I’m from North Carolina, a state full of suburbs and without large cities, so maybe what I’m about to say about one of the many differences between Korea and America won’t ring totally true.  But this is it: in America we would sooner damage our own cars to avoid driving near pedestrians, whereas Seoulites will give you a hearty “fuck you” and get as near as possible. 

Last night I read a comic book, written by a Korean, about America.  Where, where shall I even begin?  It’s time to start tossing what I can’t take back home with me, but this little piece of cultural what-the-fuck must make it stateside. A full post with pictures is absolutely necessary, but as I can’t do that now, let me impart to you this tidbit that the book informs its readers:

“In America it’s very unsafe to walk in any large city at night.”

An Acute Case of KS

I’ve  had a roaring KS day like I haven’t had in a long time.  KS being a term some friends and I coined to be discreet when we complained; it’s short for ”Korea sucks.”  We used it as shorthand for “We are foreigners and sometimes this different place and different culture is frustrating.”  The important part is ‘sometimes.’

So you have a KS day once in a while.  But today was more like a FK day. I’m sure you can work that one out for yourself.

This acute case of KS was brought on by the poor infrastructure of my school.  The toilets and the heating are appalling.  These are basic facilities that a school must provide for its students and its staff!  Earlier today I was damn near foaming at the mouth because of the inconveniences, the incompetence and the want of hygienic practices. I would like to find whoever is in charge of these parts of the school, and I realize it may be a long, bureaucratic chain, and I want to clock them all on the nose.

First, the heating. It’s hovering at or below freezing today, and the hallways and the student bathrooms are not heated.  They’ve never been heated.  They just don’t heat them, much to my continuing disgust.  It’s colder inside the hallways than it is outside.  The teacher’s offices and the classrooms are heated, but I can’t imagine the temperature is above fifty-five.  Everyone, including myself, is wearing all of their outerwear in the offices and classrooms.  Any time a door is opened – or left open by teachers and students who are clearly too inconsiderate to justify their continued existence- the meager heat is overtaken by a bitter chill.  All of the surfaces are very cold to the touch, and my feet and hands couldn’t get warm.   School ends tomorrow, but I have three weeks of English winter camp where I and the students will suffer and shiver in these poorly heated rooms.

The toilets – can I  describe the many squalid conditions of the toilets without lapsing into a string of unenlightening, heartily meant swear words?  I will attempt fortitude. Ahem.  There is one teacher’s bathroom, and, bless the lord that I don’t believe in, it  is heated in the winter.  There are three toilets in the women’s: two squatters and one western style toilet. I always use the western style toilet for my convenience and because I would wreak havoc on the squatter toilets. My aim is not professional, and I don’t think my coworkers deserve to encounter such biological horrors.  The western style toilet in the women teacher’s bathroom has been clogged for two months.  I am outraged, and I can only rely on informing my coworkers about the problem who may or may not understand me and may or may not have the time to inform whomever the hell needs to be informed to get a fucking plunger and fix it.  Some of the teachers, lovely as they are, may not understand me though they think they do, or, much more insidiously, will nod emphatically to avoid speaking English or admitting that they haven’t understood me.  Out of necessity I have had to use the toilets in the student’s bathrooms.  I’ve always had a good opinion of these kids, but after seeing how they treat these bathrooms, I wonder if they are house broken.  Shit, blood, piss – it’s all over the squatters and the western style toilets.  Because the school does not have janitors, the students clean everything, including the bathrooms.  A bathroom needs real cleaning, real chemicals, someone professional.  Do you think middle school kids would thoroughly clean a bathroom? If so,  then I have some beach side property up my ass you may be interested in.  On the walls of the bathroom stalls are old, dried bodily fluids.  The plumbing in Seoul cannot handle toilet paper, so the paper is thrown away in trash cans, or on the floor.  Feces is on the floor, all over the toilets, on paper in trash cans or smeared on the walls.  Feces, and I know I shall wow you with my medical expertise, does not increase one’s  health when exposed to it.

So basic! Toilets and heating.  Without these properly mastered, how can a school stay open?  Korea, as I often invoke when I am appalled at something, is an OECD country. How is this permissable?

A KS day takes two: me and Korea.   Some days things here, like some days things anywhere, can overload my occasionally fragile circuits and turn me into something that snarls and snaps and stares glumly.  I admit culpability for having bad days, but not all disgust is misplaced.

