Harry Potter and Double Virility...a deadly combination

The last two days, well, things happened. As usual. And now I sit down to recap them. So here we go. Saturday started bright and early, as I was signed up for a Korean culture day, which originally sounded lame until I found out that I would be going with a bunch of other foreign teachers. OMG, I actually get to speak English. Thank Jesus, Allah, Shiva, whoever it takes. One of the Madison girls who was also at the orientation last week, Amy, was coming so I met here at the train station and we walked to Yangpyeong Middle School. Upon arriving, we met some of the other local teachers, most notably Bert and Max. My stunning introduction to Bert went something like this: "Where do you live? (Bert)" "I live above Myung Moon Hagwan (Me)" "...What room? (Bert)" "Room 302. (Me)" "Room 304. (Bert)". Yep, that's right. I have another foreigner living two rooms down. If we yelled loud enough, we could probably talk to each other through the wall. He's only been here for about a week, but he did talk to the landlord and the guy said nothing about me. What a fucking cockbag! If you know there is another foreigner to talk to 2 rooms away, why the fuck wouldn't you say that? Bert is a 48 year old former safety specialist at a garbage burning plant from North Carolina. He wants to work in Korea for a couple of years, save up some cash, then go to Bangkok and start a sports bars for foreigners where they can see american football and stuff like that. Like I said cool. The other townie on the trip was on Max Han, 20 something from New York and Albany College, who just happens to have immigrated to the US from...wait for it...Korea when he was 10 months, so he can actually speak and converse in Korean pretty damn well. Which means none of the rest of us have to do dick when we go to restaurants now. Well, after introductions, we hopped onto the bus and rode back to Yongin for unteenth time in the last few days. After we arrived at the folk village we were treated to a brunch of bulgogi and some sort of seafood pie kinda thing. Brunch consumed, we had 3 hours to wander the folk village. It was a very pretty with the changing leaves and the river that ran through the middle of it (see pics). Most of the small houses were actually occupied older Koreans authentically performing such tasks as blacksmithing, weaving cloth, etc. Plus, they had a old timey market where you can buy all kinds of sweet little trinkets such as hand made pipes, hand made stamps, Korean burial masks, little carved statues, etc. Expect most of your X-mas presents to come from here, or Insa-dong, since they sell the same stuff. The best part of the day was the hoards of tiny Koreans trying to practice their English. I guess their school knew that many foreigners come here, so they gave each kid a little paragraph about some traditional Korean aspect of life and the kids had to tell it to us in English. Then we had to sign their books and give them a score. It was absolutely adorable, these little elementary kids speaking better English than most of my students. As you can see from my profile pics, they barely come up to my knee so I usually squatted down to chat with them. I just wanted to grab a couple and put them in my pocket, but I'm told that's illegal. One of the many groups actually gave me a little pen and dangly thing that attaches to one's phone, which of course made the other two female foreigners jealous since I was the most popular. They just get beauty over here, that's all I can say. They even started calling me Harry Potter, since I look like him to them. I'm a celebrity wherever I go here. After our trip ended, the foreigners headed home and decided to go out to dinner together, so with our merry band of whiteys from America to Scotland to South Africa and everywhere in between we set out upon a rampage of destruction and carnage through downtown Yangpyeong, terrifying many a school child and woman with our massive height and body hair. Yeah, there was 11 of us, so we made quite the scene wandering downtown. During dinner, I bumped into a soccer team member eating at the same restaurant, once again prompting the foreigners to rib me about the town celebrity. Seriously, everyone knows who I am in this town, weird. After good conversation and drink I had to say goodbye as I had to get up bright and early for the soccer game on Sunday. 