Workplace Poison

I've yet to post my Jeju travel journal, and that will happen soon, but this is a bit more important. So here goes. The most bizarre workplace experience I've ever had.

So, some background. The head instructor is pretty much an elevated teacher. His job, in addition to teaching, is to watch the videos of our classes and give us pointers on how we could teach better, as well as to deal with management - that is, let us know what the management (who only speaks Korean) is saying, and talk to them on our behalf.

Ben, our current HI, has never been HI before, and he's stressing out about this job. He's doing the telling us what management wants just fine, but he's not standing up for us.

Now, last Monday we had a particularly fascist meeting, which started with being told that we now have to input the grades from the system into our report cards - mindless data-entry - because the Korean secretaries, who get paid for the job, don't want to do it anymore. We don't get paid for anything outside of class time. Obviously, none of us appreciated this, particularly because it shows just how little they care about us and how much they care about the Koreans.

In addition to that, Ben's speech that day - which obviously came directly from Kathy, our manager, who is also new at the job (has only been here one term before) - talked a lot about how we needed to improve as teachers, saying that if we don't improve, they'll drop us down to three classes a week - which is in direct violation of our contracts, which state that we are guaranteed a minimum of four.

One of the teachers pointed out that this was a contract-breaker, and Ben responds, well, you COULD be fired.

Now. We're a bit shocked by all this. Threats were never a part of our relationship with management before, and none of us appreciate it.

We're also told about the summer intensive program (extra classes, which a lot of teachers want because they get extra pay). Someone asks if it's mandatory, we're told yes, it is.

Obviously it's mandatory if we've got as many classes to teach as there are teachers, and that's normal, but that's not what we were told when I asked for clarification.

Their deal was, for example, I don't want a summer morning class - I value my sanity and my hapkido. Wes does want one - he needs the money. But, if they choose me to do a class and not Wes, it's tough shit for both of us.

So instead of making two teachers happy, they get two incredibly pissed off teachers.

I ask about this, and am told that we've got to do what we're told, not complain, threats, etcetera.

So.

This whole situation is obviously poisonous.

At the start of the term everyone was feeling good, but suddenly we feel terrible. We're not respected, we're being threatened and talked down to.

I decide, then, to write a letter to Ben, detailing why we're unhappy and what about the management's attitude has got to change, along with some requests for Ben - very polite ones, mind - to be on our side and stand up for us, because who else will? he's the HI, he speaks Korean, and it's his job, but he's only parroting what he's told, not defending us. Of course, I used kinder language about him in the letter. I explain that you can't motivate employees by threatening them. You can only get people to work harder if they're happy, and you make them happy by rewarding them. With threats, they'll work just enough to keep their jobs. With rewards, they'll actually try.

But I don't think they understand this basic management concept.

Now yesterday..
We have a meeting at 3:00, one hour before classes start. We go over some basic stuff about the changes that are happening to our classes, and then Kathy, our manager, gets up and starts to talk.

She's speaking Korean, so Ben is translating.

She starts off about how difficult her job is, and how she has pride in her teachers. How she has to do all sorts of work and handle the parents and such - we know, that's in her job description. And she goes on about how she's very upset if the teachers don't want to do their jobs.

She goes on and on, and then she singles me out, looks directly at me, and says, "Brandon, are you happy with your experience in Korea?"

This looks and feels like a direct threat. Ben obviously shared my letter (incompletely translated, I think) or at least some complaints and the writer's identity with her, and she is pissed off.

She continues.

She talks about how she has to field 500 complaints a week from parents (again, this is her job) and smooths them over. Little things like, "The class is too boring," or, "The class is too much fun," or, "Teacher's hair is too long." Stupid things we can't do anything about.

Then she says, "I can make your lives a lot harder."

She threatens us with giving us regular parent-teacher meetings to deal with these complaints ourselves.

Her speech lasts 20 minutes, does not give us an opportunity to speak or explain, and then she leaves. Not a meeting, just a lecture. She doesn't address the issues I brought up about threats and the poisonous culture, she just gives us more threats.

Then Ben gets up, and he begins with, "I don't know how many of you know this, but Brandon wrote me a letter the other day..." once again singling me out, probably trying to turn the others against me, and continues: "and he tells me that you guys don't feel like I'm on your side. Y'know, that makes me really angry."

And he begins to shout at us. He slams the desk like an angry father talking to us like we're his really badly-behaved children, shouting about how we don't do our work and how everything bad we do reflects badly on him and everything is our fault.

How "if you've ever had a REAL JOB, back in America," looking directly at me (even though I'm Canadian) "you know that you have to do work outside of office hours!" Referring to the grade-input data entry complaint, which was mostly a problem because of how it was presented to us.

He's going on about how we don't want to do our jobs and that's ridiculous.

He's shouting at us.

Slamming the desks.

And when I put my hand up and ask, "Okay, can I explain something about the grades thing here?" he points at me and says, "NO. I read your letter. Be quiet. I'm talking," and keeps going on.

Wes, a teacher with whom he's butted heads in the past couple weeks, says, very relaxed and calm, "Dude, you don't have to yell at us."

Ben points at him. "You. No. You can't talk. Get out."
"I don't want to get out."
"Tough shit. Get out."
Wes is again completely calm. "You wouldn't talk to me like this outside," meaning in this case that he wouldn't be shouting at him about his job outside of the workplace.
Ben: "You want to take this outside?"

He marches over to wes and leans over him, his fists on the desk.
"We can take this outside."