For Christmas Santa Claus brought me a bladder infection, so I had to go to the hospital to get some antibiotics this afternoon.  I usually go to a hospital across the street from me.  Because of the language barrier I cannot even call to make an appointment, or insure that they have a urology department, and I definitely need my coworker Ms. Choi along to translate and shuffle me around to the various stations.  I was not thrilled about having to tell her about my problem (despite trumpeting it on the internet) because I’m afraid of the judgement of my Korean coworkers.  It’s a very different society here.  What one does is under a microscope, especially as a foreigner, and (as my friend Matt said about living in Japan) though you are excused from the rules of polite society, you may also be excused from being treated politely. I’m afraid they’ll gossip about me, and as this is something women get often, and often because of sex, and Korea is very rigid about what women can and cannot do, I felt all the inconvenience of explaining my symptoms to a coworker and being chaperoned.  In the waiting room Ms. Choi asked me if I got a bladder infection because I drank too much on Christmas.  With what delight did I hear that!  Not only does one not get a bladder infection from drinking, but I was also being accused of unsavory behavior (for a woman) which induced the sickness!  Misinformation about health and shame for suppossed immoral behavior - her question validated my concerns.  Though mostly I was just thankful she helped me, and helped me graciously.  It was what I saw before we went into the hospital that took my KS day to a FK day.

It was snowing and a man, a patient of the hospital, exchanged a few angry words with a woman. Perhaps she was his daughter or his wife.  She moved away from him, back toward the hospital doors, and quick as can be he grabbed her hair at the roots, twisted her head, and pulled her along with him.  She yelled and he pulled her and she tried to get away from him.  Vaguely restrained by Ms. Choi, I tried to give him the evilest teacher glare that I could muster, shocked as I was.  He let her go before I could decide what I would do if it went any further.  He was in the hospital for a broken arm.   He deserved another.  Ms. Choi studiously avoided looking at the scene; I looked in hopes to shame and dissuade him.  That poor woman.

And thats how a KS day becomes an FK day.

(But, to illustrate that I’m able to appreciate the good when there is good, I’d like to brag that my doctor’s visit -with tests- and my week’s worth of antibiotics cost under twelve dollars. Suck that, America.)

Last night I was exiting an elevator and a heretofore unknown to me Korean guy, probably a student at Korea University, yelled at my retreating backside “I’m fine!” and then “Thank you, and you?”  (You see, in Korea they do not greet each other in this manner, so it is seen as odd. Also it’s a phrase drilled into them since elementary school.)  As Kristin, who by the way totally doesn’t get into the same fit of pique as I do, said, they do it to entertain their friends.

This happens a lot and it ticks me off.  When I think about other ways in which cultures clash and the horrific effects, I feel bad about being ticked off at something so benign.  But if a friend of mine back home shouted “hola” and “como estas” to someone who appeared to be Latin American, I’d be inclined to punch my friend in the face or give them a terse lecture. Of course the interplay of cultures here, for me, is quite different than the stereotypical interplay of American and Latin American cultures in my home country. It’s not a fair comparison, I know.

I turned my cold teacher stare on the fellow in question and said, “That’s not cute.”

So I got in a cab, feeling pissed and trivial for being pissed (too much perspective just nullify’s all of one’s joy and hurt, doesn’t it?) and the cab driver spoke with me in broken English.  He told me he liked America. I told him I liked Korea. I chanted that cheer, Dae Han Min Guk (clap clap clap clap).  He told me he liked George Washington. That one threw me. Then he pointed and said East Sea. You see, right now the American military and the Korean military are holding joint military exercises to threaten NK for the recent attacks, and the US brought the George Washington aircraft carrier.

When one is so isolated, it’s small exchanges that hold a big sway. The cab fare was under 3 thousand won, but I felt guilty about my distaste for some aspects of Korean culture so I gave him 5 thousand won and bolted before he could give me the change.  I like Korea, I do, here cab driver, have a tip!  I think if you weigh all of my social interactions with Koreans not working at my school and cab drivers, well the scales may tip to the side of the cab drivers. Not very deep conversations, but still.