6am to be exact, as I was having breakfast with the team before the bus leaves at 7:30am. The game, however, didn't go our way, as we lost in PK's. Which, to my surprise, didn't damper the celebrations. We yet again hit the soju and beer as soon as we got to the parking lot, no different from if we had won. Several hours later I yet again had dinner with the gym teacher. To show you just how insist he is on not giving me alone time, here's my last week: Sun went to Seoram with him, Mon had dinner with him, Tues had dinner with him, Wed would've played soccer but I was much too ill, I guess, Thurs had dinner with him, Fri got alone time by telling him that I was going to hang out with another english teacher, Sat he called about dinner/hanging out, but I told him I already had plans with the foreigners (which I actually did), today went to the soccer game, he invited me to go to Yongmunsa the buddhist temple in the afternoon, I said no because I wanted to relax, but then he wanted me to go to dinner, and I did. Wow. Ohhh, and in the coming week, we are jogging/playing soccer together on Tues, Thurs, and Fri morning and playing tennis after school on Wed. I can only imagine I'll be asked to eat with his family every night as well. This is way too much. I haven't actually had sufficient alone time in the last week to be able to read a book, as school was a mess with the co-teacher just up and leaving with her illness. I blame it on his kids. I would have said no many times before, but what am I supposed to do against a 3 and 7 year old yelling in the cutest voices "Mistah Eric, Let's have dinner!!!". I'm too much of a fucking softy. But seriously, this is getting a bit much. And no mom, its not just as easy as telling them I want alone time. First, they don't really understand the concept and secondly and most importantly, there is no way to go about this without possibly offending them and causing deep long term repercussions. I still need these people to help me get stuff done for my job, and if they take my asking for distance the wrong way, my next 10 months could be absolute hell. Let the tightrope walk begin.

Everland: Even more Koreans packed into an even smaller space

Well, today was yet another interesting day. The whole school, teachers and students, went on a field trip to Korea's version of Disneyland. So, around 8:30 am I boarded one of the two couch buses to the usual squeals and shrill cries. I'm not sure how the initial thrill of me has yet to wear off, but whenever I enter a room I'm still greeted by the usual 20 to 30 voices all yelling, "Eric!!!" or "Hi, Eric!!". Which I guess can be seen as a very small victory for getting these kids to speak English...they can at least all say "Hi" or "Hello". I'm setting my expectations low, deal with it. Anywhooo, an hour or so later we arrived at the park, and my darkest fears were confirmed: it was some kind of student day at the park and there were literally hundreds of couch buses filled with screaming Korean children just aching to practice their English (see above). Well, whatever, the coasters and sweet rides will surely help ease the pain to my eardrums. Wrong. It was decided and told to me at the gates that I would be following around Jeong Dongchun, the gym teacher, rather than some of the kids, who I actually get along with quite well and enjoy. Okay, fine, it makes sense to some degree as he has the most English skill of anyone here, since my co-teacher is somewhere trying not to die from some ailment or something. That was part of the reason why I wanted to relax and enjoy myself so much at Everland, as my co-teacher abruptly left school on thursday because she couldn't hear out of her right ear and she has no plans to come back all of next week. This wouldn't normally be a problem as she offers no assistance or help in any of the classes, but she also told me that I will need to teach all the extra classes where she usually taught grammar. Hmmm, I like the sound of that. I seriously have no fucking clue what is going to happen come Monday, but rest assured, I won't be in the know until a minute before. That's the Korean way, that and never being on time for anything. Back to Everland, so maybe following around the gym teacher won't be that bad, right? Hahahah, not. We spend about 10 minutes wandering through the park before I finally ask what we are doing, if we are gonna hit the roller coasters. No, I'm told, the lines are too long...fuck my anus. So where do we go? To the lame little passenger choo-choo (not even manly enough to warrent the name "train") that travels around the park, you know the one. Every park has one, you know, for the infants and the really freaking elderly. After that thrilling ride we wandered around one of the park's gardens, admiring the flowers. Do they realize how morally wrong a cock tease of this magnitude is? Why bring me all this way just so I can look at the coasters? If that's the case, it would have been better to leave me home. This brings me back yet again to the kid gloves again. Now, I've talked