Finishee

I played the word association game Apples to Apples with my delightful students for an hour and a half, then I handed out prizes and fed them loads of pizza.  We laughed a lot, and I gave them some of the good-natured teasing that they always enjoy.  And that, dear reader(s), was my final day of teaching at my middle school.  So concludes two and a half years of teaching in South Korea, a job I wasn’t really prepared for, and a job that the training I was given didn’t prepare me for either, but I ended up really enjoying.  Perhaps it’s no great feat that my first  job acquired out of the service industry  and when I was twenty-four has been the best job I’ve ever had, but still, there it is.

I don’t leave Korea at all prepared, or interested, in continuing teaching.  I’ve been told that I’m a natural teacher, which was kind, and if I am I get it from my mom.  But I intend on it staying natural, raw, not at all educated. A friend asked me how I’ve grown, intellectually or emotionally, and I of course can’t be asked to sit in judgement of myself, that’s for them to do.  Elizabeth graciously offers to not judge me even if I’ve regressed.  Oh she’ll get hers.  What I do feel is more easily aggravated and more willing to display it, perhaps an addition to my character that wasn’t necessary.  That’s a function of being a teacher because confrontation is demanded daily and often.  Yesterday I went to two stores that sold electronics and yes, cameras, because I wanted to buy an extra camera battery and a new camera case. Neither stores sold them.  In the last store I said, for nobody’s pleasure, “What the hell do you sell here? Fluffy bunnies? Do you sell fluffy bunnies or electronics?” If any of the sales people have a background in English, they may have been quite confused about what they heard.  Also, displays of displeasure are uncommon here, and for good reason, it makes interactions far more pleasant.  But it came out anyway, in part, because half an hour before I was buying coffee and the woman grinding it didn’t understand “French press” and couldn’t change the size of the grind, though the machine had numbers and clearly said it could.  But no, 4 only.  The coffee was far too fine to work in my French press, and I stashed it behind some junk food and didn’t buy it.  Mess with Ms. Grumpy’s coffee and the rest of the evening I’m easily angered.

I am scott free for the remainder of January and all of February.  I’ll be cleaning my apartment, packing up my clothes and possessions which won’t be donated or trashed and shipping it to my parent’s home, and, of course, what I’m really looking forward to, my eleven day trip to Thailand with Maria.  My dreams these days have become entirely relevant to what I’m thinking about: home and my vacation, with strange things added into the mix, like telling off people I know and jousting.

My coworker, who liaisons with the financial office, has yet to confirm or assuage my fears about my two years worth of severance pay.  My contract with SMOE is also unclear about when I will receive the severance pay. My coworker says that I’ve received the pay after I’ve finished every contract year, and I say (and I’m paraphrasing) “Bullshit.”  I’m of course worried that I’m irresponsible enough to be wrong, and that a couple of thousand dollars has disappeared under my delinquent observation. I attacked Mrs. Kwan today with more questions, hopefully thinking that the problem was the language barrier.  She apologized for the confusion, for which I don’t hold her accountable, and she asked me to not worry.  I replied, “Oh I’m definitely going to worry.” That surprised her.  But Monday – Monday is to be the day when the necessary staff will be in the office and can answer my questions.  Cross your fingers for me.

My departure date is getting closer now; I have just two more months in Seoul.  I am not amped up and nervous like I was in the summer when I thought I was going to leave in August. I’m pleased, all in all.

My English camp classes are going well. The kids are great, and the teacher training provided by my district last month, surprises of surprises, was actually helpful. I feel like a much more competent teacher than I did during my last summer English camp.

In the summer my life just wasn’t very grand.

Oh yeah, and happy new year.

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Dreams of Severance Pay Severed?

The outrage of earlier this week was swiftly replaced by a fuzzy feeling of contentment.  I began my fifth and final English camp, which is about the perfect amount of teaching. I have the kids until twelve twenty and then we can all go our own ways.  I have found shoes which keep my feet warm in the office. I have an upcoming trip to Thailand with a dear friend who I haven’t seen in a couple of years, and then I’ll leave Korea and my job for my parent’s home in North Carolina.  My parents and I get along well.  I’m looking forward to seeing everybody, rehaunting some old haunts, and going on to the next thing – whatever that will be.  Suggestions are welcome.

