Bottle up and Explode

(click, boom)

The week's been good, and this weekend Cahill (partially) recovered from air-poisoning and escaped from the dull-gray outskirts back into the neon heart of Seoul. After a few weeks of Ben's cursed phone burning a proverbial hole in my proverbial pocket, Saturday Night seemed like perfect time to return the favour and burn a few literal holes in the phone.

Armed with the fireworks I still had leftover from mudfest, we headed down for the ravine under the tracks to blow the fuck out of the self-deactivating phone that was the thorn in Ben's side (pocket). The results were predictably explosive and were videotaped for prosperity. If you're into bright lights and destruction, check it out here:

Rocketphone

The aftermath leaves me with mixed feelings. Sure, I've still got all my limbs and such, but the goddamn charred remain of a phone still works! As well as it did before, at least. This means my work is not done - I promised to deliver the coup de grace on this burnt hunk of Korean electronics, so I've gotta.

When the sulfur-smelly smoke settled, we headed to Hongdae, as foreigners are apt to do here. On the way, a man on the subway gave us oranges. He wasn't old or crazy; just nice, and maybe eager for any excuse to say hello to foreigners. They were handpicked and fresh and tasty and not poisoned.

Saturday was John's last night out in Seoul, as he left this week. Once again the ebb and flow of Korean contracts takes away a fun person, but I guess it goes with the territory, so you kind of get used to losing friends every month. But the same tide brings some old friends back, and few people I've met have left without at least a glimmer of intention of returning for another year.

The night itself was good and relatively uneventful past that. I did run into Ryan, someone I know from Mudfest, and whom I've run into a good few times here, and for some dumb reason I completely blanked out on how I knew him. I also showed Cahill the evil crane machines here, and how they're even more impossibly crooked than those in the western hemisphere. The things are everywhere here, too, and are packed with the most random assortment of junk.

Speaking of random junk, on Sunday we found grapefruit, and grapefruit juice. This has been a mission of mine since coming to Korea, as the fruit, and particularly the juice thereof, as I'm a bitter person who likes his flavours to match his persona. The things are fucking nearly impossible to get here in Korea. We looked pretty foolish at the checkout counter; two foreigners buying a couple large bags of grapefruit, several cartons of the juice and nothing else. If only there'd been some sort of grapefruit enthusiast magazine for us to toss-in the pile at the checkout.

The closing picture for week pretty much defies explanation. It says Tuck-In! Baby Banana Club.


Remember that there is about a 99.99% chance that the people who put up this sign don't fully get what it's implying. I mean, they obviously know it's something vaguely sexual - they're not stupid, and they're not that naive. But I'm not so sure they get the full effect of 'tucking-in'.

Christmas Pills and Beer

Christmas is still a month away, but I received my package(s) of presents from home this week. Basically, there are two ways to ship something to Korea from Canada. One is relatively cheap and takes as long as 3 months; the other is unreasonably expensive and takes an unnaturally short couple of days. Thankfully, I got the latter.

I dutifully unpacked my individually-wrapped gifts and posed them under a hastily-drawn Christmas tree (which I sketched on the kitchen cupboard with whiteboard markers I stole from work). Along with the surprising quantity of gifts I can't unwrap for another month, mom included some small slices of home. Cold medication was a welcome inclusion, as the medications here are strange and confusing and don't contain the same ingredients. And speaking of my favourite medication, she also tossed-in a bottle of Blue Star, a Newfoundland exclusive beer; my one indulgence in product-based patriotism. It'll sit in my fridge so I can enjoy it during the 'holidays'.

While I'm on the topic of Christmas and all that, I might as well point out that it's not celebrated much here. I get a single day off for Christmas day, and that's about it. I'm not even sure if I get New Year's day off, because the Lunar New Year in February is actually the one that people celebrate here. I'll be fine celebrating with my little bits of wrapped-up home. That'll be surreal, as I'm a fan of the whole Christmas season, but fuck it, when in Rome, do as the Koreans do.

Just as a little reminder that Korea's a bit of a weird place (to my wide blue eyes, at least) I'm once again taking my camera around most of the time. There's always potential for 'what-the-fuck?!' moments here. I've got a couple of examples here. The blurry photos are the breakdancers in subway station. They're around at least once a week though, so they don't even elicit a 'huh?', let alone an expletive-laced exclamation of confusion.