with a bunch of English teachers now, and its all the same. It must be some cultural mindset that if you don't know how to speak Korean, they you must be retarded and clearly can't even go number two with someone to watch you. Well, except for English...we're all experts on that, supposedly, but beyond that we are brain dead. Eventually, the gym teacher caught on t0 my numerous love lorn glances toward the nearest coaster and asked if I wanted to ride them. I said "Yes", to which he responded "But there are long lines?", to which I thought "I don't give a fuck" but to which I said "Yes, I know". It was then decided that I would be allowed to ride the coaster and they found some of the 8th grade boys and I tagged along with them. The wait was supposed to be 3 hours (yeah, pretty fucking ridiculous even for amusement parks), but the kids cut and dodged and pushed old ladies out of the way to cut our waiting time down to 2 hours..ehhh. This brings me to the day's and my Korean trip's "Wow, I'm fucking lucky" moment. The coaster was a brand new wooden one, almost identical to Viper at Six Flags. Well, going down the first massive drop, I decided to hold my hands up and somehow my hand hit the side of my head absolutely perfectly and my glasses flew off my head. So here I am, in the midst of a enjoyable roller coaster ride, and I'm already now planning ahead to how the hell I'm going to get new glasses (I had forgetten that I have another pair at the apart.), and how I'm going to try to explain to my mom how my glasses were lost (I was leaning towards broken in a bar fight). Anyways, midway through the ride I happen to look in the car behind me and the little middle school girl behind me is holding my glasses out to me. Wow. Somehow, the glasses had flown back towards her and either hit her and she held on to them or they perfectly fell into her car. Whatever the explanation, it doesn't matter. By some stroke of luck, I managed to keep my glasses, meaning of course that I've used up my luck for years to come now. Everland itself wasn't terribly exhilarating, as there are only 3 coasters and some county fair style pukers that would interest me. It might be worth a trip back, only if I were accompanied by Ms. Sundaram, just so I could see the pain and sadness on her face when she gazes upon the European Village area. Their "representation" of German villages and the like, made me laugh and I've never actually been to Germany to know just how awful this area was. They even had signs written in Germany for show. Germany and the german language has been reduced to decorations. Beautiful. Also, the park finally showcased some really humorous awful English. My favorites were from the instructional video during the roller coaster line: "Do not over-play on the attractions" and "Do not be surprised by explosions". These weren't really bad English, but the idea of them made me laugh. How does one over-play? Who decides where that line is drawn? What explosions should I be expecting? How can you not be surprised by explosions? The coup'd'gras (I know I didn't spell that right) was the showy parade. The parade itself was the usual overblown spectacle, but something caught my eye. Of the dancers not wearing animal heads, that is, I could see their face, at least 60% were whiteys. I felt bad for the bastards, reduced to animals at a zoo, constantly blindsided with flashbulbs and yelled at. I was so tempted to just run into the parade, break the retaining rope and set them all free. I really don't how they got so many foreigners. Did they just use foreigners convicted of minor crimes as indentured servants of a sort, owned by Everland until they work off their crimes? I'm not sure, but I'm gonna do my research. I expect many hagwans (private English academies) are missing their English speaking monkeys. After the parade is was back to the bus, as we only had around 5 hours to spend at the park before heading home. The bus ride home was surprisingly pleasant, as I found out that our couch bus was packing a built in kareoke machine. Ohh, hells yeah. I'm still coming down from my cold and my voice is not completely back, but when you have a mike shoved into your face and "Let It Be" by the Beatles is queued up, you don't have any choice but to let it be. Song finished, queue the screams and squeals. Now I really feel like a member of a freaking boy band. I also was given Yesterday and Happy Together to sing. Sadly, only one other student and one of the teachers sang besides me. These folks are just so collectively terrified of fucking up, its ridiculous. Not surprisingly, the one student who sang four different Korean tunes is also my best student and has the best English. What a strange coincidence....

