Tuesday, May 27, 2008

My blog last week was tinged with anger, so I should be quick to point out how wonderfully everything turned out in the end. Not perfect, but well enough that I'm more than happy with the result. We were able to cancel one of the food orders, and though we had to buy the more expensive meals, and I will probably have to pay some
money to the restaurant we canceled with, the ultimate tournament made enough money to cover all those costs plus everything else necessary for the weekend.

The weekend of frisbee in Mokpo was great, I really don't know what more I could have asked for. 45 people came to town for it, there was another 8 or so doing concession and volunteer work for the town orphanages, and we had a few random spectators come by on and off to watch the games in action. I did most of the placing of players on each team, and I did my best to keep all the teams perfectly even, and I came as close as I could have I think, with the majority of games ending with only 2 or 3 point differentials. My team however did go 5-0 for the weekend, winning it all in the end.


It felt great putting the whole weekend together, and it wasn't nearly as stressful as I had imagined it would be. I was fairly good at keeping track of things, and
there were only three major setbacks during planning, all of which were handled great I think. One of them included the bar owner where our
party would be getting in a car accident, so while I wasn't able to negotiate the beer prices I wanted, I made up for it by buying each team 2-3 jugs of beer.

It's Tuesday now, and I'm still pretty beat from the weekend, though not nearly as sore as I thought I'd be. I only got about 3 1/2 hours of sleep each night this
weekend, yet I felt great playing everyday, so I'm not sure where I'm hiding all the exhaustiong I thought I'd be suffering from. Perhaps I was enjoying myself so much, I just kind of forgot that my body was supposed to be in pain. Hope everyone reading this had a good weekend as well!

Friday, May 23, 2008

Don't Help Me, Listen To Me.

A situation has developed in the last few minutes that's got me quite angry. Actually, it's developed over the last few days, but it was only a few minutes ago that I became aware of it. The ultimate tournament is this weekend, and ordering food has been the crux of the planning, causing a mild headache as I try to sort out how many people, what kind of food, and how cheap I can get it.

I talked to my school on Wednesday, and they found a place that would do it for $4.50. Not bad, I said, let me talk to you by the end of the day Thursday to let you know numbers and if it will work for us. This was on Wednesday.

I then talked to one of Shannon's co-teachers, who was able to get it for $3.50 a meal. Great, I said, let's order it. This was Thursday.

Today is Friday. I come in first thing in the morning and tell me school not to worry about ordering the food. Which of course they already have ordered, back on Wednesday when I was trying to figure out the price. I spend the next 30-40 minutes trying to get them to cancel, but it seems the place they've ordered from is doing this especially for me - they don't even make the food I wanted to order, but my school got them to do so and at a $1.50 a meal discounted price. Needless to say, when they hear that I want to cancel, they are right upset.

So we call Shannon's co-teacher to try and cancel that. Same problem. Now I've got two sets of meals ordered, one of which I never wanted to begin with but only wanted to know the price, and everyone (other than me) seems to be in agreement that I have to pay for both of them.

I know there's a way around this situation, but I can't speak Korean so I can't explain or have explained to me the way things are. I don't even know how my school managed to order these meals, since they didn't know how many I wanted or what time I wanted them, and they seem to be putting meat in them as well which I also didn't want. What a disgusting waste or resources this is turning into.

Anyway, I'm still not going to lose any money due to this disaster, but I'm not going to be able to buy any of the extras I wanted for the weekend (beer, prizes, bananas and bread). Obviously my school wasn't trying to screw me over, but this minor misunderstanding is really putting me on edge right now. I know I should have gone to tell them Thursday that I didn't want the food, but why the %$*@ did they order it without knowing the exact details of it? They didn't even wait until Thursday, they ordered right there in front of me on Wednesday when I thought they were just finding out the cost!

Oh, and right in the middle of this ordeal, the fat administrator guy who is always making jokes about my not speaking good Korean walked in and gave me a goofy-smiled lecture about closing my windows in my classroom. It's proabably the closest I've come to punching anyone. I'm calm now, but I think this is going to be a long day.

Saturday, May 17, 2008

5 Is The Magic Number

I'm feeling pretty good right now after a long day of playing ultimate in Seoul and hanging out with Miso. There's an ultimate tournament happening at the end of June in Shanghai, and it looks like I'll be able to get one a team going over there. It's quite competitive, so I've been busing or training up the past few weekends to play.

I took the dog this time, which meant he and I spent 8-9 hours on buses, subways and trains as we shuttled from Mokpo to Seoul to the fields and back. Quite a heavy trip for the both of us, but it was not without its nuggets of entertainment. My favourite was on the subway, when an ajosshi encouraged the two of us to sit down next to him. He spoke English, and it was a 30 minute ride, so I sat down and we started talking.

He was sober, which was wonderful, but still nuts as could be. Or at more likely, he had once been quite an intelligent guy, but things seemed to have been sliding on him the past decade or two. He spent the majority of our ride together discussing the significance of the number 5. I guess he saw something about the Olympics, and he thought of the rings, which lead to the many other universal links of the number 5.

