happy saturday

Yay, it's Saturday. I just got back from getting a haircut. It was a little strange. The regular girl wasn't there. It's always a little uncomfortable getting my haircut because I can't speak any Korean and the girls who cut my hair can never speak any English so it's a bit awkward. But at least before I'd been having the same girl cut it every time. It's always worse when it's a new girl. With the old girl it's still uncomfortable, but at least it feels like we've come to some unspoken agreement about how my hair will be when it's finished.

She did a good job though. When the haircut was done I gave the regular "Choayo" and the girl giggled in surprise that I was at least able to say "Good" in Korean. Then came the shampoo. They have this young kid who is doing the shampoo now and he put some weird shit in my hair. It burned like a mother fucker. My head has been on fire for the last hour, and now as I sit here writing this it's finally starting to cool down a little bit. I don't know what the hell that shit he put in my hair was.

Tonight we're going out for either Daegi Galbi or Sam-Gyeop-Sal. Both dishes are just BBQ'd pork, and their both amazing. I love the way they eat here. We just cook it right at our table. Wrap it up in some minty leaves with some sauce and veggies, and eat it. The stuff is delicious.

After food we're going to go to the beach. It's probably going to be one of the last chances we get to go to the beach before it gets cold, so I thought it would be nice to head down there for a couple of hours tonight and walk along the boardwalk and maybe have a drink or two.

This morning I watched the Toronto game, loss in overtime, awesome. The leafs have now gathered 5 points this season out of a possible 22. Beautiful. The truly sad thing though is that the Bruins only have 11 points, so they're not doing that much better. Anyways, there is one benefit to watching Toronto broadcasts, other than the pure satisfaction of watching the team go down in flames. You can learn random facts.

Today, I learned the origin of the term "hat trick". Apparently, in the early days of hockey there was this haberdashery that would give out fedora's to any Leaf's player who would score three goals in one game. Thus, the term "hat trick" developed because there was some store that would actually give you a hat if you scored three goals for the locals. Interesting. I don't think the haberdasher is going to have to worry about going out of business this year giving free hats to Leafs players.

Wow, I almost forgot. It's Halloween. Yesterday, all my kids were angry at me because we didn't have a big Halloween party at my school. According to them every other school has a Halloween party. Instead of a Halloween party the kids at my school got tests. Got to love that. I just told them that we were having a party. It's "Vocabulary Test Party" day. They were not amused. I did at least give them candy though. It does kind of piss me off that every other Academy on the peninsula has parties and Christmas day off, and holidays in general off, but we're all stuck working, sans party. One of these days I'm going to get a job at a public school or a uni and actually be able to enjoy holidays and vacations, one of these days.

Anyways, that's all I have for today. If anything interesting happens tonight I'll let you know. For now, goodnight and good luck.

name change?

I'm thinking of changing the name of the blog, too many people use Engrish to describe how Koreans say the word English, and I really don't want people to expect this to be funny because it really isn't. I'm not sure what I'm leaning towards for a name though, maybe just "Man-boy on the Peninsula" or something simple like that. I really can't think of anything at the moment. I'm too tired.

Fridays always hit me like a brick. I don't know how I could ever consider going out until 4 or 5am on a Friday night, this is the night that I'm always the most tired. It's been a long week, and I'm glad it's over. Tonight I gave a practice IBT test to my students and those tests always make me more tired than the students. Sitting at the computer for two hours when they take the test always wears me out. I'm really not looking forward to an entire week of IBT's next week. I'll be exhausted by Friday night next week. Maybe I'll just keep my fingers crossed and hope the Minister of Education decides to force all the Hagwons to close because of swine flu. I won't hold my breathe, but a guy can always dream.

I mentioned yesterday I would talk a little about our pointless meeting. We have what we call level-up tests every three months at my academy. The students have to get a certain score on the tests to be able to move to the next level. We have the same exact meeting every three months and talk about the same exact things. It's really worthless. Everyone knows that the only thing that matters is that your class falls into the average. You score a few of your worst students a little below the average, and a few of your best students above the average, and everyone else falls in the middle. Yet, we still have to have these retarded meetings every three months just so we don't forget. There was a time, about a year ago, when we didn't have to go to these meetings if we had been here longer than three month and had given the tests at least one time. Now, everyone has to go. So even though I've graded these stupid tests 50 times and know exactly what I'm doing I have to sit through these 2 hour meetings telling me the same shit I've heard 20 times. Pointless, really really, pointless.

