I realize I left y’all hanging with day 0. I’ve been really busy at work and I’ve been utterly sick. So, let’s whiz through the rest of this vacation!

On day 1, I slept in until noonish and then set out on the path to discovering that Gwangju is my favorite non-Seoul city in Korea.

Spiffy Modern Artsy Sculpturish Thing

The main reason is a little hard to describe. Gwangju is not much smaller than Seoul in land-size (maybe 70% or so), but it’s only got 15%ish of Seoul’s population. Also, the region is more rural, more green, more temperate, and the air is cleaner. All this combines to produce more relaxed people. Less running in business suits. Less obsessing over their appearance in public mirror. More dancing in clubs…

I got some fiction writing done and then called up my couch-surfing hosts, who said they were out, but I was welcome to meet them at their place in a few hours.

I went to the May 18th Memorial Park (on May 18, 1980, some political demonstrations escalated into armed conflict with the military, which ended with 200 Gwangjuites dead and thousands injured).

Here’s the main memorial: a statue of a woman holding her dead son, a big metal sculpture/mural thing showing the protests covered up by tank tracks and boots, and an oversized statue of 3 protestors. Way sad. Shouldn’t be forgotten:

I found this spiffy pagoda thing up at the top of the park: had a great view of the city from the top. I grabbed dinner and hung out with my hosts. They’re a married couple from Miami, 27/28ish. They’re saving money here to pay off their mortgage. Then they’re gonna go back and do grad-school while living rent-free.

On Day 2, I got up earlyish and headed to Mudeung mountain, which overlooks the city and is supposedly gorgeous. I ride Gwangju’s single subway line down to a subway station named for a temple inside the mountain park. Turns out the temple is a 3 kilometer walk from the station… Oops. I got my exercise. There was pretty thick fog that day, which made for a really cool, erie feeling going up the mountain. Rocks and trees emerged from the fog as I climbed.

And, of course, the view at the top was spectacular! Or, at least, I’m sure it’s usually spectacular… A Korean woman apologized to me for the fog. She said she grew up in Gwangju and she’s never seen the mountain this foggy.

I'm sure it was gorgeous the day before...

After the mountain, I went back to my hosts’ place, showered, changed and caught a cab across the city to meet the girl from the internet site. She’s a college student, but she seemed really open to and understanding of foreigners. Turns out she spent a few months backpacking alone across Europe, making a lot of European friends and using English constantly. Now she hangs out with the exchange students at her school a lot. I bet they appreciate the fact that she doesn’t treat them weird/awkwardly.

Had dinner and a couple beers. She said she’s good at pool and her foreign guy friends hate losing to her… What a challenge. We went to a pool bar. I won the first game. She insisted on playing a second, even though the buses were about to stop running. She won the second game, though barely.

I found a bus that got me within a cheap cab ride back to the couchsurfers’ place. Chatted with them for a bit, then got a good long sleep, because tomorrow’s heading for the coast!

Yay for 5-day weekends! I’d decided I would get out of Seoul and see some of the rest of the country. But where? I took suggestions, most of which were given half-heartedly. Four days before departure, one fellow foreign teacher confidently recommended the cities/islands in the Southwest corner of the country. I was sold. But none of my friends had those days off, and 5 days alone would probably get rather… lonely. So I created a couchsurfing account and put in 3 requests for couch-use starting Wednesday night. I also went on a Korean personals site which is used for everything from pen-palship and language-exchange to hook-ups and marriage-track relationships. I sent messages out to 3 interesting & stable-seeming young women. On both sites, I said I’d be in town on Wednesday, but I decided to head down Tuesday after work to get a fresh start Wednesday morning.

Day 0 – Tuesday:

I worked on Tuesday, sort of. I hung out at a soccer and basketball tournament. It was fun, and all of the students were in the second grade (16-17 years old), which means I haven’t really seen them in about six months.