Back in the office it’s just me, Ms. Choi and Mrs. Kwan.  Everyone else is on break.  We were hashing out some things for tomorrow’s lesson when Mrs. Kwan reminded me that I need to get money back from my paycheck that went into a pension.  ”Yes,” I said, “And won’t I also need to provide you information so I can receive my severance pay?”  There, unfortunately, we had a difference of opinion.  I have been under the impression that upon finally leaving SMOE (Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education) that I would be given 4 million won; she believes 2 million won has been given to me after each contract I’ve completed.  Something is seriously wrong – either she is confused, I am confused, or I’m being cheated.  I think the last is an unlikely option.  I really truly hope that I am not confused.  Oh oh oh – I was counting on that.  I feel much less content that I did a few hours ago.  I cannot find any information on the internet regarding SMOE severance pay.   I’m stunned that Google has failed me.  GOOOOOOOOGLE! Why?  Merde.

The people who work in the financial office will not be back to work until next week.  That’ll give me enough time to work on a stomach ulcer.

I’ve lived in Korea for two years and some change and still I don’t really speak the language. Oh sure, I can order food and drinks (poorly). I can get places in a taxi.  I can also give some classroom directions, though usually my pronunciation causes a bigger disturbance than the one which I was trying to control in the first place.  I’m a teacher, and I spend a lot of my time giving directions and explanations that the students can’t understand and therefore don’t follow.  There is a feeling of frustration and yes, on occasion, madness, that comes from repeating behavior that is ineffectual.  Please understand, I know it isn’t my student’s fault, and if the blame rests with anyone it rests with me.  But that doesn’t stop the madness, oh no.

The months of October and November mean speaking tests.  I get to test every student in the school and correct a thousand papers.  I love my job though, no joke.

This weekend the G-20 is meeting in Seoul.  Will North Korea exploit the international attention on South Korea and get up to some shenanigans?  Here’s to hoping that no, no they won’t.

Last weekend I visited my new, dear friend Kristin. She lives in a city just south of Seoul but still on the Seoul subway line.  I took a train though, not a subway, because it saves an hour.  My ticket was for standing room only. I was grumpy (female hormones + Molly has left Korea + being harassed by some student in my neighborhood) and I kept stepping on this boar of a tween who was sitting near me. He was playing a hand held video game where the object was to crack an egg and get the yolk into a bowl.  What sort of escapism is that?  He deserved to be stepped on.

We had a lovely evening. Lots of laughs. We ate kalgooksoo, which is a seafood soup. There were also many bottles of beer.  Between the beer at the restuarant and the beer at the bar Kristin bought some extra bedding.  The bar was what they call a Western bar.  That entails American decorations (cowboys and Indians) and a wide beer selection.  We met, as Kristin said, some salty guys.   One was American and the other, his boss, was Korean. They were engineers?  They harassed us, but at least Kristin had the gumption to pawn off our bill on them, which believe me, they deserved to pay.  If there was anything attractive about them I might have felt flattered instead of pestered and demeaned.  Nothing like boring, rude men with their assumptions to make me question my own attractiveness.  If these guys think they have a chance, what on Earth do I project?  The Korean guy was particularly rude. He thrust his cell phone at me within seconds seconds of meeting me and asked for my number.  He also kept pulling my arm hard to get my attention every other breath.  He had to be yelled at, loudly, twice, to finally stop it.  Fucker was going to give me a bruise. His salty American employee laughed at him and at me and he said  that I must be weak for a Korean man (who is obviously weak too) to bruise me.  The racism and sexism was just so deep at that table.  We were sitting by a window and a feral cat climbed up a tree.  Kristin and I did enjoy laughing at them though, which we did. We laughed a lot.

The next day, Sunday, was a difficult day.  A combination of my magic time (a euphemism my female students have used) and some beer ruined my sleep.  That Kristin is still my friend after that night is a testament to her fortitude and kindness.

The ginkgo trees are a bright yellow.  So lovely. If only they could be fixed that way all winter.

An escapee from a hospital with his IV bag on his head.

Shopping for gaudy Korean bedding. The only kind of Korean bedding.

The arm grabber and me. Intentional horrified face.

