Busan weekend

I spent last weekend in Busan.

We are in the middle of monsoon season, and it has rained each day for at least a week, and the forecast is for this trend to continue, but we decided to try for an afternoon on the beach anyway. It worked out perfectly and rained Friday night, but the next round held off until Sat night, staying nice all day Saturday as we played a little beach frisbee and swam in the still chilly ocean.

After dinner, a couple of us decided to go to the casino. I was quite surprised to find out that the casino is for foreigners / tourists only, Koreans are not allowed to gamble! The plan was to just play a little blackjack and have a few drinks before heading out. It was small stakes (5000 won = $4 a hand minimum) so although I had some bad luck, I could rationalize that I broke even with a couple mildly expensive cocktails. But my buddy busted out of blackjack and decided to play a little roulette. He fared poorly and resorted to a defensive betting strategy of increasing his bet with each loss. All of a sudden he's out of chips and talking about going to the ATM again. Well, now at least I can talk about the time I saw my friend bet more than a million on a single spin of the wheel - I put what was left of my chips ~$70 down in a solidarity bet. Basically there were three numbers out of the 37 that could hit to bust both of us, and of course 36 red came up the winner.
The rest of the night we hung out at a bar or two, and saw a street fight involving a man in underwear with a large kitchen knife. Sunday the weather was bad, so I didn't do too much before heading back home. Overall a memorable weekend.

Daegu

Like most countries, Korea is broken into provinces for local governance; there are 9 of them. In addition, the biggest cities are (geographically small) provinces of their own. Its like if Philly seceded from Pennsylvania, but Pittsburg would not be big enough to seperate. Anyway, the cities are Seoul, Incheon, Busan, Daejeon, Ulsan, Daegu, and Gwangju. Gwangju will be the last one I get to visit, as I spent last weekend celebrating the 4th of July and checking out Sean's home city of Daegu.

The weekend was basically one long party. I arrived Friday night in time for a late dinner followed by a walking tour of the downtown bar scene. An advantage of Daegu is that it is compact. It is a large enough city (a couple million) to host a significant ex-pat community, but it is small enough that the majority of the nightlife is concentrated, in all its epileptic neon glory, to a couple city blocks of downtown real estate.

Highlights from the first night included getting a free cocktail in a bag. Seriously, the new trend there is a little kiosk on the road that sells what looks like IV bags full of mixed drinks. Being American at midnight and in the right place at the right time earned us the treat.

Aided by the holiday mood I almost treated the weekend as a vacation from Korea. I ate almost exclusively American foods: hamburger and french fries, bbq ribs, eggs & bacon with biscuits and homestyle gravy, even some apple pie although it was served in a cup and a little over cinnamoned. One misguided Korean friend, having heard that it was a traditional holiday beverage, showed up to the bbq party with a can of eggnogg!

Saturday we got brunch at an America style cafe just outside of a US army base then went shopping for fireworks. We eventually found them right where I predicted: in a children's toy shop. Quick language note: the Korean word for fireworks literally translated is a compound word "fire-flower-play" this is an example of a playfull simplicity to the language. Others include fish="water-meat" watch="hand-neck-time-thing", key="open-easy"

In the mid-afternoon we went to a bbq on the roof party. It was a pleasant day for it and really a fun party. The sky had some threatening clouds, but the weather held out long enough to appreciate the rooftop a little, and get some grilling accomplished. They even had a kiddie pool which gave us the highlight of watching our host climb a tree and shake the branches when a girls dress got blown off the roof. It did start to rain after we had been there a little while, but this may have been a blessing in disguise as it broke the party up into a pair of apartments and the foyer at the top of the stairwell. It is always nice to have different rooms with different moods to wander between - basically there was a singing room, a drinking room, and a place to chat.

When the first party ended (i.e. ran out of booze) We stopped briefly at a different rooftop party to pick up a girl to talk to and a bottle of soju to drink for the cab ride downtown. I had a good time that night. Met a lot of cool foreigners (a surprising number of them English, Irish, and Scottish), and when I was talking to the natives my Korean was in rare form, bolstered as it was by the confidance imbued by alcohol and flirtatious girls.