In the afternoon, I bought the Korea Lonely Planet Guide and headed to the train station. I bought my train ticket in Korean, and the woman at the counter pointed to the name of a train station on the ticket and said something about needing to transfer trains, which I had already figured out from trying to buy tickets online. I had an hour-long wait for the train.

Fifteen minutes before departure, I headed down to the tracks and was unable to locate my train. I asked an attendant, and she informed me that my ticket was for a train leaving from a different station. Oh really? This is news… How do I get there? By Subway. Jesus! I started walking immediately. About 80 paces through the terminal later, it dawned on me that 12 minutes was probably not enough time to board a train at a different station. I asked a security guard, and he agreed. I exchanged my ticket, had another 90 minute wait, and got pissy. Sure, I’d mistranslated “you need to get on at this station” as “you need to transfer at this station,” but still, when you sell someone a ticket for a train at an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT TRAIN STATION, that’s the kinda thing you make damn-well sure they understand.

I vented a bit on the second lady behind the counter. Since “hey, does my train leave from THIS station,” was a question I’d neglected to ask upon first buying my ticket, I decided it was time to start asking more and better questions. “Where is this other train station?” “Subway…” “No, not how do I get there, where is it?” *Confused* “Subway…” I switched to Korean at this point. “The Seoul Subway is big. Is this place close? Is it in Jamsil (across the city)? How many stops away? Is the name of the subway station the same as the name of the train station printed on my ticket?” At this last one, she said yes and gave me a look that said I was asking stupid questions. I gave her a look that said ‘do I need to go to a different station to board my god damn train’ is a stupid question, too.

I hopped the subway two stops down to the other train station and called a friend to vent about the whole thing. I hoped that this venting would keep me from starting off my vacation in a bad mood. It didn’t. I was irritated. I repeated to myself that I was the only foreign teacher I knew of who got this 5-day weekend, and that I had all that time to have fun, so 90 more minutes was nothing. And I was still irritated.

Then a volunteer string quartet of 12-years olds set up shop in the second train station, and I was less irritated. I love it when kids doing awesome things.

I had 2 big seats to myself for the first half of the 3:00-hour ride, and quiet-guy company for the second half. Also, the trains are super-comfy. Awesome! The main reason I wanted to buy the Lonely Planet guide was because thus far my limited research of the city at the other end of the train ride had told me:

1)      It’s in South Korea.

2)      There are 1.4 million people there

3)      They had a protest-turned-revolt in 1980, which ended in tanks and a couple hundred dead people.

4)      Knowing more about this place before arrival would probably be a good idea.

I started editing poetry for my upcoming mass-email, and didn’t stop until I reached Gwangju at about 8:30pm. Oops. I picked up a map from the train station, flipped open the Lonely Planet to the ‘sleeping arrangements section and noticed the phrase ‘nightlife district.’ Take me there, Mr. Taxi Man!

I stopped off at a Starbucks (free internet) to send off the poetry to a friend for feedback. I also checked in with my Couchsurfing and Korean personals emails. One hit from each—woohoo! Since I had no idea where in the nightlife district the cabbie had dropped me and my maps were bad, it took a while to find the hotel recommended in the book. By the time I’d checked in, showered off the travelness and changed, it was midnight. Time to grab a drink. Most of the bars were booth-based rather than bar-based, so I passed on them, then found my way into a club. I asked the guy at the door how many people were inside. He said about 100, and free tap beer all night. It was a Tuesday. I asked him if he was lying about the beer or the 100 peopel, and he said no. The cover was cheap.

The guy wasn’t lying. And, what’s even more amazing, the 100+ people were dancing. In Seoul, I’ve been to two types of clubs: foreigner-clubs and clubs where hundreds of Koreans stand still or sway slightly and all face the DJ like it’s a rock concert. But no. I was the only foreigner in this place, and there was dancing to be had.

About 10 minutes in, I had a sign-language encounter with a Korean guy in which it was determined that we’d both come there alone, and we should become clubbing buddies. He thought that being friends with the white guy would up his chances with the ladies, and not being there alone suited me just fine.