He actually challenged Wes to a fight, in front of everyone.

Now, his tactic of trying to turn everyone against me obviously didn't work, because everyone was pissed off and both before and after the meeting thanked me for saying something.

So the meeting ended after a lot more arguing between him and the other teachers and Ben's shouting while we remain calm and try to explain things rationally. We only broke it up at four o'clock when the classes started.

It was the most surreal professional (or rather unprofessional) experience of my life.

I don't have a clue what's going to happen to me, since the manager knows about my letter and is obviously pissed off, but everyone agrees that something had to be said, and at the very least now we're not going to have to do intensives if we don't want to unless we're loaded with students. But I've got to talk to our director. He knows nothing about what goes on at this campus - just signs papers and collects money. I'm anticipating a load of small revenges from the manager... we'll see what happens.

Sigh.

I'm glad I don't really care all that much. I just want the next five months to be relatively pleasant.

Long-past-due update

Ye gods, I didn't realize how long it's been since I updated this thing. I've sort of disappeared from the Internet for a bit, it seems. My apologies to anyone who thinks I've died or faded out of existence or something.

So since my rather depressing set of issues back in the time of my last post, things have been remarkably good. Seoul's weather has been nice and warm (though it's becoming really hot now, not that I'm complaining), I've been to a few interesting places, and Hanna is here visiting me. Hooray!

I'll try to make this as coherent as I can with my poor memory and go chronologically.

Jinhae
After the evening in Changwon, Tom and I went to Jinhae with the rest of his coworkers to see the cherry blossoms. A 20-minute drive became over 90 minutes because everyone was going there for exactly the same reason. But it wasn't so bad, anyway. Once we got to the town itself, we took in some of the sights: a uniformed police officer sitting on a bench and weeping into the arms of his partner, a man impeccably dressed in a business suit sifting through garbage the entire five minutes we were stuck in the same place (he was looking for a glove), and innumerable identically-dressed couples, most walking or carrying tiny white dogs which were either dyed pink or wearing shoes. The city itself is beautiful, of course... cherry blossoms everywhere, and it's right on the sea. We saw a turtle ship and dressed in the uniform of Korean naval officers.

Busan
Mina, the girl I met in Changwon, invited me later that week to go to Busan with her for a weekend. Busan is one of Korea's larger cities, and has the country's most famous and largest beach, Hyundae Beach. We walked down it Saturday evening as people all along were shooting off fireworks or sitting in the sand holding hands. We were headed toward the 7-11 to grab some beer for a relaxing seaside drink, when we passed a man lighting a large number of candles in the sand. Interesting, we thought, but we kept going. Then we passed him on our way back.

The man was standing in a heart-shaped enclosure of lit candles, with his bewildered and laughing girlfriend in his arms. A crowd of people were gathered around to watch them. He spoke, and Mina translated for me - "Will you marry me?" The crowd applauded.
Then, before the deliriously happy woman could answer, a voice came over the loudspeaker: "This is beach security. There are no fires allowed on the beach. Please put out the candles and disperse."
Right in the middle of a marriage proposal.

That made my night, because the security people were saying nothing at all to the drunkards lighting off fireworks a few metres away. I believe that the security guard could only have been feeling lonely, and got particularly bitter when he saw this wonderfully romantic scene unfolding in front of him.

Besides that, we saw an aquarium full of bizarre fish and lovely penguins, and two famous temples on the seaside (beautiful... I have pictures, but I'm far too lazy to post 'em now), and ate black noodles at one of Korea's most famous restaurants. Highlights of eating include one place we saw claiming to serve "live food" and tanks all along the streets with the strangest and most phallic-looking squirmy creatures you could ever hope to see.

Seoul Writers
I discovered a writers' group online which meets every two weeks to share and discuss the writings of its members, give criticism, and do writing exercises to get us all in creative mode. I've joined up and so far been to three of them (scheduling issues). I enjoy it, and it's actually helped a bit in getting me writing more.

DJ Festival
One weekend I arranged to meet a pair of girls who were new to Seoul. We wandered around Dongdaemun (and completely failed to find the flea market again - turns out it moved), Namdaemun, and Gyeongbukgung (a palace, where we saw huge numbers of people in traditional dress marching around and posing for pictures). Later they joined my coworkers and I at the World DJ festival, wherein I saw more foreign faces than I thought existed in Korea and had my ass grabbed more times than I could possibly count. It was fun, though mostly I stayed in the beer tent being amused by the antics of drunken English-speakers and taking pictures of men who kept telling us we weren't allowed to take pictures. Some strange acts included a German man wearing a suit made entirely of coloured flashing LEDs wandering around the stage while music played.

Daegum-gul
Caves! Mina and I went to see caves in Daegum. We took a tour, 'cause it was cheaper than going ourselves. Like everything outside of Seoul, it seems, the area is fantastically beautiful. The caves are in mountains surrounded by trees and rivers and strange people selling wooden statues of penises. Sadly, they've become a bit of a major tourist attraction, so there were steel walkways and guardrails stopping you from doing any real exploring as well as huge crowds of people. The second cave (there were two) wasn't so crowded, but you weren't allowed to take pictures. Still, it was fantastic. There's an underground lake inside, nine metres deep and filled with the clearest water you could hope to see, slick white flowstone, and bizarre stalactites ranging from the standard phallus-shape to paper-thin sheets of rock. Waterfalls too. An amazing place, and I wish we were free to explore on our own. Not in Korea, I'm told.