But then there's these 10-foot-tall stilts-wearing pastefaces. Last Friday, I saw these monsters just strolling around my neighbourhood aimlessly, advertising some bank or something, I believe. Or maybe they were headed to a costume party as stereotypical foreigners: tall, awkward-looking and freakishly pale pretty much sums up the perception some Koreans have of us.

Speaking of freakishly tall pale people, Cahill was supposed to come by this weekend, but he ended up dying of some sort of gypsy death flu. It's pretty typical for people to get sick first when they get to a foreign country. There are thousands of variations of cold and flu in the world, and when you travel to a new country, you're exposed to all kinds of new virus strains. Add to that the fact that you fly here in an airtight tube with a few hundred other people, and when you get here, you spend all day around messy children, and you're pretty much a science experiment turned Nyquil commercial.

And while I'm on the topic of sick children...

The other day one of my kinderchildren met me in the hallway screaming "Teacher, Melonie goopie!" I know this Korean word, it means nosebleed. Kids pick their nose, and tend to get them a lot. When I walked into class, the girl's face was red with blood, as were the table and the floor. There was some incident with pushing or punching or some such thing. While I got her a tissue, one of the other kids was so freaked out by the blood that he puked all over the floor.

The whole thing actually made me laugh it was getting so bad. I told everyone to calm down and strolled out to get a Korean teacher to help.

"Yeah, Maria, Melonie's covered in blood and Kevin's puking all over the place."

I'm not sure why, but teaching them, even at times like this, is making me like kids more.

But enough sincerity, time to call Korea crazy a little more. I like call this 'Anatomy of a Korean Street Scene'. It's just a pretty dull picture of a Korean sidewalk, but it exemplifies a lot of what life in Seoul is.

The sidewalk's littered with useless leaflets from half a dozen bars and churches around the area. There's a stand made of rickety tables, selling seeds, nuts and hideous jewelry. The man running it is asleep in a chair. The light poles are full of the same posters people ignored on the last 20 poles. Traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular zips past on both sides. It's all remarkably unspectacular, but it's all very much Seoul.

That's about it for this week. Although I might have already exceeded my weekly quota for making Korea sound nuts, I'm contractually obligated to close with some kind of weird image. I've got a couple here. One is just your average Korean shirt rack. The shirts all have lots of English words that don't make any sense. "Feel is for this good". I'm not sure if I've ever seen a shirt with Korean characters on it.


The other image is of a coin-operated Rock, Paper, Scissors machine that distributes candy to winners clever enough to outsmart a series of tiny red lights. Rock, paper, scissors may be the only thing more popular here than shirts with terrible English.

Pepero Daze

This week I tricked some of my Kindergarten kids into making a banner for the website. Click the picture to see the self-portraits they drew below the words. I was kind of hoping they'd toss in a backwards 's' or something like that, but it's just about sweet enough to rot a tooth, anyway. I love it when kids don't question what they're writing down. To keep some 10-year olds quiet and distracted during a test, I had them write "I will be quiet, not loud and annoying" down on a sheet of paper. When they asked "Teacher, annoying is what?" I said "You talk - Peter headache."

For the most part, November still feels like November. There's something oddly comforting about chilly air and a heavy coat. Mornings where it's warm enough to wear my light sweater I'm seceretly a little disappointed.

Speaking of it being November, November 11th is celebrated here, just like it is in Canada. Or rather, nothing like it it in Canada. See, 11/11 here is Pepero Day, the celebration of chocolate breadsticks that are known as 'Pocky' everywhere but Korea. As seemingly pointless as the holiday is, at least the selection of the date is clever; see, the 11s represent sticks of Pepero. I tried to explain to my students why I found the choice in date a little funny, as it's such a somber war holiday where I'm from. I guess that's a little hypocritical, since in practice it's more of a day off and an excuse to wear a cheap plastic flower.

I bought lots of those little chocolatey sticks to bribe my kids with, and they actually gave me scads of garishly-wrapped gift packs as well. Now I'm stuck with a huge pile of the stuff, and I'm not even a huge fan of it. Particularly not after dealing through a few kilos of it on the day in question.

This weekend was a blast, as Cahill, my friend and former neighbour from back in St. John's spent his first weekend in Seoul. He got to Korea last week, and lives down in Suji, a long subway ride south of me. He came up to Seoul on Saturday and he got to see the city middle come alive at night. Sadly, I don't have any sort of collage of blurry-bleary pictures from the evening, as I was too blurry-bleary to remember my camera.

