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October 29, 2005 >> The Children Update
The kids aren't alright.
It's been Halloween month here at Kids Herald School and our hideous days are consumed with off-key singing and cries of "Teacher, teacher! Dollar please!" Let me explain. The kindergartners have been in intensive performance mode for the last week as we desperately try to hone their childlike abilities into something we can show their parents come Monday. I never really had strong feelings about the Adams' Family, but now I'm sure I will go into convulsions if I ever happen across a rerun on TV and the theme song assails my ears. And the choreography - oh, the choreography. Lines of children swaying back and forth, banging into each other. Triangles and cymbals clanging and clashing at inopportune times.
Screaming and yelling. "You think this is fun? Do you think Halloween is a joke? Your parents will be watching you on Halloween... do you want your parents to see you putting your fingers in Sally's ear?? You're going to make mommy and daddy cry!" The kids will undoubtably grow up with a hatred of All Holidays Western. This is definitely not the Halloween I remember.
The older children have been getting bribed with "dollars" - tiny replicas of American money - all month. On Halloween day they can exchange these dollars for candy and treats and, I dunno, maybe pony rides or something. Every day they covetously produce their collection of dollars, often lined up neatly in their own special little pocketbook, and proceed to inform me just how many dollars they have. Then the other students will either produce their fat stash of dollars in an effort to one-up the original kid, or cry to me: "Teacher, teacher! I only have ONE dollar!" And expect me to rectify the injustice. Of course, I only laugh at how poor they are.
We're supposed to give out this Halloween money for good behaviour, but I usually use it to bribe kids to do something that amuses me. Writing the best sentence about how amazing I am, for example, and then I give the dollar to the kid who draws a picture of me looking like a pig. I'm fickle like that. Anyways, I've been out of dollars for a while now and I think the children are starting to suspect my weakness.
A few weeks ago we took the kindergarteners to this place called the English Village. The English Village is ostensibly supposed to show the kids how to act and behave at such Western staples as: The Post Office, The Police Station and The Host Family Dining Room. The whole thing was a big load of shit though, as the resident teachers at each of these locales inevitably set the kids to drawing pictures. Drawing pictures is the ultimate time waster, and I gave these false prophets meaningful looks as if to say, "Bitch, I can use this tired trick for free back at Herald!" Also there are police stations and post offices and dining rooms in many, if not most, Korean locales, so I don't know what the hell this field trip was supposed to be about.
However, a big fat Texan man who ran the show gave them a harsh dose of Western reality from time to time. He would amble down a hallway, spot our kids and make a beeline to them, presumably not noticing their looks of terror. "Whaay hallo there lit-tle bay-bees!" he would roar. "Yer not mo-war than a mouthful, ain'tcha?" And they would shrink away and he would laugh, a big belly guffaw that shook them to their very bones. And then he would move on, leaving them to wonder when the scary man who didn't speak English properly would return to devour them for real. I came to look forward to his visits.
Finally, the Tale of the Tiny Thief. A few nights ago we were over at Belinda's place, gossiping about the kids as per usual. Sometimes it bothers me when you spend your entire day at work and then have to talk about work in the scant few hours you have before doing it all again, but occasionally it's worthwhile. This was one of those times. We were discussing one little girl who I would label as "entirely nondescript" and Sam bluntly called "a fucking alien."
Well, apparently I was misjudging Alien Lucy: she is definitely a Child of Note. After kindergarten, she roams the hallways during the afternoon classes until her mom comes to pick her up. I teach her sister, Alice, and weirdo Lucy often spends a fair portion of the class peering timidly through the door. Once I invited her in to sit down but she only wanted to sit beside Alice and that made the table dynamic lopsided and unpleasing to my eye, so I never asked her in again. I'm all about aesthetics when it comes to seating plans.
Anyways, Mike and Sam told us about her sordid past - on no less than three occasions in the past, she's been nabbed for stealing from the teachers' lounge. They'll do random bag searches on her, despite her wild head shaking (I've never heard her actually talk), and pull huge tins of candy and hundreds of stickers out of her backpack. She doesn't steal in moderation - she's a full-on kleptomaniac. And she's good at it. The teachers had to lay multiple traps after they found their possessions trickling away and Lucy sidestepped them all, creeping through the cracks with her ill-gotten gains clutched tightly in tiny hands.
