Six Short Stories

One more Korea blog before I go back roughly a year in time to talk about some of my past adventures that haven't yet been mentioned here. My posts have been pretty long lately, so I'll try (likely unsuccessfully) to keep this one shorter. Rather than sharing one big story, I'll just share a few short stories about things that have happened to me in the two or so weeks I've been on Jeju.

Story One: I was at E-Mart (one of Korea's own versions of Wal-Mart) the other day. There are enough foreigners in town that the sight of a “waygook” (foreigner) is not particularly exciting to most Koreans, but to some children, a tall, bearded white guy is still an amazing sight. As I was riding the moving walkway up from the basement to the ground floor, there was a mother and her three children, aged something like 1, 3, and 5, in front of me. The two youngest children were seated in her shopping cart. The oldest, a little boy, was standing next to his mother. He hadn't seen me get on the moving walkway initially, and when he turned around, he was obviously startled by my … existence? After overcoming his initial shock that such a tall, bearded white person could possibly exist, he smiled and said, “Hi!” I smiled and responded, “Hello!” He tugged on his mother's pants leg, and they briefly spoke in Korean. The boy then turned back to me, smiled again, and said, “Opa Gangnam style.” I replied, “Opa Gangnam style,” did a brief horse-dance, and then, upon reaching the end of the moving walkway, we each carried on with our lives.

Story Two: There's a stereotype about “bad Asian drivers.” One of the first times I was in a car with a Korean driver, s/he drove the wrong way down a clearly marked one-way street (I could tell it was a one-way, and I don't speak Korean, and therefore can't read signs) for several minutes, ignoring the oncoming traffic's horns and flashing headlights, only to turn onto another one-way street, again going the wrong way.

During another ride, my driver decided to do a U-turn in the middle of a 6-lane (3 lanes each way) road. See the fantastic diagram below, which showcases the awe-inspiring Microsoft Paint and Adobe Photoshop skills I command. While it would be illegal to attempt this with no oncoming traffic, it would at least be possible to complete such a maneuver. However, there was a car parked in the furthest of the lanes opposite us at the exact location we'd otherwise have been able to complete the U-turn. The driver must have been aware of this at the onset of the attempted U-turn, but paid it no attention. So within a few seconds, we found ourselves parked perpendicular to the now-oncoming traffic. Rather than putting the car in reverse and doing an admittedly-awkward 3-point turn, we waited for the parked car, whose driver was at a walk-up ATM on the side of the road, to complete his transaction, get back in his car, and drive away. It was weird. This drive was completed by back-to-back failed parallel parking jobs. As awkward as all of this was, I must admit I never felt unsafe, because the speed of traffic on city streets is quite low, and the patience of drivers is quite high.

I kick so many asses at computer graphics programs.

Story Three: One evening, as I was walking through a park en route to my bus stop (I don't yet have a motorcycle, damn it), I found myself walking behind a mother and her middle-school aged son. The mother had apparently just bought her son some type of toy, and he was tearing through the packaging as I walked behind them. After breaching the outer layer of packaging, they both slowed down so the boy could further examine the inner packaging. He then casually threw the outer box on the ground. The mother said nothing and they carried on their merry way. Then, upon getting through the inner packaging, he threw it on the ground. It wasn't like there weren't other people in the park, either. They just didn't care. The mother said nothing and they continued on their merry way. It reminded me of the scene in Anchorman where the Channel 4 News Team walks through a park in San Diego and casually throws their corn-dog remnants and other trash on the ground. You stay classy, Korea.

Story Four: I suck at cooking. How is it even possible to fuck up steamed vegetables? Well, frankly, the answer is obvious. You boil off all the water and end up with smoked vegetables. Don't do this, unless you are a fan of smoked vegetables with a metallic taste.