Sunday Sean and I were a little hungover, but a good way to cure that is to go have lunch at a cafe with outdoor tables where you can watch the human traffic in the park. Walking around, we had a little time to kill before his language exchange and my bus back home, so we went to a rather unusual place. It was a cafe with a $3.50 cover charge that got you access to the self serve bar that had coffee, iced green tea, and some breads. It was a library cafe: tons of books on shelves scattered throughout the place. All Korean as far as I saw. The gimic was that for two bucks extra you could dip your feet into a fishbowl, and the little guys would nibble the dead skin and calluses off your toes. It was ticklish and bizzarre.

I slept on the bus ride back home.

Quarterly update

I have now lived here for 9 months, so it is time for another quarterly update.

First of all here's my job situation. Since I mentioned about a month ago the lack of funding their position flip-flopped a couple times, but now it is back to saying that they cannot give me another contract. It is all bullshit beauracracy. They say they have enough money to hire me for 4 months (to finish the year) but not for a full 12 month contract. But they can only write up a 12 month contract. I suggest they give me a normal contract with the agreement that I will quit at the beginning of 2010, but it is no dice.

One option now is to resign early here to get a good job that starts at the beginning of Sept. but if I do that I will be giving up a lot of vacation time and a last month which is more than double salary (due to a bonus and free plane ticket). So things are still a little up in the air for what I shall do come October, but I'll at least be visiting America, and maybe staying there although I don't have any prospects lined up yet, and the economy may still suck for over educated under experienced folk like myself. By all means drop me a line if you hear of an opportunity that might interest me.

Language skills. They are coming along smoothly. My book vocabulary is growing at a slower rate these days, probably still between 1500-2000 words, but my recall speed of these words is increasing, as is my ability to more quickly select (or identify when listening) different sentence structures, plus my accent is improving - I think my tongue can finally distinguish between the j and jj sounds. The main thing is confidence. The more of that I have, the more I will let myself practice, and thus I'll just improve at a faster rate. The best thing to give me lots of confidence is to have in the group other Americans who have much worse (or zero) Korean ability (and none who are much better). This is another reason it was nice to have Jarod visit earlier this week.

Job satisfaction. Really, my opinion hasn't much changed in this realm. Some of the kids are getting restless because the weather is now hot and humid and its been a long time since their last vacation. This week is exam week, but there are three weeks of school yet to come before a 5 week summer vacation. Then I just have three more weeks in September before my contract expires.

A visitor!

I knew it would be a rare circumstance that would give someone the chance to come halfway around the world to visit my little town in Korea, but it finally happened last week. For readers who don't know Jarod Alper, he has been a friend of mine for almost 20 years now going back to the days we grew up about 1 mile apart in rural Long Valley. By some coincidence he also got his math PhD last year (like me, transitioning from a non-math bachelors degree), not a bad output for a highschool class of less than 300. Unlike me, he stayed in academia, and the details of his government funded post-doc afforded him the opportunity to take June off and travel Asia. Here's what we got up to in the korea portion of that trip:

be forewarned, I am bored at work because they didn't schedule me to proctor exams today, but won't let me leave yet either. So this may have too many details.

Jarod was set to arrive Friday night at Seoul's airport, so I gave him some subway instructions and arranged to meet up with some friends at Hongdae, a happening nightlife area of Seoul. The timing worked out perfectly, as I was able to collect J and bring him to meet Hightower, who had come up from Daegu for the weekend, along with frisbee Seoulites Jacob and Jeff, who were all sitting at a restaurant bbq table that was just sizzling with pork.

After eating, and securing a room for the night, we hit up the town. First stop was a cool pub styled like a European castle. The architecture was almost over the top, but they made up for it with some delicious beer. It was already late, so Jacob left at this point, but those that remained decided to check out a more dance oriented club. Now, there is some element of prejudice against foreigners in the Korean culture, but for every negative experience I seem to be more than paid back in benefits. The club we went to was a pretty decent place: nice layout, $8 cover (which I didn't have to pay) came with a free drink (which I got anyway), Ok music that was not blasted so loud you couldn't have a conversation. Anyway, there was an energetic Korean guy there who seemed to like us just because we speak English, so he was always introducing us and inviting girls to dance with us. We partied the rest of the night there, then stumbled back into the daylight. Jeff fell asleep at the table drinking his 'hangover soup', I realized its been over 24 hours since I've slept as well.

