All over Korea there are little game rooms like this one.  I thought you’d get a kick out of this:  traditional drums hooked up electronically to a game.  It was playing some Sousa march, and the girl really knew her drumming technique. The screen has a lot of little cartoon characters who hop around from cartoon drum to cartoon drum, depending on how she plays.  I have no idea how the score is kept!

The characters on the game are Chinese.  So maybe it’s a Chinese game?  Most Koreans have to learn some basic Chinese as they are growing up, and everyone has both Chinese and English names.  I’m really glad I’m not in China, as the sound of it is totally impenetrable to me.  I really like the logic and order of Korean, especially as I am learning to read and understand the grammer a bit.

As a correction to the first underground post, each car has only four doors.  The reason it took so long for me to get from car 10-4 to the Way OUT stairs at Pyeongchon was that they were located at 4-4.

So today’s experiment to get on 4-4 from Dongdaemmon in preparation for Pyeongchon worked like a dream, and I walked off the train at Pyeongchon directly in front of the stairs!  I’d kind of figured out what Mi Young had been talking about, but it didn’t crystalize until I’d seen the paving pattern…like big imaginary arrows or a lightbulb going off.

The other train lesson I’ve learned is that the two or three times I’ve surfaced to transfer, only to find myself facing turnstiles and having to pay to get out and then pay again to get back in was because (duh!) I had been using my directional logic on how to get to the opposing platform, but I hadn’t been following the direction SIGNS to their terminus.  So as another correction, of course you don’t have to ever pay to transfer, and when I did it was all because I surfaced too early.  So if you think you’re going towards the transfer and see turnstiles – turn around and look for the color of your line on the wall or more direction signs, because even though you can surface, it doesn’t mean that’s the designated transfer point.

Ahh,  I missed the Seoul Subway dance party this Saturday.  This is one of those things where everyone agrees to meet on the subway, and at a synchronized time, they all turn on their ipods and start dancing to their own music.  I was too busy crying on this blog, and then I wound up being just behind enough to probably miss meeting everybody. I hope they organize another one.  Only, I don’t know if I have the energy to dance all the way from the Express Bus Terminal station, all the way to the end of line 3.

The subways and I are going to have an interesting relationship, as pretty soon returning adoptees are going to have some shenanigans on them as well…

Well, I just blew a huge wad at the bookstore.  Actually, my budget for the rest of the month and I just got paid.  Fortunately, I am sooo thrifty here.  Like today, I ate rice w/ kimchi for lunch, and ate shishkebab 1,500 won, giant cream puff 1,500 won (I didn’t know that’s what it was – I thought it was a Chinese bun) and a drinking yogurt for 1,200 won.  So that’s $3.50 for the whole day.

Got more Korean workbooks, because the stuff you get with one textbook is never enough.  Got two great discussion books for my adult conversation class.  Got four great speaking exercise books for the regular class, and the missing CD for a textbook on real speech patterns for the regular class.  Also got two English novels for Y:  Kundera’s Fear of Laughter and Forgetting (perhaps the only womanizer I can forgive) and Duras’ The Lover, since she’s really into reading English books and she’s bought me so many gifts since I got here and I haven’t talked to her much lately.  And (drum-roll please) a book on identifying Korean food at restaurants, called KOREAN FOOD GUIDE;  in English.  Lists 800 dishes with their names in Hanguel, romanized Korean, English and French, and their cooking categories and descriptions in English, and has them categorized by the Korean alphabet so I can read menus now!!!  Which is absolutely amazing, because I was thinking last week that I was going to have to make it my life’s work to create just such a book.  (I was at the Seoul Folk Flea Market in the food court, and I literally walked around for more than half an hour, starving, and overwhelmed by all the food, none of the menus of which I could read, unable to order anything, about to cry)

Here’s a small excerpt from the introduction:

…When eating a hot or spicy soup, most Koreans will say siwonhada, which literally translates as “cool” or “refreshing,” and is also used to describe the feeling after visiting a sauna or spa.  The highest compliment you can give a Korean cook is to say the food has a gamchilmat. This describes food that wraps around the palate, enveloping the whole mouth with flavor.  There is no equivalent term in English, and here we begin to see the delicate subtleties of Korean food.

Everyone who has cried in hunger surrounded by food and unable to order any of it because they are alone, illiterate, and unable to speak so anyone can understand you, absolutely must buy this book!

Oh yeah.  Preparing for anything means I am still trying to be a better teacher here and yet I am also researching new jobs at the same time.