Anyways, one sad day Lucy slipped up. She got careless and Sue found her with a bag lined with half-eaten cookies from Cindy's desk. She couldn't really call Lucy's parents because that would be a catastrophic, immense embarassment to her family under the Korean concept of honour. They would have no other choice but to pull Lucy out of Herald, taking their fat enrollment fees away from our coffers. Unacceptable! So the little thief was lectured, and lectured hard, and she 100% knows that Stealing is Wrong.
Ever since, Lucy has been subject to intense scrutiny. When she prowls through the lounge, she's watched like a hawk. She is no longer nondescript. Still, her disease lingers on. And when I heard the story, I thought about how my bag of dollar-store candy from home had been dwindling away. I thought about my missing sticker sheets. I thought of Lucy. The next day Mike bag-searched her and, sure enough, one of my candy bracelets, half eaten, sat guiltily at the bottom of the front pocket.
And she sat there, on the edge of the desk, with a ring of teachers around her and a sad little smile on her face.
She's broken and all my candy is gone, but this is what makes teaching so great: assembling a story out of their incubating lives and turning the kids from a sea of blank faces into actual characters, one by one by one.
Posted by Chris at 12:28 AM >> Commentations (6) | Permalink
October 27, 2005 >> Conversation 2
I've failed you, Livejournal... er, Clemensy blog thing, and I'm sorry. You see, I have so many delicious words and scrumptious pictures to fatten you up with and yet somehow none of them are actually here. I think I may have left them in the trunk of the car.
Spare computer nerd time is hard to come by these days. However, my order of business when it is computer nerd time is as follows:
-Reading email.
-Looking here to see if anyone has posted comments calling me a cocksucker.
-Reading the emails that I liked one more time.
-Checking the BBC website to make sure South Korea hasn't been nuked.
-Reading other peoples' blogs, but only if they're very whiny and complain about school!
-Replying to emails that I got a week ago.
-Writing a stupid blog entry. We're talking really stupid here.
-MSN.
You will notice, I hope, that MSN is LAST on my super-important list. If you didn't notice, it's right there at the bottom, hanging off the edge into the paragraph rift. You can't miss it. Well I guess you could, if you totally skipped over the list but if you did that then you're fucking silly and please to be getting off of my interwebsite please. The list is crucial.
Anyways, I have taken a particularly vicious dislike to MSN ever since I left the fine nation of Canada. Every time I log on, the whorish realities of space and time hit me across the face and the recoil gives me whiplash. Something about real-time conversation just hammers home the point that I'm wildly detached from everything my MSN list represents, and I feel like a stranger in my own digital home. I feel worlds apart, awkward in my own skin.
I generally can't stand it for more than a few minutes at a time - my neck gets itchy. Seriously. I love you people and miss you lots but something just isn't clicking here. All the benefits of IM that I used to trumpet (come-and-go triteness and informality; always online 'just leave a message' use; multiple conversations) now work against me. I've been wondering how I'm supposed to write a Masters' thesis (fingers crossed lololol!) on a technology I can no longer stand.
I don't know what the deal with that is, but now it's time to go to bed. I'm sure I'll figure something out. Some actual stories about the last little while in this Great Korean Misadventure to come this weekend... hopefully. I'll leave you with something a bit fucked up:
This was taken from a conversational textbook purchased by the mother of my private lesson kids. She genuinely had no idea why I couldn't keep from laughing hysterically while I read this 'everyday English conversation' to her two quizzical children.
Posted by Chris at 11:41 AM >> Commentations (3) | Permalink
October 25, 2005 >> The Finished!!!
oKAY SO I KNOW I SAID IT WOULD BE LIVEJOU;RNAL WEEK BUT I FORGOT THAT TO HAVE A LIVEJOURNAL YOU NEED lots and lots OF FREE TIME TO POST SENSELESS THINGS ABOUT YOUR LIFE. aND I HAD TO GO DRIVING TO THE BEACH AND EAT HARD BOILED EGGS FROM HOOKERS AND WATCH KOREAN PUNK ROCK. sO I HEARBOY DEEM LIVEJOURANAL WEEK A MASSIVE FAILURE.
And we're done. Thank God.
