The Magic of the Last Minute

Koreans, in general, do things at the last minute, and bless them, because somehow their entire society manages to function on this habit. For waygooks in schools, this means that business involving us comes down the pipe pretty late in the game, and the information spreads through various Korean hands before it gets to someone who even speaks English, and then it gets to you once they get the time to tell you. Often, this is seconds before the thing involving you is set to begin. As an elementary teacher I am mostly shielded from this kind of thing, but occasionally things are also dumped in my lap late in the game, and without a great deal of explanation. An exchange:

 

Persona Dramatis: Me, and one of the pleasant admin ladies with some pretty rockin’ English. We sit in the VP/Admin Office place (Kyomushil), enjoying green tea after lunch.

 

Lady: So, when will you start teaching in the library?

Me: …I… don’t know? I will teach in the library?

Lady: Yes. I saw in the book today. You don’t know?

Me: No.

She goes to rummage for the book where she discovered this information and produces it for me. It includes today’s date, as well as the rest of January. It is scheduled for four hours a day, and includes the time I will teach camp, and when I will be in Thailand. I point this out.

Lady: Oh, okay. After lunch, you go to the library and teach.

Me: Who will I be teaching?

Lady: Anyone.

Me: …what will I be teaching?

Lady: Ah, speech class. Just talking with students.

Me, relaxing: Oh, okay, that’s fine.

Lady: But it is the library. So you cannot talk.

Me: …

Lady: …

This goes on for several moments. She decides to call my co-teacher, who becomes slightly apologetic when she realizes she forgot to tell me about this. No biggie. Co tells me it’s more of a story-telling thing, I just go and read some English books.

Me: Can I go to the library? I want to check what English books we have.

Lady: No.

Me: …

Lady: …

Lady: It’s closed.

Me: Oh, may I use the key?

Lady: The library teacher has the key. The only key. She is on vacation.

Several more exchanges of ellipses occur. Fin.

Do I Know It’s Christmas?

I make some Christmas cards.

Moving to a different country throws off all of your internal clocks. First you deal with the jet-lag and the disparate timezones, the nature of switching from what was day back to another day, in the future, in the new place where you arrive. You run on a different schedule, and do things at different times of day, and on other days of the week. Something I didn’t realize: it also disrupts your long-term clock. Without long-ingrained home-culture alerts around you, the seasons don’t read the same. Despite the fact that today is Christmas, everything in my body and brain is telling me that it’s not.

To Catch a Predator: Korean Textbook Edition

Just an innocent shopkeep.

 

In my efforts to entertain myself and to read into things too deeply while having to watch the same government generated English videos multiple times per week, I came to a single discovery. There is a random white male strewn about the videos amongst the regular characters. He is nameless, always in the background, ominously ever-present. Over time, I realized I was mentally building a criminal case: it is incredibly easy to read these ESL clips as narratives about a pedophile preying upon children eager to demonstrate English grammar and syntax. Suddenly, the bright, sunny world of this textbook becomes a dark tale of deception and creeping, unknown danger.

I Hate the People I Work With

Tony and Minsu. Turkeys.

Not the actual, flesh-and-blood types, mind you. My co-workers are pretty awesome, and the kids are a variegated grab-bag, like all groups of children are. No, I refer to the menace that faces all elementary ESL educators in Korea: the characters. In an effort to be distractingly engaging, multi-cultural, and efficient in its deliverance of the Englishee, various companies and government agencies designed various cartoon characters to edutain the Korean children. Like all positively intentioned educational materials directed towards children that are shaped by the foggy, institutional, elusive desire to also be cool, it is a galling, obnoxious mess.  The horrible, monstrous results (as well as their poor, pitiful live-action avatars) are contained within.

The Gauntlet: Medical Treatment in Korea

Take 34 of these and call me in the morning.

 

What I had been wilfully denying as a real threat to my health, claiming it to be a cough, a minor cold, just a reaction to the air quality, finally drove me to a doctor’s office. In actuality, I had decided to stalwartly endure all the breathing problems: I’ve had asthma and various and sundry kinds of bronchitis throughout my life (in grade 4, I had the “100-Day Cough” which is exactly what it sounds like), and no pitiful phlegmatic expulsions were going to get me down. It was the sudden onslaught of an ear-infection that made me whimper and seek out the medical profession, where my entire head was declared largely infected, and also I had bronchitis in both lungs. And thus began my interaction with the intriguing and bewildering world of Korean medicine.

I Love You, Korea: Intensive Towel

I love a lot of things about Korea. I feel as though this towel embodies several of them.

The most intense towel.

1. The need to summon us from our various schools for whatever the hell.

2. Korea’s elan with the written English word.

3. The love of gift-giving, even en masse.

4. The love of practical gifts. One of the first things people moving to Korea are told is to bring a towel, as Koreans tend towards tiny, coarse pieces of sand-paper rather than anything resembling our sheets of fine Western drying luxury. Our fine education board heard our collective, unsaid pleas and provided (in three colours!).

5. Their love of emblazoning. This special two day training (one day for us, another for the middle and high schoolers) got it’s own banner, with the similarly intensive title.

 

Also, dig the wicked box.

The Gift.

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen of even touched. They must be felt with the heart. -Helen Keller-.” [sic] of course.

 

Korean School Culture: Grabby Hands

 

 

Korean School Culture: a series of posts where I prattle on about the charming and spectacular differences between Western (read: Canadian) and Korean school culture. As consummate connoisseurs of pedagogy, you will no doubt be rapt in fascination on this subject, and will come clamouring back for more with each subsequent post. The first subject of discussion: touching. It will not be as creepy as that makes it sound.

Home in a Box

The care package.

After considerable sturm und drang, I finally received my care package. Delayed by a flurry of emails, numerous uppings of taxes and duties, and some of the thickest, laziest bureaucracy I have dealt with, I finally convinced the Korean UPS depot to drop off the parcel at my school. It was shellacked in an unholy amount of packing tape, and it was just bulky and heavy enough to make lugging it home arduous, but it was in my hands. I covetously clutched it to my chest and hobbled the thing to my apartment, my fingers taloning into the sides as I went.

The Scavenger Hunt: A Shame Spiral in Pictures and Words

Koreans: make them wear a wig.

I expend a great deal of effort trying not to be a douchebag. For many Koreans, there is a lingering stereotype of foreigners, particularly those who arrive in their great nation to educate their children in Englishee: that we are loud, obnoxious, drunken boors who do nothing but laze about all day, slurping back beer, and rubbing our enormous, swollen bellies and genitals in a flurry of perversion and gluttony. I try to combat this by being steadfastly upstanding, trying not to laugh too hard, and keeping my boorishness at bay. The Rocky Mountain Tavern scavenger hunt, featuring an array of challenges ranging from fun and interesting to dastardly and repulsive, required me to throw all these social mores and sense of dignity to the wind.

Weekly Waygook: The Global Taste

Snow on the Mr. Pizzacycles.

 

Winter has befallen Incheon, and we felt the first ballast of snowfall yesterday. As someone of good Canadian stock, I am genetically encoded to observe upon this fact, and complain about it endlessly. Snow sucks. It’s cold, and it’s only pretty for about twenty minutes before it mixes with car exhaust and salt and becomes a blackened slush. Korean sidewalks are already woozily uneven, and this will only serve to make them more slippery. And Korean roads are deathtraps masquerading as motorways, a sheen of black ice will only add to the mortality rate. In sum: boo snow.