More Seoul than a sock with a hole

Leaving - Part 2

2010-05-22T06:17:00.000-07:00

Ok, I’m safely in my accommodation in Taipei now after some hi-jinx involving actually finding the place.

So, where was I? Oh yes, I said goodbye to all the Jupiter Class girls and went up the road to Soyouki to have goodbye drinks with all the local foreigners. I’d only actually invited a few people, so I was quite surprised but also quite touched to see that everybody in town had made it.

When I told the owner of Soyouki, Mr. Jeung, that I was leaving, he gave me a look of pure disbelief and agony before pulling me aside to a private table and busting out a bottle of his (in)famous Ginseng Soju. If you’ll remember this is the same stuff that produced this blog entry on my fourth day in Korea -

“And you can't make me so go away. They have this Ginseng spirit here thats really vile and coming in to your second day at work with a big hangover is pretty lame. Leave me alone.”

Luckily he only had a small bottle of it this time, so I avoided a repeat of the worst hangover of my life.

The next day we woke at a reasonable hour (Daniel was arriving from his Motel to move in properly at midday) and began the gargantuan task of changing and cleaning both bedrooms. I think we were finally finished a little before 5pm, and I discovered that, quite luckily, I had just enough room to get all of my belongings into my luggage. I said my farewells to Dave, his lovely Korean girlfriend Ha Young, Rich (another friend from the UK that had joined us recently) and Daniel, and settled down on the living room floor for a nice 3-hour sleep before my 4am bus to the airport.

I have to say flying out of Incheon I was filled not with happiness nor sadness, but mostly just a profound sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Up until maybe 18 months ago my approach to life had always just been to go with the flow and take the path of least resistance. Granted that’s taken me some pretty interesting places, but it was a conscious decision on my part to take myself out of my comfort zone and actually go do something. I think that’s why I felt such a pleasing sense of closure. On my last day in Pyeongnae I managed to have one last kimbap at the restaurant where I first tried kimbap, it felt like a nice way of tying everything off.

So what has Korea given me? Well, for a start I feel like I’ve grown up more in the last year than in the previous 3 or 4 combined. One of the best teachers we had in Pyeongnae during my tenure there was a guy from Harlem called Johnny Walker - at his goodbye dinner he gave a speech and said he felt like he had come to Korea a boy, but was leaving a man. I share those sentiments to an extent.

I’ve also started to learn a new language, have added many new dishes to my culinary arsenal, and have conquered my fear of children.

Another thing that I haven’t really talked about in this blog - because I wanted it to be about my impressions and thoughts on Korea rather than my private life - is the other thing I’ve gained during the last year. Her name is Ashley, and I plan on making her my wife.

-----

For those interested my total time in Korea was 378 days, 18 hours and 3 minutes.

Over the next two or three weeks I’m going to be travelling to Hanoi, then back to Taipei, then finally back to the UK. Obviously this will involve photos, which you can see by visiting my Picasa album (link on the left bar there). As far as this blog is concerned, I consider the matter closed. It was a blog about Korea, and I’m no longer there.

Thanks for reading.

Leaving - Part 1

2010-05-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed I haven’t updated my blog in any meaningful way for quite some time. This has been due to a combination of things. Firstly, I’ve been incredibly busy preparing my post-Korea travelling schedule, and secondly, I simply haven’t been doing anything interesting.

I’ll give you a quick rundown of the last few days so you can get a feel for how busy I’ve been. Firstly on Monday evening my replacement arrived - a nice chap from London called Daniel who seems to be genuinely enthusiastic about teaching kids, so I was relieved I wouldn’t be leaving my class with some dribbling moron who just came to Korea to find a hot Asian wife. After school on Monday we took him for a meal (Vietnamese noodles, so some reason) to say hello, and then took him to the motel he’d be staying in for his first few days (our sleeping arrangements went through many different and increasingly bizarre permutations in our director’s head before we finally settled on getting him a motel room, after she variously suggested Dave and I share a bed for the week, I stay at her house in central Seoul, or I move in with our pregnant Korean co-teacher).

Tuesday was a rainy day, and that coupled with the arrival of the new teacher meant the kids were absolutely mental. I did my best to assure Daniel they were not always so insane. Little Jason managed to set the tone for the day by pointing at Daniel during snack time and yelling “Daniel Teacher is very very fat!”

A few days of training ensued with the kids getting more and more used to Daniel, to the point that the youngest kids actually seemed genuinely happy after a class we had with them, and two of them responded in the affirmative when I asked if they liked their new teacher.

Thursday was the killer - it was my last day and children were presenting me with gifts are cards all day, and at various points bear-hugging my legs while yelling “NO GO HOME!”. Daisy got me a very shiny, very Korean tie, John got me one of those around-the-neck airplane pillows (which I didn’t have space for in my luggage - sorry John!), Vivian made me a really amazing card with photos and a little message inside, it was all very touching and more than made up for all the silly crap I’ve had to deal with over the last months.

When we put the kids on the bus was really difficult - I had to say goodbye to some of my all-time favourites - Maximo, Jenny, Henny, Julia, Danny, Jason. I held back the tears pretty well, but finally broke when I gave Danny a big hug and said “Bye bye Danny!”, to which he emphatically responded “See you tomorrow!”. Jenny told me I was her dad and she wanted to come to England with me, Henny told me she would look after David-Teacher and make sure he eats his kimchi, and Julia yelled “Bye bye crazy teacher!” out the window as the bus pulled away.

After that I had to compose myself and teach another class, but I’d be damned if we were going to do any work. I left the textbooks on the shelf and let the kids play with balloons and draw pictures for 40 minutes while I desperately tried to impart as much of my acquired teacher-knowledge to Daniel as possible.

When I came out of my last class I found that lots of parents had come to the school to pick up their kids and wish me well. A few of them wanted photos and had bought more presents for me too. When it came time to say goodbye to Peter, who is probably the funniest kid in my class, a hardcore Power Rangers fan and all-round just a brilliant little boy, I got down on my knees to give him a hug and he threw himself at me, saying “No! No go!!”, at which point I welled up again, and had to try to converse with his mum in broken Korean and English while he was clinging on to me for dear life.

Eventually all the kids filtered out, and I suddenly realised I hadn’t got a chance to say goodbye to Christine, another one of my favourites, as she had been taken off to Ballet school while I was saying goodbye to the kids on the bus. I was really upset by this and tried to call her mum’s phone but couldn’t get through.

Once I was finally finished, I packed all my books away one last time and bid a fond farewell to Mercury Class, changed the name of my shared folder on the school network from “Jon” to “Daniel”, and walked out the door feeling sad but also incredibly satisfied. I came, I saw, I taught.

I had just one hour to go home and pack my stuff before I had to be back in town for my goodbye dinner with all the teachers, followed by my goodbye drinks with all the local whiteys. I managed to pack a pretty meagre amount and promised myself I’d do it when I got home that evening.

The goodbye dinner was really nice, even the bus drivers came (and I found out to my astonishment that one of them in also a professional saxophonist), Rose’s husband made me a really nice photo book of my year, and all the teachers got me pair of traditional wooden Korean masks as a goodbye present (both of these thing I did manage to fit in my luggage). Our old principal Jasmine came too, so I got to see her awesome son Sean on more time, who had worn a shirt and tie for the occasion, and made me a card with a plastacine flower on the front.

This dinner also produced one final piece of Korean hilarity. Apparently Rose had seen the “2:2” on my degree certificate, and thought it meant I had come second in my class. During the teachers meeting that afternoon, she had been loudly boasting to all the Korean teachers that she was so good at hiring new foreigners, she’d managed to get Dave, and now Daniel, both of whom had also come “second in their class”.

After the dinner I said goodbye to all the Korean teachers, all of whom expressed their sadness in the traditional Korean way - by talking in incredibly whiny voices. About 2 hours late for my goodbye drinks, I left the restaurant , and as I walked out of the lift on the ground floor heard a shrill “Jon Teacher!”, I turned around - it was Christine! The Jupiter class girls were having Judy’s birthday party in the chicken restaurant on the ground floor, I couldn’t believe my luck!

I said a slightly drunken final goodbye to all of them, wiped away some tears for the third time that day, and walked up the road to Soyouki, the site of my first night of debouched revelry in Korea, and was presented with an ice-frosted glass of terrible Korean beer for the last time.

----

My flight to Taipei is boarding any minute - I shall write Part 2 when I have some more spare time!

Farewell Korea. To paraphrase one of my student’s T-shirts - “Land of marvel. Good Luck To You!”

Children's Day

2010-05-05T06:08:00.000-07:00

Today is Children’s Day, a day when Koreans stop work and........celebrate children, I guess. All the kids get taken out on nice trips by their parents, usually to a theme park or the cinema or for a picnic. As such I shall most likely not be venturing out, because everywhere will be closed or gridlocked.

Yesterday we took our kids to the Children’s Grand Park in Seoul, which contains lots of pavilions and open space and a “Zoo”, or as it literally translates into English, “Animal School”. When I first heard we were going to a zoo in Seoul I was instantly put on edge, knowing full well that Seoul didn’t have enough free space to house a zoo with enough room for it’s occupants. I wasn’t wrong, all the animals were cooped up in concrete cells which had been sort of “themed” according to the animal (The seal’s cell was blue, the lion’s cell was orange etc.).

The process of getting there involved the usual amount of disorganisation that regular readers will be familiar with. The highlight this time was the fact that we were departing at 9.20, a fact that nobody had told me or seemingly half the other teachers, so as we busied ourselves making sure all the kids had their lunch and everybody had their name tags on, our director suddenly bustled down the corridor yelling “Let’s go!”, then looked into my classroom with incredulity, puzzled as to why I had not assumed we were leaving 40 minutes before we usually do.

From Childrens Grand Park 04.05.2010

The most notable thing I achieved all day was getting in the way of the Mayor of Seoul and being jostled out of the way by one of his goons as he arrived to deliver a speech at the opening of the zoo’s new Big Cat and Elephant enclosure. Two of our kids got chosen to help unveil it, which was nice, and we got to walk around it with the Mayor’s entourage before the unwashed masses were allowed in.

From Childrens Grand Park 04.05.2010

Although the animal pens were woefully small, they did include some nice touches, for instance the Lion pen had a rope protruding through a hole in the wall with the severed leg of some nondescript animal tied to the other end, so Dave and I had a tug-of-war with a Lioness as she tried to eat the thing. It also had a shute down which people could toss food. A zoo worker was busying himself teasing the biggest lion with a chicken dangling from a fishing rod.

From Childrens Grand Park 04.05.2010

After walking around this area we moved inside for a little talk given by two of the zoo’s staff. First they produced a small macaque monkey which performed some acrobatics, next was an albino python which scared the hell out of our principal and director respectively, but which the children were strangely taken with, lots of them describing it as ‘beautiful’. While the snake was being draped over the shoulders of various children for photos, I felt a small furry hand on my shoulder, and a silver monkey clambered over my shoulder and clung to my chest, apparently quite taken with me according to her handler. She was paraded around for photos - emitting a sad little scream when her handler put a collar on her to lead her around. According to the handler it’s buttcheeks were shaped like a heart, and she wasn’t shy about showing it to the kids. After the required stroking and photo, the handler would proclaim “엉덩이!” (which just means “Arse!” in English) and flip the poor primate round and prod at it’s bum for a bit.

From Childrens Grand Park 04.05.2010

Next we got a re-enactment of the tortoise and the hare which was less than successful, although the tortoise eventually won out after some encouragement from her handler, and then the zoo staff bought in their grand finale - a leopard cub. Sometimes the Englishman in me worries about the children’s safety even though they’re probably in no immediate danger - this was one of those times. The handler put this little screaming bundle - small by leopard standards but still bigger than most of the kids - onto the table not 3 feet from the kids faces and let it feed on a bottle of milk while she talked about it. After it finished the milk it became restless and jumped off the table, resulting in every child in the front 3 rows standing on their chairs and screaming.

From Childrens Grand Park 04.05.2010

Next was lunch, after which we left, which was naturally accompanied by utter, unbridled chaos, during which I got a child’s medicine spilt down me, so I’m now sporting a nice pink stain on the front of my white shirt.

I tried my best to enjoy this field trip as it will be my last one before I depart these fair shores in 3 weeks time, which I did, but between the usual miscommunication, easily-fixable organisation problems, and shoddily-treated animals I returned feeling a profound sense of ennui.

Baseball & Strawberries

2010-04-23T01:05:00.000-07:00

Last week I finally got to enjoy that great Korean pastime that they stole from the Americans - baseball. One of the Korean teachers, Maxim, is an avid LG Twins fan, so she took us to their stadium and tried to explain the rules to us. It turns out that the rules of baseball I learned from Wii Sports Baseball aren’t quite right - this led to much confusion when I tried to explain to what a Wii was. The main thing I took away from the whole experience was that Korean teams don’t seem to be very good. We didn’t see any home runs, although being a complete newcomer to baseball I don’t know how common they are, and only 4 points (runs? goals?) were scored throughout the whole game, resulting in a depressing-looking scoreboard populated almost exclusively by zeroes.

From Baseball 15.04.10

Pleasingly, Korean businesses stayed true to form and all the food and drink within the stadium was the same price it is outside - we paid around £1.50 for beers, but regrettably were only able to quaff 3 each before the final whistle blew (pretty sure I heard a whistle). All-in-all a thoroughly enjoyable if baffling experience, and one I’m keen to repeat before I leave.

From Baseball 15.04.10

This past week has gone really very quickly. Mostly because we’ve had two - count ‘em, two - special days. On Tuesday we took the children to a strawberry farm. They got to pick strawberries, eat strawberries, make strawberry jam, throw strawberries on the ground, stamp on them, then show me their remains, and generally run about like children are supposed to. Here are some cutesy pictures -

From Strawberry Farm 20.04.10

Four weeks to go and I'm finished. My daunting return to the real world is almost upon me!

Art Corner

2010-04-16T02:41:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week Maxim-Teacher got her class to draw pictures of me as a present. Here are the results -

From Kid's Drawings

Needless to say, I was touched.

A Farewell Letter From Betty's Mum

2010-03-31T00:20:00.001-07:00

Dear Jon

Hi~ This is Betty's mommy. Actually, today is the last day of her Kids-club life. Instead of her, I'd like to say good-bye to you.

Sorry to say this word because the decision to leave kids club is based on my opinion.

Anyway, I've never seen such a highest teacher just like you loving children sincerely. On the last Kids Club festival, I felt that your affection to children is really sincere and true through your deep loving eyelights. Actually, she talked about Jon teacher every day and she loves you very much.

Whenever she reads books with me, she used to say that theprince is Jon teacher and the princess is Betty, which mademe think that she really likes you.

Jon!!! I hope you'll transfer your sincere feelings to Betty and please hug her. In addition, I'll keep my fingers crossed for you and your future and you are worthy of respect.

from Betty's Mom with respect...

Hands off my childhood, Korea.

2010-03-30T03:02:00.000-07:00

When I signed my contract to come to Korea there was a section about not entering into relationships with any of the students. Little did I know that an entirely different type of inappropriate touching would be going on. Specifically, Korea as a whole (or, more accurately, Asia as a whole) buggering my precious childhood memories into the middle of next week. Here I shall examine how and why.

Exhibit 1: Power Rangers

Back when I were a lad, Power Rangers were pretty cool, they used to beat up those clay guys and summon their big dinobot things when their enemy inexplicably grew giant - as far as I can tell this is still the case, but now they have so many spinoffs even the kids have trouble keeping up. The latest craze is Power Ranger Engine Force (skillfully translated into Korean as Power Ranger En-jin Pore-suh), which seems to consist of three cars that join together and turn into a robot called Engine King (or, as Dave and I convinced one kid to call his robot, Geoff). You can find some pictures of this on this creepy blog about toys I just found here.

I understand kid's TV shows are inherently short-lived and have to keep iterating themselves at the speed of a child's attention span to remain popular, but Engine Force is just crap. One of the Power Rangers' weapons is a steering wheel on a stick for christ's sake. Oh - and they ALL have mobile phones (Hello childrens toys!) - when I used to watch Power Rangers they'd just communicate with radios in they helmets. What's with the big step backwards?

Exhibit 2: Transformers

Obviously Tranformers is popular here - it's Transformers. But of course nowadays it isn't - all the kids are obsessed with Transformers Galaxy Force, which helpfully takes the regular story of Transformers, scraps it entirely except for the "robots in disguise" part, and inserts a new and shit storyline, and of course new shit Transformers, like this fruity fellow -

I don't know what vehicle he's supposed to be but I would guess he's not quite as "in disguise" as his contemporaries.

Exhibit 3: Rescue Force

I have to admit to not knowing about Rescue Force, but I looked it up because it annoys me when my students yell "RESCUE PORE-SUH!!" and then beat the shit out of one another. According to Wikipedia, Rescue Force is "is a Japanese tokusatsu television series that began airing April 5, 2008, on TV Aichi. It is the first Tomica Hero series based on Takara Tomy'sTomica toy car line. The characters use Tomica's Super Tools and Super Vehicles to help save people from Super-Disasters and battle the evil causing them.".

Sounds super! Also as a quick aside - why does The RAF Search and Rescue Force (the second Wikipedia result for "Rescure Force") have an entry that is one paragraph long - this is for areal organisation that saves peoples lives - and the Rescue Force cartoon have an entry that stretches on for many thousands of words? Sometimes the internet is just horrid.

Exhibit 4: Thomas The Tank Engine

Yes, Thomas is alive and well in Asia, renamed Thomas and Friends and dubbed into Korean. While I'm glad it's still the live-action toys of yore and not some re-imagined animé Thomas who fights intergalactic monsters by flying in slow motion against a rapidly-scrolling starry background, I find all the various Thomas merchandise pretty upsetting for something that, when it first aired, felt like it was made by your uncle in his spare time. Now it would appear Thomas is a corporate empire unto himself. Very sad. See the ominous-sounding Korean intro here.

Catch Up

2010-03-14T06:01:00.001-07:00

I've been slightly lax with my blogging recently, half due to computer related hi-jinx which meant I've had no photos to post, and half because I've been incredibly busy - my dear sweet Ashley is leaving these fair shores at the end of this week so we've been frantically ticking things off her list before she goes. I'm upset to be losing her, but she's really had enough of her job and her terrible, terrible boss, so although I'm sad, I'm also pleased she won't have to deal with that any more.

The main thing recently that's changed is that as of the new school year I now have my own class - Mercury Class. Two of my favourite kids are in the class so I'm happy about that, but I'm also slightly perturbed that my class is 12 kids, while the next biggest class is only 7. It's been a challenge doing all the home-room teacher stuff again - its more difficult than before because there are more kids, and they're younger - but it's good fun. The new principal has made a lot of changes - all our lessons are purely based on text books now, for instance. One of the more irritating ones is that she overlooked so much stuff while making the timetable (for instance she scheduled my giant class of 12 to have several lessons in a classroom with only 3 desks) that we keep having to change it. Combine that with the Korean organisational / communicational skills I've lamented so often before and you can see why it would become more annoying than it should be.

Our director has also started looking for my replacement - I'm gone in two month, after all. I did a phone interview with a slightly confused sounding American guy and have to do another one with a British guy this week.

Apart from all that things are still pottering along. I'm planning on going into hardcore hermit mode once Ashley leaves to save as much money as I can, so things will probably remain pretty quiet around here, sometimes interspersed with cute pictures of children.

Graduation

2010-03-10T03:03:00.001-08:00

The week before last was the final week of the academic year, and as such on Friday we had our graduation ceremony. Orange Class, the oldest class, and the ones who were actually leaving to start proper school, wore western-style robes, everybody else wore their school uniform. Orange Class also got the dubious honour of giving a speech about their time at Kids Club, and in return were given nice little bound folders with graduation photos and certificates in, along with a Childrens Dictionary. All the Orange Class mothers sat at the back of the room filming the ceremony and holding back tears as best they could.

From Kid's Club Revue and Graduation 27.02.10

After Orange Class were dealt with the rest of the kids were called up one-by-one to receive their scrolls, which as you can imagine for 50-ish kids takes some time, and once again our Director was subscribing to the They-Can-Just-Sit-There-It'll-Probably-Be-Fine school of thought, while in actuality it was less than fine. Variously during the ceremony children cried, started shouting, stood up for no apparent reason, and used their scrolls as either telescopes, swords or guns. One of the younger kids decided he didn't like his so he unrolled it, took the little ribbon used to tie it, and discarded the actual certificate on the gym floor.

