Why students should never know where their teacher lives

I spent last weekend fairly determined to do nothing productive or healthy. One of the consequences of traveling around the country to see the friends I hadn't seen in a while is that I was away from Cheongju and my remaining friends here for a few weeks. I got to miss them.


I went out Friday night. It wasn't anything too ridiculous or out of the norm; it was a normal Friday. Amanda and I went to Pearl Jam.

Pearl Jam is the homeliest of the handful of foreigner bars and it also serves the most decent food. This is something I do not know for sure as I have not indulged in any of the food at Buzz or MJ's, but Pearl Jam burritos trump Road King Burritos. These things become important to a guy.

We played Jenga until my burrito arrived. By the time I had finished my food (maybe 45 seconds after the plate was put before me; I was hungry and I had the shakes) we were joined by Gavin, Robyn, et al.

We drank, talked, and joked our way from Pearl Jam to MJ's.

The only thing I really like about MJ's is decent popcorn, and a 2 hour happy hour with 2,000won gin and tonics.

My opinion of the place rises in warm weather after the roof deck is opened and you can hangout in the fresh air above the city. The weather in Korea is warming up but the roof hasn't been cleaned and it still looks like it has been hit by a series of tornados.

I left in control of my senses at around 2am. Not too late all things considering. I could have gone to bed and woken up to a glorious gray and misty day and done something productive in the morning.

I didn't.

I went back to my apartment and played Xbox with my friends and drank some soju I had in my fridge. I went to sleep at 5am.

Still, not horrible.

What is horrible is being woken up by pounding on the door.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and decided to do nothing. The most serious thing at my door at the early hour of 1pm was a repair man or somebody else on official apartment business. The knocking came again. My apartment was a disaster anyway. I had been trying to get rid of things the past week and with the clothing and general clutter I looked like a hoarder.

Most likely scenario was the ever common Jehovah's Witness; a scenario I didn't really feel like dealing with. The worst case scenario would have been ---

"THOMAS TEACHER!"

Oh shit.

It was Ji-Huan.

Hearing his voice startled me, but there was no reason for me to be bothered. He knocked again and shouted my name, with the addition of "teacher" despite my current state of hiding, hungover, in my own filthy apartment waiting for a 10 year old to go away.

He shouted again.  Everytime the boy says my home, including in school, he says it with this manic crescendo at the end.  Usually I think it is funny.

Eventually I heard Ji-Huan begin to turn my door knob.  It was ever so slowly and subtly but it made a distinct sound. 

"That sneaky ... little... ohdeargod."  At this point I realize two things:

1.  I am butt-ass naked.
2.  I forgot to lock my door.

Several scenarios went through my head and none of them ended without one of us being traumatized or in jail.  I stopped breathing for a few seconds.  I might have prayed.  Anyway, in those few seconds I decided my only plan of action was, if he came in, to spring up with my blanket open and in front of me, wrap him up, and push him right back out the door.  With a bit of luck he would think it was part of a game and even if he didn't I was ok with the idea of Ji-Huan being a little confused for a few minutes.

To ruin the story he turned the handle and walked away. 

On Monday he told me that he came by to my apartment to visit and I told him I had no idea what he was talking about.

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Sundays

Another week gone by and another week closer to the end of this whole Korea thing. Earlier this week I received all of my pension information from my boss. I couldn’t make much out of it and the amount that has been paid into it seems to be out of date (at least, I sure hope it is out of ) but it told me how to go about getting my money when I leave.


Things are getting a little sad in Cheongju. My friends all arrived around the same time a couple of months before I did and they are all leaving in about a month. Amanda is staying another year and there are a few other people who came after I did, but most of the people I spend the bulk of my weekends with will be gone soon.

Ah, such is life.

Today is Sunday. It is about 9pm. I have to go into work Monday and Tuesday but then I will be on vacation until Monday. With Intensives, poor sleeping abilities, trying to get my portfolio back in order, I am really looking forward to some time off. The occasion is that it is the Lunar New Year. Koreans use this time to go to the home villages of their parents and grandparents. Just like the Chuseok holiday I couldn’t really get much about the traditions of this holiday out of my students.