Story Five: General disorganization of the Korean workplace continues. When I was here in 2010 – 2011, I had a good number of “WTF?! This is happening in my workplace?!” moments. All such incidents were simply the result of poor planning, such as being told on a Thursday that there would be some kind of mandatory workshop on Saturday. Annoying, but you learn to roll with the punches. As I've since been told, “T.I.K.” - This Is Korea. I have had a couple such moments already on this tour of duty. Example one: being told at 8:50 that I would be teaching a 9:00 class.

Example two: I was taken to an “International Festival” for children on Jeju. I was obligated to attend because of my employment through EPIK (English Program In Korea – the federal government's English-education department), but no one knew what was going on. I was dropped off at the festival, and basically told to figure it out. There were a hundred stands, each manned by people I didn't know (I'd been in Korea for one week at the time of this festival). I eventually found a festival tent labeled “North America Corner” or something similar, and found that the other workers at this tent were North American EPIK teachers. So I talked to them for the next couple hours and did nothing. Pretty much a waste of time, but I guess that's part of the deal.

Story Six: Katie, my amazing friend and fellow ESL-teacher with whom I spent 3 months traveling in Nepal, and who lives in Geoje (a 45-minute flight and a one-hour bus ride from Jeju), came to visit me last weekend! It was awesome! Our travels in Nepal were cut short so unexpectedly that the last time we saw each other, almost a full year ago, we each thought we'd be seeing each other the next day. You can read about it in my “Tidbits and Tragedy” article from December 7, 2011. Anyway, it was awesome to see such a great friend on such short order after my arrival here. Made me feel like I was back home.

That's all. Go Broncos! The end.

An exciting introduction to life on Jeju

My first Friday in Jeju was weird, and more memorable than I thought it would be, if for reasons I hoped it wouldn't be. Read on for details.

I'm going to do a separate entry about the school I will be teaching at for the next year, but I guess it's worth providing a few details now, since they're mildly relevant to the story. I work at the biggest middle school on Jeju island. Something like 2000 students attend the school. The English department consists of maybe 10 Korean teachers, and 2 Native English-speakers, myself included. My Canadian native English-speaker co-teacher, who I will for the duration of this email refer to as Co-teacher #1, is going to be a good friend of mine. I can state this with certainty, based on the unusual bonding experience we shared on Friday, October 26^th. There's also a male Korean English teacher, which is pretty rare. Almost all Korean English teachers are women. I will refer to this teacher as Co-teacher #2. A few years ago, he quit his previous, high-paying job as an international translator for his current job. They both seem like good people that will be fun to hang out with in the upcoming year.

Co-teacher #1 has a little car that he bought for 1.2 million Won – something like $1100. I may very well follow in his footsteps and purchase a little car to get around here. Because he has a car, he was assigned to help me move my stuff to my new apartment on Friday afternoon, once he was done teaching. So at 2:30, Co-teacher #1, Co-teacher #2 and myself got in Co-teacher #1's car, and drove for about 20 minutes, mostly on a highway, to get to my apartment. Because of the distance from my school (and the town itself) to my apartment, I'm probably going to end up moving. It's a 10-minute walk just to the nearest bus stop. Ugh. Also, there are only two restaurants and one little 7-11-style corner store within walking distance of my apartment. It is cool in one way though – it's a building with 16 apartments, and each of these is occupied by an English-speaking public school teacher. I haven't figured it out yet, but I could see this place kind of being like the mid-twenties dorms. At 30 though, I may very well be the old man of the bunch.

Upon arriving at my apartment, we had to wait a while for the cleaning crew to finish getting my apartment into move-in condition. I had to sign a few papers, and then I moved in. My room is much nicer and bigger than the one I lived in when I was in Tongyeong a year ago. Probably something like 1.5 times the size. And it's pretty nice, frankly. Here, have some pictures.

My front door and entryway.

My gigantic house.  Yes, that is roach spray in the corner, because I once saw a terrifyingly-large cockroach.

