For people coming from a different culture, this can be incredibly frustrating. Not being able to speak your mind, not being able to express your opinions and try to get things done, without being seen as an obnoxious boor is troubling. It is difficult and aggravating to adjust to, as it is for anyone trying to adjust to the bureaucratic nuances in an entirely new place. You can see others achieving their aims, but the methods are too labyrinthine, too Other, and it all occurs by dark of night and in another language. You imagine navigating the social mores of a beehive would be less complicated.

In hardline Confucianism, the subordinate should simply keen to the directions of the elder. Of course, the subordinate still wants things, and so the only path to glory for them is the round-about. How you get your way is to show your long-sufferingness. You must bare your underbelly: you must show you are doing your very, very best to carry-out the sometimes intelligent, sometimes useless commands of your superiors, and you must show how this effort is taking its toll. You must throw yourself upon the mercy of the hierarchy, and show how flustered and utterly overwhelmed you are, and then things will begin to flutter up the chain of command, outside of your hands. The ignorant boob at the bottom of the ladder, if things are running as they should, needs to be educated. They need to be helped.

*

Sort of without realizing it, I used the proper methods and channels to solve an issue. The Korean way. The passive aggressive way.

The end of the semester was nigh, and I was teaching what I thought would be my last grade six classes for the whole year. The children were bitter, aggressive husks, barely capable of even maintaining respiratory function what with hating everything so much. The first withering spells of puberty were upon them, and they were already far, far too cool for elementary school, and certainly for me. If this was to be my last class with them, I was perfectly all right. I could use the extra time elsewhere to plan my camps, and minister to the children who didn’t regularly act as though they wanted to spit in my face.

And then: trouble. The schedule for the following week (three days following Christmas, where nothing could be gained), and graduation week, five days of schooling wedged between two month-long vacations, emerged. Both were dry, desolate times, arid wastelands of pedagogy, where the grade sixes are barely capable of even holding to the mores and regulations of proper society. It is near impossible to manage to get them not to defecate on the floor and kill one another for meat, never mind sit down and participate in a class. And I was scheduled to teach them. Twice.

And the rest of the staff in my office were to not teach anyone at all. Nor teach any camps.

I roiled at the injustice: my coworkers would be spending the next three weeks on vacation, while I would be spending them on additional classes. With the grade sixes. As a group, we should have been planning how to corral them all into a room and let them battle royale their remaining time in elementary to thin the herd before middle school. Also, I had planned to make use of the dead times in the semester to prep my materials. Now I would endure the grade sixes for even longer? That I was to be teaching them first thing on a Monday seemed just salt in the wound.

How could I possibly shirk these classes? I love teaching, let’s make this clear, but I was not being told to teach, I was being told to babysit. To keep the zoo animals from setting fire to the premises during the poorly scheduled nonsense days. The actual teaching would come during the break, during my doubled-up camps I needed to prep.

I couldn’t simply whine about it and ask what was the deal, which was my first impulse. No, this would be brash and childish and it would openly display my stompy-foot, hissy petulance. I needed a better route.

I wandered into the teacher’s office adjacent to my English classroom, sat down at a table, and began to sigh audibly. It was dramatic, the kind of sighing you get in amateur drama societies, or from teens at the dinner table. I fixed up my features to show my forlornness. No one would look upon me and see a man, they would see a boy, weighed down by the very weight of the world. I gazed down at my feet, and began scuffing my toe into the flooring.

“Michael, what’s wrong?” my coworkers eventually inquired. “The schedule,” I replied, sadly, “have you seen it?” They nodded, they had. They knew what this is about.

I began to spin my tale of woe: this is a very stressful time for me. I must plan six different camps (my coworkers had already found this excessive, and expressed their sympathy). It is Christmas, a very important time for foreigners, and I am so far from my loved ones. Soon I will go to other countries, I need to plan! And why, [x]coteacher has been absent for two weeks and I have been all alone with the grade sixes! What a difficult time I will soon face.

I nodded to myself, and then left the room. Nothing more needed to be said. It was melodramatic and beyond overzealous, but my coworkers knew the dance far better than even I. Whispered conversations soon took place, phone calls exchanged, horses traded. Night winds blew. Cloaks and daggers swished.

“Michael, in February, you will not teach grade sixes. The schedule is changed!”

Strategy: successful. In exchange, in supplication, I offered daily snacks proffered to me by my camp students for my coworkers. They took their share of chocopies, and gave me their knowing nods. The system works, if you know the path.

It's so pretty! Now where can I buy some soup?