Kritin's coworker May, Salty American, Grabby Korean

Kristin and May

A Teacher’s Dinner

Haemul pajeon

There was a school wide dinner last night to celebrate all of the hard work that the teachers put into last Friday’s sports day and Saturday’s festival.  Of course I had nothing to do with any of those preparations, but they are nice and invited me.  There must have been thirty teachers at dinner.  We went to a pajeon restaurant at a nearby university.  It was in an area of town I’d never seen.  I probably had at least ten helpful teachers and the principal inform me that pajeon is Korean pizza, though honestly it is more like a fried pancake.  It’s also made with green onions and, much to my chagrin, sea creatures with tentacles. I’m quite familiar with the dish.  Don’t they know I’ve lived here two years? It’s regularly served in the teacher’s cafeteria, where I eat. I had pajeon in my first two weeks here.

Pajeon is generally served with makgeolli, a Korean rice wine.  It’s pretty tasty.  Probably comparable to sake, but it’s served cool.  It also goes down easy, though I only intended on drinking it when an older male teacher wanted to cheers.  There were so many bottles of makgeolli on our table!    I was seated across from some of my co-teachers, who are so wonderful in the classroom, but didn’t seem so wonderful as conversational partners right then.  Every topic I broached just fell flat, from the mundane to the more interesting.  The restaurant was decorated in a charmingly cheap style.  Like a bar in some poor, tropical country.  The walls were hung with reed mats, there were christmas lights strung up everywhere and an array of plastic flowers and foliage.  I felt terribly sad.  I miss my family, my friends from home, and I have recently understood that I may very well spend this Christmas by myself.  I also think I’ve got a cavity in one of my molars.  It’s somewhere on my lower jaw on the right side. I tried not to cry.  I succeeded.

The waitresses were curt and fast.  So much food.  Like I said, I kind of turned my nose up to the pajeon because of the purple tentacled beasties, but they also served fried peppers stuffed with meat, which, when my co-teacher described it to me, I thought she said mint instead of meat.  It was certainly a meat which I would never be able to place.  Korea does love its mystery meat.

The Christmas lights looked pretty reflected in my milky liquor.  That made me feel better.  I also began to consume bowls of it (it’s served in little bowls) and that also made me feel better.  Ah, a bracing drink.  The principal sat at our table (there were four or five tables) and cheersed us and told stories that I didn’t understand, but which someone translated for me.  A beggar woman came by selling gum and he bought all of it and gave it to us.  He’s a nice man.  The teachers are quite happy with him from what they tell me.  I snuck out for some fresh air, as goes the dubious euphemism, and when I came back I had to change seats and I sat next to the principle. I was having a nice time.  He knocked over his glass of makgoelli.  It spilled into half eaten dishes and onto his seat and on the art teacher.  He left, red faced, and joined another table.  We cleaned it up.

After dinner I went with ten or so teachers for a coffee.  Mrs. Kwan sat next to me and I was so happy that she was talking to me, initiating most of the topics.  I felt like much less of an alien.  She told me the tentative dates for the English winter camp, so I also have a good idea of when I’ll be free for winter vacation, which I intend to spend in Thailand with Maria, a dear friend from home, and that I’ll have even more time off than I thought.

They dropped me off in my neighborhood. The history teacher with the wig drove.  I’m so used to riding in the car with taxi drivers that riding in the car with someone normal driving feels positively too cautious and slow.  Though I hadn’t drank in an hour and certainly wasn’t drunk (not drunk drunk) I had a sour stomach.  I read for two hours with a vague feeling of nausea, and no idea why I had it.  At 10:45 pm some bastards came knocking on my door.  How rude! I think it had something to do with finding out the number of people living in the apartment building.  They had clipboards. I wasn’t prepared to answer the door, but I thought they deserved to be yelled at for disturbing people so late in the evening.  I was sick, as I said, and feeling uncomfortable, so I opened the door with a comforter rapped around me and yelled at them in English. They didn’t seem as offended as I desired.

I finished my book (The Secret History, by Donna Tartt) I don’t know how many times I’ve read it now.  I love that book.  Well I finished it and fell asleep and nothing ever became of my nausea.

Gosh gee golly, I have been one tired lady all week.  On Monday night a few mosquitos got into my room.  Where they came from beats me.  Uncharacteristically there hasn’t been a single mosquito in my room all summer, so why they decided to show their horrible little selves on one of the first cool weeks of the fall is beyond me.  Korean mosquitos have a bit of a temper. Their bite hurts much more than their passive relatives in North Carolina, so I lost half of my sleep that night tossing and turning and scratching and slapping.  I’ve had a sleep deficit all week.