On a different note, the Bruins lost today. They should have won, they really outplayed New Jersey for about 58 minutes. Then they fucked up and got sloppy in the last two minutes and gave up a goal that lost it for them. Still, I'm excited about the way they played today. Without Savard and Lucic they're still looking pretty good. Bergeron is playing like he used to, and Wideman no longer makes me cringe every time he touches the puck. I'd like to see a little bit more from Krejci though. He's just not playing as well as he was last year. I don't think he's fully recovered from his surgery yet.

Anyways, that's all for today. I think I might play a little PS2. I've finally gotten through the first two hours of teen angst bullshit in "Star Ocean" so I think I can actually finally play the damn game.

Goodnight.

technology is awesome

Today was my girlfriends day off. She had a bad day. There's this presentation that she has to do so she was attempting to work on that all day. First, the printer at her parents house broke. So she called me at work and asked if she could come to my house and use my printer. About an hour later when I'm on my break I get another phone call from her. The printer at my house is now broken too and she's ready to start throwing things. I talk her down and tell her to just send me and email and I'll print it out at work. When I finish my last class I open up the email and begin to print it...the printer at work breaks. Now I'm pissed off too. I finally get the other printer at work to print it and the print out is fucked up. All the words just blend together into one long word without any spaces between them. I think her word file is cursed, it just seems to destroy everything it touches.

Because of the cursed word file I now have to spend an hour on Sunday going to Hi-Mart trying to get those guys to replace the printer or at least fix it, it should still be under warranty, but I don't think I have the receipt anymore because I'm an idiot when it comes to keeping receipts.

Other than that not much has happened today, but I did want to spend a minute talking about the Toronto vs. Anaheim game earlier this week. How obvious does the league have to be when it fixes a Toronto game?? Seriously, they should have just made an announcement before the game telling everyone that they thought it was bad for the league for the Leafs to go that long without winning a game so they were just going to let them spend the entire game on the power play to give them a fighting chance to win. 45 penalty minutes for Anaheim. Three 5 on 3 power plays for Toronto, four power play goals for Toronto. Fucking bullshit. It was so obvious that it's just silly. Every time there was even a little tiny scrum Anaheim would end up short handed.

The league just needs to deal with the fact that Toronto fucked up it's team and they will be in last place this year. Phil Kessel will not be their new Mats Sundin. Phil Kessel will be lucky to get 20 goals this year. I predict 18 goals for their new "franchise" player.

The worst part is I actually used to be a mild Toronto fan. Them paying Kessel that much money has made me hate them though. I now hate them more than I hate the Habs, more than I hate the Yankees even. I would be happier than I've ever been in my life if they won less than 15 games this year. I want that team to burn in flames. I want Leafs fans to make Kessel cry.

Anyways, that's all I have. Not much else to talk about today. The Bruins are playing tomorrow so I'll probably have something to say about that. Oh, and all the foreign teachers had a completely pointless meeting today so maybe I'll talk about that a little bit too. Bye for now.

spicy chicken

October 29, 2009

Maybe I’ll actually try to keep this blog up to date. I haven’t decided yet. However, if I do decide to publish this, which I won’t, and if I do actually have some people who read it, which I also wont, don’t fucking leave comments telling me how shitty a writer I am. I know I’m a horrible writer. I’m not writing this to amuse anyone other than myself, I’m not a good writer, I don’t care. Fuck you.

Anyways, not much happened yesterday, but for some reason all the Koreans at my job really respect me and think I’m great. I don’t know why, I don’t actually do anything. I think it’s just because I’ve been there for longer than most people and I don’t cause them any problems. Lately, they’ve been putting these little posters on all the walls in the hall with a list of kids ID’s and names. So I asked one of the Korean staffers what the posters were all about. Apparently, they're just a list of students who don’t have their pictures in the databases yet. All the Korean staffers were so happy and impressed that I actually asked about it. We have about 12 foreign teachers and I was the only one to ask.

The truth is I don’t really give a fuck about the lists of students names they have posted on the wall. The only reason I asked was because all the foreign teachers were asking me about them. Even the faculty manager (FM) asked me about it. Why the fuck does the FM ask me questions that he should know the answer to before me? Because my girlfriend is one of the Korean staffers. So instead of communicating with the Koreans about what’s going on the FM comes to me first to find out if I know anything through my girlfriend. I don’t want him to ask me about shit, it’s his job to know about shit like that before I do.

