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

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

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

Bye-bye Amanda, Hello Travel Plans

I learned today that I’ll have an ample two weeks of summer vacation instead of the one week which I had been told to expect.  At the risk of making my blog the graveyard of my aspirations, I’m going to declare my intention to take a trip to China in August.  I want to go here:

Guilin, China

This week is a busy week for me, so after work today I’ve unhelpfully done none of the things which I’ve needed and planned to do.  Curses.

Saturday night was Amanda’s last night in Seoul, so I went to her place and helped her finish cleaning and packing.  We stayed up until five in the morning.  In the morning I took some photos of her apartment and neighborhood while she made some last minute skype calls to friends and family.

It was a good day for traveling. We took one of the many conveniently located airport busses.  What a perfect bus ride for her last view of Seoul! We went past so many verdant Korean palaces, old walls, and all the while the sky was a heady bright blue.  Everything was so vibrantly colored.  She was running quite late and it was a miracle she got to her plane.  She was going through security during boarding time.  Before heading back to her home state of Arizona she’s spending two weeks in Thailand, the lucky slag.

That neck scarf could put your eye out.

Sniffle. Bye Amanda!

So she’s in Thailand at the moment, probably alternating between rapturous adoration and high velocity stress.  (She’s already lost her camera.  She lost it on our trip last year to Beijing too.  Looks like I’m not the only one who is mildly prone to problems while traveling. C’mon Amanda, I’ve donated way more to the locals of the Philippines. Pick up your game!)

I wandered about the sleek airport for a while, reminiscing about travels with friends and family, feeling grateful but also a dim sense of loss.   Maybe I was indulging myself, but when I got on the bus bound for my district, it evaporated.   I’m grateful to be here still, and that was hammered home to me even more today when I learned that only two NSETs from my district were granted that elusive six month contract.

If Tattoos are like Marriage, Then I’m the Bridesmaid

When I was a teenager my Grandma told me that if I ever got a tattoo she’d take a knife and cut it off of me, which has probably been the second strangest thing I’ve ever heard pass her lips.  (The first strangest thing was when, after retelling the story of a Korean immigrant to Canada who, on a cross-country bus trip, inexplicably decapitated a fellow passenger and then taunted the authorites by further dismembering -or was it eating of – this poor man’s corpse, she giggled and giggled.  Personally I thought she was on some antidepressants that made her giddy.  Dad doesn’t thinks so though.)

I’ve never gotten inked or had any desire to do so.  Not long after Grandma’s threat my cousin Elyce, who is about one or two years younger than I, got a tattoo.  If I was a betting woman, I’d have bet on myself getting a tattoo over her.  Anyway, Amanda has several tattoos and she asked me to go with her to the tattoo parlor to get a recent addition touched-up.  Tattoos aren’t very common in Korea. Ms. Choi said only ‘the fighters’ got them, by which she meant members of organized crime.  The tattoo parlor was on the south side of the Han river, and I live on the north and hardly stray out of my four or five nearby favorite neighborhoods.  To get there meant that I had to get on a subway, of all the horrors.  The Seoul subway system is quite nice and straightforward, but I just hate traveling underground because it doesn’t afford a view of the city.  When I got to my stop I saw something really weird that I’d never seen before; it was a stationary subway car that was being used as a market.

On the way I saw a nerdy sort of young woman wearing an overlarge t-shirt that said “Delicious Story”, and there was a picture of a cat on the bottom.  My goodness I wanted to get a photo of her.

I’d met the owner of Tattoo Korea once back in the winter when Annie and I went with Amanda to check the place out.  He said he grew up in America, though he still had a Korean accent, which I cast doubt on the veracity of his claims.  He was eager to impress us and referenced drug use several times.  He sure does know how to make the foreigners nostalgic for home.  It’s an all Korean staff and they had some terrible animated Japanese movie playing yesterday.  Amanda and I played and cuddled with the friendly dog of one of the artists and I held her hand and tried to district her from the pain with a lot of half-thought out stories, like how my dad saw a sun fish jump out of the water when he was deep sea fishing once.  (My mom is the talker in the family, but my dad, who grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina, will come out with stories like these, and I have to wonder what other stories I haven’t heard.  I especially like it when he tells stories about going to see a great classic rock band with something slightly untoward happening.)