"5 rings, 5 fingers."

'5 vital organs: heart, lungs, liver, stomach and kidneys."

"5 parts of the face." He never explained those.

"5 colours of hair." What?

"5 colours of skin. Yours is white. I am yellow. Africans are black. Russians are... uh, Russians are red. And Australians, Australians... uh... 5 colours of skin, you see!"

There were also 5 ways of speaking, 5 shapes of the mouth, etc. etc.. It was the deepest conversation I've had with a stranger in quite some time.

"My Dog The Racist"

Yep, Miso is a racist. He knows a Korean when he sees them, and he does not like them. Even our Korean friends who hang out with us get the same treatment from him: Barking, snarling and running away. Foreigners only need to s much as look at him and he's in love with them, and will cry 5 minutes after meeting them if they leave him. But Koreans, my goodness does he get his "hate" on when they come around. He still fears children, though I had we had a great encounter with a foreigner today that leads me to believe it may again be just Korean children. I think maybe I need to train him a little better with Koreans and children, or perhaps it's time to start trying to train the people he meets on how to make friends with him.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

I Want To Eat Your Manager

We're putting on an ultimate frisbee tournament in Mokpo next weekend, and I've spent some time going around to businesses in town asking for sponsorship. The title of this blog is what I said to one of the staff at a store trying to speak with their manager. I may have actually asked to eat "with" the manager, but either way, the staff member gave me a wonderfully strange look before she managed to figure out what I was trying to accomplish.

So far no one has decided to help us with our tournament, which I think is more a result of us not being able to communicate properly with local businesses than their unwillingness to sponsor events. No one knows what ultimate frisbee is, and while I have managed to put together some request letters in Korean explaining our plight, they don't seem to have done the trick. The one time I did manage to have a Korean come with me to help translate became nearly as problematic as if I had gone on my own. Shannon's old co-teacher, a magnificently intelligent and nice woman, met me at city hall to help negotiate lowering the costs of renting the fields, but the from the moment I saw her until just before we were ready to leave, she was crying. She managed to keep her composure fairly well, but tears were pouring down her face, she went through piles of tissue wiping her nose and eyes, and no matter how much I protested that we should perhaps wait till she was feeling better, she was determined to trudge on and get things done. No one we met with said anything about her emotional state, and she was fairly quick to assure everyone that she just had a real big piece of dust in her eye, but wow, what a strange afternoon that turned out to be.

Some other friends had an incredibly difficult experience of their own recently , one that ended with the police coming to their apartment. My one friend was cleaning her apartment to get ready to leave the country, and another girl had come over to help her tidy up. The two of them were taking the garbage out, and they didn't sort it out into the proper recycling piles right away, as they had to bring more from the apartment. Well, the ajosshi (middle-aged man) patroling the parking lot went ballistic, running after them and slapping them across their bodies to get them back to fix the garbage. The girls got scared of course and ran back inside; the ajosshi followed them, now accompanied by an ajumma (middle-aged woman) and hauling all the garbage they had just taken out. At the apartment door, more shouting ensued, and the drunk next-door neighbour decided to get involved. The girls were now pushing the door closed to keep people out of the house, the gabage had been kicked down the stairs and had exploded everywhere, and not knowing what else to do the girls called our Korean friend who phoned the police. When they arrived, things calmed down a bit, as the drunk man was put back in his house, the lady cleaned up the garbage and the garbage ajosshi eventually went back outside.

I should take a moment to explain these two terms, "ajosshi" and "ajumma". Basically they mean a middle-aged man and woman, but they're used in many different ways. The online dictionary translates them as "auntie" and "uncle", Koreans have explained the words as describing someone who is married, and both can be used as a respectful description of a person or as an insult. Foreigners may say someone is being very "ajosshi" when they're coming across as arrogant and imperious, yet if you watch a Korean movie, you may read a subtitle that uses someone's name yet hear them being referred to as "ajosshi" instead. An "ajumma" can be anyone from a loving grandma to a poor street person who collects cardboard from the streets for recycling.

What it seems has happened is that Korea, being a culture that places great emphasis on respect for elders, has been caught in an almost paradoxical situation where older people (the men moreso) are given a natural respect by society, and have in turn taken for granted the respect they've been given and make themselves look like fools. The garbage ajosshi was certainly right that the girls didn't sort their trash, but smacking them and chasing them into their apartment doesn't really get the point across. Most ajosshi's take great care in dressing nicely and taking care of themselves, but at night it's those same old men in suits that you find peeing in the parking lot outside your front door. Foreigner discussion forums online are filled with strange stories about old men defacting in flower pots on the street, falling down drunk on the sidewalk and just sleeping there, or harrassing people around them if they feel they aren't being treated the way they deserve to be. Shannon pointed out that in North America it's often the women who want to get married because life seems so much simpler to them after that. In Korea, most men are looking to get married and women much more wary. From what I've seen and heard, once couples are married and move in together, the man becomes much more "I'm the man" and the woman takes care of the house and kids. The co-teacher who was crying during our trip to city hall - Shannon and I both suspect her husband may be cheating on her, and we know he spends a great deal of his time outside of work golfing and drinking. He's certainly not the kind of man to go passing out on the street or telling strangers how they should run their lives, but I think some of those "ajosshi" qualities are a little much sometimes.