The next day it was pouring with rain. Jarod, Sean, and I decided to check out the "East Gate" that is supposedly surrounded by huge and varied markets. I wasn't so impressed, but the whole area is so sprawling you really need an agenda and some local knowledge I guess. We ate some stone bowl bibimbap, then searched for shirts with hilariously bad English to little avail.

The rain had stopped by evening so we were ready for another night on the town. Our first stop was Gangnam, a supposedly more upscale area. We had another great meal, then, walking around with no particular plan, saw a place that just had tons of gorgeous women walking in and out of it, so we had to see what it was like inside. It was a traditional style Korean watering hole. A place where small to medium groups have private tables to get their drinking on. We ordered some dongdong-ju, a traditional cloudy rice drink with a reputation for hangovers. It is obligatory to order a side dish, so I ordered the only one that I didn't know what it was (menu was Korean only). Turned out to be a kind of gelatonous acorn paste that is one of the hardest things ever to eat by chopstick. But the sauce was peanutty and spicy so the taste, coupled with the thrill of successfully getting a piece into your mouth, made it a good dish.

After leaving that place, a young Korean guy started talking to us on the streets. He said he was just killing time until the subway started again in the early morning because he didn't want to pay for a taxi back home. We went to a German style brew-pub that he knew of in the neighborhood because anytime you can drink non-Korean beer you've got to jump at the chance. One funny piece of conversation there was when we asked him, "What's the best university in America?" "Probably UCLA." Alright! "So, what's the 2nd best?" "I don't know, maybe Carnegie Mellon." He was making a good first impression on me. Actually he was pretty annoying, and evidently just trying to leach some drinks and taxi rides off us without really having his professed knowledge of good places to go. So back in Hongdae we ditched him at a club and moved on. We partied the rest of the night away in similar fashion to the day before. My goal for the night was to try to flirt with Korean girls in their language. One girl I asked, "What's your name?" in Korean, she replied "I don't speak English." Another was fussing with her hair in the mirror. I said, "Don't worry, you look lovely." she looked at me and said, "You look like Jesus." In guess this was an improvment. Anyway, we eventually crawled home in the early morning daylight again.

On Sunday HTower left to meet his cousin, so Jarod and I had a half day left in Seoul before catching the bus back to my town. We decided to do something cultural and take a tour of one of the old Joseon dynasty palaces. In what was a remarkable coincidence Jarod saw someone he knew in a subway station. Not just someone he knew but, "If I had to name my top three mathematical rivals this guys name would come up. We're working on exactly the same problem with exactly opposite points of view on the correct way to tackle it." But in social terms they were friendly. This guy, and his friend, were also going to view a palace (although a different one) so we joined forces. The palace itself was pretty cool, but far from awe inspiring. In fact, the "secret garden," a place hyped as being in perfect harmony with nature, was quite disappointing. The highlight of the tour was the guide. She had a dry wit that had a way of maximizing her lack of native speaking ability, it really came to the fore when she had to tell off a classless clown in the group. I practiced my Korean on her a little bit. First she made fun of my country accent (because I've been learning Korean from Southern rednecks), at the end when I thanked her, and told her it was an interesting tour, her response was to correct the 'politeness level' of my verb conjugation. But don't get the wrong idea, this was done in a charming, not caustic manner.

On Monday, Jarod got to sleep till noon waiting out the torrential rain while I taught my freshmen girls. The rain had stopped by the time school was out, so it was a good time to introduce some of my Korean friends. Jeongmi and Jinseong went out to sushi dinner with us. It is really funny how fast Koreans make judgements. After an hour Jeongmi said to Jarod, "You are very pure." Jarod said, "What about Colin, is he pure too?" "We thought so at first ..."

After dinner we visited Jeongmi's friends, married couple with a cute toddler. The whole night had a lot of laughs, but maybe the funniest sequence centered around their new cell phone with video chat capabilities. Our host decided to call his niece, who is one of my students. He points the camera at me, and she and her friend gasp in surprise. Then I point the camera at Jarod and its total pandemonium on the other end. After the short call we let him know it was the first time we had seen this technology. The guy, who has barely any English, bursts out laughing, "Country boys!!" The final stop is my apartment where Sooyeon and Jaysik join us for a little more drinking and conversation before we call it a night.