At work we were preparing for Wednesday’s Halloween party. It was an after-school event, and I only had to have one party. Some of my friends had to have Halloween parties each period of their classes.  Exhausting for them!  We played Halloween music (Thriller, some tracks from The Nightmare Before Christmas, and spooky noises), and provided the students with an array of masks, hats and headbands with which they could dress themselves. Only three students brought their own costumes.  Then we herded them into a circle, had them sit down and turned off the lights.  I had a flashlight under my chin. I told them about my dear, dead friend Sam. When Sam was alive he loved to share his food and his money, but now that he’s dead he has another gift. (They, of course, didn’t really understand any of this.) Then we offered them the opportunity to feel Sam’s “gifts” and guess which body part they were.  Ramen noodles for brains, spam for his liver, two skinned grapes for his eyes, a peeled tomato for his heart and, my personal favorite, vermicelli rice paper for his skin.  They were enjoying being grossed out and I walked around the circle with the flashlight under my face making stupid faces at them.  Afterwards we broke a pinata that was left over from my summer camp and which I decorated for the occasion. That was also a success.

While I could see that the students were having a good time, I am never satisfied with the Halloween party. Why? When I first started working at this middle school there was another foreign English teacher who had worked there for a year.  Her name is Jennifer. Jennifer had seven years of teaching experience from back in the states and was a drama major. Those are some big shoes to fill.  She even persuaded the students to dress up for Halloween.  There was a very excellent Joker, some vampires and some princesses.  I don’t have the same work ethic or ability to inspire kids.  She was definitely talented.  She was even my teacher, in a way.  She helped me through the first awkward months without an ounce of judgement showing.  She was also an outspoken Libertarian. I haven’t heard from her since I told her about applying to the Peace Corps.

My friend Phil has been back in Seoul for a vacation.  Last Friday he took me to my first casino.  He’s apparently quite a fan of casinos, black jack in particular.  It was lovely to see him, and he waxed philosophical about life and gambling and the mutability of success and failure, all the while with a self-deprecating grin on his face.   I lost 40,000 won and on the taxi ride back to my neighborhood I had to ask the taxi driver to pull over.  That was a first for me, which should be regarded as phenomenal given the amount of imbibing I’ve done in this city.  They’re incredibly gracious about that kind of thing here.  He gave me some napkins and smoked a cigarette while I did what nature intends one to do after many long island iced teas.

But alas, Molly will leave Seoul this coming Wednesday. We had what may be our final Friday night romp, which naturally ended at a noraebang. Looks like I’ll have to join a gym.  Come back to me soon Molly so I won’t have to fill my time with such mundane things!

And now, some photographic evidence:

Ms. Molly and me

Nice frames you got there, Molls

Silly face

Pig snouts for sale. For the adventurous diner.

Fancy that. After a night of drinks we end up at a noraebang.

Self-deprecation!

Sing it, lady.

No doubt I am singing Desperado. Oh don't you want to go to a noraebang with me?

Some of my middle school girls at the Halloween party. I love the face the girl is making on the far left.

School Halloween party

Pinata time

When you teach in the Seoul public school system you will always have a co-teacher in the classroom with you.  That’s a Korean English teacher.  They run the gamet.  You may have a teacher who is unable to control their own classroom, let alone assist you while you are teaching, who struggles with English, the language in which you communicate, and spends your entire lesson with their backside in a chair.  Or you may have an experienced, delightful co-worker whose control of the students make them a joy to teach and the teacher a joy to teach with.  I’m lucky because I have mostly had excellent co-teachers who I’ve learned (am learning) a lot from.

But I have had to also learn to control my anger toward the impotent teachers.  I am not saying I have mastered that yet.  When a teacher fails to control the students the brief time I have with them and spend reprimanding them is frustrating and probably ineffectual.  When I am calling for everyone to wake up, pay attention, and the Korean English teacher’s mouth is agape and does not follow my lead, I get pissed.  When, from across the room, she watches me try to quiet chattering students who are right in front of her and she doesn’t contribute and pointedly looks the other way, I get super pissed.  Limp fools!  Where is your backbone? Where is your sense of duty?  Tee hee, duty.

