Splishy-Splashy Foreigners

So we don't have a tan yet, and up until the weekend it has been pretty cold. It dropped to -6 celsius on Tuesday, and we had a rather interesting snow/thunder storm that night. We've managed to seal off the door and windows as much as we can, and the school has agreed to help us out by getting a space heater, so we'll be able to dry our clothes soon. Yay!

This week wasn't too exciting, hence the lack of blogging. Tara's still writing teacher's college applications, which will be done by the end of this week. We also sent some packages home for Christmas, which wasn't that expensive at all given that they should arrive 3 days after we sent them.

We went swimming, (finally!) at an Olympic-sized swimming pool near our school, which was fun but an interesting adjustment. As soon as Tara walked into the pool area the entire group of people turned and started whispering "Yongo" which means "English," and "Waeguk," which means "foreigner." They have one catch-all term for foreigners here, with no distinction about where you're from. You're just not Korean, and therefore don't matter. This may sound harsh, but there really is no place for foreigners in many Korean social circles. People are generally fascinated by the fact that we actually live here. It's kind of crazy that they think that Korea can remain an isolated, homogeneous country while integrating further in the global economy. Things may change drastically in the next generation or so, as the rate of men marrying foreign women is around 25% (though most of these are poor Vietnamese or Philippino mail order brides).

So, all the attitudes towards white people in particular were magnified in the swimming pool. We both had gangs of kids following us around, asking where we were from and for our names. It got a little annoying, but they're still cute. In the change room, Tara was marauded by a group of little girls asking where she is from, if she owns a plane, if they should call her "ajumma" which is what they call married women, if she is married, if she can play with them, and if she's fat. These are the concerns of 7 year-old girls... sigh.

So, the weather's been nice the last few days, and I was opening my window at school to see if it was raining and the screen just fell out onto the road. Our school isn't the pinnacle of engineering. I had to explain to our principal what happened, then run and get the screen before anyone came out of or into our parking garage, and then try to put it back. As I was trying to install it again, I saw the school's cook, a super nice woman, looking at me strangely, and all I could think to say was, "it's broken," knowing that she wouldn't understand me. The screen's back in place, for now, but it will probably never be fixed. We still don't even have clocks yet.

We're Getting a Tan!

Hello Everybody!

Guess what? We have booked ourselves a once in a lifetime, Christmas vacation. It will be a hot and sunny Christmas for us because we are going to Boracay, Philippines! It will be just like a honeymoon - except not a honeymoon. Apparently, this is the "cold" season there. Everyday is about 30 degrees celsius. Thats pretty cold. It's too bad we are going in the "cold" season. Wow. I'd totally be jelous of me. Are you jelous? Okay, okay, I'll stop rubbing it in. If it makes you feel any better we will totally be thinking of all of you under the shady palms, on the sandy beaches, while we eat fresh fruit at Christmas.
That's terrible. I'm sarcastic, okay? Brendan says, "If we could bring you all with us, we would."
I agree.



It's been really cold here lately. Yesterday it went down to -6 in the daytime. We wanted to go for a walk, but opted to take the bus to "HomeEver." It is yet another huge department store. Brendan wanted to find a cheap guitar, but they don't carry guitars at that HomeEver. We looked around and found that they had sweaters on sale for 5ooo won (about 5 dollars cdn). I found a few that I wanted to try on, but the sales lady didn't want me to. So, after asking for a change room, and not being allowed, I striped off my coat and started trying on the sweaters in the middle of the store. The lady flipped out. I kept asking why I couldn't try them on, while I kept trying them on. They just kept telling me to pay for all the sweaters. None of them fit, so I didn't buy them.

I asked at work today why I couldn't try the sweaters on. Apparently, women wear so much make-up here that stores don't want them trying on shirts because the make up will ruin the clothes. I wasn't wearing make up. The teacher at school told me just to say, "no makeup!" and rub my face next time. I'll try it.

There was a thunderstorm tonight. The thunder was really rumbling! It was kind of scary. The wind was really howling too. Luckily, we put plastic on our windows this week, so we kept most of the cold wind out. It is freezing.

Oh yeah! We met some new friends at Canada Buddy. They are a bunch of young Korean guys. They were very nice. The one guy, Tiger, was sad that his friend from Philidelphia had recently went back home and was looking for more people to speak english with. He is quite a liberal guy, which is great, because Korea can be really conservative. Hopefully we will meet with him and his friends again. It would be nice to have a language exchange, and some new friends!


