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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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

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Headline News

November 10, 2011 4 Comments

My dear and beloved readers, I apologize for my hiatus from the blogosphere.  I’ve been all kinds of busy about all kinds of things, but it’s high time you got an update.  The last few posts before my long silence seemed to be all about one crisis or another.   Well here’s what happened with all those crises.

First up, the neighbours.  It took a month, but things have almost normalized.  When I went to work the Monday after that fateful night, one of the guys who had been at that rocking party, Rick, went out of his way to make sure we were on speaking terms.  It wasn’t the apology I had hoped for but it was something, so I accepted the olive branch.  Mike, the neighbour that I work with, though, well he wasn’t speaking to me.  A couple days later I realized I had been suffering from raging PMS the night that the whole thing went down, so I hoped that maybe the absence of crazy-making hormones would help relations improve.  (I’ve since downloaded a period tracking app on my iPhone–it warns me when the PMS is coming!)  Just as I was starting to think things might be okay, a week later these signs appeared on my neighbours’ door:

WTF??

Assuming this was directed at me, I was horrified.  I stopped making any effort to speak with Mike at work after that.  Then I eventually found out the signs were directed at someone else entirely.  While I still think the signs are pretty awful (and a month later they’re still up), it was a relief to know they weren’t for me.  With stops and starts Mike and I  managed to get back to being friendly with one another at work–helpful since he sits right next to me.  As I still haven’t been in their place since all of this went down, I haven’t actually seen the other neighbour, Sam (who no longer works with us), but we’ve communicated by text once and it seems the waters have calmed.  I’m still treading lightly and I doubt things will ever be quite like they were before–but I kinda think that might be a good thing anyway.  And they certainly haven’t woken me up since then.

In unqualified foreign teacher news, Mona is supposedly out of a job as of December 1st.  While it sucks for her, it’s good for the kids and the rest of us teachers.  In the last week or so I’ve gone from assuming that most of the trouble she was having on the job was about her lack of English skills, to realizing she just isn’t terribly bright. We had to do testing on all the kids this past week so we foreign teachers had a meeting just to ensure that we were all grading by the same standards to keep it fair.  Since there is some pressure to maintain enrollment we discussed the fact that we really need to grade on a bit of a curve.  This idea could not–COULD NOT–be understood by Mona.  It was mind boggling that we couldn’t get her to see the shade of gray we were going for on this–she kept seeing the black and white of “pass all the kids,”  or “fail every kid who could possibly be failed.”  No in between.  It was baffling.  So no, she will not be missed.

Having said all that, I’m happy to report that this did not become my problem because Mona and I had a frank talk about a month ago.  I finally told her that she needed to stop acting like I was some sort of human job/life handbook.  She wasn’t too thrilled to hear that from me and seemed genuinely shocked and hurt which made me feel like a total shit for waiting so long to tell her this.  It was tense for about 24 hours, but then we bumped into each other on the elevator to the office a couple days later and all seemed well.  She even claimed that I looked like I’d lost weight.  She clearly knows the way to my heart.

While she can still manage to get under my skin, she doesn’t ask me nearly as many questions.  She spreads the pain around a bit more too.  It also seems like my not being so angry with her all the time has caused everyone else to kind shift a bit in their attitude towards her.  I’m not really sure of why that is–maybe they know that I won’t Hulk out if she’s around so it’s not such a big deal to have her around?  In any case, this shift was good because the night she found out she wasn’t long for this job, we all felt enough compassion to go out for drinks with her and stay out until 3:00am.  I think if I hadn’t been honest with her before that, I wouldn’t have felt enough compassion to even be civil let alone social.   In addition to all of this I’m not walking around in a vein-busting rage all day at work which is a nice change of pace.