From Kid's Club Revue and Graduation 27.02.10

Another important thing about last Friday was that we had quite a big turnover of kids (Koreans often move to where the good schools are shortly before their kids are of school-going age), not including Orange Class we lost 7 kids (Dribbling Sophia, Eddy the Little Scamp, the Braindead Brothers Andy and David, Thomas and Glen the little genii, and Jack - who seemed to be, for the most part, a placeholder for a real child), and gained about 8. I'm still mentally sorting through the new ones, the two that stand out right now are Kevin and Harry, who have very good English. The admissions process seems slightly disingenuous to new kids, mainly, again, due to the ever-changing whim of our director. It was decided the older new kids should take a test to see what level they were at and be assigned a class accordingly. Kevin and Harry scored really well and should have gone into the top class, however our director didn't like that idea so she put them in the next class down. One of my favourites, John, also got moved down from the top class - where he absolutely deserved to be - to the second-highest class because two of his classmates' parents complained that he didn't seem as able as their daughters. Likewise another girl got moved up to the top class because her mum badgered our director endlessly. Hope you're proud of yourselves there mums.

After the graduation we were taken on an exciting weekend retreat with the Korean teachers. This involved hiking up a mountain as the weather was unseasonably good (which was really beautiful and really lifted my spirits - the winter is slowly ending and I couldn't be happier about it), having a Korean BBQ of mussels and oysters, getting drunk, having a drunken work meeting, falling asleep and being woken up by our director at 8.30am demanding we play football.

From Kid's Club Weekend Getaway 28.02.10

A "Love Latter" from Eddy's Mum

2010-02-23T22:51:00.001-08:00

To Dear Mr. Jon
We appreciate your kindness.
Eddy is always talking about you.
He is always feeling your loveness.
How to say ~
Eddy will move Seoul on Mar 20. So, the end of
this month will be the last day for Eddy
in Kids Club.
Eddy and I will remember you forever.
This Kindergardten is the first one where Eddy
experienced and he really enjoyed this life
and you are the first foreign teacher who Eddy met.
And you are a really good teacher.
We hope you will be a good teacher
like now, then every children will remember
you forever like Eddy.
And we hope you will have happy memories
in Korea.
Eddy likes your science class.
Good luck!

From Eddy's Mum.

End-of-Year Revue

2010-02-23T04:55:00.001-08:00

Three or so weeks ago it was announced to Dave and I that to celebrate the end of the academic year (Last day is this Friday), we would be putting on a show for all the parents. The form of this show would be the results of the last few months Ballet, Gym and Musical English classes. So after many weeks of frantic rehearsals (so frantic, in fact, that all of last weeks classes were canceled so we could practice instead), last Saturday we finally debuted our opus to a hall full of 200 or so doting parents, grandparents and extended family.

At first I was told I would be MCing the whole event - I pointed out this was possibly a bad idea as only maybe 30% of the parents speak any English, so luckily the week beforehand our director came to her senses and hired a 'professional' MC, and I was relegated to a sort of announcer role, one that I was slightly relieved and more than happy to fill.

On the day we arrived at Kid's Club, loaded up one of our buses full of props and things we'd need and headed to the hall where the show was to take place. Now, one things Koreans love is incredibly staged and cheesily-executed shows. Ours was no different - the backdrops was a cartoon castle, we had flashy lights adorning the stage, and an awkwardly loud inflatable flower arch for the parents to walk under when they arrived. So as the parents filed in, hurriedly grabbing the good seats and frantically stabbing buttons on their many and increasingly odd cameras the children worked themselves up into an excited frenzy in the backstage area (actually another room off to the side, but lets not nitpick).

First on were Pear and Melon Class, performing a strange truncated version of The Jungle Book, featuring no actual songs from The Jungle Book, but they all dressed in adorable animal outfits so it didn't matter. Next Apple and Lemon Class came on performing a song medley called Tiger's Birthday, again dressed in all cute animal outfits. Once a large group of children were on stage the front few rows of the audience became a thronging mass of parents clambering over one another to take adorable pictures of their little babies, usually shouting and waving to them, resulting in lots of breaks in our careful choreography as excitable children responded to their parents gesticulations.

The show went on and it became clear my only job was to read aloud the names of the children performing, making the occasional quip that flew high over the head of everybody in the room. The Korean MC's job seemed largely to be to mock the children and me, and shout over their performances on her microphone. After one performance she collared one of the 5 year old kids as he walked off stage (Maximo, one of my favourites and one of the very smartest kids we have), and asked him mockingly "What is your name?!", and he responded in perfect English "My name is Maximo.", and followed up with "I am five years old.", much to her surprise. She laughed it off and carried on with her strange performance and I ducked behind my lectern and did a mini fist-pump. She again made an unwanted nuisance of herself during Orange Class's meticulously rehearsed "debate" about the merits of watching TV, interjecting when the kids were mid-flow, which caused visible annoyance to both them and their teacher. At one point we held a raffle, and upon asking me to read the ticket number she was again surprised when I read it in Korean, but then so were most of the parents in the room. I don't know if this is standard fare for Korea, having only been to one show like this, but it wasn't very amusing, slightly odd and really took away from all the hard work the kids put in.

Annoying MC aside, the show was a great success. All the children performed admirably, bar the usual braindead suspects, and we even got a dance contest between 6 of the parents towards the end to fill time. At the end seemingly every mother was keen to tell me how handsome I was, which is a fairly common occurrence when I see them on-and-off during the week, but having all of them at once was slightly overwhelming and somewhat embarrassing.

The highlights in order of cuteness were -

1. Cherry Class performing "Chick, Chick, Chick!"

2. Lemon and Apple Class performing "Tiger's Birthday"

3. Cherry Class's Ballet (The Nutcracker - performed with typical Cherry Class coordination and skill, i.e. none)

Photos courtesy of Dave, as obviously I was a bit busy up the front and couldn't take any.

DMZ

2010-02-07T02:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday myself, Ashley, Dave and Marisa embarked on our most terrifying adventure to date - a tour of the Korean DMZ. I'm going to include some stories about the DMZ in here too because frankly I find it fascinating. Some of the stories I knew prior to yesterday (I'm reading a big book about North Korea at the moment), some were new to me.

We arrived at our pick-up point on time and after a short wait were put on a tour bus with lots of other foreigners (Koreans aren't allowed on the regular tours - they have to apply to the government to visit the DMZ) and introduced to our tour guide, the hilarious and slightly camp Mr Kim, or, as he said we could call him "The Handsome Mr Kim". While we made our way to the civilian control area to the north of Seoul he entertained us and pointed out things of interest. He also told us he was discharged from his army service after only 6 months because he was so handsome, and that the DMZ soldiers are chosen based on their height, language skills, Taekwon-do skills, and how handsome they are (like him). One interesting thing he told us was that the low bridges we kept driving under were actually anti-tank bridges - they're all lined with dynamite and can be blown up, blocking the road with massive blocks of concrete, should the North invade again - from Panmunjom (The DMZ town we were visiting) it's a straight shot down Highway 1 to Seoul, so they put in place as many things to slow down the invaders as possible.

Another fact I found interesting was that when the North invaded in 1950 there were only 3 bridges over the Han River, which the North promptly blew up, giving themselves free reign over the northern side of the city and trapping everybody that happened to be North of the river that day. Now there are 29 bridges.

From DMZ 06.02.10

Our first stop was Imchingak, which is the last publicly-accessible railway stop in South Korea heading north. Past that is Dorasam, the very last South Korean railway stop within the civilian control area, then the line heads into the DMZ and out the other side to Pyongyang. The track was rebuilt as part of the Sunshine policy between the North and South in the 90s, but the North claimed it didn't have the resources to finish their part of the track, so the South ended up building all of it. This story was related to us by The Handsome Mr Kim, and the telling gave us the first clues as to his views on the North - he seemed very patriotic and loved the South, but also seemed sympathetic to the Northern people, but not their regime. Repeatedly he spoke about the South giving aid to the North, and each time he mentioned how he assumed the aid had ended up "in Kim Jong-Il's belly".

From DMZ 06.02.10

After this stop we got back onto our bus and drove across "The Reunification Bridge", paid for by the founder of Hyundai, and into Camp Bonifas (named for an American officer killed by Northern troops while attempting to trim a tree in the Joint Security Area). Here we were given a quick briefing on the history of Camp Bonifas and the JSA, and then transferred to some UN buses to go to the JSA itself. The most important instruction we were given was not to point at anything, due to the fact that Northern troops might see somebody pulling their hand out of their pocket to point and think they had a gun, and promptly mow them down. We were also not allowed to take our telescopic lenses in (curses!) or take pictures of certain things.

Although the tour had a fairly light mood due to The Handsome Mr Kim's storytelling and the general levity of the group (excluding one overweight American guy who managed to attract the ire of everybody there by having a smart answer for every question Mr Kim asked - one of them prefaced - in all seriousness - by "I saw it in a movie on the Internet."), once we got off the buses in the JSA Sunken Gardens - the scene of a fatal firefight when a Russian defector ran across the demarcation line - the mood turned decidedly more serious.

From DMZ 06.02.10

We were led from the South Korean "Welcome Hall" across the road into the meeting rooms shared by both sides. The demarcation line bisects these meeting rooms so by standing at the far end of it we were technically in North Korea, which although it seems completely arbitrary and pointless was quite exciting nonetheless. The guards in these rooms were intense to say the least, especially the one stood in front of the door opening on the Northern side. Apparently they stand in some kind of Taekwon-do ready position so if anybody tries to rush them to get through the door they are ready to kick their ass.

From DMZ 06.02.10

In the corner of this room is a small picture frame containing the flags of all the countries that participated in the Joint Security Force. It used to be a shelf with little flags on it, but when George W. Bush visited in 2002, two North Korean soldiers marched into the meeting room, the first cleaned his boots with the South Korean flag, and the second blew his nose with the American flag. Since then its been replaced with the picture frame to prevent any more incidents.

From DMZ 06.02.10

When we left the meeting room we noticed a North Korean soldier had some out of the building on their side to keep an eye on us with his binoculars. We were told in no uncertain terms to not try to make any contact with the KPA troops. Apparently sometimes they wave and shout things, especially if there are pretty ladies on the tour. The reason we are not allowed to acknowledge them at all is that while we are there they have a hundred cameras trained on us at any one time, and any type of bad behaviour can be photographed and used as evidence of how imperialist and un-revolutionary we are. For a while faded jeans were banned because the North were showing pictures of westerners in faded jeans and explaining to their populace that everybody was so poor in the west that they only had one pair of jeans.

From DMZ 06.02.10

We were taken up to a little platform to get good pictures of the JSA, from which we could also see the North Korean propaganda village , featuring the worlds tallest flagpole (built in response to the South building their flagpole taller than the previous Northern one - as The Handsome Mr Kim put it "Theirs is taller - but ours is thicker!"). The weight of the flag flying from it is 600lbs, and they have to take it down when it rains or it would tear under its own weight. From this platform we could also see a few of the buildings from the Gaesong Industrial Complex - a big complex of buildings built by South Korea's biggest firms inside North Korea to take advantage of their cheap labour. North Korean workers are paid $65 a month for working there ("What a cheap!" commented Mr Kim), but currently they are at something of an impasse because the North wanted their wages doubled. Of course the workers only take home $5 a month - the rest goes to the state (or, as Mr Kim put it again, "into Kim Jong-Il's belly").

From DMZ 06.02.10

We re-boarded our buses and drove out of the JSA and back to Camp Bonifas, where we were allowed to go into the gift shop (Yes, the DMZ has a gift shop), which sells North Korean postage stamps, currency, and some drinks. I personally picked up some North Korean Soju which I'm sure will be just delicious. After purchasing our souvenirs we headed back out of the civilian control area and back out into the regular world where there's a much lower chance of being shot. All that then remained was tolerating that horrendous American guy for the hour drive back to Seoul, which was easily the toughest part of the day.

From DMZ 06.02.10

Wine Train Liveblog

2010-01-30T04:22:00.001-08:00

8.40 - Boarded Train. Very fancy, slowly filling up. We've got a little booth to ourselves.

From Wine Train 30.01.10

9.30 - Getting a little talk in Korean about the different wines we'll be trying. Seems like we're having red, then white, in sweet and dry varieties.

9.45 - The 'Wine Tasting' has commenced, although there's no spit bucket so it's actually Wine Drinking.

10.06 - They're not messing around, we've had three reds already. They also bought a plate of food featuring cheese singles.

10.15 - Now raspberry wine. Oppressively sweet.

10.20 - Now we have to choose from the four we tried. Even through my blocked nose I can tell they were all shit.

From Wine Train 30.01.10

10.22 - Ashley is singing along to Total Eclipse of the Heart. Perhaps drunk already?

From Wine Train 30.01.10

10.30 - The bloke that was telling us about wine has now stood up with a guitar to sing. He gave us a shout out for being English (no shout out for Ashley).

10.45 - Singalong!

From Wine Train 30.01.10

10.45 - The family sat next to us just gave us a load of oranges. Sometimes being white has its advantages.

11.09 - Entertainment has finished, as has the wine mercifully. Getting off the train in ten mins or so. Everyone is quite merry.

11.20 - We've arrived.....somewhere. Now a quick bus ride (sans wine) to the vinyard.

11.50 - Sitting down for lunch. Quite a spread. Nobody wants to sit at the whitey table.

12.12 - Dave got sweet wine instead of dry with lunch. Stupid boy.

From Wine Train 30.01.10

12.18 - Dave redeemed himself by cunningly offering our Korean tablemates some wine (Korea protip - its very rude to refuse a drink from someone who's not a close friend). Touché, Dave. Now onto the dry goodness.

12.28 - The wine lecture is starting, in Korean. Should be fun. Onto my seventh (eighth?) glass of red of the day.

12.54 - Tool silly pictures outside the Chateau

From Wine Train 30.01.10

13.00 - Sitting down for some kind of Generation Game style lets make cosmetics out of wine thing. Wonder if wearing it gets you drunk. After that it appears we're having a wine foot bath. Wonder if that gets you drunk.

13.29 - Made bath bombs. Dont have a bath. Lame.

From Wine Train 30.01.10

13.45 - Wine foot bath. Very hot. All the Koreans are very jolly - got invited over to another wine-jacuzzi to converse in bad English / bad Korean with a guy called James. He told me "Korean people very small? Oh no no!"

From Wine Train 30.01.10

14.09 - Cellar tour, quite a small cellar. Probably a good thing as I'd be very depressed if this wine was produced to a level where it was available outside Korea.

14.19 - Private Cellar Tour

From Wine Train 30.01.10

14.25 - Gift shop time! Loads of wine-based stuff, and of course some dried squid.

14.45 - Back on the bus, no idea where we're going.

14.48 - Ashley got a free bottle of wine from a guy at the vineyard! She didn't have to sleep with him or anything.

15.36 - We're in a room, just got off the bus. Not entirely sure what we're doing, we think something to do with Ginseng. Comfy chairs though.

From Wine Train 30.01.10

15.41 - There is a woman talking. So far the only words I've recognised are chicken soup and sauna.

15.52 - We made little paper things filled with wood chips! I guess it's like Korean pot poris? Now we're looking at their prize Ginseng collection or something.

From Wine Train 30.01.10

15.56 - History of Ginseng Cultivation Techniques tour! Woop woop! Apparently most Korean Ginseng is cultivated for 6 years - longer than that and the skin becomes bark-like and not good.

16.10 - Back on the bus then off it 3 minutes later straight away for the Ginseng market.

16.43 - Ginseng market was totally deserted, sort of weird. Ate some deep fried Ginseng, tasted of nothing in particular. Back to the train now filled with precious wine.

From Wine Train 30.01.10

16.58 - A Korean lady on the bus gave us chocolate! All the Koreans are being so nice today.

17.55 - Back in the warmth of the Wine Train. Chugging our way back to Seoul and THEY'RE PLAYING AFRICA BY TOTO. One last piece of Korean niceness turned out to be a double-edged sword as they were J-Hos trying to give us their stupid magazine.

From Wine Train 30.01.10

18.17 - Still no wine been served, getting anxious. They're playing ELO though. Every cloud I guess.

18.40 - Finally got wine. Had to have an emergency beer in the meantime. Feeling very tired but maintaining enough of a drunken glaze to keep me happy.

18.50 - Mysteriously we're only being served red wine - think we've worked out what's going on - further up the train there's a white wine carriage. Wish we were up there - this wine is terrible.

19.03 - Our sommelier disappeared so an old woman took it upon herself to serve the wine. 와인 아줌마, I salute you.

19.10 - Dave has taken up her mantle and is serving wine to the whole carriage. Saturday Night Dave, I salute you too.

20.03 - Wine has finished. Disembarking in 10mins or so. Tiring day, pretty bad wine, but very good company and lots of fun.

21.19 - In Seouls premier Irish pub reviewing the day. A solid 8/10 I think, let down by terrible, terrible wine.

Next Day Edit - Added photos!

Birthday Day!

2010-01-28T23:34:00.001-08:00

Today was our monthly Birthday Party, and Cherry Class gave us the gift of dance -

A wonderful gift indeed.

Quick Update

2010-01-28T00:05:00.001-08:00

Lots of stuff has been going on recently, we're approaching the end of the school year and just what the hell is going to happen is slowly congealing into a semi-turgid plan. Our principal is leaving to spend more time with her son (I'm actually quite sad about her son leaving, he has the best English in the school and he's always good fun to teach), and another one of my favourite teachers is leaving because shes getting married. Funny thing about Korea, if you're a woman and you want to get married, you quit your job. If you get pregnant, you quit your job. It's incredibly sexist but then so much about Korea is that there's no point dwelling on it. It's looking as though I will become a homeroom teacher once again as Dave and I are to get our own classes come March (which is when the new academic year begins), so we're currently worrying about which classes we will be given as neither of us want to teach the dreaded Melon Class. We're holding a year-end revue on Feb 20th which will feature dancing, singing, probably some crying and falling over, and Dave and I hosting the whole shindig - which should prove interesting for those parents who dont speak English.

In other news a photo I took got published in a Korean magazine this week as part of an article they wrote on the venerable Ms Sheets, so now I can add published photographer to the list of pseudo-lies on my CV.

Techie Interruption

2010-01-23T22:52:00.001-08:00

I'm going to write some nerdy tech stuff for a little while, because it's something I want to write about but it's outside the sphere of my actual techie writing gig, so it's going here. Apologies if it doesn't make any sense to you.

Last week I finally cracked and bought an Android phone, something I've been putting off for entirely too long. I've been clinging onto my precious Nokia, telling myself all their promises of of a UI overhaul would come to fruition soon, and while Symbian OS was, and still is, in some senses, a great OS, it's really showing it's age, and although the functionality is still great and it does literally everything I want, Nokia have been dropping the ball in the hardware department for a few years now, and even their flagship-ish 5800 is woefully underpowered. So I waited for an Android phone to appear that ticked all my boxes, and that happened on January 5th when Google announced the Nexus One. Purchasing it was a bit of an ordeal, I can't get access to the purchase page from South Korea so I had to phone up my father, and guide him through the process, then when it arrived in England get him to ship it here, which he did, and it arrived on Thursday.

My first impression was complete joy. Usually upon getting a new phone I have to spend hours importing contacts and bookmarks, but with the Nexus One I just logged in to my Google account and everything was there already - it even synced my Picasa pictures, for gods sake. I've used Android quite a bit before, but I've never set up a brand new device, and I had no idea how easy it was. Within three minutes of turning the phone on all my information was on there, ready to use. This is how devices should function. About a year ago, just before I moved to Korea, I made a conscious effort to move all my important stuff to the cloud (specifically to Google services), and when I pressed that "Synchronise" button it all came to glorious fruition.

The hardware is very wonderful - the texture of the phone is a sort of rubberised plastic that sits in the hand very well, and although the phone is about the same size as an iPhone, it's thinner and the screen is noticably bigger (and higher quality thanks to the OLED display). Everybody is comparing the Nexus One to the iPhone, but I think that's an unfair comparison to make - the iPhone is Apple's vision of the perfect phone, the Nexus One is Google's, and the two companies have very different philosophies about software design, I just so happen to prefer Google's.

At first I was very unhappy with the battery life - it drained almost entirely on my first full day of use, but then I discovered a Skype app I installed had been cheekily running in the background and had stolen almost half my battery life. Now my phone is sitting next to me with a third of it's battery still left since charging yesterday morning, and thats including about 2 hours of playing a pretty processor-intensive Tower Defense game on it yesterday.

I'm a total sucker for anything Google so you should take this praise with a pinch of salt - Android, although in my opinion prettier than iPhone OS, isn't quite as user friendly, and requires a bit of technical knowledge to get the most out of it. Nevertheless, I am incredibly happy with my purchase and would recommend the Nexus One to anybody in a heartbeat.

Anyway, sorry about that, now back to complaining about Korea.