Here is a picture of Brendan enjoying some freshly cooked Octopus in Insadong, the traditional district of Seoul. We found some exciting Christmas gifts for our families there this weekend!

Who likes sharing?

So, we have a new goal at school. A previous goal of ours has been to eliminate certain phrases from the kids' vocabulary, most importantly "fine, thank-you," as literally everyone says that in response to "how are you?" We've been quite successful on this front.

Sparked by an incident yesterday with one of our fellow teachers, our newest project is to promote sharing as much as possible, in kids and Korean teachers alike.

Many people are very selfish here. It is rare for someone to move out of the way if you need to get by, for people to watch where they are going and avoid hitting you with a shopping cart, a handbag, or whatever else they are pushing/carrying, and at lunch time it's often a scramble to get even enough food to be satisfied.

We don't wish to generalize. Korea is a very large nation, and we make no pretensions about labeling them all in a certain way.

However, certain people are terribly rude in the way that they strive to take as much as they can, irrespective of what they need or how many people are around them. This is a daily annoyance at the school and so we've decided to try and remedy it.

How exactly? It was easy with the kids. They REALLY don't like to share even pencil crayons, or books. But they're children and it's both easy to understand and easy to make them do it. With co-workers, it's a little more difficult. I (Brendan) have taken to being one of the first into the lunchroom to get what I need, though I simply cannot deprive other people of food for my own selfish reasons, especially our principal who is pregnant. My co-teacher, on the other hand has no concern whatsoever for the amount of people that we share lunch with every day.

The most depraved incident happened yesterday, when Tara brought up the fact that it's really hard for us to use the computers, as there are only two and the Korean teachers arrive before us and spend the whole morning on them if possible. Before, when the four of us worked in the same office, Tara and I had our own computer and things worked fine. Now that both computers are in the library, and both have internet access, we've had to fight to use what was formerly our computer (which has all of our files on it, as well). Tara brought it up at our daily "meeting" (which we have every day to promote "discussion" though only Tara and I actually bring important matters up to discuss, and are invariably met by silence), and our supervisor dodged the issue by saying we should talk to the Korean teachers about it. The supervisor left, and we were prepared to discuss the matter, but the Korean teachers also completely avoided the issue. Tara followed them, and proposed dividing the computers the way things were before, and my co-teacher actually answered by saying "I will not share!" She is 27 years old, and worse than the children we teach.

Tara said maybe we should talk to the principal about it, and they answered by repeating the same suggestion, and the principal basically spoke to them like they were children, came back to us and said that the computer was rightfully ours again. She told us we were now responsible for the computer, which was fine by me as I now have license to clean all of the crap off of it and get it into better shape.

I feel bad about forcing such a thing to happen, but I've become sick of asking for the computer, because I need something for a class the same day, and waiting another half-an-hour while my co-teacher finishes making some useless worksheets that have nothing to do with the curriculum.

So, tomorrow we're going to start by bringing in some dessert for lunch, and sharing it with our fellow co-workers.



Here is a video on sharing, if you need a lesson. If we could arrange for our co-teachers to watch it, and then explain it to them, it would probably help a lot. For now, any suggestions?

I guess it was a happy birthday...

It was just a little strange. The school remembered, which was surprising, and I was greeted with a nice little gift of a card and stationery from my co-teacher, Jinny. They all bought me a nice cake after lunch time, though as I was bending down to blow out the candles I almost lost an eye. They have these firecrackers with streamers in them for birthdays--you just pull the cord and it blasts out, usually in the air but yesterday right in my face. It was a close call, but harmless in the end. The cake was a yummy almond chocolate, good except for the almonds being a little too salty. Not a huge deal.

My kids even remembered, and one, Janice, told me she was sad because she forgot to bring a present. Another gave me some chocolate, and another some oranges, though she had a whole bag and was sharing them with everyone.

The rest of the school day passed normally, though I was in an exceptionally good mood for obvious reasons.

We returned home, enjoyed the last of the cake, and had a birthday Guiness as well, which wasn't even that expensive. It was around 6000 won for two cans (the size of pop cans, not pints), and came with a glass. It's more expensive than Korean beer, or even Budweiser, but great once in a while.