But speaking of blurry night photos, I took a few photos this week to prove that not everything in Seoul is a flashy neon nightmare. There's still some quiet pretty to this place. Some amber nightlight city charm.

The store in corner there is the epitome of Korean convenience stores. It has no cash register, no cash drawer, not even a counter. Just a bed where the owners sit quietly and watch a tiny TV. When you bring something up to pay for it, they just say how much your total is, and pull out a cardboard box full of cash to make change. I'll reitterate that Seoul's an anachronistic city of contrasts like that. Walk down the subway stairs, by the old woman selling hand-peeled vegetables from a cardboard box, through the gate, where your train fare is automatically deducted from a little electronic card in your wallet.

Speaking of quaint old people in the subway, I had a really awkward moment the other day where a strange-looking old man was so interested in staring at me that he literally chased me around. I got a coffee from the machine, and he stood about 3 feet away, jaw agape, bottom lip protruding noticably further than his nose. I walked over to wait for the train, and he popped in front of me again. Trying to avoid him politely, I walked another hundered feet or so down the platform. He kept pace, not more than a footstep behind the whole time, and stopped right where I did, inches away, gawking. Frustrated and a little freaked out, I quickly changed direction and walked briskly behind him, back to my first position. He 180-ed, followed, and stood right in front of me again.

By now the train was entering the station. I waited until the doors opened and jogged alongside the traincars, hopping into the nearest door just as they started to close. I lost him, and probably looked pretty rediculous in the process. But I didn't care; the way this guy was going he'd have followed me to fucking school and watched me teach for the rest of the day. Curiosity I can stand. Creepiness not so much.

Closing thought for this week is this strange subway ad for... I have no idea. It seems to feature some kind of mobile phone off on the side, but the bulk of the ad is the repition of the line "Toilet papers in the bowl."


I hear that in parts of Korea, you're not technically supposed to flush toilet paper, because the sewer systems can't handle it. However, this is gladly not the case in Seoul, and besides, I can't imagine why a cellphone ad would even bring up the admittedly awful topic to begin with.

It's Ben a Blast

(there's a fancy new gallery button on the right you can click, too)

I remember bragging last week that it still felt like late summer would back home. The first week in Novermber would not arrive unnoticed, though. Somewhere between Sunday night and Monday morning late fall came and kicked the shit out of Seoul. As I left my house that morning I was wearing a thick trenchcoat and scarf, watching my breath where just a day before I'd contemplated whether my light sweater was even neccesary. I heard it snowed a little in parts of town that night (not mine). The cool syberian airstreams have calmed down now, and it's a lot warmer, but Monday was an icy reminder that it's a good thing I brought my trusty scarf. It's still warmer than home, though.

Cool air's not the only in the atmosphere, though. This week I lost another friend and co-worker to harsh nature of the one-year contract. Ben was actually the first foriegner I met in Korea, as he showed me the city on my second day here (Mike joined that night, thereby forming the Canadian trifecta). I remember walking to meet Ben that day, thinking "How am I supposed to pick him out in this crowd? Oh wait, he'll be the only white person."

Saturday night the boy had a proper sendoff, with a few folk congregating at a nice restaurant, which actually closed its doors for our private party. It was a great eve, and we sat and ate and drank and were merry around our long table. Last Supper references are obvious. We also played this funny little Korean game involing guessing how many thumbs people will stick up and ultimately getting your forearm severely bruised. Check out the close-up action shot of Trevor making a crater in some poor Korea girl's arm. Thank lucky shot timing for the high-speed-photography effect of the ripples going through her arm.

Later into the night, we spilled out into the street and it rained and we huddled under some little roof and ate greasy street foods and climbed around and maybe even sang. We even managed to get all who remained into a groupshot (note John in the obligatory Thriller pose). Overall, it was a good sendoff, at least from where I sat. Or leaned awkwardly, as per the photo.

Much like Mike, who left me a veritable assload of stuff when he left, Ben did not leave me empty-handed. I managed to score a microwave from Ben's apartment. That officially means that I've got an actual place to live now; a real grown-up apartment. Microwave, bed, sofa, small fridge - it's all here. Of course my initial reaction to the nuke box was to cook something in it as quickly as possible.