The Problem With Being White

2010-01-16T21:14:00.001-08:00

There are a number of problems with being a white person in Korea. The first one, and although it may seem like a major problem, it actually doesn't effect me too much, is that lots of Koreans are still pretty racist. Here's an excerpt from a thing I wrote but subsequently didn't post explaining my feelings on Korea's view on foreigners -

Here's another one which I find very funny - westerners, well,
we're only in the country to sleep with your daughter. One of my
friends isn't allowed to be alone in a room with any of the female
Korean teachers because if he was alone with them for even a few
seconds, he would have his wicked way with them and that would be disastrous for some reason or other. Quite regularly when we're
walking down the street mothers will position themselves between us and
their daughters, because, well if you think about it, we could quite
easily sleep with them then and there, right on the street in front of
their mothers.

Well, Korea, allow me to retort
with some fun facts and figures you yourselves collected. 25% of
Korean women admit to accepting money for sex, 50% of Korean men admit
to paying for sex, and 70% of Korean men admit to cheating on their
wives. So statistically speaking, a Korean man is more likely to nail
your daughter right there on the street, probably in front of his wife,
and he'd probably stuff a W10,000 note in her waistband when he's done.
In fact, Korean men are so insatiable that prostitution accounted for
1.6% of the GDP last year (from here -
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/FE26Dg03.html). The Government even
started a reward scheme for men who promised to not go nail a
prostitute after office Christmas parties (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6209549.stm).

There isn't any legal recourse against racism in Korea, there are no laws forbidding it. So if you are Japanese you can be expected to be hated because your ancestors burned down most of Korea ("Very bad camera", a Korean said about my Sony camera, "Very bad car", she added when I mentioned back home I drove a Nissan, while defending Kia to the death.), and if you're western you can be expected to be hated because instead of having loads of very dangerous and amoral sex and never talking about it, you have some regular sex and sometimes talk about it, and want to do responsible things like visit sexual health clinics and use contraception.

Anyway, although racism is quite a deeply ingrained social problem here, I only usually see it manifest itself in the odd old person scowling at me on the subway, so, for me at least, it's not a huge problem.

The Problem With Being White for me personally is that Koreans, I assume after decades of seeing adverts with westerners in, seem to be subconsciously drawn to anything a westerner is standing in close proximity to. When I first arrived I thought nothing of it, but now I've had almost 10 months of it (The Whitey Effect, we've started calling it), it is definitely a documentable phenomenon. A few weeks ago Ashley and myself found a Kebab stall in one of the food courts we go to quite frequently, manned by a genuine European (I thought he was Turkish at first, turned out he was Greek), he was doing his best to sell his food in very good Korean, but he only really drew a crowd once we headed over. After he served us our kebabs, noticing the queue that had formed behind us, he said "I think if you guys stayed here for an hour I'd have a very good day!", so we made an agreement to come back and stand around for a while in exchange for free kebabs. This also, somewhat depressingly, shows that we are not the only ones aware of The Whitey Effect. The coffee shop where I'm sat writing this has just given us free coffee, and the pessimist in me thinks it's because business has picked up slightly since we arrived, and the owner wants us to stay.

You may think I'm slightly shallow for saying deeply entrenched racism is a minor problem and that queues forming behind me is the bane of my life, and you'd be right - in this instance I'm being very shallow, but imagine stopping to look at something in a shop window, then turning to keep walking only to find a wall of people has been erected there, and they're all staring at whatever you were looking at (I'm not even exaggerating there, that actually happened once). I only find the "Get out of my way please" element to be somewhat frustrating, I mainly find The Whitey Effect to be problematic because an entire culture of people should not have been trained to copy the actions of a person based on their ethnicity - especially if they're not going to enact any laws to make sure that person isn't persecuted while in their country.

Korean Bizarreness Brain Fart

2010-01-10T23:22:00.001-08:00

Last week our director's husband, who is also a photographer, offered to make me a Calendar using pictures of my choosing. He'd made all the kids one for Christmas with pictures of themselves looking cute, so I thought "sure!" and sent him 20 or so of my favourite pictures of the kids and a few scenic ones of Korea.

Two days later our director approached me and said she was concerned because the pictures I sent didn't include any of my family. Don't worry, I said, the Calendar was for me when I go back to the UK so I can remember the kids and Korea, she nodded in a slightly concerned manner and walked away.

Today when I got into work the directors husband was there, and he excitedly presented me with two Calendars, both of which were the same and featured precisely none of the pictures I had chosen, but did feature lots of pictures of me in various stages of beard-growth, teaching and generally looking awkward with the children. If I had gone out of my way to pick a more awkward selection of pictures I don't think I could have managed it. So these Calendars will be sent home for my parents and perhaps doting grandparents to enjoy, as my unshaven face is not something I want to stare at every day.

I appreciate the gesture Mr. Park, but....what?

The Bloody Weather

2010-01-05T02:52:00.001-08:00

Following on from my sweary opus "My Fucking Windows", I'm now going to write a piece about the weather here. More of a lament, really.

From Snow in Pyeongnae 04.01.09

I've already mentioned how the seasons are like clockwork here, and after protesting to my Korean teachers that -5 was too cold (so cold, in fact, that I've had to buy new gloves, boots, socks, and embarrassing man-tights to keep my legs warm), they confidently predicted "January will be colder.". Whatever, I thought, assuming the current temperature was near enough 0 degrees Kelvin. Well lo and behold, as soon as the calendar flipped over to January 1st 2010, the temperature dropped another 5 degrees. Currently it's -12 degrees, although my computer weather thing informs me that it feels like -18. This week it's supposed to hit -20, which I can only hypothesize will feel like -26. We've also had a biblical amount of snow. Apparently the most in Korea since records began, and because it's so cold, this snow isn't going anywhere. Some of the drifts are still sitting exactly as they fell 2-3 days ago.

From Snow in Pyeongnae 04.01.09

One thing I've also mentioned is Korean driving, specifically, how terrible it is. Now imagine that driving with 7 inches of snow added into the formula. Hilarious is the only word that accurately describes it. I saw a pickup truck go down the hill opposite my apartment with all four wheels entirely locked up. God knows how he managed to miss all the parked cars.

From Snow in Pyeongnae 04.01.09

To Korea's credit, they do seem to know more-or-less how to deal with snow. Although the airports have been colossally fucked up, as far as I know trains and buses are running as normal (although the buses are significantly slower, thank god). The morning of the heaviest snowfall, the owners of every business and property that fronted onto a street was out with little brushes piling the snow upon the curb, then the snowplows came along and did their thing, so now the pavements and roads are mostly clear, with huge 4ft piles of snow in between.

From Snow in Pyeongnae 04.01.09

Another interesting observation is that as soon as the snow falls the ordinarily straight-laced Korean populous are prone to bouts of lawlessness. If a road is completely clear with no cars even in sight or within a hundred miles, Koreans will still walk to the pedestrian crossing and wait patiently. However once there is snow on the road, anywhere is fair game to cross. Perhaps it's because they can't see the boundaries of the road and pavement? Either way, even the big 6 lane main road at the bottom of town was a frenzy of very naughty activity on Monday as Koreans, empowered by a new sense of oh-shit-it's-snowing scampered back and forth with gay abandon.

From Snow in Pyeongnae 04.01.09

So, in conclusion, this may well be my last entry, because if I'm forced to go outside in temperatures nearing -25 degrees, I will die instantly (remember the climax of Demolition Man when Sly Stallone freezes Wesley Snipes? That will be me.), no amount of embarrassing tights will save me.

Farewell!

A Very Kid's Club Christmas

2010-01-03T00:35:00.001-08:00

Last week before our Winter Holiday started (apologies for the lack of updates - that's what I've been doing, having a nice holiday), we had a Christmas Party at school. It was a very nice way to wind down after a long term, and the kids were just as ready to have a week off as I was. The preparations for the party began in earnest about two weeks ago, and since then parents had been bringing in presents for their children and putting them under the big Christmas tree in the foyer. This pile grew exponentially every day as we got closer to Christmas, to the point that it was spilling out from under the tree by quite a way. Some of the presents were very large and there were about fifty of them under there.

Dave and I concocted a very devious plan, which was to make charming homemade Christmas cards and give them to the kids a few days before the party, giving their parents time to reciprocate with gifts of their own if they should so wish. Our plan worked out rather well in the end - on the day of the party we got a few cards, a nice little pearl keyring thing, and so Issey Miyake aftershave. And unfortunate downside to our card-making was that our director saw us making them, thought it was a lovely idea, and ordered all the Korean teachers to make cards for their classes, which, on top of all their other work seemed quite excessive. So in the lead-up to our party all the Korean teachers had to stay even later than they usually would to get their work done. I, of course, stuck stoically to my I-only-work-till-6-so-that's-when-I'm-leaving policy.

By the time the party came around, we encountered another problem. All the Korean teachers had been so busy making cards, making sure all their kids had presents, making sure the hall looked beautiful for the party, that they forgot to plan that actual party. The improvised running order then, was for Santa to turn up, do a bit of magic (as Santa does), then give each kid their present individually. The problem here was the teachers wanted everybody to cheer "Merry Christmas!" after each present-giving, which became quite tiresome after the first 6 or so kids. Each class had a table with party food on, and after about 10 minutes of sitting patiently some of the younger kids began to show signs of weakness, and after about 15 minutes they were essentially ravenous. The principal gave in and allowed them to tuck in to their food, so the rest of the present-giving took place to a loud soundtrack of crunching and slurping.

All-in-all a very enjoyable if chaotic day, fraught with the usual terrible planning issues but fun nonetheless.

I left early once the party was finished and hurried away to the airport to jet off to Hong Kong with Ashley and my visiting parents, but I won't talk much about that because I believe I've mentioned my love of Hong Kong more than once. Suffice to say my Christmas dinner in Hong Kong consisted of cheese and crackers, curry, lobster thermidor, turkey, beef, ham, brussel sprouts, oysters, sashimi, and both custard and chocolate fountains. Anyway, here are some pictures of both -

From Christmas Party 24.12.09

From Hong Kong 25.12.09

Yet More Stupidity

2009-12-11T06:06:00.001-08:00

I honestly thought this bout of Hagwon-based idiocy had passed, but I was wrong. Oh lord how wrong I was.

Saturday before last we had a sort of open day for our Hagwon so the parents of prospective students could visit, see a little presentation from our Director and Principal, and look at Dave and I to make sure we're white enough. One particularly enthusiastic mother called ours the most handsome Hagwon in Pyeongnae. Obviously a lot of mothers who attend have children at other Hagwons and are thinking of switching to a new one.

I've also heard it's not entirely uncommon for other Hagwons to send in their teachers as spies to see what we get up to. Earlier in my Korean adventure this would have seemed stupid and petty to me - which it is - but I'm now adjusted to the way Hagwons operate and interact so I pseudo-accept it as the norm. We used to have a little girl who came to us in the afternoon after spending the morning at a different Hagwon, and once I caught our Director rifling through her backpack looking at the materials from the other school, then magically the next week we were asked to produce report cards that looked suspiciously like the ones from the girl's other school. Ashley was simply told in a meeting about other Hagwons, "They are our enemy".

Earlier that week we'd been visited by an elderly American woman who lives locally and works with our friend Frank (she's thoroughly unpleasant, but thats neither here nor there), and she gave our Director a CV as she's looking for a new job. At the open day our Director told one of the mothers that our Hagwon was so popular that she'd been receiving CVs from other foreign teachers in the area wanting to work for her. In a shocking M Night Shyamalan-style twist this mother's child already attended Ashley's Hagwon, and she somehow managed to contort this little nugget of gossip so much that by the time it reached Ashley's Hagwon it had turned into "Two of your teachers are leaving to work at Kid's Club". The Principal of Ashley's Hagwon assumed this meant Ashley and her flatmate Marisa were leaving, and lots of stupid shit ensued, including their Director almost putting a notice in their weekly newsletter that Kid's Club were trying to poach their teachers.

Another slight cock-up for our open day was that our director had too many posters printed - 500 too many, to be precise. The hilarious result of this was that our Director came up with a brilliant new marketing strategy - lie to people. Today she had all the teachers sit down and put stickers on the original posters changing the open day date from November 28th to December 19th, her idea being that people will phone up to inquire about the new open day and then she could get her hooks into them. Once we were informed of this new plan the following conversation happened -

Me: "So there's not actually an open day on the 19th?"

Director: "No."

Me: "So what will happen if people turn up here on the 19th expecting an open day?"

Director: "It will be ok."

I find the best way to think of Hagwons is not just as schools for children, but also run by children, who are also idiots, and who do not play nicely with other idiotic children. But enough shop talk - have some nice photos I took last weekend.

From Myeongdong and Gangnam 06.12.09

The Problems With Winter, Part 1

2009-12-06T04:22:00.001-08:00

When I moved to Korea I was told Korea only really has 2 seasons, very hot summer and very cold winter. Whatever, I thought, thats a stupid idea. Only now am I realising how very true it is.

In late September we had the hottest day of the year, a sultry 37 degrees Celsius (round about 99 degrees in old money), and we enjoyed the day sunbathing on our roof drinking ice-cold Korean beer. A scant 40 days later it dipped below 0 for the first time, and today it hit -8 degrees in Seoul. This incredibly fast change of weather has left my body in a state of disbelief and confusion.

We first started to notice the cold weather when we had to turn on (and figure out) the heating for the first time, and witness our gas bill go from W5,000 a month to almost W55,000. Our boiler is a funny old thing. Our friend's apartment (which is in a big towering highrise at the top end of town - our flat, by contrast, is above a hairdressers and a chicken place in a small pink building that appears to have been designed by someone who was blindfolded and drawing with their feet) has a futuristic LCD panel to control their heating, they can set the temperature to the precisest degree. Our boiler has an old rotary dial and four modes of operation - Thermo, which is normal operation, this is the mode in which it breaks the most, Outing, a sort of low simmer to keep things sort-of warm for when you go out, Sleeping, I'm not entirely sure what this does, breaks a fair amount though, and Hot Water, which provides you with 10-20 seconds of scoldingly hot water and an infinite amount of luke-warm water which is just too cold to have a comfortable shower in.

To give you a good analogy of the contrast between our flat and our friends, one of the girls has a small robot in her room which tells her the time and temperature on the hour every hour. Our flat has a fairly large spider that lives in the outside hallway that we don't want to get rid of because he kills a good amount of mosquitoes.

So that is problem number one with Winter - our flat is woefully ill-equipped to deal with it.

My Bloody Windows

2009-11-26T05:46:00.001-08:00

So one problem I've been having since the weather got cold is that the windows in my bedroom are terrible. The windows in the rest of the house are double-glazed (or, at least, Korean style double glazing, which is one window installed in front of another one), but our bedrooms have a strange curved window thing going on so are only single glazed.

Since the weather got cold I've been noticing my room has been colder than the rest of the house, and a few days ago discovered a giant gap between the window runners and the frame, letting one hell of a draft in.

Luckily the landlady is having work done on our roof right now so she asked the builders to put a second layer of windows in our rooms. I'm not entirely sure if these builders are children, blind or just really mean, but the way they installed the new windows would seem to indicate they are all three.

I returned home from work yesterday to find our flat stinking of window putty. What the builders had done was install another window in front of my ill-fitting one, unfortunately the new window is also ill-fitting so there is still a cold draft. This new window also had scratches and blotches all over it, I can only assume they got it as a cast-off from another building site. They either weren't able to or couldn't be arsed to find another curved piece of glass, so installed three flat pieces bending around the corner. Only problem is, they sit quite far apart and so they had to use a lot of filler to join them together, and in the process made quite a bit fall through the gap, so now I have a sealed cavity between the two panes of glass with loads of bits of putty sitting in it.

I don't have it too bad though - to install Dave's window they removed the mosquito net, so he basically won't be able to open his window in the summer, and his window was all steamed up when they sealed it, so there's a good amount of liquid between the two windows, which will likely rot the wooden window frame.

The icing on the cake of all this was that the builder had made a complete mess of my room - he'd pulled my desk out without unplugging anything, so the trailing wires dragged everything off the desk. He'd also left various amounts of builders detritus on the floor - bits of putty, dust, parts of glue guns etc. I explained the obvious problems with all of this to a Korean co-teacher and she shrugged like it was the norm. God help them all.

Catch-Up

2009-11-22T23:15:00.001-08:00

There are a bunch of little things I've been meaning to write about for a while, so this is going to be a little catch-up post. First of all, let me tell you about how farcical the end to last week was.

Stupidity

After the yes-we're-closing-for-a-week-oh-wait-no-we're-not saga of the week before I had, quite reasonably I thought, hoped for some downtime from stupidity. Unfortunately this was not to be as the two classrooms with windows have become quite chilly since the temperature plummeted to a chilly -7. So our director's solution was for me and Dave-Teacher to stick sticky-back plastic to all the windows. Apparently this makes the rooms warmer, except that it turns out it doesn't, so that was a nice hour and a half wasted. Plus we were pretty bad at it so now the blinds have to remain drawn so no parents see our hideous handiwork.

The next day we were told we were to be making kimchi for special day next week. We were also told two of the teachers had gone to a local farm to pick up lots of radishes and lettuce. We were then tasked with moving this from their car in the basement to Kid's Club on the 4th Floor, without any bags or boxes or anything useful like that, during the hour when all the kids from the other Hagwon upstairs arrive and depart. Obviously this was a ton of fun and something I can't wait to repeat.

We were supposed to be working this Saturday for a new parents recruitment afternoon thing. Turns out Rose had rescheduled it to next Saturday, just that nobody had thought to tell us. It only became apparent when I asked one of the other teachers what was the plan for tomorrow, and she stared at me blankly and asked "What is happening tomorrow?". Honestly, how difficult is it to have one teacher tell us the contents of each weekly teachers meetings? Apparently very.

Kim-Chi

It appears to be Kim-Chi making season in Korea right now, and we got given some of our director's personal stash, which was very nice of her I have to say. It's currently in our fridge ripening until it is at its most delicious in a few weeks time. For those not in the know, Kim-Chi is the national dish of Korea, it is lettuce or radish pickled in chilli, garlic and fish paste. Disgusting, you may be thinking - but you'd be wrong. It is delicious and I'm addicted to it. We made it with the children on Friday, and all the kids bought their own special Kim-Chi making overalls - very adorable.

Weather

It's bloody cold here right now and shows every sign of getting colder. This is not good. I hate the cold. Last night it snowed for the first time in Pyeongnae. Suffice to say I am going out as little as physically possible.

Thanksgiving

This weekend was Thanksgiving in the US, and as I hang around with a few Americans we celebrated it by roasting up a big turkey and many delicious side dishes. Gallery of events here.

The Kids of Kid's Club Part 6 - Thomas

2009-11-12T23:23:00.000-08:00

Name - Thomas

Age - 4

Class - Cherry

Favourite Phrase - "Yes. No no no no no!" when getting yes and no confused.

Favourite Class - Reading

Additional Information - Thomas is something of a tragic figure due to being so incredibly smart in a class full of jabbering idiots. He tries his best and always gets the right answer but is usually shouted over by other children in his class. He has the unfortunate honour of being the only member of Cherry class to stay until 6pm, so usually sits there looking mournful after nap time, or, like today, just puts himself back to bed. Here is a video of him being sleepy after nap time -

Pepero Day!

2009-11-12T04:40:00.001-08:00

This past Wednesday (11/11) was Pepero Day in Korea, a national holiday not to honour the war dead like in Britain and America, but to eat a particular type of sweet called a Pepero (Pocky in Japan), which is a little biscuit stick dipped in chocolate. For about a fortnight before the day people kept asking me if I was buying Pepero any time soon, which proved very confusing as I am a foreigner and was not aware of this strange holiday. Once I figured out what a Pepero was and when Pepero Day was, I looked into it because, well, it's a bloody strange thing to have an entire day for. It's like the UK having Mars Bar Day or something.

As the big day drew closer the local convenience stores filled up with an incredible array of Pepero permutations - small Pepero, big Pepero, Pepero with cute cartoon characters drawn on them, loads of boxes of Pepero tied together in hearts. It sort of reminded me of all the Easter Eggs appearing around Easter, only it was one specific type of sweet, available only in 3 flavours.

Apparently Pepero Day was begun by a group of girls in Busan (South Korea's southern city), taking place on 11/11 because the number one resembled Pepero themselves. This was because they wanted to become "Thin and slender like Pepero". This in itself is pretty plausible, what with Korea's obsession with the body beautiful, however it does seem slightly suspicious that this is the official story put forward by Lotte, manufacturers of Pepero and unofficial rulers of Korea (it's actually a Japanese company, don't tell any Koreans though, they'd be distraught). Allegedly the day grew in popularity to the point that Lotte saw a noticable bump in Pepero sales on 11/11, and did the humane thing and threw their weight behind it, satiating all of Korea's rampant desire to eat a certain type of confectionery on a specific day.

Lotte also tried to introduce Pepero Day in Japan (Pocky Day there, obviously), but it failed miserably. Obviously the fact that it was home-grown Korean holiday invented by some honest-to-goodness Koreans meant it caught on better here. Honestly that's how it came about. For real. Shut up. Stop laughing.

