A Brief Soliliquy on Losing

So, I come to you day slightly crestfallen, as I did not win The Big Blog Exchange. I can’t deny being slightly disappointed, but it was a battle valiantly fought, and some of the other contestants have some really cool content, and others some really dynamite motivation. So congratulations and bon voyage to them.

I lied awake at three a.m., considering that I was not getting a free trip, and feeling weird about feeling bummed. Nobody owes me this. This company is not duty-bound to fund my travel based on my mental assessments of merit. And really, this contest has always been an extrinsic reward I’ve tacked on to something I find pretty intrinsically motivating. The existence of this blog is not contingent on the creation of a contest on the internet. I will continue to travel, and will continue to write, because those are things I like doing and planned on doing anyways. A free trip to Iceland or Spain or South Africa might have been nice, but I know me, and I know that I’ll get to each of those someday. And I’ll be writing the whole time, and hope you’ll come along with me.

See you on the road.

In Which Our Hero Requires Aid

Dearest compatriots,

I do not often write to you directly in this manner, for I feel it lowly of me to beseech you in such a fashion, but we have arrived at a time of need.

I know many of you hunger to assist me in any manner possible. Through many long nights you have sat awake at your windowsill, looking out onto the dark landscape with longing. Your thoughts were troubled, your heart heavy. You glanced back at your commemorative Stupid Ugly Foreigner shrine that you built in my honour. You clutched your handmade SUF t-shirt close to your heart. There was still a sting on your lower back from where you had your freshest SUF tattoo recently inked. But still you yearned. You wanted to do more for Stupid Ugly Foreigner, the man. Sending him disturbing nude portraits and locks of your hair just didn’t seem enough anymore.

Fear not, gentle reader. I bring you the opportunity you have waited for. For now is the time I sound the clarion, when I too sit at the sill and hope that somewhere, out there, my champions await.

The Big Blog Exchange. Hostelling International has opened a contest on the internet. Writers from around the world enter, call upon their devoted and ravenous fans to vote for them, and move up in the rankings. Those chosen few who vanquish others in their region have a chance of being selected to exchange blogs and lives with one of the other winners from Anywhere in the World. They fly these writers around the globe, put them up, feed them, and furnish them with all sort of zany hi jinx in which to engage. The only catch is: they must write about this experience.

Writing, you say? I have some experience with that.

And so, I throw myself before you, dear chums. Click on that glittering wonderbutton at the top of this post, or the one permanently and garishly lodged into my sidebar. Vote for Stupid Ugly Foreigner (and confirm via your email), then come back here and receive words of praise and adulation from the cult of SUF and perhaps even the thanks of the suave, Svengali-like master of this group.

Vote Stupid Ugly Foreigner in the Big Blog Exchange. It’s like democracy, except better.

Nuggets of Pedagogy: Election Time

The entrance to my school is through a park, where several branching paths eventually merge and usher my students forth into the bowels of elementary education. On Monday, I took to the park with my earphones in, and soon noticed there was some amount of commotion up ahead. Being in Korea, and being at a Korean primary school, I am strangely acclimated to loud, showy commotions: people chanting, people singing, people waving signs, people distributing leaflets. This is common. It is not as common for my kids to be the perpetrators.

 

Democracy in motion.

 

Being the relentless attention-hog that I am, I switched paths so that I could walk the gauntlet and witness the frenzy first-hand. One of my camp kids, JW, spotted me from afar, screamed my name, and took off running. His compatriots followed, and they stopped before me and began to sing their campaign chant, while telling me to vote for CM, Grade 5 candidate number one. When I informed them that I probably didn’t get to vote, they chanted once more. The further I moved along the path, the more I was accosted once more in partisan passion, as my students threw logic to the wind, abandoned their usual terror of English, and urged me to vote for their chosen one.

 

The campaigns went on for three or four days, much of it bewildering and bizarre as it was comprehensible. When I could read the signs, they usually said the same things (Our school! Happy, clean, fun!), though the parents obviously differed in how much money they shelled out. Some went for heart-felt and homemade, with lots of glitter-glue and embossed construction paper, while the eventual student president, DG, had professionally printed and graphically designed posters (he also, in person, seemed like he really did not want to be in the race, but as my co-teacher mentioned, his mother was probably in on it). What some lacked in flash, they made up for in intensity. And sashes. There were a lot of sashes.

 

The eventual winners were not at all who I predicted, but I did play a part in student democracy, and got to enjoy embarassing my grade 6s by taking pictures of the candidates. And ultimately, that’s what teaching is all about, probably.

Housecleaning in the Echo Chamber

Hello, gentle readers. I know that you are out there, funneling words from my fingertips directly into your own eyeballs, and I am flattered that people go on reading this blog on a regular basis. But sometimes, I run out of things to say. Despite living in another country and daily experiencing weird things beyond my previous imaginings, I find nothing is humorous or bizarre enough to preserve in splendorous internet amber. I wither and my fingers twitch over a sullen, silent keyboard as I try to figure out what the hell to talk to you guys about.