Me, Malnourished? Really?

It's obviously been a while since I posted last, so I do apologize to the 2 or 3 of you out there that actually care even the slightest about what I do with my time here in Hanguk (Korean for Korea). I was at an English speaker conference/lock up all of last week and I couldn't really get internet. I'll post soon on the goings on at that little shindig soon, I promise, but for the time being I need to discuss more about the god damn kid gloves they are handling me with over here. Most of this deals with the cold I developed last week Monday and is still lingering to this day, which prompted me to lose my voice during the workshops last week. Kinda hard to meet and chat with english speakers when you can't actually talk. Anyways, on my first day back, as luck would have it, I had one of my freak nosebleeds and the gym teacher saw that and freaked out. When I got to school that was all the news and I actually was pulled aside by the gym teacher so he could diagnose me. He thinks I'm suffering from a combo of malnourishment, too much exercise and not enough sleep. The malnourishment one is particularly funny as they have all seen how much bloody food I shove down my gullet and if I am in fact malnourished then that is the directly the fault of this country and its food. Course, after my 3 nosebleed in 2 days this evening, the discussions and prescriptions aren't gonna stop anytime soon. I'm thinking that it's a combination of the really dry air here, the really shitty quality of said air, the amount of cigarette smoke I'm forced to breathe in on a daily basis, and the massive lack of accessible water. That's one thing that has really bugged me about Korea. I'm used to having meals with a water glass that I refill 3 to 4 times a meal...I need alot of H20 to stay hydrated. Here most meals have no water at all, and if they do it's a tiny little glass the size of a double shot glass. As much as the Korean food burns/stings going down, its insane to think they don't have water handy. And since my teachers think I'm dying they aren't gonna let me play soccer and I really don't feel like trying to argue with these people...it just doesn't work.
My other issue that has come to the forefront is that of "downtime". I think it came about when over the weekend the gym teacher asked if I ever get homesick. I obviously said yes, and he was genuinely shocked and responded that if I ever get homesick again, I should just call him and do stuff with him. Now that he knows I get homesick, I don't think he's gonna allow me a moment to myself in which to possibly become homesick. Now the easy answer would be to simply tell him I don't wanna do stuff with him on such and such occasion because I want some alone time but the problem with this is two fold in my mind: 1) I don't possess enough Korean or he enough English for me to accurately explain the idea of downtime/breathing room without offending him (I'm trying not to burn too many bridges, as I need them to get around) 2) The Korean cultural mindset may not be able to grasp the idea of "alone time". The second problem is the big one, as from what I've seen, there really is no where you can be alone here. There are just simply way too many people in too small a space. Take the national treasure mountains I visited last weekend for example. Moving around the trails in the middle of the freaking woods felt like an amusement park line as you can only move as fast as the person in front of you and so on. You were almost always bumping into and getting into the way of some other traveler. Now the gym teacher is a nice guy, make that incredibly nice guy, but I'm quickly realizing that he isn't any genius or remarkable conversationalist. Apparently gym teachers aren't too different wherever you go. I don't mean to demean gym teachers but you simply don't see Rhodes Scholars or Genius Grant winners teaching kids how to bump and set properly. Even if my Korean got good enough to converse with him on a fluent level, I'm sure the conversation would still be sadly lacking, as he doesn't realize what level of banter and such I had the privilege of enjoying back in the states. Regardless, he seems determined to fill whatever void I have in my life, as I spent a total of 7 hours in the last two days at his house after school. Now our arrangements began as helping each other with Korean and English respectively on the way to and from school, then it evolved to tutoring each other for 30 minutes each after school. That was all good, but now it is getting a bit out of hand. Now I'm honored that they want me to come over for dinner every once in a while, but from what he said today it sounds like he expects me to eat with them every day. Which means that after being at school from 8:30 to 5:30, I'll be at his house from 5:30 to 9:30pm, which is simply too late to finally get home. In the meantime while we wait for dinner to finish cooking we tutor each other, but now he's having his 7 year old tutor me in Hangul and vice versa. This is fine in principle, but poor Jaehan just wants to play. Dude's 7 years old and he's already spending his free time outside of school practicing learning English? Just let the kid be a kid. If he wants to tutor me fine, it works for the first hour or so. After that he just gets grumpy and cranky the more teaching he has forced down his throat, and then it's no good for anyone. If a 7 year old doesn't wanna be taught, there is no power in the 'verse that can change that. Fuck, even I don't really wanna study after my day. I really just wanna play with the kids, but I can't. Boo. I know everyone over here really just wants to learn English, but they gotta understand that at some point I get sick of teaching English. You don't wanna bring your work home and I'd prefer if I didn't either. I'm sure this message came off really meandering and rambling and probably pretty trivial to your ears, but its a tricky situation. Overall, everything is really wonderful, but this little stuff is gonna fester and grow if I let it and I'm really struggling to find a solution to it, as no one over here speaks English well enough to understand the nuanced stuff in which I spend so much of my time.

