Opinions, anecdotes, musings, misinformation and questionably helpful information about working, living, surviving and thriving as an ESL teacher South Korea; the land where logic comes to die.
Questions?
email: aavanwey [at] gmail [dot] com
Daring Fireball posted a link to an amazing animated map of the growth of the U.S. jobless rates.
When I see things like this I’m reminded how lucky I am to have a job that, overall, I actually enjoy quite a lot, AND that pays me enough to put some money in savings and buy enough toys to keep me entertained.
(Source: Daring Fireball)
How To Make Authentic Korean Pizza!
Mmm….yummy!
Korea exists in its own little sphere of oddity. It’s like that island in LOST.
One such cultural practice that always amuses and frustrates me are how Koreans deal with illness…or more specifically, how they don’t deal with it.
This last Saturday I came down with something nasty. It was like the flu. But without the fever. My basic symptoms included: headache, nausea, sore muscles, exhaustion, sore throat, coughing, sneezing, runny nose, and basically feeling like I was watching myself from the 3rd person like some freakin’ video game.
By Sunday it subsided a bit, but by that evening it came back in full force like when the Chinese backed North Koreans pushed the UN forces back to the DMZ in 1950. By Monday I could barely talk and yes I just used a Korean War metaphor.
So, I wandered over to school, told our boss my symptoms, and, knowing Koreans, I asked him whether he thought I should teach.
Why did I ask him whether he thought I should teach?
See, in Korea it’s usually YOUR fault if you get sick. It’s never the fault of germs, or bacteria, or working with children who have the cultural hygiene habits of fucking sewer mutants and living in a society that constantly spits on the ground.
No, it’s YOUR fault you got sick.
You didn’t dress warm enough.
You should probably get more sleep.
You aren’t thinking positive.
You probably didn’t wash your hands regularly.
You didn’t eat enough kimchi!
What’s more, few if any hagwons actually have a substitute teacher they can call. Such a network or practice simply doesn’t exist at most private academies because (a) they’re logical, and (b) they cost extra money, two things that generally scare business owners out here. In fact, you’ll most likely have the Academic Director/Head Instructor/random person substitute for you if, and only if, you’re dead or dying and unable to be wheeled into school. (See 2008 Pneumonia Incident Below for further details)
Anyways, our Head Instructor Boss Dude is a pretty awesome guy, even if he does religiously believe in Fan Death, and when I told him my symptoms he gave me his professional opinion.
Boss: “I don’t think you have flu, I think it’s just cold.”
Me: “Okay dokie!” *marches off to stare blankly at photo copy machine*
The whole country is coming down with Swine Flu and schools are shutting down, but somehow I only caught a cold. Go figure…
TheraFlu and tea in hand, I marched into a classroom that’s already down six students from Swine Flu. I did my best not to hack and cough, and certainly covered my mouth when I did (which is not widely practiced here). Mainly I just played MP3 files for my students and got caught up on some much needed Facebook time.
This week we have Level Up tests. Basically, ten weeks into the quarter, we throw the Einsteins and R-tards together and let the Magical Sorting Hat do its work. All I have to do is explain the tests, press some buttons, and make sure little Minsoo isn’t cheating off Sanghuen. Occasionally I have to bark out commands and clarify instructions. The Special Students get the majority of my voice during this week because instructions like: Choose A, B, C, or D can sometimes be too complicated.
My first class on Monday has a lot of Special Students.
So three hours in, my voice had gone out and I sounded like I was in the throes of puberty. Dr. Boss-man asked me how I felt.
Me: “Pretty cra-ppEEEEEEE…”
Him: “Should I cover your class?”
Me: “Your call.”
Him: “Go home, get some rest.”
Me: *Thank you Raptor Jesus*
So I went home and rested. I even made myself some chicken noodle soup Korea style by adding kimchi, mushrooms, ramen, and Sriracha sauce until the concoction was literally so spicy hot my body temperature jumped up a full degree and a half celsius after eating it.
Yes, I actually measured the Before and After, simply out of scientific curiosity.
I promptly played Resident Evil 5 until I passed out for a nap at an ungodly early hour. I dreamed about my Head Instructor, who’s wife is pregnant and a few days past due, naming their son after me. Then his wife turned out to be the faculty manager at our school and the faculty manager is a man, so everything got very awkward and David Lynch.
Part of me even felt guilty for going home. Weird huh? Feeling guilty for going home sick. See, it’s the first time in 18 months that I’ve taken a sick day. And I’ve been sick a lot out here.