Now is not one of those times, mind you (I’ve got like six posts gestating on my flash drive), but it’s happened before. It will happen again. To insulate myself against the ensuing panic when I can’t think of what to write, I bring thee this: Ask Me Anything. A place where you, the viewer, can express your deepest, innermost queries about me and my life, as I know these issues consume your very spirit even as we speak. Ask me about life, Korea, and teaching, or just tell me how much you love and worship/loathe and despise me and everything I put to words. (Or, do it by email! stupiduglyforeigner [at] gmail [dot] com)

Onward, internet soldiers.

A Year (or Sixish Months) in Blogging

As someone who finds statistics and charts  inherently soothing, I was pleased that WordPress inundated me with regular updates on the hit counts of my blog in bar graph form, helpfully detailing from whence each hit came. During the long periods of desk-warming, periodic checks of blog functioning have been a staple in by boredom-combat diet. It was thus that I was exceptionally pleased to receive an email wrapping up my year (or sixish months, since I started Stupid Ugly Foreigner late in July of 2010) in glorious charts and summaries. It’s raw numbers are meaningless as I have no point comparison, and its conclusion that my blog health reads “Wow!” seems spurious and arbitrary at best, and yet, I still let out a childish squeal of excitement. That some website, upon which I rely to spread my useless yammering, thinks I’m doing a tip-top job is satisfying in a vague and incomprehensible way. After the jump, see what WordPress.com has to say about my stats.

Well, damn it.

So, this is happening.

SKorea: NKorea fires artillery onto island

Cue my family probably emailing me soon to make sure that I continue living. I am fairly certain the Koreans will tell me there is nothing to worry about. (Although, hilariously, they are of extremes when it comes to this sort of thing. According to one of my Korean friends’ facebook update: “we are dead!!!! crazy north korea!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! they shotted 50cannonballs to yeonpyeongdo!! its in incheon!!! damn!!!! i should go to busan!!!!”)

Guy and Sheep: Why WordPress Search Terms is Amazing

A real post is coming later today about teaching and pedagogy (aren’t you excited?), but in the interim, I have this. On the WordPress dashboard, you can see fairly comprehensive graphs of the statistics for your blog: number of visits, pages viewed, referrers, linkbacks, all the good stuff. My favourite is search terms: it displays what search terms brought views to your blog. The most amazing ones that brought people to Stupid Ugly Foreigner are below. (And also, by putting them in this post again, I only invite more strange internet wanderers stumbling upon my site in their nomadic quests for out-of-the-way erotica, but if you’re Googling some of the following things,  you’re probably asking to be thrown off course occasionally .)

 

Weekly Waygook: Mario Reich Cellphone Charm

During the hunt for adequate Halloween costuming, we stopped for dinner in Dong Incheon, a small area near the port and China Town. We sat down and I managed to order, completely in Korean, though we refused the offer for makgeolli, which the proprietress did not take kindly. We tore through the samgyeopsal (fried pork belly), prepared on the tin-foil shellacked centre grill, and desired more food. I managed to ask another table what was the delicious thing they were enjoying, attempted to order it, understood that the other table had had the last of it, and then ordered something else. Upon her questioning, I managed to communicate, in Korean, that two of us were from Canada, one from the U.S. When we eventually came to pay the bill, I understood the number she told me fluently and quickly. It was thus that I took an unnatural degree of chagrin when she asked, “Money changee? You need changee Canada dollar for won?” The woman assumed we were tourists! Such an affront. I bristled with pompousness and declared us to be English teachers before, I imagine, leaving in an aloof huff. Then I began to wonder: do the Korean language skills of your average tourist surpass my own? Like many times when my ego gets ruffled, I soon deflated sheepishly.

 

Tales from a Eurotrip VI: There is No Sleeping in this Establishment

Amsterdam began with some degree of sturm und drang. Donny was to leave Paris on a later train than both Zack and me, so we headed to Gare Nord early in the morning. We had ordered tickets online, and later on I received a weird email from Eurostar with a bunch of numbers in random places: only by chance did I decide I would write them down, as we had a bunch of other confirmation numbers for our tickets, that all seemed like they werevalid and useful. Of course, when we arrived, the machine would only accept numbers: indeed, the random ones from the email which I had not told Zack about. Well done, Eurostar; well done, Michael.

Cross-Canada I: Ontario is Very Wiggly

My family is fairly close. There are dozens of people on my mother’s side, as she’s one of nine, and I’m one of 19 grandchildren. Family get-togethers require obscene amounts of space, food, and alcohol in order to function. Most of us grew up with at least a few cousins around our age, and while we’re not hand-holding besties or anything, there are fairly strong bonds, to the point that a lady we met on a train spoke of us with chest-clutching adulation of our adorableness. It was thus that the prospect of travelling together did not ignite terror or disgust, and we seriously underwent a cross-Canada trek together.