"Penis Contest"

Well, I'm sure this post sounded a lot differently when I wrote it yesterday, as I was still coming down from a day of heavy drinking and hadn't had to keep from strangling my co-teacher all day (another story, suffice it say...I don't like her at all). My weekend began, or was supposed to, at 6:00am Saturday for a soccer club game. Since I really didn't feel like getting up that early just to watch a soccer game, I slept it...to the ungodly late hour of 8:30am. Yeah, I have that much of a night life...full nights sleep and still up before 9 on a Saturday. After I crawled out of bed and fed myself, I decided that rather than rot of boredom alone in my apartment, I would journey to Seoul and hit up the numerous markets to find some goodies from home. From there is was on to the train station and then on to Seoul, but not before stumbling into one of the fellow native speakers who was also heading to Seoul. I didn't catch his name, as he was Scottish/Irish/doesn't really matter as I couldn't understand him terribly well, but he did manage to write down directions to the foreigner/import grocery store in Itaewon. I now had a destination, and an hour or so later I was standing outside of my personal oasis in the middle of the desert. I thought it was pretty funny that the Hannam Supermarket was in the basement of the Volvo building...not sure what the hell they were doing in Korea either, the Asians certainly don't wanna buy their crap. The sights contained within the said grocery store were so beautiful that I actually started to tear up a little, no joke. My eyes got especially watery when I gazed upon their beer section and spotted real beers (Guiness, Spaten, you name it they had it). Also couldn't help but chuckle when I saw America's finest hard liquor, Dr. Boston's Rum, lining the shelves. But, alas, since Guiness and other like beers ran for around 4.80 per bottle and soju is very drinkable and 98 cents per bottle, I passed on the liquor. But I did walk out with salt, pepper, BBQ sauce (missed that shit), mouthwash, power converters, and my holy grail, Oreos (I really missed that shit). After leaving the grocery store it was on to the Tech market in Yongsan. Beautiful, that's really all I can say to describe it. I walked out of Yongsan with a copy of Okami for PS2 (my Korean PS2 that I have yet to acquire) and 4 black market DVDs. It seems odd to see such shady dealings just outside the door of legitimate electronics dealers, but whatever. If I can get Hellboy 2, Dark Knight, Iron Man, and The Incredible Hulk for 10 bucks, I'm content. From here it was back to the homestead, as my groceries were getting mighty heavy on my back (huge tactical error on my part to buy the heavy stuff first...dumbass). The train ride home was unusually engaging as I conversed with the woman sitting next to me...in real English, not broken words. Turns out she has been speaking English much longer than I have, hell, longer than I've been alive. She lived in New York for 25 years, her son was 10 months old when they moved to the US, and he now attends Stanford for grad school (got accepted to Harvard and Stanford). It was incredible to be talking to a middle aged Korean woman about American politics, economy, and foods we missed. You can't imagine the shock hearing this woman tell me: "I really miss Thanksgiving food...the turkey and cranberry sauce". Hell, I can't stand cranberry sauce for the most part, and here I am thousands of miles from home listening to a woman speak lovingly of it.