In fact, prior to coming to Korea, I probably got sick once every five years. But in the last 18 months I’ve come down with every type of ailment, from a misdiagnosed kidney problem to a chronic sinus infection that wentantibiotic resistant when a crappy Korean quack under prescribed antibiotics and culminated in my sinuses popping at 35,000 feet over the Pacific during winter vacation.
It was awesome.
I blame it on being surrounded by kids with bad hygiene. And if I didn’t love teaching the little germ factories so much I’d probably have fled into the hills.
But not Koreans.
They force themselves to work even if they’re fucking melting from Ebola. It’s a work culture, and to go home sick is to admit defeat and lose face. Taking a sick day just isn’t programmed into the collective operating procedure of the K-Borg. Damn the spread of infectious disease! Who cares about that sneezing office drone next to you! Go ahead, full steam and only go home if you’re dying.
In Korea community comes before the individual.
In the west, if you’re sick, you stay home to get better.
In Korea, if you’re sick, you bring it to work and share it with the community!
During our first year out here in 2008 my girlfriend and I worked for The Welton School in Jukjeon. It was a good place to work. It was a better place to learn how slimy some Korean bosses can be. 75% of what we looked for in a school our following year was the opposite of what The Welton School was. It gave us a great barometer for suck and a pretty high tolerance for crap.
Any sandwich looks good after you’ve eaten a shit sandwich for 365 days.
Anyways, as luck would have it in May of 2008 my girlfriend came down with Pneumonia. She coughed. She gagged. She shook and wretched so bad that she actually gave herself micro fractures all across her ribs.
We went to the E.R.
Going to the E.R. is scary. Going to the E.R. in Korea is downright terrifying. After finding the only doctor not covered in blood and capable of communicating in English, we described her symptoms and our own amatuer diagnosis.
Some x-rays and tests later, the doctors confirmed it. Pnuemonia. Her lungs looked like two half filled water balloons.
They gave her some morphine. They gave her antibiotics. They gave her a satchel full of various medications and cough syrups and instructed her to stay home for a week crank up the humidifier.
The next morning the academic director showed up to our apartment. Not to see if she was better, but to physically drive her to school.
He wasn’t worried about the pneumonia, he was simply worried about how long it would take her to get to school WITH pneumonia.
Despite the doctors orders, despite common sense, our director decided he was too lazy to teach her classes. So into the car then into the classroom she went.
With broken ribs.
With Pneumonia.
Oh, but he gave her a megaphone to teach with.
And a chair.
How considerate!
My girlfriend’s a fucking champ. She didn’t complain. She didn’t even whine. She tried her best to teach and it wasn’t until the owner of the school actually saw this, berated the academic director for being a lazy bastard, and then sent her home to rest for the week.
So after last nights chicken noodle kimchi ramen and mushroom fueled soup of spicy doom I went to sleep. By this morning, I was feeling better. Not a lot better but not bad enough to go to the hospital.
I comfort myself with the fact that the school I work with actually does care about my health. Enough for them to send me home. Enough for them to at least not be lazy and hand me a megaphone when my voice goes out.
And yes, my Head Instructor may still believe in fan death and that Kimchi cures a lot of ailments, but at least he’s an awesome enough dude to step in and send me home.
And who knows, maybe the kimchi noodle soup did help after all.
~cheers!
I’ve always loved airplanes. There’s something about welded metal intentionally flying through the open air and landing on the ground without breaking to pieces that makes my jaw drop. One of my first memories was seeing Top Gun with my dad when I was 7. One of my second memories was playing Top Gun on the Nintendo and completely sucking at the landing missions. The fact that people choose to put themselves in these welded metal objects and fling themselves through the as a job actually blows my mind.
I’ve always loved airplanes.
The problem is, I hate flying. I have to take Xanax and copious amounts of sleeping medication even to get through a take off. The slightest bump en route from point A to point B sets of a panic attack. Any time there’s an odd noise from any end of the plane I automatically assume it’s because the wing just fell off. I love traveling but I just hate getting there by air.
It’s not the possibility of dying that scares me, it’s the part before it.
The part when the plane starts to break apart at 35,000 feet and the cabin separates in strips like metal beef jerky. The part where people are vomiting and screaming as the air turns cold and violent and the plane corkscrews out of control. The part where I find myself getting sucked out through a hole, still latched into my seat, hurtling down through darkness towards the ocean. The part where the death screams of passengers give way to whipping cold as the air slaps my face and I alternate between watching the exploding wreckage of the plane above and the impending death of the terra firma below.
These are the images that rush through my head while flying like some endless loop of horror. I’ve been to therapy before about this, and even the shrink said that I was a hard nut to crack.