The nice thing about Pepero Day was I got given a shedload of Pepero by the kids, the bad thing about Pepero Day is that I don't really like Pepero a huge amount.

In Swine Flu news our numbers are still down around the 60-70% mark at school, most kids have adopted stylish face masks to wear to and from school (although curiously not while they are in school, surrounded by hordes of coughing children). Here's a little rogues gallery -

Swine Flu

2009-11-03T23:39:00.001-08:00

Sorry for doing another wordy update without any cute pictures in between, I'll post some from the Halloween Party soon, I promise.

I'm sure all of you in the UK are bored of Swine Flu and think it's terribly passée to talk about it now, but it's still fairly exciting and newsworthy in Korea (9000 new cases a day last week!). Lots more fun things have happened since my last update. Here's a quick rundown of events up to today.

- Many more cases of Swine Flu have popped up at Ashley's Hagwon, their director has broken her own rules though and has stopped sending infected classes home for a week, using her in-depth medical knowledge as the basis for the decision (that was a little joke there - she has none).

- Lots of the local public schools remain fully or partially closed, most of the Hagwons seem to be back open now though.

- We still don't know what the big important 'government announcement' was, or even if one took place.

- Yesterday Korea went to Swine Flu Red Alert (FLUCON 5 as I just named it), meaning something or other.

The biggest development of the past week was that a kid at Kid's Club got the terrible influenza over the weekend. Her mother took her to the doctor, who confirmed the diagnosis. Kid's Club were then informed, but our fears were assuaged when our director, using her in-depth medical knowledge (there's that joke again), informed us that it wasn't Swine Flu as the stupid doctor had 'confirmed' with his 'tests', it was just a temperature (sometimes kids just increase in temperature, you know?). The truly amazing thing was that she reached this diagnosis having not seen or spoken to the girl in question, only her mother, who had only phoned to say that her daughter had Swine Flu. Astonishing, I think you'll agree.

Currently Kid's Club is operating at about 50-60% capacity, a lot of kids simply aren't coming back for a whole month, but this has led to a quite fun we'll-cross-that-bridge-when-we-come-it approach from most of the teachers - some classes have been merged, we're having some free periods, it's all very interesting.

Korean Management Style

2009-10-30T01:44:00.001-07:00

A lot of foreign teachers get incredibly frustrated with the way Koreans do business, and I can see why entirely - because it's incredibly daft. To better give you an understanding of the emotional rollercoaster that is a typical day at work, here is what happened during my day yesterday, when we were in the final stages of planning our Halloween Party for this Saturday.

9am - The Korean teachers have an impromptu meeting outside the directors office. Dave and I are expected to watch all six classes by ourselves while it goes on (about 20 minutes). We weren't told to do this - I just knew from the last time it happened.

10am - Before first class we are told Kid's Club will be closed all next week to stop the spread of the dreaded H1N1. This seems only logical as all the local public schools are closed and most of the other hagwons. Our Saturday Halloween Party will be moved to tomorrow (Friday).

10.30am - I am told we are taking different activities during the party than we were originally told, as the change of day has also led to a change of timetable. The principal wants to change me from Games to Reading, and move Dave from Reading to Cooking. Dave thinks he is taking Art and is confused, the Principal says she will get back to us.

11am - We begin making plans for our week off, including hiking Seoraksan again and going to Everland, a huge theme park in the south of Seoul.

1.30pm - We are told we will probably only have up until Wednesday next week off, as our director has decided 5 days is too much. This is fine, as in my eyes time off is time off.

1.45pm - The Principal gets back to us with the new timetable. She explains it to us at length but the take away message is that everything is exactly the same as we thought it was, none of us can work out what, if anything, she has changed.

3.00pm - During our teachers meeting that we have every Thursday (used to be Friday, inexplicably changed a few weeks ago, we weren't told), we're told Rose has changed her mind again and we won't be having any time off at all, and Kid's Club will be open as normal next week. I slowly peel off my glasses and rub the bridge of my nose, two of the Korean teachers mouth the word "Everland!" at each other in a despairing way, and I'm pretty sure somebody else took off their hat, scrunched it into a little ball and threw it on the floor in frustration.

3.30pm - Later in the teachers meeting we're told that we may still get time off pending a government announcement that evening, so we all cross our fingers and go home.

As far as we can tell today no announcement took place, and our Director is sacheting around the place casually reminding teachers to phone their pupil's parents to remind them we're not closed next week like she told them we were, all the while completely unaware of the utter chaos she has caused by opening her mouth before thinking with her brain.

Anyway, that's just a little snapshot of the absolute car crash that is Korean organisation. I'll post some cute pictures from the Halloween Party later that we successfully held today despite Rose's best efforts to sabotage us.

Autumn Picnic!

2009-10-23T01:37:00.000-07:00

From Autumn Picnic 22.10.09

Racial Awareness Day

2009-10-20T01:26:00.001-07:00

Last Friday we were due to go out for an Autumn Picnic, but rain was forecast so instead we stayed at school, and the teachers put together a very touching Racial Awareness Day. The premise was simple - the kids would spend half the morning making faces out of food, the other half racially profiling people, and the afternoon watching Finding Nemo.

Alarm bells started ringing in my head when, the day before, the Principal showed me a picture of three faces made from different rice and asked me which looked like an African American. I eventually picked one, after being at a complete loss for words for rather a long time. More alarm bells started ringing later in the day when I noticed one of the teachers printing out a buttload of pictures of Barack Obama and lining them up next to the picture of the "black" rice face.

I'll spare you the nitty gritty of teaching the "lets-make-different-races-from-food" lesson, suffice to say it was mightily painful, but here is a brief rundown of what I learned from both teachers and pupils -

- There are only three races in the world - White, Black and Asian

- Asian people have yellow skin

- White people have blue eyes

- Black people have big lips

- Barack Obama is the President of Africa

- Black people have the most delicious hair (Broccoli)

"Black People", collage on red card by Melon Class.

I was only teaching the cooking portion of the morning so missed out on racial profiling class, but I saw the hilariously offensive result - big pieces of card with three columns, headed "Black", "Asian" and "White", with pictures of Obama, Lee Myung-Bak (President of Korea), and myself. This was amusing to me because it made me look like the President of White People (which I basically should be but that's for another blog post). The problem was that they got the pictures of people from all the newspapers we had lying around for art, and, being Korean newspapers, they had a great many pictures of Asian people, some pictures of white people, and basically no pictures of black people. Orange class' board had three pictures of black people on - Barack Obama, Michelle Obama and some gangsters holding AK-47s. Pear class' had one - Mariah Carey. Yeah.

Jon Norris - ruler of all the Whites.

I'm not entirely sure what prompted this ham-fisted outburst of racial equality but I certainly hope it's the only time we do it. Koreans do lots of things very well - food, electronics, healthcare - just turns out political and moral correctness isn't one of them.

In more cheerful news I finally took some decent pictures of the Changing of the Guards at the big palace in Seoul this weekend, as well as some other general Seoul ones. See them here.

Reenforcements Have Arrived

2009-10-14T00:58:00.001-07:00

Just as I was starting to get a bit down on Korea again my spirits have been thoroughly lifted by the arrival of my good friend and University housemate Dave, who will be taking over from where my housemate and teaching-Yoda Lachlan left off last Friday.

Last Friday was an incredibly hectic day - a lot of the children were quite upset to see Lachlan go, and we had lots of concerned mothers phoning up in the afternoon asking what the hell we had done to their child to make them cry so much. We had a small pizza party and cake with the teachers after the kids had left, and then Lachlan walked out of Kid's Club and forward into the pages of history (I presume). That on it's own would have been hectic enough, but Dave also arrived on Friday, and it was lovely Ashley's Birthday weekend, so somehow I managed to leave work a little early, have something resembling a dinner with some friends, get to the airport only slightly late, and still return to Hongdae at around midnight to continue with Ashley's party.

My original plan was to take Dave into Seoul the next day to show him around, it became obvious that would not happen though when we got home from Hongdae around 5am, and didn't get to bed until about 5.45 after helping Dave sort his stuff out. So the next day was spent relaxing, with a nice Galbi dinner in the evening.

Another nice little sidenote about Koreans and the way they do business again - I was told in no uncertain terms that when Dave arrived he would have to be quarantined from the children for a week in case he had the dreaded H1N1, so he would start work on his second Monday in Korea. This wasn't a government rule or anything like that, this was Roses decision because she has to look after the health of the children under her roof. First Rose floated the idea of him coming to our picnic on Friday, which, although against quarantine, would be a good way for him to meet all the kids in a non-scary non-classroom setting. Shortly afterwards it was suggested that he come in on Thursday to see how the day runs, I tentatively agreed to the afternoon. Then Rose said she wanted him to come in today, which was just silly. Then Rose just up and bought him here yesterday afternoon. So much for quarantine.

So this afternoon (right about now actually) Lachlan is heading to the airport to leave Korea behind him and return to his beloved Australia, and I'm moving into the big bedroom and buying myself a goddamn Playstation. In reality, very little has changed, but it feels like I'm starting a great new chapter of my time in Korea, and I'm really looking forward to all the kid's terrified stares when they lay their eyes on Dave for the first time tomorrow.

Quick Photo Entry

2009-10-07T04:45:00.000-07:00

Today was Ballet day for Cherry Class, and you know what that means? A tsunami of cuteness that ruthlessly destroys everything in it's path. Luckily I had my camera with me!

From Kid's Club 07.10.09

Chuseok Weekend

2009-10-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last entry, last weekend was Chuseok, or Korean Thanksgiving. We scored a three-day weekend so myself and Ashley booked ourselves into the Shilla Hotel, reputedly Seoul's best hotel. It was also Ashley's birthday weekend, so, determined that she should have the fanciest time possible, made arrangements to go to Seoul's two best restaurants (one of which, happily, was located in the Shilla itself). I was looking forward to it not only from a having-a-very-nice-time perspective, but I also wanted to try and glimpse Korea's upper classes, if indeed they existed, because up to this point I hadn't seen the slightest hint of them.

The first night we ate at Continental, the French restaurant on the top floor of the Shilla. I was expecting a "Korean-French" experience but to their credit the Shilla pulled off French dining very well. The decor was classy but with enough frills to be recognisably French, and I'm fairly sure the Korean maître d’ was sporting a hint of a French accent. The food was priced as you'd expect in a five-star hotel in a big city, but there were lots of unexpected extras such as a few actual nice bread (one of only a handful of times I've found such a thing in Korea) appetizers. Unfortunately my rich-Korean spying was spoiled by the fact that for the majority of our meal, we were the only ones in the restaurant.

From Chuseok Weekend 02.10.09

The next day we ventured out into Seoul early in search of a suitable birthday present for Ashley, unfortunately our problems were instant and twofold. Firstly, this was a national holiday and Seoul was fairly deserted - almost like a ghost-town in places, it was very odd. Secondly, nothing in Korea opens until midday-ish anyway, so even the shops that were due to open that day were closed. We twiddled our thumbs until enough shops were open to do some shopping but soon gave up and returned to our palatial suite and giant bed to get ready for dinner.

From Chuseok Weekend 02.10.09

Koreans are really big on big family events, and big on the renting out of big function rooms for big family events, luckily the Shilla is a big hotel and has many big function rooms, and Chuseok is a big night for big family events. This was good news for me and my beady little spying eyes, because as we were heading out for dinner near City Hall the cream of wealthy Seoulites were rolling up to the Shilla to have their big Chuseok parties. On our short walk out of the car park I saw a Lamborghini Murciélago, a Ferrari F430, a Porsche 911 GT3, the new Bentley Flying Spur, a Mercedes CLK Black and more top-of-the-range BMWs, Audis and Mercs than I could count. I bit my tongue so as not to gush embarrassingly in front of Ashley but it was very exciting to finally see Koreans who didn't drive Hyundais.

From Chuseok Weekend 02.10.09

So we boarded the subway, my trousers slightly moist, and headed to the Jongno Building in central Seoul, on the 33rd floor of which sits the Top Cloud restaurant. The Jongno building itself is a bizarre and terrible looking thing, resembling something built out of Lego by a child who is blind, but when you're inside looking out it's much more enjoyable. The top is elliptical and the huge restaurant windows bend with the building giving an unobstructed view of Seoul. The romance gods were shining on me that night and gave us a heavy thunderstorm while we ate, and the restaurant staff turned the lighting way down so we could enjoy the view of Seoul and it's surrounding mountains silhouetted by forks of lightning.

The food in Top Cloud was equally as authentic and delicious as the Continental, the atmosphere even better, but the service slightly worse (obviously it's tough to get better service than "being the only people in the restaurant", but I still felt we were left wanting at times).

After another delicious meal we returned to the warmth of our hotel and hid from the rain, then in the morning checked out and headed back into Seoul's (now incredibly crowded) shopping district to complete what we hadn't been able to the day before, which we managed with some success.

From Chuseok Weekend 02.10.09

Anyway, that was my extravagant and lovely weekend, we now return to our regular service of whining about work and eating BBQ'd pork.

There Ain't No Party Like A Chuseok Party

2009-10-01T03:23:00.000-07:00

So this weekend in the Korean Thanksgiving holiday, otherwise known as Chuseok. What this involves I'm not quite sure, but apparently everybody goes home to visit relatives and most roads become basically impassable. Luckily I'm holing up in a luxury hotel in Seoul so won't have to worry about what the plebs outside are doing, but in the meantime we had a Chuseok party at school today. All the kids wore traditional Korean clothes (Hanbok), which were both hilariously impractical due to their size and long skirts (lots of the little girls spent a good portion of the day falling onto their faces), and massively cute. Here are some of my classes looking adorable -

From Chuseok Party 01.10.09

We played three traditional Korean games today, the first was Chaegi Chogi, which involves making a little paper pompom, putting it on string, and kicking the crap out of it. Observe -

From Chuseok Party 01.10.09

The second game was played with folded cards and seemed to be a sort of ancient version of pogs. I forget what it was called but it barely worked and most of the kids hated it. Oh well.

From Chuseok Party 01.10.09

The third game was me putting on a milkmaid-style bucket backpack-thingamy and the kids had to put as many nuts in my buckets as possible, which of course led to me delivering lots of off-colour jokes while encouraging the kids. This one was pretty fun but again nobody explained it to me so I don't know the significance of it at all.

From Chuseok Party 01.10.09

Of course the highlight of the day was the gifts. From various children I got given two boxes of little cakes, some fancy socks (I'm wearing one pair right now - very comfortable), some Italian shower gel, some coffee, and a crate of Corona beer (which I am also enjoying as I type this). To be honest I don't know that much about the holiday so there's not a great deal more I can say about it on here, so here are some more cute photos to enjoy.

From Chuseok Party 01.10.09

The Kids of Kid's Club Part 5 - Chris

2009-09-28T01:07:00.000-07:00

Name: Chris

Class: Cherry

Age: 4

Notable Achievements: Being bloody huge for his age

Favourite Phrase: "Manicure!", said every time his mum paints his nails (a lot) and he wants to show them off.

Additional Information: Chris is the very definition of a free spirit, and by that I mean he's pretty annoying and sort of an idiot (See photo above). His homeroom teachers have given up on him so often during classes he wanders the halls visiting any class he likes. I once had to throw him out of my gym class five times in one lesson because he just kept wandering in wanting to play in the gym.

Some days he can't wait to get to school and run in filled with the excitement only a child can have, and other times he screams and cries, holding pointlessly onto the doorframe as his mother pushes him into the fiery cauldron of Kid's Club.

His language skills are slightly lacking (both English and Korean), so often if he is angry he will just emit a very high-pitched scream at the top of his lungs which usually results in several dogs appearing from the elevator.

Health & Safety

2009-09-22T01:41:00.001-07:00

I've mentioned it in passing before but one thing that constantly amazes me about Korea is their baffling approach to health and safety. Obviously coming from the UK I've had insane levels of health and safety drilled into me from a young age, but even now after almost five months some Korean behaviour still worries and confuses me.

Here are some of the more interesting tidbits -

Red lights are essentially optional. The standard approach seems to be to stop at a red light, then sort of creep forward if no cars are obviously going to collide with you, then at some point you're basically through so then you floor it. This approach in itself is optional too, I've been in many taxis that just flew through every red light regardless of other traffic and visibility.

Horns are also used differently here too. When pulling out into a new road or different lane, you just go. You don't check your mirrors, you don't signal, you just go where you want to go, and everybody else better damn well stop. Horns basically means "I'm not stopping so you better". If you hear a horn you can reliably expect to see someone come flying down the road seconds later narrowly avoiding someone else pulling out, having let them know that if they continue with their manoeuvre, everybody in both vehicles will die.

Koreans won't cross the road unless there's a green man, which seems slightly counter-intuitive as we've already discussed how red lights mean nothing (I was almost hit by some Korean woman talking on her mobile the other day while crossing on a green man). But Koreans are also 100% herd animals, so if you wait for a gap in the traffic and cross on a red man, odds are everyone else waiting at the crossing will follow suit. Every time I do this I sort of feel like I'm freeing them from some kind of invisible prison, a pedestrian Moses parting the traffic and leading them to the promised land.

Koreans also don't seem to subscribe to the prevention-is-better-than-cure philosophy. At the moment one entire class at my school is sick, teaching them is very difficult over the coughing. I see "If you are sick, stay home!" stickers everywhere, but Koreans just don't. I think one teacher has had one sick day since I've been here, and she really caught hell for it. The moment anything goes wrong, even just a cough or runny nose, straight to the doctors for you, where you will be given an injection and a cocktail of pills to take for a few weeks. My co-worker was given two injections and 5 pills twice a day for a fortnight for a sore throat. Admittedly Korean healthcare seems excellent, but I can't help but think they'd be avoiding a LOT of injections if they'd just exercise some common sense and not get each other ill the whole time.

I'm not joking about the injections by the way - I was teaching a lesson last week about injuries and things like that, and when I asked what you do to a broken bone, more than half the class yelled "Injection!".

The recent Swine Flu hoopla hasn't gone across well at all here - as I've already mentioned Korea has a very right-wing press, and they've done their best to scare each and every Korean senseless with how Swine Flu will kill them all. Oh, and it's a dirty foreign disease (The Korean press tend to be pretty racist - there is actually no anti-racism legislation whatsoever in Korea). As such teachers that I know have been banned variously from travelling abroad, going to Itaewon (the American military base area of Seoul), or from leaving their town at all.

Once Swine Flu was confirmed in Pyeongnae our Hagwon put in place some very stringent anti-contamination measures. All children are given anti-bacterial handwash when they arrive in the morning, anyone showing signs of a temperature is frog-marched over to the doctors down the hall and usually comes back with a little bottle of pink children's medicine (Which always reminds me of how goddamn delicious Calpol was when I was a child), and any kids who travel must wait a week before returning to school. Bizarrely, disease-spreading staples like shared cups and towels have stayed. None of the teachers tell the children to put their hands over their face when they cough or sneeze, and one little girl actually used my co-teachers hand as a tissue last week (which he was thrilled with, as you can imagine).

It's amusing but slightly disenchanting as a foreigner to be blamed by an entire nation for a diseases spread, while the very same nation continues spitting on the street and coughing at each other.

Dog Cafe!

2009-09-20T03:42:00.000-07:00

Given that I'm living in Korea, the phrase "Dog Cafe" may worry the animal lover amongst you - fear not though! This was an entirely different and completely awesome type of Dog Cafe. Allow me to illustrate -

From Hongdae 19.09.09

Awesome, no?

Chin Up!

2009-09-18T00:32:00.001-07:00

After my frustrations of two posts ago I am now feeling much more positive.

The first ray of hope came when I had simply had enough of the Principal and the Director both throwing bad ideas at me, resulting in a Principally-Directory-melange of stupidity. I sat the Principal down and explained to her that the other experiment that I'd been told to do for Open class was a bad idea, and if I did it, the class would be boring both for the kids and for the parents watching, and that it frustrated me that there was such a lack of communication that my class was changed only after I had made all the materials for it, and only 3 days before it was due to happen.

The Principal took my concerns to the Director, and later that day I was told that I could use whichever experiment I wanted. I made the final preparations for the original experiment, and did it last Friday without a hitch. There was much praise from the parents, and the Principal informed me afterwards that it was 'perfect'. This was a great result for me in two ways - firstly it was a victory in my never-ending battle against the massive and crippling lack of organisation at my Hagwon, and secondly it restored my faith in myself. To plan an entire lesson only to be told that it's no good is quite disheartening, so when the lesson went really well I proved to myself that I'm actually not a crap, which cheered me up enormously.