We had been at Angkor Wat since sunrise. Bobby and I had seen light and clouds pour over the ancient structure, illuminating the landscape, soundtracked only to the natural chorus of birdsong. It was now 4 p.m., and we had eaten two meals in the shadow of centuries of history, walked amidst great carved stone faces, touched slabs of rock placed there hundreds of years before. It was beautiful, and stunning.

Also, it was hot, and we were out of water, and we had been walking and sight-seeing for nearly 12 hours. Neither of us wanted to say aloud that we were now kind of bored.

Because what a horrible thing to experience, to be actively bored in one of the most amazing places on the planet. To be faced with a monument to human ingenuity and planning and imagination (also, one imagines, slave labour) and eventually respond with a listless, breezy, “Meh.” What did this say about us? How spoiled and degenerate, how dull and low-attention and first-world were we that we couldn’t keep up interest after half a day?

We called the experience “templed out.” We had seen so many temples, including the really important one, and had explored every nook and cranny and crevice and wedge. I had hundreds of photographs, we had dozens of memories, and we had seen with our own eyeballs the sights that had been burned into our cultural awareness for as long as we knew Cambodia existed. And we had been doing so continuously for 12 hours, and it was getting kind of tedious.

It is weird how quickly our brains adapt to experience, how quickly we acclimate to what is going on around us. It is a matter of helping us process information, to block out useless data: if we’re experiencing something continuously, we might as well stop noticing it’s happening and think about something else. I can feel sitting for the first moment or two, but after a while my brain gets bored of noticing me sitting, and goes on to more pressing issues.

I think, in the same way, we can experience a similar, grander-scale when we’re travelling. If you overload on too much of one thing, no matter how objectively important or awesome of beautiful or heart-rending it may be, it can grow tiresome. Your reserves of being amazed, or wowed, or sad only go so deep, and after a while your body turns off the tap as a fail-safe to conserve emotional resources. If you’re being amazed continuously, your brain just kind of assumes it’ll probably keep happening, and decides to cut-off noticing and move on to maybe what you’ll eat for dinner.

It was 2009, and we travelled directly from London to Paris, which made perfect sense to us historically. It also meant that we could enter an obscene number of museums and art galleries and basically experience a huge swath of European history and art in one fell swoop: we could compress several centuries of the past into a few short days! We set off through the British Library, the British Museum, the Louvre… I saw some of the greatest works of literature and art, some of the most important artefacts of human history, and experienced collections of the totality of human culture and experience.

Oh, look. It's another important thing.

But after a few days, my tolerance was starting to dip. Where previously I had walked through some of the art museums for 7 or 8 hours with peppy resilience, now I was beginning to tire after just a few. My back ached from standing with a hand pensively propped below my chin all the time. The paintings were still magnificent, of course, but it was the of course that was the problem. Of course the history was amazing. Of course the artworks were stunning and important. Of course that thing was wrenched from the very bowels of time just for me and those around me to behold. But my feet kind of hurt, and I could really go for a sandwich. Isn’t there a gift shop or a hotdog salesperson lingering around somewhere?

With time, you just sort of grow accustomed to glory. You see so many amazing things in sequence, and after a while, your brain comes to expect it. It becomes commonplace, the baseline of your ongoing experience. Whatever spectacular sight you are currently intaking becomes your basement for awe, the 0 point which must be surpassed if your body is going to bother getting all excited again. If the amazing things you see afterwards only match what you have just ogled in magnificence, it’s difficult for your enthusiasm to keep up the pace.

While driving across Canada with my cousins, I kept a chart in my notepad about the numbers of times we engaged in a group-wide “whoo” holler. It was a big trip for us, and thus our shouting was measurable in frequency and intensity, and it was elicited by every great vista that Ontario provided us with on that first day. We saw rivers and lakes as we zigzagged around our home, we saw trees and great wide expanses of land and sky, we saw mountains and water and we saw Canada.

But by the second day, while all of the vistas were no less vistay, they were no more. They were exactly equal amounts of vista. Our whoo count plummeted from the first day, and would not recover fully until we had settled for a few days in one town before setting off once more. It wasn’t that Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C. were not stunning spreads of majesty, but we had already been staring at majesty for going on 16 hours, and suddenly it was just more interesting to work on our iPod playlists.

What helped, if anything, was settling down in Shannon’s quiet mountain burg of Revelstoke. Things were pretty there, certainly, but they were also quiet, and easygoing, and the majesty didn’t keep changing. Mundanity clawed our expectations back down to regular levels, so that when we left, suddenly the world around us was once again beautiful and inspiring, so that the scenery again became worthy of our childish glee and excitement.

The lesson, then, is that you can’t mainline majesty–you can’t let yourself burn out on splendour. When you travel, you have to mix things up: if you pack your schedule too full of things of equal awesomeness, after a while the equal becomes the problem. You have to pace yourself, you have to do some boring things in between the exciting, or else the exciting becomes your boring.

