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.

This Winter’s First Worthwhile Snow

The cliffside behind my school

The grumpy dog that lives in my school's garden

Jongam Neighborhood

Jongam Neighborhood

Korea University

Yours Truly

Korea University

 

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.)

My 3rd Expat Christmas – 2010

 

Gift giving guilt

A traditional style Korean building at the Shilla hotel

Christmas decorations in the lobby of the Shilla hotel

Sparkly. Good.

Kristin primping

Me and some beautiful Christmas lights at the Hyatt

More lights at the Hyatt

In the lobby of the Hyatt.

We drank and dined for very unreasonable prices in the beautiful lobby of the Hyatt. There were lounge singers, an incredible view of Seoul and everything just dripped sophistication...except for me, of course.

Ridiculous cars outside of the Hyatt

Kristin and Sunday Indian lunch

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.

 

It’s not fair I can’t go to the fair, but my fair friends imitated my presence fairly well (barrage of lame wordplay!)

Back in North Carolina the State Fair has just packed up their deadly rides (ahh! The Zipper is the best), swept away the manure (maybe) and left the inhabitants of my state even more in need of heart medicine (you can buy any kind of already deadly food fried!).  The NC State Fair is tacky, of course.  But I’m human, and it’s pure nostalgia, especially a world away as I am.

My friend Maria  frequented the fair this year, and she asked me if there was anything I’d like from it.  Yes, I said, I’d like you to print off a photo of me (with as few chins as possible) and take that photo with you and take pictures with it as if I was there.  What’s surprising isn’t that I’d ask something so silly, but that my friends would do it.  Wonderful friends, Maria and Matt.  You guys get a gold star.

Baah! I'm a prize winning sheep.

I'm the business end of an anthropomorphic banana!

Oh God, if you knew how nostalgic I was for prize winning produce!

Matt and Maria, my gold star, funny hatted friends on the midway

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.

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

Look at this Culinary Monstrosity

The solid gray Seoul skies are back with a vengeance.  Boo, I say.  I can love a dramatic sky that has white clouds and dark clouds and sunshine, but what we have today is a uniform dreariness.

I’m in Itaewon. I came for the Mexican food.  Oh, I always do.  In North Carolina I thought there were too many Mexican restaurants but now I can’t get enough.

Here is something terrible:

The worst Korean street food

I think the Koreans are giving us Americans a run for our money in awful junk food.  Spam, as all of us here know, is given as a gift on the Korean holiday Chuseok.  (For the uninitiated, Chuseok is a feasting / worshipping your ancestors kind of holiday.) Even if a few french fries don’t significantly add to the already bulky caloric value of a corn dog, there does seem to be a terrible symbolism here.  Like a fried twinkie.  Like if someone ate that corn dog with french fries on it and followed it with a fried twinkie that unholy meal would usher in the apocalypse.

Korean McDonalds has a delivery service.  If I get mowed down by one of those boys on a moped delivering Big Macs, well, fast food was going to kill me one way or the other.  I hate that motorcycles and mopeds ride on the sidewalk and weave through pedestrians here.   When I trained in taekwondo I used to fancy that if a driver got too close to me I could smack them in the helmet.  Take that, helmet!  Ah well, the joys of living in a foreign country.

Podcasts for the Expatriate

I’m always behind the times when it comes to the ways we’re using the Internet.  Is it even called the Internet anymore?  File sharing and blogs and youtube, collaborative bladdidy blah, nsfw.  What is an RSS feed? In the last year I was turned on to podcasts.  Donate your radio folks, that shit belongs in the Smithsonian.  Of course, podcasts offer a lot of shows which you can’t find on the radio.  Production value is all over the place.  There are also video podcasts as well.  Those take up a lot of space on your compy though, so use sparingly.  I’ve found these shows to be a great comfort in my sometimes lonely expat life.

If you aren’t listening to these podcasts, start.

• Radiolab
• This American Life

Everyone should know those.  Onward!

• The Moth
• Risk
• Stuff You Should Know
• TEDTalks (video)
• Best of Youtube (video)
• The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

These are my favorite, though I’m always on the lookout for something else to entertain and inform me.  Oh, one more:

• Slate’s Culture Gabfest

Once you get used to Stephen Metcalf’s acidic and self-described pompous on-air persona you’ll start to really enjoy the Culture Gabfest.  I did, anyway.  It’s either June or Julia, or maybe both, who I really like.  They’re far more diplomatic.

Movies, books and podcasts have been so important to me.  I’ve always loved all kinds of media, but these have really helped me keep in touch with my culture when I’m so far away.