Tension between genders in Korea is 30x worse than it is in the states. Almost all kids are in mono-gender classes in middle/high school, and many are in mono-gender schools. Groups of friends are mono-gender. Outings are sets of couples or mono-gender. In short, dynamic, friendly, relaxed interactions between the genders are relatively rare for young people. Now put them all in a club where they dance provocatively and chant “Sex, sex, sex on the beach!” It’s part sociology experiment, part comedy sketch and part Greek tragedy.

Almost every guy there wants to approach a girl—any girl, but has no idea how, especially without being able to talk. Almost every girl there wants to dance with her (female) friends and wants to meet a confident, comfortable guy who would approach her somewhere other than a club.

Oh, and I suppose I should mention that in their intensely group-based society, Koreans in general are terrible at making those first steps toward getting to know a stranger.

So, what was happening in the club? Everyone would pretend to ignore everyone else until groups of K guys would display confidence by starting to dance inside the personal space of groups of K girls. Groups of K girls would then rapidly develop the need for another drink from the bar, which would happen to be far away from the invading K guys. There’s no prior exchanged glances, no people starting to dance nearer each other, no looks of approval or nods or flirtation of any kind. Just Girl/Girl/Girl + Guy/Guy/Guy – Girl/Girl/Girl = Guy/Guy/Guy alone while girls are at the bar.

But they are dancing in this place, which is a huuuuuuuuuuuge improvement over everyone standing still in Seoul’s clubs. My new K-guy clubbing pal decided that what was missing from the tried-and-false strategy was a white guy. Righto… He gestures that I should begin dancing in one girl after another’s personal space; maybe it’ll work… ‘No,’ I answer, ‘they haven’t been looking at us.’ ‘Those ones haven’t been looking at anyone; they just wanna dance in their little group.’ I spot him two examples to show him that when I start dancing in the personal space of uninterested Korean girls, they still walk away. Go figure. I also had supposed that every Korean girl must know that if she gives in and dances with one personal-space-invader, then every desperate K-guy in the club will be invading her personal space within the next 10 minutes. I tried to work out a way to communicate the futility of trying to dance with an uninterested or terminally bad-at-interacting-with-strangers girl in Korean. The closest I got was to point toward a tightly-bundled group of girls all facing inward for mutual protection and in Korean saying: “that right there is a girl-fortress.”

I drank my beer, enjoyed the music, didn’t mind the attention pouring in from all angles, and I got to know K-guy a bit while drinking. He’s a nice guy and a relatively confident guy, but he totally wants a girlfriend and has no idea how to meet one. I suggested he meet girls outside the clubs, maybe even start up a dual-gender group of dinner-then-clubbing people at his university so club-goers can actually dance with people they know.

I exchanged contact info with K-guy, drank a fair but not excessive amount of beer, wandered back to my hotel room, and marveled that it was still day 0; my vacation hadn’t even begun yet.

I’ve had access to a friend’s Starcraft 2 Beta Testing account for a few weeks now. It’s fun, though I’m not very good at it by beta-tester standards. It’s also cool that I have a SC2 Beta acct in Korea, where Starcraft is a professional sport, complete with fan-base, superstars and dedicated cable TV stations.

Last night I got my own starcraft 2 beta account. Since the account was brand-new, I got matched up against brand-new players. It doesn’t matter how lack-luster I am at the game, I’m 1000x better than anyone who’s only been playing for a day. I play as Zerg (swarms-’o-aliens), so I decided that until I was free of the newbie-bracket, I’d just try my hand at winning through huuuuuuuuuuuuge waves of generally ineffective (but hilarious) little aliens.

Anyway, that went on for a few hours last night right before bed. Then I discovered an interesting side effect of playing Starcraft late at night.

I had the most vivid Zombie-rise dream, complete with arms stockpiles, baseball bats, fortified government compounds, Clive Owen, a school bus with a decent engine and a big trunk, and ninjas.