That said, I love WATCHING airplanes. And as luck would have the last week has been great for that.
See, we live near an airfield here in Bundang, Seoul Airbase to be exact. When we walk to school sometimes we see the bellies of C130’s as they take off above the buildings. Occasionally we see Apaches flying in formation. Lately, we’ve been watching fighter jets break the sound barrier over the mountains nearby, shaking buildings and interrupting my freakin’ lectures. It’s hard to keep Korean kids attention when Maverick-Kim is giving you a fly by.
This last weekend was the Seoul Air Show, which ironically not held in Seoul, but outside it in Bundang. This, however, was awesome because it was basically a 20 minute walk down the Tancheon River from Yatap. Plus it gave me an excuse to get off my ass and go outside and see some real airplanes on not the ones on my Xbox.
So we met up with some friends for some afternoon Italian eats our favorite little fusion bistro, Bistro Re. I had the always awesome Club Sandwich and a pint of Cass. Before venturing down to the river path I stocked up on one of my favorite concoctions: Pocari Sweat and Chongha sake.
Booze infused sports drink in hand, we made our way down the Tancheon River enjoying the glorious autumn day outside. All we had to do was follow the sound of sonic booms until we were at the airfield.
We bought tickets at 9,000 won a pop, and made our way onto the airbase where they had this hand sanitizing station set up. Swine flu is everywhere, so it was nice to see some hygiene being promoted with firepower nearby.
They even had this cute little traditional gate covered in flowers to welcome us to one of Asia’s largest military trade shows.
Nnnnnnnneeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaarrrrrroooowwwwwww! Imma airplane!
Inside the tents they had all sorts of booths and full size tanks and helicopters set up by the various companies that make tanks and helicopters. It was both awesome and disturbing to see these people pimping their products of destruction, especially with taglines such as: “Deadly Accurate!” and “The Enemies Will Never See It Coming!”
One of the weapon case manufacturers set up a nice little display that the kids sure loved!
I found it a little uncomfortable that a few booths down from Korea Air was a company showing off what could happen if a stinger missile hit a commercial airplane, and then selling the appropriate counter measure technology to prevent it.
And of course with the guns come the girls…or at least the ones paid to stand around and make awkward faces while pimping products they may or may not even know how to use.
My girlfriend, pretending to be G.I. Jane in front of the US Military Weapons trade booth. 
Outside the Black Eagles were performing their amazing 8 man “We’re Going To Fly Really Fast and Almost Hit Each Other” routine at sonic boom levels of loudness. Of course, since they were jets and jets fly at really freakin’ high speed and my camera is pretty crappy, the best shot I got out of fifty looks something like the Zapruder film.
After the planes finished their mid-air-no-crash-cock-tease routine we got to pose with one of the pilots.
All the planes were lined up on the landing strip like some giant military parking lot. It was pretty cool to be able to walk right up next to the machines I hate most and not have to actually step inside one.
I was really amused that Kia makes a military troop transport. Personally, I wouldn’t be terribly comfortable riding around the Middle East, dodging IEDs and kamikazes in a camouflage carrier with the letters KIA on the front…
I found a tank and promptly acted out the scene from Indian Jones and the Last Crusade where the Nazi dude gets crushed beneath it.
At the end of the runway there was a massive A380 sitting there like some beached whale. The thing was *huge*! Like, Titanic big.
On closer inspection it was still very big. 
Even more interesting than the A380 were the assorted UAV’s all over the place, ranging from model airplane small to huge and oddly phallic. There’s something weird about a plane without a glass cockpick…it seems soulless and almost SkyNet sinister.
I tried to imagine what it’d be like taking out a terrorist convoy with one of these things and came to the conclusion it’d be pretty much like every video game I play.
As the day came to a close the cheesy 80’s rock blasting over the airfield sound system was replaced by classical music and polite voices saying: “Thanks for coming but this is a military base, so please GTFO!”
Despite my sheer hatred of traveling on planes, it was still pretty awesome to get so close to them without being forced inside. Who knows, maybe I’ll even learn to love the sheer discomfort of flying; the smells and noises, the mass of people crowded together, the screaming children and rude parents, even the odd tasting food and dirty toilets. After all, I have grown to love living in Korea!
Cheers!
I was lazy this summer. Last summer I spent pretty much every weekend climbing some random mountain nearby. This summer I beat a ton of Xbox games and went to the gym. The gym is a great way to stay in shape, but jogging on the hamster machine for 45 minutes isn’t the same as climbing a fucking mountain. And video games are awesome but every time I scaled some peak in Fable 2 or marveled at some digital vista I realized I was needed some serious outdoors time.