Accordingly, apparently my kids are going to eat all of grandma’s Mandu-rice cake-soup and steal all of her money. They might wear some fancy Hanboks, though.

My plan is to head to the big mountain, Seoraksan, in the north-east with Rick and Lauren and try to make it to the top. It is no Everest or K2, but it’s a mile vertical anyway, so who knows if we will get all the way to the Summit, but I am going to give it a go. We will spend a couple of nights there before heading back. In my mind it is going to be awesome. Realistically, everything will probably be closed as it was on Chuseok so it will likely be a giant disaster. Oh well.

It seems that I have a firmly established routine on Sundays. I really do not know why given that it is totally unproductive and ends in me spending too much money, but it has become a solid part of my week:



8am- My alarm goes off. I have not woken up at 8am in months. I set this so that I wake up, realize how lucky I am to not have to be into work until 1pm. I then promptly go back to sleep.

12pm- Usually I am reasonably conscious by now. Now, remember, I am writing about Sundays in Korea. The thing with Sundays in Korea is that Saturdays in Korea routinely spill into Sundays in Korea. So, despite being conscious I rarely move. At the most, I might rotate my pillow if I happened to drool in my drunken sleep.

1pm- Think about getting out of bed. Actually, this is an inaccurate wording. This is more accurate: think about getting out of my floor mat. Usually, this is just a bluff.

1:15pm- Realize I am hungry.

1:16 - 1:30pm- Think about what I want to accomplish during the day. Realize that none of it will happen.

2pm- Finish my meal at Burger King.

2:15 - 3:15pm- Walk around Home Plus like a zombie.

That is basically a long way of saying that I spend too much time at Home Plus. This doesn’t really surprise me so much as it makes me worried. On days when I was really bored at home I would sometimes walk around Target. I would generally buy absolutely nothing. I am worried that I am predestined to become a routine part of the mall-walking circuit.

I never bought anything at Target largely because I was flat broke. Now, I am not flat broke. I have become one of those clichéd people who goes to the store for one thing (usually salsa) and walk out with 80 bucks worth of junk.

Now, every Sunday I do the same song and dance at Home Plus: buy salsa, fake pizza cheese, and tortilla chips. I start off on the first floor which is home goods. I like to look at the cameras and the fancy rice cookers. In the beginning of the year I thought about buying a small toaster oven so I could make food that doesn’t involve my pot or frying pan. Now, I have managed to stop myself from making any purchases that can’t be eaten by me as I do not have a very long time left in Korea.
Things I have bought in the home department:

Steaming rack

Floor sleeping mat

Shoe rods that don’t work

Christmas tree (aprox 6 inches)

2 pairs of jeans that I didn’t bother to try on (take that mom)

A Walther PPK BB-Gun (with a silencer).

Then I go down the escalator ramp to the food section. In order to get a huge number of shopping carts to the food floor the employees send them down the escalators in big groups. They become stationary on the ramp and are received by an employee at the bottom who quickly pulls them out of the way. Now, I have seen a few people almost get wrecked when their individual carts get stuck when the escalator ends and the floor begins. Always, I get stuck between two groups of carts and fear for my life enough to formulate an escape plan if the set of carts in front of me. I do not plan on dying via a shopping cart sandwich.

The food floor in Home Plus is almost always ridiculously crowded with people and their carts.

Usually, I am in a good mood until I get to the food floor. I usually walk around the produce and meat departments to see if anything pops out. I don’t usually buy too much food as I eat at school, but sometimes I like to mix it up. Last Sunday I had tacos.

The problem with Home Plus is the aisles. They are smaller than aisles at home and they are also a lot fuller. I often try to walk up and down the aisles looking for snacks but I usually only make it threw a handful before I start getting flustered.

I do not know if it is because of the narrow aisles or something else, but Korean shoppers have this tendency of just stopping in clusters in the middle of an aisle. If I could make eye contact with them or even get them to look at me without making an idiot of myself I would just scoot by. Often times they stop in groups big enough to make the passage into a dead end. So, I go to the next aisle and hope it has not already been sealed.

Within 10 minutes of trying to simply get to the other side of the store my mission of buying snacks turns into a mission of buying salsa and then getting the heck on out of there. As it is, I usually spend a lot of time swearing at everybody beneath my breath.

