Saturday, December 12th
Well, this week has been rather dull. I have been sick all week (as you would notice from the few recent posts) so there was little to tell. Most of the week I went to school and came home and stayed in my tiny apartment. There were, however, several things worthy of note. Well, at least I found them rather interesting.
1. Wednesday on the way home from school I was accosted by a group of four middle school girls on the bus. Accosted… I think in some ways a better statement would be sexually harassed (verbally). I am continually being told how handsome I am here (usually by older Korean men, oddly enough) so I was somewhat used to that. I don’t think it is much to go by. They just like white people here. This, however, seemed to be a little beyond the normal bounds of etiquette ( even for here). They were completely disecting my physical appearance. When I stood up to get off they of course noted how tall I was and one of them said, “nice butt,” to which they all burst into a fit of embarrassed giggles. It was somewhat amusing and somewhat annoying.
2. Friday night came without it’s usual fanfare and plans for going out. I was still sniffling and what not and didn’t really want to go out, let alone an all-nighter in Hungdai (which is what all of my friends here were planning). After getting home, however, I decided that I was feeling a lot better and really didn’t want to sit alone all night in my crappy little apartment. One of my fellow teachers had previously given me the number to a friend of hers who spoke English and wanted was interested in meeting sometime to talk. So, in light of the fact that I didn’t really have anything to do that night and wanted to get out, I sent her a text asking what she was doing that night. In the end I went to meet her and 4 of her friends, including my fellow teacher. It was an interesting experience. They were all kind of tipsy when I got there and only Sul-Gee could speak English to any degree. Half way through the evening one of them dropped her cell phone in the toilet. They also kept insisting that I eat something. (It is a very Korean idea. You can’t go out and have drinks without getting food.) And, when I kept refusing this insanely spicy soup (yeah, soup and alcohol just seem ideal) they ordered a plate of dried octopus and beef jerky. Then, they wouldn’t let me pay for anything. Also, they got drunk by 11:30 (very early for Friday nights here) and wanted to get ice cream. Baskin Robbins was closed so they made do with a weird honey syrup stuff (also forcing me to have one, as it was good for me) and insisted on walking me back home. So backwards, they wouldn’t let me pay for anything, and they wanted to walk me home. So, I walk home stone sober with a group of giggling 25 year old girls, all with their arms linked.
There was one more thing but now I can’t remember what it is.
December 15, 2009 | Categories: Random Thoughts, Related to Korea | Leave a comment
Thursday, October 8, 2009
So, while I decided to stop waiting to post current things until I had gotten the backlog out of the way, I still want to go back and document some of the things that happened a while ago.
This happened a day or two after I got here.
I was told to bring my passport and stuff with me to school shortly after my first day at school as we would be going to to take care of my immigration stuff in Suwon (kind of the city of bureaucracy here). In the morning I went with the Vice-Principal to visit a nearby school and to both meet another English teacher and kind of get some pointers from her. It was very helpful and yet still somewhat bewildering. At first it just seems like there is just so much information that they throw at you. Now it seems pathetically simplistic (at least the terrible government mandated curriculum) yet still fatiguingly hard. It is hard to make a 40 minute lesson out of what they want you to teach.
I should mention Lisa here. She is an extremely nice 40-something year old woman from California who has been teaching here in Anseong for about 7 months now. She was the first foreign teacher in Anseong that I met and really did help me a lot. She gave me materials, copies of the English teachers guide to the curriculum (something my school didn’t think about giving me for a couple of weeks), showed me around the town some and even fed me one night with an avocado omelet and toast when I was starving. She really made my transition here a lot smoother than it could have been. Sadly I have lost contact with her somewhat as our paths rarely cross downtown and she lives on the other side from me.
After sitting in on a couple of her lessons and talking with her for a while her vice-principal and mine took us out for lunch at a traditional noodle restaurant. After this, and I barely got to finish the food he drove me to Suwon to take care of my immigration. This is one situation was one situation where I
The Suwon Immigration builiding. Hmm... but I guess you can see that from the picture.
was glad that my school is so bureaucratic and officious. We got there and because they had made an e-appointment or something we got to skip ahead of the line of about 40 people that looked like they had been sitting there already for some hours. Soon the paperwork and my passport were turned, the money paid for it to be sent back to me, and we were on the way back to Anseong.
It was funny, aside for the big letters on the building declaring it for what it was it was a really non-desrcript and unofficial and we had to walk down what amounted to an alley and past a garbage truck to get into the stairwell (no lobby or foyer just stairwell).