From dealing with Holt to now this.  And just last week, I was attempting to play my out -of-tune bandoneon, the one I returned last year to be tuned at great great great (at least a hundred bucks for each great) expense for warranty work, and I asked the bandoneon community what to do about it going out of tune, so the maker came forward out of shame and to save his reputation to fix it YET AGAIN (which he admits means it needs a whole new innards since this one just degrades meaning it’s irreparable) and then the guy didn’t want me to insure it because that means he might have to pay German import taxes on it.  Then I told him of course I’m going to insure it, it’s an instrument that cost almost 5 grand.  So I finally brow beat him into allowing me to insure it, even though I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO PAY ANYTHING since he never really fixed it and I’ve never really had a working instrument from the day I bought it.  But then I tell him no, I’d rather go to someone else because he sent it back to me that first time so-called-fixing it uninsured, which means if a gorilla throws it around in the cargo hold of some airplane, then I am OUT OF LUCK.  Out of an instrument. Too bad.  5 grand worth of matchsticks.  So we go back and forth like this for days until I finally say, “LOOK.  You haven’t answered my question.  Are you going to make me an all new instrument or give me my money back if it gets smashed in shipping?  No.

So I have to threaten him with telling the bandoneon community what a lemon I got and how crappy its been doing business with him.  And finally he relents.  So add fighting with this guy via email in broken German all week on top of the other crap.

Is this the way of the world?

And here I am in Korea.  My school district employer is shafting me for half my airfare reimbursement.  My teacher representative for the school district is paid by the school district (no conflict of interests there) and she basically told me to go to hell.  So now I have to go to the labor board if I’m to get this injustice addressed and my contract breach recognized.

And In Kyung writes me an email telling me essentially that I should just accept Korean culture and stay positive…I write her back and basically tell her Korean culture has nothing to do with it.  Gyeonggi-do schools basically violated my contract and I’ve been doing my best working under a broken contract.  The one thing about Korean culture I will reject, if it is Korean culture, is calling accepting injustice being “positive.”

OK.  You are a cover girl.  Rough-looking beat-up cover girl.  Who got to speak to the Korean people about adoption.  That was good.  Being optimistic.

It occurred to me today what Mi Young tried to teach me the second night I was here in Seoul.  I knew she was talking about efficiency, how to get on the right car, and what the metal numbers on the platform floor meant.  So I acknowledged that to her, and she seemed pleased.

Later, I have asked other Koreans about the numbers and what they meant and nobody had any clue why they would bother noting the number of the train car doors.  But tonight I figured it out.

Okay, so here’s why:  If you follow the stairs leading down (or up) to the platform, the floor pattern will continue from the stairs to the nearest waiting spot for the train.   The rest of the platform has a different flooring surface.  There are ten cars for every train, and each door to each car is numbered.  Sooooo, if you’re a regular and you really want to shave ten minutes off of your commute, you can memorize which car door is closest to the exit stair  when you get off the train.  Therefore, you can plan accordingly which car to get on, and which door is closest.  For example, I got onto the number 4 line train heading south to Oido.  I got onto car 10, the last door (9?)  But then when I got off of the train at Pyeongchon Station, I had to walk four minutes before I got to where the Way OUT stairs were located, which was at something like car 6-4 (car 6, door 4.)   So next time, I’ll probably split the difference and get on something like car 7 or 8 instead.

Just a little trivial tip.  I also will often wait for the next train if I see one packed like cattle.  It’s almost always paid off.  And if the trip is a long one, I will not always take the shortest route.  I’ve found that the longer between me and my destination, the greater the odds of getting a seat early on and being comfortable on the journey, while a shorter trip the odds enough people are going to get off before I get there are rather slim.

So those are my subway strategies.  Because I’m too cool to hurry and would rather sit and read.

Oh, and btw, Pierre, the Seoul subways are incredibly clean.  Not really sure how they do it.  Maybe because the train technology is better?  The Manhattan subway underground just seemed covered in grime and soot.

It was raining a lot today and the subways were full of Seoul’s homeless.  They are an INCREDIBLY clean lot, who pack extremely light:  multiple light layers, clean cardboard boxes, and perhaps a sleeping bag.  There was a line of about twenty cued for some reason, but I didn’t see any food or anything being handed out, so don’t know what was going on there.  Mostly they hug the walls of the corridors and they don’t bother anyone and vice-versa.  Some didn’t look that worse for wear.  Maybe they are newly homeless, due to the reduction in jobs here since the economy tanked in the U.S.  I kind of felt better after seeing them.  They weren’t being shooed away like they would be in the states, and they were above the draft of the train tunnels and below the draft of the streets.  Thank god for subways.