So last saturday I dragged the girlfriend out to climb a fucking mountain.
We picked Bukhansan. It’s on the north east end of Seoul. It’s 837 meters tall. Its name sounds like bukake so it stuck in my head. Wikipedia said it had some cool wall or something as well, so why not?
We woke up at 9am. 9am on a sunday is godawful early for me. I usually go to sleep at 4am on the weekends. Sometimes I watch the sun rise. I hate the mornings like Michael Vick hates pit bulls. One of the things I love about my job most is that I work from 4-10pm. I’m usually awake by then. At 9am I’m functionally retarded.
Anyways we took our sweet time getting ready, and by the time we got from Bundang to Bukhansan, it was already the afternoon. We wasted an hour getting off the subway early to find a bathroom so my girlfriend could empty her pea sized bladder. After 30 minutes of wandering past black out drunks still asleep on the sidewalk in The Ugliest Side of Seoul we found the one building that didn’t have a locked bathroom. Then we got lost trying to find the subway stop again.
Finally we got off at Dobongsan, the closest subway stop. I’d noticed an increase in middle aged men and women on the subway the closer we got. Now the only thing middle aged Korean men love more than going hiking is to dress like they’re going hiking. The ‘town’ around the base of the mountain looked like a maze of K2 shops and soju stalls.
There were more Koreans there than in the garment district of L.A. The income at the mountaineering stores probably make up half their global profit. Even if you never touched the mountain you could at least dress the part and drink to your hearts content.
Climbing the mountain itself was pretty much the same as riding the subway in Seoul without the Subway. Fifteen minutes into the trail the mountain was still packed with people pushing their way past each other in a hurry to get to the top.
I was getting angry. In my mind I had built up the hike as a serene excursion, my girlfriend and I summiting the peak like the Fellowship in Lord of the Rings. Instead we found ourselves fighting for rock space with families and old men on some twisted human conveyor belt funneling us upwards. The possibility that we might not get to the peak before the sun set was an idea I was not happy with.
After a half hour we ducked off the main trail and spent a little time wandering around a beautiful Buddhist temple. The air was clean and crisp and the calming sounds of MP3 chants being funneled through speakers settled my nerves for a little while.
I was calm. I was collected. I was going to be one with the trees and bark and little old men that burp and fart as they push their way past you with their trekking poles on their way to the top.
Rejuvenated and enlightened, we got back onto the main trail, followed it for a few minutes and came to a fork in the road. Remembering my Robert Frost I decided it would be in our best interest to take the trail less travelled. After all, we wouldn’t have to deal with the hordes of day-hikers fumbling past each other up the mountain like migrating wildebeest.
It was deserted! No one within eyeshot. It even gave us a chance to enjoy the beautiful autumn colors without getting stampeded into the rocks by the Korean conveyor belt.
We came to a parting of the trees…and there it was…the summit!
My first thought was: “Holy Crap, there’s the peak!”
My second thought was: “Holy crap, that’s really far away!”
It was already 3:45, the sun sets before 6, leaving us with two hours to summit and potentially have to call rescue workers to medivac us down in the darkness. It was now a race.
“Hurry up!” I shouted back at my girlfriend as she tripped over some rock. If that injury jeopardizes her ability to maneuver, I may have to leave her behind, I thought.
We reconnected with the main trail, pushed our way past the Korean Horde…I may have even nudged a grandma into a ravine. Every step took us closer to the top…and then…Horror!
We weren’t even close to the peak!
Hours of pushing past elders and following Robert Frosts trail advice had taken us around in a loop, bringing us right back to the first stop after the start!
Fuck Frost! Worst hiking advice ever, I cursed.
Some people see hiking as a fun way to work out. Not me. I’ve always seen hiking as a battle between man and mountain. I’m sure he’d deny it, but I know for a fact that when Edmund Hilary got to the top of Everest the first thing he did was drop his pants and tea-bag the summit.
It was getting late, and I’d just been tea-bagged by Bukhansan. As always, my girlfriend seemed to find something positive. “Hey, look at this!”
We made our way back down, stopping to take pictures of the foliage.
She was in good spirits, smiling and prancing about the woods like a freakin’ wood elf from Narnia while I silently cursed the mountain and my poor planning. I vowed to return one day, nuts in hand, ready to make Bukhansan my bitch.
At the bottom we ate cotton candy and planned our shame-filled retreat back to Bundang. I could hardly taste the sugar with the bitter taste of bitter failure on my tongue.
“Hey, you know what could be fun?” My girlfriend asked.