Sunday was even more fun, as every outing with the soccer club turns out to be...must be the heavy, heavy drinking. Our adventure started around 10am when the whole team and crowd boarded a couch bus donated by the county magistrate in honor of our success. The big man himself even came out to watch our first game. Everyone on the same vehicle with no concern for driving means only one thing: the drinking starts that much early. 10:30am, to be exact, is when the club started badgering (haha) to drink with them. Being a man of strong morals and principles, I held off...until we reached the field in Suwon at noon. Since I couldn't play as the tourney is 30 and over, it was all drinking and eating for me. No sooner had we hopped off the bus and relieved ourselves in the bushes, as there was no bathrooms anywhere, we eating kimbap (Korean sushi rolls) and chicken along with soju and beer. I felt a little uncomfortable going in the bushes as we were only a stones throw from Suwon Olympic Stadium, where only a few years ago some of the world's best soccer was played, but there really wasn't anywhere else to go. Plus, when in Rome... I feel like I did my part as English teacher, as now the entire club knows how to say someone is a drunk. Trust me, they used it alot. It felt like a Packers or Badgers game except that when they drunkenly got up and ran around, they actually ran out on the field and had to be pulled back several times by lines judges. The team won its first game 6-3 to move on to the round of 8, so, of course, drinking ensued. Sometime before our quarterfinal game, I was called over to chat with my old friend, the Yangpyeong Casanova. As you may or may not remember from the previous post, this entertaining man speaks very little English but makes up for it with graphic gestures and expressions. First, these men were amazed at the size of my feet, and as is custom with any gathering of males, regardless of location, the conversation eventually shifted to penis size. Naturally. They were all talking up their meat sticks and were curious as to my size, even going so far as to issue a "Penis Contest", where we were supposed to, I suppose, whip them out. The Casanova obviously built himself up, actually doubling over in pain when someone grabbed him around the knee, insinuating....well you can guess. The club pulled out the second game in PKs to move on to the semis, in a tourney that started with 500 or so teams. Not willing to pass up the opportunity to celebrate, the team, myself included, helped themselves to more soju before we even left the parking lot. It's an interesting feeling to be buzzed by 1pm and then sober by 5pm. Once back in town, it was off to dinner at one of the team member owned restaurants and more, you guessed it, alcohol. The tricky thing with team victory dinners is getting in a bite of food in between toasts and speeches, which obviously end with a shot of soju. Here the Casanova and I went head to head, as he decided we would drink our soju out of a real glass, the water glass, instead of those weeny shot glasses. This also meant that my sole liquid refreshment would be soju. As the custom is to never fill your own glass, we went back and forth watching the others glass in case it got close to being empty and the other was starting to wuss out. I believe that in the end I won, as I was less red faced and not sweating as badly as him, although he did invite me out for a drink at the bars later. I do have to thank my extra foot of height, German and Irish blood, and the fact he was 20 years my senior for this esteemed victory. Now it's off to the native speaker's conference for the next 4 days, where, one assumes, I will actually meet other English speakers.