The only other thing I have to say is for all you young men out there be very careful when you’re getting intimate with your girlfriends. Last night my girlfriend came over and we had some great hot spicy chicken. Seriously, this stuff will make your mouth bleed and your eyeballs sweat. I love it. Hot chicken is one of my favorite things about Korea. I can get it from 20 different places. The only place back home that had hot chicken was Dominoes pizza. That’s not joke, the only place I could get could hot chicken in my hometown was a fucking pizza joint.

Anyways, back to my advice. If you happen to be eating hot chicken with your girlfriend some night; make sure that after you’ve finished eating it you don’t forget to wash your hands. If you forget to wash your hands your girlfriend will not be happy. She thought I did it on purpose, that I intentionally didn’t wash my hands because I wanted to burn her holiest of holy places because we got in an argument the night before. I would never do something like that. Why would I want to spoil the mood? It’s not like I get laid in the middle of the week very often. Sex has been pretty much relegated to a weekend activity now that her father caught on that she had been coming to my house every night until 2am, and not hanging out with her girlfriends. So, now we only get to spend late evenings together on Fridays and Saturdays.

So my advice you ask? Wash your hands. Hot chicken sauce will be hot in places other than your mouths. And it's much more likely to get you in trouble in the other places.

first post

October 28, 2009

Well, I’ve never actually written a blog before so I really don’t know what the fuck I should do, other than curse a lot and try to act like I’m a reluctant hipster. Admittedly, I’m a little late to the blog train, but I’m always a little late for everything. That’s ok, I don’t really care.

So, today was a relatively normal day here in Korea. I’m an English teacher in Korea. I’m not Korean, which should be clear by my at least rudimentary ability to use English. I’ve been here for two years now and have gone through the typical trials of an ESL teacher. Someday, I’ll get more into that and dissect things a little bit more, but this is my first blog, so I’ll try to keep it relatively short.

When I say that today was normal, I mean it was normal for an ESL teacher living in Korea, with a Korean girl, a Korean boss, and Korean students. My kids were great today. It’s Tuesday, which means it’s one of two days a week that I only have one class. At a hagwon that means about three hours at work and then back home. Easy day. In fact, most days are easy at work, even the hard days.

My girlfriend works at the same hagwon as me. She has to work a lot more hours for a lot less money, because she’s Korean. She doesn’t like this. Because of this, even when I get out of work three hours before her I come back to work at 10:00pm just to walk her home. She likes this and it keeps her from hating me so it’s a small price to pay.

Tonight we started talking about marriage again. I want to marry her. I love her. But I fucking hate talking about marriage with her, because every time it ends up in the same retarded argument. She doesn’t want to rent an apartment, because it’s not the Korean retarded tradition, I just want to do what we can afford, because I’m realistic. I try to tell her that coming up with $50,000 in a years time is just not possible, I don’t even make that much in a year, how the fuck am I supposed to save more than I make in a year?? It just doesn’t register though. I get the typical answer, “But this is how it works in Korea.”

“Well”, I need to remind her every now and then “I’m not Korean.” That doesn’t matter. I’m in Korea so I have to live up to her parents unrealistic expectations of how much money a 34 year old man should have. Without the consideration that I did not spend my entire 20’s living with my mom and dad. I didn’t have mom and dad to pay rent, pay college tuition, phone bills, electric, food, etc…Doesn’t matter…this is the Korean way.

Eventually, she comes back down to reality, but we still have this argument periodically. I just want to get married so we can stop having this fucking argument. I also got a surprise quiz from her tonight. “What documents will we need to get married? What embassy do we go to? When we have a baby, what country will he be a citizen of? If we move to America what will I have to do? Can I become a citizen? (This one was followed by “I don’t want to be a US citizen, but what would I have to do?) How much will it cost? How much will we spend on the wedding? How many fucking orders of sam-gyeop-sal should we prepare? Are you going to dye your hair before you meet my dad?” Fuck. I just wanted to be nice and walk her home from work. That’s all. Sometimes I really feel like I’m too nice and I need to lay down the law a little bit, but then again I’m just a pushover so any law I laid down would only last about two minutes so that’s pretty pointless.

It’s ok though. I got home after getting the test and looked up a bunch of shit and text messaged her information until she called me and told me she was sorry for being a bitch. I had some Hite, that’s my brand of Korean beer for now, and played some PS2, and now I believe I will get some sleep. But before I go to bed I’ll just mention that when I say Hite is my brand for now it’s because I have some plans in the works. I’ve had my fill of Korean piss macjew so this Christmas I believe that I will buy myself a homebrew kit and make my own shitty beer. If my only choices are Shite and Ass then I might as well just brew my own crappy tasting watered down swill. At least then I can legitimately say that drinking beer is my hobby.