I don't have much time - we dropped firecrackers in the hallway and ran away, so the Korean police are undoubtably coming for me. Halloween is around the corner and I have solidified my plans to be a Mexican Frankenstein. The children will be boggled and, really, my entire mission in this country is to Boggle the Kids. Boggle the Kids, incidentally, would be a really great name for a game show with an ambiguous child-molester of a host. He would wear tiger-striped suits and have a hairy chest and his name would be Luther.
I think Korean TV is starting to get to me.
The finished.
Posted by Chris at 10:49 AM >> Commentations (3) | Permalink
October 20, 2005 >> Octoberfest bitches!!
OK FIRST of all i just want to say fuck you to the haterz in the crowd, livejournal totally owns and u know u love it. holla!
number 2, i have for you a new image gallary entitled Oktoberfast @ Latte World~! lol Ya I bet you guys thought you were so cool with your oktoberfest back home , well guess what suckas I found nazi beer here too.
thaz all. peace!
PS britany call me
PPS todd u can call me too, but only if britany doesnt
PPPS kyle if you call me i will kill your dog with garden sheers!
(031) 398-3381
Posted by Chris at 05:53 AM >> Commentations (4) | Permalink
October 19, 2005 >> Turtles turtles rah rahra!
I just thoght you guys might like to see these cute little guys!!! They are mikes turtles and he bought them at e mart and they are sooo tiny and small and they run across his floor like theyre chasing satan into a dranepipe!! i droped one from GREAT HIEGHTS accidently and he went into shis shell and SURVIVED TEH IMPACT like a hero! Itr was almost like you kno that episode of dragonballz where goku is turbo p;owered up and his energy sheild is like a shell of ULTIMAATE POWER and nothing caan touch him! not evan vegata's combo power special, you know the one where he fires all that litening and fire and stuff and the world truns into an egg and cracks and blows up. but i dont watch dragonball anymore its for fags TOTAL FAGOLAS.
who here remembers ninja turntles -teenage muteant- bc I sure do!!! theze turtles are totally the same they are gonna put on color headbands and fight with bo staffs and sais and numchunks. my favcorite was always donatello bc he was SMART. raphael was badass but a l4m3r and michalangelo was a n00b p0s3r and leonard was a fagot times TEN. thats ten X the fagotry! he should just have used a gun he was no TRUE ninja master.
mikes turtles are not fags they are called songsom or something like that the girl is song because she is a girl and teh boy is som just because. together they mean MALAYSIAN WINE TAHT WILL GET YOU FUCKED> and turtles get u fuckd too so i totally know what mike is talking abougt. one of them fell off the bed and tripped me out HC !! Hc is hardkore btw
aneways i am posting one more picture of the turtle because he is eatting a PRAWN and prawn is korean for TINY TINY SHRIMPY. here we gooooo
[a herf="prawn!!!!!!
no wait
{a href=".../graphics/backdoorbeauties.jpg" fuck this thing is busted wait a sec
wtf!
thare we go!!!! turle power!!
Posted by Chris at 10:45 AM >> Commentations (13) | Permalink
October 18, 2005 >> It's a weak week for grammar
In honour of the exceptionally poor sentence structure vomited onto paper by my afternoon students yesterday, I will be writing any and all further posts this week in the style of a teenage LiveJournal. Starting... now.
dear diary
omfg lol! sometimes i forget when i write in my diary and when I write on my livejournal. but rite now i'm writing livejournal so all you bitches who want to read my secrests can just FUCK OFF :P :P :P
accept for you know who! ;) Luv you babe.
anywayz, 2day was totaly fucked. these fagot kids were running around and screaming after lunch and i just couldn'[t take it any more! i made them drink lemon juice and salt water and venegar and spell all those words out in thier little books. they can't even spell right lolol! stupid AZns. but theyll learn. but then they were being soooooo sweet and hugged my legs and i dragged them all down the hallway lik a monster on crack! halloween is going to be amazing! duz anybody know where i can get some crack in korea??
this weekend i saw so many white guys with korean bitches and omg these guys were FUGLY. like they couldn't ever get any sexxx back home but here there the biggest pimps ever! they were pussies and wuldnt make it for even a second back on the streetz. like in cambridge and shit i dont understand how they got these girlz but one of them looked at me and he wuz like so GUILTY and I knew that he knew. that it was fucked. and his gf didn't know. she was azn. so i guess azn girls jus dont know what a quality man is! and its too bad bc they were HOT. i thought why cant i get a hot korean but then i was like fuk those sluts need MONEY bling bling and i dont want to buy them new ugg boots and lipstik and big pears or any of that shit. i don't play that. clemenz 316 b itches!.