Bored...good thing I've got Jesus to keep me company

Well, another week is in the books, so I figured I'd recap the less than exciting aspects of the week past. I had absolutely no work to do after Monday since the students were all taking midterms. Midterms were interesting to observe in themselves as they basically amounted to ACT or SAT exams, as everyone in the school had to move their desks down into the cafeteria and took their tests in that big room. Everyone was forced to be there for the whole time, regardless of whether they actually had an exam. After 3 45 minute exams, two 15 minute breaks in between, and lunch our days were done, at least for the students and myself. So I had to catch the bus with some of the students, which was interesting in itself as today I was accompanied back to Yangpyeong with 9 of the 7th and 8th grade girls...Suffice it to say there was plenty of whispering, giggling and the occasional "Hi Eric!". With this shortened schedule, I arrived home at 1:15pm, with little to do, as the gym teacher and the fellow soccer club members were still working, so that shoots Korean tutoring and soccer. I decided I would wander around town and finally get a definitive idea of what my town has to offer. My final verdict: not much. I really shouldn't expect too much as Yangpyeong is only 80,000 strong and it has plenty compared to my previous homes (ohhhh Oshkosh...). The town is roughly dissected into 3 sections: the area north of the Train tracks, the area south of the Han river, and the central section. I live north of the train tracks, and it is comprised mainly of restaurants (like all of town), the golf/driving range, the bus depot, the Walmart-esque super store and the major electronics store. South of the Han river is made up of more restaurants and a few apartments and hotels with a pretty view over the river. Most of anything of consequence is housed in the central downtown area. When I say there are tons of restaurants, I'm not exaggerating. Honest to god, restaurants/bars alone are about 50%, at least, of all buildings and businesses in town. Throw in convenience stores and PC bongs (rooms where kids go to play video games for many hours for a hourly rate...when I say play video games, I mean Starcraft), and you've covered close to 70% of the structures in town. Which leaves me with little to do if I don't feel like eating, drinking, or playing Starcraft. After searching the town up and down, I found 2 tiny music stores, a movie rental place, an arcade, a bowling alley, a soccer store, and a few bookstores. The arcade and bookstores were disappointments as the arcade didn't have any DDR-esque games, only 1 Beatmania machine, and the bookstores offered nothing in English, no surprise. That's probably good as I have so many unread books cluttering my room back in the states. I just hope I can hold out until Christmas when, hopefully, reinforcements arrive. Now I just need to find some people to enjoy all these things with, as bowling, drinking, noribong singing, etc. are not much fun alone. I did actually communicate with someone on the street today!! Unfortunately, she was some religious lady handing out little pamphlets on how something fun and wonderful is the devil and we're all going to hell for enjoying it. I was just so excited that I found someone that speaks even kinda decent English that I took the pamphlet with hesitation. Plus she had her name and phone number on the pamphlet...Ohhh yeah, I pulled a number! Score! Hmmmm, maybe not... This simply continues my trend of being the target of missionaries. I'm not sure what draws these people to me. Is it the stench of sin and vice that I give off or is it the sense that I'm some poor pathetic fuck who really needs Jesus in order to give his worthless life some semblance of meaning? Must be a little bit of both.

Babysitting, in a sense

Well, another interesting and fun-filled day is yet again behind me and we come to the point where I reminisce. Today started a little later than yesterday, as nothing happened till noon, which meant I could sleep in and recover from the hard partying the previous night....ohh, who the fuck am I kidding? I wake up at 7am naturally after a full night's sleep and have absolutely no social life. Anyways, Mr. Jeong picked me up again today, this time for his children's school field day. Now, I had no idea what the hell to expect from this "field day" other than a gathering of small children in, presumably, a field, during the day, one would think. Sure enough, I wasn't too far off. Basically it's a monstrous picnic as the parents sit in the shade and chat/eat/drink with the other parents while the kids run around/run amok/yell/scream/play games. Of course, someone had the bright idea of equipping each kid with a pair of the inflatable "Thunder Sticks" you get at sports games. My god, the chaos. I got a mighty handful of stares as I was the only whitey in a group of a hundred to two hundred or so. Plus, Jeong Una and