Back and Behind

So, I got back from my Korean Adventure last night! It was sad to leave, and it was a very long flight.

As you can see, I only have 1 week's worth of postings. After a busy day in Korea, I much preferred to unwind and spend time with my fiancee than blog, but I will finish things up with my second week over the next couple of days!

Children's English Shirts

So, shirts with English on them are big in Korea. For the most part, they make sense except for shirts made for children. These seem to be filled with random English words or sentences. Sometimes it's not even English words, just English characters. It's fairly amusing sitting in a grade 4 class, reading these shirts that make no sense, and realizing that no one else gets that. Now, the school is fairly cold, so now that the fall has hit, there are few Tshirts for me to read, but my fiancee and the other English teachers have told me about some. Apparently their sometimes rather rude and inappropriate except that no one realizes. Here are two that I spotted last week:

ONE J BOY
MULTIPLIES
EFFECT

and:

U'R MIND FRIENDS
KEEP THE EARTH
AUTHENTIC
Z^TH - 26^TH
1964
LOVE GALAXY
UGIZ JEANS

Korean Adventure: Amusing Teaching Video

An amusing video that one of the English teachers found for the class. Some of the lines are hilarious like: "I've been vomiting" or "It's pussing".

I've heard it about 6 times now (each grade 6 class gets to hear it), and parts of it are actually getting stuck in my head. Scary.

Halloween in Korea

Friday was of course Halloween! We both went to school in costume for kicks and to teach the kids about this English holiday. My fiancee was an angel, and I went as a bond-ish villain, with a black shirt, white bowtie, and eyepatch. The kids and teachers got a good laugh. The one co-teacher made herself a candy costume on the spot in order to join in. Very inventive. The classes of the day were the grade threes, my fiancee's favourites. They've just started English this year, and are pretty nervous using it, so most of my questions were translated for me. They loved the candy we brought. The whole school loved the candy. During lunch, the English office was swarmed by every student I think. When they heard the policy of one candy per kid, but two for a costumed kid, they started sharing all of the costumes that the kids had come in, so we saw a lot of repeats. It was really crazy, the VP had to come and pull kids off us and get things organized. I think we kinda annoyed the one co-teacher too. Things were quieter after lunch.

The English office

Candy and costume

The hordes

The evening belonged to the big party. I changed into my not school appropriate night costume, an Ajamma! It was a multi-floor open house with a number of English teachers in the same building. Each room had a drink. We did sangria. We didn't have our usual liquer to fortify it with, so of course we used Soju. It came out very tasty. Around 11pm, we wandered off to Hongday, the university bar/clubbing area, and went to a place called Gogos that my fiancee is a fan of. It was crazy busy, and very smokey (people are allowed to smoke inside) and I had quite the sore throat by the end of the night. We danced for a while, but decided to leave early (1am ish) as we had our early morning flight the Jeju island. On the way out, we ran into one of the English teachers passing out. She apparently gets stupid drunk every weekend and usually needs someone to help her home. It's gotten rather tiresome for everyone. She also never remembers any of it. I don't know how people can do that every week. Seriously, the teachers here are acting like they're frosh all over again and I don't think I'd be able to go out with them weekly.

Anyway, no one else was willing to leave early, so we dragged her along with us to crash on our chesterfield until we had to leave in the morning. She was horribly uncooperative, and spent the next hour or so crying for no reason. She has crying drunk phases. Nice. Anyhow, our trip home was also a bit interesting because of the other teacher in the same that we shared the cab with. You see, the first cab we hailed wouldn't take us, as he was going the opposite direction, so we decided if we cross the street, we could hail on the the other hundred cabs we saw that was going in the right direction. This guy though, who's been learning Korean, convinced the driver to take us and called us back to the cab. When we neared our destination, we discovered that the way he convinced the cabby was to offer him twice the going cab rate, and now that we were there was backing out. The driver was pissed, and this guy basically insults and threatens him, a few times saying he'll open the passenger door into traffic. Hi tactics managed to get us only 1.5 times the going rate. Never taking a cab with this dude again, he lies to a cabby, pisses him off, and ends up having us all pay 50% more when there were plenty of other cabs to choose from across the street. I was not impressed. Oh well. Apart from the cab dude and the crying drunk girl, it was a decent night.

Korean Adventure: Thursday

Thursday finished off the grade sixes at school. Nothing too exciting beyond what I've already described. It was amusing that all of the teachers were fairly subdued and didn't mention the previous day much. Party time is over.

I did get a bunch of questions about how I was feeling and if I was hungover. Truth be told, I think I was slightly hungover in the morning. Not bad, no headache or anything, but I felt slightly off. I decided to try this hangover drink that Korean drugstores sell called Condition. Not because I needed it, I was just curious. It's in a fairly small bottle and tastes like pineapple juice. No idea what's in it, or even if it works, since my head wasn't hurting, but it's pretty tasty. The guy at the drunk store seemed to be laughing as he sold it. Probably amused by the poor hungover foreigners.

Condition

Anyway, everyone at school was tired, so when classes finished, the principal excused everyone and we all got to leave early! Assah! We went to this Halloween costume store. Halloween is not a thing here, so the store caters mostly to foreigners this time of year. We needed a curly wig for my costume. My fiancee ended up not needing to say anything in English at the cash, and it came out very cheap, so she thinks she got the Asian discount. More on Halloween in the Halloween post.