Geez, I feel like I've done another one of my "Look how bad Korea is" rants, when the truth is I'm really enjoying my time here lately. My palate has warmed to Korean food to the point I'm going to miss it when I leave, I've made some wonderful Korean friends over the past few months, and school is, well, it's OK. I really am going to miss this country when I leave. Anyway, I've written lots for today and I think it's time to get ready for class. I've had heaps of holidays the past few weeks, so I'm a little slow on keeping up with the blogs, but thanks for keeping with me. Take care till next week.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

The Weekend Warrior


I finally got my things together - and by things I mean photos - and now I've got a couple of fun weekends worth of adventure to blog about here.

Nearly two weeks ago, 16 of us from Mokpo took the 5 hour boat ride to Jeju Island, the "Hawaii of Korea", a nearly tropical Korean paradise with various degrees of actual "paradise" qualities to it. Actually, if you've read my old blog on the trip Shan and I took to Jeju, you'll see it is really quite nice.


This year's tournament wasn't quite as fantastic as the one last year - not as much free food or drinks, separate fields for different levels of teams, and far too many teams seemed to suffer from self-imposed curfews, making the party on Saturday and Sunday wind down by 1am. It was still loads of fun, though Saturday had us riddled with challenges on the fields.
The wind was bordering on hurricane strength, our team was placed in a much stronger competition level than we belonged in, and it wasn't until the final game of the day that we managed to score more than 2 points against another team. Still, good times regardless.

Sunday was much better, and the calmer weather meant for some enjoyable games
regardless of whether we won or lost. We won the first two games fortunately, but lost our final game, giving us 2nd place in the "C" division.

Last weekend had myself, Shannon and a few other Mokpo-ites traveling east of Seoul to a tiny town called Ganhyeon, where heaps of the local and foreigner climbing
community had descended upon for a weekend of climbing adventure. I also got to meet up with my old University buddy Les who's been living in Korea as long as I have but we hadn't met up yet.


The climbing was great, I learned plenty of new knowledge on climbing, pushing myself a little harder and further than I'd thought possible, and I managed to replace a little more of the nice tender skin on my hands with a callous layer or, well, callouses.

Friday, May 02, 2008

Kids vs Adults

I'm not sure who takes the cake for strangest behaviour, kids or adults. I've had a few more unusual run-ins with adults the past week, but one of my kids threw me for such a loop I'm not sure what to make of it.

While walking yesterday, I noticed a lady walking her granddaughter (I assume), and nearly get hit by several vehicles. She was crossing the street 30 meters away from the crosswalk, and looking the wrong way so as to not see any of the oncoming traffic. A bus came by blaring its horn, and while I jumped in the air having been so frightened from it, she didn't even look in its direction, but did at least take half a step back. Once the bus was gone, she again began crossing the road looking away from the coming traffic.

I also have started once again to run into a former Korean acquaintence, a possibly mentally handicapped man who throws out every English sentence he knows all at once -
"Hello nice to meet you my name is Ki Baum how are you I am fine where are you from nice to meet you what is your name I am from Korea how are you nice to meet you..." and on until I move out of earshot.

My student though, there's nothing really wrong with him, he's just a little eccentric. When I first got here he would hold my hand sometimes (many students do that), then he started humming "here' comes the bride" when we walked. Lately he's started hugging me and telling me how much he loves me. And finally, last week he wrapped himself around me while I was at my computer (he's quite a hefty fellow) and tried to kiss my face. I don't know where he was trying to kiss, cause I got my hands up awfully fast, but it was certainly not an appropriate or welcome gesture. He's a nice kid, seems to get along with everyone else, but he's the kind of kid you see wearing bow ties, sweater vests and sporting a crew-cut. Something's just not adding up.

I'm a little behind on this weeks blog, and I realized it's cause I wanted to talk about my last weekend in Jeju, but I don't have any pictures yet. Most of the photos were taken by our amateur photographer guy Dave, and I haven't snagged a copy of them, and I really want to put up some good shots of me and the team playing. My only good team photo had someone (I'm sure it couldn't have been me...) acting mildly inappropriate, so I think I'll wait till I get a more accurate photo-description of the weekend. I will however say that I had a great time, played really well at least one of the two days we played, and I'm going to be sad to miss next years tournament.

Finally, I'm hosting an ultimate tournament here in Mokpo. You can see our details at www.mokpoultimate.com, and yes I know there's heaps of type-o's, I'm sure I'll get to fixing them later (well, I'll have my helper fix them, I don't actually make the website). While I'm sure a trip to Korea is probably out of the question for most people, everyone I know is more than invited, and if you make the trip from overseas, I promise to waive the $20 registration fee. So long for now!