Work?.....What work?

Yes, as the title suggests, there hasn’t been too much work going since I last posted. Now people could argue that (and rightly so) that there isn’t much work being done by this particular English talky-box on any given day, but this week has been a special exception. There was no classes last week Thursday (where I spent most of the day writing last week’s post), no classes on Tuesday, and only a half day yesterday (Wednesday).

Jumping off topic for a bit, but just a few seconds ago one of the money ladies came in and started discussing paycheck stuff. Naturally, I was worried at first cuz my last paycheck, which was just a week ago, had additional overtime pay of about 400 dollars. Why be worried?? Well, cuz I didn’t do any overtime. Thankfully, they were just explaining that through some error, I had been paid twice, once last week and another time today. Damn electronic banking. Had it been the good old days I would have been half way to the county line before anyone discovered the missing funds. As is, I didn’t even realize that I had been paid twice before the mistake was caught. So much for all the Dom Perignon and expensive women that paycheck was gonna bring me. Maybe next month.

Back to my free days. Let’s hit this shit chronologically:

On Tuesday, I had zero classes as grades 3-6 were taking nationwide standardized tests all day, leaving all the teachers with nothing to do. Our office decided to do something fun, as opposed to sitting in front of our computer screens for 8 hours (well, maybe the rest of the school would find that fun….they really do like Starcraft and computer games here), so we went out for lunch. We had deliberated over food, movie or art museum and naturally lunch won, as food > movie and art. I was told we were going to some New York steak house and having seen how Korea does “American” food, I was skeptical. I was, however, quite pleasantly surprised. We quickly piled in the cars (everyone was generous enough to let me sit in the front, as they know I’m too big for the back…..that’s what she said) and headed off for the restaurant. I was even more surprised to find out that this restaurant was within the mythical “French neighborhood”. I call it mythical because I had heard rumors about its existence, but had yet to find out where the hell it was, despite being in my backyard, so to speak. It would probably be more appropriate to just call me dumb, as the neighborhood clearly wasn’t hard to find. Now, it wasn’t anything super amazing, but it did have: nicer buildings and streets than most of Seoul, French flags on display all around, appealing restaurants with names in French, and some people not speaking Korean. Now its obviously not much, but if you have spent 1.2 years in a place where everything and everyone is so mind-numbingly the same, you would wet yourself over a little variety too. You might ask, “What is a New York steak house doing in a French village?”. The answer: Koreans are bad at geography (course US students would probably put Seoul and Paris right next to each other too….actually I’m certain they would). Anyways, we pulled up to the little steak house and I soon realized that this food might actually be pretty good. How did I know? Cuz the restaurant’s name was “Eric’s New York Steak House”. Now, as I am clearly the most famous Eric ever (that guitarist guy? Please. The dude from Monty Python? You must be joking), they had most certainly named it after yours truly. Now, as I wanted to play it humble and avoid all autograph seekers, I decided not to tell the waiter that my bill should be free. I did laugh when some Korean businessmen were reading some of the signs at the table next to me and began uttering my name in confusion. I was tempted to clear up their confusion by standing up and yelling “I’m Eric, bitch!!!”, but again I was playing it modest. All in all the food was delicious and I shall return, especially when the Germans inevitably roll through the French village and we Yanks will need it as our base of operations.

After lunch we decided to go hiking around on of the smaller parks near my home. Why I have no idea, as the other 5 ladies in the office appear to get the majority of their exercise clicking away on their computer mousse (mice?), shopping for clothes on the web. Needless to say, it was shortlived. We wandered around for a bit, sat down, rested, whined about being tired, then we went back down. I can’t be too critical as some of these women had shorter strides than Rounds, so they had to do a lot of walking.