After this I go home, clean my apartment, eat and then wonder why I can’t fall asleep after sleeping until almost 2pm.

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A Birthday in Cheonjgu

Burritos courtesy of Han.

Yesterday was my birthday. To be honest I was not expecting too much and wouldn’t have been disappointed if nobody so much as threw a “happy birthday” my way. In recent years I have not been a huge fan of my birthday. I could go without the presents if I could stop getting older

It would not be Korean for my birthday to pass unnoticed.

Actually, I knew that I would at the very least be getting a book from the Young Receptionist because she made me sit down and pick a book from the Korean equivalent of Amazon. I am very excited for this present as I am having problems finding books written in English. I am almost at the end of Road Fever by Tim Cahill and would have jumped straight into the Lord of the Rings trilogy but now I will be reading The Best American Travel Writing. I am not sure what edition it is but before I came I read a recent installment edited by Anthony Bourdain and I enjoyed it a lot. Some of the stories weren’t my cup of tea but all in all it was like reading a really great travel section in a Sunday paper.

As soon as I sat down in my little office Han gave me her present contained in a Tupperware container.

“Tom, I made you burritos,” she told me. I could have died. I am from the Northeast but have been craving American-perverted Mexican food for the past two months. I probably WILL take a two hour bus and subway ride to Itaewon just to go to Taco Bell whenever the place finally opens. To get a burrito on my birthday was like being given a car or a million dollars.

‘But,” Han went on, “I could not find a recipe so I made it up myself.”

This could be a problem, I thought. Even if they were the worst burritos on earth I still would have been appreciative but Koreans tend to put some pretty funky things in their foods. Still I was determined to down at least one even if a tentacle fell out when I bit into it.

There was no octopus inside, and no fish. They were as genuine as burritos got this far from Mexico. They were made with real beef, fresh tomatoes, onions, red and yellow peppers, and about a dozen tiny slices of fresh chili peppers that I didn’t see until it was too late.

It was that sort of food burn where you feel at first a tingle on your lips and think “this is going to be bad” before the pain kicks in and next thing you know your eyes are watering as your face is under the faucet. Still, they were amazing and I ate two of them.

Boram gave me travelers coffee cup with a picture of Seoul stretched around it. The Older Receptionist gave me a shirt but promptly took it back when she thought it was a little too big. I was pretty proud as I have lost 20 lbs since I have been here. My boss’ wife gave me some K-Swiss sandals.

If the day was like any other day I can say that we sure ate a lot more than usual. A few hours after the burritos the Young Receptionist brought us all Red and White burgers from Lotteria. I should point out that Lotteria calls everything a burger and they are not to be trusted as this was made out of shrimp.

Part of me genuinely thought that I would go home after work, maybe have a drink and get to bed like any other night. I have this thing where I think about what food I will eat when I get home if I was still hungry after dinner. Would I make chicken nuggets? Mandu? Donkkaseu (pork cutlet)? No, I wouldn’t make anything. I would go to the Kimbap joint next door and get the donkkaseu meal (cutlet, radish, salad, rice) or omurice (a sort of omelet with fried rice).

Everyone else knew we were going out but they didn’t tell me. Oh, don’t think that it was meant to be a surprise or anything like that- they just didn’t tell me. Nobody tells me nuthin’.

After work we hailed a cab and soon we were at Seduce in Downtown. In the beginning it was just Han, Boram, the Older Receptionist, the Younger Receptionist, and I. Several things happened at Seduce that likely played a hand in how the night turned out and the quality of teaching experienced by the kids the next day.

Boram and one of my birthday cakes.
Cellphone camera.

- We started with beer.

- We ended up doing a few tequila shots each. I learned that it is a horrible idea to be polite in Korea when it comes to alcohol. The Younger Receptionist told me that I could have more tequila if I wanted it. I stated that I would only have a shot if everybody else wanted one. Thus we found ourselves licking salt, downing the thing and sucking lemon for a fourth time.

- Albert’s wife showed up and ordered a cocktail that was mostly Bailey’s.

- Albert showed up in his shiny suit a cake from the exotic Baskin Robbins.