Sun fish!

Well, Amanda was pleased with her tattoo and especially pleased with her tattoo artist whose hands, she insisted, were quite big.

Lickums

"Please no more lickums."

Revenge!

Ms. Choi asked me if getting a tattoo hurt, and I told her yes.  ”How do you know?” she said.  I think she was testing the waters to see if I, too, had a tattoo.  ”Does it hurt to get shot?” I said.  She said yes.  ”How do you know?  Have you ever been shot?”.  I don’t know if she totally grasped my point.  I may have persuaded her to believe that getting a tattoo feels like getting shot.

Plastics Made it Possible

On my jaw, under my chin, there is a large and deep pimple.  It’s painful and it will take a long time to reach the surface and go away.  As a teenager I didn’t have a problem with acne.  I’ve always had red cheeks, and I don’t like those very much.

I was crossing a six lane street in Hyewha with a large number of Koreans. A truck carrying fruit skidded to a stop a few feet before he would have hit this old woman.  Two watermelons fell off the back and smashed on the asphalt. The driver was at fault; we were all crossing with the light.  She was shocked and stood there looking at the car.     I read somewhere (or maybe it was hearsay?  Someone else read somewhere) that if you are born in Korea and live here all of your life you have a fifty percent chance of dying in a car accident.  Like I say over and over, they are admirably nonviolent, but make up for it with recklessness and incompetence and way too much drinking.  After crossing that street I got in a cab and on the other passenger seat there was some remnants of dried ramen vomit.

Amanda is leaving Seoul in two weeks and going back to her home state of Arizona.  Last night I helped her clean and pack, which is the most sane I’ve felt this week.  (See, I’m feeling unproductive and uncreative, though washing dishes and packing hardly count as a creative outlet.  Until I know the verdict from my district office about my six month contract, I can’t really start working toward anything.)  We drank sweet, cheap champagne.  After midnight things got a little silly, and here is photographic evidence.  

Don’t worry everyone, plastics made this photo possible.

I have been thinking a lot about North Carolina recently.  My state is so lush.  I miss that a lot.  It’s lush here too, but this is a big big city; a concrete canyon.  If there is green, it’s isolated and hard to find and everything smells like shit.  Weep weep weep.

On Friday I had a low level boys class, 9th graders to you Americans.  Two different boys took their pants off in that class.  No, they aren’t mentally handicapped.  They depanted themselves in front of me and the other female English teacher.  A different student, in the same class, drew a naked woman spread eagled with an arrow pointing to her gaping sideways eye of a vagina on the test paper I’d given him.  Test paper.    As much as I fear working in the service industry when I go back home, at least I can call the cops on these kinds of people.

Spring Jaunt with Amanda and Katie

Katie, Amanda and I met up at the recently opened North Seoul Dream Forest.  The name of the park not withstanding, it was a pretty good park.  Lots of trees and green space, something obviously lacking in this city.  The trees were older too.  They obviously weren’t planted within the last few years.  My friends and I went out to enjoy the warmer weather and look at the cherry blossoms.  We also used it as shameless photo ops.  We are becoming Korean, for sure.  Koreans love photo ops.

My brilliant friend Amanda

Amanda and I – love love love

Katie gets some unwanted attention from an agashi who wants to know if she is here by herself.  Oh la la.

Katie!

Taking up prime photo op space while a Korean family waits.

While a little kid in a surgical mask totally looks like the End Times to us Americans, it’s really very common.  Folks wear them all the time – they wear them to keep warm, they wear them if they have a cold, they wear them if the Yellow Dust is strong that day.

Cherry blossoms and forsythia

This building’s primary function seems to be observation.  There are a lot of stairs that lead to the top where you can get a view of the city, and boy is there so much city.  This place is also on top of a little mountain or hill or what not.

Did I mention that there were a lot of stairs?

Looking out from the building you can see lots of mountains and lots of apartment buildings.  The city doesn’t seem to have an end.

Pictures of flowers are so boring, but it’s spring and I love them right now.

Can plants blow raspberries?  This one is trying.

This pipe is disconcerting.  That junk it’s pumping out wasn’t water vapor.

We stopped for sinful snacks, and the cafe still had up Christmas decorations.  I might add that this was taken in mid-April.