I couldn’t take it anymore.

After the second week of class 1-3 blatantly erasing my presence as a teacher, the principal refusing to stamp my application for flight reimbursement and forcing me to request something less after being two months late, the dismissal of my taking on extra work in order to help the Korean English teachers, and the continued absence of my male co-teacher, and being told “I understand” from my Korean teacher friends while at the same time offering staying positive as the only solution in the face of it all, I blew a gasket.

When Miss Baek, my co-teacher came to get my revised second application for flight reimbursement I couldn’t help but let my voice raise to the point of almost yelling.  (they are all scared of this strange confrontational girl)

• I finally made it clear to her that I felt not getting my application stamped was the same as my principal shitting on me and not supporting me.
• I finally made it clear to her that not getting the same amount of money as most of the other English teachers for flight reimbursement was the same as a breach of contract.
• I finally made it clear to her that it was absolutely unacceptable to not have a co-teacher in the boys classes – they’re breaking Korean law by leaving me alone with 40 boys.
• I finally made it clear to her that co-teacher boredom was THEIR fault and that I can’t write a lesson plan to include co-teachers when the co-teachers are ABSENT 70% of the time.
• And being pressured into attendance at religious services was NEVER ACCEPTABLE given there was no mention of this as a requirement prior to my signing up for this job.

During part of my conversation with Miss Baek, I told her I now understood why so many English teachers leave in the middle of the night and get on an airplane.  Her eyes got very wide.  So I went with it.  I told her I had a good mind to just get a job at a Hagwon somewhere.  I’m SERIOUS, I told her.  I am VERY VERY ANGRY about this situation.  And if I don’t get my flight reimbursement, I am going to the labor board.  In fact, I am going to the labor board anyway.

Miss Baek will try and persuade the Vice Principal to talk with the co-teacher, Mr. Lee.  Seems Mr. Lee was once in line for the Vice Principal job but didn’t get it.  Mr. Lee doesn’t give a rats ass about teaching now and he has more seniority than anyone else in the school.  So basically, he can do whatever the hell he wants. I told her his work ethic was disgusting.  I told her to get me a substitute.  Hell, get me seven substitutes if that’s what it takes.

Miss Baek tried to defend the principal saying he couldn’t stamp my application because he had to do what Gyeonggi-do School district wanted.  I told her it was MY application, not his, and that he could sign it, he just chose not to.  I told her the application was my head not his, and his wanting to not look bad is called politics.  I told her that by forcing me to submit an application for less than half what was due me meant he supports the injustice done to me, and shows me how valued I am as an employee.

Miss Baek wants to go with me to talk to Gyeonggi-do school district.  I told her my teacher representative, the will go amazingly low Miss Dain Bae, tried to railroad me and that it is pointless.  Miss Baek says we should talk to whomever is in charge of flight reimbursement.  Ha!  That person is probably the person who tried to shoe-horn in that extra proviso that “unnecessary” stops not be reimbursed POST contract signing, to cover-up their contract over-sight.  I told her no, this is a CONTRACT issue and above just the flight reimbursement.  She doesn’t seem to understand this.

Miss Baek wants to write the next lesson plan, and what was going to be my topic?  She’s been wanting to do this for quite awhile.  I told her it was pointless unless the other co-teacher participated.  I told her that was fine, as long as it was total English immersion and focused on the children speaking.  So I told her stress-time was going to be my topic, which just happens to be a really hard lesson to grasp.  So we’ll see what she comes up with.

And you know what?  A job just appeared in June at an academy in the city next to Wonju where I was born.

Maybe I should just take that.

sort of…

It was my last evening class in the series, and eight of them showed up.  We did some lost in the desert scenario which sounded more interesting than it really was, followed by the board game again.  We had a nice time.  They restored (sort of) my faith in something.  (not sure what – probably being a girl)

But Korea is heartbreaking as well:

Q.  Tell us something you worry about:

A.  Test scores.

Q.  What are you going to do on your next vacation?

A.  Go on a diet and study.

Q.  Is there anybody you’re really afraid of?

A.  Math teacher.

Q.  Tell us something about your neighborhood.

A1.  It’s too dark when I get home, so I don’t know my neighborhood.

Q.  Tell us something about your neighborhood.

A2.  Well, actually the only neighborhood I know is around this school.  So I guess this is my neighborhood.

They all want me to have the class again, and to text them when the paperwork is finished so they can get in. The pay is low, it takes up any free time I have, and I’ve no life left for myself. But it’s the only thing that keeps school bearable.