an this is why WESTers get bad namez in korea bc these ugly mofos are taking all the hot koriean girls and the korean guys are like WTF I DRIVE a CAR W/ A SPOILER. I WONT CHEAT ON U FOR A LONG TIME!!!! but the korean girlz are like NOPE and prefer spicy WHITE SASSAGE. even if its attached to a fat pizza face soljier with NO HAIR. nevar get pizza w sassage! one time me and kyle did and it tasted like the untastist vagina of all time. and the pizza guy was late. so fuck white guyz wit korean gfs. their just losers back home.
anywayz this post is startinjg to have a THEME and we cant have that can we??? its hard work being inane lolol! so shoutz to my peeps back in W-SYDE and ill shout at cha later.
laters! diary!
peace
word
aight forsure now
don stop getit getit
taht's real
Posted by Chris at 12:46 AM >> Commentations (8) | Permalink
October 16, 2005 >> Crackers in Korea
New image gallery up today: It's Playday!
I thought you guys should take a look at this Darren Mullins fellow - he was playing a folk-y acoustic set at RockSinn on Friday. The Korean teachers we were with looked visibly pained by his performance, wincing and asking us to boo him off stage, but the furthest I got was bellowing "WEEEEEZER!" at him between songs. Because I was drunk on Canadian Club and really, really wanted him to play some Weezer. He didn't.
After the show, Belinda called him over and ran some kinda scam where she pretended to be a white girl raised by Korean parents so she didn't know any English... anyways, she got a free CD out of it. Wow-ee! Here it is:
Yeah.
Posted by Chris at 02:02 AM >> Commentations (4) | Permalink
October 13, 2005 >> Reincarnation tip #130076
Don't be reborn as a Korean woman.
Korean men cheat on their wives. They have affairs and fuck hookers. This is a well known and documented phenomenon.
Korean wives are bad in bed. They just lie there on their backs and take it. It's all they know. Under the right circumstances, many women will openly admit that sex is unsatisfying, usually because their husband is their first and only partner (and vice versa... crazy Christians). There's a lack of experience and a lack of knowledge and a lack of zeal.
Korean women suck in the sack because they don't/can't learn and talk about sex with each other and certainly not with their husbands. It's just not done. These girls are socialized to be passive and uninterested. They are sexually uneducated: encouraged to appear innocent, expected to know nothing. If a Korean woman is good in bed, or 'overly' enthusiastic about sex, her husband assumes she's either a sleep-around slut or a nymphomaniac. He pulls away from her. He turns away.
So if a Korean woman is good in bed, her husband is suspicious and hateful. If she is 'properly' bad in bed, he cheats on her because he's bored.
DEPLOY FEMINISTS!!!
Posted by Chris at 11:52 AM >> Commentations (6) | Permalink
October 12, 2005 >> Payday
I've been here for a month and I'm gearing up for a battle royale against my school's director, Mrs. Kim. From what I can tell, this is a rather common occurrance in Korea: because foreigners get paid handsomely, directors often look for a way to skim their pay with bloated taxes, fake cuts and outright lies. Most English teachers are isolated and culture-shocked and just fold sideways when it comes to pay. Lots of people get ripped off on severance pay, on the promised flight home, on apartment repairs, on holidays. They shrug their shoulders and concede just about everything to their director's 'expertise'. This is not the way of the Shetland Pony, my friends. I will fight these devilish Koreans in the mountains, in the tunnels and in the boardroom.
Consider the following:
2 million won.
minus 200 000 won for housing insurance (600 000 overall is taken off in monthly installments to ensure people don't cut and run on their utility bills. It's refunded at the end of the year, although I know of a couple people who forgot about it and didn't get their cash back).
minus ~5% tax: 100 000 won.
Should be about 1.7 mil, right? I pay my utilities and internet and phone bills seperately from the school, although many hagwons lump all that into the pay process (which makes things even more confusing).
The reason I anticipate fist-shaking and soforth is primarily Mrs. Kim's reported habit of deducting pay for 3 "training" days. Let me just tell you now, there is no "training" at Herald Kids School. Training is arriving at the school and getting tossed into the classroom by yourself for a mind-blowing trial by fire. Training is running around like a fucking madman, looking for the red books (NOT the fuscia books!!) because the goat-faced children are waiting to be taught. Training feels like a day-long act of unpleasant sodomy. I don't know about you guys, but back home I damn well expect to be paid for a vigorously sodorific afternoon.