“Pushing a hiker in front of a train?” I snarled back.
“We should go to Technomart!” She answered, ignoring my hostile tone. “I need to get some new Lush soaps, and you’ve beaten all the video games we got last time. You should get some new ones!”
So we went to Technomart. 10 floors of electronic goodness. It’s like a Best Buy on crack. I get a nerd boner just typing about it.
The day wasn’t a total failure. My girlfriend bought a ton of Lush soaps. Stuff with names like Flying Fox and Cinnascrape and Rockstar. Stuff that makes your skin smell pretty much what I’d imagine heaven smells like.
And I picked up two new Xbox games so I could go back to doing what I do best: beating them.
Sometimes it’s so darn hard to be angry with my students.
Take TOMMY, for example. He never does his homework. His pronounciation sounds like he’s chewing gum balls. He’s dressed in FUBU gear. He actually wrote “EXPENSIVE HAT” inside his designer hat so kids would know…yes…it’s expensive.
He looks like a cross between TOAD from Super Mario Brothers and Odd Job from James Bond and has the kind of dull, vacant expression that makes you want to smack him with a rolled up paper in the back of the empty melon on his slouched shoulders just to see if you hear an echo.
He’s pretty much borderline retarded and on top of this he talks about spending all his time in PC Rooms playing video games because his home computer is broken after he downloaded movies onto it and got a virus. By all rights I should be angry with this kid…yet…
Me: “Okay, the word vocab word is ‘Dance’. Please give me a sentence.”
(glances around, sees Tommy staring off into space)
Me:
“Okay…Tommy, go!”Tommy: “Uh….I *dance* with-uh…SPIDER-PIG! (*sings*) Spider-PIG…SPIDER-PIG!…LIKES TO DANCE THE SPIDER JIG!…
(long pause)
Tommy: “What was question?!”
This last week our school made its best attempt to take us out to the Korean Folk Village in Yongin this saturday, despite, of course, telling us that it would be happening on Wednesday. Unfortunately I had already made plans to whisk my girlfriend up to Seoul on Saturday, and she had already made plans to have her hair cut and colored in Jeongja as well. According to our Head Instructor there was going to be copious amounts of booze and BBQ at the folk village, and despite it being 45 minutes away and having rented a bus and driver, they also rented motel rooms where we could crash for the night if we “were too drunk”.
Crazy as I was to pass this up I knew my girl needed my moral support for the hair cutting ordeal.
Men have it pretty lucky out here, as we can just go to a Blue Club and have our hair cut for about six bucks. Asian hair is thicker and most so-called barbers have no clue how to cut western hair outside of the standard menu of Bowl Cut, Mullet, Legolas, Violinist, Military Shave, and Juggernaut. I usually just role the dice and say: “Blad Pitt” and they understand. And at six dollars, even if it comes out looking silly I can always just shave it and start fresh.
My girlfriend pays between $100 to $200 and she gets free espresso. I pay $10 at most and that gets me a head massage that leaves me stumbling and smiling. Maybe I should start pocketing the $190 left over and spend it on vodka.
Anyways, the girlfriend has been going to Toni & Guy since last year, and they usually do a pretty solid job. Plus they’re one of the few salons in miles that actually have blonde hair coloring and know how to use it. She stresses over stuff like this. I tend to just shrug and roll the dice with the clippers.
So like a monkey on a leash I followed her down to Jeongja, the high rent district, and sat on the sofa surfing the internet for a few hours while she got her hair trimmed. Jeongja is only a few stops down in Bundang from Yatap, but might as well feel like the Beverly Hills to our Inglewood. The buildings are all five years newer which in Korea basically means the difference between falling apart and totally awesome. Plus there’s a great place that does excellent American diner food called Daily King’s that’s actually worth the visit.
It’s amusing being a foreigner on a sofa in a hair salon that’s totally out of your price range and dress code. Every customer spotted me for what I was: lower class steerage that’d somehow made my way into the wrong class cabins. I just wiled away the time sending off emails while my girlfriend and her entourage of hair attendants combed over each hair fiber one at a time like some fucking CSI unit. Customers actually scooted away from me as if my mere presence would cause them to go out of fashion.
Then I realized what it was. It’d actually been about two months since I’d had a chop up top. Here I am, sitting on a sofa that’s worth more than my monthly paycheck and my hair’s messier than Dwight Schrutes.
“Dammit, if only I could get my hair cut!” I actually thought.
Five minutes later I was being massaged and shampooed by a sweet but paranoid toadstool of a stylist. Her english was excellent if not for the fact that she spoke at a whisper, and between her silent questions regarding my preferred hairstyle and my tendancy to ramble on, I don’t think either of us communicated our actual intentions at all.