I took this photo at night, but in the day, this series of confusing glass doors leads to a semi-enclosed balcony with a nice view of  Hallasan, the highest, now snow-covered mountain in South Korea.  It has an elevation of a whopping 1,950 meters.  I'm gonna go climb it one of these days.

My bathroom has the rarest of commodities in Korea, a bathtub.  A bit luxurious for me, but I'll take it.

After moving my stuff from Co-teacher #1's car to my apartment, we got back in the car and went on a thirty-minute drive to the restaurant where my school's English department was holding a goodbye-old-teacher- / hello-new-teacher-dinner. It began, I believe, at 5 PM. Retrospectively, I should have known that any celebratory event that begins at 5 PM and entails irresponsible quantities of alcohol consumption could only end badly. At this amazing dinner, I enjoyed another delicious, traditional Korean barbeque dinner while being pressure-drinked like a mofo by a Korean co-teacher who spoke almost no English. Apparently the English department is not limited to people who have some grasp of the English language. It is worth noting that pressure-drinking-co-teacher wasn't drinking alcohol himself, but did have the courtesy to drink either water or Korean Sprite with Co-teacher #1, Co-teacher #2, myself, and Co-teacher #3, the fellow Coloradan English-speaker who had just showed up, and whose job I will be taking over.

Delicious pork, beer, and soju were all consumed, not necessarily in this order, in unhealthy quantities for the next couple hours. Korea is kind of funny, at least when viewed from an American perspective, in that for men, drinking oneself stupid is not viewed as irresponsible, or even, necessarily, in a negative light. And while I maintained a respectable degree of perceived sobriety throughout this dinner, Co-teacher #1 ended our dinner, somewhere near 7 PM, at 10 PM-drunkenness.

The rest of the English department gradually bid adieu to Co-teacher #1, Co-teacher #2, Co-teacher #3 and myself, and we subsequently took a taxi to the Shi-Jung (City Hall) area of Shi-Jeju, which translates to New Jeju, and which is the area of town in which all the happenin' night spots lie. It was a 10-minute cab ride from the restaurant, and it was during this ride that I learned an interesting but previously-unknown, and now-obvious bit of international-travel trivia. It's well-known that many Americans who travel around the world and act politely tell people they meet that they are Canadians in order to avoid any unpleasant experiences with those who hold anti-American sentiments, which are, unfortunately, many. Frankly, while I don't typically prescribe to this behavior, I understand it, if only from the perspective of trying to avoid unnecessary conflicts. But on this cab ride, I learned that obnoxious, drunk Canadians sometimes claim to be Americans in order to shift the blame of obnoxious, drunk Canadians to “Ugly Americans.” Thanks a lot, America's Hat.

Our next stop, which lasted a whole 5 minutes, was at “Island Stone,” a small bar that draws a large expat crowd. It being only shortly after 7, we were the first ones to roll in. We were immediately handed a drink menu … on an iPad. This is irrelevant to the story, but a small detail possibly worth sharing, if only to give some perspective on the state of society on Jeju. I pointed out that since it would probably be hours until anyone started showing up, we might as well save our money by drinking outside a corner store. This isn't a viable option in America because of the whole illegality of it, but here, it is legal, encouraged, and awesome.

We left the bar, wandered a block off the main street to a “CU,” which stands for “See You.” CU is a common corner store on Jeju island. I'd say there's a decent chance I'm going to spend some significant time getting drunk at CU for the first time since 2006. (The hilarious joke, for those of you that don't know me, is that I graduated from the University of Colorado – CU – in 2006. Someone once told me that jokes are extra funny when they require a separate parenthesized explanation.)

Co-teacher #1, Co-teacher #2, Co-teacher #3 and myself spent a couple hours at CU drinking mediocre Korean beer before Co-teacher #2 announced that it was time for him to return home. He's in his mid-thirties and has a wife, so without calling him a pussy too many times, we let him go, and shortly thereafter, returned to Island Stone.