For reasons that are still at least a partial mysetery to me, I left Canada with a stockpile of Easy Mac packages. Now I can finaly use them. I wasted no time in whipping up a bowl of my favourite fake-cheese-potentially-cancer-inducing pasta. Three minutes later and was I home.

Ben also left me his cell phone. Not to use, though. It was left to me with specific instructions: destroy it and take pictures. See, it's a crappy cellphone that malfuntions and shuts itself off quite frequently, so Ben wants to see bad things done to it. I don't want to let him down. Stay tuned to see what becomes of the poor thing in coming weeks.

This week I've got the quirky sign outside of the Police Station near the school. It's pretty much self explanatory. Or rather, the confusing image explains itself at least as well as I could...
Which is to say not very well.



Curiously, little wooden beating sticks seem to be the weapon of choice for the police in Korea. Bank guards carry handguns. Security at the airport carry machine guns. Police carry sticks.

Halloweird

(click to see the stranger's sofa I love so dearly)

The week's been great. The weekend was danergously close to being a do-nothing, but then at the last moment, me and Ben grabbed a few drinks and played video games and then Trevor joined us and we stole a sofa.

See, in general Koreans don't recycle furniture. They often replace it, but typically just put the relatively new old stuff on the sidewalk for the trashman. It's pretty standard fare for us shameless Weigooks (Korean for foriegner) to obscond with said perfectly-fine furniture. Knowing this, and knowing that my apartment was an underfurnished paradise of spartanism with but one actual chair, I've kept my eyes peeled for any discarded chesterfeilds. Early Saturday I happened on just such a pile of previously-loved furniture.

Later that night, the three of us (Moi, Ben, et Trevor) just happened to be walking by the very same collection, and I said 'feel like carrying a sofa for about 10 minutes?' and who in their right mind would say no, right?

Trying to slide a large sofa into a small apartment with little room to spare is a challenge under the best of conditions. At 2 in the morning with a night of drinking under your belt, it's really no easier. And certainly no quiter. But I'm pleased with the results. Intensely so. This sofa has changed my place from a mid-sized bedroom into a tiny apartment, and it makes me significatly happier to be here.

Speaking of being happy here, this week was Halloween - at the school, at least. See, the country as a whole doesn't celebrate it, but as an expensive private English school, we apparently try to immerse the kids in occidental culture. Of course, in the interest of getting everything western a little wrong, the school scheduled the 30th as Halloween and I was caught unawares.

I love dressing up for Halloween, but given 15 minutes to make a costume, I ran to the store and bought a garbage can. With some tape and scissors and stolen stationary, I added an eyehole and antannae for the world's crappiest Halloween costume. The kids liked it, but most called me garbage-can-teacher in either Korean or English. At least I learned the Korean word for garbage can.

It was adorable to see them in costume though, even if most of them were princesses, superheros or Snow White. Alex (the real bad kid whom I mind less lately) was Peter Pan. With a knife. That was probably the coolest, I must begrudgingly admit. Kevin's got a great Devil pose, though.

Outside of work, life's fine and dandy. It's funny, when I take pictures now I'm a lot more interested in capturing the humanity of this place than the scenery and such. Mind you, the art and achitecture and old and new are all still facitating, I'm just seeing ineteresting things that I didn't neccesarily notice before.

The subway, for instance, is a real bastion of most everything that is Korean. Between the stares and the homeless and the pushing and shoving and the loud and slient old and new and drunk and people selling everything imaginable everywhere imaginable; the underground is Seoul at its Seoulest. I'm becoming a lot less camera shy, too. Or camera-use shy that is. Where I once thought it rude to take out a camera and snap pictures of people just trying to live their life and mind their own business, now I realize that cameras are a way of life here. As is people not minding their own business. Speaking of which, I'm trying to start a series of cameraphone pictures that fall under the category of "Koreans who won't stop staring at me"

This week, I close with this poster full of Korean and shady photos of scantily-clad Koreans. It's of interest largely because of the only English words on it. The 'no touch' is kinda confusing. Or maybe the opposite of confusing, but shady, at the very least. The adopted Konglish word 'event' can apparently also mean some shady things in Korea as well.


The poster on its own hardly seems funny enough though, so I tossed in a truckload of pigs for the hell of it. They're actually piggy banks, and they're frighteningly prolific around here. Hence the truck filled with them.