At lunch today I was talking with the divine little Mrs. Kim. (She does so much! A full-time teaching job, a two year old and a new baby on the way, and she is in the process of applying to grad school to get a doctorate in English literature.) Our co-worker Ms. Choi is getting married and we will be attending the ceremony next week. I would be uncomfortable attending the wedding of a coworker in the United States, but in another culture I’m even more worried I’ll wear something or do something to embarrass her.  Appearance is highly valued in this culture.  Fucking Americans, well, we’re like the casual epicenter of the world. Little Mrs. Kim told me that when she got married three years ago that one of the foreign English teachers who worked here at the time came and wore flip flops and that her guests asked  her (Mrs. Kim) about the foreigner’s flip flops after the ceremony. (They don’t wear flip flops here, pretty much ever.) Good lord in heaven, everything we do is under scrutiny.  Lots of people laugh it off, all of the attention, but I think it’s quite sick.  I live in Seoul! Seoul! The vibrant capital!  A mountain studded metropolis! Not some isolated village.

 

A Minor Aggravation about Seoulites and their Eyes

I cleaned today.  Nothing is ever clean enough though.  My apartment was old and grimy when I arrived. I can see all the dust bunnies, horrible clumps, lurking, taunting me.  I’m detail oriented? Sometimes, to my dismay. What sorts of vicious chemical concoctions could get ride of years of grease (on grease) on the stove?  And the toilet! I swear, the toilets in Seoul have flatulence.  The sewer gods, they are capricious. So that’s what I did with the bulk of the daylight this Saturday.

In the evening, which comes too early now that it’s winter, and all done up like a sweet librarian, I left my apartment.  Can’t even walk on the street on which my apartment sits (cramped by other buildings, so disordered) and already the old people are turning their heads to stare.  And what do I see when I turn the corner onto the busy street? A boy, elementary age, wearing orange pants.  He’s pissing, and there were many adults going into the convenience store he was next to and many more adults waiting for the cross walk.  No hidden, dark corner was needed for him.  Get some shame, kiddo.  He was on a slight incline and his piss flowed back to his shoes.  And still people are staring at me!  He hardly put away his little junk before pushing open the glass door of the same convenience store.  I, reluctantly, opened the same doors (tried not to touch the same spot, not out of real disgust, but out of show…stop making such a big deal about me when you guys are obviously much weirder than I am!)  One of these days some stranger is going to stare too long at me while something that’s appalling to me is simultaneously happening (because being a foreigner is it’s self a happening, a real event, someone get snacks!) and I, completely in keeping with my character, am going to say or do something ultimately stupid.  I just want to wave my hands and yell, oh yeah! Look at you! Just look at you, you weirdos.

There is a mom in my neighborhood who is very friendly. She speaks English quite well and her daughter, a second grade middle school student, goes to my school.  You could hold a gun to my head and I wouldn’t be able to tell you who this student was though. I teach too many of them.  Anyway, this mother’s friendliness seems to be born from some sort of personality disorder. There is something in her behavior that seems to yearn for a diagnosis. She scared the shit out of me one day last semester.  A moped was passing me, and as it did, there was  jubilant screaming in my ear.  Her glee was my fright.  Got that metallic taste in my mouth.  She was riding on the back and was very happy to see me, or, more likely, unable to handle even the most mundane stimulus.  Last month she  came into my office once to see a different teacher, but spoke to me.  She told me that Koreans stare at me because they think I’m beautiful, that I look like a pop star from TV (yeah, maybe if the pop star was filmed with like a fish-eye lens). Boy, she does need a diagnosis is she thinks I’m glamorous.  It’s insulting to be represented as one is not.  Anyway, I don’t bring her up just to be a snarky bitch.  But like she said, I guess there is always the chance that the staring isn’t necessarily insulting.  It’s sure as hell invasive though! The way the turn around to see me punch in the code on the electronic lock and scurry into my apartment building. You people need a hobby. 

Hmm. Well, so do I.

Blame it on the exercise of writing and why and when we do it, or blame it on my sometimes gloomy (though I prefer to call it realistic) sensibility, but I don’t often say this here enough: I’m happy with Seoul.  When I’m busy and happy , but especially when I’m busy, I don’t come to my blog as often, and so I don’t say it.

One more time: I’m happy with Seoul, my lifestyle. I’m basking in my upcoming trip and my uncharacteristically clean and organized apartment.  I’m enjoying my job, my students and the company of my co-workers. (I teach all of the school now. I have over a thousand students!)  Life’s good.  A friend asked me why I was happy, and I said I didn’t want to dissect it.  I think when you take it apart and name the components they don’t always add up to happiness, even though I did just that now.