After we got back to Anseong, and maybe just because it was only late afternoon and we were passing the entrance area, he decided to take me mountain climbing up Pee Bong Mountain. I thought at first we were just going sightseeing a little way up but soon we were passing people with laughably serious
Outside of Suwon: One of the "home" forests as they call them. It is just one apartment building after another like some weird tired community housing.
mountaineering apparel complete to sets of those extendable hiking poles. We got plenty of strange looks, partly, I think, from me being a very white white-boy and partly from the fact that my Vice-Principal was wearing a suit and I was wearing a button-up and dress shoes. We looked quite out of place. It also may have been due to the fact that we seemed to be effortlessly gliding past many of those “professional” hikers. I think my Vice-Principal only has one pace. It was at least 2 miles up a very steep trail but the scenery was more than worth the uncomfortable shoes. It was beautiful up there and perched near the very top was a traditional octagonal structure (I forget what they call them) that you could climb and look out over the city below.
One view from the top. I live somewhere near the middle but closer the the bottom left.
It was really pretty and it made Anseong look al lot better than it usually does closer up. On the way back down we stop to get some water at a natural spring there that is supposed to be very healthy. The part where everyone drinks out of communal dippers might negate the health benefits but who knows. Koreans share everything, right? There is also a place for Badminton too. Right next the Buddhist temple. It is funny how the old and the new are intermixed so much. We also passed quite a few burial mounds that didn’t really seemed to be separated from the public land in any way.
The spring. Down below and the other side there was a place where the used water came out and you could wash your hands or even bathe there.
After we finished the climb down he decided to take me out to dinner. Oddly enough he took me to a chinese restaurant. The first course was really good, a huge plate of sesame chicken. The second, individual plates of an incredibly spicy mixture of tofu and what looked like ground beef, I couldn’t eat. It was just too hot, though I did my best, and may have done irreparable damage to my mouth and tongue from trying so hard.
Another view from the top. I think it might be the same as before but just lighter.
December 8, 2009 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
Also Tuesday, December 8, 2009
I ended this as a separate post from the Pizza tangent since one was a completely random topic and this is more of a plain narrative of my day.
I went in to work today despite not really feeling much better just to avoid the scandal and harassment that my taking sick days seem to engender. It seems so strange too. Guess what I did today all morning. I slept on the hard floor in front of my heater until about 11:30 am. I was supposed to teach to curriculum classes this morning (the ones that my co-teacher always seems so miffed about me missing) only to find out that she intended on testing them instead of me teaching (I think out of consideration for my health). She mentioned something in a text message about it last night, but in such confusing jargon that I missed the concept entirely and was too tired to try and figure out. It was fine by me but why would they seem so anal about me being there if I wasn’t even going to teach? So, I slept on the hard, cold floor in front of the heater in my office instead of in my nice warm bed at home. After lunch I taught two free teaching lessons, to 3rd and 4th grade respectively, that I whipped out in about 30 minutes. Again, not much to miss if I had been able to stay at home, and even if it was all important could I not have just come in at noon? The last thing on Tuesday’s is the class for the teachers themselves. I was told around 1:30 pm that I need not worry with that because I looked so bad. Nice but why force me to come in at all, or, like I said, if those two classes were so important, why not just let me come in late and leave early and take a partial sick day. Sigh… Sometimes I can’t help but think that Koreans only use very little of their cognitive thinking capacity (hmm maybe they just lack it?) and let tradition and customs do the rest.
Totally random but I just thought I add something on my mind: I wish my Aunt Debra would let me know she is still alive. I have emailed her a couple of times and never gotten anything in response.
December 8, 2009 | Categories: Related to Korea | Leave a comment
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
I don’t really understand it. It doesn’t make sense to me. I guess those are key words that preface any ethnocentric statement though no matter how one might try to escape its grasp. Now that might be a good introduction to any short essay for a sociology class but really I am just talking about people putting corn on pizza. Now you might say that pizza these days is a worldwide food with no one really able to claim it as there own but I would argue that we (Americans) have a right to call it our food. True, it was the Italians who may have first devised the dish but it was Italian-Americans from New York and Chicago who made it what it is today and it is from expanding American imperialism and globalization that have made it such a world food. I say this somewhat in my support for my argument (and trying to negate the force of the “ethnocentric” card that people do so often throw out there). I might win you over a little, I might just be being ethnocentric, you can decide.
So, why do people put corn on the pizza? There are different levels in this, in what I would call a travesty, mockery, nay, this desecration of the word, Pizza. Corn? Really? I ran into this fetish when I was living in Brazil but it seemed a little more understandable, they produce lots of corn there (especially the region that I was in) and use it in various ways in cooking. But even that doesn’t negate the sacrilege entirely as I grew up in the States in one of the most corn dense regions outside of Kansas and Nebraska and nobody there ever thought of putting corn on your pizza. In Brazil though you had to order one of the various “supreme” pizzas (as we would call them) to get the corn, and I only made that mistake once. So. Here in Korea it seems to be a completely different story. They don’t produce large quantities of anything but rice. (I won’t get into the agriculture of the country as I really don’t know all that much, but while you see pears, grapes, rice cakes, and mandarin oranges [from Jeju] you never see ears of corn sitting out for sale. I haven’t even seen them in the big E-marts.) So there isn’t that excuse for putting corn on pizza. And, conversely, you don’t have to order a supreme for you pizza to come laden with corn kernels. Tut tut, so much worse, as there are no excuses.