Hooray! It's impressive again!

]]> http://anageonism.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/burned-out-on-splendour/feed/ 9 stupiduglyforeigner Angkor sunrise I See London, I See France Lake Louise http://anageonism.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/saigon-and-nha-trang/ http://anageonism.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/saigon-and-nha-trang/#comments Sun, 12 Feb 2012 09:47:44 +0000 stupiduglyforeigner http://anageonism.wordpress.com/?p=1164 ]]>

Where the phở at?

The bus had stopped, and we piled into the border control centre. A man collected all of our passports and handed them to the single border agent in a neat stack–he listlessly stamped them one by one. I walked to a baggage check manned by someone not looking at the screen, and then the final agent checking my visa had difficulty flipping the pages with one hand while the other texted. Eventually, feeling certain there was a visa in there somewhere, he waved me onward into Vietnam.

*

Bobby, the eagle-eyed, stared across the street. “Hey,” he remarked, “that guy looks just like Joe Landry. And that girl looks just like Brittany Thurston. That is definitely them.”

Korea has a way of really condensing the world, giving you friends from across the globe, all of whom are at least somewhat adventurous and interested in travel. The chances of being in the same country as one of them in the future is decently high, although the odds of stumbling across some former Korea comrades just on the street in Vietnam had been low enough that we weren’t expecting anyone to appear. And then they did, just wandering down the street across from us.

That they are also very pleasant people certainly made this discovery a bright one. We met them daily for our time in Ho Chi Minh, eating many of our meals together, seeing the major sights of the city, and watching the sunset over the wide spread of the skyline from an overly pricey hotel rooftop bar. (We had their happy hour explained to us on four separate occasions by three different waiters, and still never fully got it correct. We received what one waiter reported to be our free drinks, which we drank. Suddenly another waiter appeared with two more, which he also declared to be our happy hour freebies. Neurotically, we stewed in deep conversation for minutes at a time, debating whether or not to drink the things, lest they charge us another $9 a person for the drinks.)

*

Much like last year, I just sort of stumbled upon some Lunar New Year festivities, and much like last year, an elderly Asian woman took my enjoyment of the performance as her personal project.

Walking back to my hotel after a morning walk, I stumbled down a street where a bunch of people were doing some dragon dances, possibly to bring blessings on one particular business in the area. They spun and twirled and played various tinny percussion devices, and then several more people joined them, in shaggy dog-dragon costumes, two-men-a-dragon. They did tricks and jumps, all the while some terribly large props loomed nearby.

A Vietnamese granny, standing around happily with her grandkids, noted me and my big stupid DSLR, and began motioning to the props, and miming what might occur. Her sign language was bewildering and idiosyncratic, but I was charmed that she wanted me to get the most out of whatever exactly was happening in this alleyway full of dragons, and kept my eyes where she directed.

In time: a dude in a dragon costume shimmied up something the diameter and height of a telephone pole, symbolically ate a bouquet or something (my studious note-taking faltered that day, and thus the details of the performance grow hazy), tossed off his costume to another dude who had shimmied up the pole, danced a little on top of the pole, and then had to slide down when the police arrived. The best New Year’s celebrations are always the ones with the most tenuous holds on reality.

*

Our journey to the Mekong was a well-lubricated tourism run-through, with stops at very many places to spend your money, but it still manages to be pretty cool, regardless. We were boated along the Delta, along various rivers inside, and transferred boats to various other craft at least a dozen times, manned at each stage by tinier, older, and stronger Vietnamese women.

We sampled local fruits, ate a lunch of elephant-ear fish-stuffed spring rolls, and wandered through a coconut processing plant (while also purchasing various coconut products). Each portion of our trip was usually followed by someone standing around, hoping to accept our money, to uneven success. After the coconuts, numerous people bought goods, us included. But at the honey centre, despite numerous claims about the health benefits of the royal jelly we have just sampled, no one really wants to pay $10 for a miniature bottle of horrifyingly noxious goo to help us develop our queen bee morphology. Similarly, while enjoying some tropical fruits, local performers listlessly belt out a few Vietnamese traditional songs, with the passion and enthusiasm of people actively inserting suppositories without using their hands. When their tip baskets approached, our desire to be polite suddenly clashed with our upturned-noses at poor performing.

*

Our bus-ride to Nha Trang was relatively easy: we clamboured onto a sleeper bus, made up of Vietnamese person-sized pods that you jam yourself in and lie down. Ours were at the back of the bus, and thus we were slightly crammed together, but then a tiny, delightful Vietnamese American family climbed alongside of us, placing their miniscule, toe-headed son at the centre, and taking up none of our precious shoulder room. We shared Oreos with him, and were saddened when the family was replaced by three burly Russians.