Hanna
Hanna's here! We did all kinds of exploring together and discovered that there's actually a park near my apartment, which makes Gangseo-gu a thousand times more livable. She spent a lot of time sleeping during her first week here, but we went places and saw things and generally have been having a lot of fun. In-town we saw Iron Man, went to Insadong, and drew pictures with pastels we found at the 1000-won store. Last weekend we went to Gyeongju, a city full of history as it was Korea's capital until a couple hundred years ago, and saw burial mounds, entered a tomb, went to temples and museums and ate strange food at a really friendly restaurant and slept in a bed that was actually big enough for two people. Amazing! Before that we also went to the traditional hwaeshik, where my boss takes the new and departing teachers out for a night of eating and drinking and ridiculous drinking games. Hanna was quite embarrassed after one of the Korean secretaries told me, "Your girlfriend is so beautiful."

In her first week here, we went to the relocated flea market and Hanna bought a traditional cymbal (she was so happy about that) as well as an autographed record of "Korean art songs". In the aisle that nobody goes to without glancing about to make sure no one's looking, we found odd sex toys, mainly consisting of products which fit over your regular genitalia to make them... um... larger. There was also a man carving a penis out of wood, who embarrassedly allowed me to take a couple of pictures of him.

Next week we're going to Jeju Island, to see a volcano and caves and old women with spears diving for fish and waterfalls and all sorts of lovely wonderful things and I'm very excited but mostly excited simply to have Hanna here for a month.

The next six months feel like they're going to be so much more livable now. I'm doing things and I'm feeling good.

I also have my blue belt in hapkido. I think I've destroyed at least one of my shoulders, but hopefully that will heal somewhat during my week off.

Cherry blossoms and cool people

Man, I didn't realize just how badly I needed a day out of Seoul. My friend Tom, who is escaping soon to Taiwan, invited me down to Changwon - South Korea's alternative capital in case Seoul gets bombed to bits by Kim Jong-Il - where he lives and works for some fun and a cherry blossom festival. The weather reports forecasted rain for this weekend (no surprise there), but I wanted to get out and see my buddy before he left, as well as see a bit of Korea, so on Saturday (would've gone Friday night but he works Saturdays) I took the "express" bus (five hours) to Changwon from the express terminal, which is an hour's subway ride away from where I live. It was a long trip, but no matter.

After a minor debacle with a cab driver taking as long as he could get away with to bring me to Tom's apartment, I saw my friend outside the Family Mart, drinking, like ya do, with two other foreigners - an Irish lass, and, I believe, a South African. This sort of thing is standard foreigner procedure in Korea, you see.

From there, we proceeded to a party with his coworkers and friends on the roof of their apartment building - but first, of course, we needed booze. Which brought us to our first adventure:


Creepy Construction Worker Guy

We wandered on down to a small grocery store in a basement. On our way down we passed a tall, strange ajosshi in coveralls and a yellow construction worker's helmet, who started rambling in Korean upon seeing Tom. We believe he thought Tom was Russian.

Anyway, we proceeded on to the beer aisle, while we looked at our (very sadly limited) options. But the creepy fellow had followed us and began gesturing at the dried fish foodstuffs on the racks while making what I believe had to be suggestive comments. We did our best to talk with him, but we didn't know a scrap of his language, and nor did he ours.

When we picked up our beer (maekju), he perked up, as if genuinely impressed that we were buying (so much?) beer. He started rambling on about alcohol, and the various benefits that could be derived from it, in the most physical manner possible: he snatched at Tom's crotch, and pulled his hand back up to his face with a vigorous sniffing. He then did the same to me, making, much to my dismay, contact with the bits he was apparently talking about. As far as I could tell, he was trying to tell us that a) beer makes you manly, or b) it makes your urine stink.

After the crotch-grabbing incident, we hurried away from the crazy fellow, who was happily distracted by one of the store employees as he elaborated on the benefits of maekju.


We went on to the roof, where I met some of his quite fun and lovely coworkers and friends, chatted a while, till it got cold and we retired to someone's apartment for more drinking and chatting and suchlike with more people showing up.

At that point we (or somebody, anyway) decided it was time to go to a nightclub, which was apparently all you can drink for 15,000 won, a pretty nice deal when they throw in platters of fruit for free. I tore up the dancefloor all night with Mina, one of the Korean girls who work at their school... good times.

It was about 4:30 AM when, in a slow, random trickle, we somewhat disorientatedly left the club - and we unfortunately missed the creepy short fellow stalking one of the girls. Probably (hopefully) harmless, but would've been fun to see.

I need more nights like that. Tales (and maybe pictures, if you're not on Facebook) of the next day to follow.

Clueless

So now I've got to suddenly rearrange everything I thought I knew and figure out some kind of new plan. It's a daunting task.

At least it's sunny out again...

On a more positive note, tomorrow I'm taking a five-hour bus to Changwon to see a friend and the cherry blossom festival. Finally absorbing a little Korean culture, perhaps. Cherry blossoms are supposed to be beautiful... and Changwon should be a bit more natural than Seoul... so let's hope for a positive iteration of Spring here.

I'll bring my camera.

Ye gods.

I had something to post about Easter last weekend, but it just kind of fell off... I'll put it up later. Today I'm just shocked and appalled and dismayed at the unreasonableness of nature in this country.