So, in a sense there is really no such thing as Pizza. It is corn pizza. It comes on everything, as if the two were inseparable here. I have had Pizza three times here now. Twice before I was surprised, the first much more than the second, with the corn sitting there peeking maliciously up through the cheese at me. I thought we had just ordered something that corn was standard on (though I didn’t remember seeing it on the ingredients list), but tonight was the final straw. I stopped and got a pizza on my way home from work at this little cheap (and Americanized) pizza chain restaurant that a friend had told me about. I ordered a plain cheese pizza (yep it even said that in English) and what did I find when I got home and cut off the little red ribbon they tie up all the pizza boxes with? You guessed it, corn.
Plain cheese is no longer plain or Pizza just isn’t Pizza.
December 8, 2009 | Categories: Random Thoughts, Related to Korea | 2 Comments
Monday, December 7, 2009
My school is great in many ways but in one thing they seem really unreasonable. Now, we have sick days written into the contract, sick days that we can take without even needing medical approval. I know a lot of people that whenever they need a personal day they just call in sick and it’s no big deal. In fact, every other teacher I have talked to about it says that it is no problem for them when they need to take a sick day. Now I am not arguing for the ability to call in sick whenever I don’t feel like teaching. I don’t think that is right or appropriate but twice now I have been legitimately sick and needed to take a sick day and my school has flipped over it.
I don’t understand it. The first time I had a migraine ( I get them about 2 or 3 times a year. I have medicine now and I just have to wait for it to run its course ) and it was so bad that I called in sick and stayed in bed all day with my head buried under my pillow. The second time was today. I stayed in all weekend because I felt like I was starting to get sick and sure enough I woke up on Sunday feeling terrible. I told my co-teacher last night that I was really sick and she asks, “oh, that’s to bad, but you will come school tomorrow?” In the end I basically told her that I would be coming to school probably only to get my medical insurance card and to go to the hospital. I don’t think that went over very well.
This morning I was still feeling so bad that the idea of getting up and even riding the bus 20 minutes to my school seemed beyond me and I texted to tell her that I would be waiting for a while to come in until I felt up to making the journey. I get a call from my vice-principal about an hour later saying that he was on his way to my apartment to take me to the hospital. Now, despite the serious breach of personal privacy laws and the flouting of several social mores (American) that this would entail I was genuinely happy as I really did need some medicine. So, he took me to the doctor and stayed there throughout my exam and everything and took me to the pharmacy to fill my prescription bought me some rice cake, as I hadn’t breakfasted, and walked back to my apartment and inside (without waiting to be invited). He talks to me and gets me to eat some rice cake and the whole time I am just dying to crawl back into bed. Now here is the kicker, I look sick, I sound sick, it is very apparent that I in bad shape, yet, when we finish the rice cakes he says, “okay now wash your face and we will go to school.” In the end I kind of just flat out told him that I wasn’t going anywhere feeling like this. He wanted me to lay down in the nurse’s room if I was still feeling bad but seemed convinced that if I went to school and had some lunch and talked to people (and taught some English) that I would feel better right away. Huh?
What is with this school? I don’t understand it. Not only does their behavior seem totally beyond the bounds of rationality, it seems to be completely against what every other English teacher around me has said. Now I am not trying to complain or justify my behavior based on what other people have but trying to rationalize why my school behaves thus strangely when it doesn’t even seem to be the norm.
I contacted my district co-ordinator (who I just found out about and met at orientation) about this and she offered to contact my school and she if she might be able to help. I am rather ambivalent. You see I really want to maintain a good working relationship with these people. I really, really like all of the teachers and the vice-principal in general has been very kind and friendly towards me. So, in some ways I would like to resolve the situation myself without going through an intermediary. I don’t know if that would shame them or cause some ill-will towards me that I was contacting someone else behind their backs to complain of their behavior.
That already kind of happened once with my recruiting agency. They school put me in this terrible little apartment that I am really unhappy with and I contacted my recruiter about it. I just wanted to sound out the possibilities before broaching the topic with the school myself. However, she just called the school herself, despite the fact that I asked her not to, to talk to them. So, I had my co-teacher and vice-principal suddenly descend on me, asking me what was wrong with the apartment (as if it shouldn’t have been apparent, but that’s another story) It just made for a very awkward situation.