But life isn’t all rainbows and kitties.  This week strangers have been making a lot of unsolicited, rude comments about my body.  I am overweight even for America, and in Korea they consider Beyonce fat.  They are quite severe.  On Friday night I told one rude guy at a bar to sit and spin.  Sit and spin mother fucker, I said, among other things which I honestly can’t remember.  I said them firmly, angrily, justly, but I wasn’t shrill.  In my defense, he absolutely deserved it.  Then I closed my eyes and started subtracting by seven.  Forty minus seven is thirty-three.  Thirty-three minus seven is don’t throw your drink on him.  Thirty-three minus seven is uh twenty-five no twenty-six.  Twenty-six minus seven is if I threw the bar snacks on him that wouldn’t be so bad.  Fuck.  Forty minus seven is thirty-three.  Thirty-three minus seven is don’t make a rude comment about the reputed size of Asian men’s dicks.  Etc etc.  Anyway, I didn’t do anything stupid and he left the bar with his friend pretty quickly.

Maybe I should say what he said?  Molly and I were sitting at a crowded bar on Friday night.  I mean, around the bar, not at a table.  It was great.  The bartenders had done a lot of juggling tricks with liquor bottles, and they did several cool stunts with fire.  They gave away some free drinks.  All the young patrons were clapping and yelling when the bartenders did a particularly difficult trick.  So was I.  We both took a lot of photos.  All of mine turned out blurry because I wasn’t willing to use the flash and potentially fuck up their vision while they were tossing around heavy glass and flaming sticks.  Then we played a game of darts on an electronic board.  I won, but only by thirteen points.  We sat back down at the bar, she chatted with two Korean guys for a little bit.  A man a few seats down from me asked the bartenders who spoke English to tell me that I’m pretty.  My usual response to flattering but unwanted attention is to call them a liar, with a grin on my face, and then call them Pinocchio.  One of the guys that Molly had been talking to made a disgusted, disbelieving face.  I said, Yes, do you have something to say? And he said, oh, you’re pretty from the neck up.  Cue my disbelief and my severe potty mouth.

Last Saturday in the late morning Molly and I went to the nearest KB Star bank so I could transfer her the money I owe her for the plane ticket to Thailand.  It was a beautiful day.  Bright blue sky, warm.  We didn’t succeed because we had the wrong account number. I was trying it a second time.  I turned back to her to tell her that it was a no go when I saw an old couple, maybe in their sixties, pointing at my body and talking together.  Pointing at my body and talking about me!  I said to Molly, “Look at these rude people!  They are talking about me.” And she looked and said, with satisfying and parallel disgust, “That’s so rude.” We left, and I tried to reason myself into being calm.  They are from a very different world than I am, etc etc.  But still, I didn’t think I signed up to come to a third world country when I signed up to come to Korea.  Think whatever you like, you rude people, but how cruel is it to openly ridicule me when they aren’t the only people in the bank who speak Korean?  And am I so other worldly that they don’t think I can see them? We aren’t in the country, we’re in Seoul.  They didn’t look poor, they looked quite well-off.  Just so rude. They sure make me feel like I’m an animal in a zoo.  I asked one of my wonderful Korean co-teachers about this and she confirmed what I already suspected.  They wouldn’t treat a Korean this way.  It would be considered very impolite and probably down right nuts.

I found out two hours later that in my haste and anger I left my card in the ATM.

I get my fair share of flattering, kind compliments from Korean men and women too. But the rude shit does make a bigger impression.

I didn’t have time to write you a short letter so I wrote you a long one

While getting ready for work today I listened to a new podcast.  It’s a kind of sketch comedy from what I gather called WireTap.  One sketch stood out.  It was the correspondence between Kafka’s Gregor Samsa (of Metamorphosis) and Dr. Seuss.  Samsa wrote looking for a cure to his curious condition of being a gigantic bug, and Dr. Seuss responded in that Dr. Seussian way (Something about I fear I’m useless as you remain Suessless).  It wasn’t necessarily the funniest thing I’ve ever heard, but god damn it was fucking awesome.  Such a clever, unexpected combination.  It’s a part of the CBC Radio.

