Dancing Queen

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.