‘Nerd’ ain’t a label. It’s a banner.

I had a friend from home visit recently. He’s living in China at the moment, working for IBM (he outsourced himself). He just came by for a 3-day weekend, but the flight’s only an hour, so a short trip’s fine.

“Dude,” he announces as he meets me at a Starbucks near my work, “I am in Korea!”

And then it began…

Everywhere we went

In forty-eight hours, we managed to see almost everywhere. From a western bar with an adorable pitbull named “shock” to the city’s central plazas, an intro Korean class, a stroll through the financial district (one of them), an English breakfast complete with eggs, hash browns, bacon, sausage, toast and real coffee (they don’t have such things in Zhuo’s city in China: this one was a big hit), a movie out (Shutter Island – trippy), and a pub-quiz. We sucked at the pub quiz b/c I don’t care about sports or entertainment facts and Zhuo was raised in China, but darts was cool.

Oh yeah, and we ate plenty of Samgyeop Sal and Galbi, which Zhuo was understandably jazzed about:

Oh so good!

When we first went out to dinner after Zhuo’s arrival, he said he expected to see me utilizing my Korean skills throughout the weekend. Sure thing, man! My fumbling Korean phrases aren’t exactly Zhuo’s fluent Chinese, but I can try… At one point in the dinner conversation, we were talking about global economic stuff, and Zhuo showed me his Chinese money (fresh off the printing press). The waitress noticed the Chinese money, and when we went to pay, I was all ready to show Zhuo how paying for stuff in Korean works… And  the waitress turns to Zhuo and starts rattling away in some language I didn’t even begin to comprehend.

Our waitress was Chinese.

Well, damn.

Most Koreans I talk to tell me they can tell the difference between the Asian nationalities on sight. I was curious as to whether Koreans would automatically know that Zhuo was Chinese. Nope! More fun for me. Everywhere we went, servers, bartenders, bouncers, cabbies, and even random Koreans asking directions all talked to Zhuo. Excepting that first encounter, none of it was in Chinese. It was awesome!

Chillin at a Coffee Shop in Gangnam

I got really good at saying “Sorry, he’s not Korean,” in Korean. It was great seeing the little head-wobble of ‘oh, it’s the white guy I should try talking to? Didn’t see that comin.’

Another interesting discovery was that between the two of us, we could fumble our way through translating a lot of Korean. Zhuo had just begun learning the Korean phonetic alphabet, so it took him a looooooong time to read a word out loud. But, about 75% of Korean vocabulary is derived from old Chinese. So, between us, we could muddle through.

I think the most poignant example was:

“Oooh, Zhuo, quiz time! What’s that building over there with the big sign?”

“Uhhh…. Dunno.”

“It’s a wedding chapel! See, that part in the middle means wedding.”

“Read me the whole thing, slowly.”

“…..”

“It’s not a wedding chapel, man. It’s a wedding gown store.”

“Oh.”

Lastly, something terrifying but noteworthy that we ran across in Nowon: the Hello Kittymobile!

Run for your lives!

I finally got around to organizing and cleaning up pics from a trip that I took with friends a while back. We went to Juwangsan, a big gorge and national park, complete with frozen streams and waterfalls. We also visited Korea’s 2nd- and 3rd-largest cities, and then the historical capitol of the country, which is now an awesome little historical town, and has been called “the museum without walls.”

In general, the vacation was trains and buses and sights and helpful locals by day, a few drinks by night or an American movie back in the room, tucked into mats laid out on the heated floor.

Here are a few of the gorgeous things I saw while running around Korea:

It’s my desktop background

It’s a WELL!

Traveling buddies

Korean palaces rock, though this one’s a bit dusty.

Does this one look familiar?

wide shot of the buildings at Anapji pond.

Purdy

oh my god, racism!

Learning a new language will always involve misunderstandings. Occasionally, those misunderstandings are awesome. I’ll recount two such misunderstandings below:

#1: What Did You Say About My Girlfriend?