Things got more interesting when they dropped me off at my house. Right as I was hopping out of the car, my primary co-teacher asked, “Eric, can we visit your apartment?” WHAT???? Don’t get me wrong, I really didn’t care (not like my apt is gonna be dirty or anything), but wow was that request out of nowhere. I guess I’ll have to chalk it up to Koreans’ innate curiosity about how we non-Koreans live and conduct our lives. I said it was okay and so they headed up (both co-teachers and the music teacher). We grabbed some snacks first at the Institutes little convenience store, then settled down in the living room for cookies, dried squid and oranges. It was different, to say the least. The first few minutes were spent soaking in their amazement at how clean the apt was and how I can actually manage to feed myself (which says a lot about their expectations/experiences with men/Korean men). My ego sufficiently stroked, we sat down in the living room, listened to Stevie Wonder, chatted (well, they mostly talked in Korean and I listened in or zoned out) and ate. Now, I know the less scrupulous of my readers (cough Collin cough) would suggest I do “adult” things with the ladies, but obviously he would be saying that in jest (wouldn’t he??), as that would be incredibly stupid in real life. They soon departed and I was left relieved and quite confused. That seems to happen a bunch in Korea.

Wednesday saw us taking a half day due to our hiking day (what???). I was confused too. I think this may be an annual or seasonal thing, but seeing as my school is overwhelming stocked with female employees and teachers and given Korean womens’ terrible allergic reactions to sweat and physical strain (just a guess), I can’t imagine this kind of thing happens all that often. After lunch, we all headed off for a nearby peak, I in my usual work dress clothes and the co-workers decked out in full hiking gear (naturally). The mountain in question was only a few minutes drive from the local subway station near my house. It was remarkable how quickly Seoul just disappeared. Seriously, we went from the hussle and bussle and city around Sadang station to hills, green and a whole lotta nothing in seconds. I had no idea I was so close to the edge. Anyways, I decided to go up with the female office mates, rather than with the group of male teachers for several reasons: 1) The women are much liable to stop and rest every ten feet, thus giving me plenty of time to relax and actually enjoy the sights 2) The male teachers will undoubtedly be drinking, drinking and then drinking just a smidgen more and I obviously wanted no part in that. Turns out I was dead on with both assumptions. The ladies tired quickly and the men got drunk. Course, I’d be tired from just a little hiking too if my legs and calfs and leg muscles were only as thick as my real forearms (yeah, that’s pretty fucking skinny). We stopped part of the way up for pictures, then headed back down to meet up with the rest of the group for dinner. I only mention the pictures because people say that a picture is worth a thousand words. You be the judge. In one pic, I appeared in all my goofy-faced, confused and frightened glory, while the co-teacher thought she looked ugly and hadn’t fixed her hair properly, so she just covered over her face with her hand. Great pic. Ohhh, and if you get the chance to spend time outdoors with a Korean woman do it. Watching them freak out and run away from a single mosquito are beyond priceless. Once back at the bottom we walked to the nearby restaurant and settled in. I was originally concerned with the menu, as the signboard outside mentioned dog soup and I got terribly sick last time I ate dog (not to mention it tastes lousy), but we had duck instead. The meal was uneventful except for the head administrator guy sitting down near me and trying to get me to drink. By this time he had had his fair share of makgolli (Korean rice wine) and was a tad bit loud and pushy. Eventually I relented to a single glass of beer, but he wasn’t satisfied. Thankfully, I had the non-drinking ladies of the school to back me up. Then he started talking to me in Korean. This is one of those times when I wish I had never bothered to learn Korean at all. He called me cute and I really had no idea how to respond. What do you say when a 40 year old man says that to you?? I’m open to any answers, cuz I don’t have any. After that he wanted me to repeat some stuff in Korean. One of the things he wanted me to say, I’m told, was the Korean equivalent to asking someone out on a date. Don’t ask me why he asked it or how that fits in with the previous comments. I simply don’t know.