“Just make me look handsome. You know, not ugly?” I said and went back to playing with my iPod Touch knowing I’d given her an impossible task.
After she snipped, consulted her sinpping, snipped some more, checked the alignment of the previous snips and the current snips, then consulted her star-chart to verify said snippage was in fact in harmony with future intended snippage, somehow she finished it all up in just over an hour. This was perfect too because this was just about the time where I was starting to get really uncomfortable with the awkward grunts and whispered mumblings coming from behind after each slash of the scissors. Plus, I wanted a cigarette bad and my bloodsugar was starting to feel like battery acid.
All in all the haircut was about 30,000 won ($25) and it came out rather interesting. I don’t recall asking her to leave the back long while shaving the sides, and I am pretty sure I didn’t say the word Mohawk, but somehow that’s how it turned out.
“Whatever, at least I get to eat a chili cheese burger for dinner,” I thought.
My girlfriends hair came out a lot better, despite the stylist insisting to poof it out like some homeless poodle which I promptly had to fix. 
Despite not making it up to Seoul due to spending freakin’ half a day at a hair salon and walking away with a mohwak, we managed to have a productive weekend. I spent a small fortune buying new Xbox games at HomePlus (Devil May Cry 4, Army of Two), plus some pots for plants (my new vice, I have 13) and we hit the gym hard twice over the weekend. After putting on a bit of a beer gut during out vacation through S.E. Asia this spring I’m determined to look good naked at any cost, so I’ve done my best to stay away from the beer (vodka for me) and spend at least 90 minutes in the muscle factory a day, usually four to five times a week.
I love the gym. I even bought a handy little app for my iPod Touch called iFitness that works more or less like a workout log. It tracks the weights you lift, the pounds you shed, and the time spent running on that damn hamster wheel while staring at the TV screen. After that it graphs it all out like some freaking TPS report. If my little line graph dips down, I know I didn’t work out as well as I did yesterday and then I feel bad in my soul and will probably drink beer. It’s a vicious cycle. Plus it’s fun to see results and prance about the officetel naked like big blue penis dude from The Watchmen, especially since I can’t shower at the gym without getting eye-raped by the locals.
That’s one thing I still haven’t gotten over: having your willy wowed at by whomever happens to be next to it when it’s removed from its sheath. Bathrooms, locker rooms, half the time I end out partially undressed I end out having another pair of eyes on it that aren’t mine. I’ve given up showering at the gym because it’s simply uncomfortable to be around so many naked dudes that have zero problem staring at your cock.
Yes, it’s bigger, that rumor is true. Yes, the curtains match the drapes, or did you expect them to come in different colors like a box of crayons. And yes I like to keep my carpet trim unlike the explosion of black vines most gym rats seem to prefer. So now I just use the gym locker room for its medical scale and the occasional chuckle.
After the gym eye raping we packed the calories back on by going to our new favorite little Italian restaurant here in Yatap called Bistro Re-Al. Most Italian joints in South Korea make me sick, but not Bistro Re-Al. Unlike Ola’s, Bistro Re-Al is both extremely affordable and in the same freakin’ time zone. The food is good enough to crave weekly, as it offers a cool blend between authentic Italian and funky fusion.
The chicken salad is pretty good and massive enough to be an appetizer for two.
Tonight I had their incredibly spicy Thai Peanut Sauce and Indian Curry Chicken Seafood Pizza. Yes, it’s a mouthful to order but it’s just spicy enough to put a good sweat on your forehead in the cool autumn air.
Previously, I’ve had their delicious Caesar Salad Pizza. Ironically, they don’t have a Caesar Salad on the menu, and weren’t able to make us one because they “don’t have the ingredients.” How they were then able to make us a caesar salad pizza then is unknown.
I usually get a sandwich to go because, number one, it’s freaking way better than I can make at home and, number two, because in the mornings I’m a lazy bastard who doesn’t always want to cook his own food and would rely upon McDonalds and Mandoo five days out of the week if I didn’t plan for future hungers. When it comes to food, I tend to think very short term, usually as far as my next meal, but never more than half a day ahead. Hence taking one of their awesome sandwiches to-go for tomorrows lunch. I may be the worlds most immature 30 year old but at least I’m learning to plan for the future!
Last Thursday night I wrote about how excited I was to have my first of few three day holiday weekends roaming about Seoul while the whole city emptied itself out like a pinata on Cinco de Mayo. Well, like most things in Korea, this strange little Peninsula had other plans. They say if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. What they should say is if you have plans in Korea, expect for them to get fucked five ways from friday.