At first it seemed like unfortunate coincidence, but it's happened far too often - there must be some kind of malevolent force or at least a decent scientific explanation of the phenomenon. It is as follows:

No matter how beautiful and sunny and lovely the weekdays in Seoul are, the weekends will be utter crap.

This has been my experience over the past four months here... I believe I've seen two nice weekends, and those were both a while ago now. At this point I can say with complete confidence that something causes weekends to become grey and cold and wet and dark and altogether unpleasant, even though on Friday and the following Monday the sun will shine and the sky will radiate blueness.

So what causes this? Is it the fact that traffic picks up on weekends as everyone frantically drives out of Seoul to escape the certainty of terrible weekend weather, pollutants from all the cars spewing into the air and becoming both the cause and the effect of this bizarre and depressing phenomenon?

What a country. I need a vacation.

Dongdaemun Stadium

Ack, I'm kind of bad about updating, aren't I?

Korea's been okay to me over the past couple of weeks. Winter has been very reluctantly releasing its stranglehold on Seoul... we see days around a nice, balmy eight degrees, and the very next day the ground will be covered with snow and ice... but I think it's finally let up, which can only mean one thing: Yellow Dust, that fifth season wherein poisonous dust storms streak across the sky and even the foreigners wear masks on the streets. There have, according to Army monitoring sites, been days at areas across Seoul where the danger level has been off the charts, but here in Gangseo we've not seen a speck, so far as I can tell. Hopefully that remains the case and I get an unexpected perk of living in such a less-than-interesting region.

I've not been going out much, though our celebration in greeting of the new teacher was fun. We went to Wild Vill after far too much heavy Chinese food and sweet but strong Chinese liquor and horrible-as-usual Korean beer, where there were darts and bartenders who put on shows involving the spinning of flaming liquor bottles. Good times. I helped Nick win 10,000 won in a rather abysmal darts game. A lot of my time has been spent reading or cursing the unpredictable weather - last weekend I had planned to go mountain-hiking, only to be foiled by one of those unexpected bad days. But I've gotten a fair bit of progress done on my graphic novel project, so I can't complain too much.

Hapkido has been great as ever, though two Fridays ago Nick and I walked into the class as normal a bit before 11:30, expecting a usual day, and the place was overrun with children. Only the older sonseignim was there, and his English is nonexistent, so I had to sit politely and confusedly in the office until the younger instructor came in. After a few requests for an explanation, it turned out that every month they have a testing class at this time... so we had a surprise grading. Having only been there a couple weeks, I don't think we did too spectacularly... but we've moved up on the belt chart with the terrible photographs on it, so we must have done okay. The class is back to normal now, and it's excellent. It's a great reason to get up in the mornings.

Regardless, that's not the main point of today's post.

Today's post is about Dongdaemun Stadium, formerly an important athletic building and now the site of Seoul's big flea market. The place is full of vendors selling anything from massively-cut-price clothing to weapons to sex toys and bootleg porn DVDs. They've even got cassette tapes. It was an experience walking around in there... it was like being in some of the seedier parts of Paris's antiques market. A lot of fun, and I kind of wish I'd been there with a) more money and b) competence in the language.

My favourite parts, of course, were the people selling absolutely anything they had - one vendor had constructed a wall of miscellaneous junk supported at the bottom by a tangle of assorted electronics cables and occasionally reinforced with old luggage. Upon this pile were busted-up camcorders, tools, and the occasional musical instrument. It was the flea market equivalent of a catacombs. It's a potential gold mine of weird crap - sadly, the limited space in between aisles and the constant press of people makes proper digging impossible.

But within this dizzying array of random and useless things, I found a wondrous treasure.

Yes, I have realized one of my life's ambitions. Well, closer to partially-realized, to be honest, because it could be bigger, but it's a great placeholder for now.

For many, many years I have wished for a stuffed (read: taxidermy) crocodile to hang from my ceiling, a dream influenced mainly by the wizards of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, whose bedrooms simply must, for some unexplained reason, be decorated with one of these reptiles.

Well, it's smaller than I hope for, and it's not technically a crocodile, but I present to you my new pet:


He doesn't do much, but he's fun to have around.

And that's it for now. I close wondering whether I'm going to have to tell off my inconsiderate next-door neighbour again, who has an unfortunate habit of playing the television at ridiculous volumes. The walls are concrete here, but that's not enough to stop his annoying pastime from reaching my ears. Alas...

I hope all's well back home in Canada and the States and Ireland and wherever else people may be reading from. Goodbye from Korea.

Cliche #604: Emotional Roller-Coaster

It's trite, but there's a reason cliches are cliche. What better image is there to describe extreme emotional highs and lows in a short period?

Two Fridays ago, I was happy and excited about my life here in Korea. Hapkido was going well, I had received an e-mail saying my book (Manga Studio for Dummies) would arrive within two days, and a new term was coming with a new schedule showing fewer hours and new classes, all of them late elementary to early middle school, the group of kids I seem, based on the past term, to get on with best. A friend told me she'd be arriving in Korea to teach not too far away by subway. I was thinking about my comic. Things looked good.

Then on Monday, we had a meeting, in which we were given yet another revision of the schedule, with my awesome classes going to a new teacher and me getting two classes of the second-lowest level and age they have at this school, as well as one each of the next two levels. Young children. Yikes. I've never really understood young children, and the youngest groups in my previous term were the ones I'd had the most trouble with. Surely my head instructor had noticed this when going over our CCTVs? Surely there was some mistake? But after some questioning and nagging and a promise he'd look into changes, I was told that it was too late and there was no way to revise the schedule.