As for the events of this week (the preceding paragraphs were written last week, just to clarify the time frame), not too much. The school airwaves have been buzzing this week due to several things: 1) Obviously its swine flu. Don't know what its like back in the States but Korea might just be the most terrified country in the whole world (with the US a close second), so naturally this swine flu thing is gonna frighten the hell out of folks. I'm told that a student came down with swine flu last week, so everyone is on high alert. The students have started wearing facemasks in class, which, combined with the hats/hoodies/warm weather clothing on their faces, has made it nearly impossible to tell who everyone is. Poor form on me for not memorizing what their eyes look like and thus being able to recognize them that way, since I'm not seeing any other part of their faces. I get warned on a daily basis to take care of myself, yadda, yadda, yadda, but thankfully we haven't gotten to the point where people want me to wear a facemask all day or eat this disgusting looking and smelling traditional remedy that may share common ingredients with my excrement (not true, but you never know...). I've heard some schools have closed out of fear of it spreading further among the children, but that hasn't come up yet at mine. 2) Recently there was a horrible child molestation case that worked its way through the courts and people (rightly so) are fucking pissed. The basic jist is that some older man kidnapped an 8 year old girl, raped her repeatedly, then to cover his tracks, poured some manner of chemical into her vagina. I'm not sure if he poured some chemical or if he was just so brutal that he permanently damaged her insides, but she had to have many surgeries and is forever crippled. For his god awful offenses, he received some asinine sentence (3 years in jail and 12 years of probation, or something like that), which isn't all that unusual for this kind of stuff in Korea, but this time people got so angry (again, rightly so) that the government finally took notice and have started working to change the laws that govern cases such as this. Parents are scared, so today we had a police official come to school to give some presentation on how to keep yourself safe from predators. Thankfully, his presentation featured no white foreign English teacher types as the predators to further slander our names (though some opportunistic types in the parliament and papers have brought up that Korea must do more to protect its children from the devilish foreign pedophile plague.....god damn I hate this rascist fuckers some times). 3) We also continue to hear news about the student who was hit by a car and put into a coma a few weeks back. I'm told she has finally woken up, but she's in pretty bad shape. Now, I have no idea about the details of the case, but from what I've seen, it could have been either party at fault. Obviously, Korean drivers are terrible. Stats seem to document that, at least in regards to accidents, they are the worst in the developed world. Disregard for traffic rules, always in a rush to get everywhere, poor basic driving skills, GPSs/TVs/cellphones in every car, and just generally unobservant. Any one of these could have been the cause. Hell, I nearly got run over in a crosswalk yesterday, when I clearly had right of way. I saw him, so I was able to get out of the way. I guaran-fucking-tee that he didn't see me. Pedestrians, however, are some of the most unobservant that I have ever seen. I was taught from an early age to always look before I go, because you never know who is driving the car coming at you. Usually you'd be fine in the States, but you still are taught to look. Here, where they know without a shadow of a doubt that the driver is lousy, walk into intersections blindly and without any regard for the consequences. I chalk most of that up to always being on a cellphone/gameboy/tech, but even when a car announces its presence and has to slam on its brakes to avoid the person, I rarely see apology or surprise in the pedestrian's behavior. It seems (in my opinion, for whatever that's worth) like the people on foot assume that they are always in the right and cars must bend to their whim. Frankly, I'll pay proper reverence to the several hundred pound, multiple horse powered metal contraption of death.

The other new of note is that next Wednesday I will have SMOE (the Seoul Office of Education) reps coming to observe my class and then discuss how what I did was completely wrong. This is different from the open lesson, which I have at the end of the month, as that at least has native teachers that observe and can possibly give helpful constructive criticism. I have no idea if either of these reps can speak English, have ever taught English or even if they have ever taught anything in their lives. I have low expectations, as this is Korea and experience has taught me to think thusly. I think my co-teachers are freaking out for me, but I don't really mind. I certainly hope they aren't expecting me to put together some super lesson, cuz I'm not. If they wanna observe me teaching, they are gonna observe how I actually teach on a daily basis. Since I'm exceedingly tall, white and good at being a talking box (although that doesn't happen too much in the new job), I can't really see what they could possibly criticize me for. Either way I shall dismiss them out of hand, as I still don't do well with authority figures, even after a year of Korea's dearth of authority figures. Should be amusing.