The next few hours, which we spent at Island Stone, were fun, but frankly, forgettable. I met probably 30 Jeju residents, mostly native-English speakers, but a few Koreans, Japanese, and people of other nationalities as well. Everyone was really friendly, and having met these people, I have no doubt that I'll be able to have an enjoyable year here. At around 2 AM, Co-worker #1 (Co-worker #3 had disappeared a while before this) told me he was going to go home. I was thinking of leaving too, so we walked out the door together. I guess now is as good a time as ever to mention that Island Stone, the bar we were at, is on the second floor of a building, and it is accessible by a concrete staircase. I mention it now since it now becomes extremely relevant to the story.

For reasons I cannot begin to comprehend (but I actually can … drunkenness), Co-worker #1 decided to take a shortcut down the first half-flight of stairs by tripping and flying head-first down them, rather than the traditional method of, you know, walking. The next few minutes, while not as “slow motion” as a stereotypical near-death story, do stick out more clearly in my memory than most of the preceding hours.

I stood at the top of the stairs and, with hindsight being 20/20, regrettably laughed casually at the situation, with the bouncer, about Co-teacher #1's clumsiness. I shouted something to the effect of, “C'mon, (Co-teacher #1), get your lazy ass up!” Co-teacher #1, I noticed, after a short while, was a remarkably good actor. Remarkably good at acting to be seriously injured. At this point, I broke off my conversation with the bouncer, and wandered down the half-flight of stairs that led to Co-teacher #1's disturbingly unmoving body. Then I noticed the eerily movie-like pool of blood that was slowly spreading from his head. The bouncer had followed me down the stairs, and realized at almost the exact moment that I did that this wasn't the joking matter we'd been making it out to be less than 30 seconds earlier, and ran up the stairs to call an ambulance.

My first thought was “[Explitive] [explitive] [exlitive]! [Explitive!] [Explitivingly-][explitive!]” I immediately checked Co-teacher #1's pulse and was, to put it mildly, relieved to find a strong pulse. Not really knowing what to do, and in fear of making a bloody horrible (pun intended) situation worse, I gently pulled Co-worker #1's body away from the wall, propped his head up on his own sweatshirt, that I had somehow come to be in possession of, and tried to slow the bleeding with one of the sleeves of this same sweatshirt. My under-qualified check-out of Co-worker #1 told me that the only obvious injury here was an approximately 1-inch cut on the top of his skull that looked deep, but not life-threatening.

A few minutes before the ambulance arrived, Co-worker #1 came back to (semi-) consciousness. In a more slurred voice than could be attributed to simple drunkenness, he elicited to me his curiosity about what was going on, and even more than this, he made it clear to me that he was sorry. You know what I mean, right? Drunk people love to apologize. That tendency is even more exaggerated in drunk people suffering from considerable blood loss and head-wounds. I let Co-worker #1 know that no apology was necessary, he just needed to follow “Rule Number One: Sit still!”

Over the course of the next couple hours, which were spent in an ambulance and a hospital, I had to tell Co-worker #1 to “...shut up and follow Rule Number One!” on more occasions than I would have preferred. There was also more otherwise-awkward male hand-holding occurring during this time than I'd have been comfortable with in other circumstances. But these weren't other circumstances. These were these circumstances, so, even though I knew that the gays were about to be responsible for Tropical Storm Sandy (this was before all that went down), I went ahead and held hands with a man.

I didn't take this picture because I didn't have my camera with me on the night of this particular incident, thank god.  But this is about the size of Co-teacher #1's head wound.  He later claimed he was Frankenstein for Halloween, a frankly brilliant idea.

A couple hours passed. Co-teacher #1 had an MRI that revealed no damage. He also had the joy of having a nurse walk up behind him, stapler (visually identical to a stapler you'd find in any school or office) in-hand, and tell him, “this will hurt,” prior to having his no-longer-bleeding skull literally stapled shut. The tense-ness wore off after the first 30-minutes, and we both just realized that the situation, memorable as it might be, basically sucked. Eventually, we were allowed to check out.

