The Verdict on EBS!

It's the end of the day on Friday.

The Educational Broadcasting System of Korea has shown their true colors. EBS failed to follow up on their own request for the second time in a row, and again didn't even have the decency to let my school know.

My co-teacher had to call them to find out that they had canceled their own plans of shooting this show. They were the ones who contacted us and asked us to come, and yet they didn't even have the decency to keep us informed. For the second time.

Moral of the story? EBS lacks fundamental professionalism. I wonder if they even realize they should be embarrassed. If they happen to be dumb enough to call my school about this show again, I'll personally tell them to go fuck themselves.

Anyway, I'm still going to Seoul. It's been awhile since I've been up there. I'm gonna fleece Eddie and his friends out of their money when we play poker tomorrow night, and I'm gonna eat 열탄불고기, which is the best Korean meal that no one knows about, not even Koreans.

The EBS Broadcast Fiasco

A few weeks ago, I was called into the teachers' office. The vice principal got a call from EBS, a TV station in Seoul. They were doing a show on native teachers who do morning broadcasts at their schools. They wanted my co-teacher and me to come up to Seoul to record a show on Saturday.

They also said that afterward, they would send a crew down to Daegu to film me doing one of my broadcasts.

My co-teacher and I had a little picture and write-up in a local newspaper when we first started the broadcasts, which must have been how they found me. I was surprised about the newspaper article, and surprised about the call from EBS, too. It's not like English broadcasts are a novelty among schools with native teachers.

Anyway, this call was on a Tuesday I think. I was told they would send some official documents with more details the next day. I was pretty excited about it, it seemed like a cool experience, plus I could brag that I'd been on TV. Oh, the possibilities.

The documents didn't come the next day, or the next. Nothing came, not even a phone call to cancel. The weekend came and went, and that was that. It just goes to show what sort of professionalism you can expect in Korea sometimes.

I wasn't really that upset. I had no idea what I would have to say about doing weekly morning broadcasts. Until recently, all my broadcasts were super boring anyway.

On Tuesday of this week, my co-teacher told me that EBS had called her the night before, asking us to come up to Seoul again. I wasn't really surprised that they would simply let things go completely cold, and then call us again and expect us to jump at the happy opportunity. Maybe I've been here too long.

I asked if she'd yelled at them for their shenanigans, and my co-teacher said she had, which is pretty surprising considering she's one of the sweetest people I've ever met. I agreed to go again and was told we'd get the documents and info the next day.

The next day was yesterday. Today was Thursday. Still no information, no calls, no documents. Will EBS really make an ass of themselves and leave us hanging again? We'll see tomorrow.

I'll just say that I won't be surprised if they drop the ball again.

Minor Updates!

I've added a couple little bells and whistles to this blog, mostly because I'm avoiding some work I need to finish up by tomorrow morning.

If you would kindly look to the right side of the page, you will see there is a poll. Mom and Dad, I'm pretty sure you two are the only people who read this on a semi-regular basis. Andy, you're probably in there as well.

Does anyone else read this? Maybe I'll find out. Some random visitor posted a comment on my post about the food waste. I was quite honored to know that a random stranger may occasionally pay me a visit and read this blog.

Also on the right side, I added a feed of my Twitter updates. Not that they are anything interesting, or that I even enjoy or fully understand Twitter, but I'm doing it anyway. Now you don't even have to click on my link to see what mundane thoughts or actions are occupying me.

Oh, and a couple weeks ago I added a search bar at the top of my blog. Now you can easily search this blog.

I hope everyone is as excited about these new additions as I am.

School Safety

Summer vacation was fast approaching and my school was doing a few minor renovations here and there. They moved the IT office upstairs across from my office, and they were sprucing up a couple old offices and the lower hallway with some new design touches.It was all very nice, considering my school is pretty old and could use a new look here and there.

One morning I was walking past the office renovations on the first floor towards the stairs when I noticed a pneumatic nail gun just lying unattended on the ground right in front of a first grade classroom. As much as I knew leaving a tool like this laying around in an elementary school was a bad idea, I can't say I'm surprised.

It seems to my American mind that renovation and construction might be better done when the students were actually not in the school. And if you can't avoid that, at least tell the workers not to leave deadly tools on the ground for 5 year-olds to trip over.

It also seems to my American mind that encouraging students to carry around X-acto knives and box-cutters in their pencil cases might be a bad idea too. Regardless, have any student show you what they have among the pencils and pens and Big Bang stickers and there you'll inevitably find something that is illegal to bring onto a plane.

While I'm thinking of it, students haven't seemed to get a grasp on how to properly handle scissors. I remember learning to hold and pass scissors with my hand around the blade, finger grips out so as not to accidentally cut someone if the blades open. I don't think Korea's gotten that concept yet.