On the homefront, as some of you may have seen, I have a few bugs to deal with. The earwigs started showing up in my apartment about a week or two ago and they have been a nasty nuisance since then. During the worst of the onslaught, I was killing about 30 or so per session (they all appeared in the 10 or so hours I was gone for work and Korean class). Things have slowed down, as I hastily taped over all the edges of my windows and filled the corners with paper towel wads, but they still manage to find a way in somehow. I contacted the head teacher guy, our mouthpiece to the folks actually in charge of our building, and he told me, and I quote, "They sprayed the trees on the other side of the path behind our units and they also did a walk through our units. There should be less bugs. This is as much as they can do to help with the bug problem. You should notice alot less bugs around as the tempurature gets cooler. They're virtually gone by winter." As you can imagine, I didn't take to well to this weak-ass response. Firstly, "This is as much as they can do". Seriously??? How about fix the cracks/gaps in the lining around my walls that allow the buggers to get in, hide, and (I hope to god no) reproduce. Then there's the shitty windows that let a healthy amount of air and bugs in. They could replace those. But they won't. Cuz its Korea. Secondly, "they are virtually gone by winter". Don't know where this fucker comes from, but in my neck of the woods virtually gone and absolutely, positively fucking gone are not the same thing. I sent a response back to him saying the same stuff and his response didn't make any attempt to assuage my fears. He just suggested I ensure that my screen is on the proper side, so more bugs can't get in. It is. FAIL!!!! I know its not his fault, but still he could at least lie to me to make me feel better. In fact, I just stopped writing to kill another two of the bastards. I'm almost tempted to gather a bunch of these nasties up in a box or something then release them all under this fuckers door, since he is just next door.

Now on to cheerier news. Namely the random shit I've done over the last few weekends. Let's start it off with 2 weekends ago. That weekend promised to be quite nutty, as my co-teacher (the attractive single one) asked if I wanted to go to this big global fair shindig in the neighboring city of Incheon with her....just the two of us. Now, naturally everybody I talked to thought this was a date or something, but I, ever the pessimist, didn't know what the hell to call it. Who knows if we can actually interact outside the workplace atmosphere (my guess, given my social "skills", would be no)? Anyways I was looking forward to an epically interesting or disastrous weekend, but it was not to be. She never called to decide when we were going to meet. When we were back at school on Monday, she talked about not being able to go, but never apologized or said anything about not contacting me. Did she forgot that we were supposed to go together (remember her suggestion)? Did she just avoid the issue to save face? I have no fucking clue. Korean women....ghaslgdhalsgh. Take all the weird unexplainable stuff that all women pull add the Korean multiplers and you have some massive math problem that I have no hope of solving, ever. I'm an English major, this much calculation is way way beyond my metal ability.

Anyways, with all this free time on my hands, I decided to get together with the regular gang. We headed to Itaewon to catch a Rolling Stones vs. Beatles cover band challenge. Not surprisingly, the Beatles sounded a lot better. While enjoying the music, we quickly realized why we never like to come to Itaewon, the foreigner district. During the hour or so we were there we witnessed a bunch of GIs engage in some pretty juvenile horseplay (there was lots of bro humping), drunkenly spill their beer over our table, and slap the ass of a Korean women leaving the bar. Makes me proud to call myself American. Christ. Being ever so happy to leave, we moved on to a bar/club down the street. This place felt like we were back in the States. See, normally at clubs populated mostly by Koreans, any foreign girl will be free (for the most part) to dance without rando dudes saddling up on their backsides. The reason is that many Korean men actually like dancing and go to clubs for this purpose. Also, it usually takes them anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours to build up the liquid courage to talk to a foreign lady. This club, being as it was mostly populated by foreign folk, was not like that. The girls stepped foot on the floor and there were the fellas, like a scene from Night at the Roxbury. All in all, we won't be going back anytime soon. On Sunday, Jenna and I wandered around Seoul in lieu of anything else to do. We found a cool ass used bookstore in Itaewon and gorged ourselves on books. I splouged myself when I found a used copy of Stephen Colbert's book and a Lewis Black book. I'm a little tired of Korea's "humor" and I badly needed an injection of actual funny. They also had a substantial section of books in other foreign languages. However, I was disappointed to find that inferior languages such as French and German featured huge numbers of books while the Spanish section was a shelf or two. Also the only non-critical thesis type book in the Spanish section was actually Portuguese. Nice try guys. They are almost the same. We also wandered around Mt. Namsan for some exercise and topped off the day with a trip to the Namdaemun market, where I found the awful English/Engrish shirts I had been looking for. FINALLY. I would show them to you, but I'm pretty sure my entire reader base consists of people who will be receiving said t-shirts and I don't wanna ruin the surprise.