Anyways - long story short - the raping comes for free. My payday got pushed back a couple days on account of this "training." This I accept, for it has been accepted by my forefathers and their forefathers before them, and the cardinal rule of teaching ESL is "bend or you'll break." Nothing runs exactly to the letter and a written contract is virtually worthless when you get right down to it. Working in Korea is an endless process of negotiation, of favours and fluffing. If things at the school don't go your way, who the fuck are you gonna go complain to?? It's sorta like being the token minority character on a reality TV show.
But this token minority will not be raped twice! If my pay gets scraped for these so-called training days, it'll be a repeat offence: I'll lose three days for having the pay period pushed back (meaning I worked three for free), and then three more if my salary gets pillaged as well. That's six days, bitches! This doesn't add up. This isn't right at all.
And so I'm waiting, pondering, anticipating, till Friday. I've got a gun and a pack of sandwiches.
Posted by Chris at 09:06 AM >> Commentations (5) | Permalink
October 10, 2005 >> Traveller
The subway system here in South Korea is a marvelous, wonderful thing. For about a dollar, you can sashay across the expanses of Seoul, annoying Koreans with your Westernness. I've noticed that most Koreans will get onto the subway and, assuming they're able to wedge themselves into a seat, will immediately pass out. I don't quite understand how they're able to rouse themselves when the appropriate stop comes along. It seems likely that many businessmen have to call their wives and tell them that they're not coming home because they took a two hour power-nap and ended up on the far side of the city. The train seems to be a perfectly acceptable place to sleep, and one time an old woman SHUSHED me because I was talking too much and ruining slumbertime. "IS QUIET TIME???" I asked her, and luckily my stop arrived right then and I left Matt and Sarah to deal with the tail end of her wrath.
Anyways, the only balls-y thing about the subway is the inconsiderate hours it keeps. Inconsiderate, that is, for drinkers and carousers: the line stops running at about midnight and opens again at 5:30 AM. This means that if you're out for the night, you're really out for the night. There's a dead zone between 4 and 5:30, when most bars close and you're left to toodle around drunkenly or pass out in the subway station until the metal grates open and the path home is blazed once again. Taxis aren't really too expensive - I could probably get back to Sanbon from anywhere in Seoul for less than fifty bucks - but goddamn, fifty bucks will get you a lot of better stuff over here. Comfort can wait.
It's pretty easy to find where you're going because everything is colour coded and station names are Anglo-friendly. You can even get these rad magnetic cards that automatically calculate your fare so you don't have to deal with the embarrassment of mispronounciation. You just set your whole wallet on top of the turnstile and -BLAM!- The System knows that alien resident #103530101 wants to get the fuck out of Sanbon. Sometimes I wonder whether it's reading my credit card info as well... I should probably check that out.
It's pretty interesting to travel this much via public transit: you don't really realize how infrequently most people take advantage of the services back home until you rely so heavily on them abroad. I don't think I'm ever going to buy another car.
But, of course, I will. It'll be silver and shiny and have a massive spoiler and oversized exhaust pipes. That's how I roll, baby. That's how we do it in the S. K.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In other, unrelated news:
My body is rather battered and bruised from fighting Chad and a bunch of Kiwis with bamboo poles, and falling down a giant childrens' slide fashioned like a fearsome alligator. I just got a call from Lisa in Daegu and she's doing well; hopefully we'll head down to visit her soon when we're not quite so broke. Daegu sounds pimp.
My private lessons are going well, and I found out through the grapevine that the mother is 'chuffed' (presumably British slang for happy - sometimes I don't know what the hell Mike is talking about). Her elder kid, Chun Min, got a 95% on his English exam last week and I felt a wee bit proud when he told me. I'm having dinner with their family tomorrow and I hope they feed me a tasty scrumptious dog soup.
I hope you guys aren't bored back home, because with a planet this huge and varied and fucking amazing there's really not much time for apathy. Sometimes I get scared that I'll die just as I realize the beautiful magnitude of everything that's left to see and do.