Today was my second day back from vacation.  During my vacation I accomplished nothing of use.  I went to many a noraebang, played an awful lot of darts, met many people who I will likely never meet again.  That’s all beating around the bush.  All of those activities were accompanied by copious amounts of late-late night drinking.  They’d be unenjoyable if they weren’t.  One night Molly and I tried to continue our drinking and the only bars open in Itaewon were on Hooker Hill.  It was daylight. If you were thinking we left quickly because it was scummy and scummy men wouldn’t leave us alone and thought they had the right to touch us, you’d be right.  Listen, we’re wholesome girls who just like to drink a lot.  Innocently.  I never used to stay up this late drinking.  I only did it once as a teenager, and I did a lot of substances as a teenager.  Nothing to the point of a problem, I was just fooling around.  My point is is that I think we don’t value our time here very much, and we egg each other on, and we do have a lot of fun too.

Some things have changed at work.  There is a new restriction against physical punishment.  (See, hitting the students has always been technically illegal, but not enforced.)  Well, all physical punishment is out.  No more standing with their arms above their heads, squatting in uncomfortable positions, or whacks with a stick.  Some of the teachers use a recorder, you know, those musical instruments kids played in elementary school. The plastic bastard cousin of the flute.  Instruments of art as punishment.  I’d prefer to whack them with a really big, bristly brush.  Or spray paint them.  This new prohibition was announced at a meeting which I did not attend.  I then talked and talked about my knowledge of punishment in American schools.  Lunch detentions, after school detentions, suspensions.  Sending the kids out into the hall, a staple I remember well, is frowned upon here.  The kids could run away, they’ve said to me.  In my earlier teaching days I’d send the kids into the hall and make them leave their shoes inside.  They aren’t running away without their fucking shoes.  Definitely not in the winter.  I never used much physical punishment anyway.  I only ever made the kids stand up with their arms above their heads. I once, probably in my first month of teaching, whacked a male kid hard on the shoulder who was doing something dangerous that nearly took out three girls.  I still haven’t stopped feeling ashamed of that.  Really, really ashamed.  Moving on.  It will be interesting to see what the teachers will arrange.  I think it’s great.  Not necessarily because I think a whack or two is the most destructive thing for students, but because they don’t take it seriously.  It isn’t real punishment for them.  I can’t help but feel that taking time away from them is far more effective.  Plus I have seen too many instances of adult Koreans hitting each other.  It’s upsetting.

On a related note, in my first months here I saw a male teacher roundhouse kick a male student several times, break his sandals, and smack him in the head during a student field trip.  I took this sneaky photo of this teacher’s atrocious behavior and then stormed away to smoke a cigarette and think about hitting the fuck out of this teacher.  (The student’s crime? Wearing sandals when he should have been wearing sneakers on the field trip. Notice he only has his socks now)

What a fucker. This photo didn't really capture all the fuckedness of it. Fuck is a word we use when we are being fucking lazy thinkers.

Another change, and this less welcome, is that instead of seeing my kids once a week (which was scant time with them anyway) I now see them once every two weeks.  This even more effectively demotes me from kind-of-teacher to babysitter.  I also have to teach the dreaded second grade, along with the first and third graders.  I feel positive about teaching again, despite professing a few posts back to being an anti-teacher.

Tonight I finished reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the seminal feminist literature published in the early 1960′s.  It wasn’t so long ago, only a few decades, that a woman was discouraged from doing anything except getting married and having kids.  She was considered incappable of anything else, and if she strived for it she was unfeminine, insane, would probably become barren from the stress.    There was a disturbing chapter where Friedan linked the rise (rise?) in homosexual men to the effects of overprotective, smothering mothers.  I haven’t yet finished an introduction she wrote for the book in 1997.  I’m hoping she recants that.  Yeah.  Anyway, it was informative.  For a long time I’ve shunned reading much related to feminism because I didn’t want to be angry, or see the prejudice.  I tried to name myself apathetic on a lot of things because I wanted to be above it all, and cool, and, well, you know.  All those dumb things some of us think we should be when we’re self-absorbed teens and early twenty-somethings.  Not to say I’m still not self-absorbed.

Speaking of me, my hair is pretty damn long these days.  I came to Korea with a pixie cut but it’s down to my shoulders now.  I forgot what a pain in the ass longer hair is.  Styling and all that.  It feels gross sometimes because now when I shed hair the hair is more pronounced and when I shed hair on myself it feels creepy, like bugs.