We are less saddened and more confused when we enter Nha Trang, and discover that every other breed of tourist has been replaced with Russians. They are everywhere, and they are not terribly difficult to spot (gold chains, headscarves and skin paler than our own were the main tip-offs). While crossing the border, a young Russian man on our bus seemed particularly happy about not needing a visa to enter Vietnam, and every beach showed thousands of Russian tourists taking the same opportunity.

*

We signed up for something advertised as a snorkelling tour, and befriend several other pairs of travelers along the way. When we climb on the bus, the only seat left available to me is a plastic lawn-chair, which I wedge in the aisle between seats. Each of us hopes it is not a sign of what is to come.

We begin to worry about the quality of our trip when the first island we journey to features only the saddest, most boring aquarium any of us has ever seen, filled with desperate, raggedy fish, each seemingly less tropical and amazing than the last. We worry more when the second stop is a sort of man-made water-sports island. Here you could pay additional money to ride jet-skis or banana boats, or take a hilariously unsafe looking parasail trip. We (two Australians, Bobby, and I) decided instead to take the cheapest option: remove everything but our swimsuits and jump in the water. We would try to swim to a nearby island, but as soon as we got close, Steph was stung by a jelly-fish, and Bobby and I had both cut up our legs all over the rocks and were bleeding. We headed back to our transportation.

On the boat, we had a decision to make: find a water-taxi back to the mainland, or begin drinking.

Several beers later, they served lunch, and tied several boats together, advised everyone to pile onto one, and live music began to play. The sound was tinny, the instrumentals were childish, and though they sang songs in several languages, most of the words were forgotten in favour of general la-la-las to the beat. However, prolonged sun exposure and plenty of free wine can make you enjoy anything, and thus we had a great time. Soon the boats parted and we were encouraged to climb onto the roofs of the boats and leap into the water, to receive more free wine (which was, as a result of the splashing, about 25% seawater. The taste of freshness.) and act like boors.

Tourist traps will always be a part of travelling. As long as you have money and others very much want to get it  without the hassle of robbing you, they will invent reasons to put you in a place and try to convince you to spend it. The only solution in these sorts of places is to do as we did, and make the best of it. Not every day of vacation will always be perfect, but they will be what you make of them.

Marching onwards in this vacation-palooza I’ve got going, here is the second photoglut from January. After blasting through the major sights of Cambodia, we turned our sights on southern Vietnam. One bus, a hilarious lax border control and a stamped visa later, we were on Vietnamese soil, looking for our first bowl of food. We arrived just in time for Lunar New Year, to watch Saigon go from the bewildering, swarming, traffic-horror dimension to that of a quiet mini-city, ruled only by ghosts and the occasional tangerine tree. Vietnam: let’s look at it!

It was Lunar New Year, and thus: thar be dragons.

Our bus out of Siem Reap was a sort of giant mini-van, lodged with many seats, all Cambodian-sized. This is to say: tiny. I am not a tall man, and even I sat mostly with my kneecaps braced against the seat in front of me. The road was long and meandering, though beautiful and serene which allowed us to space out and enjoy, interrupted only by the incredibly regular and lengthy phonecalls taken by every Cambodian on the bus (the folks we rode with were popular, some of them getting calls roughly once every four minutes for the six hour bus ride). The sun set, the roads darkened, and we could no longer see the cows lolling parallel to our path, but in a few hours, we were in the capital of Phnom Penh.

*

The hipster parts of my personality (which is to say: large, large parts of it) are, of course, particularly concerned with authenticity. With experiencing the real, with getting down and seeing a country for what it is. Being a big, fat, be-backpacked tourist with a giant DSLR and a wallet full of money understandably kind of precludes me from some of the experiences I wish to engage in, but occasionally you can find yourself in the midst of just regular, actual life while travelling.

There are times when you just want to get away from the tourist bubble: while it’s safe and well-lit and full of English-speaking guides, it has a tendency to be white-washed and sanitized for foreign consumption (with appropriate price-gouging to match). You go all the way to a foreign country, and you can’t help but actually want to see it, to see the people and how they live real life in that place. That I have deep, raised-pinky douchebag yearnings to experience life off the beaten path and get in touch with real Asia drives me to seek this out even more.

Most of what we got to experience in this regard had to do with food. There were food stalls everywhere in Phnom Penh, but our best, cheapest, and most Cambodian-y meals were always the ones on little byways, in the depths of gigantic, sprawling marketplaces, in the shadows away from the main road. The greater the density of locals eating at an establishment, and the less chance that the proprietor actually spoke English, the greater the chance of the food being real (and being real cheap).