Today was the second of three Open Class days, the third of which will be held in a fortnight (Birthday Party day next Friday - alright!), and again everything went very well. I was doing two Science classes, the first of which was the same as last weeks, so that was easy from a planning point of view as I had everything ready and had already done the class once. As always though, something unexpected and completely out of my control happened which threw the class into a bit of disarray. One of the girls in that class, Lisa, lives with her Grandma as her parents died when she was younger. Upon walking into the class and seeing all the other kids mums sat waiting expectantly and brimming with pride she burst into tears and was completely inconsolable for the better part of the lesson. It was heartbreaking, to be honest, and really threw me for the first part of the lesson. My co-teacher and I finally managed to get her mind off her lack of mother for long enough to stop her crying and she seemed to enjoy the rest of the lesson.

The second class was slightly younger kids, and a different experiment which I hadn't yet tried out - thankfully it worked. My main worry in this class was one of the kids, Sean. Sean is the Principal's son and his English is absolutely amazing, so I had to make a deal with him beforehand for him to let some of the other kids answer some questions. Luckily he stuck to our deal and all the kids took part very well, resulting in some quite brilliant Science (for 5 year olds) occurring.

After both Open Classes again going well, and having some very enthusiastic goodbyes from the kids when we dropped them off on the bus (a few of them even hugged me, which barely ever happens), I got back to Kid's Club feeling like a good teacher again, rather than the bored, semi-competent foreigner of last week.

The Kids of Kid's Club Part 4 - Peter

2009-09-14T00:10:00.000-07:00

Name: Peter

Age: 7

Class: Orange

Favourite Phrase: "Look At These Guns!" (This is all of Orange Classes favourite phrase after I taught it to them last week, it is always accompanied by at least a bicep-flex, sometimes frantic gyrations and thrusting. It has spawned many permutations such as "Look at this lunch!")

Notable Achievements: First kid in Kid's Club to get his big teeth, also the tallest and strongest.

Additional Information: Peter is my joint-favourite kid at the moment with Adward. He's not quite as funny as Adward, but he is a little bit smarter, so he laughs at more of my jokes (such as giving the entire egg soup bowl to a kid who doesn't like eggs and saying "This is your lunch!"). He is also what some would term a little rascal, he firmly believes that Lachlan is in love with one of the Korean teachers, Maxim, and when we ate Oreos the other day he pulled the biscuits apart, called one Lachlan, the other Maxim, then mushed them together while laughing and nodding at me.

When we were playing a game in gym the other day where we had to impersonate certain things (Monkeys, Frogs, etc), he impersonated Danna, who eats a fair amount, and waddled around holding an imaginary huge belly and shouting "MORE FOOD!".

I visited the Aquarium and 63 Building this weekend - the tallest building in Korea. Not all that impressive given that I was at Taipei 101 a month or so ago. Anyway, here are a few photos from the weekend -

From Seoul 13.09.09

Frustrations

2009-09-08T05:07:00.000-07:00

This week has proved a slightly frustrating one, which is a shame because every week since I came back from vacation has been a good one. A combination of external problems and stupidity at work has soured my mood somewhat, I'm afraid to say. So basically prepare for lots of words, some of them slightly blue in nature.

It started with the mentioning of "Open Class" a fortnight ago. Open Class is when Korean mothers come and watch a class being taught so that they can make sure their children are getting the education they're paying for. My suspicions were first aroused when my principal described it to me as "the most important day ever". Each class would be getting two Open Classes, one with me, and one with Lachlan. Lachlan's would be Story Time, and mine would be Science. Our Science equipment is delivered every month in a one-box-per-kid-per-month format, so when this months equipment arrived I stole the best experiments, planning to use them for Open Class. Unfortunately the one I chose for Orange Class (the oldest class, my homeroom class, and also, as the director charmingly put it "the most important class") turned out to not work. This happens fairly often with our equipment supplier (they're shit you see), so I sighed and picked the second-best experiment, which was still pretty good, and my principal agreed.

I should explain at this point that Open Class as an idea mostly disgusts me. Sure, the parents want to know their kids are being taught properly, but there are many better ways of doing it than shoving them all in a classroom during a lesson, where I'll bet any amount of money their kids will clam up like they do whenever their parents are around. The main problem is that the importance hierarchy in Hagwons goes something like this -

1. Parent's happiness
2. Financial stability
3. Having native English speakers
.....
.....
.....
112. Type of Kimchi we're having for Lunch
113. Children's education

Basically this means that tremendous, 100ft-high flaming hoops will be jumped through if any parent complains. Our entire school's class system used to be based on ability, then a parent complained that her 7-year old son was being taught with 6-year olds, so the entire class system was re-done based purely on age, so my class went from 10 kids to 4. Similarly, another teacher I know was recently spotted by a parent with a kid on her lap that did not belong to that parent, the parent complained, and my friend had her class taken away from her because she, it was explained, didn't love them all equally.

So you can see the problem I have with letting the parents sit in on two whole classes, as any and all perceived problems will be brought up, and ridiculous solutions that do nothing but inconvenience teachers and probably jeopardise the kids progress will be put in place to appease the parents. Add to this that fact that I feel like I'm being wheeled out like a performing monkey (a performing monkey that does a shitload of laminating, at that) for the parents to gawk at, and you can see why I don't like Open Class. Anyway, back to the story.

I spent most of last week preparing and laminating lesson materials. The topic of the experiment is liquid viscosity, so aside from the main experiment I came up with a nice little extra activity where we race two liquids down a sloped racetrack that I built to see which is the most viscous. I usually put in little to no effort for lesson prep so this was quite above and beyond for me. Feeling pretty pleased with myself I demoed the lesson to my principal and director on Monday, only for them to hold a discussion in Korean for 10 minutes while I sat there twiddling my thumbs. Eventually the principal turned to me and said "Rose (the director) doesn't understand.".

"That's worrying, it's meant for 7-year olds." I retorted.

"No no, she doesn't understand what the experiment is about."

After a lot of back-and-forth it eventually became clear that Rose didn't think liquid viscosity was an interesting enough subject for Open Class and wanted something more "Scientific". I explained that none of the experiments are scientific, they're just to get the kids playing around with different liquids and building stuff, and plus the other two experiments left in this months box were complete duds.

Unphased, Rose disappeared into her office and reappeared an hour or so later, triumphantly announcing the company were going to send the next months experiments early and hopefully there would be something good in there. So today next month's boxes arrived, and the principal spent an hour or so going through the four experiments and eventually decided that a crappy cardboard mobile of the solar system was more "scientific" than my painstakingly crafted viscosity experiment (which, by the way, involved mixing Alginic Acid with warm saline solution, which, if you don't already know, causes the Alginic Acid to increase in viscosity, becoming a goo-like substance that is very cool for kids to play with).

So upon being presented with the materials and being instructed what to do (no more "Plan a lesson", I had failed at being Scientific, so now the art school graduate was dictating how my science lesson would unfold), I was met with several obstacles. Firstly, all but one of the instruction booklets were in Korean (see above under "the company we buy our equipment from is shit"). The obvious solution, in the principals world at least, was to copy it and tape them together, so one kid gets the nice glossy original and the other kids get crappy taped-up copies. The parents will love that. Also she has to go home so I'll have to do it, as well as print out and laminate pictures of all the planets, their names, and make sure all the equipment works (This is, of course, after I've already done all this once before for my original lesson).

The second problem was that the main meat of the class was the building of the mobile, which was basically taping small cut-outs of the planets onto the mobile, but the principal didn't want the kids spending too much time on that, as it isn't interesting, so I have to do most of that beforehand.

The third problem is that the company only sent 4 sets of equipment, and most of it is flimsy cardboard, and a kid always, always rips their cardboard, and I have no spares, so when that happens I'll just have to say "Sorry kid, suck it up" in front of their parents.

The fourth problem is that with me doing the majority of the lesson for the kids beforehand, all that I'm left with is teaching them the names of the planets, and 8 new, fairly complicated words is far too much to teach, but not enough to fill one half-hour lesson.

After she gave me a list of materials that needed making and announcing she was going home, I asked the principal if she had run this experiment past Rose yet, she said that she hadn't, so I told her I'd hold off making anything until she'd checked it was suitably Scientific. After all, which is the more Scientific, mixing fluids together to create a chemical reaction or gluing pieces of paper to a coathangar?

Another Sunday in Seoul

2009-09-06T05:53:00.000-07:00

From Seoul 06.09.09

James Adams, a Kimchi Lover.

2009-09-04T21:31:00.000-07:00

James Adams (30), who works at Samsung Tesco, has lived in London, England, until he moved to Seoul six months ago. Although he had heard about kimchi, he had never ventured to try it in Britain. It was at his companies cafeteria that Adams tasted kimchi for the first time in his life. Since he is single, he often eats at the cafeteria, where he seldom fails to see Korea's favourite side dish. In this respect, it is only natural that he has learned to love it.

When asked if Kimchi was too spicy for his palette, he says it was but he that he rather enjoys the fiery taste now. He says he can even distinguish newly prepared kimchi from well-fermented kimchi. He especially likes kimchi with wine, which challenges the common Korean notion that kimchi goes best with Korean traditional alcoholic beverages.

So which British dish does he think would go best with kimchi? After a long pause, he says it would be steak - which might suprise many Koreans expecting a fried dish like fish and chips. The almost 185 centimeter-tall Londoner and his love for kimchi seems to be another success in the globalization of Korean food!

- From the Korean Herald

Seoul At The Weekend

2009-08-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

Koreans. Not good at.....

From Seoul 29.08.09

Fair-ground rides.

From Seoul 29.08.09

Appropriate policing.

Very good at.....

From Seoul 29.08.09

Shopping.

From Seoul 29.08.09

SHOPPING.

From Seoul 29.08.09

SHOPPING!

From Seoul 29.08.09

Being adorable.

The Kids of Kid's Club Part 3 - Adward

2009-08-24T01:34:00.000-07:00

Name: Adward (Edward but spelt wrong)

Age: 7

Class: Orange

Favourite Phrase: Laughing maniacally or saying just about any word in a funny voice (His favourites being "Oorongi", which is Korean for mud snail - see video below, or Min-Joo Nee, which is one of his classmates Korean names).

Favourite Class: Anything where he gets to shout

Additional Information: Adward is one of the best characters at Kid's Club. He is insufferably cheerful, and finds just about anything funny. He is also massively ticklish, to the point where you can just approach him like you're about to tickle him and he'll just collapse on the floor in fits of laughter. He is also one of the group of children who do not realise Lachlan and I don't speak very good Korean, so will often come up to me, spout off a load of Korean, then say "Yes?" like I'm supposed to understand. In Show & Tell today he told me how at the weekend he ate Kimbap for dinner, then played jump-rope, then vomited.

He is also spectacularly un-coordinated and routinely takes dodgeballs to the face in Gym, however he is also mostly impervious to pain so takes it like a champ (see other video below of him getting floored by Dawson).

It is also worth noting that Adward is my current favourite child.

The Kids of Kid's Club Part 2 - David

2009-08-14T00:53:00.000-07:00

Name: David (Has the unfortunate Korean name of Min-Jee)

Alias: David The Gnome

Age: 5

Class: Lemon

Mood: Uniformly Nonchalant

Favourite Class: Reading

Favourite Phrase: Just yelling "JON!" at the top of his lungs whenever he sees me

Additional Information: David "Cold Dead Eyes of a Killer" "The Gnome" Min-Jee is fairly new to Kid's Club, but hasn't taken long to establish himself as the resident purveyor of high waistlines and expert in sort of bumbling about the place.

He is very studious, possibly due to the fact that he seems to live with his Grandfather (aka "The most serious man on the planet"), and something of a robot. He plays the same game by himself all lunchtime, which is as follows -

Step 1 - Build a spaceship, size depending on how many blocks he can get

Step 2 - Ride it around, sometimes shooting people, sometimes not (I think the times when he's not shooting people are humanitarian missions)

Step 3 - Continue until the spaceship falls apart (as in the video below) or lunchtime ends

Step 4 - Repeat tomorrow

The Kids of Kid's Club Part 1 - Danna

2009-08-12T01:09:00.000-07:00

Name: Danna

Age: 6

Class: Melon

Mood: Grumpy

Favourite Class: Snack Time; Lunch Time

Favourite Activities: Eating, Sleeping, Punching

Last Seen: Licking flavoured colouring pens, stomping around in a huff

Additional Comments: Danna, known by her pet name Danna International, is possibly bipolar. One minute she is hugging and playing nicely, the next minute swinging punches wildly, not caring where they land, as long as they hit something.

She scares very easily and is a common target for scary noises in Science class. Also very susceptible to tickling. Her happiest time at Kid's Club used to be Cooking class, as she was guaranteed food at the end of it, the amount of which varied depending on how many other kids she could steal from before getting in trouble.

See a short video of me winding her up below.

New Brog Entryahh

2009-08-07T02:17:00.000-07:00

Something that has been amusing me for a while but was really pushed to the forefront of my mind this week is the way Koreans (specifically the teachers at my school) mispronounce western names.

Obviously all the kids have Korean names which are things like Min-Joo Nee and Sun-Song Oo, but they're all given western names too - which I'm not entirely sure I agree with. I've not been given a Korean name so it seems like a bit of a shitty deal for them, a lot of the younger kids don't respond to their western names at all. Another reason why I don't agree with western names for Korean kids is that they'll mostly be chosen by people like me who can barely handle the responsibility of reading a broadsheet newspaper, let alone giving someone a name for the rest of their lives. For instance the last girl I named is called Hetty, after Hetty Wainthrop.

At least I give my kids actual passable names though, some of my friends have some incredibly weird ones, like Oprah, or a boy called Carol.

Their western names are obviously subject to thick Korean accents the whole time, so a lot of the time when I say them properly they don't understand me. The reason I bring this up now is because we had a new boy in my class this week called Dawson, his name began at Dawson, by lunchtime was "Dallson", and by the end of the day was "Dallson-ah". I'll list some other examples below along with their usual mispronunciation -

Edward - Aduwarde
Barbie - Balbie-ah
Esther - Estuuhaarr
Glen - Guhh-lem
Mathilda - Martuh-ildahh

This isn't something I'm complaining about, merely something I find amusing.

Holiday Part 2 - Taipei

2009-08-03T06:09:00.000-07:00

I have to admit I didn't get into Taipei feeling hugely positive. I'd just left the best city in the whole world with a really lovely airport and flown into a 60s sweatbox where I was faced with an hour bus ride to Taipei Main Station. The bus ride was made better by the fact that I could see Taipei in daylight for the first time, so despite my trepidation I pressed my face against the window like a special needs kid and enjoyed the views.

From Hong Kong & Taipei

Some time later I arrived very sweatily (34 degree heat + 94% humidity + two large bags will do that to you) back at Eight Elephants, showered, changed and talked crap with the other residents while I waited for Ben and Frank to arrive. Once they arrived we knocked back a few beers then headed out to a club that had been recommended to us by the hostel regulars.

From Hong Kong & Taipei

It was at some point during this evening that we realised that going out in Taipei is really very expensive. Beers cost between £3 and £4, and a lot of the clubs had an entry fee. One we tried (which was apparently all-you-can-drink but turned out to be anything but) cost us £10 to get in and was so loathsome that we left after one drink. Eventually I found my way back to the hostel at about 3am after deciding I'd had enough to drink (the stumbling and slurred speech was my first clue).

From Hong Kong & Taipei

The next day we finally got out and about around 1pm feeling a bit groggy but positive nonetheless. We first visited CKS Memorial Hall, which consists of 3 buildings, a National Concert Hall, some kind of Gallery (if memory serves) and a big memorial to some guy (whose initials I'm going to presume are CKS) who used to be the Taiwanese dictator (I think). The gardens in the Memorial Hall were particularly nice, and provided a welcome bit of shade from the baking sun. We walked around, ate ice-cream, and chatted (we had, by this point, been joined by some fellow Eight Elephants residents called Garrett and Viktoria who were a welcome addition to our cadre).

From Hong Kong & Taipei

We visited a Buddhist temple which, although it was very nice visually, was sort of samey (don't get me wrong, it was one of the better temples I've been to, but having visited at least 2 temples on every trip I've been on during my time in Korea, and having zero interest in religion, there's only so excited I can get over another temple). Next, though, we visited Taipei 101, which was a much more religious experience for me.

Nothing can really prepare you for just how big the damn thing is. The fact that Taipei doesn't have any other skyscrapers certainly helps it's cause, as it sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the endless 4-storey town houses and apartment blocks. As you approach it seems almost farcically tall, as though it's some kind of visual trick like those endless mirrors. Once you get in the (worlds fastest) lift and get to the (worlds highest) viewing platform though, you realise that no, this isn't an illusion, and yes, you are in the tallest completed building in the world, and holy shit those cars look small. We walked around the first viewing deck in amazement and snapped some photos, then went up to the roof and waited for the sun to go down.

From Hong Kong & Taipei

While we waited we watched a film about the tower's construction (A good indicator of our tired / hungover state of minds is that we all laughed quite a lot when the words "Erection Ceremony" flashed up on the screen), then were treated to a textbook Asian sunset as the clouds and pollution turned the evening sun bright red as it fell below the horizon, and the lights of Taipei came on and we enjoyed a completely different and possibly even more spectacular view.

After an enjoyable trip to a night market involving a foot massage (heaven), and eating snake (tastes like chicken), we turned in for the night, albeit at 5am.

From Hong Kong & Taipei

Next day we were up reasonably early to head to Wulai, a nature reserve on the edge of Taipei with some really excellent scenery and supposedly filled with monkeys, although we didn't see one all day. We did see some snakes and lots of quite large spiders, and hiked most of the way up a mountain before finding the route down was closed, so we had to retrace our steps. The Taiwanese are obviously not as big on hiking as the Koreans, as even though this was the middle of the summer holidays and a thoroughly lovely day (34 degrees again, but with clear skies so not as humid thankfully) there weren't a great amount of people there.

After hiking we headed back to the hostel, went out for some drinks at a bar, and after a fairly uneventful but enjoyable night I got up early in the morning to head home.

From Hong Kong & Taipei

Taipei as a city didn't do that much for me. It has some nice stuff such as Taipei 101, but other than a few unique features it seemed very similar to every other large Asian city I've been to. Taiwan as a country, from what I saw outside the city, seems fantastic though, and I'm sorry I only had 3 days to explore.

Holiday Part 1 - Hong Kong

2009-08-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

Shortly after my last entry I boarded my flight on the very cheerful and pleasingly cheap EVA Air to Taipei for a one night stopover on my way to HK. My initial reactions upon arrival in Taipei were, in this order -

- Shitty airport
- 34 degrees is quite hot for 10pm
- Cool 70s Metro system
- Nice hostel

But more on Taipei later. After my one-night stay at the lovely Eight Elephants I hot-footed it back to the airport and boarded my 90-minute hop to Hong Kong. The morning was mostly a blur - I didn't sleep too well and got up late so had to hurry in the morning. Where my memory snaps back to clarity is when we began our descent into Hong Kong airport and the cloud cover cleared as we passed over Victoria Peak, revealing the harbour, Central and Kowloon in all their glory.

From Hong Kong & Taipei

Basically from this moment onwards I was filled with unabated happiness for my entire stay. After landing at HK Airport (A pleasingly pleasant experience after Taoyuan, which is, if I haven't mentioned it already, shitty) I made my way on to Hong Kong island and met daddy dearest at the hotel he was very kindly letting me stay at with him while he was in town on business (incredibly fortuitous timing, you'll agree).

From Hong Kong & Taipei

One thing I hadn't even considered but was a very welcome addition to my holiday was staying in a hotel. I gorged myself on the breakfast buffet every morning, slept in a wonderfully comfortable bed, and was able to get all my laundry done before I left for Taipei three days later.

From Hong Kong & Taipei

I won't drone on about Hong Kong for long because I'm aware that the amount of praise I heap on it can be quite tiresome but lets just say it's been my favourite city since my last visit and this visit just cemented that opinion. Everything that I love about it was there in abundance - the great food, completely insane commerce, more concentrated multiculturalism than anywhere else I've been, and the fact that it still feels incredibly British despite not officially being so for quite some time now. The only problem with this visit - as with my last one - was that I wasn't there for long enough. I managed only about 50% of the stuff I had planned (mainly due to the very changeable weather) but even so had a blast just exploring and enjoying being back.

From Hong Kong & Taipei

One thing I didn't manage to do was eat any Chinese food in Hong Kong. The majority of my dining there was getting my fill of things I can't get in Korea - Italian food, a good curry, European beer etc.

From Hong Kong & Taipei

So after a great three days spent shopping, exploring and catching up with Dad I bid Hong Kong farewell once again and went back to Taipei.

