Been Bad or Good

(swag)

It was Christmas this week, and not even Korea is completely oblivious to that. Like many Western holidays, it was celebrated at the school. Also much like the last western 'holiday' (read: Halloween) I was obliged to dress up like a retard for this one, too. In fact, this time it's safe to say I was obligated to.

In order to fend off the inevitable event that the kids would recognize me from earlier that morning, we positioned the hat and beard strategically, hiding my whole damn face - albeit at the expense of my eyesight and proper breathing. A surprising number of kids didn't quite catch on, but a number of the older kids called me out on my shoes, recognizing that wears the same skate shoes as Peter Teacher. It was cute that after it was all over, some of my own students were excited telling me how Santa came while I was away.

After work, the grownup had our own party. Me, Scott, and Chris started the party a little early, grabbing a few drinks in the bland hours after work but before the party. After the small headstart we went to Outback Steakhouse and met with the rest of the faculty.

I was seated across from the nice new teacher Natalie (good) and the new manager of the school who doesn't speak any English and may or may not hate all foreigners (less good). But dinner was delish and we drew tickets for prizes and most of us won cookies and I gave mine away. After that, Chris, Scott, Bora, Natalie, Sue, and I headed out for some drinks (largely to ease Chris' pain over not winning that prized air purifier, I figure). That was a great chance to meet the two new Korean teachers at work, plus what's a Christmas party if it ends after the couple of drinks that accompany supper?

When I next heard from Chris, it turns out he'd left his apartment key at work, and when he got home, he ended up sleeping in the hallway outside his door. He had to teach at 10 the next morning. I'm just really glad my apartment has a keypad.

Saturday night me and Cahill went drinking and ended up at (you guessed it) Hongdae. We met up with Adrian and went to a red/white-themed Christmas club party. The music wasn't terrible, and you could get eggnog drinks at the bar, and there was a Santa hat floating around from head to head, so all was happy and bright.

The next day (that being Christmas eve) me and Cahill went to the CoEX mall and I had my first tinge of real Christmas spirit, fueled by the most familiar festive sight I know: a crowded mall. There was something about pushing and shoving and lights and consuming that kinda put visions of sugarplums in my wallet. It even enticed me to buy a couple of presents for myself...

Not that I needed to augment my present haul, as such. I got a fine haul sent from the homsestead. Among the swag was a plethora of Christmas-themed food items, as well as a few nice new shirts, some DVDs, magazines, and other such slices of home. The most clever gift was a collection of Star Wars Christmas ornaments; I really wish I had a tree that wasn't drawn on my cupboard on which to hang them.

The childish indulgences I purchased for included a remote-controlled helicopter (small, hard-to-control fun) and "I Am 8-Bit" - a book of art based on classic video games. They're both more than cool enough for me to have bought them for myself without the flimsy religious occasion as an excuse.

I got a few little gift from students, along with some cards - some of which are quite elaborate. Some of the Christmas cards I've seen here in Korea aren't like anything I've seen before; multi-layered pop-up book cardboard festive dioramas with writing on the back. I swear some of the card envelopes for the presents 'Santa' handed the kids were thicker than the gifts themselves.

Of course, toys and books and food and clothes weren't the only presents I got for Christmas. I also got the nastiest bout of cold I've had in Korea, along with an ear infection. It all lead me to my first visit to a Korean doctor, which was relatively painless, albeit bizarre. See, when he looked into my ears, nose and throat (he was an ENT, after all) instead of using a score, he used tiny fibre-optic cameras and then displayed the images onscreen to decipher in front of me. After years of hearing about it, I finally know what the chronic scarring of my tympanic membrane looks like. This uninsured visit to a private medical specialist cost less than $4.00. Korea is cheap.

After it was all said and done, I got my prescription, which was conveniently doled into little easy dosage packages. They're convenient, but they also remind me of the random bags of kills that teenagers used to get from friends on after-school specials. Suffice it to say that whateverthefuck these are, they're downers, kids. I've been sleeping like a madman. Assuming it's some sort of really lazy madman who sleeps a lot.

In honour of the Christmas spirit this week, I'm going to give Korea a break for a change, and not make fun of it in my closing picture. Instead, here are two of my favourite images from my new art book "I Am 8-Bit". They are titled "An Old Reflection" and "Duck Hunter S. Thompson", respectively. They are also packaged together here, as their inspirations were two decades ago.



See you next year.

City of Frost-Covered Angels

(been waiting to use that lyric in the title for ages)

A few days from Christmas, halfway through my time here, and it snowed this week. Snowed more than it ever normally does in Korea, I hear. The timing was about right; even if it is all melted again now, it was nice to see snow once before Christmas, for what it's worth...