One of my favorite English teachers is also one of the teachers who I’ve had problems with in the classroom.  Poor thing.  She seems totally beat this semester.   Our first class this Monday was a low level boys class.  All of her classes are low level, no wonder she looks unhappier.  There are three or four boys who muck it up for the rest of the kids.  I can’t teach until these handful of boys sit down and shut up, and I don’t think anything but an act of God could do that.  I see the bored faces of the potentially good students and feel bad for them all.  Well, the ringleader of the annoying boys lit some paper on fire in the classroom while I was teaching.  Then his pal turned on a fan on the wall to disperse the smell of smoke and the ringleader tossed the singed paper out of the window.

At least this isn’t the US.  It would be so much worse.

The ban on corporeal punishment, which was to begin in October, already seems to be wildly failing.  The older, male gym teacher in my office still regularly whacks the boys with a stick.  Not to say that I don’t see the benefit to myself if I was allowed to wail on the little fucks who won’t shut up and who light fires in the back of the classroom.  Stress relief!

My friend Amanda who has taught in Korea and in the US told me that yes, it is much worse in the US.  Especially because they can talk back to you.  Maybe there are some benefits to speaking a language most of your students can’t understand.  She also said that the favorite topic of the teachers at her school is the kind of mood lifting drugs each takes to deal with the stress.  Damn.

It’s fun to talk about the outrageous stuff that happens at my school, but mostly my students are really good kids that I really enjoy interacting with.  And I really enjoy my job.  Also, to people unfamiliar with corporeal punishment, it seems like the halls would be filled with wailing and fear, but that isn’t how it is at all. My objection to it is that it legitimizes a kind of violence that I think is bad for a society and for individuals, and also that it isn’t an effectual form of punishment.  Teenagers value their time way more, and if you took that from them it would be a much better punishment I think.

Autumn is nice! I was so worked up about the approaching winter that I distracted myself from fall’s comforts.  The temperature is mild and it’s sunny and dry.  And the foliage is still green.  It’s only blushing with a little red and yellow.  It’s chilly enough to even get me to drink my first hot coffee in ages.  I’m a cold coffee kinda gal.

Last weekend I, as usual, spent a hefty sum on some books.  Just this afternoon I finished The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.  Blarg. It’s a cloying parable.  It’s some super cheese.  Follow your heart, God gives you omens on how to fulfill your dreams, everything happens because that’s God’s will.  Just sickly full of quotable, uplifting things about life and God.  Lots of capitalized, flouncy nouns like Language of the World and Personal Legend and, I mean, just not the kind of thing for an atheist, would-be story telling snob.  Anyone want to read it? I’ll give you my copy with pleasure. And not just sarcastic pleasure.  I hadn’t heard of the author before a few months ago.  My co-worker Ms. Choi was reading it in the summer and we talked about a place name from the novel (though now I am not sure why she wanted to know where the city of Santiago was – to which I replied, I am sure there are a lot of cities with that name – because though the author is Brazilian, the book took place in Spain and Africa, and the main character’s name was Santiago and he didn’t go off and found his own city or anything.) After talking with Ms. Choi about the book I started to notice other people reading him, and a lot of his books on display.  Anyway, screw you, Paulo.  You want people to think there is only one person in the world they can love? I know it’s a popular sentiment, but how depressing.  Sounds like the kind of thinking about the world I’d expect from people with their head in the sand.  Yeah.

I need another novel to cleanse my pallet.  (I should probably stop eating my books, huh?)

Actually, before that I read I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe.  Hmm.  I am Charlotte Simmons is pretty much the opposite of The Alchemist in every way.  In Wolfe’s novel your personal goals are shitty and make you become a shitty person.  Plus it was a study of people’s pyschology and the culture of a certain kind of collegiate.  And the writing was good.  And, in the end, romantic relationships don’t save you, they further the girl’s journey in becoming an image-obsessed social climber.

At work I’m testing all eleven of my third grade classes.  It’s a lot of paperwork.  Our Halloween party was scheduled for tomorrow, and thank goodness they moved the day because this lady is not prepared.  My English teachers were really generous with our budget and bought me a really nice Halloween costume.  What will I be wearing?  I’ll be wearing a hanbok.  That’s traditional Korean women’s garb.  Isn’t that thoughtful of them?  Yes, yes it is.