Speaking of my other obsessions (besides my hair) CHRISTIAN BALE.  Oh my God.  I came to this coffee shop hoping to rewatch American Psycho but I forgot my headphones.  Because I can’t, though, lets just put this right here.  Beautifully done.  So funny, so creepy, and that is one beautiful man.

I tried to make another video this afternoon, but you know, I really should stop putting embarrassing videos of myself online.  My mac’s video making software is trying to protect me by not working.

A Crazy Night for Seoul

Oh, the things I saw last night.  There must have been a full moon, or something in the water.  The Koreans were crazy last night.

Something I think I know about Korea, but can’t actually know, is this: Though Korea has a homicide rate less than half that of the United States, they tolerate far more domestic violence and aggressive behavior.  I’ve seen more fights in Korea than I ever saw in the United States. And they just fucking drink way too damn much.

As you can see, last night was a bad Korea night for me.

It started innocently enough.  Molly and I went to the movies.  We saw Toy Story 3. Pixar is, of course, the animation studio responsible for it, as well as Up, Finding Nemo, Wall-E, Ratatouille,  The Incredibles, etc.  I love Pixar so much.  Their stories are excellent and the animation is always breath-taking.  Even when their movies don’t match my expectations, and to be fair they’ve done a lot to make my expectations pretty high, still that movie is better than most.  The shorts before the movies are also always excellent.  Basically what I’m saying is I’d be happy to take a minimum wage job sweeping their holy floors.  (PS: Dreamworks Animation, you haven’t got shit on Pixar.)

I love you. Show me where the broom is and I'll get started.

Afterwards we played a few games of pool.  I haven’t played in years.  We were appropriately terrible, but it was a lot of fun.  I’m itching to get Molly out of the house to play again tonight.

Molly, bless her heart, had to work Saturday morning, but such inconveniences as teaching children don’t stop us.  It was one in the morning and she suggested we get a drink.  We were in Sungshin, and you can find about five bars on each side of one short street.  We went to a basement bar.  Their were albums on the shelves and a fancy speaker system.  There was also a group of Koreans and Korean Americans who were quite drunk.  One dude had his head on the table, asleep, and there were plenty of beer bottles on the table.  We ordered two Long Island Iced Teas, a cocktail that the menu listed as “for men.”

Molly was sitting with her back to the table, but I wasn’t so I was getting an eye full of the table’s antics.  One girl offered to take her drunker friend home, but it seemed like that should have happened a while ago.  The bartenders were taking what seemed an inordinate amount of time to make our drinks as we were the only ordering customers in the bar.  Then two girls nearly toppled over Molly because they were in a wobbly, inebriated embrace.  The girls apologized and Molly moved chairs so she wasn’t in the crossfire.  One of the guys from the table leaned over to us and said, “Can you do me a favor?”  I said, “Maybe not.”  He laughed, which seemed like a good sign, and then his friend who was asleep somehow launched himself from the otherside of the room and fell into the bar, knocked over a couple of stools and a lamp, then hit the floor.  A ragged, drunk mess.  It looked like he was in a rollicking bar fight with himself.  This table was too much trouble, so we grabbed our bags and ran out of there.  It didn’t look the bartenders even finished making our drinks anyway.

The next bar we went to was on the second floor one street over.  There weren’t any customers there, and all of the staff was young and dressed all in black.  We ordered two Long Island Iced Teas again and this time we stayed long enough to get  them.  We were sitting in a booth by a bank of windows.  Sitting near a window is like a lava lamp for me.  I get lost in people watching.  Below us two men and a woman were having a heated argument.  It was great fun to watch.  Molly and I couldn’t tell if the woman, wearing a beige one piece, was the nut ball, or if it was the guys.  She kept stepping between them, and touching and pulling them away from each other affectionately.   She probably fancied herself in her favorite drama.  She seemed to be more panicked than what the situation called for.  We sat up in our seats and pressed ourselves against the window.  I was chanting fight fight fight, urging them from above to throw a punch.  Entertain us!  The girl went back inside, and the guys ran off to the corner, which we could barely see, holding hands.  I could just see one throw a punch, some headlocks, a serious head butt that sent the other one falling backward.  That was a bit more entertainment that I wanted.  The man in the blue button down shirt left first and walked back toward the bar and  gave us a perfect view as the other guy ran up behind him and launched himself at his back, knocked him on the ground, kicked him in the stomach and back, squatted over him and punched him in the face one time, two times, so many times, and then kicked him in the head, slammed his foot into his face over and over  and over again.  I became shrill, probably yelled some incoherent things.  I ran downstairs because even though I don’t know what on Earth I could have, God damn if I’m going to watch somebody beat the shit out of another person and not, I don’t know, yell at him not to kill him.  Neither Molly and I speak Korean.  We couldn’t call the cops.  Being downstairs I saw one man’s foot stomp another man’s head over and over, still.  How many head injuries does it take to get to the center of a coffin?

