My Saturday Nap...Ruined

I had the perfect Saturday going. I got up early and watched a couple of movies, then I vacuumed and washed the floors, stopped a pile of dishes from climbing out of the sink and took care of a load of laundry. This all happened with a slow rain sleeting down outside. The day felt accomplished and right. By 4:00 o'clock I had a plan of watching the latest episode of J-pod (the best Canadian TV show to come out since the Beachcombers that somehow has been cancelled) and taking a nap with the front window open. About twenty minutes into the show I was asleep and drifting in and out of dreams (don't hold the show responsible, it's amazing). When the show finally ended I tripped into a heavier sleep and back into my classroom for a Saturday class.

I was teaching the sixth graders who are one of my favorite class. They rarely give me trouble and when they do I quickly stop them using any one of the tricks of the trade I've learnt. The problem was in this dream there was nothing I could do to shut up a trio of normally quiet girls. Every thing I did got the same reaction of more chatting and evil, evil sneers that said they didn't even care. I lost it in the dream and the whole class just started laughing at me. It was a horrible feeling. Come monday, we'll see if these three girls will be as cocky when I get my revenge for ruining my lazy Saturday.

Museums to Avoid

A couple of weeks back I was given a small booklet of all the museums in the Seoul area. It's taken me that long to finally crack it open and try to find something new and exciting in Seoul. I saw a few that sounded interesting but also a good many that I will NOT be visiting. Here are the worst offenders:

The Tax Museum (Zzzzz)
The Museum of Rice Cake and Kitchen Work (I hate the things)
Seoul Museum of Chicken Art (Do chickens really deserve to be made into art?)
Kimchi Field Museum (Been there, done that.)

Who am I kidding though? This weekend is Saejin's birthday and Saturday we'll have an amazing dinner at Aimo E Nadia before moving onto a night of drinks. Whatever time I surface on Sunday I know I won't be in the mood to shuffle through a variety of rooms pretending to interested.

The Chopstick Diet

If you are a foreigner in Korea you can expect random compliments coming your way. Learn a spattering of Korean and you are fawned over by the ajumas you understand and use it on. Have a clean appearance, wear respectful clothes and suddenly you become the double of any Hollywood star. If you can handle spicy food without making a funny face and suddenly you are at least a third Korean. But the (most condescending)compliment that comes my way is attached to my being able to eat using chopsticks.

When I first came here I admittedly could not make a meal enjoyable by using the things. Korean chopsticks are proudly thin metal ones that take some getting used to. They don't handle food as easily as the square shaped wooden or plastic Chinese ones but because they came out during the metal age they have stuck around. I was taught how to use them my first week here and when it was a choice between starving to death and eating I was a fast learner.

At our school Mr. Oh starts each lunch with his class inspecting his kids finger placements. I pointed out his premeal patrol to Betty and she turned the redess shade a Korean is able to without drinking alcohol. She then admitted she never learnt how to eat with chopsticks and slunk back to plucking food from her plate in her unique backhanded scissor way. By the size of her I think it's best I learn from her. I could then package this way of eating into a new diet fad and become the richest man alive. Muhahaha!

Garbage Patrol

Here in Korea there are two bags the laws say you should buy to put your refuse into. In my district the white ones are for stuff that clog landfills and take years to break down, the orange ones are where you put all the bits of food you don't eat. If you are lucky enough to live in a good area there are bins for the recycleables. It's a good little system with regular pick up runs. If you don't follow the rules and are caught a huge fine follows. My first couple of years here I avoided getting nabbed by donning dark clothes and doing midnight garbage runs.

Restaurants follow the same program but on a larger scale. A restaurant's main dish can be horrid and still have you coming back for more if the number of side dishes are enough. An assortment of side dishes means the restaurant cares. This leads to a mountain of leftovers (that could literally feed the North Koreans for a year) that no bright orange bag could hold. Instead of bags, the waiting staff dump the food into its own garbage on wheels that at closing time is brought out to the kerb.