Anyway, on the other hand I don’t think I will be able to resolve this on my own. I kind of already had this out with my co-teacher over the last time when they seemed so unreasonable about me taking a sick day. In short I got an email from her stating basically that I had been irresponsible and that “this shouldn’t happen again.” I tried to talk to her about it but her English is not really up to discussions about such things and her “Korean” dislike of direct confrontation didn’t help either. The issue was just kind of dropped without anything coming from it, except for the vague feeling that I was being judged by some of the teachers for about a week after. Now this… It is just so annoying. I understand (kind of) the Korean point of view of this, but it is really frustrating that to take a sick day (that I am entitled to according the contract), especially when I really need it, causes such an imbroglio.
The other thing that makes me kind of sad about this is the fact that it really seems (despite the fact that they were telling me the other day that the teachers are all like a family) that they don’t really care at all about me or how I feel just that I should come into work, though my own perspective might be causing a skewed take on that.
December 7, 2009 | Categories: Related to Korea | Leave a comment
Sunday, December 6, 2009
So, I have decided that I am going to stop waiting to write new and current posts until I write about some of the things that have already happened. My sister gave me the advice that if I won’t ever write anything if I wait to start at the beginning. I did that already and now I have been here for 2 months and only have 2 legitimate posts. Maybe if I am okay with writing short little notices I will be more faithful in keeping up with writing things here.
Not much has happened this weekend. I had felt kind of bad ever since getting back from the GEPIK teachers orientation that was held from Monday to Wednesday. (More on that later – I think it deserves its own post) and Thursday and Friday at work were kind of hard. I got back from classes on Friday with plans to meet a fellow English teacher downtown for a drink around 8:30 and had plans to go running first while it was still warm out. Well, I came tired from work as I usually am and decided to sit down for a minute and read some of the current book I am reading. I also had an intense desire to curl up under my comforter for a few minutes as I had turned the heat off in the morning and it was about 50 degrees in my apt. The next thing I know is that it is 7:30 pitch black dark outside and about 36 degrees, so much for the warm.
I stubbornly decided to go for a run anyway, however. It had been a while and I had been feeling unhealthy (especially after eating loads of greasy quasi-western food at the orientation meeting) and I refused to give in and put it off for another day. So, I called the girl and told her it would be a little longer and staggered out into the cold in my thin sweatpants, jacket, and earmuffs. Despite the weather I got in about 2.3 miles in 19 minutes. (good enough I suppose and I could no longer feel my thighs) I came back, showered, and got dressed and ran up to meet her. Due to the delay I had asked for some plans had been messed up and now I had to wait for her for about 30 minutes. It turned out to be a good thing, however, because some other friends called and said that they were on their way up to Seoul in a few minutes and wanted to know if I wanted to join. I probably would have gone as I was feeling kind of reckless at the moment and that would have made for a very long night. You kind of get stuck there until the public transportation opens back up at 6. I only stayed out for a short while and went home early instead.
Saturday, I had had week long plans to go up to Seoul in the afternoon and meet some people I had met during orientation and go out with them at night. I had actually been thinking of going up in the morning with a couple of people from Anseong and seeing some touristy stuff with them too. That didn’t pan out. I was just not feeling well during the day and never really got to feeling better so spent most of the day in bed or cleaning my apartment. Finally, around 8pm or so I formally canceled my plans with the people in Seoul. (A two hour long skype convo with my parents put a dent in my getting ready time) So, what with the advanced hour and my fatigue I decided not to go. Instead I hung around cleaning and what not in my apt until around 10 when I walked downtown to meet a friend. It was nice and much more relaxed than Seoul. Two other people showed up as well. The funny thing was we went, in the end, to one of the more frequented bars by foreign teachers here in Anseong and the owner came over and joined us. Then not long after, her friend, another bar owner (and one also known as the western hangout) came in and joined us. It was a fun and slightly bizarre experience, sitting around a table with two forty year old Korean women eating fruit (among other things) with chopsticks, occasionally being fed by one of them with chopsticks. They would sometimes just reach over and try to shove something in your mouth.
Today, I have spent nearly the whole day in bed. I woke up with what seems to be a pretty severe sinus infection and cough. I am so glad I didn’t go to Seoul last night. I don’t know what I would be feeling like today if I had. Last night I went out for a very short time and had relatively nothing to drink, just basically a walk, some company, and some food, and I’m feeling like this. Ugh.
I just got off the phone with my co-teacher and may not be going to work in the morning. I am not sure yet. I left my insurance card at school and am not sure if I will have to go out there first before going to the hospital or even whether or not I really want to take tomorrow off. The last time I took a sick day they had a fit.
A friend is going to bring me over some medicine now though so I might have a better night’s sleep. What will tomorrow bring?
December 6, 2009 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment
The Korean Connection 