So, thursday night we went to the gym and followed up a healthy work out with a beer or two while listening to some friends play guitar at a little basement dive bar in Yatap called Woodstock. A Canadian named steve, our friend Matt, and an unnamed Korean guy who looked like Eddie Vedder wailed away on guitar and sang songs until we mosied on home around 3am, ready to hit the hay and get up early for a busy day.
Usually I enjoy waking up next to my awesome girlfriend. It’s like waking up and smelling someone making waffles and coffee, except these waffles talk and sometimes talk dirty. That friday, however, my girlfriend looked like something between a sack of grey skin and that huge Turtle beast from The Neverending Story.
She looked sick. Not just a little sick, but sick as fuck. My first thought was to get out of bed and rush her to the hospital. My second thought was that: “HOLY SHIT, I FEEL SICK TOO!” As I slithered forth from the bed like a snail leaving its shell I came to a horrible conclusion: I was far too sick to do ANYTHING other than ooze and writhe about the apartment in misery.
See, the thing about getting sick in Korea is this: everyone is always sick, or recovering, or in some stage of illness. Our head instructor has gout. Our director has constant allergies. There’s always a teacher among us who’s battling off some sort of virus horde like orcs against the ramparts of Helm’s Deep. And the students…wretching and coughing and being forced to school after school like a thousand zombie Typhoid Maries; sharing erasers and snacks with the same hands they wipe their noses and never sanitize with. Looking for suspects who gave us our sickness was like looking for war criminals in Hitler’s Bunker. Everyone was guilty of some viral treason.
Our school recently installed hand sanitizing stations around the place, and of course the students, being freakin’ students, ended out pouring copious amounts into their cupped hands like liquid gold and flinging it at each other in some splooge-fest sanitizer fight. The gesture was nice, but in typical fashion around kids it went over as well as a wet fart in a packed church.
So our glorious three day weekend retreat where I planned to whisk my girlfriend into the city on a romantic river cruise and spend the night or two at a luxury hotel complete with bubble bath and bath bombs from Lush turned into a 72 our quarantine period where we slept in until 4pm, watched an entire season of Deadwood (one of the best shows ever, end of fucking story), and played copious amounts of video games. Thankfully we’re both video game nerds and having a recent supply of games to beat (Prototype, Halo 3, F.E.A.R. 2, and Mirror’s Edge) made the weekend at least a little more amusing than just sitting around and staring at each other as we decayed into rotting corpses before our own eyes.
By Sunday we weren’t feeling much better and so we ventured over to the Cha Hospital in Yatap. Last year my girlfriend came down with bacterial Pneumonia, and having been quarantined for 9 days back in May at the start of the whole Swine Flu in Korea scare tour, we’ve become intimately familiar with Korean medical establishments. So we felt fairly confident walking in there on a sunday afternoon on the second busiest Holiday weekend in the country, waving our white waegook hands held up high and saying: “We’re sick, help us” in our best broken Korean and receiving results. Again, our plans were not in sync with the psychic energies in the land of the morning calm.
The hospital was a war zone. Imagine what shit would look like on day two of a zombie outbreak, and triple it. People were everywhere; sitting in wheelchairs, laying in stretchers, sitting on the ground in groups having coughing fits. Doctors ran about like the place was some fucking M*A*S*H war zone and this being Korea I half expected to see Alan Alda come scurrying by with some bomb victims limbs hanging on by red threads and duct tape.
After four or five confused Korean faces wondering why we were there and how to communicate to us, we finally found the only english speaking doctor in the entire fucking 20 story medical compound. He took a look at us, two white foreigners standing there amid a sea of moaning misery, and simply asked: “Swine Influenza?”
“No,” was our reply, and a truthful one. We’d been monitoring our temperatures, and they’d never gone over 37’ (99f) since we’d incurred this sickness.
“As you can see,” he said, a favorite fucking Korean way of starting sentences they want to end quickly, “we’re very busy. I think with your symptoms, you have cold. Perhaps come back tomorrow if you feel worse. We open at…eight…three hundred. Three hundred and eight.”
“Eight thirty, got it,” I said. Koreans have trouble with converting numbers into english. Their lowest paper currency is the Chon Won, literally 1,000 won, and it’s around 80% of a dollar at current writing. Anyways, they tend to always count in different increments, so if they have 50,000 won they’ll just say 5 man won, which means 5 x 10,000 won. It’s so common for lost in translation moments that are usually resolved by subtracting a zero that I hardly flinch anymore when someone charges me a million won for a soda. I simply check the register, receipt, and go on my merry way.
