HALLWAYS AT SUNSET

SMOKING

Compared to how I was back home, I smoke a disgusting amount of cigarettes per day. I'm up to about five or six a day, and if I'm drinking, that number can be as much as doubled plus an extra two or three, depending on how late the night goes. I'm hoping I'll curb this habit when I'm back in the land of $11 packs of smokes and where no one is allowed to smoke indoors. (A pack of cigarettes will cost you $2.50 here.)

ONE PLASTIC COMPANY MUST HAVE MADE A FORTUNE

Restaurants here will very rarely have pictures placed next to the items listed in the menu, which makes it somewhat difficult for foreigners to order. (They’ll also only give the table one menu despite how many guests are seated. I think this is because when a group of Koreans go out for dinner, usually only one of them pays, and they all eat the same dish. This custom is not so prevalent with the younger generations, however.) In lieu of appetizing pictures, some restaurants will have a large display case holding what you could call plastic prototypes of the dishes the restaurant serves. Normally yellow light will splash over these plastic food dishes to entice potential patrons to come in and have a bite.

From experience, I’ve learned that restaurants that cater to this kind of display have less than mediocre food, and it’s usually the fusion restaurants that have them, as if Koreans could never imagine combining one style of cuisine with their style of cooking. However, I’ve been to one amazing fusion restaurant in Korea, which specialised in combining Korean cooking with Chinese- and Japanese-style cuisine. One of the dishes included a hollowed out pumpkin with cheese, chicken, peppers, onions and a variety of spices cooked inside. There was no plastic food anywhere near this place.

I thought this plastic food thing was localised in Korea, but I've found this practice in other Asian countries as well.

Take note of the floating chopsticks. Suspended utensils are the norm.

OOPS

I once had a class of children, whose ages ranged from 13 to 14, who claimed that nothing scared them. They told me they loved horror movies, and listed off a bunch of gory Korean films they'd seen. I asked them if they had seen 28 Days Later--my favourite zombie movie--to which they responded no, they hadn't.

I decided to show it to them on Halloween, and hoped to get a few screams out of my students. They did do a lot of screaming that class, but not before gasping and giggling. I totally forgot that there's a Cillian Murphy penis shown the beginning of the movie. Longest ten seconds of my life.

FIGHT LETTLE

It's hard not to play favourites in the classroom. Some kids are just the best things in the world, and other kids are a curse from Satan himself.

That said, I had to confiscate a phone from my favourite kid, named Buzby, and I told him that he wasn't going to get his phone back until the next day (a practice which has resulted in a lot of students' tears). He immediately gave me this look of anger and fear, because when a student has to face their parents sans phone, the parents will know what's up and will punish accordingly. I went on teaching, and he busied himself in what I thought was work. A while later he thrusts an envelope into my hand. Scribbled on the envelope is "Death Lettle." The 'lettle' inside is folded professionally, and says the following:

FIGHT LETTER

THE PLACE IS KJC 21 [the hagwan's name]
THE TIME IS 8:00PM

YOU WILL DIE

I couldn't help but laugh, and the letter is now on display by my desk in the teacher's lounge. That night I put the phone in a place I thought Buzby couldn't reach.

As I'm walking home from school, I get a phone call. The voice on the other end says, "hiiiiiii, teacher." The bugger took his phone back!

The next day in class, as the clock ticks closer to 8:00pm, he keeps telling me to prepare myself. He also threatens, augmented by the waving of his arms, that all his male friends "got his back."

It was hilairous, to say the least.

Now, if this happend with a kid who I couldn't stand, the outcome would have been different and less amusing for both parties involved.

THREE MONTHS LEFT

Teaching remedial English for six hours a day for the last nine months has taken a toll on my grammar skillz.

PRE-OBLIGATORY FINAL POST

We all know it's going to come, probably on one of my last nights here, a lengthy final word, so to speak. But I’ve been thinking about what I’d say for a couple of days, and this pre-obligatory-final post is inspired by what Vanessa said:

i'm so enviuos
you've been away for a year nad lived in another country
and travellde to so many other places*

This was said when I told her I had some crazy deju vu in Korea. “Korea twice? I don’t think so,” is what I said.

