::A Geek in Korea::

Occasionally when you are outside, you’ll see people standing on street corners with envelops full of cash or gift certificates offering them to strangers. This is a somewhat odd behavior to observe, but even more strange is how the people react to an offer of free money. They go out of their way to avoid the person and treat them like he was handing out free samples of the plague instead of cash. People will go to amazing lengths to get free stuff in Korea, so what’s going on? It’s not like these people are driving those creepy windowless vans you see in movies trying to lure people inside with their dough like in a child safety video.

It turns out that the whole situation is related to selling newspaper subscriptions. The people on the street corners are trying to lure you into a newspaper delivery subscription contract for multiple years. They work on a commission that assures that as long as the newspaper is delivered to your house, they’ll make more money than they’ll give away signing you up. What’s so bad about a newspaper subscription?

From what I am told, these subscriptions are of the "impossible to cancel" variety. People that deliver the newspaper will send people to collect their bills and hound people with subscriptions constantly. If you leave the newspapers outside your doorstep and tell them you want to cancel, they will continue to deliver them and try to collect their fee. The only way to get them to stop is to wake up earlier than the delivery service, stalk the door, and tell them to stop multiple times. The hassle involved in canceling is why no one wants to take people up on the offer of free money.

It’s like "Columbia House" except every day extremely early in the morning with newspapers. No wonder no one ever smiles at these people. I’m immune to their offers, because I, as a foreigner, can’t easily sign up for credit based contracts.  People here assume that’ll I’d flee the country rather than pay for a newspaper each month. I get a free newspaper at work that usually isn’t worth the price of the ink and paper if it wasn’t for the crossword. Either way, I won’t get involved in the shady dealings of people handing out free cash on the streets.

At my first few schools, I hated when Korean teachers were chatty and were obviously talking about someone when they knew that other person couldn’t understand. Using your language to talk bad about a person while they are in the room isn’t cool. It would also annoy me when foreign coworkers would have to talk "down" to me and translate something incredibly witty they said to each other in Korean. I hated feeling like I was "out of the loop" in an office environment, especially when things were being said about me.

Now, however, I’m the foreigner with the best Korean language skills at my school at the moment. I can follow a lot of my coworker’s conversations, and when they aren’t talking about the mundane aspects of single life in Korea, I get to hear some good juicy gossip about the school. They chat about mothers, students, and usually complain about our director. They are really annoyed by the fact that the new camera system in the school will let the director spy on their conversations in the room. The reason is that they talk about the director ever second she is out of the room. Someone’s going to get busted eventually.

Anyway, today, my coworkers were sitting around in the office when one person said to the other, "Someone smells like alcohol in here." Now, I know who they were talking about, and it was obvious someone had a rough night out. They were doing their job well, and there were no other complaints besides the smell. They didn’t even look hung over. They were a little worse for wear, that’s all. It was clear that alcohol was still on someone’s breath, and it just stunk.

The one teacher said, "Uh, yeah, I can smell it too."

I responded in English, "It’s not me."

They laughed, and of course the other foreigners in the room had no context for what I just said, so they just ignored us. The wheel had turned 360 degrees and I can either use my power for good or evil. I’m usually a very inclusive, helpful, "let me offer what I know", sort of person. I’ll try to keep it that way, instead of alienating my foreigner coworkers. I do think my Korean coworkers enjoy having someone "in" on the joke at times and that they say some things for my benefit since they know I understand.

I had an absolutely terrible lunch time break today. I wanted to head home because I needed to eat lunch and spend some time with Yoshi. Unfortunately, when I got to my apartment building and went to look for my keys, they weren’t anywhere to be found. They were locked behind the metal door, unreachable. My wife had locked the door this morning, and with me stuffing a box of pears, an orange juice, my phone, my gloves, my hat, my scarf, and my wallet into my coat pockets, I wasn’t able to realize that I had forgotten my keys! Crap!
I called my wife, who finishes an extremely late hour today. A plan was formed, and she would give her keys to a coworker who lives in our neighborhood. All I had to do was go to meet this person and pick up her set of keys after work. No problem. I was still fairly annoyed about the incident when I got into a taxi to head back to work. Luckily I had enough cash for the taxi.

When we pulled up to the school, my fair read 3,200 won. This was above the average fair, because the taxi driver hit a few lights and went the wrong way. I pulled out my only bill, 10,000 won, and a 500 won coin so that he didn’t have to break the bill to give me an excessive amount of change. I should have gotten 7,300 won back as change. I paid more than I needed to, and got change, so that I would get more bills back. This is a standard sort of business transaction that requires a little math and some thinking skills.