There's a lot that seems obviously dangerous to my American mind over here in the land of the morning calm. And maybe I'm really over-thinking the nature of school safety here. That would be yet another distinctly American trait. After all, I've never heard of a kid getting cut by the knives they sharpen their pencils with, or falling off the roof when they have to crawl out the windows to clean up the trash. Hell, even when one middle school student was getting a little wild with her knife and I told her to relax and she made stabbing motions at me (apparently something funny here in Korea, rather than criminal over in America), I never got cut. Maybe I am being a little overly critical here. After all, despite a pneumatic nail gun lying around on the ground, how many elementary school students could actually lift it and figure out how to use it, right?

So Smooth!

When you are part of a small group of foreigners living abroad, you don't get a wide selection of people from which to choose your friends. Sometimes you're stuck hanging out with a drag, a bore, a jackass, or someone supremely annoying.

Case in point: Mani.

Mani is a tall, handsome English-Indian guy. He has light brown skin and a strong chin and often has a sharp, thin goatee going. He fancies himself a real smooth operator. He claimed once to me that he has a high standard in women, but I've never seen him with any good-looking women. I think they all know better, even the dumb ones.

Korea played Uruguay in the round of 16 on a Saturday night. My friend Ken and his girlfriend were having people at their place to watch the game. His girlfriend had invited some people from their salsa dancing club. He invited me and Miju and Moise. We all met downtown at an end-of-season softball party.

Mani was with Ken at the party, and was at the stage of drunkenness where he was still fully in control of himself, but excessively loud and friendly and jubilant.

My friend Paul had never liked Mani. He thought he was smug and obnoxious and pushy. It's probably one of the reasons Paul opted not to watch the game with us.

I had never really minded Mani, although I could understand why someone would find him obnoxious. This night really changed my mind though.

As we were walking to Ken's apartment, Mani latched onto Moise and wouldn't stop talking about hip hop. Mani has a terrible taste in hip hop, from what I could tell, and Moise has no taste for hip hop at all. But Moise is black and Mani just assumed that black people and hip hop go hand in hand. Fortunately, me and Miju were talking with Ken the whole walk and didn't have to deal with Mani at all, but I couldn't help feeling bad for Moise.

At one point, behind me I could hear Mani rapping to Moise, and then for the rest of the 20 minute walk, he was holding a tiny MP3 player to Moise's ear, blasting tinny rap. Moise was miserable, and this is on top of the fact I had to drag him out to watch the game, against his will and desire to sleep.

During the game, Mani gobbled up about half of the food that Ken's girlfriend had prepared, and was later complaining about having to help pay for it.

He squeezed on to the couch amongst some terrified Korean girls, loudly claiming he was "bringing together cultures" or something like that. Everyone eventually moved away and the once full couch was nearly empty. He noticed and joked that he had all the couch to himself, but seemed to fail to understand why.

He pronounces my name in a stupid accent so it sounds like "E-fin!".

He got a phone call from a girl who was downtown. She must have been Korean, because he kept slowly repeating in English that he was "at a friend's house. I cannot meet now. I will call you when I am free." Over and over he did this, until he was yelling at her and everyone around was wondering why he was being such a dick, and at such a volume.

Earlier in the evening, he asked Miju if she had been out of the country before. Surprised, Miju said, "Huh?"

Very slowly, Mani repeated, "Have. You. Been. Out. Of. The. Country?" with little arm gestures.

Miju asked, "Which country?"

"Koh-ree-uh."

"I'm from Canada."

"Oh."

The icing on Mani's brilliant social performance that evening really came out of the blue. I had my arm around Miju who was on my left. Mani was on my right, having scared everyone else off the couch. He turned to me and said, "Maybe this isn't the best time, but is that the same girl you were with last time?" I couldn't believe he was be so dense to ask such a question almost right in front of Miju's face. I knew something else remarkably stupid was coming, but said, "Yeah. At the Indian restaurant." This was an occasion when he accosted me and her crossing the street on our way to a big dinner with friends. He was with a Korean girl on a date, and he wound up having dinner with her, ditching her, and crashing our dinner and insisting on taking a lot of pictures.

"No, no, I mean at the theater thing, before that. The girl from Seoul?"

I couldn't believe how fucking moronic he was. This was not a whisper. There was no doubt Miju was hearing all this, she was leaning against me, after all. Miju is not the girl from Seoul. That was my last girlfriend. I really couldn't process his depth of idiocy so I just shook my head and stared straight ahead at the TV. This seemed to dawn on Mani, and he started mumbling weak apologies and qualifiers. I did my best to ignore him for the rest of the evening.

Korea lost that night, but walking home, the only thing Moise, Miju, and I could talk about was Mani. We all had our own stories about him that night that the others didn't know. How could he be so socially retarded? He wasn't even very drunk.

It's a sad fact about foreign communities abroad: they're very often largely made up of misfits and morons who just can't make it in their home countries.