We then wandered off to Homever (well, now Homeplus, they're just merged, but the sign hasn't changed), a Walmart like store not too far away to get food, drink, candy, and the last component of my costume, an Ajumma visor. We were serving sangria for the party, so we wanted some cheap red wine. We found some for 5000 won ($5 wine!). I don't know how good it is, but in sangria form it was fine.

We came home, cleaned for the party, and I blogged a bit. Easy night.

Update: At my goodbye dinner the other night, the one teacher who told me about condition just realized that you're meant to drink it BEFORE going out drinking to prevent hangovers. When she remembered, she broke out laughing and was nearly in tears. We however realized that the laughing drug store guy was probably actually laughing at us preparing to drink at 8am rather than at us being hungover. Amusing.

Korean Adventure: Wednesday at Bukhansan

This is a fairly long post as it was a busy day. One of the reasons it took me so long to get to. I apologize for the delay.

So Wednesday was the grade sixes. They were much the same as the fives. Their English was noticeably better however and they were more able to ask me questions beyond the standard ones. They were also impressed by my "Pro Gamer" status. Many wanted to know what my favourite games were, however I don't think there's much crossover between what I like to play and what they do. I don't play Starcraft, or WoW, or really many of the overly popular games here.

Anyhow, after classes, the teachers left the school early for a staff trip and I was invited along. The destination, Bukhansan, a mountain not too far from Seoul. It was a fairly difficult hike; parts of it were simply 40 degree rock faces that we had to climb up. We didn't take the usual path you see, we'd have to pay to get into the park to do that. Nope, the buses parked just outside the park and we hiked in along a service road and then up some back path. It actually seemed fairly dangerous and I'm glad I had travel insurance.

Now, I have to say, Koreans are hardcore when it comes to hiking. I can't think of any workplaces in Canada that would even think of having a staff trip of a mountain hike, let alone one where 100% of the employees go and finish. Also, while some of the teachers had a few problems on the hike, others could seriously put me to shame in a hiking race.

It was awesome though. Quite the view and an awesome bonding experience, not only for me but for the teachers too I think. Anyhow, I took a lot of pictures and also have those taken by one teacher and my fiancee, so despite culling them down, there are quite a few to post.

The Way Up:

Old fortress wall in the mountains and the rock trail we climbed

The Mountain

Buddha shrine

Us and the teachers

Her Co-teachers

The Way down was pretty steep at times

After the hike, we were taken to a nice Korean restaurant in the countryside. We had BBQ there and I had my first taste of Makkoli (a Korean rice wine drink). Also, most of the male teachers migrated to a side table to drink Soju, and my fiancee thought that they'd be impressed / amused if I went over there, asked to have a drink with them, and then told them "0ne shot". So, I did, and they were very welcoming. In fact, they didn't want me to leave and asked me to stay and drink with them. The principal came over, poured me another shot of soju and told me, "one shot". So, there I was doing shots of soju with the principal. We talked for a bit and they were surprised that I had had soju in Toronto and actually liked it. In truth, I can't say I love it, but it's certainly more drinkable than some other things I've had, and in Korea it's the tastiest cheapest way to drink (seriously, it's 20% and the bottles are a couple of dollars). They taught me some of the drinking etiquette, which is somewhat complicated. First, never pour yourself a drink, you'll look like an alcoholic. Always let someone else pour for you. Similarly, if you see someone's glass empty, pour a drink for them (because we are all alcoholics). When someone older pours you a drink, take it with both hands and turn away slightly while drinking it. There's more, and I don't really understand it all but anyhow, they're very forgiving of foreigners.

So, dinner ended and we started the drive back to the city. The bus was equipped with Karaoke, and the VP, who had had maybe a little too much makkoli started the singing. Apparently bus karaoke was made illegal a year or two ago for safety reasons, but it didn't seem to stop the teachers. They were singing and dancing in the bus aisle and really wanted me to sing. Rather than disappoint, I picked a song.

The highs, and the lows.

Bus party!

My Fiancee being awesome

The tip was so successful that when we hit Seoul, we drove off to norae bang ("Singing Room" - Korean karaoke term). We got a very large room that fit all of the teachers (norae bang is big here) and continued to sing and drank beer. The machine rates you on how accurate you are at the lyrics, and anyone who gets 100% is supposed to stick a 10,000 won bill (~$10) to the screen and help contribute to the cost for the night. My fiancee and I scored 100 with our duet, and I pulled out a bill.

When the time was up, we packed up and the group dispersed. However, roughly 10 of us decided to go to a nearby bar for some food and continued drinking. The food was very good, and they kept ordering the soju as the one teaching assistant had started the drinking games. The first is called "Baskin Robbins 31", and the second is "The Game of Death". I'll gladly explain the rules sometime if you ask, but suffice to say, we all got more drunk. The one assistant was impressed enough at my not being utterly wasted that he told me the he loved me. In truth, I think the reason I wasn't wasted was that I had had less than he did, but whatever, I'll take the compliment. It was also quite amusing that the staff had to tell us to quiet down. After a while, we decided to call it a night.