Children of the Candy Corn

As I sat in one of the rooms prepping a lesson they brought the youngest students down to our classrooms for trick-or-treating. It sounded like a blend of Children of the Corn and Dawn of the Dead. The kids wandered back and forth in groups moaning "trick or treat" over and over and over in a low, joyless tone. It was a little bit scary. The finer points of trick-or-treating were either lost or neglected with the youngest ones. They all had costumes and some of them recognized my Naruto head band.

Happy Halloween!

I Hope You Can Wire Bail Money

Oh sugarpuff. I've been here less than two weeks and have already broken the law. I stole my neighbor's mail. None of the mailboxes are locked (odd in an enormous city like this, yes?) and I wasn't paying attention to the numbers and hauled off with his or her bills. I managed to sneak them back without getting caught by the guy with the giant tongs who keeps watch over the building. Yes, giant tongs. He also is in charge of managing the "recycling" and, presumably, the abandoned furniture farm next to his office.

Speaking of obscenities: I had a brief flash of agitation and stress while prepping for a class today. I wanted to print a quiz and was having problems because the printer in the computer lab is older than some of the students (and I don't know Korean). The end result of this was that I just kept thinking "comma jackass" at the guy who was "helping" me. Literally watching him while all kinds of irked thoughts ran across my mind followed by my own private narrator saying, "comma jackass". Totally justified, I might add, as he ended up having to do exactly what I asked him to do before he began futzing around.

When it comes to computers it's like bloody Ground Hog's Day: each time I tell someone to do something in a technical realm they do something else until I yell at them or they realize it's getting them nowhere and they go back and do what I instructed in the first place (unless they've managed to hopelessly pooch things). Fortunately, my frustration melts away very quickly at this job.

Someone's Never Played SimCity

I don't think there is such a thing as a zoning law in Seoul. It seems that if you own the land and have funds at least to begin building something, no matter what it is, you can. There is a mega-church under construction that has been, according to a colleague, under construction for close to two years. They ran out of money and the site sat dormant and half-done for about a year and just recently came back to life. This is wholly contrary to the typical layout in the U.S. where mega-churches are out in the suburbs. Here there is within the same square half-mile: proto-mega-church, apartment colonies, stores, outdoor vendors, a truck driving school, small farms, hagwons, schools, and a mountain.

I passed a sheer cliff down from a sidewalk that was actually a staircase into a subterranean shoe store. I would have taken a photo but was uncertain of whether that was polite. This, and other stores and vendors, just sprout up out of the sidewalk. The distribution of stores, restaurants, and street vendors is very unexpected. In most of the places I have lived there are specific districts and streets that, because of habit or zoning, are the center of commerce. It seems that here you simply have to have a wander two blocks in any direction from any point of origin and you'll hit someone selling something. One time out of two it'll be something fried.

Probably strangest of all, to me, are the gardens. There are small orchards and gardens distributed on any small patch of land not already paved. I assume that this is partly what fuels the vegetable sellers that set up shop everywhere. The last bit of evidence that there isn't a great deal of delineation of function within the geography of the city is that the trash can end up a variety of places. There is a designated recycling day but instead of having specified bins all manner of objets, including used hula-hoops and broken computers and so forth, are hauled into the parking lot and onto the curb here. Old furniture is ditched, whenever the whim strikes, in the yards of our apartments. It is either liberated by people who want it (there's a constant effort by my coworkers to keep an eye out for useful furniture) or taken away by a mysterious force.

Is This My Sock?

The straw that broke the expat's back...

Ghost Stories, Errata

Some general notes:

*I won't record anything from work because 1) I don't really want you to know or see where I work largely because 2) I don't know how to get the appropriate permissions and 3) Although I'm trying to keep this blog and associated clips family-friendly I don't want to be in trouble for dropping the odd f-bomb and linking this to the specifics of my job might increase the cross-referencing possibilities. Those of you familiar with my tales of No Biscuit from my previous job should know that someone here reminds me of her and I might have to just vent four minutes of obscenities in order to keep cool about that.

*My laundry survived. Amusingly, one of the Korean girls at work, who grew up in the Congo going to an international school (thus bilingual), saw my notes and called me out on translating the washer. As yet noone knows why "sliced raw fish" is an option on my washer. More specifically: noone understands wtf I'm talking about when I mention the sliced raw fish status light.

*I'm going to try to say "yeah", "uhm", and "awesome" less often. One of my smart (too smart for his own good) kids actually tallied my language in use for class. I already told him I'm sending his mom a note telling her not to let him have sugar ever.

*Also, is it just me or am I sounding more like a Canadian? Most of the weagooks are Canadian and it is taking all of my willpower not to say "eh". One of the guys is from Thunder Bay and, I swear, it's as though he has to fit a quota of "eh"s into the conversation. I like him.

This clip is a touch long. I ended up relaying some ghost stories we discussed in class and thought I'd share. Also, now taking offers to increase my status!

"Oh, I just turn it on and push the play button..."

I spent several hours today translating the various words on the input panel of my washing machine. I would refer to the words as representing "options" except that poking them did not seem to have any recognizable effect on outcome so for me most of the buttons are not options but taunts. Having now fed the hangeul into Babel fish and observed the results I can understand why it is just as well that I don't make use of the other buttons.

Before embarking on the translation project I spent a great deal of time trying to determine if the internet already held the answers I sought and found nothing. Now, given that there are thousands of expat English teachers here, I have to assume that somewhere on the web is a tool of use but I could not find it. I decided that I would forge new territory and be a hero to the weagooks[clip below] by creating a useful tutorial on operating the washer. Yes! I will contribute to the greater good while learning the language! I am awesome!

FAIL



Autodidaction is hard. I spent another few hours poking the image above in GIMP. "Weagook" explained:

Time = Distance/Rate

The traffic in Seoul is horrendous and infinite. Only utter madness could explain one's desire to travel by car or bus rather than train. So, although we were told that it only takes 40 minutes to get to our destination we ended up in the school bus almost three hours. The estimation, I assume, was based on the idea that Time = Distance/Rate (with natural addition of a few minutes for lights etc.). However, in Korea the formula must incorporate complex logarithms and variables, such as how many vendors have set up tents in the road, to achieve any form of accuracy. We took the train to get back and it did indeed only take 40 minutes.

We saw lovely mountains, water, and fall foliage. We enjoyed Korean food. We played kickball. In spite of all that my highlight of the day was finding a fantastic example of "Engrish" in whatever little town we ended up in. It's not upside down because the location to which the arrow refers is indeed on the right.