Korea brings about mixed feelings. I think most of the negativity towards the experience stems from the fact that I live in Busan. The sun, the beach and the ocean during the summer months all kind of washed aside the negative aspects about living in a smaller city. As soon as winter crept in, and after many visits to Seoul, I truly saw what this city was lacking: culture. It’s all Lego block apartments and concrete wastelands. It even says in the one of the travel books about Korea that Busan frowns upon the arts and focuses more on the business side of things. I think that if I lived in Seoul I’d be singing a more positive tune. Busan is to Seoul what Ottawa is to Toronto: a nice place to visit, but a place I would never want to live. Seoul is this amazing culture hotpot, brimming with a music and film scene and really attractive Koreans. (A lengthy post about Seoul is coming.) Even Kiran, who came to Busan mainly for the beaches, said he wished he lived in Seoul.

I have been away for a year and lived in another country, which in itself is pretty cool, but I’m really disappointed in myself because I really have nothing to show for it. My creativity has kind of been…stunted. I’m always inspired when I’m in Seoul, but as soon as I return to Busan a form of…I don’t know, disappointment? sets in. And I can’t place all the blame on this city; a big part has to do with myself and my prevalent laziness as well. I kind of found a rut in which to drink and debauch. I kind of found myself in a stagnant atmosphere.

It’s easy to forget you’re in another country when other foreigners and friends surround you constantly. And as much as I love my friends from home sharing this experience with me, and as awful as this sounds, a very small part of me kind of wishes I ventured out on my own. Don’t get me wrong, I love them being here to death. I’ve had some amazing and unforgettable times with them and I’ve met some of the coolest people in the world because of them, but having them around kind of cheapens the deal. Maybe cheapens is too hard a word…more like, makes the venturing out on your own experience seem kind of less authentic, since I had friends here before I came, and had friends come after I arrived, and never really was on my own.

The best part about this is how I’ve been afforded the opportunity to explore other amazing countries. My life plan is highly contingent on whether or not I get into grad school. If I don’t, I don’t know what I’ll do. There’s a nagging part of me that says I should venture out again, in a whole new country, and do this again. Taiwan is one country I’d love to live in; I fell in love with everything it has to offer. The jobs in Toronto because of this so-called “bad economy” are non-existent, or so I hear from third-party sources. I don’t know. Stuff blah blah.

If it weren't for my friends with me in Busan, I would be having a worse time. If it weren't for my friends with me in Busan, I'd probably be living in Seoul.

This post is stopping too far in the selfishly negative side of the spectrum, and that’s not what its intent was. I’ll fix that.



*(She claims her type thinger is broken or something.)

RETRACTION

I wrote something earlier about the chances of seeing Amanda again being slim. This was before I found out she was planning on visiting Canada. So I'll definitely see her again. And so will Claire. And when Amanda comes she'll probably bring a U-Haul, a toothbrush and a sheep, because that's what lesbians from New Zealand do. (There are like four million New Zealanders and 300 million sheep.) And who am I kidding, I love the stupid instances on Facebook.

This retraction is for Claire.

I WANT MY MONEY and EXTRME DRINKING

Every bank in Korea has these so-called "blackout hours," which essentially means you don't have access to the money in your bank account; your debit card (or ka-du) is essentially useless. It usually lasts for an hour every day, and this hour falls between 11pm and 1am depending on what bank you use.

Now that doesn't seem that bad 'cause you could plan around that. However, your debit card will fail to work at random times through out the night, which can last upwards to a day. There's no rhyme or reason to when your access is cut off (there probably is, but I can't read the Korean error messages at the ATM), and this can lead to embarrassing moments where you have to borrow money from anyone around you. The worst was when I was stranded far from home, and I couldn't take out any money for a cab ride home.