I have an ear infection. This afternoon Shin Minyoung went with me to a nearby clinic so I could get antibiotics.  They stuck things deep into my ear which tickled and hurt too.  Afterwards they sat me in a chair in the lobby and before I knew it the nurse has thrust two things that look like blow driers over my ears.  I had to hold them there.  It felt as ridiculous as it sounds.

Photos!

This ginkgo tree at my school turned yellow before most trees even got a hint of it.

Look-they stare at me all of the time. So I can photograph them doing laundry or washing veggies.

On the train going over the Han River

I'm a millionaire. In won. (Hey Kristi, do these bills look familiar?)

My Thailand Vacation

My dear friend Molly works at a hagwon.  For the uninitiated that is a private school that students attend in the afternoons and evenings.  I work in a public school.  We don’t often have the same vacation days.  Hell, as a hagwon teacher Molly hardly ever has any vacation days.  (Work in a public school in South Korea if you have the option.)  But we both had time off for the Korean harvest festival Chuseok.  Originally Molly wanted to visit Jeju Island, which is at the southern end of the Korean peninsula and touted as Korea’s Hawaii, a dubious claim in my opinion.  I, a true cynic of what Korea has to offer in terms of tropical vacations, said that if I was going to go anywhere during Chuseok, I’d sure as hell make sure it was outside of this country.  No offense, Korea.  But you and I both know you aren’t a big draw for tourists, and it’s not as if you’re a diamond in the rough or up and coming.  Nice place to work, though.

After a lot of fumbling around late in the game for plane tickets, we ended up with not inexpensive tickets to Bangkok.  We were going to meet her friend Mandy there.  Mandy works in Singapore.  She’s the manager of a Chili’s in a resort area and, reportedly, making bank and living in a beautiful, culturally diverse, very expensive southeast Asian metropolis.

Chuseok is, if memory serves, the most important holiday in Korea.  Koreans take to the streets, subways and planes.  It’s the busiest travel time of the year?  I think.  Even if it’s ranked two or three, it’s darned busy and we were lucky to get the last remaining seats on the bus to the airport at 5 in the morning.  I’ve often taken this bus at the same hour and  there are usually only a handful of passengers on.

Molly, bless her heart, didn’t sleep a wink the night before.  She also posses the uncanny (or at least, for me, unfamiliar) ability to fall asleep in any moving vehicle.  Taxi, bus, plane.  Our flight left early in the morning.  We had a brief layover in Guangzhou China, the least capable international airport I’ve ever been to.  If you can, do not have a stop over there.  Hong Kong is much preferable.  We arrived in Bangkok’s sparkling new airport, which was uncharacteristically not taken over by protesters (I jest), at six in the evening.  I’d had big plans.  We were going to drop our bags off at our hotel near the airport, then grab a taxi to any decent place in Bangkok for street food and gawking.  But both of us were exhausted.  We were so tired we felt as if we both had a fever.

Our hotel was decent, though nothing to brag about.  The food was great though.  Before ordering Molly realized that she had forgotten her camera on the plane.  To her credit she was only ticked off for five minutes at the most, though she lost her appetite when it came time to order.  But it was restored when my plate of large flat noodles and veggies came and she was able to ooh and awe over how delicious Thai food in Thailand was.  Also two for one mai thais.

We expected Mandy by ten thirty or eleven.  Across a small river in front of our hotel was a glittering temple.  We tried to kill some time by crossing this small bridge over to the temple but a stray dog slept in the middle and first unnerved Molly and then that unnerved me.  One of the hotel staff told us, in his limited English, not to go that way.  He called it a dog temple.  Sure enough we were sitting on our side of the river and saw around twelve stray dogs asleep on raised wooden platforms with traditional, red Thai roofs that we think belonged to the temple.  Then some women, hotel staff whose shift was over, came and threw moldy bread into the river and a writhing mass of huge fish climbed over each other’s bodies to get to the bread.  We showed Mandy when she arrived, but she didn’t appreciate it the same way I did.  I believe she called it gross.  This is what it looked like in the daylight:

Molly and Mandy are dear friends from back in the states.  They stayed up talking over a few cheap Thai beers while I hit the hay.  Molly was pretty much sleep deprived our entire trip.