So monday morning my girlfriend woke up at eight-three hundred and meandered over to the hospital, spent a little less than $10 (go go public health care) and had our suspicions confirmed that we were not walking merchants of swine flu but rather that we’d come down with some sort of mutant strain of the Korean autumn cold.
Feeling better, I ventured into school while she stayed home to sleep and couldn’t have been more envious or bitter of the other teachers adventures. Everyone had stories to tell about spending their Chuseok in some awesome corner of Korea doing awesome things and eating awesome food with awesome people and I simply had a glazed gaze over my eyes from hours of afternoon naps and sore thumbs from too much Xbox. Last time I went home for christmas vacation, I came down with a full blown sinus infection a few days before that culminated in 21 days of antibiotics after my sinuses popped mid flight over the pacific. This time, I got my ass handed to me by a cold.
So for the next three day weekend, I’m not making any plans. Fuck it, I figure. I’ll just wing it the morning of, taking a ticket to some corner I chose minutes before I board the bus. I’ve had enough telling the Korean Gods my plans only to have them laugh at me and throw sickness my way like lightning bolts from Olympus to let them have the last laugh yet again…
Chuseok is almost upon us this year, and despite half falling on a weekend (friday-saturday) I’m looking forward to it. Chuseok is basically the Korean Thanksgiving. Most return to their ancestral towns to visit family, eat traditional rice cakes, and according to my students, their grandparents give them a ton of money which their parents promptly take and either dole out in small increments or simply pocket to spend on soju and english academies.
From Wikipedia:
In modern South Korea, on Chuseok there is a mass exodus of Koreans returning to their hometowns to pay respects to the spirits of one’s ancestors. People perform ancestral worship rituals early in the morning. They often visit the tombs of their immediate ancestors to trim plants and clean the area around the tomb, and offer food, drink, and crops to their ancestors. Harvest crops are attributed to the blessing of ancestors.
Why, you ask, do I care about a Korean Holiday? You’re a waegook with not an ounce of Han blood and hardly an ancestral tomb in 8000 miles to bow before! Well, we at Chungdahm work our little butts off year round, and yes it’s true we don’t even get Christmas off (unless it falls on a Saturday), but…we do get 1 day off for Chuseok, and it will be glorious! 24 hours is a lot of time to commit a lot of crimes, mainly to my liver and wallet, and I plan on heading INTO Seoul while everyone else heads the other way. Visions of myself, Will Smith, and a dog, wandering around the empty streets beneath forlorn skyscrapers while looking for random bars and BBQ’s sounds like a wonderful way to spend a three day weekend.
Aaaaanyways, the big boss at work bought us all Chuseok gift sets this week, and they’re pretty awesome.
We were given the choice between Shampoo/Soap sets and Tuna sets, and since my girlfriend deals with her tuna on a daily basis, she opted for the shampoo/soap set.
Being a dirty dude, I opted to chew the tuna set and was pleasantly surprised to find some sort of Spam/Ham canned thingy jumping from the bottom like a midnight rapist. Here I thought I was getting a bunch of tuna but now I have Rich Ham too! OLLEH! Now I’ll have to try my hand making Budae Jjigae.
It was also a bit of a sad day too since one of the awesome Korean secretaries at our school was leaving us and some of us only found out a few days ago. See, in the west a secretary is usually just someone who types up notes and takes care of the bosses laundry, but out here in the land of a thousand responsibilities an amazing secretary can make the difference between a hell hole and an awesome place to work, and ours sure busted her butt to deal with our needs, our schools enrollment, and the ever shifting drama and demands that are spat forth from Korean mothers faster than their own crotch goblins. In Korea, a good secretary is sort of like a Secretary of Defense and to have one that’s so awesome and helpful and always greets you with a huge smile and a “GOOD AFTERNOON!” is like riding into battle with big blue penis dude from The Watchman watching your back and kicking ass for you.
So to say thanks, we bought her a cake and took pictures of it.
As a side note, cake in Korea is awesome. I hated the stuff back in America but I find myself seldom refusing it out here. Like Fried Chicken, Spam, and internet piracy, somehow the Koreans have figured out how to do something far better than we do it back home. As sad as I am to lose an awesome secretary, I’m always happy to eat cake.
Happy Chuseok!
The amusing KT Telecom commercials over here in Korea have spawned a new catchphrase for all my students. So now when I say: “Good job Min-soo, you got a perfect score on your test” little Min-soo shouts: “Olleh!”
It’s kind of funny in a ‘You’ve Probably Been in Korea Too Long’ kind of way…
