Our passports were checked by a military guide (the dishy Lt. Harner–at least I think that was his rank).  We had to leave behind all of our belongings except cameras.  We also had to leave behind our Korean tour guide.  If I remember correctly a South Korean was killed in an incident involving the North and the result was South Koreans being disallowed from entering the JSA.  So our Korean guide and driver cooled their heels and the US and Korean military took us the rest of the way. 

After we signed a waiver indicating that neither the South Korean nor US military nor the UN would be responsible in the event of our unfortunate demise, dishy Lt. Harner gave us a presentation regarding the history of the DMZ.  Then we hopped back on the bus and headed to the big leagues:  the conference rooms that sit between Panmun Hall on the North side and Freedom House on the South.  We entered Conference Row by way of Freedom House but were only allowed to point our cameras towards Panmun Hall to the north.  Again, it’s a military issue to point them south at Freedom House. 

It’s here where you see the view of the DMZ you’ve seen before.  South Korean soldiers on one side watching North Korean soldiers on the other side.  The DPRK soldier usually stands behind a pillar on the top step of Panmun Hall, but came out to look at us through his binoculars a few times.  And with him moving around, the ROK soldiers on our side became more animated.  We were forbidden to gesture towards the North at all but we could take as many pictures as we liked.  We had to enter in two lines and leave the same way.  Also our group could not exceed a certain size; another group waited inside for our return before they could come out.  It was utterly surreal.

After that we got on the bus and went to another look out point.  This was near the site of the 1976 Ax Murder Incident in which two US soldiers were killed by North Korean soldiers while trying to chop down a tree that obstructed their view of the other South Korean look out posts.  This incident actually happened quite close to the Bridge of No Return where North and South Korea exchanged prisoners after the war.  From this look out we had a really incredible view into North Korea and we could see the North’s peace village–Kijong-dong, also referred to as Propaganda Village.  Both the North and South have one village situated in the DMZ and they are both meant to represent the goodness of each side.  The village in the North has brightly painted buildings and a super tall flagpole (the two sides competed on this for a while) with a 600lb flag that takes 30 people to raise.  It was dubbed Propaganda Village because of the loud speakers delivering broadcasts from the north for hours a day.  However no one lives in the village.  It’s truly all for show. 

The South Korean peace village, Daeseong-dong, is actually inhabited and is a pretty good deal if you can get in on it.  People whose ancestors lived in the village before the war can live there and women can marry into the village (men cannot).  They don’t pay taxes, the men are not required to do military service, they are all land-rich rice farmers and the government buys any rice they don’t sell every year at inflated prices.  So in its own way, a bit of a propaganda village as well.

On our way up to the look out Lt. Harner pointed out anti-tank walls and these other walls that would detonate and block the road in the case of a Northern incursion.  The creepiest part was when he told us that on either side of us were active mine fields.   Suddenly that waiver seemed a lot more real.

Soon all thoughts of active mine fields and empty villages were put out of my head though, because we had found our way back to the gift shop!  I picked up a couple of cool hats trivializing the entire experience just a wee bit.  I apologize for the length of this post but I didn’t want to leave anything out.  It was a really incredible day and I totally wanted to share it.  For the full album of pictures click here!

Souvenirs baby!


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Say My Name

December 1, 2011 3 Comments

I realized during my walk this morning that it’s been far too long since I posted about my students.  We start a new term tomorrow though, so this seems like an appropriate time to write a tribute of sorts to the kids who have inspired, amused and driven me nuts for the past three months.

As I mentioned in a previous post, most of the elementary students choose an English name and some of those names are all kinds of awesome.  Some are spectacular choices while others are just spectacular failures. Some kids choose a name and then never bother to check into common spellings for that name.  They proceed to spell the name both incorrectly and strangely and will not budge when you suggest a more common spelling.  Some kids simply can’t pronounce their English names very well and I’ve spent a lot of time in classes having a student repeat their name over and over again, only to realize it’s something really basic like Brad or Amy.  What I find super odd is their propensity to choose names that include sounds that don’t exist in Korean.  Most kids find the consonant sound “v” difficult to say but lo and behold there’s an Elvin in one of my classes (and no he will not spell his name “Alvin”).  The letter “r” is also a challenge and yet there are no shortage of Rachels, Richards and Brians.

I find all of this so amusing that I’ve actually picked my three favourite English names out of my 40-odd students.