Again I get up to teach while Jarod sleeps in on Tuesday, but he comes to have lunch at the girl's high school cafeteria, and helps guest lecture my last class on the day. Unfortunately of all my classes, he came to the one with the least enthusiasm and English ability. Jarod said some of the students he tried to talk would just hide their faces. Oh well, he had a more entertaining time introducing himself to a 3rd grade class, and was probably complimented on his good looks more in those two hours than in the rest of the year combined. Tuesdays are my shortest day, I am free after 2:00. We borrowed a racquet and played some tennis. It was a lot of fun, but really tiring in the 85F high humidity. I had never gone to a bar in Hadong without a Korean in the group before, but that is what we did after dinner. It was pretty late for a Tuesday, and the place we went only had one other occupied table

Weds the final exams started at the high school. I only had to proctor some tests in the morning, and was free by lunch time. Afterwards we played tennis again, then only had time for a quick meal before packing Jarod off on bus to Busan so he could catch his flight early the next morning.

We packed about as much as possible into his short time here. The next day, after another half-day of exams, the rest of the teachers and I went for a mountain hike in the afternoon. In need of catching up I slept almost 12 hours that night (from 8 to 8 with just a short break in the middle watching some Wimbledon).

Fresh news

For a record tying third blog post in a day, let me share with you the news I just heard today.

Apparently the county is cutting back funding in the schools: the cost of cafeteria lunch is going up, they will not replace the old school buses as planned, and funding for native English teachers will be limited to elementary and middle schools. That's right, my job is disappearing at the end of my contract. So my previous plan of hoping to stay until the end of the school year in February is kaput. Well, it just proves the old adage about the best laid plans; I've got to make a new one for next autumn and winter at least.

Fun times in Busan

After the long weekend at the beginning of the month, I spent a couple weekends staying local. It was raining, and I felt like I need to relax anyway. I did alos get a gym membership this month, cause I felt like I'm not getting enough daily exercise. I made a few new friends this way, which is nice, but the best part is after you are down working out. They have a dry sauna, three hot tubs (bubbly, extra hot with sea water, and green tea enhanced), and an extra cold swimming pool; it's very relaxing.

Last weekend the weather was good at last, just in time for a planned trip to Busan to meet up with a bunch of frisbee friends again. Busan has Korea's most popular beach, in the summertime you cannot even get a tan there because the sand is almost 100% covered by umbrella shade. But May is not official beach season, so even on a ncie day there was room to set up some fields and play some beach ultimate. We had a tournament. It was lots of fun, and my team ended up winning. To make it more memorable I had one of the my best catches ever in the finals: full field huck in hard to read wind, full extension layout grab, and it was game icing (took a 2 pt lead to 4 pts, and we just needed one more for the win).

Also I found a new trick to drink for free when we went out Saturday night. At dinner someone told a lame story about how he and a friend had a bet to see who could stand on one leg the longest. The loser stepped down after 18 minutes. So I disparaged their endurance, and asked a stupid question "Which leg got tired, the one dangling on the air, or the one that was supporting the weight of your entire body?" and it was on. Almost a dozen people ended up taking part in the challenge on the rooftop of a bar. After half of us outlasted 20 min we demanded shots of liquor to continue. In the end 4 of us got about 4 or 5 free drinks each over the course of another hour before, in a show of solidarity and boredom, putting our other foot down in unison for the tie. Then I went downstairs and won a game of connect 4 for my final drink.

More "little things"

I forgot to update this topic for a long time. It is the kind of thing that you think of a lot of good ideas for, but they slip your mind when you are in front of your computer. So here are some more of the details of lesser significance but nonetheless cool aspects of being in Korea.

Full service food delivery. Everyone likes a hot delicious meal right at your door. Korea goes one step farther. When you order delivery they bring a basket with solid dishes, metal cutlery, and depending on the meal your ordered, a mini gas cooker to keep your stew simmering as you chow down. For $20 you literally get a family size feast and $60 of hardware delivered to your door. Then they make the return trip to take back there equipment and take care of the washing up.

Drinking in the streets. Besides Vegas and Mardi Gras, where in America can you just walk the open streets with an unshielded container of alcohol? This society is surprisingly libertarian in a lot of ways, although drugs outside of alcohol and tobacco are very harshly controlled. Another example is that in some provinces red traffic lights are treated as stop signs at night.

I'll try to do a better job, and add a few more of these in the not too distant future.