That many stalls tended to specialize in one type of dish certainly helped, as we didn’t need to stumble through much preamble. We would walk down an alley or through a crowd, spot something tasty, and essentially ask, “One food, please.” Everything else is ultimately ancillary, and usually if we simply nodded at whatever was asked of us in Khmer (and later, in Vietnamese), we were provided with still greater amounts of deliciousness.

*

One of few big hulking masculine goon fantasies I harbour is to shoot a bunch of guns, and Cambodia has places you can do that. (The bigger step, also available in Cambodia, of shooting a rocket launcher at a cow, we decided we would forego.) Bobby, similarly intrigued, packed a wifebeater and dirtied it up some for the express purpose of wearing it while holding a big giant weapon.

But some of the desire to fire big weapons drains a little when you find out about, you know, gigantic historical tragedies. Our second real day in Phnom Penh we went to S21 Museum and the Killing Fields.

The Fields themselves are incredibly quiet: upon entry, you receive an audio-guide available in approximately one billion languages, and then you set about walking the path in silence. The guide is narrated in grandfatherly tones, as though wisdom being passed down to the younger generations by regretful, weary elders. It is a man who tells you simply and without preamble about the horrors committed in his country, and most specifically on the ground where you stand.

Butterflies tumble in the air over grassy knolls, rent upwards from level ground from the excavations and years of rainy seasons. Bones and teeth still erode up from the soil, and pieces of fabric are entwined in the roots of trees. Terrible, terrible things happened there. And they didn’t happen all that long ago.

It is awful, but you knew that. And it was important to be there to understand it.

*

Local tuk-tukists are always spouting game at you no matter where you go, and there is generally a hierarchy of sleaze which they will offer you. Most will start with a simple tuk-tuk ride, and will usually follow soon after with an offer for a full-day tour. If you decline, they also want you to know about the many, many hotels they know.

If you keep walking, they will say, in a comically loud whisper, about all the weed they can get you. Still not piqued, if you have not yet turned, they will begin shouting at your tail about prostitutes.

Once you are out of earshot, I can only imagine what goods they still have on hand. Nuclear warheads? Hyper-heroin? Roasted orphans?

*

Our third and last real day in Phnom Penh we took an impromptu walking tour and took in the sites, eating locally, and eventually fleeing back to the hostel to shower and siesta, drenched as we were in our own exhaustion and sweat.

By nightfall we wandered to the riverfront, seeking out food and beer, and eventually moving to simply sit along the boardwalk, looking out to the water. Party boats drifted by, blasting music in English, Korean, Khmer. Light reflected across the water, and we simply sat, and talked, and remembered that on vacation, you are, occasionally, entitled to sit down and rest.

Cambodia is a country where I really did not know what to expect. Being the specifically ignorant boob I am about certain areas of facts and history, my knowledge of the country extended to it containing Angkor Wat, and also some impressively horrific (and recent!) historic tragedy. The contours of its language, the colour and name of the currency, the ingredients common to its cuisine, the likelihood of its people to spit upon me once entering the country: all were delightful mysteries I was waiting to discover.

We arrived late at night, and after some time trying to finagle into a cab, we were whisked away to our hostel, through streets that looked beyond seedy and terrifying, but that we came to quickly recognize as safe as houses.

Waking up the next day, we began to realize our itinerary for Cambodia was largely empty, but for large, block capitals practically scrawled in bright green crayon reading “GO ANGKOR WAT.” We inquired at the front desk and thus took to the streets, and later made our way via incredibly cheap tuk-tuk to a floating village.

I am always struck when travelling about how instantly individual you can feel, how unique your experience seems. It is, of course, absolutely illusory, and often there are dozens of people around you doing the exact same thing, but being out and seeing the majesty of the world does have a tendency to make you feel good about yourself. And so we blasted through this floating village, townspeople gently canoeing back and forth from school and neighbours’ houses. Later we parked out on the open water and watched light pouring soft and heavy from an unfinished jigsaw of sky. It was breathtaking, and magical, and it showed us the glory of nature’s splendour, and so on and so on. It was our first day of vacation.

*

Going for a kind of sight-seeing overload, we then managed to struggle out of bed in the nether regions of the morning, and saddled into a tuk-tuk by 4:30 a.m. We drove down barely visible streets, Cambodian back-alleys and byways, red plastic chairs strewn and wild animals wandering along the side of the road. The path to Angkor Wat is wide and breezy, and we arrived with enough time for people to accost us with offers of breakfast, tour guides, and flashlights.

We trudged over dark, ancient roads, following distant beams of light from other travellers who had gone for the flashlight deal. It was hard to really get a feel for what we were experiencing, as everything was dark and naturey, and you can’t really gasp splendour in the dark.