I had my students do a simple activity in which they broke into groups of 2-3 and wrote down one place they wanted to go and 5 reasons why they wanted to go there. Then they read the reasons out loud to the class and all the other groups tried to guess where the place was.

Places like France, the UK, the USA, Brazil, and Europe were way too easy, and people usually got them in 2 or 3 clues. Next after them were the abstract places. “Home,” “to a restaurant,” and “to Neverland” worked out better.

When one group was writing, I noticed that 2 of the  three students sat there sulking. Turns out one guy had hijacked the project. His destination of choice was “my girlfriend’s house.” Dating is not common among highschoolers here, b/c they’re expected to be 24/7 study machines, and friend groups tend to be mono-gender (sucks).

So Mr. Proud Student wanted to brag that he had a gf by saying he wanted to go to his gf’s house, while the other two guys sat there annoyed. When it came time for that group to present, Mr. Proud Student stood up and said with a beaming smile: “I want to eat food there.” No guesses. “I want to see her.” No guesses. “I want to hold her.” At this point, one triumphant student shouts out: strip club!

Mr. Proud looked like he wanted to punch triumphant student for implying such things about his girlfriend’s house. Mr. Proud’s team-mates giggled. “I want to kiss her” was followed rapidly by “I want to be with her.” At this point, the levy broke. Guesses of Nightclub, hooker-house, girlie-dance-bar, and a thousand other cobbled together names for adult entertainment venues came in from all directions. Mr. Big and Proud got very red in the face, shouting over and over again “No!” “No!” “NO!” Now his teammates were the ones beaming. They were absolutely loving it.

The end didn’t come until I pointed out to the class that “her” refers to a specific person. By this time, Mr. Proud had gotten more than his share of just rewards.

#2: Where’s on First

I’ve got this English friend who is very big on the fact that the English language is called English, not American. This means that any differences in spelling or terminology between the USA and England are instances in which the Americans are wrong. If there’s any doubt, just look at the name of the language…

Korea is one of the world’s lovely places that learns English the American way. They also have a little difficulty understanding heavy English accents (though, ironically, Korean doesn’t have an ‘r’ sound at the end of syllables, so they pronounce a lot of our words with the English nonexistent ‘r’).

My English friend and I were in our Korean class a little while ago, learning the Korean question words (who, what, where, when, why, how). All of us knew a few of them already, and some of us knew all of them solidly (they’re quick to master because you hear/use them constantly).

While reviewing, the teacher had put all of the words up on the board and was having us plug them into sentences. She pointed to “odeeyay,” the Korean word for “where,” and asked the English guy what this word meant in English.

He said “where.”

Then we had problems.

Because he didn’t actually say “where,” he said “whe-” and then neglected to pronounce the ‘r’ at the end–because he’s English.

The problem is that “whe-” is the Korean word for “why,” which was right next to “odeeyay” on the board.

“No, not ‘whe-’ the teacher says, this one. What is this one.”

“It’s ‘whe-”

“No, ‘odeeyay.”

“Yes. Exactly. ‘whe-’”

At this point, the teacher begins to doubt not only the English guy’s knowledge of the word’s definition, but also his ability to read Korean and tell which of the vocab words she is pointing to. She gives the English guy a look like he’s grown a second head, and he gives her a look like the world is falling apart and he can’t tell why, because damnit he knows that “odeeyay” means “where.”

Also at this point, I couldn’t breathe. I’d figured out what was up a ‘whe-’ or two back, and I was utterly helpless with laughter. I could only watch. And laugh harder.

“odeeyay, what does it mean?”

“means ‘whe-’, right?”

“no, ‘odeeyay.’”

“Yes, ‘odeeyay…’ It’s ‘whe-’”

“No, not ‘whe-’…”

Between rounds, I finally managed to squeeze out “he’s British!” and “‘whe-’ *gasp* is British *gasp* for ‘where!’”

Then everyone was laughing. The English guy said something like “well, for fuck’s sake!” Then in his best Texas hick drawl: “wheeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre!”