Posted by Chris at 10:14 AM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
October 09, 2005 >> Take a Picture & Hold it Close
It's a Public Gathering, y'all! The city of Sanbon was celebrating something this week, probably 5 years of unprecedented growth in the neon sign industry, and a couple of the Korean teachers invited us along. There would be fireworks, they said: fireworks and live music. Cindy was excited because she was convinced that some big Korean pop star had been recruited to come out and play this 'prestigeous' event. If you need some kind of Canadian equivalency here, picture a free concert in Waterloo Park to raise money for a nature walk footpath. I somehow doubted that the red carpet royalty crowd would be rolling into town for this one, but it sounded rad regardless.
Me and Belinda were absolutely the only whiteys there, in a crowd of about 5000 or so, and many small children stared at us fearfully. I gnashed my teeth at some of them, and did the Robot Dance for others. My criteria for Fear versus Fun was unknown even to me.
The music only caught my attention for a few minutes. Most acts were carefully choreographed pop-a-thons, with sexy sexy dancers and a bare minimum of Rocking Out. Some songs were in English. They were not songs that I would've chosen though. I would've chosen Bohemian Rhapsody. The populace seemed to approve though, clapping their hands and spinning glowsticks slowly in the crisp autumn air.
At one point a small boy was dragged up out of the crowd and mercilessly berated by the evening's host. At least that's what it sounded like to me. Yelling and berating. Cindy and Elissa translated for me every once in a while, but I didn't understand any of the jokes. Apparently the child got the better of his accuser, drawing big laughs, and I idly wondered whether he had finally got around to calling the host a fat motherfucker. And then he began to dance and, let's face it, everybody loves a dancing and/or wildly gyrating kid. The crowd loved it; they chowed down his ridiculous shimmying and screamed for more. It must be noted that this kid was on for nearly twice as long as any of the bands thus far. That's gotta feel pretty shitty: you're Dancer #3 in one of Sanbon's finest up-and-coming pop acts, and a little kid steals half your stage time.
Cindy taught me the Korean word for fireworks and I bellowed it repeatedly as the stage was taken by pop stars and more pop stars and then a washed up pop star who used to be nationally popular but now she's not. The Dancing Boy made a glorious return and was awarded a vaccuum cleaner for his antics. The host sang a fucking song. I felt like I was watching the biggest Karaoke stage in the world. I have seen enough Karaoke in one short month to last me a lifetime.
Finally, heads turned upwards and the sky roared and bloomed into bursts of blinding colour. I took a few pictures because my camera has a Fireworks Mode which is, as far as I know, only good for taking photos of fireworks. And then all around me I noticed Koreans aiming their cell phones at the blazing heavens, taking pictures, bowing their heads to examine the results and Repeating. Trying desperately to own the moment. Trying to turn a captivating display of movement and light into a series of still-shot instances. Missing the show because they were so busy trying to capture it and put it in a box. I put my camera away.
The entire fireworks display was short, maybe five minutes, and I left convinced that most attendees hadn't really seen it. Sure, they had photographic evidence, proof that they had been there (done that), but in their eagerness to document the fleeting cascades of light they had missed everything. This is not necessarily a Korean phenomenon: this is a worldwide epidemic.
This is where we're going, where we are.
Posted by Chris at 12:25 AM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
October 05, 2005 >> Frustrated by...
No projects. Back in the summer I talked a lot of shit about how I was going to finally finish (or even start) a screenplay or a book or something while I was out East. I just don't think it's going to happen. I jot down ideas and themes daily, but where do I get the motivation and enthusiasm to turn them into something I'll love? Tired. Passive. And if I don't have time now, will I ever have time?
I don't want to lose my voice in the Oriental wilds.
This aside brought to you by Corwin's ambitions.
Posted by Chris at 10:23 AM >> Commentations (4) | Permalink
October 04, 2005 >> Drawings of Children and Other Devilish Things
To kill time I usually sling them a piece of paper and get them to draw me something from the book. One boy, Griffin, doesn't seem to be able to draw anything other than a gigantic crocodile devouring an elephant. If I berate him for his single-mindedness, he'll scribble out the elephant and replace it with:
a) Potato Pals, the ill-fated protagonists of our reading adventures
or
b) me.
So basically I get eaten by a giant crocodile at least once a week.
Anyways, today I decided to draw too. I started with a masterful portrait of a Potato Pal trolling for fish ("On a camping trip, we go fishing!") and, of course, catching the omnipresent river boot instead. Who puts all these goddamn boots in the river?? Because boots don't taste nearly as good as fish.