Happiness and anticipation move out of the way. Dread settles in comfortably.

I had gotten into an absolute funk. No energy, except in hapkido class. My favourite classes felt like they were dragging. Even the new material I was teaching, which was actually exciting compared to the stuff we'd had, felt like suck. I was half-convinced I would hate it and not be able to get through the coming three months. It's amazing what one little twist can do. Ah, and also, Manga Studio for Dummies, though the e-mail had said it shipped, was not in my hands. All week.

A little over three hours ago I was still filled with dread. My first class was to be my youngest group. Couple that with the usual dread of having to make the first impression on a new pile of people, and things weren't feeling nice. But I tried to make the best of it, tried to convince myself that I'd have a good crop of students, and went in with as much energy as I could muster and as much smiliness and excitement as I could inject.

Damn, was I surprised.

Not only did the material not completely suck (a major problem I'd had with the level above this one last term), but the kids were (mostly) respectful and paid attention. They listened, they interacted, they laughed at my silly drawings, and it was actually, dare I say it... fun.

So to those who had to deal with my dread, my apologies.

I'm excited once again. Tomorrow I have another class of the same level of kids... hopefully, if I do things the same as today, the rest of the term will be good. The key, I've learned, is to start out strict, establish your rules, call them on it when they break 'em, and force the timid ones to interact... and at the same time, relate yourself to the kids. I opened the class with an attendance check in which I called the kids' names - then asked each one to talk about him or herself for a bit. I occasionally interjected some - like when a girl said she liked to draw dragons, I mentioned my own monster-drawing.

It was good.

Let's hope things go well tomorrow.

Ah, yes. My book had apparently delivered, but the ajosshi who "guards" the building had mistaken my room number on the package (1413). I looked into his office and saw a book-shaped box with 413 on it, and took some initiative and walked in. He was confused, but I pointed to my name on the box, pointed to myself a few times, and he seemed to get it. At least, I thought so, but then I got a buzz on my intercom saying, "Box - four-one-three, you one-four-one-three! Wrong box! Four-one-three! Four-one-three!" Happily, it was remedied easily enough once I had him put on his glasses.

Time to plan out some comic-drawing practice!

Bonus post!

Recently, news came out that MSG is a significant contributor to stomach cancer. Coincidentally, I saw in the subway today this advert:


If the resolution is too low to read the print at the bottom, it says: "Wellthy Food... Well-being+Healthy"

So what we have here is an advertisement promoting MSG as health food.

...

How I Spent my Lunar New Year

Not having the scheduling-ahead abilities of some of my family (eg. aunt Karen), I'm stuck in Korea for the holiday. For the Lunar New Year, Seoul empties itself of a huge section of its population, so plane ticket prices skyrocket, ferries become overbooked, and basically, if you don't plan ahead, you can't go anywhere. On Wednesday the roads were completely congested. Thursday morning (the actual New Year Day), the eight-lane road that goes by my apartment had about twelve cars go by in twenty minutes.

Seoul is known for its crowded subways. So here's a station on New Year day:


Another station shot:


And waiting for the #2 train, the busiest line in the city in the middle of the afternoon, when normally you can't move for the crowds:


The reason I was on the subway, if you're curious, is that I was on my way out of Seoul to Namyangju, the home base of Matthew, a fellow former CDI trainee from the American South. I figured since I couldn't go away for the holiday, I might as well do something fun - and he lives a four thousand won cab ride away from a ski resort.

The last time I went skiing I believe I was still in elementary school, but it's amazing how quickly things come back to you. And it's a surprising happy feeling to rediscover that you enjoy doing things you used to enjoy doing. After two spills, I was weaving down the hills like I never took a twelve-year break from skiing.

It was a tremendously fun experience, but was marred slightly by the bloody idiots flooding the slopes that night. I guess during the holiday is when people decide to try skiing for the first time, or maybe it's just a coincidence that the majority of people who came to the resort that night were jerks, but all down the hills, scattered randomly, were people sitting and taking a break or standing around even smoking, while people going down had to veer and fly off jumps and into fences trying to avoid them. Amazing.

Still, it was fun. And today, although we didn't get to see Sweeney Todd as we'd planned (sold out), I got myself an mp3/video player at a steep discount and bootleg DVDs of my favourite television shows. I'm pleased with myself.

Of course, I'm completely exhausted now, having only just gotten home at about 8:00 pm. Tonight I think I'll just watch a couple of episodes of Doctor Who, sleep, and try to do something interesting tomorrow.

Happy Year of the Rat, all.

Lunar New Year

Christmas isn't a big deal in Korea, but the New Year is important enough that it's one of two times in the bloody year the poor suckers who signed on for work at my company get off. In preparation for the holiday, all the grocery stores become high-end, selling incredibly expensive gift boxes of various products (remember, 1,000 won is about $1.00): old ginseng roots for 250,000 won, 175,000 won mushrooms, ridiculously overpriced booze, and of course, these:




Sometimes, the Korean War influence of the USA is blindingly obvious. Brand-name Spam, rather than being the only meat poor people can afford, is a luxury food.

Tastes vary so much between cultures.

I actually got a gift from my school, which was nice, and it was obviously expensive and high-end, judging by the packaging:


I'm grateful for the consideration it shows, but I find the items I've tried so far unpalatable.

Next: How I Spent my Holiday.