At one in the afternoon on our first full day in country a hired car was going to pick us up at our Bangkok hotel and take us to Ban Phae and our, hopefully, seaside cabana.  We took a cab into the heart of Bangkok in the morning.  We were staying in the suburbs, still rife with the symptoms of poverty.  Notably, in terms of poverty, there ware  a lot of stray dogs whose friendliness we were in no way sure of having not even spent twenty four hours in the country.

Our cab dropped us off in front of Wat Phrae Kaew and the Royal Palace.  While driving through the city our cabbie, predictably, tried to convince us that this, the most famous and holy site in Bangkok, if not in Thailand, wasn’t open yet.  No doubt to take us to some market where he will earn a commission for bringing our foreign wallets.  I was probably a little rude, as I learned in the Philippines that polite can get your ass in trouble.   Wat Phrae Kaew is, in English, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha.  Now, I’m starting to feel like I’ve seen it all.  I know, how snotty, right? After seeing Vatican City and The Forbidden City,  I’m a bit done traveling to see ancient holy places and palaces.  But this was one spectacular temple!  We had to dress appropriately.  No shorts, miniskirts, or revealing shirts.  If you don’t come prepared they will loan you the appropriate clothes. It was crowded but not uncomfortably so.  The buildings at this temple were remarkably close together.  It was hot.  It was beautiful.  The detail on each temple was amazing.  All made of glittering things and porcelain, I think.

The entrance and exit, one in the same, from Wat Phrae Kaew was overrun with locals hocking tourist junk at very steep prices.  They’re relentless and overwhelming to a traveller who is unfamiliar with this kind of thing.  If Molly was a cartoon character a vein in her temple would have been throbbing.

We picked up a taxi that tried to get us to agree to go to some market, and we did, but because we thought he was asking to stop to get gas.  He kicked us out and our next driver spoke a lot of English and was very friendly and honest.  The Thai people were so friendly!  Delightful.  He told us that he was a lucky man.  He was seventy-six and said his youngest child was ten.  I guess you would call him an active older gentleman.  (Apparently the Brits of a different era really disliked how Americans used the term gentleman for anyone who is honest and kind.)

Sitting outside of our hotel with our bags repacked, we gobbled up a few more delicious Thai dishes and cheap, cold Thai beers before our driver came.  Oh yes, our driver dahling, don’t you know.  I think he was not terribly literate because when we reached Ban Phae I spotted the signs (both in Thai and in English) for our cabana before he did.

Oh, our cabana!  We had two rooms in the same cabana.  We were booked for a mid-range garden view, but there weren’t any other guests and they bumped us up to the seaside.  Mandy, always on the case, quickly ordered us some Singhas and a bucket of ice which they brought to our porch.  We all loved our indoor/outdoor bathrooms.  Sitting on the john as a giant tropical butterfly lands on the magenta flowers climbing over the wall, topped off with tropical bird song issuing from palm trees is indeed the best bathroom one can get.  And shower too.

I said our cabana was seaside, which is a little false. It was gulf side. The water wasn’t that brilliant turquoise hue of postcards.  A small river entered near our resort and turned a strip of water a sandy color.  We spent a few hours luxuriating on our porch in our beach wear with our beautiful view. (I’m trying to find a picture of it, but iPhoto has lost – lost? – many of the photos I’ve downloaded. They were there! Oh the heartache.)  Then we went on a walk along the narrow beach as dusk turned into night.  From the shore two street dogs bounded toward us and scared the hell out of me.  They were sweet though. They just ran around with us and chased small ghost crabs into the surf.  I found a dead puffer fish on the shore.  I had the idea that our walk would end when we reached some other resorts that I saw further down the beach, but we didn’t get that far because out of the dark, treed roadside near the beach a pack of street dogs bared down on us, barking.  Our dogs placed themselves in front of Mandy and I and barked at the new dogs. Molly started running toward the surf and so did I. I was scared and I didn’t realize at first that our stray pooches were protecting us.  My ass just didn’t want to be between brawling street dogs.  We quickly turned around and our dogs followed us back to the resort where they were thrown our scraps of meat after dinner because they were good, good dogs.