- The restaurant gave us free food, which was very nice. The food consisted of peanuts, cooked beef jerky (from a package- I know my jerky and I knew the brand), and heated mayonnaise. It might have been the trashiest thing that I have ever eaten.

- I had to choose between the cake brought by Albert and the cake brought by my coworkers. I don’t even like cake.

- Albert offered to extend my contract and hire my girlfriend when the school reaches 100 students.

- I was served a flaming shot of 151 which was pretty scary.

We walked out of Seduce at 11pm and I was feeling pretty happy. If I had to celebrate another birthday then I was happy with how it had turned out. I became a bit self-conscious as I was walking around with shopping bags and wearing socks with my new sandals. I thanked everyone as Albert and his wife, citing fatigue, went home.

“Ha! Tom,” Han said, “you think the night is over?”

No, of course the night wasn’t over. This is Korea. We went to another bar with a name that made it sound like an all-male strip club and found our way to a wooden table in the corner by the windows overlooking a fairly quiet night in Downtown.

There was more beer and a lot of conversation. I feel so bad sometimes that I can’t communicate with the two receptionists. They are trying to learn English when it should be me trying harder to learn Korean; I am, after all, a guest here.

Still, we all talked for what seemed like a very long time over a fiery hot chicken dish. One of the more poignant things that I have learned through international traveling is that communication is often not held down by language barriers. It is true, that 90% of the time I have no idea what the heck is going on or what anybody is saying but that didn’t seem important.

The night still did not end when we left. We made a trip to the horrible dance club Frog Rain only to find it closed. I thanked god for my luck and we found ourselves at noraebang.

Noraebang.
Cellphone Camera.

Ordinarily, I am not a fan of the karaoke rooms but tonight I did not care. I threw ego to the gutter which, given my song choices, was a very good thing. By the time we left the place at 4:30am I had willfully sang four songs while my coworkers danced on couches, banged tambourines, or smoked cigarettes in the corner as the colored lights pulsated.

What did I sing?  I’ll tell you.

Buddy Holly - Weezer

Semi-charmed Kind of Life - Third Eye Blind

Girlfriend - Avril Lavigne (…I know)

Bitch - Meredith Brooks

To say the least, students did not learn anything new the next day as we hung onto podiums just to stay vertical. Still, it was an awesome birthday in Cheongju.

Things I ate today:

Noodles with black bean sauce

Lettuce wraps with spicy pork and sauce.

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Fish and Norebang (re. Nightmare)

My first week seemed just a countdown ‘til Thursday, like so many other weeks in my life. Thursday, Albert told me, was a work party day. Having experienced the welcome that I did, I assumed that it would be, well, a shit show. It was indeed.


Albert owns two schools: a high school and an elementary school (mine). This evening would be an occasion for both schools to unite and welcome me and say goodbye to the other girl. I feel like a jerk saying “the other girl” because she was really awesome and put up with me checking Facebook on her computer, but I do not remember her name.

My office consisted of myself, Han, Boram, the Oder Receptionist and the Younger Receptionist. The High school consisted of a good deal more.

I should have known that I was in for one hell of a night when the Young Receptionist showed up as the last kid was leaving with a bag of bottles she claimed would kill the next day’s hangover. The stuff was putrid and it was all I could do to swallow the brown stuff . I could not even pretend to like it. This gave everyone a laugh, but it was really very horrible stuff.

From here, the Young Receptionist drove us to a further part of town that was home to all of the hot discos in the area with such amazing names as Don’t Tell Momma. We arrived to the kick off meal already in progress.

We sat at a collection of tables on one side. At one end were the teachers of the high school, including a Korean-American whose husband had remained in California. Around her were several girls who obviously thought I was funny looking and kept staring at me. Next to me were Han and Boram, and further down was Albert and three Korean guys.

When asked if they were English teachers Albert spoke for them with a laugh.

“These boys, they are very bright in many things, but English? It is not one of them.”

All the same they tried the hardest of anybody to talk to me, asking me what teams I liked and so on and so forth.