Jeong Jaehan, the PE teachers kids, were taking me around to show off. After a delicious lunch of kimbap and fruit, it was off to catch grasshoppers and crickets as apparently Koreans actually cook these bad boys. Saw a fair share of the buggers having sex and decided it would be far too cruel to send them to their doom right there and then. I'm sure they only have a life span of a couple days or so, and I figured I'd let them live it up for their fading lives. Now, after the field day was over I was planning to hop the bus to Seongnam to catch a soccer game that evening, but Mr. Jeong decided that if I helped him pick sweet potatoes he would drive me there and back. I agreed as I didn't really have a preference either way. So after a couple of hours in the field, we were trucking it to Seongnam in order to catch the game. Despite our haste, we still got there 10 minutes late. Thankfully, nothing happened until the second half when Seongnam subbed in their Brazilian, I'm assuming. 20 minutes after the sub, and Seongnam are going home 3-1 winners thanks to the efforts of DuDu, I shit you not (sorry unintentional pun, honestly). Now, I appreciate all the help and assistance that everyone has offered since I've been here, but at some point they need to take the god damn kid gloves off. I mean, I'm perfectly able to get to Seongnam and back on my own. Unless of course this is just the gym teachers way of ditching out on watching his kids. If so, kudos good sire. I've never been one to graciously accept help or even ask for it at all, so all this babysitting is starting to annoy the fuck out of me, as evident by the frequency of 4 letter words littering these last couple of sentences. I'm a loner at heart, sorry, that's just who I am. It's not gonna change. I like doing stuff for myself and get a great deal out of satisfaction out of getting things done that way. I feel like an infant at times and it's really starting to irk me. At some point you gotta take off the diapers and let me shit for myself. Otherwise, I'll be 40 and still needing someone to wipe my ass for me.

The 3 S's to Success: Sun, Soccer, and, of course, Soju

Well, I had an interesting day off yesterday. This whole weekend is some sort of Korean Independence day, or something like it. I had Friday off from school, and as usual, I didn't find out about the day off until Thursday. So much for making advanced plans. Anyways, on Thursday Mr. Jeong asked me if I wanted to come along to the soccer club's tournament games on Friday. Apparently, the team is in a Gyeonggi province soccer tourney,and Friday's games were to advance to the round of 16. I said yes, as I had nothing else to do and I thought that maybe I might get to play. Granted, I didn't expect to play as I'm sure a tourney as well organized as this one has rosters and what not that have to be followed. So off we headed to Suwon to kick some other town's ass. Upon arriving at the field I was amazed to find that we were playing on something other than a dirt field. As much as I hate the composite turf/carpet fields, this was still an improvement over dirt. Not surprisingly, I didn't get to play but that really didn't matter, as the team won both games despite a major refing snafu that led to a stoppage of play and our team arguing for 10 minutes at least....frankly, I'm not sure how most of the team didn't get tossed. The other team played a ball through to the forward, who was flagged offside by the line judge, so our entire team stopped playing. What they didn't see was the referee quickly wave off the line judge and issue no "Play on" or any indication that play was to continue. So our goalie kicked the ball casually back to where the free kick would be taken for the offside and the other team's forward easily took the ball and dribbled into the goal. Everybody threw a shit fit. It was pretty fucking sweet. Again, I'm not sure how that ref didn't either get his head smashed in or deal out any cards...weird. While, I didn't get to play, it's true, I was treated to lunch with the rest of the team fans: beer and fried chicken. We actually ordered out and sure enough, eventually a guy showed up on moped with our grub. After this substantial lunch, we headed back home to Yangpyeong for lunch? Yeah, that's right. After eating my fill at 2:00pm, I was treated to a large lunch/dinner at 5:00pm. The team sat around munching on budejige (ham, onions, peppers, and instant ramen mixed together in a stew of sorts) and takdoritang (same stew set up as before, this time with entire chicken drumsticks, breasts, etc. thrown in) while sipping much soju. After about 2 hours of this, the group insisted I head with them over to a restaurant owned by one of the players and was treated to a couple pitchers of beer. All of this delicious food and drink, as usual, on someone else's tab. Plus I got to take home all the leftover taktoritang. Yum. I can't wait till I can actually communicate with these guys. They all seem like a good time.