Assorted airport musings

2009-07-25T02:02:00.000-07:00

Once again i find myself at Incheon Airport, only this time I'm not soiling myself, I'm actually very relaxed and very much looking forward to going to Taipei and Hong Kong. I arrived at the airport a few hours before I needed to check in due to having to pick up a re-entry visa. Given how woefully time-consuming getting visas has been in the past I thought I'd give myself plenty of time to accommodate any cock-ups, but strangely it was a breeze. I waltzed into the immigration office in my new hat, filled out a very simple form and a nice lady stuck a sticker in my passport so I can get back into Korea when my holiday is over.

In my few free hours I finally caught up on some reading, ate a Burger King, some chinese style dumplings, and took a crap (two of these things I did on my last visit to Incheon, so extra marks for consistency).

The last few days have been incredibly hurried getting everything ready for my holiday, especially with the last-minute addition of a trip to Hong Kong (which I'm now looking forward to even more than Taipei).

(Quick aside - I just farted a bit louder than I'd planned to and the Korean woman next to me put her hand over her mouth and gasped)

Somehow I managed to fit everything into my hiking backpack but I'm obviously going to have to buy a second bag in Hong Kong to put all the stuff I'm going to buy in. The bonus of just having a backpack is I didn't have to check any bags, so no waiting around like a chump at baggage claim in Taipei.

I've mentioned it before, but goddamn is Incheon a nice airport. I'm currently using their free internet on a nice laptop (first time I've typed on a full-size keyboard in months), the late-afternoon sun is streaming in through the window and it's quiet as a mouse. It's the first Saturday of summer holidays and it's quiet enough for the Korean woman next to me to hear me fart (it was a pretty quiet fart). If this was Gatwick I would be pressed against the wall by hoards of screaming children going for their week in Spain with their trendy orange suitcases they got free from La Redoute throwing BigMacs at each other.

I was thinking yesterday, I have a pretty decent chance of catching Swine Flu on this trip. I'm going on 4 flights, will be traipsing around two of the most populous cities in the world, and I always stand really close to people I don't know to freak them out. I'm going to go on the record here as stating that I want Swine Flu. Only if I catch it on the way back, of course. I don't want it to ruin my holiday, I just want to go into quarantine when I get back to Seoul and score myself another week off work.

Another thing I was thinking about yesterday, which my flatmate brought up, is that since I started growing a beard lots of doors have opened up for me. Since I started growing in my beard I've had -

- More of the kids mums calling me handsome
- More interest from 'the ladies' (not sure that needed to be pluralised though)
- More service at restaurants

And at this point my beard is still in the slightly homeless-looking growing in phase. I almost shaved some of it this morning because it's growing annoyingly slowly and some of it looks silly, but I thought no, I'm going to tough it out through the silly phase to get to the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, where, if things continue on their present trajectory, I'll be some sort of educational superman with the power to influence human thought.

Oh, I had another run-in with old-school Korean bigotry today - I was sitting on the tube (which was fairly full) reading on the way to the airport, and a middle-aged Korean guy got on, made a bee-line for me and ordered me to stand up and give me his seat. I wasn't sat in the old-people seats or even a particularly good seat, but he walked past the teenage girls, past the 20-something businessmen and told me to stand up because he was Korean and I was in his seat, dammit.

I think to a certain extent I accept the in-built discrimination of Korean culture, not because I agree with it, but because it's there and there's nothing you can do about it, same way you can't do anything about the far-right in the UK or the US. You just have to leave them be and pat them on the head occasionally when they throw their toys out of the pram.

The problem with what happened today was the guy walked straight past many other people who were much lower than him on the Korean social ladder, and decided to pick on the foreigner, and to me that meant he wasn't just an old-school hierarchical Korean, he was a racist too.

My first response was to ignore him and carry on with my book, and when he repeated his request louder I looked up and said no. He launched into a big soliloquy about god knows what, so I returned to my book. When he was done he stood there, arms folded, glaring at me. I looked up and asked him, simply "Why?" (I like to think it sounded really poignant but actually it was due to my terrible Korean). His response was again long and impassioned, and I managed to pick out the words "teacher", "American", and "stand up now". I told him in bad Korean that actually I was British, but strangely he didn't care. He stood for a little while longer while I carried on reading, possibly hoping he could intimidate me into getting up (the fact that he was only marginally taller than me when I was sat down didn't help his cause), and eventually said what I can only assume was something quite rude in Korean and stomped off. I hadn't really acknowledged his presence in the last 5 minutes, but I looked up after he was gone and got a "fight the power" fist bump from an American along the carriage, who sagely commented that "man, that guy was a dick!".

Anyway, just about time for my flight to start boarding. My next update will be full of lovely pictures of Taipei and Hong Kong and less boring words.

WATER CAMP!

2009-07-17T01:21:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted about any school-related stuff for a while now - that's because honestly it's been quite dull. We went to a farm and picked potatoes, had another Birthday Day, all the regular stuff. But this week we went to WATER CAMP!! Not in any way a camp, and only half of it involved water, but nonetheless it was WATER CAMP!

Water Camp consisted of a big exhibition hall (if you've ever been to the ExCel in London it was exactly that) partially filled with little above-ground swimming pools and water slides. Some of the pools had little boats in, some of them had inflatables. Imagine a regular water park made shit, put indoors and filled with hundreds of screaming children. Also the only fun looking slide we weren't allowed on.

From Water Camp 15.07.09

Apprehension is too weak a word to describe my feelings when the principal first said to me the words "One hour bus ride", given that our 30 minute bus rides to take the kids home are usually chaos, and thats with less than half the kids. Thankfully Lochlan and I scored seats in the directors husband's car, and were able to chat to him about Korean beer, food and women for the whole journey.

From Water Camp 15.07.09

When we arrived it was just about lunch time, so we sat down and ate the worst lunch I've had so far in Korea (a dry little pancake of rice, 2 tiny bits of Kimchi, some horrible soup and 2 soggy pieces of Don-cas-uh, which is usually breaded pork but in this form was more like a week-old sponge), then went straight to the swimming directly after eating.

Luckily I had the presence of mind to use the toilet before taking my shoes and socks off. Imagine this, if you will - a normal public toilet containing two urinals, one of them a bit lower down for children. Now imagine you put that toilet in a convention centre. Now imagine you open a Water Camp in that convention centre. Now imagine several hundred small boys need the toilet. Now imagine the floor of this toilet. Yeah.

From Water Camp 15.07.09

The children played in the water, some of them loved it, others seemed to simulate drowning for hours at a time (that's the acid test really - if they haven't drowned after 5 minutes of splashing and screaming they won't drown at all), and some sat reluctantly on the edge of the pool shaking their heads and looking scared. All the children were completely over-dressed, the majority of them had little one-piece Victorian-style swimsuits and swimming caps, and they were all made to wear hi-vis vests so we could spot them when they sank to the bottom. Now I think about it all this equipment was probably the reason so many of them almost drowned.

At 3pm we were treated to a Bubble Show. When we told the kids they all started chanting "Bubble Show!" excitedly even though none of them had the faintest idea what it meant. The Bubble Show itself was fairly standard kids entertainment stuff - a bubble, smoke in a bubble, bubbles inside bubbles, bubbles hats, at one point I got up on stage and was put inside a bubble (turned out to not be very exciting at all). However, the real star of the show was, well, the star of the show, the guy making the bubbles. Not because he made awesome bubbles (I've seen better) but because after every successfully completed trick he would put his arms out in a sort of "what you gonna do?" style and smile with a look of almost sexual satisfaction. And this was after ever. Damn. Trick.

From Water Camp 15.07.09

I think he truly believes he is the David Copperfield of the bubble world, after the show (which was maybe 40 minutes long and not at all physically strenuous unless you're not fit enough to blow) we saw him in jeans and a t-shirt, a towel around his neck and his hair all ruffled up like he'd just had a shower. Why would you need to have a shower after performing a bubble show? What is wrong with this man?

From Water Camp 15.07.09

Anyway, after we'd witnessed King Bubbles and his Erotic Bubble Revue it was time to go home, so we all hopped back on the bus and headed to Kids Club very tired and mostly still a bit wet.

From our day out I can conclude that -

- Organising 50 kids is difficult, even moreso when you apply the organisational skills of Korean women

- No other Hagwon that teachers our age group has 2 foreign teachers. We are a pretty pimp Hagwon in that respect.

- Fat kids + Water Slide + Fast shutter speed = Hilarious pictures

- Other Hagwon teachers don't like it when their kids ask for a picture and you tell them you just have to set your camera to "ugly mode".

- Other Hagwon teachers don't like it when you get your kids to rate their teachers looks out of ten.

I've decided what I'm going to do on this blog to keep it interesting is do little bios of all the kids I teach, which means I can write about all the retarded stuff they do and also provide cute pictures. Maybe I'll start that next week.

MudFest

2009-07-13T04:53:00.000-07:00

This weekend our gung-ho posse of unmotivated ESL teachers took a trip down the West coast to Boryeong, to see the two-week extravaganza that is MudFest.

I personally had no idea what to expect, but I'd heard that MudFest is popular with Americans so I had a sneaking suspicion the type of atmosphere we could expect, which was confirmed very promptly and we arrived to see people staggering down the road, beer in hand, screaming "MudFest!!" at the top of their lungs. We even saw one guy with a Fraternity tattoo, which I wasn't even aware existed outside the realms of film.

Before departing, the volume and questionable sanity of the emails we were receiving from our organiser had us all a bit concerned, but once we arrived the depth of her incompetence became readily apparent. We were directed to a huddle of 150 or so impatient westerners, all surrounding this one woman who at that time was screaming down the phone at somebody. Her ticketing system had fallen apart the previous night when she appeared to have had a nervous breakdown, and now she was having to assign rooms on an ad-hoc basis, which as you can imagine was chaos.

We took the initiative and cornered one of her helpers, who told us which hotel we were in, so off we went, and after some more pointless shenanigans with the hotel reception we dumped our stuff and headed out into the muddy unknown.

Womens mud-wrestling - not nearly as violent as it sounds

Once we hit the main square the glory of MudFest was driven home - this wasn't just some drunk westerners getting muddy, this was every drunk westerner getting muddy, at least the same amount of Koreans, and hundreds upon hundreds of photographers nervously trying to take pictures while keeping their expensive cameras mud-free. The volume of photographers sort of worried me, as in our first 15 minutes there we saw a girls wrestling match take a turn for the sexy when one of the girls bikinis was ripped off, and westerners already have a hard enough time of it with our reputation for promiscuity without pictures of naked western girls being circulated to every concerned mother on the Korean peninsula.

Luckily there was enough mud to go round

Thankfully I don't think those pictures will be going very far as the victim of aforementioned bikini-based atrocity was slightly on the large side, and there was a groan of disgust when she rolled over, legs akimbo, that was audible even over the frantic Korean camera shutters.

After washing our eyes out we went and watched the mens wrestling, which our friend Mike entered and subsequently won, beating a really quite large Korean man with a bodyslam that echoed around the world and through time itself. This instantly made him the hero of MudFest and throughout the night people who witnessed his victory rewarded him with hugs and high-fives.

Mike Olsen - the true people's champion

We headed further down the beach and met two (very drunk) Americans, who were dressed as Pirates, complete with little ships attached to their waists. Soon a fairly large wave hit, destroying their ships. One stood still, staring incredulously at the ocean, the other just collapsed in the surf crying, and started wailing about being "scuppered" and how he wasn't a real pirate any more. I like to think that in their drunken haze, these two men legitimately thought they were pirates, and when I saw them dragging what was left of their little ships onto the beach a little while later I felt genuinely sorry for them.

At this point we were all coated head-to-toe in mud, and decided to go exploring. We found a stall giving out coloured powder, so we did what any group of slightly drunk foreigners would do and launched into a big coloured-powder fight, which quickly escalated as more people joined in, until the stall owner was shouting over the din for us all to stop, but to no avail. Once we were thoroughly coated in every colour of the rainbow, we left the carnage we had created and went down to the sea to clean off.

The day continued in much the same way - getting muddy, drinking, rinse, repeat. Once the sun went down the heavens opened, but nobody really cared as everybody was wet and muddy anyway, and we were treated to an absolutely spectacular fireworks display from our hiding place under a beach hut.

Frank, Ashley, Marissa, Ben, Me and Mike

The party went on late into the night, and we eventually found our way back to our motel room after a dawn swim for which I sacrificed my last set of dry clothes.

The next day I wandered down to the sea front which was the scene of so much chaos the day before, but the shoddy weather had driven away all but the most hardcore (read: drunk) mudfesters. We boarded a bus and headed back to Seoul, all slightly damp and incredibly tired.

Ordinarily I'm not sure MudFest would have been the place for me - especially around the wrestling area you could smell the testosterone, and drunk American GIs seem to be more trouble then they're worth, but after so many weeks of cultural stuff like Ganghwa and Seoraksan it was nice to just get blind drunk with thousands of other people and not have to worry about offending Korean cultural mores (Although I feel fairly certain the conservative Korean press won't hold off with the pictures of drunk westerners this week - hopefully they'll spare that fat wrestling girl's dignity though).

4th July

2009-07-05T02:46:00.000-07:00

Last night Lochlan and I finally held our inaugural roof terrace party, which just so happened to coincide with July 4th, so all our American friends were more than happy to accept our invitation.

The roof really has turned into a nice little hangout - I've spent several hours up there cleaning out all the shit that was there before and we've now got a couple of tables, loads of chairs, and for last night some flag bunting that I liberated from a cupboard at work. Our plan was for fairy lights but I couldn't for the life of me find any, so we went with candles instead.

Using all my cunning I recycled the little flower pots we were given for teachers day and fashioned them into little lanterns, which we then hung from bits of string tied to the walls and pipes up there. Once the sun went down it took on a quite cool bohemian feel.

We hit up Jay's burger place for some good all-american grub, and picked up a few more thirsty westerners, then headed back to begin the party proper. Initial estimates had been of 10-15 people based on those that we knew were coming, but people bought friends, people bought people back from bars with them, etc etc, so we ended up with maybe 35-40 people on the roof.

We let off some fireworks at about 9, which drew the ire of one of our neighbours, but also drew in several Korean people who wanted to come play (their faces upon going up the stairs and being greeted by more westerners then they've ever seen before were priceless - one woman even bought her kid!). Shortly after the fireworks the police turned up to tell us that we shouldn't be setting off fireworks (I soiled myself slightly when I saw them pulling up given that I was the host and the party was slightly lively at this point, but they were really friendly and I think more than a little confused).

The party eventually came to an abrupt ending at about midnight when a creepy Indian man who we denied entry got angry and called the police back, once again though they were very nice and we were planning to head out so didn't mind one bit and obliged like good citizens.

Parties like that are very good for my soul I think, last night we could have been anywhere in the world enjoying some drinks with good friends. As awesome as Korea is, everybody misses home once in a while so I think it's nice to have a westerner-only shindig to feel like you're home again.

The Good, The Bad and Some Other Stuff

2009-07-03T02:49:00.000-07:00

Following on from my lovely photo update from Soeraksan, this one is going to be a big ranty tome, because I need to write some of this stuff down before it's lost in the quagmire of my brain.

This week has been the fastest week I've had here so far, I think due to a combination of things. One, we have a new timetable at school which has shaken everything up a bit, so this week was a bit messy as we all got used to it and kept forgetting lunch is now half an hour earlier than it was before. Two, there was an absolutely biblical thunderstorm on Wednesday night that kept me up for a good 90 minutes because of how damn loud it was. The problem with being in such a mountainous area is that you don't just get the thunder, you get the echoes too, which seem to go on forever. And you can still hear the thunder when its several miles away. The storm started at about 3am and was still rumbling when I started my first class at 10am. Three, I've been very busy out of school this week trying to organise my summer holiday, and I'm now mostly booked up for a nice week in Taiwan, staying at (apparently) one of the ten best hostels in the world - but lets keep things in perspective, it's still a hostel. I once took one of the best ten shits in the world, but at the end of the day it was still just a pile of shit. As you can probably tell I'm bitter about not being able to afford a hotel.

I've also been filling my time this week getting our roof terrace ready for a 4th July party we were due to host this Saturday, but due to the stormy weather it doesn't look as though thats going to happen. In amongst all this other stuff I've also found time to learn a bit more Hangul (I read my first sign all by myself the other day - very proud of that), and see the new Transformers film. So as you can see I've been very busy and I'm never happier than when I'm very busy.

One thing has been troubling me though, I can't quite put my finger on exactly what it is but if I give some examples hopefully you'll see what I mean. On Monday the new teacher at our school was watching me play with this little tubby girl that I like called Danna just before it was time to go home, and once the little girl went away she came up to me and said very matter-of-factly "Danna is not beautiful. She is not beautiful, but she is a person." I think she meant she has a lot of personality, but regardless it struck me as a very blunt and slightly mean thing to say. I've seen this a couple of times before, once when our principal was talking about her son who had anemia as a baby, she explained "He is, I think, an idiot", which is completely inaccurate, and made doubly hilarious by the fact that he's 4 years old and translates for me in class because his English is so good. I explained to the new teacher that in western culture you always say a baby is cute or beautiful, no matter how loathesome and disfigured it may be, which confused her.

Second example, on Wednesday one of my students mums came in to talk to me, I assumed about her daughter's performance, which is above-average, but these Korean parents are a very pushy bunch. It turned out to just be a 20 minute apology for all her daughters perceived shortcomings, most of which were completely unfounded. She said "I want to love Esther more, but I am very busy, I have two young children, and I have to love them also. I know she is bad, but I do not have time to love her more.". She followed up with "Do you have children?" (No), "Are you married?" (No), "Are you single?" (Yes - she perked up a bit at this point), "Are you Christian?" (No, I'm not religious), "Oh - I will pray for you.".

(This took me aback slightly. Firstly, I can appreciate that she was trying to be nice, but telling somebody you will 'pray for them' when they just told you they're not religious is not only incredibly patronising but also sort of insulting, and secondly I couldn't work out if she was praying for me because I wasn't Christian, or because I was single.)

Example number three comes from my cooking class, which is always a highlight of my week because what we cook is always prefaced with "Traditional Korean...", even if it's something like a jam roll or, like yesterday, lemonade and melon cocktail. It's also always funny because being a traditional Korean dish, all the teachers know how to cook it, but they all know different ways to cook it, so the first lesson of the day usually involves a 20minute debate on the proper traditional way to cook whatever dish we're making.

Anyway, all the kids dress up in little aprons and chefs hats and look very cute, and prop ingredients are laid out on the table, the co-teacher who is in the room with me is basically just there to take pictures (each classroom has a camera - when I was promoted to homeroom teacher I was told "One of the jobs of the homeroom teacher is to take lots of photos."), and at the end of every period when the food is ready the director comes into the room with fresh makeup on and makes the children feed her food for cutesy photos to show the mums. Most of the time the kids don't want to give her any so she has to sort of wrestle with them to get a spoonful of food into her mouth while retaining her relaxed smile. It's quite funny but at the same time quite troubling seeing a 40 year old woman fighting with a child over some food that the child themselves just made and had the reasonable expectation of eating.

I think whats bothering me is the way Koreans don't treat children as children per say, like we do in the west (I'm not saying the way we treat children in the west is the 'right' way, it's just what I'm used to). Parents are interested in children as a way to make themselves look good, so obviously if they underperform even slightly it's a disaster, hence the endless apologies (amusingly, the parents of the one genuinely bad kid we have at school never apologise, because they simply don't give a shit). Likewise the director here is interested in the children as a way to lubricate the parents wallets with cute pictures, and the rest of the time stays in her office with the door closed.

I'm not so pessimistic that I think Korean's don't love their children as much as any other parent, but I think they regard children differently here, which I suppose fits with the general heirarchy of things here (older = superior). They simply see children as lower on the ladder than they are, hence the judgemental comments about childrens looks and intelligence. They also don't have any qualms about making use of kids to further their own interests in ways which, to me at least, seem quite shallow and exploitative.

This shouldn't really come as a suprise to me at this point, given that maybe 50% of the stuff I do on a daily basis has little to do with teaching and a lot to do with showing parents my western face and making sure they know where their W650,000 per month is going, but I think it's bothering me now because I've reached a stage where I'm no longer in the honeymoon period (8 week in Korea tomorrow - terrifying), I have good days at work and bad days at work, and it's incredibly rewarding when I manage to teach kids something, given how little time I have to actually teach them in amongst all the novelty classes and other bullshit. So to have a parent come into my classroom and start complaining that their kid isn't as perfect as Korean society demands that they should be annoys me, because I know the parent is saying this to a certain extent because the kids performance reflects badly on them, rather than out of genuine concern for their progress.

I feel I should put this in context - I'm not losing sleep over this, nobody is beating up kids or forcing them to make leather wallets for sale on the streets of Bankok (although we're always looking for new ideas for classes), it's just an interesting cultural difference. I'm also finding the fact that it annoys me quite interesting, given how I usually take great care not to let my job influence me on anything close to an emotional level, and how I'm now writing hundred-word essays about people not treating children how I think they should be treated when two months ago I was completely apathetic to children, and more than a little wary of them, too.