And it was worth a bit, really. This weekend was one of the nicest I've had in a while. The snow Saturday night was a great catalyst for a fine evening. We ran around and threw snowballs and I hit some random Korean who looked really pissed off and there were snowmen and dangerous roads and slush and cold wet feet and it was really hard to believe I was in Korea and not Canada.

The first snowfall is a bit of a significant event here. I've heard that it's traditional for couples to give gift to each other to celebrate it, and it's quite evident that people all over the city try to take blurry pictures of falling snow with their cell phone cameras. I'd ridicule them a bit more for that, but it seems a bit hypocritical since I was also pretty giddy over a few falling frosted flakes.

Saturday was good on its own merits, without the snow. Earlier in the day, when it was reasonably nice out I took my first bike ride in months, then met Adrian and dropped by a skate shop.

That night we ate Japanese and drank and snowed and walked and ate Korean and never got back to his place until 8 in the morning. I crashed on his comfy sofa and never got home until 8 Sunday night. If you measure the success of a weekend by how late you get home, it was monumental. If you don't, it was still pretty goddamn good.

Back to the 'real' world, it's Christmas in Korean. I think. The poorly dancemixed carols and scattered artificial trees seem to suggest so, at least. Tomorrow's the Christmas party at work, both for the Kiderchildren and the faculty. Later into the evening, we're got the staff party at Outback Steakhouse, but that morning, I have to dress as Santa for the whole school. I have to hope that my own students are too retarded to notice the same guy they see every morning is just wearing a red suit and fake beard. I don't want to ruin the illusion, since they were really excited today when they told me that Santa was coming to see them tomorrow. I had to awkwardly reply that I wasn't going to be there.

"What, Santa was here? And I missed him!?"

Speaking of students, I'm closing with one of the weirdest things I've ever seen a student write here. To be fair, this isn't my student, so I can't vouch for his sanity or lack thereof, but just check out what he wrote about his favourite pet:



Past the typical grammar, notice that he says dogs are "very fast and tasty". Now, this is a real contentious issue for Korea, but some Koreans do eat dog. No urban myth, dog soup is a delicacy here. Dog's not a common ingredient - you won't order something innocuous and end up with a plate full of fido. You can, however, walk into certain restaurants and order up a bowl of dog soup.

This paragraph is potentially funny to anyone, even Koreans. Eating dog isn't about cooking-up your pets. There's basically just one breed of dog eaten, and they raise them in farms just for food, like we do with chickens and all sorts of animals.

It's a cultural difference, one that just freaks us out because we've been using dogs as pets for so long. I'm not personally going to eat any, but I don't think any differently of anyone that does. It's something I'd have never brought up if not for this hilarious essay about one kid's favourite edible house pet. Even more hilarious is that before corrections, this was all written in past-tense, "dog was very fast..."

But that's a fucking awful downer on which to end my last pre-Christmas entry.
So here's a happy condom:


Merry Christmas!

I Love the Passing of Time

(good tidings of great consumerism)

Christmas is just a little over a week away now, right? Surely it's less than two weeks away. That means I've got a couple of long weekends coming up in the near future. A few ambitious people are traveling for one of those three-day periods, but I've got nothing planned. I'll probably be a bit more ambitious for the significantly longer holiday that comes with Lunar New Year in February. No point in planning too much too soon, though, that ruins the surprise.

But even if Christmas isn't a deep-seeded holiday here, that doesn't necessarily stop its commercial appeal. Stores still use it as an advertising point, and an excuse to put even more gaudy lights and flashy decorations around. As cynical as that sounds, I'm real thankful for it. I'm secretly a big fan of Christmas, and being in a world that doesn't go apeshit for it is a bit easier when they at least acknowledge it.

At least one international sign of Christmas is quite alive here, albeit with a slightly Korean twist. The Salvation Army folk are around with their kettles, but here there's also a high-tech alternative, where you can simply wave your T-Money card (the same one you use to pay for the subway) in front of a little screen and it automatically donates 1,000won (around a buck, American) from your card to the bell-ringers. You can see the Santa-laden display here in my pictures.

I really wanted to send some presents home for Christmas - some awesome interesting stuff for virtually anyone I could think of; things that you might only get in Korea. Procrastination and a long work day and fear of the Korean Postal Service and probably some more excuses means that I've done nothing to that effect, and will therefore miss any sort of Christmas deadline. I'm still intent on sending things home though. Hopefully thoughtful shit - no trinkets.

Another weekend with Cahill this week. We hung around with Mike Jim, a guy he knew from back in St. John's. As is often the case with people from St. John's, me and Mike realized that we'd run into each other once or twice before. Cahill had a similar experience with a little blonde lady from Grand Falls - they'd met in Scotland.

