One Inch of Intestine

Extruded.

I was trying to walk to downtown (I think I was lost, but don't know) and felt a bit of rumbling in my stomach. Couldn't be anything, sez I to myself, as I had taken care of all that nonsense at home. Until 5 minutes later it became clear that it was something - the fabled Korean Grippe. I was nowhere near a bathroom and I had left my toilet paper at home. In Korea you really can't trust that your toilet stall (with toilet or squat-toilet) will have toilet paper and so you carry your own. With some regret I turned around (noted a Samsung store on the other side of the street) and scooted, increasingly clenched, home.

That 5 minutes almost turned out to be tragic and if it had been 5 minutes and 30 seconds it would have been too long. Let's say that I made it and then pull a veil over this unfortunate incident.

I was bummed, but after sitting around (so to speak) for an hour, all seemed returned to normal and I took another walk about town which resulted in procuring thumbtacks and a mini-DV tape. I also spotted the place that I will be purchasing my "Window Stuffer Anti-Korean Honking, Hawking and Spitting, and Yelling into a Cell Phone System" (patent pending). The only thing I'm having difficulty finding is western-style hangers for my shirts.

Still, 3 out of 4 isn't bad and I didn't have to do too much idiotic pantomime to get the things. Korean class begins on Tuesday, with study group on Friday, and I hope this will speed things up a bit.

I have a slightly better grasp on the classes and next week, when we get into our canned curriculum I will have a bit more to learn. But two weeks after that I hope to be confident enough to take a weekend off and head up to Seoul.

The mini-DV tape should mean a video-post quite shortly.. perhaps exploring the contested terrain (me versus the mold) of my apartment. ;-)

Living on the Cheap, In the Land of the Morning Calm…

So, you get up in the morning and have a delicious crab-sandwich from the GS 25 store, 1,000 measly Won. You wander over to work, where you grab the ‘mocha coffee stick” and open it into a small Dixie-like cup. Then you get hot water from the machine and you have sugar-coffee (certain to reduce moral fiber, but all you’re gonna get around here). Free, gloriously free! Up to your heated office and some computer dorking. Then class.

Lunch is late, because of one thing or another and so you push it to an early-ish dinner. Stop at the store to get

1) 4 mild Ramen
2) Container of Garlic in water
3) Small bottle Soju (it’s Friday baby!)
4) Grape juice.

The Ramen and Garlic will last several more days. The entire expenditure for this is 7,200 won (about 7 bucks) and with some chopped up veggies and a small sausage, you got dinner for well under 4 bucks. Later, I’ll check to see if the strawberries are still tasty and if they are, that’s dessert.

Simple, cheap, and with bottled water and my multivitamin, reasonably healthy.

So my question to me is –

Why was this not possible when I lived in San Jose?

I blame society. ;-)

So Now That I Know it All.... ;-)

Second day of teaching went better, although my class is now up to 37 students which makes group work absolutely cacophonous. I can’t whine about this, since I hated instructors in the States who complained about their “workload.”

Some people never do have a real job. Lucky sods.

There were mix-ups in student scheduling that had to be dealt with afterwards. I discovered, to my intense joy, that there is a wireless network in that building so I was able to upload some changes I’m making to my websites. I think I need to designate one as my official website for business/education/marketing uses and the other as my play site. So a few things will be coming along to Spunangel.

Then, more hassling with class planning. They promise me that the Academic Writing class will likely be small and completely up to my discretion as to content and grading. All a bunch of “blah, blah, blah” that sounded to me like, “sex for grades.” ;-) Well, in the hands on one less trustworthy than I. In any case, I’ll need to think about this one over the weekend. Tomorrow I meet two new classes with the lesson-plan adjustments learned in the first one. Should go better.

Didn’t get out in time to do any of the shopping I wanted to. The effing Canon website is OUT of the battery chargers for my camera. Perfectly understandable as no on uses the Digital Rebel these days.

On the way home I stopped at the GS 25 Mart and it was out of its little crab sammiches! What to do? What to do? Everything else looked so very… Korean. I took a chance on a small triangular wedge of something green. I figured it was small enough to finish, even if it was bad. Lo and behold, when I got to the counter it was knocked down from 700 Won to 500 Won because it was late in the day. Koreans frequently do this to a foodstuff they deem better served fresh. Even the large grocery stores start discounting meat on the first day.. the later you shop, the better the deal you get. And it was delicious! The suspicious green was, of course, seaweed. But the inside was rice and some kind of savory (maybe meat-based?) sauce/stew. The seaweed gave the thing just the right amount of bite, so now I have another “safe” thing to buy. Well, of course, they probably stuff these things with everything from rice and beans to rice and fermented Skunk belly-button. My luck to get the best one first, and the next one will be between the Skunk belly-button and the pepper-sauced e-coli paste. As I think about it, those last two would be 900 Won each, because they would be reputed to have special healing powers (In a Nietschzean kind of way).