Sorry if that was a bit rambling, it's a bit tricky to try to explain a major part of a completely different culture and why it annoys you in such few words. Now I'm done being all serious heres some more stupid stuff that happened this week -

- A kid dropped a chair on my toe and I didn't realise I was bleeding until my slipper started dripping blood, cue one screaming principal, about 30 kids with their noses pressed up against the window of my classroom, and one ruined sock.
- The oldest kid in my class has started a rumour that Lochlan loves the new teacher. I really should stop them chanting and writing it everywhere but it's just too funny.
- I've now named 3 kids in the youngest class. They are called Glen, Fry and Chloe.
- I asked the principal if there were any decent massage places in Pyeongnae to fix my back and she thought I was asking for prostitutes. She still gave me directions, bless her.
- One of the kids in my class who has an older brother who is also learning English responded to his classmate's teasing with "Yeah? Fuck you!". He is 4.
- I taught one class the Thriller dance in gym as my own little tribute to Michael Jackson. In another class, one kid said "Teacher! I am Michael Jackson!", stood up, grabbed his crotch, then collapsed on the floor, dead. One of my friend's students asked him why Michael Jackson's family are black.

Seoraksan

2009-06-29T01:36:00.000-07:00

This past weekend our rag-tag band of highly professional English teachers visited Seoraksan national park, which is, as you might have guessed, located in the Seorak mountain range. I don't actually know how big the park is but I'm sure you could get lost in there for a good few weeks if you were so inclined. For this entry I'm going light on words, heavy on pictures, for obvious reasons. Click on the pictures to go to my Picasa page where you can view them all in their fat-o-vision full-sized majesty.

From Seoraksan 27.06.09

Our initial plan was to have a warm-up hike to something called Ulsanbawi, which was only 3.6km away on our map, so we figured we could go there and back before lunch, then hike the main peak in the afternoon. What the map failed to mention was that the distance of 3.6km was horizontal - it was also 850m vertically to the peak, which involved lots of climbing and the steepest, most rickety set of stairs I've ever had to climb. About half way up when we realised that this was actually a pretty tough ascent we cursed the fact that we only brought small bottles of water but carried on regardless.

From Seoraksan 27.06.09

After making a brief stop at Heundeulbawi (a big 16-ton rock that you can wobble if you're strong enough - which it turns out we are) we continued our climb and were met by these -

From Seoraksan 27.06.09

In total there are 707 steps to Ulsanbawi peak, which in 32-degree heat is quite a sweaty task, but completely worth it once you reach the top. The views in 3 directions are utterly spectacular and a quite insane man has made a little cafe of sorts (he calls in the sky lounge) where he sells Ice Tea at exhorbitant prices, and congratulates climbers on their success when they arrive.

From Seoraksan 27.06.09

I actually felt quite good about reaching the top, as even the Korean robo-hikers were struggling, we saw quite a few fall by the wayside or retreat into caves for shelter from the brutal heat.

From Seoraksan 27.06.09

We hung around on Ulsanbawi for an hour or so, shared some Makoli (Korean rice wine) with some generous Korean hikers, then took our time on the way down and found lots of gorgeous views and vertigo-inducing rocks to clamber out onto. Heres one that will make my mother wet herself -

From Seoraksan 27.06.09

Once we regrouped at the bottom roughly 3 hours after we had planned to, we decided to abandon our grand plans of hitting Daechongbong Peak (which is 1700m, compared to the mere 850m that we'd struggled quite considerably on), and find a waterfall instead. After an hour or so hike up a really quite beautiful (I fear I may run out of superlatives to describe Seoraksan in a minute - suffice to say its the most stunning place I've ever been to) gorge we reached the Biryong Falls, and promptly jumped right in, not realising you're not supposed to. This led to an angry Korean man scowling at us for a few minutes for polluting his pure Korean spring water with our filthy western bodies, but eventually he left and we enjoyed the cool water in peace.

From Seoraksan 27.06.09

After swimming we slowly ambled back to the entranceway as the sun set and bid Seoraksan a fond farewell, vowing to come back in the autumn (when its supposed to be even more picturesque, if such a thing is possible) to conquer Daechongbong Peak.

From Seoraksan 27.06.09

A lovely evening hike

2009-06-23T07:13:00.000-07:00

I was feeling quite energetic after work today so I threw some stuff in my backpack and took off up the big mountain at the back of Pyeongnae. The hike up was nice, and there weren't too many people around, but the top was absolutely incredible. Here you are, have some pictures -

From Pyeongnae Mountain 23.06.09

Obviously all the teachers at my school thought I was utterly mad for going hiking alone (Koreans just don't do stuff on their own and don't seem to understand that some people like spending time alone), but I had a great time so nuts to them. I'm meant to be visiting Seoraksan (third biggest mountain in Korea, dontyouknow) this weekend, so I guess this was something of a warmup.

Service

2009-06-19T00:24:00.001-07:00

So here's something I've been meaning to write about but haven't remembered to up until now - Service.

Service is a little extra treat you get in restaurants and other places sometimes if the waitress / owner likes you. It can be anything really (most likely depending on what they have going spare at that precise moment). The main ways of getting Service seem to be -

- Be a regular at the restaurant
- Talk to / Flirt with the waitress, tell her she has very good English etc
- Order in Korean when you're not expected to
- Track down the owner (restaurant owners are usually somewhere in their own place talking to people) and complement their food
- Be western

We also went to a restaurant we frequent the other night for a friends birthday, and were given free beer by the owner when she found out we were celebrating.

The other night we achieved what we thought was the holy grail - Double Service. We spoke to the Korean waitress (who at first claimed to not speak any English, but was actually quite good - this is pretty typical, they're really shy), asked her where she went to college, where she lived, etc., and she rewarded us with Pig Skin.

That may sound like a pretty shit gift, but you BBQ it on the grill (this is one of those every-table-has-a-grill places) until it's crispy, then rub it in this nutmeg stuff (although we've found the other salty powder you get is the pro option) and you sort of end up with a strange pork scratching. It's not all that tasty but its really important to appear to like it (This is a big part of Korean culture apparently - nobody must ever lose face. If an argument takes place it will usually end in some sort of agreement so nobody appears to have "lost", it's the same in restaurants. If you say you don't like something its roughly equivalent to sleeping with the owners wife and all of his children. It's even more important with home-made things, I've choked down numerous rice-cakes that students mums have made for me - I almost have a tolerance for them now).

Once we were done with the Pig Skin, the owner appeared (who we've spoken to in the past), and presented us with Pork Cheeks, which were really very good indeed, so no faking was required. All told we were in the restaurant for almost 2 hours, ate more than I've ever eaten previously in Korea, and spent about W10,000 (£5) each, including drinks.

What prompted me to finally write about Service was that yesterday Lochlan and I achieved what I now know to be the ultimate Service - the owner of the bowling alley we go to gave us our own balls. We were taken to the shop in the back and had our fingers and thumb flexibility (or something) measured, and our balls are being hand-crafted as I type and will be ready in a few short hours. Not only is this incredibly nice but also completely unexpected - we talked to the owner the other day about different types of bowling balls (I didn't even KNOW there were different types of ball - apparently lane balls are straight, and you can also get short hook and long hook balls. The ones we're getting are long hook), and when we turned up for a quick frame or two last night we were ushered in back so our measurements could be taken. Needless to say it put us both in rather fine moods.

We're heading down to try them out and to learn how to bowl hook shots tonight, and all for free because of Koreas awesome policy of giving free stuff to cool people.

Ganghwa Island

2009-06-17T04:37:00.000-07:00

This past weekend me and 7 intrepid compatriots took a weekend trip to Ganghwa Island, which is just to the north-west of Seoul, right on the North Korean border. It was sort of last-minute and we left Pyeongnae on Saturday morning with something of a hangover so I didn't have an expectations to speak of, but once we got out of Seoul on the bus it was clear we were in for a treat.

Like I've said (many times), Seoul is huge, so it took over an hour to get outside the bustle of the city and out into something resembling the countryside - although high-rises still rose out of the landscape with annoying regularity. After an hour and a half on the bus (after an hour on the subway and half an hour on another bus) we finally arrived in Ganghwa around midday to be greeted by a very 80s bus terminal and baking, sweaty heat. A quick cab ride took us to the village we were meeting our friends in, and once all assembled we caught the ferry over to a small island off Ganghwa.

From Ganghwa 13.06.09

Once on this island I started to feel we were really in rural Korea - the area surrounding the ferry ramp consisted of maybe 3 restaurants and a shop, then you were straight out into paddy fields. A smarter member of our group suggested renting bikes, so we found ourselves a couple of trusty steeds and biked the hell out of dodge - or whatever that little town was called. A depressingly short cycle later we were forced to abandon our steeds to walk due to a steep hill, but we soon all arrived at the top (break-downs and unexpected phonecalls notwithstanding).

I can reliably pinpoint the top of this hill as the point where my journey turned from enjoyable to epic. As we looked down the hill we could see a couple of things - the open road, endless paddy fields, clear blue skies and beautiful mountains off to the side. After gathering our thoughts and catching our breath we set off down the hill, and into the greatest bike ride I've ever been on.

Once the terrain levelled out we found ourselves cycling a flat road that neatly bisected the paddy fields and the mountains, so no matter where you looked your eyes were massages by the glory of rural Korea. This, incidentally, was the first time I've ever really felt like I was in Korea. Seoul, and to a certain extent Pyeongnae, could a lot of the time be any other city anywhere in the world, but the mountains, paddy fields and old ladies tending their precious radish crop all screamed Korea. It was also nice to see an area completely devoid of American influence.

After cycling for 30 minutes or so we heard the familiar sound of a child screaming "HELLO!", so stopped to chat and ask for directions. Once we stopped the silence really hit me, there was no traffic, no trains, no bloody air raid sirens, not even any wind, just the ocean way off in the distance. With our directions acquired we set off again for Bomunsa, a mountain temple that is apparently not to be missed, but is, like all good things in Korea, up a massive goddamn hill.

From Ganghwa 13.06.09

Bomunsa was a really excellent place to visit, good climb to the temple and an even higher prayer platform complete with Buddha carved into the mountain, the view was spectacular. Once we'd had our fill of religion for the day we hit the road again, and took in more fantastic rice fields and blissful straight roads stretching on to the horizon, before eventually finding ourselves back at our starting point roughly 40minutes after our bikes were due to be returned - luckily the kindly old man in the shop didn't mind.

From Ganghwa 13.06.09

We returned to our motel (confusingly called a Pension here in Korea), ate like kings, then drank like peasants. And by that I mean on the beach by moonlight while being loud and western. The night was warm and the beach was full of cheerful folk and we could see the lights of Seoul twinkling in the distance. We found a shop that sold fireworks for W2,500 (about £1.25) each, so obviously stocked up on a lot of those, and eventually found our way to bed around 4am.

From Ganghwa 13.06.09

Waking up the next day feeling slightly worse for wear, we pottered around, grabbed some lunch, and eventually found our way up to the Peace Observatory (complete with tanks), which overlooks North Korea. Some in our group found it to be quite dull, but having read about and taken an interest in North Korea I found it absolutely amazing. We peered through the binoculars and watched North Koreans tending their rice fields, looked at a hilarious pretend town they've built by the border to show how great life is over there, and looked at various displays about reunification. The most pleasing thing for me though was the amount of South Koreans there.

From Ganghwa 13.06.09

Up to this point all the Koreans I've spoken to have expressed extreme apathy towards the North Korean situation, most using the excuse of their "bali bali culture", which more or less means "busy busy", i.e. they're too busy to care about it. Bali bali is also apparently the reason people walk into you on the subway, why nothing ever gets finished, and why theres so much clutter around (they're too busy to clean up, duh). It put me at ease somewhat though the amount of South Koreans at the Peace Observatory, at least now I know SOME of them care about it. They also had the "Unity Room", where people could leave messages of support for relatives in North Korea, and the amount of messages was quite moving.

After the Observatory it was time to head home, so feeling satisfied but weary we boarded the bus, then the tube, then the bus, home.

You may notice I've gone a bit panorama-happy this week - I've found some new software that makes them a piece of piss to put together so I'm milking it! Click the pictures to view the super-huge versions.

Long Week

2009-06-08T00:56:00.000-07:00

I havent updated in a while, mainly due to being busy as hell. So this update is going to be a real meaty one, full of pictures and interesting stuff I hope.

As I mentioned, last weekend I climbed a mountain - I had planned to do it again this weekend but I completely lost track of time in Seoul and got back too late. Anyway, here's a nice panorama of Pyeongnae and Hopyeong that I took half way up last weekend.

Pyeongnae Panorama (Click to embiggen)

This weekend I took a day to myself and went into Seoul to have a look around some of the bits I haven't had a chance to see yet. After running into one of my students on the train and being given a Capri Sun by his mum (whenever you meet a students parents they'll always buy you things, that is one of the few universal truths of Korea - I'm eating some Baskin Robbins right now that a students mum bought for us), first stop was Yongsan Electronics Market to pick up a hard drive enclosure. I'd been told that Yongsan was the place to go if I needed anything electrical, but once again Seoul completely exceeded my expectations. When I walked in, it was obviously apparent I was in the camera section, so I wandered for a while and found a man who sold Sony equipment (this isn't just one big shop, it's hundreds of small retailers each with a little stall) and discussed a new lense, but unfortunately as I still haven't been paid (this week hopefully) a purchase was out of the question. So I walked off to find the computer section, but all I could find was more cameras.

After about half an hour I realised to my absolute glee that the huge space I'd been walking around was merely the ground floor of an 8 floor centre, the first two of which were cameras, the third was home stuff (fans, toasters etc), the fourth was MP3 players, the fifth computers, the sixth mobile phones, seventh games, and the eighth an eSports Stadium.

I don't feel at this point I can just casually throw the term "eSports Stadium" out there without explaining this very Korean, very strange phenomenon. All Korean boys, and a lot of girls, are completely addicted to games - specifically StarCraft and World of Warcraft - and "professional gamers" are treated like superstars out here. On the computers floor of the Yongsan centre most of the retailers had a game of StarCraft going on when they didn't have any customers, and on the games floor the usual suspects of Playstations, Wiis and XBoxes took a back seat to PC games (Wiis, incidentally, are only about £100 here, I might pick one up). So the eSports Stadium is just that - on stage they have two guys playing Starcraft against each other, with about 500 people watching and cheering really quite enthusiastically for seemingly rather dull occurances. At one point a Korean boy sat in the audience turned around and noticed me standing in the back, tapped his friends on the shoulder and within 30 seconds I had maybe 40 Korean boys waving and shouting "HELLO HOW ARE YOU!"

After making a quick getaway I left Yongsan having bought my enclosure (for a mere £10 after some passionate haggling) and headed to City Hall for lunch. I watched the Changing of the Guards again and decided to walk in the opposite direction to the way I went before to see what I could find. What I found was the Cheonggye stream, which used to be covered over by roads, but was recently resurrected and tarted up to create a really nice attraction.

The Cheonggye Stream (Click to embiggen)

I walked along it for a while and enjoyed the sun on my back and the laughter of children, until both started to get on my nerves and I hopped back on the subway.

The Cheonggye Stream (Click to embiggen)

Next on my list of places to visit was the COEX mall, which is apparently the biggest Mall in Korea. When I hear the term "big mall" I think of some cavernous glass complex full of walkways and dangling lights, but the COEX is completely underground and on one floor. To give you a sense of scale, some of the signs directing you to various parts of the mall are in kilometers. Aside from the scale of the place, the multi-coloured lighting and lack of windows means parts of it are quite claustraphobic, and, as usual with Korean shops, theres lots of loud music and people with megaphones.

Having failed to find a pair of shorts that I wanted, I moved my search to Dongdaemun, and proceeded to fail once again, so I then went to Namdaemun (another market) and failed for a third time.

Feeling incredibly tired I headed back to Pyeongnae at about 7pm with my purchases feeling very satisfied that I had crossed several more places off my "Things I want to see in Seoul" list. For a sense of how gloriously cheap transport over here is, the bus to the subway and back (about half an hour each way), and my underground travel for the whole day cost about £5.

Another strange thing I've noticed is the amount of influence corporations have over everything here. The big corporations are called Jaebeol (Think Samsung, Hyundai and LG), and I've heard it from several Korean people that they have more sway in the government than they probably should. Lots of the music used in ads here are songs written for K-Pop artists specifically to promote a product - for instance theres a new mobile phone that just launched called "Lollipop", and the ad is like a 30 second music video by a big K-Pop band. Another strange thing is that the major baseball teams are called their sponsors names, rather than their team name. So the LG Giants (I don't think thats an actual team, this is just an example) are called "The LGs" rather than "The Giants". I suppose it's equivalent to Chelsea being called "The Emirates" or something like that.

A typical Seoul backstreet (Click to embiggen)

One thing I've been doing to keep myself entertained at work is lending my phone to kids to take pictures with (and also long-distance phonecalls probably), and today I am ready to show the results. A lot of them are really shit pictures, but I think the head-ache inducing blurriness of all the shots gives it a nice "this must be what being a kid is like" feel. It's also interesting to see how giant I am from down there. You can see all the photos here.

Welcome to Big School

2009-06-01T00:44:00.001-07:00

Today I took over as "homeroom" teacher of Orange Class - the oldest and also coolest of the classes at our hagwon. This basically means the kids are my responsibility now - I have to feed them, make sure they don't beat the shit out of each other, and make sure they get down to the bus on time. This is quite suprising as one of the big things in my contract was "THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A KOREAN CO-TEACHER IN THE ROOM WITH YOU AT ALL TIMES", but I think I prefer it this way - it gives me more room to do stuff I want to do, and for the kids to get more comfortable with me around (the silent kid, Tony, sat on my lap and spoke actual words to me using his mouth for about 20 minutes today), rather than just having me pop in and out to take a few lessons a week. It also means I don't have to impose myself on other teachers for lunch, which is one thing I feel really uncomfortable doing.

I'm trying to introduce a new sense of democracy to the class - before gym today I asked the kids what they wanted to do, and we had a vote as to which games we would play, and later in the week I plan to introduce Jon Dollars, which will be currency earned for good work / behaviour that can be redeemed at a later date for fabulous prizes (an idea I've totally stolen from another teacher I know here, but I think too good an idea to be limited to just his school).

This past weekend was another very good one - I hiked up a mountain with a friend, which was very tiring and slightly disappointing because there were no views from the top owing to the very thick forest, but on the way down we took a less-travelled route which involved very steep rock-faces (interesting when wearing Converse) and some ropes to abseil down. We even found a natural spring halfway down which was spewing out crystal-clear ice-water from the busom of Korea herself, so I filled up my bottle with that and enjoyed it for the rest of the weekend.

While having dinner with some Korean friends on Saturday evening (pig trotter and vegetable stirfry - yummy) I was told apparently there is an Escort bar in Pyeongnae where you can go, pay about £200, spend the evening with the woman of your choice in their hotel, and in the morning the hooker will do your laundry for you - now thats service.

Heres another little brain dump of things from the past week or so -

- The names of stuff can be brilliant sometimes - theres a brand of showers called Forskin, and a kids stationary range called Morning Glory.

- I've got a thing at home which is a pot of powder, apparently you add an egg to it and put it in the microwave for one minute and it makes a cupcake. Pictures and video to come of this when I make it, because it sounds goddamn incredible.

- Lochlan and I are slowly piecing together our roof terrace - we've found an old table with a hole for a firepit that a restaurant are going to give us for free, and we're doing business with our friend Jay the Hotdog Stand owner on some chairs and possibly an umbrella. Once we've cleaned the roof up a bit and put up some lights and maybe got some plants up there it should be a pretty nice little hangout, especially with the hot weather just beginning.

- If you ever teach a Korean class, don't tell anyone their work is "super" - it's very close to the Korean for "go fuck yourself".

- I've decided none of my friends from England can ever see me teach - I've now reached a stage where I overact so much it would be quite embarassing if anybody who knows me saw me doing it.

More odd stuff

2009-05-26T23:03:00.000-07:00

Heres some more bits and pieces I forgot to mention.

1 - In a fortnights time I'm taking over a class from a Korean teacher, so I'll be a real-life teacher with responsibility and everything, with a group of kids that I can mold in my image and train up until they are a motley crew of english speakers with can-do attitudes and borderline doughnut addictions.

2 - An interesting thing I've heard about (but not yet visited myself) are Booking Clubs. Apparently a group of men book a room, where they sit and drink and make merry and do all the things men do best, all the while watching screens of a dancefloor downstairs, which is filled with single women (who come to find men). When you spot one you like a messenger is dispatched downstairs to collect them, and they are brought to your room for you to flirt with. An interesting concept, to be sure.