Many things! First, hapkido

After spending almost three months believing others when they say they'll help me out, I finally took it upon myself to arrange my hapkido class on my own, or at least, with only help I knew I could rely upon.

Last week, I realized that behind our building is a big sign saying (in Hangul, of course), "Hap ki do" with a phone number. I dutifully recorded the number, wrote it down, and at school dug out my phrasebook and wrote, in Korean, "Hap ki do, [phone number], timetable, cost, foreigners okay?, thank you," and passed it to our secretaries. After they finished giggling, one of them got on the phone. Eventually, it was all arranged: mornings at 11:30, a private one-hour session five days a week for just me and Nick, 100,000 won per month.

Huzzah!

After a mishap on Monday in which we went to the wrong building (the school had moved about two buildings down), on Tuesday we found our class and our master.

Our master (and I have no idea what his name is) is wonderful - one of those very old men who looks perpetually happy because he's completely at peace with the world and the fact that he could kick your arse in about four seconds but he has no reason to want to. He has no English at all except a hearty "Oooh-kaaay!" when we do something well. The introduction involved a lot of talk in Korean about breathing, energy, the body, and various places where energy rests, which we did our best to understand but really went right over our heads. Then it was falling drills and the basic block-attack drills. After a time he brought in a second instructor, younger, but very qualified, who is very modest about his English, which is actually quite good.

So we've got two instructors taking care of us, five days a week for the rest of the year. I'm very excited about this. I only had one class so far (New Year means no class), but already I can feel the onrush of energy that tends to come with me practicing martial arts.

The remainder of the winter is going to suck a lot less.

Art

In addition to wasting time on the Interent and weekend journeys into Seoul and the rare drunken night with coworkers, I've been trying to get back into my former creative self. It's been going slower than I'd like, but it's happening, so that's relatively pleasing.

I'm working on a comic book (I came up with the concept for the series and the characters and wrote and finished issue 1 inside a month, and still haven't finished issue 2 since I started on it in August), the writing of which has been suffering and ignored and put off because of my usual winter creative drought (I'm trying, but it's hard), but since Bryan delayed so much on the character drawings, I've decided to try sketching them on my own. This has led to a sort of rediscovery of my love of drawing, and I've been sketching and even drawing in fountain pen in my sketchbook on my breaks from work. The kids are all very impressed by my drawings and many demanded photocopies since I wouldn't give up the originals. Makes me feel good. But I feel especially good that I'm starting to figure out some good approaches to drawing my comic characters, and if Bryan persists in being too busy with other things to work on the comic, I may eventually be able to draw it all myself.

To this end (and also because I wanted 'em), I ended up in Hongdae yesterday, the area around Hongik University, which is full of art shops. I bought myself a mannakin and a wooden hand for reference purposes. Here they are saying hello:


Hopefully they'll be useful. Now if only the next 8 to 12 weeks would pass so I could get my Manga Studio for Dummies book...

Being a minority

If nothing else, being a white foreigner in Korea is teaching me a lot about discrimination and racism. I've been white all my life, but I've only been white in western countries, which is very different from being white here. Here you stand out a lot, and sometimes that can be a bad thing.

Aside from the country's own rules (including restrictions on banking for foreigners) and shops overcharging us (example: in Insadong I asked the price of an instrument, the guy asked his boss, who told him, in Korean, 80,000 won, and the guy turned back to me and said, "100,000."), there have been occasional examples of extreme, pure, individual straight-out racism, which I will now recount.

Emart has started to really annoy me. I'd been grudgingly accepting the little things, like cashiers failing to give me the sale price of some items or charging me the extra 50 won for a plastic bag after I said "anyo" ("no") to the bag question and then not giving me the plastic bag (presumably pocketing that extra five cents and feeling smug about putting one over on the waeguk... I tried pointing this out with a combination of English and my non-existent Korean to one cashier who tried it on me, who got upset and acted angry and frustrated, so I gave up). But on my last excursion it was overt racism, and that got to me somewhat..

Emart, like many other grocers, regularly has staff manning stands giving out samples of various foods. The staff are uniformly polite, using the higher form of politeness ("ni-da" endings rather than "yo") and bowing to the customers who ignore them. I've always been polite to these people, giving them a smile, an "anyang ha-seh-yo" when I approach and a "kam sahm ni da" when I leave (that means "thank you"), so I guess I'm not really acclimatised to the standard way of shopping, but that's not the point. I'd sampled a few things, but I was obviously not just there to nick free food as I was carrying a basket full of groceries.

In the seafood area, a woman was manning a stand offering small pieces of sashimi, which is quite possibly my favourite thing in the world. She was bowing and smiling at every Korean who walked up, picked up a toothpick, stabbed a piece of fish or five and ate it and walked away. There was plenty of fish left there as I approached. I gave her a smile and a greeting and reached for a toothpick, and she gave me the dirtiest look I'd ever seen from a grocery store employee, leaned over, covering the fish with her arms and hands, and shouted, "No!" at me.

I was rather surprised.

Looking back, there she was happily serving more Koreans their sashimi samples.

...

Of course, it's not all bad here, and many Koreans are very nice. Even in the Emart, which seems to be worse than other shops, I've met a couple of employees who were extremely friendly, smiling surprisedly when they see me buying kimchi, and one who even tried to talk my ear off about Canada when I got a bag of ginseng from her.