Soon we came to a small pond lined with large rocks, and found seats for ourselves. People around us began to gather, though in the din we had no idea the size of the crowd. We gleaned snatches: little bits of people’s faces in the flashes of cameras in the early morning, tidbits of conversations in rapid foreign tongues. Only as the light began to pour over the structure before us did we see that the crowd was massive.

But we didn’t notice for a while, because all we could see was the sky and Angkor Wat. There are times in your life when you really have to check yourself, to make sure you are terribly aware of how awesome the things in front of you are. In these times I imagine that maybe I’m dreaming, or that I’m dead, or that everything is some sort of holographic projection, but then I get the jolt of happy realization—nope, here I am, sitting in Cambodia at sunrise.

The first hour or two after sunrise, no one really entered the temple, being wooed as they were by the siren call of the locals offering them breakfast and coffee at next-to-important-thing mark-up prices. We were able to wander the grounds practically alone, scaling huge, rugged staircases, crawling in between stones lain hundreds and hundreds of years before.

*

Our tuk-tuk driver around the temples became our kind of mental representation of the Cambodian people in general: uncontrollably pleasant, hard-working, and pint-sized. Pauly (I am choosing this Romanization over possible alternatives Polly and Poli) picked us right up at 4:30, and was constantly asking us questions about our trip, about what Korea is like (he was studying both Korean and English at the same time), and telling us his plans for the future. He was so constantly nice that we didn’t really understand how to deal with it, and when we treated him to lunch he seemed to be nearly overcome with polite ecstasy at the reciprocal kindness.

Also, he could fit in your pocket.

At our lunch, we both noticed that the table was maybe too high for him, built as it was for tourists, and thus he had to prop his elbows on the table to be able to reach the food. When he forgot our names, he would refer to us simply as Big Man and Tall Man, because we were practically giants towering over him, a kind of relative feeling I do not often get to experience.

Later, after briefly losing us in one of the more confusing temple surroundings, we got back to the hostel for him to pick us up once more. “I didn’t know where you went!” he cried. “I was asking other tuk-tuk drivers, ‘Have you seen Tall Man? Or Big Man?’”

*

I generally detest child labour (what a controversial opinion!), but being surrounded by it also causes you to grow numb to it in a way I didn’t really think possible. More than anything, the children approaching us with various wares I began to judge for their skills, and I found myself duly impressed by the sassmouth and marketing skills some of them developed.

Near a large lake, 2 girls approached us, 8 and 12. The younger one targeted Bobby, and worked the guilt angle: would he promise to come visit her store? She offered up her dainty, delicate little hand for a pinky swear. My salesgirl barraged me with questions. “Where you from? Where you from? What language do you speak?” I tried to not say anything, to march on, to which she responded, “Maybe you are from country where they don’t speak any language?”

*

Our time in Siem Reap was short, as our knowledge of it essentially extended to “Angkor Wat adjacent,” and indeed the local townspeople knew how to work this angle. Every article of clothing, every restaurant, every thing was adorned with visuals or some reference to the temples. The most popular bar in town was lauded for its simple punnery, being called “Angkor What”. There were at least two beers available, one named directly after the temples, and another (“Anchor”) making a play at the name.

But within a few days, we had exhausted ourselves of the temples and the simple, small-town life, and were headed for the capital, Phnom Penh.

Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, Cambodia

You have no idea how pleased I was with myself after I got this shot. Also how pleased I was with being in the place where such a picture like this could happen.

Subphotoglut: Angkor Wat extravaganza!

Well, at least they don't know about the blog.

Small-scale celebrity is something I’ve grown accustomed to in Korea. As the only foreigner the majority of my coworkers and students regularly interact with, I am a subject of a certain degree of fascination and notoriety. What I do, what I eat, what I wear—most everything about me is remembered and shared amongst others as gossip. It’s not just within the school, either, because my students and coworkers live in the same neighbourhood, and if I am spotted in the off-hours, it’s almost certain to be reported back to the school hive by the next day. With this celebrity, I’ve had to get used to never having any secrets, and to just having my business be everyone else’s.

At home, I enjoyed a great deal of privacy. I lived far away from my university, and later far away from every school I worked at. My students could only know me for the professional I showed up to be, and whatever I did in my off-time was all mystery. They had no idea if I drank, or if I dated, or who I hung around with. If I even contained human biological systems, nevermind reproductive organs, was of considerable debate. I was only Mr. M, and that was perfectly okay with me.

But not so in Korea. My habits and daily rituals are thoroughly assessed, pondered over, and judged for both veracity and interest. On the regular I am interrogated as to what I eat for breakfast and dinner, those nebulous meals outside of school where I can not be directly observed. I am asked what I drink, and with whom, and where. What did I do this weekend? What did I see? Where have I gone and been and had and done and ate and lived and sat upon?