3 - The way Koreans use the horns on their cars is brilliant - its not "Hey what the hell was that?!" like in the UK, its "Get out of my way because I'm not stopping!". I've even seen someone blast through a red light honking all the way for the other traffic to get out of his way.

4 - I'm currently conducting an experiment which involves giving a kid (only the responsible ones, mind) my phone to take pictures with every lunch time. I'll post the pictures at the end of the week, but some of them already are brilliant.

5 - Lloyds are miserable shits. I told them before I left I'd be using my card in Korea and the portly woman at the branch said "Oh yes that'll be no problem, don't worry!", so I got some money out at the weekend and they froze my account. So I had to make a very costly phonecall to un-freeze it. Bastards.

6 - It is getting pretty hot here at the moment. 28 degrees today, hotter tomorrow.

That's all I can think of for now. I'll add more as I remember it, as I inevitably will.

Seoul Pt2

2009-05-24T22:49:00.001-07:00

Another weekend, another thoroughly enjoyable, if tiring, visit to Seoul. Our first stop was City Hall, where we emerged from the subway to be greeted by a few hundred riot police. Apparently Korea's former President, who was bought up on corruption charges, had committed suicide the night before (or, as it was explained to me, "Fell off a mountain") so everybody in Seoul was a bit pissed off because they wanted to see him in jail.

Korean Riot Police - no needless shoving in sight

We arrived at the entrance to Deoksugung Palace just in time to see the changing of the guards, which was fairly interesting and certainly a nice thing to come upon completely by chance.

Changing of the Guards - loud

After grabbing some lunch we walked up Namsan, which is a peak in the centre of Seoul, topped by a big TV Tower. We took the stairs, which turned out to be a fairly exhausting option, as it involves around half a kilometer of quite steep steps. It turned out to be doubly disheartening as we were constantly being passed by 60 year old Korean women in tracksuits who didn't even seem to be out of breath. When we finally reached the cablecar at the top we gladly paid the 6,000W to be taken back down to ground level, and began to walk back towards City Hall. Unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera so next time I go back I will be sure to go up the TV Tower and take some decent photos.

The view from half-way up Namsan - Seoul is chuffing massive

One interesting thing that I don't think I've mentioned yet is underground markets. At most major road interchanges, rather than having crossings or overpasses, there are huge underground chambers housing markets that you can walk through. The one by Namsan seemed to be a camera market, so I spent a while looking at old Nikon cameras and planning my next lense purchase when I get paid. It also had lots of record stores such as this beauty, tended to by an old man listening to jazz. In the old CDs section I found Return of the Mac for about 20p.

Underground Record Stores - saviours of the shelving industry

After emerging from the market we paid a visit to the Bank of Korea Museum, where we learned about Korea's economic troubles of 1997, and saw lots of old currency and were taught how to spot a fake bank note (The guy on the back of Korean notes, I forget his name, the line of his collar is actually text that says "Bank of Korea"). We also got to go in the vault and look at vast amounts of money and some gold bullion.

Bank of Korea Museum Vault - I'm not sure I was allowed to take this picture

For dinner I headed to Hyehwa which turned out to be a nice little suprise, it's another University area and its quite bohemian, lots of nice cafes and small parks to sit in, and strangely no high-rises, so I enjoyed a Krispy Kreme or two while I sat under some trees and waited for the people I was meeting.

At some point during the day I also found the greatest little off-license I've ever been in, it was run by a little old Korean man, and he had so much booze it was all scattered all over the floor, so you had to be quite careful where you walked. I hunted through and eventually found a bottle of my favourite vodka (vodka is remarkably hard to come by in Korea it would seem, they all just drink Soju), so went home a happy man that evening.

Climbing Namsan only served to reinforce my previous assertation that Seoul is fucking massive, it was a fairly clear day and it literally stretched as far as the eye could see.

The dirt won't come off

2009-05-22T01:04:00.000-07:00

Today was 'Birthday Day', which is an extravaganza held once a month to celebrate all the kids who have had birthdays that month. The celebrations involved making birthday cards for the lucky few (See my effort here), then all gathering in the playroom, where each kid was ceremonially marched in front of a table laden with loads of food for photos, first on their own, then with me and Lochlan, then with their whole class and me and Lochlan. I think there were 7 birthday kids today, so you can imagine the logistics involved in mobilising that many children and making sure all the others didn't start fighting / run away / wander in front of the camera. Once all the photos were taken each class stood up to do a dance they learned earlier in the week, which was basically their teacher doing the dance and the kids staring at the floor half-heartedly flailing their arms.

I felt quite sorry for the director's husband, who apparently is a photographer, so was roped in to take the pictures, but he's still here now (about 7 hours since party-time) putting up shelves and doing heavy lifting. I'm thankful the director's english isn't that good or I'd probably be doing it.

Experience the horror

Once the 'party' was done, the plan was to watch a Pixar film but we had some slight technical problems so it was replaced by Dora The Explorer, which mercifully all the children enjoyed.

Things of note this week -

- I taught my favourite kid a gangster handshake and to tell everybody to "chillax"

- When I was taking cookery class I was teaching the kids how to say "Spring Onion", and usually they speak with a pretty heavy Korean accent, but one kid, I assume as a joke, said it in a beautiful cockney accent and it took me by suprise so much I had to sit down because I was laughing too hard.

- I learned a funny Korean phrase - when somebody is unhappy they are said to "look like North Korea"

- I went to the restaurant over the road, ordered tuna sushi rolls in perfect Korean, talked to some school kids in there in Korean / English, understood the lady when she told me how much it was, thanked her appropriately and left. I was pretty pleased with myself.

- I have a rash on my hand. Couldn't all be good stuff now could it?

Techie Stuff

2009-05-20T22:54:00.000-07:00

So one thing I was looking forward to in Korea was the fact that it's meant to be a high-tech metropolis full of robots that can feel love and cars that drive themselves, but so far I've been a little bit disappointed.

Koreans seem to use technology better than in the UK, but the actual technology itself doesn't seem to be more advanced - for example those umbrella wrapping machines I mentioned earlier. Pretty basic stuff but a really good idea. Also the whole of Seoul seems to be bathed in free Wifi (called "Sky"), which again is something that could easily be done in the UK but just hasn't for whatever reason.

Seoul's version of an Oyster Card, called T-Money, despite sounding like a bad rapper, is really quite cool. It functions in the same way as an Oyster card, but each turnstile has a readout that displays your balance as you scan in and out of the tube, and the card works in the whole of Korea for buses, trains and taxis. I have T-Money built into my phone, so when I get on a bus I can just sort of shimmy past the scanner to pay for my journey. It also has an "emergency tank" option to charge the journey to my next phone bill if it runs dry and I can't find a place to top it up.

Apart from that nice feature my phone has been the biggest disappointment. Apparently it's a brand new model, but in a moment of biblical retardedness Korea decided to have its own phone system that's different from the whole rest of the world, so people like Samsung and LG build really awesome phones, and then ship them off the the west to make their money, while spoon-feeding Koreans shitbox phones because its a closed market and they can do what they like. It's such a lame phone that I'm still carrying my Nokia around with me for GPS / Music / Calendar / Internet because my Korean phone can't do any of those things to any degree of decency. The one advantage of only having these phones sold in Korea is that they can tailor them to Korea specifically - my phone has interactive subway maps for all the large cities, and if I paid for it I could have locational services, like vouchers for nearby restaurants texted to me (Although as it stands all these texts are in Korean so they wouldn't be much good to me).

I'm planning on visiting the techie part of Seoul this weekend so hopefully that will do something to charge my mind, but as it stands it just seems to me that the people are smarter, not the technology.

EDIT: Oh, I feel I should probably point out that the real star of the show so far has been my little Samsung laptop. It's amazing the amount of stuff you can do with this little bastard, and the battery just goes on for eternity. Best £300 I ever spent.

The Kids Aren't Alright

2009-05-19T22:45:00.000-07:00

So I'm now a full-on grown up teacher, taking classes and forcing brutal and unrelenting knowledge on all those children who dare enter my classroom, but that also comes with the burden of having to deal with children who do not behave as a normal child should.

We have one kid who has some kind of hairband fetish, and always takes the hairbands of the girls in his class, another girl who will, upon seeing you, just shriek and run straight at you, and usually headbutt you in the groin (I haven't work out if this is on purpose or not yet). Another kid simply won't open his mouth to say more than two words and usually all you'll get out of him is a strange squeaking noise similar to that made by a guinea pig or hamster.

Yesterday the teacher in my main class had to go into Seoul to do a training course, so I had to take the class for lunch, which was not too much of a problem (I know enough teacher-korean to control a class at this point), the problem came when the children would just look up from their food and say something completely indecipherable to me, then wait expectantly for an answer. Luckily one girl in that class is a bit of a madame so she sorted most of the kids out when they had a problem.

Towards the end of lunch, however, the girl sat immediately to my left just starting crying. I don't know what I did, but it must have been pretty horrible because she wouldn't quit. I sat her on my knee and hugged her for a little bit, then got some shiny stickers I know she likes and showed them to her, and eventually she shut up.

Today in a "science" class I took, which was all about elephants, the kids had to make elephant masks and were given little tube things to blow in to make elephant sounds. The sight of 6 kids in terrifying elephant masks making an ungodly racket just made one girl freak the fuck out, and she launched immediately into hysterics (not even any of the usual lead-in blubbering or lip-quivering), and had to be consoled by the Korean teacher in the corner while I tried to make the other kids stop blowing into their pipes for the sake of her sanity, which was harder than it sounds.

Eventually they settled down, but the mere sight of one of those pipes would set her off again. Hilariously the korean teacher put one in her bag for her to take home - a little treat when she goes to get her homework out.

Odds and sods (and photos!)

2009-05-17T23:02:00.000-07:00

Heres some other stuff I've realised in Korea but haven't had time / forgotten to write about.

- Korean kids have it tough. Some of them go to school from 9am until 8 or 9pm, then go home and relax for a few hours (usually by playing Starcraft it would seem), then go to bed and repeat.

- Korean school girls are a flirty bunch. They all seem to hang out at Lotteworld (McDonalds basically) in the evenings, and if you walk past you're gonna get stared and giggled at, maybe even the odd nervous "Hello nice to meet you."

- Korean trains have special seats for old people. Not just like in England where you're meant to give the seat to an old person, theres a special section just for them and if you sit there you're a horrible person and screw you for doing that.

- The length of time you've been in Korea determines your place in the western teacher heirarchy. A lot of disagreements seem to be settled with "Well I've been here X months!"

- Here is the video of that kids show I went to see last Friday.

- Here are some photos from our exciting day out -

A couple of the badasses in Apple Class (the one in the middle, Peter, has a superhero alter-ego, Peterman, and the way he fights crime is by punching me in the crotch)

Left-to-right: Sam, Me, Rose, Lochland

Lemon class (the girl in the lighter top, Linda, is just about as damn cute as it's possible for a human child to be)

Left to right: Carol, Me, Rose, Lochlan

Melon Class

As you've probably realised now some of these kids are weapons-grade cute.

Bigger versions of the pictures here.

Also a couple of pictures from the temple in Seoul on my Flickr page.

Seoul

2009-05-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had my first day in the centre of Seoul, and also my first night out in the centre of Seoul. We arrived around 2pm, still feeling somewhat tired and croaky from the previous nights

vigorous Noribanging - luckily I still had a nice coffee drink one of my students got me for Teacher's Day. We proceeded to hit Insadong, which is quite a hip shopping and tea room area encircled by a few Buddhist temples. We stopped for tea to formulate a plan and also to have some tea, and then went to a temple and sat during a service which was really great. I don't want to be one of these twatty westerners who visits a temple and rants at everyone about how transcendent it was, but it legitimately was a very cool thing to see and the temple itself was amazing (photos to come as soon as I find my camera cable).

After experiencing old-style Seoul we hopped on the underground and went to Myeong-Dong, which is one of the most intense shopping experiences of my life. The shopping area itself is seemingly endless, and has just about every clothes brand you care to mention. All of the shops we went into were playing K-Pop (Korean pop, think British pop music sped up and force-fed 5 kilos of acid), and Koreans seem to shop at double-speed, so I was constantly being walked in to and pushed out the way by hurrying shoppers. It was like E-Mart, but thankfully with less sharp objects.

Here's something thats incredibly mundane but I thought pretty cool - all the shops have a little machine by the door that you put your umbrella into and it wraps it in plastic so it doesn't drip all over the floor. A lot of the shops also have little screens on the shelf-edges too, so you can see a nice promotional video of someone wearing a shirt before you decide to buy it or not.

Aside from all the regular shops, there are also street vendors and preachers - all of whom have megaphones, obviously, and every available surface is covered with adverts. It's a real assault on the senses but honestly I was expecting big things and Myeong-Dong delivered. After we'd bought a couple of shirts and shoes (I sold my new compatriates on Converse - we all match now) we hopped back onto the underground to another shopping district. Another interesting thing - they have people trying to hawk stuff on the underground. On this particular journey there was a woman singing the praises of some kind of pipe cleaning product. Imagine a live infomercial and you're about there.

The second shopping district we visited (Dongdaemun Market) was another modern miracle. It's one colossal market but situated in four huge high-rises, spread over about 36 floors. The purchases here were much more satisying as you're expected to barter so we got a couple more cheap items, then headed for some drinks.

Our first port of call was Iteawon, which is a very westernised area of Seoul due to the nearby American military base. After visiting a small pub by the tube station where I learned the first of many important lessons (don't talk to an American GI's Korean girlfriend), we ended up in an Irish pub called the Wolfhound and met up with a load of other British people to watch some game of football or other. At one point I was struck by the fact that I was having a conversation with a Welsh guy, watching a British football match in an Irish pub built for American soldiers, while drinking Chinese beer in the middle of Korea. I made a note of it on my Finnish phone.

After Itaewon we headed to Hongik which is a big University area, and there was a noticable change of atmosphere. In Itaewon it's very much us-versus-them - we had numerous

conversations with Americans about American Football vs Rugby, Nascar vs F1 etc, and there was always a slight tension, but in Hongik everybody wants to know where you're from, how long have you been in Seoul and would you like a drink? We started at a live music place with a pretty decent covers band, then moved to another bar and settled in for the night (bear in mind we arrived here at 3am and you get a sense of the nightlife here). We ended up getting a taxi back home at about 7.30am after sunlight started streaming in the skylights.

The drinking culture is far superior to the UK here. We were drinking for just shy of 12 hours, but nobody fell over, nobody vomited everywhere, nobody got into a fight, and we were all still best of friends at the end of it. I suppose it comes from being a 24 hour city - nobody is in a hurry, nobody has a last train to catch and there is no such thing as last orders.

So as for my impressions after my first day in Seoul, well, love is a strong word so I won't throw it around, but so far Seoul is a very close second to Hong Kong in my list of "favourite cities that I've visited".

The main thing I came away with though is just the damn scale of the city. As far as I can tell there is no "centre", like Times Square or the Houses of Parliament, there are just several districts, and each is huge. In the shopping district every street you look down is full of shops, in Hongik every street is lined with bars, shops and Noribang. I even stayed awake for the taxi ride home just so I could take it all in in daylight. Seoul, I salute you and your hugeness.

Welcome Dinner

2009-05-17T01:30:00.000-07:00

After work on Friday once we had finished cataloguing and typing up the eBay listings for all our Teacher's Day presents, the director of my school took us all out for a meal to welcome me to Korea. Her plan was to introduce me to Korean food so we went for Sun Jup-Sau (that won't be spelt right, I only know these things phonetically), little did she know I had already had it twice during the week, so I suprised them all with my Sun Jup-Sau-Know-How. This restaurant was slightly fancier than the ones we usually go to though - you sit on the floor (hello leg cramps) and rather than the usual hotplate we got a coalpit with a grill over the top (interesting thing - if the coals are too hot you put lettuce on them to moderate the temperature). Sun Jup-Sau is chicken, but we also had duck (which I can't remember the name of) and beef (which I believe was called Koju) which was really quite excellent.

The basic idea is you have a pot of leaves which is mainly lettuce - but they also have sesame leaves which is the pro option - you cook your piece of meat, put it on the leaf, add whatever other accoutriments you wish from the table (Kim-chi, garlic, onion, chilli paste etc etc), scrunch up the leaf around the bit of meat and eat that mother. It's incredibly nice but somewhat messy and undignified. I really like Sun Jup-Sau not only because its tasty but because it's distinctly Korean. A lot of the 'Korean' food that I've had up to this point has been slight variations on Chinese or Japanese food, but I've never had something like this and its great.

Although the food was good, like I said before only one of the teachers speaks decent English so it resulted in me, Lochlan and her talking, and the other teachers all chatting in Korean.

After the meal was done we met up with some people and went to a hotdog stand thats just opened (I wasn't particularly fussed but as you can imagine all the westerners who have been here for months were very excited at the prospect of a hotdog). The stand was run by a big fat Korean guy called Jay who rides a hog and is basically the coolest man in Korea. I didn't eat any of his food as I was full from the meal earlier but I can definitely see myself wanting a hotdog at some point this week.

After hanging out at the hotdog stand for a while (which was actually quite a strange thing to do now I think about it) and being taught some Rock-Paper-Scissors variant that apparently is to do with that Dragonball-Z cartoon by some Korean kids we headed for a Noribang (which is Karaoke, bang means room, nori means song - song room. Simple). This was was yet another hilarious experience that I wouldn't in a million years consider doing in the UK, but if theres one thing I hate its people who go to foreign countries and don't at least try the culture (I'm looking at you, horrible Costa Del Sol people), so I've been diving in head first as much as I can.

The place we went to had a pretty pleasing collection of western songs, so we whiled away a few hours singing some awesome 80s classics (disappointingly they had no REO Speedwagon though), while being fed beer by the kindly old man who ran the place. The system there scored you after each song, and I'm proud to say Jay and myself scored the only perfect 100 of the evening with a stirring rendition of More Than Words by Extreme. Thankfully the system also had the most auto-tune and echo of any sound system ever invented, so it mellowed the horrible sound of our voices somewhat.

Teacher's Day

2009-05-14T23:25:00.000-07:00

So I thought yesterday was awesome, how wrong I was. Today was the awesome day! Presents were flying everywhere (Lochlan and I are going to have the fruitiest flat in all of Korea that amount of flowers we got given) and all the kids came in and gave us hugs and stuff, and some had made little cards (the one on the left is from Peter, one of my favourite kids).

As Fridays are 'special days' we went out in the morning to see a kid's musical which was baffling but from what I could work out it was about a slutty princess who had to choose to marry either a frog, a rich old mole or a ginger pixie. When Lochlan and I walked into the theatre there were 5 or 6 other hagwons (thats the type of school I'm teaching at) already sat in the audotorium, and instantly all the children jumped up and started shouting "HELLO HOW ARE YOU!!!" at us, obviously completely over-excited to see a westerner. All the classes took pictures afterwards so I'm going to try and get hold of copies of those photos because I think they'll be quite good. To get to the theatre we had to go through a shopping centre which as you can imagine was quite fun with 40 children in tow. I don't think we lost any but I never bothered to count if I'm honest.

Also apparently it's 'tradition' for the western teachers to go on the bus with the kids every Friday and see the kids home safely (This is clearly just a ploy to let the parents see us so they know their kids are getting taugh by westerners, but it killed an hour so I'm not complaining).

The picture on the right is our haul from Teacher's Day, mostly flowers but a couple of awesome things like some some Peppermint Coffee, some Chanel deodorant and a few bags of sweets. We also had curry for lunch, and as such only one question remains - great day, or greatest day?

My first class

2009-05-13T22:47:00.001-07:00

I just took my first class, sort of on the spur of the moment as the other guy that was meant to have it went home at lunch time (it was his last day - I think I'm his replacement), so one of the teachers said "Do you want to take it?" and I was like "Shit yeah!". This was before I realised it was cookery class with the youngest kids.

We were making Sweet Potato Canapés (which I thought a very bizarre thing to make but its just carrots, cucumber and sweet potatoes bashed together so its pretty good for kids to make). The other teacher kept calling them "Sweet Potato Canopies" and explaining it was because the potato forms a canopy over the cracker. I thought about correcting him but thought there really wasn't much point as all the kids were interested in was smashing stuff up. And smash stuff up they did.

At the end of the lesson they all described their canapés as "yummy", but I think thats only because they didn't know the english for "You must throw some shitty dinner parties."

I also just found out I came here at exactly the wrong time - tomorrow is Teachers Day, and so my colleagues have been showered with gifts all day, while I being the frightening new guy have received nothing.

Tomorrow is super-happy trip day, which I'm sure will prove exciting.

UPDATE: Turns out Teacher's Day is really a big deal - one of our students mothers made us all dinner, and got me and Lochlan a bag full of presents.