Downstairs there was a small crowd of passersby and wait staff watching.  The girl was involved somehow too, crying and pleading with people near her to stop them.  YOU stop them, honey.  I couldn’t pity her.  She seemed to enjoy it.  Maybe I’m being unfair.  They’re all crazy, though.  Crazy crazy crazy.  I was shaking.  No one else ever seems to get as upset as I do.

Some of the staff from our bar ran down and broke it up.  The guys in the brawl kept trying to fight.  I left because I didn’t want to get injured, and what could I do, anyway?

I’ve never seen violence like that.  I’ve never seen someone smash another person’s head to the ground repeatedly.  I was appalled and not eager to go back downstairs.  That was not the kind of entertainment I wanted.  Answered prayers cause more tears than unanswered ones.  Not that I cried, but it was shocking, so shocking.  Molly and I didn’t talk much after that, and I realized a few minutes later that the bar was playing Christmas music in August.  No police ever came to the street.  Maybe they were never called.  I don’t understand these people sometimes.

When I got home it was three in the morning.  I got ready for bed and I heard voices shouting outside.  Of course!  Why should the insanity stop?  Let’s just all get hammered and let out all of our pent up aggression!  The voices got louder, and I realized they were in my building, in the hallway above me.  The argument increased and they were both shouting at the top of their lungs.  It echoed through the whole building.  I went halfway up the stairs in my bathrobe and yelled at them in English, because nothing helps aggression than more aggression.  ”Shut the fuck up, it’s fucking three in the morning. SHUT UP!”  I yelled “Be quiet!” in Korean.  They didn’t.  I stomped back to my room and angrily slammed my metal door.  There were a few seconds of quite after that.  The yelling ended and the woman, who I saw coming down the stairs, was an older woman.  She left the building.

Fucking crazy bastards.  What the hell is wrong with people? Stop being crazy people, stop it now.  Before you make me as crazy as you.

Language and Cultural Barrier at Work Strikes Again

Late last night I got it into my head that I should start stringing together the little videos I made in Ireland last summer because it would be fun and something kind of creative for me to do.  I didn’t get to sleep till past three a.m, so I was ragged and glazed for work today.

Some of my Korean co-teachers want me to give my students a chance to take the speaking test even if they missed my test without an excuse.  (Hell, I’m not even sure what sort of system they have concerning absences.  Are the students accountable for their absences?  I keep posing that question to them.  Do they have a legitimate excuse for missing our class?  What is the system?  And I never get an answer because I’m constantly misunderstood.  Are my co-worker’s English skills not strong enough to interface with a native English speaker?  Am I failing to persistently and clearly ask the questions I need to ask? I mean, am I failing at communication and not understanding my coworker’s needs?  What are the questions I even need to ask?) I’ve already put my foot down and refused to grant make-up tests to students without legitimate excuses, but since Ms. Yoon got the backing of the older English teachers, do I then have to grant make-up tests for other classes?  I’m  just hoping it all fades away soon so I won’t have to deal with this behemoth of nonsense.