People here get unbelievably drunk. There are many foreigners (and Koreans, for that matter) passing out in bars, on subway cars, on benches (though the latter is usually reserved for the Korean business men). The cheap and immediate access to alcohol might have something to do with it, but, on top of that, there's no such thing as cutting someone off if they've had to much. The bar tenders will keep serving you and serving you until you come to somewhere in a forest with a bleeding leg (that wasn't me). Back home, if I was to order a pint and I dropped it as soon as it was in my hand--and not because someone knocked it out of my hand or I bumped into something, but because I just literally forgot I was holding it, causing gravity to snag the pint out of a loosened grip--that would be a signal for the bartenders and me that I shouldn't drink anymore. That doesn't happen here. Someone dropped their drink twice in a row before ordering a third, and they were still served with a smile.

WHITE WATER BIRTHDAYS

Charles had put together a white water rafting trip that just so happened to fall on my birthday weekend. It was a lot of fun, but there were times I was embarrassed to be a foreigner. The white people here take the whole motherfucking ten miles when given an inch. We get away with so much here, and the foreigners take full advantage of that fact. One of the few rules that you really, really shouldn't break is the 'never hit a Korean' rule. On one of the stops at a rice wine factory, after everyone was pretty drunk from drinking on the bus, a bunch of foreigners broke into the water park we weren’t allowed to go in, and someone ended up smacking a Korean. The police were called, and a long, uneventful wait took place as the police tried to get to the bottom of this debacle. I felt incredibly bad for Charles, who doesn’t deserve any of this bullshit. He didn’t want to get involved, but because he was the only one who spoke Korean, he was forced to mediate.

ANYways, that aside, the white water rafting trip was great. It had rained the day before we hit the waters, so the rapids were pretty intense, and a lot of us got thrown around. We were allowed to jump off the raft at certain points and be carried down the river by the current. A bunch of us attempted to do back flips off the raft, with only a few people succeeding. One guy’s attempt had his head bouncing off the raft before the rest of his body fell into the water. We were supposed to go bungee jumping as well, but the rain made the water rise too a point where it was unsafe to jump. I was really disappointed--I think I was more excited for the bungee jumping the the white water rapids.

The trip was an overnight excursion, and that night Charles gave Rich and me a bottle of traditional birthday whisky, along with two wooden hammers. The two wooden hammers were used to break the whisky bottle out of its ceramic casing. I was really excited to try this drink, and Charles poured two big shots into two rather large Dixie cups for the two birthday peeps. Oh, fuck, it was the worst tasting thing I ever let caress my tongue. After one shot, my stomach burned and did things I didn’t know it could do. I had to calmly excuse myself from the group to throw up quietly in the bushes. I wasn’t drunk at all when I had this shot, but every fiber of my being rejected that drink. I was kind of hoping that maybe it was just a strong drug and I would be coming up at some point...but all it did was make the pizza and galbi I chowed down on taste a little off.

PROPS AND STAGES

One rather large downfall about living temporarily in Korea is the high turnover rate of the really cool and incredibly interesting people. Each awesome friendship I've created with the people here comes with a sort of expiry date, and maybe that's why we're able to forge pretty deep relationships in the short amount of time that we have--live like it's your last day kind of thing. There are a few people that have left an impression on me in the short time I've spent with them. One example is a girl from New Zealand, Amanda. She's such a fucking treat, and every moment with her has been pretty memorable, but she leaves tomorrow and the chances of seeing her again, other than the random and banal instances on Facebook, are slim.

Conversely, the many douchebags I've met are a won a million and tend stay longer than the one-year contract.

Korea feels like a giant stage, with the Koreans being the props. Because it's hard to fully interact with the Koreans due to various barriers, they almost feel like inanimate objects and are viewed as such. I don't know. I have made a few--full disclosure, one--good Korean friend, but on a whole, with the thousands of Koreans constantly around me, they are on another level, one that I, as of right now, can not fully reach to fully interact with them. I can understand and say a few things in Korean for when I'm at the store or the like, but it's still such a foreign language to me that the interaction almost feels fake and unnatural, and, like with an inanimate object, one-sided. The only interactions that do feel two-sided are with other foreigners, and so there are just pockets of interactions taking place on this stage.