Last week again featured me lazing around Seoul. A few of us gathered together in the French village of Seoul for some wine and other typically snobbish French endeavors. In this case we looked down on people that couldn't authentically speak our language and people that weren't as intellectual as us. Seriously, we were curious to see what the fuck this "French Village" was actually like. It would appear that all that entails is lots of wine and cheese shops, which is just fine with us, as you can't find that shit almost anywhere anyway. Cheap wine in hand, we sat down at the outdoor seating and drank away the afternoon while watching the downpour of rain mere feet from our protected heads. Sufficiently liquored up at 4pm (or was it 5pm...), we grabbed some grub then moved to Gangnam for some drinks. We unfortunately chose the "Irish Pub". Granted, they had Guinness like a real pub, but I sincerely doubt real Irish Pubs are filled with affluent young couples and feature Shakira and MJ and Rihanna concerts playing on the projection TV. Also we go fucked over on the bill, cuz we are Korean and can't do shit about stuff like this. Rather than charging us for the half pints of Guinness one of us ordered, they were charged as if they ordered full pints (a difference of 6 bucks per beer...yeah, guinness is hella overpriced in this country, but what the hell else can you do for decent beer?) and they charged us for a full extra Guinness we didn't order. We won't be going back. On Sunday, Jenna and I headed to another bookstore so I could pick up some practice books for the TOPIK test (the Test of Proficiency in Korean). Why, you ask? Well rather than have people say "Who gives a shit?" when I tell them I know Korean, I can possibly show them a piece of paper....and then get the same, "Who gives a shit?" response. Ohhh well.

This weekend saw Jenna and I heading to Incheon cuz "well, we've never been there before and they gotta have something to do." Yep. Turns out there isn't a whole lot to do in Incheon. Course it would have turned out better had we actually known where to go. Case in point: when we exited the subway, we decided to walk towards the pier to see the ocean. Cept, the harbor turned out to be over an hour walk away, and the whole stretch to the harbor was filled with ugly, loud, and terribly stinky steel melting/fabrication factories and various other heavy industry companies. And I used to think Seoul smelt awful. ahahahdhahh, was I naive. We eventually gave up on that foolhardy venture and hoped a bus that happened to take us to the only official recognized China Town in Korea. Nice. Now, as you can see from the pics, it was nothing like a real town in China, but it was something different (lord knows that that is so hard to come by in Korea) and so we were amused. There were plenty of cool looking murals, sculptures, shops selling semi-Chinese looking junk (in this case we were happy to see the Made in China etchings on all of the trinkets), and restaurants. China Town was also attached to Jayu Park, which featured some cool architecture and a Gen. Douglas McArthur statue commemorating America coming to save South Korea's ass from the Communists during the Korean war. I was a bit surprised to see General McArthur hanging out in Incheon, but apparently that was where the US troops made their landing. We soon saw all we really cared to see and quickly headed back towards Seoul, but not before being accosted and chatted up by a really weird and neurotic fella from New York. We were lucky enough to run into him not once, but twice. Back in Seoul we headed to the picture show house to watch "Inglorious Bastards". Tis a very good movie. I felt a little said for the Koreans, as their vulgar words lack the creativity and beauty of their English counterparts and much was undoubtedly lost in translation. Really, there is no way to translate the transcendent beauty that is calling someone a "pecker-sucker" or a "pecker-sucking bastard". Ohh English, how I love thee.

Pics: See "Incheon's China Town" album