The driver handed me back 6,000 won originally. I don’t know if he thought I was a complete moron, that I was a foreigner that didn’t know not to tip, or that he couldn’t do math. I looked at him and said, "Give me 7,300 won. This is wrong."

He pulled out the change I gave him and said, "No, you get 6,000 won." Then he looked at the meter again and handed me 300 won in change. I had 6,300 won in my hand.

"I gave you 10500 won. The fee was 3200. 10500 won minus 3200 won is 7200."

The fare jumped a 100 won. We had been arguing for at least twenty-six seconds, which is the interval for fare increases after the initial fee. It would just another two times before I got out out of the taxi. Normally as soon as you arrive at a destination, you hand over the money, then they cancel the fare and give the correct change. Since the guy didn’t know how to give the right change, he didn’t hit the button. I wasn’t paying any more than that it should have been the first time.

At this point I was fairly exhausted from arguing. I had four classes in the morning and had little patience. I was also hungry. I just sat with the door open. Eventually he gave me the bill to get rid of me. At this point everyone on the sidewalk where I was getting out had seen me arguing with the taxi driver. I slammed the door and gave him a few choice words, which got me some stares. Koreans always give each other the benefit of the doubt when dealing with a foreigner, so I got a lot of accusing eyes when I walked away from the scene.

This week alone, I’ve had three incidents in taxis that could have been fatal accidents, and now a guy that can’t give the right change. Never mind the fact they don’t obey traffic laws, speed, and drive like idiots all the time. Who gives these people licenses, and how do they get jobs requiring a flawless driving record for an extended period of time?

I had a long break from work today, so I came home to walk Yoshi. He spends too much time alone these days, with both his owners working double the hours we usually do in a week because of intensive classes. I try to get him some exercise by walking him in the afternoon when it’s not as cold, and I have enough energy to make it around the block a few times.

We went out on our walk as usual. In the elevator there was a pan and a garbage bag. The absent minded cleaning lady sometimes leaves her supplies in the elevator as she mops the floors of the apartment hallways. When she finishes cleaning whatever floor she is on, she calls the elevator up, grabs her stuff, and moves on to the next building. The lady might actually be some sort of halfling or hobbit, as she’s incredibly tiny and old. There was no sign of her, so we left her things in the elevator and went out for a walk around the block.

Yoshi has learned proper elevator etiquette.  He sits down in the middle of the elevator on command and peeks intensely at the crack in the elevator door. Occasionally he will go up to the door and press it with one paw, as if imitating pressing a button. It’s adorable. Anyway, Yoshi was watching the door carefully, as there is a noise that sounds when the it is about to open. He’ll hunch down with his head and face next to the door, and as soon as the doors open wide enough for his head to fit through, he’s out the door.

Today, as we came back from out walk, he did his little elevator routine again, waiting to squeeze his head through. The door opened, and on the other side was the diminutive cleaning lady, bent over sitting on a stool cleaning the outside of the elevator door. She had her face down close enough that Yoshi could give her a nice big kiss. She jumped up and shouted in surprise. I got Yoshi under control, as he was nearly as tall at this woman when standing on his hind legs. She retreated to the elevator, perhaps to grab the broom and shoved to beat off, what probably looked like to her some sort of fearsome giant hairy creature.

I assured her that she didn’t have to worry about my dog being scary, and headed back to my apartment before she went to go find her makeshift sword.

So, after mentioning my birthday a few times, it wasn’t until Monday that I got anything other than I card from my students. In one of my classes I got candy and a paper "bouquet", and other I got packets of cookies. Now, when handed a large enough amount for something, there is something of an implied hint in Korea that foreigners sometimes miss.

In my class, I was handed a bag of some store bought cookies. Two bags, along with some candy. Now, the bags of cookies had exactly ten servings, and we had eleven students in the class. As soon as the cookies came into my possession I walked back to my desk. I was checking papers and needed two hands free. I heard a student mumbling to the person that gave me the cookies, "Foreigners don’t do that. They don’t know. See."

Of course, I knew exactly what was demanded of the situation culturally. It comes with careful observation after living here a long time. I waited until I checked all the homework, then broke open the bag so that everyone in the class could have a single cookie. This is what is expected to be polite. All the students were surprised I knew that was the "correct" thing to do. I gave one student a piece of candy instead of opening the second bag. This was a slight breech of protocol, as everyone is supposed to get exactly the same reciprocal gift, but I didn’t want to eat nine cookies by myself without milk.
 