After Co-teacher #1 paid his $75 dollar hospital fee (yes, you read that correctly. An ambulance ride, a thorough examination, an MRI, and staples-to-the-skull costs a grand total of $75 in a first-world country with awesome, socialized medicine), we took a taxi back to Co-teacher #1's house. I volunteered to sleep on his floor in case anything went horribly wrong during the night. Fortunately, nothing went wrong, and late the next morning, we both wandered down the street – one of us under his own power for the first time in 12 hours – to an amazing Korean restaurant where we enjoyed a brunch of what is literally translated to “Hangover Stew.” We both needed it, but one more than the other.

Here's looking forward to another year's worth of hopefully less bloody, but equally amazing adventures.

Back to the grind, back in Korea

EDIT: This is being posted one week after I wrote it.

I'm writing this in Korea. In a cheap hotel on Jeju Island, Korea (Google maps it) to be more precise. I'll be spending the next year here (although hopefully not in this hotel room...), working as an English teacher. While this is not the first time I've done this, it is my first time on Jeju. I spent a year teaching English to elementary- and middle-school students in Tongyeong (Google maps it, too), from August 2010 to September 2011. Why am I back in Korea?

Well, after dabbling in more “career paths” than I care to admit, teaching English in Korea has been the best option I've thusfar been able to make happen. Probably not the best based solely on financial gain, but certainly the best based on the combination of financial gain, quality of life, and opportunities presented. I made a bit more money as an Engineer, during my brief tenure as one from mid-2006 to mid-2008, enjoyed my day-to-day job more as a lift operator in New Zealand during the winter of 2008, and had more free time as a waiter / handyman in Australia in 2008 and 2009, but none of these jobs have provided quite the net personal benefit that teaching English did during my last adventure in Korea. So during the five months I spent back home in Colorado, from June through October, 2012, I spent a considerable amount of time looking for new teaching opportunities in Korea, hoping to quasi-replicate the amazing year I had here previously. And the fact that I've only worked for about three of the last 13 months and have been broke, living rent-free in my parents house (I'm now 30, by the way) while back home meant it was time to get back to work.

I landed at Incheon International Airport, one of the world's busiest airports (it lies just outside of Seoul), on the afternoon of October 24, and had about three and a half hours from the moment my flight touched down until my next flight would take off – from Gimpo International Airport, Seoul's other international airport. During this three and a half hours, I came to remember a few things that I loved about Korea. In order to get from Incheon to Gimpo, I had to (1) collect my checked baggage, (2) pass through customs and immigration at Incheon, (3) find my way to the inter-airport subway, (4) take this subway / rail line – a ride of 35 minutes, (5) collect my boarding pass at Gimpo, (6) go through security, and (7) get on my next flight. Would this have been doable in the United States? I don't really know, but it would be a lot more stressful, given the longer times required for each of the steps in this process. In Korea, I made it to my next flight with over an hour to spare. AND I wasn't forced to pay an excess baggage fee for this leg of my flight. I WAS forced to pay a $70 “extra bag” fee to take my camera gear from Denver to Seoul, and it would have been $270 if I hadn't just barely managed to get the weight of my primary bag down from 52 to 50 pounds, by means of transferring 2 pounds of stuff to another bag. Bear in mind this is just a transfer of weight. The plane was still carrying the same amount of weight. But the gate workers made me go through the loops, all over two pounds. Argh, whatever.

I landed in Jeju at about 8pm on October 24^th, and after getting a ride to my aforementioned cheap hotel, I enjoyed a delicious meal of black pork, a Jeju specialty. I learned last night that it is only called “black pork” because the skin of the pigs raised on Jeju is black. Does it count as racism to charge more for black pigs? Regardless, it tasted about the same as normal pork. Delicious. Kind of like how black people taste the same as other races … delicious.