The next day our hired boatman came to shore in front of our resort and took us to Koh Samet, an island we could see from our porch.  Our dog friends followed us into the water, doggy paddled after us with their tails wagging and tongues hanging out.  What a sweet, heartbreaking sight.  If I lived in Thailand as an eccentric expat, I would have an army of adopted street dogs, oh my God I would.  It would be a problem.

First our boatman took us to a fishery not far from shore.  There were all kinds of big fish, even a sea turtle and a shark in the same enclosure. To walk around the fishery one had to walk on narrow, feeble wooden planks. One misstep would send one into the water and the nets with the sea creatures. Needless to say my darenot devil attitude kept me on the planks closest to the boat so I could hang on to it while Molly and Mandy carefully walked around.  I could see the seaturtle decently from my safety perch.

Then he took us to a beach on Koh Samet.  We paid a pittance to sit in chairs under umbrellas, bought fruit from the licensed vendors and would take dips in the calm, turquoise waters.  It was beautiful, I was delighted.  But if anyone can find fault with being on a tropical beach, I can.  The waters were as calm as a pool.  I’m from North Carolina where, when one goes to the beach, one plays in the waves.  No waves make water much less interesting.

But Koh Samet was certainly a postcard. Turquoise waters, white sands and plentiful palms.  After a few dips in the water we opted to take a banana boat ride.  A banana boat is a inflatable, plastic thing shaped like a hot dog that holds five and is pulled by a little motor boat.  To stay on top of the hot dog you have to grip it with your legs and hold onto a cloth handle.  The first time we capsized, which I gather is the whole point of renting one, Molly took a smack to the schnoz and got a bit of a bloody nose.  After that we were adamant that we didn’t want the driver not intentionally dunk us.  At first I was content looking at the island on the little jaunt but then it got boring and I wished that we could get thrown around more.  Then my cloth handle broke.  It was meh. I would have preferred the more expensive and much briefer parasailing, a thing I’ve never done.

Later Mandy read on the beach and Molly and I went in search of food but were naturally waylaid by shopping for beachwear. The village was so adorable.

Fisherman walking in the village of Koh Samet

That night, back at our still empty resort, there was much feasting on Thai food and panicking about how much cash we had for the remainder of our trip.  Mandy was leaving a little earlier than us, so we had to pay for our ride back to Bangkok and another hotel.  I alone was burnt to a crisp.  Curse my caucasian skin! Molly and Mandy are both white too, but their skin fared much better than mine.  It’s a month later now, and my legs are still peeling.

Our hotel in Bangkok was in the middle of all of the action. After Mandy left I said to the front desk, “Send me a chariot and take me to the best spots” so of course they sent us around a free tuk-tuk (a small jalopy that would look more at home carrying argicultural goods than people) and whisked us away to a night market, the name of which I wasn’t told at the time so have a very good excuse for not recalling.  We browsed and bargained.  Molly was terrible at bargaining. I read in the guidebook to smile and be friendly, which worked. Molly scowled and looked incredulous.  Did I mention the Thai people were very friendly?  Even bargaining with them was delightful.  (As a tourist I know it’s my job to pay a lot for goods other people don’t.  I don’t mind being scammed, just not seriously scammed.)  I went to look at some purses I was jonsing for and Molly went back to purchase some clothing and then she got lost.  I was worried for a few minutes but she came back.  There was a bit of beer, but just a bit because we were worried about cash.

The next day we went on a tour of a floating market. It was an hour or two outside of Bangkok.  Very touristy, but oh so photogenic.  I fed and elephant and went camera crazy.

After the floating market we, exhausted, ate some more at a restaurant recommend by our hotel and freaked out about the prices.  Then we left Thailand.  Leaving and the stories from it may actually be worth telling, but telling is getting old.  Here are some more photos from the trip that I like.

Wat Phrae Kaew

Wat Phrae Kaew

Molly zonked in a taxi

The view from our cabana in Ban Phae

Delicious! Uncharacteristically all of the food at our various hotels was damned good.

Mandy on the boat ride to Koh Samet

Molly and I Drinking coconut milk on the beach

Fruit vendors on Koh Samet

Me: pre-sunburn on Koh Samet

Sunset on Ban Phae

Beautiful ladies on the ride back to Bangkok

Ms. Molly, show us the way

Tourist and vendors at the floating market

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.