Now, about the meal: I will try anything if only so that I can say that I have had something outlandish. I once made myself bone marrow and had to leave work because I had gone and gotten myself sick. Generally speaking I hate seafood. I used to like the standard fried clams but now I just don’t like any fish. That being said I was at a dinner that was being paid for by the boss and I had decided that I would not turn anything away for fear of looking rude or ungrateful. Han knew my aversion to seafood and turned to me when she heard what was coming our way.

“Tom, I am sorry!”

The first dish was soup, brought over and placed on top of three propane heaters. It looked tame enough. When the waiters brought over three decent sized, thick octopi I knew I was in trouble. After they hit their respective bowls and 24 arms shot up in panic, I too began to panic. After a short time the waiters picked up the recently departed and cut them into not so small pieces. The boss’s wife made sure that I had a couple of the purple arms in my dish.

Octopus arms are hard to eat. They are not soft for one thing, and another thing is that their suction cups add a bulbous and funky sticky factor to the whole meal. I choked down the smaller pieces but was left with the thicker base of the tentacle. Han, feeling sorry for me, tried to cut them down a bit but was promptly sprayed by a rupture that spewed black ink. I tried dousing the things in wasabi and soy but it wasn’t much more than a hotter and saltier monstrosity.

The next dish was sashimi. Being fairly popular at home I figured it would be easier for me to down than the octopus. I was wrong. I am a baby when it comes to texture and I could not get through more than one piece without gagging. I am serious; I gagged a bit twice and once more would have brought the octopus back to what was left of him on the table.

I was relieved when the final dish came. Chicken. Thank God! I smiled and finished my drink to have another poured by the Older Receptionist. I asked Han what this was and she smiled and told me to just go for it.

It looked like little hunks of pale grilled chicken. It didn’t taste like much and it certainly was not horrible, but it was tough! No matter how hard I chewed the piece would not break down. Here, Han looked at me and told me the bad news:

“Err, it is, I do not know the real name in English, but it is chicken ass?”

Then I remembered my Anthony Bourdain. The chicken was, in fact, chicken sphincter muscle. It was also the best thing I had eaten at that point of the night. Soon, there would be chafers of baby snakes and monkey brains in the skull and I would be off to free the slaves of the Temple of Doom.

At that point the food was done and the general drinking commenced. I was mostly left to my own devices as multiple Korean conversations popped up Albert came over to me and we smoked one of his very thin cigarettes and he seemed generally happy to talk to me.

Afterwards, we walked to my biggest fear: norebang. Karaoke. We took the stairs to the fourth floor of a neon-lit building and walked into a large room with a horseshoe couch surrounding a long table, all facing a huge television.

The singing began instantly. Asians seem to love this concept, but to me it was a nightmare. Han rocked the place like no tomorrow with rehearsed moves and crowd involvement. I was too soon to realize that I was not nearly drunk enough and I couldn’t get any courage from the whiskey fast enough: it was too soon my turn. I stood up and walked to my doom in front of virtually total strangers.

I had hoped I would feel better with the whine of the harmonica but I looked at my crowd and realized that there would be no way out of it, that I wouldn’t find myself suddenly and pleasantly hammered. Hell, vomiting or wetting my pants would have been an acceptable alternative. So, I sang.

The place was generous enough so that there was a fair amount of sustain added to my voice as I butchered “Piano Man.” At a certain point Albert, who was completely hammered, came up and sang with me all the while banging on a tambourine. Not so soon enough it was over. I received a few whistles and much applause, but my ego had already pulled the trigger.

The night becomes a fuzzy memory at this point. We made it back to the cars at 4am and I remember walking with Albert when he began to hold my hand. I am told that it was a mix of Korean culture and the fact that he was totally wasted, but it was an awkward walk. When we sat in the car he mumbled on about something and could not sit up straight and began leaning on me until finally he pulled it together enough to lean against the door.

We were driven home by some sort of chauffeur service for drunks. I was let off at my apartment to pass out at 5am. At work the next day I came to the conclusion that the anti-hangover potion did nothing. If I was doing horribly, my cohorts were not doing much better; kids learned nothing from us that day. Also, I suddenly remembered being told to dance with a big group in front of the television. It is something I wish I could get out of my mind’s eye.

At about 2pm, Han told me that I would be moved that day and that I had to give the keys to the Young Receptionist. I only wish I had been sober enough to pick up all of my underwear.

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