Still, it was a win.

I had been planning to eat in the school cafeteria, but as I had left my wallet at home, I only had about 1,400 Won in change in my pockets. Turned out ok though. I didn’t have to use my AK.

Quotidian Nation

Ho-hum.. most of yesterday was dealing with simple things.. getting the copies I needed for my classes since the copy-boy will be gone (again!) tomorrow. As it turns out he was gone yesterday because someone had sent him over to the campus to help the police guide traffic. This makes no sense at all, but I’m not Korean. I think I copied what I need. Then putting together lesson plans which went at a glacial pace, but I will at least have outlines for all of these books by the time this semester is over. This seems like one-time hard graft and then, if the books don’t change, just adapting as I go.

It was interesting to note that one of my classes is heavily dependent on a CD. I say “interesting” because I have yet to step foot in a classroom with a CD player. Given the level of coordination I’ve seen here so far, I have no reason to believe there will be one in my classroom either. Oh well, I’ll figure something out. I will do an interpretive dance. I believe the little beggars will enjoy it.

I have arranged to go observe one of the apparently more successful instructors on Tuesday and I think I should get a much better sense of how to handle the classroom. Nothing went wrong in my class on Monday, but I did come out of it with more ideas on how to begin my other classes, and that’s a good thing. Learning experience I guess. In fact I might ask the guy who lives below me if I can observe his class as well.

Made a little dinner (half a thing of ramen, cucumbers, green peppers, and half a sausage all done up in soybean oil) and now the question is if I want to start Lord Jim before I go to sleep. This is the other good news besides finally getting my office key – I discovered where the big old bookshelf of English books is. Grabbed some science fiction, which I have finished tonight, and Lord Jim because it is one of Conrad’s works that I remember nothing about.

When what to read is the big issue, it’s pretty much domestic blister….

REMINDER: Mean Mail #1 Has just gone out

To those who would like an occasional update that can't be placed on my blog for reasons of acute superiority complex...

Email me if you would like to get these random posts

A U-Curve on the Road of Life..

I made it through the first week here. This is largely due to the fact that I no longer trust the tapwater. The first two times I was here I was unaware that it was unsafe. The unsafetiness (Yeah, that’s a word buddy. I’m an English Instructor, I’d know) was not communicated to me by my BKF, though his wolfish laughter each time I drank tapwater would have been a signal to me if I wasn’t so consistently drunk, tired, or sick.

I sometimes forget that Korea is in some ways a very third-world, first world country. They did all this shite since 1950 and that’s commendable work in a short time frame. But if the new government is looking for something to do? It might work on the water.

Then there’s my impending suicide.

As I look through the “training manual” (which, so far has helped me in exactly no situation) I discover that from the minute I landed in Korea I’ve been on an inevitable and precipitous slide towards the brink (I actually have no idea what that last phrase means, but it sounds good so I’ll let it stand). The bad news is that, given the time frame that this graphic presents, there is no chance I will be able to purchase any kind of automatic weapon. The good news, I suppose, is that this means my fat ass won’t have to climb any kind of tower to find killshots. If I have to be a depressed lunatic I’d just as soon be a lazy one.

This is where Korea has brought me.

The rest of you?

I have no idea. I suspect you have all lost your houses in the great crash of ’08. Hard to say.

None of you email me and many of you are clearly afraid of the reality of that graphic, since you duck out of IM as soon as I log on…

Bastards!

Off to research gun ownership laws in the Land of the Morning Calm.

P.S. My decline into suicidal rage has been hastened this morning by the news I still don't have an office key.

SJCC Reprographics, you rocked..

Just a few signs that this may not be the most organized unit in the Army fighting for the eventual victory of the English language (just before Chinese swallows it whole).

1) I get up early to check out my classroom and, heeding the map which helpfully notes that the Woosong Tower is either building N or Q depending on what class you teach. I head to the tower where I discover that my first class, scheduled in Q-301, is therefore to be taught somewhere in the middle of the on-campus Post Office. This can't be, but I wander in slightly larger concentric circles and discover it must be. OK, I figure, I'll head over the WLI building and get this straightened out.