We may still call the language “English,” but damn that felt good.

I was hired to teach English in a Seoul public school last August along with 400 other foreigners. We got to know each other over a week-long orientation. Last Saturday was our 6-month reunion. 150-200 teachers crammed into Roofers, a semi-seedy bar in Itaewon (foreigner town where Koreans will give you a wide berth if you have a buzz-cut).

When we all first arrived in Korea, everyone was extremely social and open, so it was a bit of a surprise that last Saturday most of us stuck to our little groups. I realized about an hour in that everyone in attendance fit snugly into one of three categories:

1) People I had seen in the intervening 6 months and gave a hoot about.

2) People I hadn’t seen in the intervening 6 months and couldn’t begin to give a hoot about.

3) People who recognized the logo on my Cloyne Court Hotel sweatshirt and chatted with me about Berkeley Co-op politics for an hour and a half.

Okay, so there was actually only one person in the latter category, but even one is a noteworthy occurrence. He was vice-president of the co-op shortly after I left the board of directors, so we knew a couple dozen of the same people. Our who-do-you-love and who-do-you-despise lists were very similar, so I approve of the guy. It was a nice little taste of home.

I realized shortly after concluding my talk with him that I was bored and that all night I’d operated under the assumption that the best defense against boredom is a good offense–namely buying more drinks.

I woke up Sunday on a friend’s floor. This had less to do with alcohol consumption and more to do with 1) avoiding the $35 cab ride home and 2) the fact that Korean floors are relatively soft and heated.

In fact, with a pillow and a little mat, Korean apartment floors are almost as comfortable as a run-of-the-mill bed.

The ending of my last post was wildly popular, so I’ve decided that as a reward for reading up on the less-than-exciting events in the life of Me, I’ll try to end as many blog posts as possible with something entertaining (or at least really novel).

Today’s Novel Bit:

My school is surrounded by huge apartment complex of 35+ buildings of 25+ stories each (ie: the population of a not-so-small town). The place is very posh, and its security detail is very professional and takes itself very seriously. A couple months ago I absently ran my fingers through my hair while walking past a security guard. He mistook the gesture, giving me a stiff return salute immediately, followed by an approving I-like-ex-military-people nod and a satisfied I’ve-got-rapport-with-the-foreigner smile.

It took me a minute to realize what had happened. I and the co-worker walking with me laughed about it. I forgot about the incident soon after.

Apparently I was the only one. Yesterday I once again crossed paths with a security guard. I assume it’s the same one, because he produced another incredibly crisp salute. I answered with a confused-foreigner look while my memory caught up with me.

Now when I leave work, I try to keep my eyes up and my right hand free. Next time I cross paths with Sgt Awesome, I’m gonna be ready.

I’ll probably only be posting once-ish per week for next month or so, for a wide variety of reasons, including:

Writing! I joined a writer’s group. So far it’s made up of four other guys, all of whom have been doing expat teaching for 5+ years and 3 of whom are married to Koreans. I’m also one of only two lit majors in the group, so there’s a wide variety of perspectives/opinions. One thing which is nice is that there is no bowing down to some perceived literary establishment; we focus mainly on reader engagement and enjoyability, not approval. This is a very good thing.

More than individual feedback, meeting once a week with other writers keeps me active and in writing-mode. Since starting 3 weeks ago, I’ve written 2 new pieces of short fiction and am about 40% of the way done with a third. They’ll be emailed out once I’ve polished them a bit.

As an interesting side-note, one of the guys is Canadian, and he just wrote a 40-page light sci-fi about a scientist who’d created a weather control system and was hired to install it in California to clear smog and increase rainfall in the Central Valley. The thrust of the story is the poor scientist guy getting his project completely bogged-down in California’s utterly messed up water & utilities infrastructure, which in turn creates huge problems with the state’s special interests/budget/environmentalism/political elections. To the writer’s credit, if not for getting some CA dialect terms wrong, I wouldn’t have known that he was from outside the state, b/c his portrayal of our political mess was spot-on.