The last couple of times heading into work I've been present when mini garbage trucks come around to collect this fresh compost. They hook the bins up to the truck and the warm, smelly kimchi slops out. In a list of dirty jobs I would rank food collection in the top ten. I have to suppress my gag reflexes the best I can as I speed walk by. Today was the worst because I have a cold and my lungs are working at half their capacity. Filling them with this morning stench is not a great start to the day. Luckily, the rest of the day was great but I'm willing to pay anybody huge sums of money to give the garbage truck a mysterious flat tire so they are late in doing their rounds tomorrow.

On Edge

The first wasp of the year floated by me after lunch pausing just long enough to get a close glance of my left ear but it quickly bored and gambolled off. I'm not a big fan of wasps so his attention to my ear was enough to get me on edge.

Mind you I'm not as on edge as some Koreans at the moment. (No, the North hasn't attacked nor have they crumbled forcing the South's economy to take a huge nose dive.) The latest news to unsettle Koreans was the discovery of a deep fried rodent head in a bag of Saewookkang (aka a very popular sort of shrimp chip-that I gave as a stocking stuffer for my brothers last year). The story exploded a few days ago when the customer who had found the prized head, got the cold shoulder from the company (Nongshim) who make the snack, decided to contact the media. I can almost guarantee not a single bag of the stuff has been sold since. My co-teacher Betty said the news of the rat head was so gross she couldn't eat anything the night she heard about it.

Nongshim has since recalled the lot of bags made during the same time of the bag in question. They also quickly went on to blame China and the working conditions/sanitary issues of the factories there because this is where the batter is made before it is shipped back to Busan to be fried and packed up. But fear not loyal customers, a crack team of previously disinterested food safety inspectors from all the major Korean snack makers have been sent to China to set things straight. I know it was a freak incident but have as much faith in the inspectors cleaning things up as I do in Bush winning the Nobel Prize.

Jewel Of the School

Koreans love their ceremonies and the new school year has been full of them. Today we had an hour long meeting to greet the parents who represent each class in the "PTA". All gatherings at school start with the National Anthem and then move on to the principal taking the stage where he loves to ramble on and on and on.

Normally I can only follow 40 percent of what he says but now that I have a partner teacher she sat next to me and translated. I wish she hadn't. At one point he segued into talking about the English program and my name (Mr. Cam) peppered the rant. Near the end of this particular trail in his talk, all the parents heads rounded onto looking at me with giant smiles that frightened me. When they finally had a long enough look I learnt he'd said I was the jewel of the school. (It's OK, that vomit in your mouth is natural. It happened to me too.)

I do like the principal and from stories I've heard of other authoritarian principals, I know I have it very good. I do my job well, we have lots of fun in class and the kids are (slowly) improving. These are the basic qualities a teacher should try to live up to. I was just thrown by this compliment because of the timing. Overly nice compliments like this shouldn't come about on a day where I've laid into one whole class for being needlessly noisy and then threw a couple of kids from another class out in the hall for acting sassy. Oops.

Cocktails The Movie Wanna-bes

Last week I met up with Saejin, YunJeong and her husband to be introduced to a new student and we went all out on a nice sushi dinner. It was nice and quiet and supposed to be an early night. That was until Saejin and I decided to find a random bar for a few beer. (Always a mistake.) We chose Flair bar, a chain of bars in Korea, that are alright if you can ignore the 10 pm cocktail show.

Come this hour conversations are interrupted and customers are forced to watch the bartenders fling bottles, blow fire and make two free drinks to awful dance music. This Flair bar was Myeong Dong which is the heart of shopping for tourist in Korea (especially the Japanese). This night, most of the small bar ended up being foreigners. While one bartender does their best Tom Cruise Cocktail impression the other speaks Korean urging the customers to clap along. I did my part by taking out my camera and pretending to be impressed with a show I've now seen more times than I've seen the actual Cocktail movie.



The shows are boring but seeing as I got one of the free drinks out of it, I'll pretend to be a supporter. The one good thing about the show is that it is a conversation starter. The guy sitting next to Saejin and I turned out to be a solo tourist from Hong Kong and we ended up having a good night. But seeing as I wanted an early night, I felt very much kidnapped and forced to drink.