In third place, Rubby. This is one of my favourites mostly because the child in question considers her name to be “Ruby.” When I first read her name on an attendance sheet it was well after I’d heard her pronounce her name aloud so I assumed I was seeing a typo. Not so much. I soon noticed that whenever she handed in work, “Rubby” was emblazoned across the top of it. I conceded defeat. I won’t lie though; I chuckle “rubby” to myself when I’m marking pretty often.

The runner up, Captain. Do I really need to say anything about this? He’s a cool kid with an even cooler name. He makes me want to name my future son Captain. I also like to call him “Cap-i-tane” when the mood strikes. He seems to enjoy it. I’m not sure if his name entirely suits him or not, but he takes the prize for sheer cool factor.

And the winner: Yetty! Now Yetty is probably my very brightest student.  So bright that she’s being moved to a level in which she’s the only student in the class. I’ll be teaching her again (yay!!). She knows what a Yeti is. She still rocks the name. She used to actually have another far more conventional English name but she decided it was too common, too plain. She wanted something unique, so she cast off Sally and took up Yetty. She has, by far, the most amusing and yet awesome name of all my students.

In a sea of Kevins, Sallys, Jennys, Lenas (not sure why that’s so common), Kellys, and Harrys, and at least one kid who asks to be called Harry Potter specifically, there are also some stand out selections that impressed me when I first heard them.  In no particular order they are:

Lance
Duke
Eva
Dana
Clara
Scarlet
Ty

Tomorrow I get a crop of new kids. Who knows what names await!

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Photographic

November 21, 2011 2 Comments

And now I give you some long overdue photos.  I’ve started uploading my albums to facebook rather than flickr which makes all of this immensely easier, so I’ll try to keep on top of this a little bit better going forward.  However, today, you get a few sets to look at.  Admittedly my albums are never big.  I hate posting 25 different pictures of the same thing from different angles and instead prefer to post five pictures but have them all show some variety.  Hopefully you enjoy that.  Also my current camera does not do well in low light, so hopefully when I get a better camera (next month, fingers crossed) I’ll be able to shoot a greater variety of stuff too.  In the mean time, here’s what I’ve got.

I went to an expat Halloween party in Seoul at the end of October put on by the organization Adventure Korea.  I hope to do some more activities with the group in the coming eight months (can you believe it’s already been four months!!) and I’m sure I’ll end up posting more photos from events put on by AK.  There was a band at the party and they were pretty damn good I must say.  The big draw of the event though (apart from quality beers and TexMex cuisine) was a quick spin on a boat down the Han River.  There’s this lovely light display on one part of the river and these are a couple of photos from that night.

Oooooooo!!!

Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!

Next up, Insadong.  At the beginning of this month I finally checked out this nifty part of Seoul.  Insadong is an area where you can find all kinds of traditional calligraphy stores, tea houses, and souvenirs of Korea, as well as great art galleries and small designer boutiques.  On Sundays the main street of Insadong is blocked to vehicle traffic and becomes a walking thoroughfare.  The alleys off the main drag lead to all kinds of neat places.  I visited a gallery where I ended up speaking French with the Korean curator; I went to the Old Tea Shop where finches fly free on the top floor and one of the coffee tables is an enormous fish bowl; and I got some really cheap scarves!  For the full album click on this link, but below is a bit of taste:

This gallery also houses the biggest book in the world - I didn't get a picture

At a calligraphy store where the owner gave me no trouble over taking tons of photos

The goldfish bowl coffee table--or should I say tea table

Last weekend I took a couple hours to do some more exploring around my own neighbourhood and took these photos.  As per my last post I finally realized that there is a boardwalk not 15-20 minutes down the street from my apartment.  I wish I’d known it was there in the summer as I’m sure it would have provided some welcome respite from the humidity, but it’s still been really great to go down there as winter approaches.  Yesterday two friends and I sat on the boardwalk while one of them played ukulele and we sang along.  It was one of those perfect moments that money can’t buy.

And lastly, this past weekend I went to the Lantern Festival in Seoul with a new friend–someone who answered my online ad for a travel and sightseeing buddy.  It was bitterly cold.  I’m still kind of stunned at how cold it’s suddenly turned in the past week.  Until about two weeks ago, it was hitting 20C on the thermometer during the days.  Today it was just a degree above zero. While the festival was not quite what I expected, I managed to get some neat shots.  And I met a cool new friend.  For the full album click here.

So apart from working that’s what I’ve been up to in the past few weeks!  (Bonus points for you if you can name the group who sang the title of this post).