An example of Korean niceness:

I have a bike, a hand me down from Jen, which has not seen any use at all so far because it suffers from a myriad of problems, the worst of which being that both tires cannot be inflated - the valves don't close. It having been too cold to do any biking anyway and me being timid about the whole language barrier thing, I hadn't done anything about it, until today, when I decided I shouldn't be spending so much time indoors.

So I walked my bike on its floppy tires down to a bike shop, where I saw, as I was approaching, the shopkeeper leaving the place and locking the door. I glanced at my watch, which told me it was 4:45, a very unusual time for a shop to close. So I walked around a bit hoping that by the time I came back he might have returned. After meeting one of my students (one of my bad students) leaving a store, I came back and saw the shopkeeper with a heat fan set three inches from his body and watching television.

I went in and asked him if he spoke English, which got me a laugh and a "No English", so I found the words for "to repair" in my phrasebook ("suri haeyo"), which he seemed to understand. He got up, motioned for me to bring the bike over, I pointed to the tires, and he inflated them, discovering for himself that the valves leaked. So he pulled them out, fiddled with them, replaced something, and fixed them up, on both tires, then waved me away as he closed the door. Didn't even give me a chance to ask how much. I was ready and willing to pay, but he wasn't interested.

That was nice.

A story from my "good" class

One of my classes is an absolute joy to teach. The kids are attentive but not boring, they care a lot, they're respectful and playful, and they're really smart. Sally, one of those kids, is an absolute doll... she listens, always participates, writes down EVERYTHING, is a keen learner...

We have one exercise where they have to verbally create sentences using templates. On Friday, one of them was, "I want to know everything about... because..."

Her example was, "I want to know everything about USA because I want to go to USA." She had written it down, too.

I asked her, "Why do you want to go to the USA?" Her answer: "Because I want to learn English."

I told her, jokingly, "Ah, you should go to Canada. We speak much better English over there, and it's so much nicer!"

I kept teaching, and on my next pass by her desk I happened to look down at her book. She had written in "Canada" beside "USA" in her sentence.

For some reason, that makes me feel good. Respected, perhaps.

Kids aren't all bad.

I have a camera!

There seems to be something about Western body hair that fascinates Koreans. In addition to my students' inability to keep from touching my arm hair when I'm not looking, as I was purchasing a camera at Yongsan today, the effeminate clerk assisting me demonstrated the detail of which my particular model is capable by taking close-up photos of the hair on my hands and face.

Afterward I went to Itaewon, the foreigner/club/fashion district, to set up the two-plus-month-long process of ordering a book (Manga Studio for Dummies, which I should have just asked my parents to ship over before they sent me stuff), and walked around the fashion markets for a while, accosted on all sides by pushy tailors. I have been hoping to get a replica made of the Doctor's suit, so I allowed one to pull me into his store, and with his broken English he talked endlessly, refusing to let me leave. He insisted I tell all my friends about his store, and wouldn't allow me to go without giving him my name and phone number. Looking back, it was probably so that he'd remember me and give me the same price offered in case I returned, but at the time I was confused and mildly frightened at his persistence, so I scribbled my name illegibly, mumbled that I had to go, and scarpered while he was puzzling over the letters.

Strangely, one of the pushy suit-sellers I passed by chose to accost me (me specifically, nobody else) in French. So I responded with a "Non, merci," which led him to draw me into conversation, asking where I was from. I don't think he expected an answer; he was probably just trying to have some fun by confusing the foreigners. I haven't met any Koreans who speak French, and nobody at all with a reason to.

One thing that Korean merchants can't seem to understand is this:
You cannot haggle over hat size.

7 1/4 is not an acceptable replacement for 7 5/8. I cannot adjust the size of my head to suit their stock. Price is negotiable. Head size is fixed. But they don't seem to understand that, and the notebook in which I write and draw things that I can't say in Korean has pages filled with Korean merchant-written alternative suggestions to my large-print, circled "7 5/8". I oblige them by putting their tiny hats on top of my crown, and they always seem genuinely astonished that they won't fit. I shall continue to look when the opportunity arises, however... surely there is one haberdasher in Seoul who understands the needs of "big-size" customers.

Meanwhile, I have a camera! Hooray! Pictures of my apartment come now.

Here is the Great Hall and kitchen.


Below we have the living room. Note the convenient proximity to the bedroom.


And here we have my office, elaborately furnished and decorated, of course.


And here's the view: Gangseo-gu at night.


That's all I've got for now. Good night!

Flower Handsome Boy

For the last two weeks, three of the girls in what was once my quieter middle-school class have not been able to look at me without breaking into a fit of giggles. My assumption was that one of the three has developed a crush on Teacher, which I believe has been confirmed today, when one of my giggly students said, to the extreme embarrassment of her friend, "teacher, someone say you.. um.. flower handsome boy."

Now, of course, handsome is nice, but flower boy? Are they calling me hot, or calling me gay? I asked if that's a good thing or a bad thing, and the class was generally unanimous with "good thing", though the boys had some broken-English qualifiers to add. But who can believe students?

So I looked it up when I got home, and the only mention I find online Korean-wise of "flower boy" is in reference to Super Junior, one of those manufactured boy-bands that the girls are crazy for whose name I always see my students writing on the back of their test papers with hearts all over them. Apparently the members of Super Junior are "flower boys" and the major item of controversy about them is which one is handsomest.

So my assumption is that it means good-looking in the way that makes twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls swoon.

I'm sure they mean it as a good thing, but it's not exactly the look I'm going for.

I'm not sure how to close this. Just another bizarre occurrence in the foreigner's life.