I’m much less satisfied with the job and with my performance as a teacher.  I’m tired of being a teacher without having any formal education on how to be an effective teacher.  At least my frustration indicates that I do care about doing this job well, if I’m to look on the bright side. (I love this NPR show Radiolab.  A recent rebroadcasted show was about deception and talked about the work of some folks who were showing how self-deception can lead to a happier and more successful person.  For instance, they asked all of these very biologically and psychologically explicit questions to a group of swimmers.  The questions were along the lines of “Do you enjoy shitting?”, “Have you ever had a fantasy where you want to be raped or rape someone?” etc etc. The assumption that they were making, and I agree with, is that everyone, if they were honest with themselves, would answer in the affirmative.  The swimmers who denied these natures did statistically significantly better in competitions than the swimmers who were self-aware and honest.  The idea is that while they are psyching themselves up before a race the self-deceivers can inflate their own confidence much more effectively.  Their conclusion is that realists are pretty much doomed.   I thought I should deserve a prize for seeing shit as it is, instead of being more prone to depression.  Apparently honesty isn’t the best policy.)  So, why the tremendous tangent?  Firstly, I felt like it, but secondly because I don’t think my frustration proves I care about doing a good job.  If I cared about doing a real quality job I’d be doing a real quality job.  But I’m throwing in the towel. They’ve invested under two weeks of training in me, and it’s all been incredibly useless.  It was a good idea that suffered in the extreme from lack of organization and content.  Well, any NSET in a public school system knows what I’m talking about. At one of the last training seminars I went to there was a lot of talk about what a joke the whole thing was.  (And I’m serious about education and training.  My God I wanted it.  I was so looking forward to it when my school told me I was going to a two-day training for NSETs.)

Once again, when the Peace Corps seemed on the horizon, dealing with the cultural and professional conflicts here seemed more like a safe testing ground for the future, but the Peace Corps doesn’t seem to be in my future now.  I’m pretty sure Vincent Wickes in the Peace Corps’ New York offices hates me.  I’ve sent him my appeal letter three times, and on the third time I asked for an email confirming that he’d received my documents.  It’s been a couple of days and I haven’t heard a word.  I definitely have the right email address this time because he very unhelpfully sent me an email, responding to a follow up email I sent asking if he’d received my documents, saying that he hadn’t.  No wonder my afternoon snack consists of impotent rage.

Speaking of learning emotional maturity, an English speaking couple were sitting behind me at a coffee shop last night and they were breaking up.  I loved them both immediately because she was Korean and he was of African heritage, but I couldn’t place his accent.  Maybe English, or maybe from an African country. It was a nice accent, anyway.  They were so stoic, plus they had the honorable audacity to be a mixed race couple in a country that aggressively dislikes it.  At work I nearly cried while dumping my lunch in the bins because I was sitting with some English teachers and they didn’t fully understand what I was saying.

One of These Things is Not Like the Other (If you’re a foreigner in Korea, that other is You.)

An excess of dopamine causes people to see patterns where there aren’t patterns.  One of the patterns they see that isn’t there are people starring at them and talking about them.  If you are a foreigner in a homogenous culture (and I am) you don’t need a superfluous amount of this hallucination causing chemical to make you perceive strangers staring at you.  They most definitely are staring at you, blatantly.  On rare occasions it can be endearing.  Really, really rare.  Mostly it’s embarrassing and invasive.  Today a little girl was chasing her friends and, as she passed me, she came to a dead stop and stared at me.  Mouth agape.  That’s not so cute.  Elderly people, while passing me, will stop and turn to gawk at my receding backside.  When the foreigner rage has me in it’s grips I turn to stare at them too.

Everyone is staring at you, and no you aren’t crazy.  You’re a foreigner.

A Bit of Annoying Apartment Happenings

I’ve lived in the same cramped and grungy apartment for my entire year and nine months in Seoul.  When I first moved in I was surprised that one didn’t need a key to get into the apartment building itself.  Seoul is remarkably safe and the Koreans remarkably trustworthy.  I never saw anyone enter the building for any nefarious purpose.  Truthfully, the worst thing I ever saw in my apartment building was a man in an adjacent room leaning out of his door at some early hour of the morning and throwing up ramen.  Apparently it’s better for him to vomit in the hall than in his own toilet, like any decent human being.  Yup, remarkably safe, but they make sure to bring down the standard of living by their unrestrained vomiting.  Jesus, what an uptight people, but they have no compunction about puking willy nilly.

Ahem.  Moving on.  When I came home yesterday afternoon the old landlord and his middle-aged, English speaking son were supervising the installation of a device on the front door that requires you to enter a number to enter.  I was lucky to be there when the son was there, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to get into the apartment building.  I am not thrilled by the appearance of this lock, because these buggers like to beep a lot.  They beep when you enter the code, they beep when they open, the jingle when the lock again.  I can look forward to hearing that several times a night until I leave.  Assa!