After, we headed to Sang-dong area, and enjoyed some rather good curry chicken BBQ (karae dokgalbi), before heading to Canada Buddy in hopes of meeting a few people we kind of know. We had plans to meet a Canadian guy named CJ, but I guess we were a little late or something, and he wasn't there. We sat at a table, and eventually two guys named Tim and Reece (American and South African) asked to sit down and proceeded to play poker and smoke cigarettes. They were joined by a few other people, and after an hour so of sitting awkwardly, we started talking about work and comparing horror stories of working in Korea. We had a good conversation with a nice girl named Sara(h) from Northern England, and she invited us to a different bar near Bucheon station, closer to home.

There, we saw more foreigners in one place than anywhere outside of Itaewon (the "foreigner district") in Seoul, and ended up talking to a nice English guy named Craig. Tim and Reece wanted to check out another place called the Goose, in Bupyeong, which we had heard of before but had never seen, so joined them in a cab. We didn't realize at this point that Bupyeong is in Incheon, the city west of us. It was a little far away to travel to a bit of a dive (part of the bar's charm, according to Tim), but it was a decent place with cheap beer and a pool table. Tim and Reece are quite good at pool, so they split up onto to different teams and Tara and I took turns playing each of them. I was happy to be playing some pool again, and Tara enjoyed herself too, but the smoke was a little thick in the small room (her mostly gone Bronchitis wasn't too happy).

By the time we took a cab home, it was after 3am. I wasn't too drunk, (was I Tara?), but my head wasn't too agreeable this morning either. We slept until the last moment we could this afternoon, and luckily we got up when we did because the internet guy came shortly thereafter. Which reminds me: I'm writing this at home!!! We are actually connected to the internet, now. Y'all can expect more blog posts, and some pictures as well. We're going to update the blog with past pictures, so feel free to take a look at old posts to have a glimpse into our wonderful Korean lives.

Thanks to all who wrote me nice birthday messages. An honourable mention goes to Uncle Fergie who actually figured out how to write happy birthday in Korean. It was inded a great start to my day.

(p.s. We changed a comment setting, so it will no longer open in a popup window. We hope this will fix the problem for those of you still having trouble. Either way, feel free to let us know if it works or not)

Yongsan Electronics Market...Wow!

So, guess what we did yesterday? After searching around the most technology-filled area I could ever even imagine, we actually managed to find and purchase a computer!! It's an HP Compaq Presario, with an AMD 1.8 gHz processer, 1 gig of RAM, 12o gig hard drive, a DVD RW, and some other stuff for under 900 000 won ($1000 cdn). Best of all, we got an English operating system. With HP computers you can choose a language when loading Windows, and this saved us probably 120 000 won anyways.

We were told to check out the Yongsan electronics market, near Central Seoul, to find a good deal. Right at Yongsan subway station there's a "mall" called I-Park that puts all other malls in Canada (that I've seen anyways) to utter shame. This place was 9 floors, at least 3 buildings, with a huge Restaurant section, an outdoor courtyard with a stage and some fake trees, a roof-top area where you can view the vast magnitude of Seoul's downtown, and a lot more than we were able to explore. Pictures will soon follow.

We quickly found a computer we were interested in buying, but decided to look around elsewhere, so then took a bridge over the train tracks to the Electronics Market proper, which was equally as large as the I-Park mall, though not as nice. We only looked at two of the 8 or so floors, failing to find a better deal than we previously found and realizing that it was all basically the same stuff over and over--LG Digital booth, HP booth, Samsung booth, Toshiba booth etc. We'll probably head back when were ready to buy a superior digital camera (mine, though serviceable, is just not good enough, sadly).

After, we headed to Itaewon to meet Tom and Jess, the Brits, and tried to find a Thai restaurant we were all excited about. We failed, unfortunately, and decided that Itaewon was too expensive for the likes of us. The area has the largest foreigner population in Korea, thanks to an American military base nearby. We headed instead to Insa-dong, another nexus for tourism, and found a Korean restaurant tucked away in an ally way off the main street. Dinner was quite good, and cheap too. Tom and shared some good pork, served with with chige, a stew commonly made with tofu and/or seafood, while Tara and Jess each had their own soups.

Tara being still under the weather (she apparently has Bronchitis, and was loaded up with medication on Friday to treat it), we headed home and slept a long time.

Tonight, our only plans are to try and find a cheap movie to (finally!) enjoy in the comfort of our own little home. We don't yet have internet access, but it shouldn't take longer than a week to get it in one of the most wired countrise on the planet (in 2005, only Finland had a higher rate of broadband internet connections per capita in the OECD).

No other plans yet this week, though we might head south a bit to Suwon to see the massive fortress located there (just in time for Brendan's birthday, which is Friday for those unaware or forgetful).

Cheers!