I just walked home from work through the thickest fog I've ever encountered outside of a rural highway at three in the morning. I literally could not see the building across the street from me. Car headlights suddenly appeared seemingly from nowhere twenty metres away. Only a few seconds later could you see the rest of them. It was like going to Laser Quest when the fog machine off switch is broken. And yet the crazy Korean drivers continued along at speed, occasional delivery scooters zooming at you from the shadows, half-invisible and ready to deal accidental death. There is absolutely zero visibility from my fourteenth-floor window.

What a country.

Saxophone!

Yesterday, I went to the Nagwon Instruments Arcade with Nick (coworker) and Matthew (friend from training who lives on the opposite side of Seoul). Matthew and I had planned to go there for a while now, since my chops were itching and his fingers curling and we needed instruments. Alas, he hasn't the money for his piano until two paydays from now, but it's worth taking a look anyway, so off we went.

The instruments arcade is massive. Tiny shops crowded with all manner of musical devices. It is honestly a musician's Mecca. Yes, that's right, a musician in Seoul will invariably turn toward Nagwoon at specific times of the day and offer prayers. We spent far too much time looking around and trying things out. Nick bought a guitar tuner, and Matthew found an incredible range of prices for the digital pianos he'd been looking for. I tried several saxes, trying to find something reasonable below 800,000 won ($835ish). I was looking for a tenor because my chops are very out of shape, I don't own a tenor, and I wanted something that would give my mouth a challenge - it's easier to blow on the smaller instruments, as my experiments on the sopranos proved.

There were a couple I found for 600,000, but they weren't fantastic. So we were heading out to Insadong for a little exploration, and we talked about instruments, when a random fellow foreigner overheard us and approached.

"Excuse me," he said, "did I hear you say you were looking for a saxophone? 'cause I've got one I've been looking to sell."

It turns out that this guy had bought an alto sax in Nagwon a couple of months ago, spent a lot of time trying out all the instruments he could find, bought a fantastic mouthpiece and a great case which doubles as a backpack and two boxes of reeds and cork grease, and played it plenty - until he realized that he really, really missed the trumpet. But he couldn't find anyone to buy his sax, because there's not a huge foreigner demand for wind instruments, and no Korean stores need to buy used items (or if they do, it's not easy to communicate in Korean, and they don't generally give good deals to waigooks).

I tried out his horn (he'd brought it with him), and it had a very nice sound and a lovely mouthpiece. He was hoping to let it go for half what he paid, and I coincidentally had withdrawn 400,000 won before we left on the off chance I might want to buy something - so I pulled out that wad and now I have an instrument!

The four of us exchanged numbers; turns out this fellow lives near Incheon, which is actually fairly close to Gangseo-gu, and knows of a lot of jazz clubs in Seoul.

Hooray!

I've been playing for much of the time since I got up, and it's been wonderful. I'm a musician again. I just need to find myself some music...

But now, time to get some work done. The teenage girls are screaming outside the SBS building, as they have been doing since the morning, the sky is horribly dark and grey, and it's a balmy five degrees outside and eighteen in my apartment, and I'm going to see if they've got any reasonably-priced tangerines at Homever. I've got a saxophone, I'm drawing again, and feeling my way through my writing projects. John (my head instructor and a great guy, who is a fellow movie/comic/zombie nerd) has promised to talk to the hap ki do place he knows of three subway stops away from here. My head has stopped hurting from the beer and the hard liquor that had a dead baby cobra in the bottle. Things are looking good.

If only I didn't have report cards to finish tonight.

Tears and violence

I made a kid cry today!

I'm a bit proud of that. Because he very much deserved it.

In my youngest class, I've several students who stand out in some way - either they're very good, or very bad, or very annoying, or outspoken, or whatever. Two of my more notable students were involved in this incident: Peter, a child who I consider my absolute worst student since he rarely does his homework and never pays attention in class, and Jack, who participates and talks and is pleasant to have but isn't the most gifted of my kids.

During the break, Jack was goofing around near Peter's desk, and he bumped into it, knocking down Peter's pencil case and scattering the dozens of tiny origami stars which were located therein. Peter saw this and lost it. He stalked after Jack menacingly, which could have been construed as playful if you happened not to look at his wrath-filled eyes. Jack was backing off, not fully realizing how enraged Peter was, and I gave a warning, "Peter, don't touch Jack!" But I was ignored, and Peter threw an angry punch at the unsuspecting child.

Immediately I rose up in righteous vengeance like Jehovah in the good old days, seized Peter's arm, and bellowed, "PETER. DOWNSTAIRS. NOW." And dragged him from the room. I stopped him near the stairwell, and saw that he - the aggressor - was crying. I guess he hadn't expected consequences for that kind of ridiculous behaviour. He and Jack were sent downstairs and stayed there talking to the administrators for a good half-hour while the rest of my class was eerily quiet until their return. Never before had I had as easy a time with that group of children as after I chewed Peter out for hitting Jack. I put the fear of Teacher into them.

Let's see if they stay good.


It occurs to me sometimes that my job, especially with the younger classes, is not so much teaching the kids as it is getting through the material as best I can while maintaining as much control as possible in the classroom. In the better classes I feel like they actually learn, but with the rowdier ones and the one wherein most of them do their best to make themselves invisible and inaudible, my job is more just getting on with everything within the prescribed amount of time while making sure some of the kids understand what's been happening.

Of course, I mainly feel that way when I have to deal with behaviour problems.