So remember that book club I talked about starting?  Well I did it, but it’s not quite what I had hoped for thus far.  At the moment there are three of us, with a possibility of a fourth.  I met the first two members, let’s call them Jack and Diane, a couple weeks ago and we chose a book.  Jack and I both thought it best to meet in a couple weeks to give us all time to read the book, but Diane insisted that we meet in a week, citing boredom.  I reluctantly agreed and so we met this past Saturday with the plan to do a review of the first two chapters of the book.  I had a bit of a rough week so I had to wake up early Saturday morning to read those chapters.  I realized they were quite short and assumed everyone else would have gotten farther in, so I hurried through the first 50 pages…only to find that Jack had read nothing and Diane–oh she of boredom–had read *two* pages.  Then we spent four hours waiting for Jack’s friend, who might join the club, to meet up with us.  While socializing is nice I was a little annoyed and to be deadly honest, I’m not sure I enjoy spending time with these folks enough to do it without a book to discuss!  And the point of all this was to meet kindred spirits.  I can read books all on my own really.  I figure I’ll give this a couple books to come together and turn into either a good, solid book discussion group or a good, solid social group.  If one of those things doesn’t take place, I may choose to spend my Saturdays otherwise engaged.

You may recall my griping and whining about not knowing the language.  Well I enlisted the help of a Korean teacher and she has turned out to be batshit crazy.  Alright highly, highly eccentric.  Initially I thought I had scored with someone who was fluent in both English and Korean but she is proper nuts as a friend puts it.  And she’s also not very good at this gig.  She just sort of sits next to me in a cafe and rushes me through a text book at the speed of light.  At first I thought, “well at least she’ll be like a warm body to keep me accountable,” but she doesn’t even achieve that, and I haven’t the energy to tell her how to do her job.  And you know, she’s batshit crazy.

Also, strangely, I’ve felt a lot less urgent about learning the language in the last few weeks.  I’d still like to pick up enough to function with ease, but I realized that suddenly it’s not my main priority anymore.   I think I realized how well I could function once I stopped being so anxious and got more confident in my ability to make myself somewhat understood.  I’d like to do more traveling and sightseeing and writing and picture-taking and friend-making, but I’m not sure I’m that interested in spending a lot of time on language study at the moment.  I’m gonna give my teacher the heave ho this weekend after my lesson tomorrow.  Yeah, I’m too much of a wimp to do it in person–she’ll get a nicely worded e-mail or phone call.

Lastly, there is another thing I do need to be a lot more focused on which has taken up a bunch of my head space, and that’s my health.  I went to the doctor with one symptom–painfully, chronically (well since June) swollen feet.  He did a bevy of tests and found that I am borderline anemic, on the edge of osteoporosis, deficient in vitamin D and suffering from mild arteriosclerosis.  The first three are not so bad; I take iron and A LOT of vitamin D and a fair bit of calcium.  The last one though, that’s a doozy.  Apparently I have stiff arteries and that causes poor circulation which causes my feet to swell.  My weight and standing on my feet for work exacerbates this.  The swelling has put some of my shoes off limits–I simply can’t fit into them.  A friend went to the trouble of shipping me my favorite heels only to discover when I tried to put them on for a party, that I can’t get into them.  The doctor had me on diuretics to begin with but you can’t take those forever, so the long term remedy is to exercise, drink lots of water and lose weight.  Yeah, cause exercising and losing weight are easy.

This turn of events has been overwhelming to say the least and I can’t describe how frustrating/annoying/disheartening it is to see my feet constantly look loaves of bread.  I actually used to think of my feet as two of my most attractive physical features and now they have utterly failed me.  The exercise is up and down but coming.  However my feet have not responded quickly at all.  I go back and see the doctor again in about a month and hopefully there will have been some improvement by then.  For now I grit my teeth and keep working at it.

This post is getting lengthy so I’ll end it here for the moment.  But don’t fret, I’m just brimming with things to say so you won’t have to wait long for another one.  And in case you thought “Headline News” was made up song title, think again.

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Seoul City

October 14, 2011 4 Comments

Tell me you remember this old song by the Partland Brothers.  Every time someone inadvertently says Seoul City (which happens when speaking about the subway line) this song goes through my head.  In any case, as promised, over and over, without delivering, some pictures from a few of my trips into Seoul.  I’ll add more albums in time, but here’s a taste.

The first album is pictures from a couple of visits to the foreigner district of Seoul – Itaewon.

The second album is from a quick jaunt to the old palace.

I also have some pictures to upload from life here in Incheon soon.   Enjoy!

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