Work! My classes started this week. 500 new students. I’m teaching with a much older generation of co-teachers this time around, which is proving to be less problematic than I’d originally expected, though they are a bit uncomfortable, they’re either toughing their way through it or sitting out from teaching entirely. Either way, I’m not getting any grief/pushback, which is awesome.

With the benefit of last year’s experience, planning for this year is going relatively smoothly. Schedules, lessons, grading systems, etc are all a lot easier this time around.

But I’m also working a lot more. Last year I taught 21 classes of 1 hour each, and if I wanted to I could teach the same lesson 21 times. Not too bad, considering I have to create all my own lessons.

Now I’m teaching 24 hours of class, 2 of which are after school, and I have to create 4-5 different lessons each week.

The upside to all of this is that overtime is a big deal here. My 3 hours of OT each week come to a 27% raise. Since one of the main reasons for coming here was to save up money, it’s a pretty sweet deal.

The downside is that I have way less time at work to write emails, write blogs, read, study Korean, etc., and now I’m sometimes noticeably tired when I get home during the week. That will hopefully settle down some as the year gets going and I have fewer special projects at work (paperwork to set up new classes, ordering English books/boardgames, etc).

Starcraft 2 Beta! Oh my god, I got a SC2 Beta testing account! Woooohoooo! All my students are mad jealous. Anyway, that’s been eating away at my time a bit. I’ve also discovered that I’m not as good at video games as I used to be. Must be getting old or something.

Hi!

Many of you may have noticed that I took a 2-month hiatus from blogging. It was a great 2 months! I also started a new blog, mostly for greater anonymity. I’ll be tinkering with the theme/layout and making a bunch of topical posts in the next couple weeks. For now, here are a few bits:

I went and explored South Korea for a week, saw lots of cool stuff (including the palacial pond on the header picture).

I also went home for two weeks, which was utterly awesome! There were a few people I did not get to see, sorry! I wanted to see you as well, but my visit home was absolutely packed with family, friends & state-side business all over norcal.

I’ve been back at work for two weeks now, and boy, it is totally different this year. I only have 2 of the same co-teachers as I did last year (out of 7). My desk got moved into a smaller office with all the older-generation teachers. They are utterly uncomfortable with me being there, which is interesting. They make efforts to work what English they know into their conversations for my benefit, often trying to out-English each other, which is sometimes hilarious and sometimes just really awkward.

When I first moved into my apt in August, I was told I owed the landlord a $40/month management fee. Mkay. I never heard when/how I was supposed to pay this, and the landlord never told me. A month passed and no bill. Maybe the school decided to pay it? If my landlady wants the money and isn’t getting it, I decided, she’ll let me know.

I was right. She let me know this morning. Apparently I owe them 7 months of management fees. The accountant who took the call at my school was probably amused.

Oh, I also filed my U.S. income taxes. My total tax-related liability came in at $10–the fee to electronically file my CA return. Muahahahahaha.

One last rather amusing occurrence: I met a few Korean friends-of-friends, including 2 girls who are utterly and incurably English-shy. We went to a historical site, dinner, and then a coffee shop. They spent almost the entire time chatting at each other in Korean, so that they wouldn’t have to actually interact with me (in English). I spent most of the time talking to the one other person who was there, and I now have a no-more-than-two rule for meeting new Koreans (a.k.a. the Bupu rule).

Well, over dinner, I finally got Korean-shy-girl-#1 to speak English a bit, and I commented that she uses colloquial a lot (esp “you guys,” “gonna” and “gotta”), which isn’t that common among Koreans. She said that she’d picked it up from American TV shows. Somewhat reluctantly, she said: “I know one more. You wanna hear?”

Sure…

Tiny shy Korean girl put on her shy determined face, and then, with an emphasizing head-nod and perfect inflection, she said:

“SHUT YO ASS UP!”

and I laughed until it hurt.