In the United States, there is no expectation you must share a gift immediately with someone that gave it to you. In fact, the entire point of having a birthday party is to get cool gifts no one else can play with, then bringing them to school that they can be lost, stolen, or broken by bullies in class. The point is to have more stuff than everyone else, and if you don’t, talk badly about the people that have more than you. Sharing gifts? What a lame way to try to make friends THAT would be!

I’ve told all my students we will never play Hangman in my class anymore. Since every single lazy teacher ever plays the occasional game of Hangman in their classes to kill that last five minutes of class before the bell rings, the students sometimes ask to play. No more. I’ve made it my goal to never play Hangman again in class.

To be honest, playing Hangman as an educational game is a complete waste of time. In large classes, there are always non-participants that don’t work on figuring out the word and simply guess a random letter. Other students try, but usually are just trying to guess letters without thinking about phonics or words they know. The amount of time spent with one letter left in the word guessing the same letters is just as great as when the entire word is unknown The last time I played the game with a class, a student wasted all the classes turns trying to spell his English name with his choices.

It’s also a terrible and cruel image.

Whenever any of my students say, "Teacher, please, Hangman!" I give them a a look of surprise and disappointment.

"Do you have a rope?" I will respond. The students will get a confused look on their face.

"No. Why?"

"Well we can’t hang anyone without a rope now can we? Does anyone have a long scarf? It might work, but we don’t have anything to hang it from. Looks like we can’t play Hangman today. Let’s talk in English instead."

"TEACHER! HANGMAN! PLEASE."

This is where my keen skills of distraction usually work the avoid their complaints. I’ve broken quite a few classes of the habit of asking for Hangman after I give students homework.

Today we had an extra short lesson. The class had prepared several items as gifts for my birthday, including candy and a paper "bouquet". Since they had been the only students to remember their teacher’s birthday, I let them play a game. This game is a variation of Hangman, where I choose a word and reveal the number of letters in it by writing it on the board. Then, students have to guess words of the same length. I tell the students if their word contains the same letters mine does. If a letter is in the same position as it is in my word, I write it in the place where they are in the word in a box called "My Word". The letters that are in the student’s word but not my own are written in a space called "In My Word". The students need to use the process of elimination to figure out words to guess that contain new letters not in previous guesses, and can also look at the position of letters to try to guess my word. There is a limit of 10 or so guesses before the student must figure out my word or lose.

My main problem with Hangman was simply guessing a letter without paying attention wasn’t punished. Students playing this new game had to at least speak English, think about words, letter placement, and smartly choose words. If they picked words with repeating letters, they got in trouble with their friends. It was a much different sort of class game than Hangman. I’ve played it with classes at other schools whole thought it was entirely too confusing. I think now I’ve found a way to easily present the material so that everyone in the class can understand how to play.

The best thing is that by changing the length of words, the game forces students to learn better words, as well as keeping the game fresh. The students improved the amount of guesses they needed about 50% each time they played. By adding to the length of the word in the game, they had to think of new words to guess, since the words they were using before no longer worked. While I’ll still avoid playing games and doing Hangman in classes, if I happen to fall short, this will be my new game of choice.

Today was my birthday, so we went out for dinner. Nolboo, which was my favorite new restaurant in the area, has slowly been slipping in quality with every visit. This time, they had about a third of the staff they usually have. Not only that, but the food wasn’t as well portioned, the meat had an excessive amount of bones, the vegetables weren’t fresh, and they didn’t replace our grill mesh fast enough, resulting in a lot of charred and burnt meat. The wife was slowly brimming with rage with each added inconvenience. By the end of the meal she was absolutely stewing. She claimed she was going to log onto popular websites and raise "Netizen awareness" about the store. Blacklisting stores online in response to poor service is very effective in Korea. The food wasn’t good for the price, and we won’t be going back there any time soon. My wife used to never be the type that would complain about poor service because she felt guilty about it. Now that I’ve rubbed off on her a bit, she’ll speak up and tell people when she expects better.

We needed a few items at the store. We were shopping at E-Mart, a retailer I now despise because it no longer carries Corona beer. They reduced space for more domestic beer! The ironic thing is the they only started carrying lime once they stopped carrying Corona. That’s particularly cruel for me, since Corona with lime has been my favorite beer of choice when I drink for past two years. Anyway, as we walked around the store, every few minutes there were announcements on the loud speaker welcoming people to the store. This would happen so often that it was really odd. They were training people how to say, "Hello," and how to greet people. Odd.

