Fun and Games

(it's so unexpectedly predictable)

This week I learned an obvious lesson: that an awful way to get to know far too much about people really quickly is to play drinking games with them. By 'awful' I mean messy, not ineffective. On the contrary, it's downright messily effective.

But I use words like 'messy' and 'awful' in a completely positive way - Saturday evening was actually quite fucking fun from start to finish. I went to Hongdae with Bora, Saebom (Bora's old schoolmate), Trevor and Jason. After a tasty steak dinner (with an exceptional salad bar and a failed record attempt from Jason to create the world's tallest self-serve custard cone), we headed to a bar, bought a bottle of Tequila and introduced this naive young narrator to his first round of the Korean "Image Game".

This is a game ideally based on visual impressions, in which you sit around a table pointing and judging who is the person most likely to... (insert potentially embarrassing characteristic here). Really, it's more like the crush-one's-image game, as observations include things like who's been with the most / least people, who's most / least attractive, and so on. The person pointed to by the most people has to drink, but I guess that's a given, seeing as it's called a drinking game. After the tequila evaporated at an alarming rate, we went to a new bar, and played the more tried-and-true "I Never" game, which is a diplomatic and revealing game in and of itself, of course. Copious quantities of Megju (beer) and Soju (if you don't know by now, you don't want to - trust me) were consumed, and almost-copious good times were had by all.

Then I left the weekend behind. Or waited in bed until the the clock told me to go to work, at least. Work has been good. It certainly doesn't seem like I've been teaching for seven months now, and that's not just because I'm really about a week shy of the seven-month mark. The kids are still wonderful, and my schedule keeps changing, and I keep losing some of my favourite students but getting new ones and fuck it, as Hello Kitty says, "You can never have too many friends." Ms. Kitty never said this to me personally, but a lesson I taught the kids about her history and financial success informed me that it's her motto.

I seem to have run into an unusually fortunate barrage of hilarious Korean English misuse and general insanity this week. More accurately, I probably ran into about the status quo amount of said madness, I just happened to be carrying my camera for more of the strange photo ops.

I'm a particular fan of the tiny pink garbage can that purifies you and recycles life. In defense of the "Water passed by the manager" subway ad, I think this may be for an English school, and actually explains why this might not be a great sign to put up in a restaurant. I'll give no such defense to the Peter Fan notebook. The gibberish English on the front of this is miles worse than the English journal of an 11-year old Korean girl that's kept inside. Surely the company who made this could have at least run the grammar and spelling past a small child before sending it to presses.

Incidentally, Peter Pan is hot shit in Korea now. Makes my name a big hit with students young and old. I don't even mind the jokes, in fact, I've suggested to some kids that they can just call me Peter Pan Rabbit Teacher. Past the initial laugh they give, that's just too long, so they give up and just call me Petuh or Teachuh.

And speaking of students and English and questionable printed materials, I close this week with the following...


The page on the left is probably the result of the fact that some of our course materials are written by native English speakers who may or may not have senses of humour borrowed from adolescent children. In the same book series, there's a lesson titled "Those are My Balls!" And no, Korea is not that progressive in sexual education. Quite the opposite, I'd venture to guess. They do, however, have at least one copy of "Everyone Poops" at our school, though.

On the right I've just got a simple and completely honest grammatical error gone hilariously wrong. When correcting I crossed out the words "and hard" and I'm glad I didn't have to explain why to the student, 'cause I simply couldn't have done it with a straight face.