It is half curiosity and half water-cooler boredom, a kind of fascination to fill up the hours of the day. I am sure that once the school day is complete, I am completely out of their minds, but in those hours of the day for which I am present, my existence is of the utmost importance.

The biggest degree of fascination has to do with my many, many girlfriends. I am regularly questioned at school about my possession of one, how she might have been acquired, and weirdly technical particulars on the make and model. The problem is that with each shrugged shoulder and claim for lack, I am met with more and greater quirked eyebrows, more suspicious head-tilts, more rolled eyes. When I say I don’t have one, I am met with distrust.

Because every time I go anywhere in my neighbourhood with a human female, she is my girlfriend. If my students or coworkers or friends or anyone in the massive grapevine spies me, the horde is alerted, and the next day the whole school knows. Whether I am dating the particular woman or not is not really of consequence: our proximity is all the evidence that matters. Actual people I’m seeing, friends, acquaintances, women who accidentally match my stride and are adjacent to me at the wrong moment–each of them is a girlfriend.

Every day, I am, with certainty, confronted by a student to ask about the girlfriend I was spotted with most recently. They give me askance eyes and nod knowingly. Invariably, I must ask them how this woman in question looked, to try and narrow down a time and place where I was spotted, and who they might be picturing. “Very tall.” “Very short.” “Many skin picture.” “Very beautiful.” “Very glamour.” “Small face.” “Short hair.” “Black hair.” “Golden hair.” These descriptions are said practically with little animated heart bubbles floating from adoring, speculative faces, and occasionally with vigorous hand-motions to better simulate the shape and dimension of my many, many girlfriends.

The staff are just as bad. I was eating dinner with I’m No Picasso in the neighbourhood, when I spotted someone I thought I recognized leaving the restaurant. I waved politely, and Liz and I both agreed there might be a flurry of gossip the next day. And then another coworker walked by. And another. Hweshik had just let out, and the entirety of our administrative, secretarial, and maintenance staff sauntered by, each politely saying hello to me, and then almost certainly texting everyone they know at our school about what they had seen. (Quoth Liz, on their sheer numbers: “It was like they were piling out of a clown car.”) The next day, within ten minutes of entering the school, my coteacher was in my office, with an accurate depiction of the previous night, including where I was, what I wore, what I ate, and most critically, who I was eating with.

But in its own way, having no privacy is kind of refreshing. Being a teacher at home meant basically pretending not to have a personal life: professionalism dictated that you could certainly enjoy alcohol, and the company of other adults, but that there was something inherently shameful about it, and that if the kids or your superiors ever discovered that you did not simply knit and make brownies through your off-hours, you would be shipped off to the education mines. Here, everyone knows my business, and they certainly care—but they are not scandalized. Adults drink, and hang around other adults, and even children understand this. I wouldn’t parade around my neighbourhood with opened bottles of everclear, but knowing that I won’t be chased away with pitchforks for having a beer in my ‘hood is a relief.

Where once such incursions in my private life would have made me prudish, protective, and hissing with fraught anger, nowadays I have grown increasingly comfortable with everyone knowing everything about me. My students are legion, and they are everywhere, and each has a smartphone with which to capture me and alert the rest of the student body. If everyone is going to find out about my business anyway, why bother trying to be secretive about it?

After my fridge broke down a few months ago, a new unit was ordered, but the delivery was scheduled during one of my regular classes. My coworkers were reluctant to reschedule everything so I could pop home, and suggested I just give my keys to one of the secretaries, who would go to my apartment, let in the delivery man, and, of course, snoop through everything I own.

I pondered for a moment, and very quickly realized my desire for a fridge far outweighed my previous, Victorian daintinesses about privacy and my home. There was nothing new for the secretary to glean, anyway. Eventually an open book gets boring.

At least two of these people have been identified as Michael Teacher's Girlfriends. Also, I really couldn't not share this picture from New Year's. My kids don't know what shameless photobombers we all are.

Let's get all procedural language up in this turkey.

Winter camp is upon me, which means I must go on teaching English, but that I must also toss in enough distraction and entertainment to justify my kids giving up their precious winter vacation time. Camp is very clearly delineated between the kids who signed up willingly (I’ll be generous to myself and say a solid 40%, higher in the third and fourth graders), and those who were signed up by their parents to get them out of the house for a few extra hours.