Also, as we were looking for some items we needed during the week, we passed the bagged kimchi aisle. I live a life of luxury, where relatives create enormous amounts of kimchi from family owned farms. We don’t ever run short of kimchi in this household, so we don’t purchase bagged, store made kimchi at all. However, as we were walking by, there was a loud POP, and then a bag of went flying to the floor. DEFECTIVE BAGS! All the people in the aisle were quick to issue denials. "We didn’t touch anything!" was the first word out of someone’s mouth. What probably had happened was that the fermented gas from the bacteria in the kimchi had simply swollen the bag to the point where it burst. Beware exploding bags of kimchi!

We got home and ate some cake, took Yoshi for a walk, and settled back into our lazy Sunday routine. We had made plans to celebrate more this weekend, but both of us have been so exhausted from work recently that we didn’t feel like staying out late. My birthday present were some pants, and I was happy about it. I even delayed my techno-lust about getting a new gadget yet again.

I’ve gotten no gadgets for our Wedding anniversary, Chirstmas, or my birthday, which is a record. I want to wait and see about something just around the horizon instead of going immediately to the store and picking something up when the mad urge strikes me. This is my wife rubbing off on me, keeping me from spending all the hard earned dough when their might be a deal around the corner on something better I might really like. I’ve been given the go ahead of a future Nintendo Wii purchase however, so even if I don’t get the latest toy, eventually I’ll get something cool this year, so I’m happy.

Our paperwork helps us do our job. I’ve got to accumulate test scores, grades, journal scores, and every other single number I’ve gathered about the students while they sit it in my class. I grade them on homework, behavior, class room assignments, speaking tests, and attendance. All of this is complied in an attendance folder the teachers guard like a treasure, since it’s the only common link that allows two or three teachers to teach the same class during the week without going crazy.

Every two months we are given evaluations to fill out about our students. I’ve got about sixty to seventy of these to do over the weekend. I was handed a bag full of evaluations sheets and attendance folders and told "Finish this by Tuesday." My pile was slightly less monstrous than my coworker, but I’m still buried in papers, journals, and everything else I need to keep myself organized at school.

My wife was doing some grading as I was going through one of my absolute worst classes. I had copied down their grades, but I needed to work on their commentary. Nothing was coming but, "Die in a fire," or "Buy a cage for containment so that the evil doesn’t spread outside your house" sort of sarcasm that would totally be lost on mothers that pay the money they do to send their children to the school. Since I was at a loss as to what to say, I asked what the Korean teachers had written on their section of commentary.

My wife read a few comments from my worst students:
A boy that recently stabbed another boy in class with a pencil and got thrown out by me this week was, according to the Korean teacher, "Not taking his studies seriously enough."

The boy I called my "Naughtiest" in a post previously was simply, "Not realizing his potential and was lacking in self-confidence." Some of the descriptions given by the Korean teachers were glowing, some where outright lies.

On Friday, my foreign coworker and I were talking about the number of evaluations and how much work they were. I asked my Korean head teacher about some of her comments. I asked her if she was simply being creative or did she really feel that way about the students. She didn’t come out to say, "I was lying,"  but she strongly hinted that what was written on the paper isn’t what she actually thinks about each students. Since she has a direct line of communication between the parents and the director, I can imagine she’s probably hearing about the things she is writing far more often than I am. I don’t blame her for trying to let the parents and students save some face. I just hope most of the commentary given by Korean teachers was helpful criticism, and not "cover your ass" sorts of distortions that I’ve seen so far.

I’m a princess, so I don’t drink alcohol stronger than 19.8%

There have been a series of advertisements running from the Jinro Chamisul company, which makes Chamisul soju. They are absolutely ridiculous. The girl in the picture above looks so pale and thin I don’t think she’s ever been outside. She might be a princess, but really, when you’re drinking soju, trying to draw the line at some sort of level of alcohol is completely silly. All of the stuff tastes like death, it’s not like something any stronger is going to be worse.

I love the fact that in the United States, drawing the line at something over,12% for beer would be where the limit of where "hard alcohol" starts. In Korea, even the princesses drink stuff stronger than that. That’s when you know the country has a serious drinking fixation.

These are handy little chat icons that are for download at Chamisul’s site. Celebrate overdrinking with your friends with these expressive emoticons.

Look. The "princess" is weeping because someone has cut her off at the bar and there is no more alcohol left.

Oh, how cute. The "Fresh" mascot drank until he vomited. He even made a cute "U-aek" the onomatopoeia in Korean for that particular bodily function. Charming. It seems that the soju companies themselves encourage people to over drink until they vomit. What responsible marketing!