More than a little jetlagged, I fell asleep more solidly than I can remember having happened in the last few years. In fact, I woke up at 3 in the morning to find that all my lights were still on.

So far, so good. And then I had a shitty experience.

I was picked up outside my hotel by “Jimmy” (Korean name unknown) at 9:30 AM on October 25^th. Jimmy was the guy who got me my job. He's basically an intermediary between potential public school teachers and EPIK (English Program In Korea), which is the Korean public school system, on Jeju. We spent the next five hours doing paperwork and whatnot that was required for me to teach. First, we went to the hospital, where I took a drug test that involved taking 4 (yes, four) vials of blood, and a urine test. Then, we went to the Education office, where I re-signed a contract that I'd signed earlier and emailed to Jimmy. Next, it was off to the bank so I could open an account so I could be, you know, paid. And then the ugliness.

Let's go back a ways. Prior to my five months in America, I'd spent about 3 months teaching English in Vietnam. This was roughly March – May, 2012. Long story short, I ended up leaving Vietnam with about $2,900 US in Vietnamese dong – yes, their currency is the dong, and yes, the currency I had with me in America was a gangsta-style half-inch-thick roll of 500,000 and 200,000 dong notes. I never exchanged it for American dollars because I wasn't able to find anywhere with a halfway decent exchange rate and was under the impression that it would be a different story once I was back in Korea. Turns out I was wrong.

After opening my new bank account with NH Bank, I asked if I could deposit my Vietnamese currency and was told, “Nope. Y'all gots ta roll inta one dem ekchange banks t' do dat.” Not verbatim. I explained to Jimmy that I needed to go to an exchange bank, and we went to Jeju's branch of KEB – Korea Exchange Bank – with whom I banked with when I was here before and had had nothing but positive things to say. We were in a rush at this moment, so I didn't bother counting the bills the teller had given me. The currency exchange accomplished, we carried on, taking care of the rest of the paperwork necessary for me to spend a year here as an English teacher. It seemed that everything went fine, and the rest of the day's interviews and paperwork breezed by. At about 3:30, I was back at my hotel with no obligations for the rest of the day, and looked at my financial situation.

At KEB, I should have been given about 2.8 million Korean Won. I'd even been given a receipt that said I was given about 2.8 million Korean Won. Unfortunately, I had only been given about 1.8 million Won. Only now realizing the situation a couple hours after the exchange, I panicked, and counted my money again. Panic, again. After re-re-confirming that I was about 1,000,000 Won (something like $900) short of what I should have been, I called Jimmy, and briefly explained the situation to him. He seemed a bit disbelieving, but suggested I return to the bank and explain the situation to them, with the stipend that if I encountered a problem, I was to call him. Heart racing, I walked back to the KEB, and pulled a number from the queue machine.

My number was called, but it wasn't pulled by the woman with whom I dealt earlier, so I pantomimed that I needed to speak with a specific teller. A few minutes later, I was “conversing” with the teller who had shortchanged me $900 a couple hours before. I went into this situation with the assumption that, no, she hadn't tried to steal $900 from me (she's Korean after all, and Koreans don't steal, right? Is that racist?). This assumption was based on my previous year here, during which I heard multiple stories of wallets being lost and subsequently returned with ALL the money contained therein untouched. Her reaction, however, just led to more questions.

When I explained that I was short one million Won, she didn't dispute the fact at all. She simply grabbed a million Won and handed it to me. She gave me $900 without batting an eye, checking records, or contacting a manager. I don't know whether this implies she knew she'd been caught stealing, or if she had, after my departure, realized that she'd shortchanged me, and just wanted to fix the situation immediately. I think this will remain one of life's unsolved mysteries.

Ah reckon that's just about enough for one entry. I'm going to try and be more vigilant about writing, and I'm optimistically saying that I will, in general, try to put up a new post every other week or so for the duration of my time in Korea. Next story: the first weekend. Spoiler alert: it involves a hospital visit...