Bowling Bragging Rights

After spending a way too sophisticated Sunday afternoon looking at art, we decided to have a late lunch before classing the day down with some old fashioned bowling.

Chanyeong has been nagging me and others for the past month to go with him bowling. One night I finally agreed to go but not before making sure there was something on the line. If Chanyeong beat me I pledged to buy him a bottle of whiskey. As I am one year older than Chanyeong, he isn't supposed to be saying my name, instead he should call me Hyung which means older brother. If I won Chanyeong would have to address me in this formal Korean style.

Had I known that we could drink and play, I'd of been there weeks ago.

After losing two straight games Chanyeong demanded a message from JungHui to get him back on track. At the end of the night we both pulled off three wins and managed one tie. With no clear winner we will definitely be going back.

After dinner we headed off for some Korean grub.

My favorite Korean appetiser. It's raw beef minced with garlic, that you pour a raw egg over before picking it up with slices of Asian pears. I know I should be scared of eating all these raw goods but it's too delicious to stop.

Van Gogh's the man

On Sunday, Saejin and I got up early thinking we could avoid any lines for the Van Gogh exhibition but a hung over Chanyeong was late meeting us so we ended up being just slightly ahead of the mob and tucked just behind the early birds. We slipped into line at the bottom of the hill and from here the line wandered up and around for a couple of hours.


Once in the building there was a TV screen set up showing proper museum etiquette. It taught patrons to, stand back from the art, fold their arms before nodding and raising a single hand up to their face where they then whispered to the person next to them sentences you'd never admit to saying in public. Of course the video had a near empty gallery. Let's just say what the video wanted and what the mob of people produced were two different stories. I really want to write bad things about how people view art here but I was too impressed by the number of people willing to put their time in line and give the art a go.

Seoul Museum of History

The plan was to head off to the Van Gogh exhibition on Saturday. When Saejin and I showed up late afternoon, the line up to get in was insanely long. It would been at least a couple of hours before we got into the place so we decided to roam the streets instead. Eventually (after passing the new swanky Canadian embassy) we got to the Seoul Museum of History. Seeing as that night we were boozing for Joel's birthday, we wanted to do something cultural to make up for it. March 1st is a holiday in Korea so the (way too low) 70 cent entrance fee was waved.


The museum was a lot better than I was expecting. I spent most of my time staring at the pictures of Seoul from the days when tigers roamed the streets. I also made good use of all the photos opts the museum offered. I didn't feel the least bit guilty pushing some kid out of the way so I could have my turn being the queen of Korea.

Attack of the Yellow Dust!

The hoody is out of the closet and I'm ready to declare spring. Not because of the weather, it's snowing as I type. I know it's spring in Korea because of the yellow dust warnings on the news. So far this year Seoul has been lucky to avoid major dust storms but the Southern areas of Korea are getting it bad.

There have been schools closed because of it and warnings are given if, "the hourly average dust concentration climbs above 800 micrograms per cubic meter and is expected to continue for two hours or more." The dust clouds are disgusting. You know you're in one when whole buildings in the distance disappear for a few hours and all around you there is a yellow tinge to things. The dust is mostly a discomfort, it burns your eyes and lungs but if you happen to be elderly or are a tiny tot or have lung issues it can be deadly. There has to be a lot more pressure put on China to help fix this problem because it's a horrible way to greet a new season.

Hello, Goodbye

School started up early this morning for it's 61st year.
It was a day of ceremonies with long winded introductions, deep bows, bored kids and mulitple parental cameras taking it all in. The kids looked out of place in their new classrooms. Much too mall to be carrying around their new classrom titles.

Last week we went in for the day to say hello to the new teachers starting at the school and goodbye to the ones leaving (teachers change school's every 5 years). I met my new partner teacher and she seems very nice. She's young, comes from a very rich family, has traveled a lot and is now working her first full time job. The principal told her just to follow me and do what I say so I'm hopeful it will be a good working together.