2) The packet I have received for my first class (the one in the PO) was mysteriously absent a syllabus. I head over to the syllabus office where the nice woman tells me there isn't a syllabus and there isn't about to be one and I should really just leave because I'm in the way. OK, I figure, I'll head over to the Director's office and get this straightened out.

I head to his office and ask him if I need to write my own syllabus for this class. He says, "no, just go up to the syllabus office and pick it up." I tell him my story and he asks if the nice lady said when the syllabus would show up. I reply that she seemed to be saying, never. He looks off into the middle distance, bemused. "That's odd, I just off the phone talking to her about his, she really shouldn't have told you that." Turns out this is a "new" class with a new textbook and the department was supposed to create a syllabus but apparently hasn't. This is interesting and there's nothing I can do. I grabbed an old (electronic at least) syllabus and mark "Draft" all over it and adjust what I can.

3) Then I ask the director about where the mysterious "Q" building is? I tell him that it is marked as the Woosong Tower and he looks at the map and asks, "where did you get this map from?" I respond that I tore it out of the orientation manual that he himself gave me at orientation. Once again he looks off into the middle distance. "Well, that's wrong." He pulls me over to a window and points to the Q building which is right across the street, but nowhere near its position on the map. Good enough. I've got that.

4) Then I go to get my office key. The office man grabs every single key he has (in an unsorted pile on the top of his desk) and heads up to the 7th floor where he tries them all individually. None of them fit. I wonder if I might mention that keys could be.. oh.. marked in some manner? But I know better. Finally, he sighs, pulls his master key and lets me in. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to lock up when I leave.

5) But it's ok. I fix the paper jam in the printer and print out the syllabus and a page of "In English We Think" $500 bills (I'll explain that later). I also have a two-sided assignment that I'm going to give the students while I conduct brief one-on-one interviews to assess them all. I head down to 'reprographics' and it is a small room in the basement with one B&W copying machine. It is also locked tight. When I go upstairs to inquire they say, "oh he's working off-site this morning."

On the first day of classes? Surely you might guess someone would need copying done on that day? But no, the inscrutable Korean mind does not see it that way and so a steady stream of professors wander into the office, lone sad copies in hand, and hear the news, "come back later."

So I shall. I sit and cultivate an asian attitude of resigned patience. And build grudges. Oh yes, I build grudges! ;-)

Cleaning out my Closet

Today has been laid back.. reading and some research.. but I have been relentlessly cleaning my computer and trying to get it in order..

As I did that I came across this lovely screenshot I took some time ago while searching Craigslist for jobs in Korea..

It strikes me that if you're gonna get all bent about how your skills in English are ignored?

Y0u should spell "available" correctly....

But I'm a purist....

Downdates..

No intarwebs at home as the laptop seems to have damaged Ethernet port. No doubt a symptom of the "Great Drop of '08".

But here's the pix...

That one there on the right is the bedroom I am not sleeping in...

The one down below itis going to be of the Awesome Party Deck. And, yeah, I am trademarking that.

Finally.. down there is a hastily cobbled together version of my view from the deck.. Click here for a bigger one.. man..

Alien Whale Pods

Today was Alien Registration Card Day. About 10 or 11 of us stuffed into two cars to head to the local consulate. In “Monday’s Mean Mail” I will refer to the fact that many of our group are pretty fat. How fat? So fat that I didn’t have the slightest chance of getting into the front seat of either car. The last two times I was in Korea, I was always in the front seat. In any random group of Koreans I’m gonna be the fat guy and thus get the coveted front seat. In this group I wasn’t in consideration – I’d have to pack on at least 50 pounds to even be in the running and I’d still have to be in the ‘lighter’ of the two cars to earn the front seat. We be fat!

So three of us fatties, without seatbelts, for there was not even room for a wafer-thin mint between us, were jammed in the back seat as we careened through downtown Daejeon.

I can’t imagine what local Koreans thought about all the avoirdupois stuffed into, and then pouring out of, these two medium sized cars except possibly to call for the Japanese guys with the harpoons.

All went well for all but two of us. Most of us are on the more prestigious E1 (professor) visa, but two of us were on the E2 (teaching kids) visa and as it turned out they need to go to the hospital and get a blood and urine test (primarily for THC and AIDS screening, but also for other drugs that might pop up). Not me though, so now I am safe to go back to the Chinese Rock.

As I looked back on previous posts I note that I left out a picture of the bedroom and the rather astoundingly large deck. I sense some lawnchair parties before this whole thing is over. As soon as the intarwebs man lands at my apartment, I will post these pictures as well as a snapshot of Daejeon's Lovely Panorama.