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.

음식쓰레기

It's summer time in Korea, and that means the street smells are blooming. Sewers and trash piles are becoming hot and pungent. This is as fitting a time as any to write about the on-going miniature debacle that is food waste disposal.

The system is pretty simple, but really foreign to how things work at home. You don't just throw food out in the trash. You either put food waste in a big neighborhood compost bin or you put it in individual buckets. My neighborhood uses the individual bucket system. You have to buy tickets to put in the buckets to get your shit taken care of. I got my bucket at the neighborhood office when I moved in, and they wrote my address and apartment number on it so everyone would know it belonged.

I used to keep my food bucket inside, but it got too gross, so I finally got the bright idea of keeping it outside and bringing out my food waste in a bag like most people. I don't know why it took me so long to figure that out.

There's a little cluster of the buckets outside my building's door. In winter, you hardly notice them with the cold slowing down the decay of the food, but you can't miss the stench now. People come by early in the morning three times a week to empty the buckets.

I don't leave my bucket on the street anymore. I put it in the parking area by my motorcycle because I was sick of random people throwing their nasty food into my filthy god-dammed bucket. It's annoying to bring out a stinking bag of food rot to get disposed of, setting loose all the flies that gather on the buckets when you open it, and finding some jackass already filled it with their own disgusting rot, and having to force yours in, and then sticking a ticket in the bucket to pay for their shit to be taken care of.

Sometimes I put my food in the bucket, and stick the ticket in the lid because the handle with the special ticket-holding slot broke off, and the next morning my food is still there, but the ticket is gone. I can only assume some clown comes by and takes advantage of the fact that they can steal my ticket.

Once I went around the back of my motorcycle to get my bucket to find it missing. Someone had not only put their shit in my bucket, but gone through the trouble to finding the damn thing, and then bringing it out to the street full of their rot. They didn't even have the decency to put a ticket in, I had to do that.

Once, I saw an ajumma rooting around the cluster of buckets by my door one day when I was coming home. She was poking around to see which one would be best to put her rot into. This immediately pissed me off. Why didn't she get her own bucket? It's so cheap it might as well be free. It probably has to do with some sense of Korean community-entitlement, but I don't have that, so I didn't care. She shouldn't have been dumping her rot into someone else's bucket.

Fortunately my bucket was out back. If I had seen her dropping her rot into my bucket, I would have probably been forced to break out my weak Korean to tell her to get that nasty shit out of my disgusting bucket. What's this world coming to when someone can't even take responsibility for her own food waste?

A Belated Sports Day Report

Sports Day was a month and a half ago. I like Sports Day, I think they should have one in the American school systems; maybe some schools do. I remember Field Day when I was a kid, Sports Day is different though. It involves a full day of all the classes dancing and competing in various running activities and games. Parents and grandparents come watch their kids, and even are expected to participate in some of the dances. It's a big picnic, which is pretty nice.

Here is a video of a lot of photos I shot during my school's Sports Day:



I teach at an elementary school. Last year, I taught at a middle school. As much as I like my current school better overall than my last school, I have to admit that the Sports Day at my middle school was more fun. The kids at the middle school are obviously older, and thus more ridiculous, though less cute. At the middle school, the students bought matching class T-shirts and made a lot of elaborate signs, with some in English that said things that didn't make sense, but were a hoot to read. Overall, the middle school students were a lot crazier, and as a bonus, there were a lot of really pretty student teachers who were doing some in-school training at the time.

Last year's sports day wasn't all entertainment and beautiful women though. I remember distinctly that it was game 7 of the playoff series between the Carolina Hurricanes and Boston Bruins. I kept running inside to catch pieces of the game on a choppy internet feed, and then running back outside to take pictures and generally be seen during intermissions. The Bruins lost on that fateful day, but all the students out on the playground didn't seem to mind. Weird.

Why I Hate the Flyers

I know this isn't the most timely article. The Stanley Cup Finals wrapped up last week and the World Cup is now under way and rightly demands full attention as the most important sporting event there is. However, I still think about the Flyers losing in the Cup Finals last week and feel warm and fuzzy, so lend me your ears a moment, and let me tell you why I hate the Flyers.

1.Phil likes them.

We lived together in a tiny apartment at UNH and it turned out that he loves the Flyers and I love the Bruins. Naturally, acceptance of the others' team was out of the question for the sake of entertainment in the form of shit-talking. Thus, I grew to despise the Flyers. Phil is a great guy, make no mistake about that. I'm proud to say I would have grown to hate any team he liked.

2. Chris Pronger.

Chris Pronger is just a complete dickhead. I've never liked him since watching the playoffs a few years back, I guess, when he was on the Ducks. He's a dirty player and gets away with stuff that others don't just because he's good. He's likes a smug, over-privileged rich kid that you fantasize about punching in the face in front of his girlfriend and busting his nose on his new white shoes or something. Plus he looks like a gap-toothed ape and his haircut sucks. I hope he got really mad when the Chicago Tribune ran that picture of him in a skirt. Chris Pronger is a goon which leads me to a more general grievance:

3. They're goons.

The Flyers are a bunch of dirty bastards. Look what they did to Patrice Bergeron in 2007. And they took some other players out for awhile too, but I'm not gonna go dig up a bunch of old facts. They're dirty.

4. They eliminated the Bruins.

They not only eliminated them, they did it in a highly embarrassing fashion. Sure, I can get mad at the Bruins for blowing a 3-0 series lead and a 3-0 game lead in game 7, or I could just hate the Flyers more; I hate the Flyers more.

The World Cup!

The World Cup is about to start; you should know this already! It's the most important sporting event in the world, and that fact should get anyone exited. Apparently, Korea has been pretty crazy over soccer ever since they hosted the tournament in 2002 and Korea surprisingly made it to the semi-finals and ultimately finished fourth place.

Korea plays Greece on Saturday at 8:30PM. It's their first game in the tournament, and I think it will be a great match-up, but I don't really know much about soccer so that assessment really means nothing. I'm going to Daegu's World Cup Stadium to watch it on the big screen on Saturday. Eric is finally getting his lazy ass down from Seoul, so I'll watch it with him and Miju. I hope they open up the field for people to sit on, rather than in the seasts, 'cause then we can get there early and play cards and drink beer and have a picnic.

America plays their opening game against England. This is at 3:30AM Sunday morning here in Korea. I'm gonna watch it. I feel like I have to. My English friend Chris thinks that America will probably beat England, and I want to believe him, but I know that England is usually pretty good. We'll see. I think they should call this match-up "The Revolutionary War: Part 2".

After playing Argentina in their second game, Korea plays Nigeria on the 23rd of this month. It's their last game in the opening round, and I'll have a Spanish couchsurfer staying with me when that game is on at 3:30PM. I'll probably watch it with the projector in my classroom if I can find a decent Internet feed.

This whole thing is perfect timing, too. With the Stanley Cup Finals having just wrapped up (thank god those fucking Flyers lost), I'll have a solid month worth of high quality, high stakes sport to watch in my free time. It should be great. Maybe not as great as four years ago when the World Cup was in Germany, and I could listen on the radio while I was landscaping, or wake up on the weekends at Chad's apartment and watch games, but still, I'm pretty pumped.

Photo Album Updates

I have finally updated and uploaded a couple more photo albums onto my Picasa gallery. The two albums range from my post-Australia winter to last weekend.

Click on the link on the sidebar to check them out!