A few of the kids were bored and acting up, so I solemnly drew them into my picture... drowning pitiably in the river. Their reaction was rather horrified, so I flipped the paper to start again and drew them all hanging out in a tent. Boredom kicked in once more and OH NO! an evil looking bear was menacing the tentful of children. The girls looked scared so I penciled myself in between them and the bear, plunging a dagger deep into the beast's eye. Griffin then thought he would be a smartass and scribbled me (and the bear) out of the picture, so I retaliated by setting the tent and children on fire.
It was a good class.
Chris Clemens As Depicted By Small Korean Children
Posted by Chris at 12:46 AM >> Commentations (10) | Permalink
October 02, 2005 >> Purchase My Circuits
This weekend we took the subway into Yongsan to check out the electronics market. It was a seething mass of florescent displays and arcane gadgetry, "I want I need" desperation and pressurized haggling. Eight floors of All Things Electronic invited power-browsing: two floors were exclusively cameras and MP3 players of miniaturized stature, three floors were computer geekery and the rest... well, the signs said "Small-Large Electronics". Figure that one out.
If you kindly look to your right, you will see a very expensive toilet seat that will: (blue button) spray water right up your anus and (pink button) spray girls - and only girls - in the privates so hard that their skirts will fly heavenward with ecstacy. This Pleasure Toilet appears to be well worth it.
You will also see Jen and Matt warily caressing what appear to be back massage devices of some kind, although their phallus-like design leaves me suspicious.
The very steps leading up to this circuitry heaven were electronic: lights shimmered into patterns and symbols and screamed "Here Be Consumerism and Pirates!" After marveling at the relative cheapness of everything - hi-def TVs of gargantuan girth for under 3000 dollars, for example - I sauntered from booth to booth on the computer level with a very distinct purpose. "Hard drive?" I would ask. "USB connect? USB ONLY??"
Most vendors looked at me like I was retarded and, instead of trying to fleece my wallet, sent me away with a shrug. I finally found a shop of computer nerds who spoke bare-bones English and were willing and able to provide me with a very snazzy portable USB hard drive of the 80 GB variety for 155 dollars. I am proud to tell you that I haggled them down to 130 with false pleas of poverty, and the salesman even put a free movie on it to demonstrate transfer speed! I am now the proud owner of an illegitimate Korean copy of Mona Lisa Smile. Gah.
I very much want to purchase all kinds of neato cameras and tiny MP3 players and blank DVDs and a monolithic television before I return to Canada. The price is right, my friends. The price is right, but the luggage space is limited and the instruction manuals are in Korean. An inherent conflict indeed.
Other highlights from this week:
-Being solicited by a Korean Jehovah's Witness. That's right... they're everywhere. We talked a bit but then she wanted me to commit myself to "learning to love the Bible correctly", so I casually mentioned my previous involvement with the Church of Satan: 2 years, alter boy. She immediately freaked out and coughed violently from that moment onwards. "The air... eees so bad!" she said, her eyes streaming with tears. There would be no Bible study that day.
PS: I was never actually a Satanist but it's quickly becoming my favourite lie.
-Irish girls are, quite possibly, more nationalist and egotistical than Americans and Canadians combined. That kind of superiority complex is quite an achievement.
-Never buy beer for sad-looking underaged Korean kids who are supposed to be studying at 1 am, because they'll get shmammered and they'll like it. Then they'll come back time after time until you say "No more beer or soju, you fuckers!" and they trash your lounge in a non-alcoholic show of rebellion. Give them an inch and they take a mile. THEN you'll have to angrily choke them against the elevator wall the next time you see them (MIKE).
-Marking tests. Lots of them.
-Watching Sam try to buy some shoes while under intense pressure from an abusive sales donkey. He talked shit about us to the other Korean customers until Sam called him on it - he was calling us retarded and that's a word that every foreigner should know. I can't remember it right now though. Anyways, the sales donkey's grasp of English was pathetic at best:
Sam: "Are these real leather?"
Sales Donkey: "Yessss! Oooookay!" *sounding rather like a Korean Lil Jon*
Me: "Are they fake leather?"
Sales Donkey: "Oooookay!" *flashes thumbs up*
I can't ever stop laughing in this country.
Posted by Chris at 05:27 AM >> Commentations (6) | Permalink