My greatest fury this year came from conflicting schedules. To fill up the hours and keep the staff busy, multiple camps were established this year, including math, cooking, science, library, and computer camps. Which is all well and good, as they were all scheduled at different times, and thus the kids could just choose, yes? Well, no. Some parents, essentially, wanted to maximize the babysitting time, and wanted to keep their kids out of the house for as long as possible. If they signed them up for my camp, which ended at 10:30, and computer camp, which starts at 11:30, it means they might have to deal with their children for a whole additional hour! Well, why not just sign them up for library camp, which runs from 10:00 — 12:00? Sure, it messes up the schedule for every single teacher and makes each camp sort of a breezy waystation for free babysitting, but it also means not having to see our kids for a few extra hours!

For the kids who did stay, there was good fun to be had. I’ve been trying to give them more opportunities to just be creative, as most of the curriculum is so staid and structured they often sound like robots. While some of them assacre the grammar, I cared more about them having free reign and using English to just free-wheel rather than confining them with reason or syntax. Some of this is also for my own benefit, because dig what these kids came up with.

Animal blends project:

Dogons. They're only in Korea, you dig? I did not ask how the mating process went, though JW clearly considered this when he specified which parent performed which mating role.

GM was so into it he wanted to design two animals. I think the sqraffe is the clear winner.

I like that E.S. specified the exact height of the snakpus, which is to say: terrifyingly tall.

There's a little too much Korean, but she felt duty-bound to inform me which part came from which animal.

500 years from now, 500 years ago comic:

A lot of my kids went for the "It was just a dream!" plot twist.

I suggested dragons for 500 years ago sort of half-assedly, but most of them latched onto the idea pretty hard.

He was hungry.

I like that her time machine is basically a flying saucer.

Angry bird palace looks pretty wicked.

That said, I try to minimize my interactions with him. Nice as he is, interactions with a principal in Korea are always risky, and generally go one of two ways. Either you are doing a fantastic, spectacular,  unheralded job, or you are the worst bum that Korea has ever seen. Whichever of these becomes the narrative for discussion yields the same two options, which are: lots more work, or lots less work. The chances of either option are about equal.

The last time I had an open class, the principal was duly impressed. After, he inquired as to my credentials (having never really looked into it before, what with the peaceful wandering), he declared in Korean that I was a super-duper teacher. The following days saw the news that I would be heading several new English programs at school, and that my winter camp teaching would be doubled, such was my skill. Yay, it sure is nice to be great?

To avoid these sorts of scenarios, I generally err on playing dumb. I like and do well at my job, but I play down whatever I’m good at, I don’t do anything pedagogically flashy when he is around, and I almost never speak Korean around him unless absolutely pushed. If I am neither seen nor heard, he won’t remember to dump more busy work on me.

Such was what coursed through my brain when I was told we’d be going out for lunch with the principal. It was winter vacation time, and I was spending roughly four or five hours of my day on camp, and the principal wanted to treat us with lunch. I had been working hard lately, and real vacation so tantalizingly close, and I became nervous. Uninterrupted time with the principal would give him at least an hour to think about me, what with sitting directly across from him. This was dangerous. I am far safer when he is not thinking about me at all.

We sat down in the restaurant, and giant, voluminous hot-pots of sea creatures were brought to us. A live squid undulated angrily in one side, while various chitinous monsters quivered in their submarine homes. The whole bowl was a mess of wriggling, and there was considerable debate in Korean at the table over whether it would be more or less delicious to eat the various terrors within the pot before they died or after (thankfully, we went with after). I did as my parents, many years ago when I was an obnoxiously picky eater, would have wanted of me, and simply shut up and ate whatever was given to me, mostly because everyone assured me of how expensive it was.

I kept quiet, answering whatever questions were asked of me in Korean or English, but as usual when I am at a small table with Korean staff, they simply discussed me in the third person like a centrepiece, which I have grown increasingly comfortable with. At one point, the principal half-heartedly attempted to set me up with the librarian.

We had almost gotten through the meal, I had downed the squid’s brain (it is, as I was assured, good for man strength, wink wink nudge nudge), when the subject came once around to me and my coworker. “What time does work finish for you two?” the principal inquired. I tensed immediately. I was working hard on my camp, certainly, but I also had about three hours in the afternoon of quality alone time that could be filled with squalling children, should the principal decide.

I studied his indecipherable expression. His whim could make my life much easier or much more difficult, with but a simple word. I tried not to stare into his soul. My coworker mentioned when we left the school, hours after my camp had finished.

“Oh,” he murmured in Korean. “If you finish so early and you have something else to do, why don’t you just go home? No point in you sitting around all day.” He waved his hand magisterially, and rose from the table, while one of the secretaries took care of the bill.

His majesty had just freed up my afternoons for at least a few days before he forgot his generosity. But I would take this boon, and then go back into comm silence so he couldn’t remember to reverse his decision.