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24-Hour Store

November 15, 2011 Leave a Comment

Many posts ago I mentioned the place where I do my groceries.  The store is called Home Plus, a UK-based chain that offers groceries and housewares in one handy location.  While the pricing isn’t as good as its domestic competition, the Korean-based E-Mart (E-Mart purchased Wal-Mart Korea in 2006 to boot), the local Home Plus is a 10-minute walk from my apartment while the E-Mart is a bus ride away.  Convenience wins with me every time so I shop at Home Plus.

In that same post I also mentioned that I can only tolerate shopping at the Home Plus during certain hours.  When I wrote that post I would only set foot in the Home Plus after about 11:00pm.  It’s open 24 hours a day, six days a week (only till midnight on Sundays) which, thankfully, makes that possible.  The reason behind this is that during regular shopping hours–weeknights and weekends–the Home Plus is a madhouse.

Large scale discount retailers like Home Plus and E-Mart are still a relatively new phenom here.  From what I’ve read E-Mart is the oldest discount chain and it was only established in 1993.  While shopping at a Home Plus is only impressive to me in that I can find a few foreign food items, for Koreans it still has a certain amount of newness to it.  I don’t know if that’s the reason that Koreans make going to the Home Plus a freaking family outing but that’s how they roll.  So in addition to women who think it entirely reasonable to block the entire aisle so that no one can get by, there are wandering husbands, and toddlers underfoot.  Add to that the enormous number of do-nothing staff.  These are folks paid to stand at the entrances of various aisles to greet you, help you find stuff and generally try to get you to buy more things that you don’t need.  Do not make the mistake of thinking these are people who replace stock.  That’s a whole other group of people.  But we’re not done yet.  Then there are the sample slingers.  They take up all the spots not filled by the aisle greeters.  While they might be politely ignored in a lot of North American grocery stores, no such thing happens here.  Everyone stops for a sample constantly clogging the entrances to the aisles.  I assume because meat is so expensive here, people *line up* for the meat samples.  And there’s usually a guy or gal bellowing into a microphone to attract people to the meat sample as well.  In addition to all of this there’s a small eatery right next to the meat section and pizza stand next to that.

I don’t like grocery shopping at the best of times, but when the grocery store is a full-on circus I risk resorting to violence while I’m there.  So I have generally done my groceries well after 11:00pm at night.  Today, though, I stumbled onto a new strategy.

I don’t start work until 2:30pm so I have shopped at Home Plus in the morning or early afternoon here and there.  However I’m a pretty intense night owl so I’m usually not awake much before I have to be at work.  I’ve been trying to change that though, since I have the distinct impression that not getting enough daylight was causing some mild depression.  Also I’m a hell of a lot more productive in the morning than I am at night, despite the fact that I like staying up.  So I’ve been trying to get to bed by 1:00 or 2:00am in hopes of being awake by 9:30 or 10:00am.  So far it’s been working with stops and starts.

This morning though, my eyes flew open at 7:00am and refused to close again.  I had no desire to be up so early since I didn’t get to sleep until 2:00am last night but I figured I’d better get on with the day.  If I needed a cat nap before work around 1:00pm, so be it.  So I went off for a morning stomp to the boardwalk (pictures below) and then decided to stop in and do my groceries on the way home.  When I entered the Home Plus it was about 9:00am.  I didn’t think it could get more dead in there than it is at 1:00 or 2:00am but I was wrong.  This was a new kind of quiet.  Hardly any staff on the ground, some parts of the store still unlit and no more than five patrons in the entire place.  I even caught the staff doing some creepy morning Wal-Mart thing.  Each staff member stood at the entrance to an aisle and they all greeted one another in response to a recorded message playing on the sound system.  Then they clapped in time to some pretty funky house music.  It was bizarre.

Crazy staff doings aside, it was by far the most relaxing time I’ve ever spent at Home Plus and here’s a little ditty for your listening enjoyment.

In other news, I finally found the water.  There’s been a boardwalk a mere 20-minutes from my apartment all this time and I had no idea despite the fact that I can see water from my office at work and kids would mention it in their essays.  Yeah, sometimes I’m all kinds of oblivious.

Walking path left, bike path right

The body of water near my home

Uhm, not that it's stopping anyone

In addition to not fishing, you're pretty much not allowed to do anything but walk or bike here

Filed under The ESL Adventure Tagged with , ,

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