The night itself was pretty standard Hongdae fare. Despite the fact that I had a great grip on that egg-shaped clock in the picture, the evil Korean crane machines shagged me once again, and the flimsy arm dropped the goddamn thing halfway through its trip to the drop slot. That probably counteracts my luck from earlier in the night, where I hopped-in on a 'closest to the bullseye' 10,000won contest with Mike and Cahill, and hit a dead-centre bullseye on my first shot.

We actually stayed out a tiny bit later than usual, and we got to see a pretty rare sight here in Korea: bars closing. After walking into three or four bars that were in the process of cleaning up, we went all home around 6 in the morning.

Bars here are quite accommodating, and often if you just stay and keep ordering drinks, a lot of them will stay open as long as you'd like them too. There's no law to stop them. It reminds me of the flyer I got in Thailand for the 'after hours' Full Moon Party. It started at 10 o'clock... the next morning. Yeah, that's the kinda place Thailand was. While I really want to get out and do life experience-type traveling a whole damn lot, I wanna get back to see that insanity once more, too. Plus, it'd be real nice to be on a beach just a few clicks north of the equator in these chilly winter months.

For closing this week, check out this seemingly innocuous box of butter-lemon cracker sandwiches. Now, neglecting the fact that the 'lemon' is clearly green, and therefore possibly lime, and neglecting the fact that this idea both looks and sounds pretty unpalatable, suspend disbelief for a moment to check out the packaging:


"Ongoing real love story"?

Now I'm not saying Korea is embellishing the veritable Soap Opera that is the relationship between lemon/lime and butter, I'm just questioning whether using their sordid love affair to sell crackers is really prudent.

Gigantic

(stuporsize me)

It's cold here - officially fucking cold. The fall leaves are still on the ground, but now I get to see my old friend 'my breath' in the chilly morning air. At least chilly air tastes better than the heavy humid sludge that I was breathing all summer.

Breathing is still a battle of it own though, as I've got a damn cold. Still got a damn cold, that is. Teaching kids who love to cling to me in a culture where people don't necessarily cling to the concept of washing their hands after they use the washroom is getting the better of me. Not that post-restroom hygiene is necessarily the cure for the common cold, I'm just taking it as a rough indication of habits of people pressed against me in the subway.

But I'm not really all negative like that. Not about this place. Not even about the unwashed masses in the subway. And certainly not about my kids. Especially when they entertain me so consistently. I certainly take a tiny bit of advantage of the fact that the kids don't always understand what I tell them to write down. It's never anything vulgar, just things that I get a big kick out of. In turn, they're happy if their work makes me laugh.

I also love the pictures. I love how kids this age draw, there's little effort to make it look good, just to convey an idea. I've got some of my particular favourites here, including some giants with great descriptions (I helped with the english) and a picture 4-year-old Thomas drew of me living in harmony with Dinosaurs and airplanes. Like many smart kids his age, he loves dinos. Sometimes we discuss Jurassic Park.

Speaking of dinosaurs, me and Cahill went to the Led Zeppelin bar this weekend. It was good to be back there. Me and Ben used to go there a fair bit, but we got out and I'm not quite sure why. The place is a real diamond in the rough here in Korea. The music is good and it's played off vinyl into old, warm-sounding Bose speakers and the room is shrouded in eggcarton and it's all a feast for the ears. It's also the only place in Korea I've seen a live act in a bar, even if they are classic rock and blues cover bands.

The night itself was quite nice, we just sat and drank and listened and requested songs and enjoyed ourselves a lot more than we would have in the crowded, foreigner mess of Hongdae. Variety, spice of life, and all that shit.

I've had a nice few changes at work lately. Three teachers (Chris, Yoony, and Alley) left last week and I've lost almost half of my classes, replaced with new ones. It's kind of disappointing that you get to know and like this class of kids, and after a few months they switch things up and you don't teach them. Two of my favourite students whom I lost are actually in one of my new classes, though. Plus, it's a class of all the smartest kids of their age, so I'm not exactly complaining.

Even though Christmas is just a three-day weekend, a lot of people seem to be traveling somewhere to celebrate. It gets my mind-gears to grinding about the potential for last-minute travel plans. But I'll see about all that.

It's the Christmas season, alright. Even though Korea doesn't necessarily celebrate in the way I'm used to, it's acknowledged, in advertising, at least. Although the context in which it's observed is a little confusing. To close this week, I've got a picture of a pickle wearing a Santa hat, and a poster from the mall near my apartment, advertising their festive 'Happy Virus Story'.


I can't even begin to explain either one, other than to say they're at least as mysteriously bizarre as they seem.