Touristy Things Ahoy!

It's strange to be a tourist in a country that you are currently resident in but at the same time it's oh! so fitting...even though I can just blend into the background should I choose to. My Korean heritage means that I can have a healthy level of anonymity, which none of my friends or fellow co-workers have, although I do draw a fair level of ire and horror from traditionally minded Koreans when I open my mouth and a stream of Belfast-punctuated English exudates.

I had a very entertaining week where, in chronological order, the following things happened:

1)I cooked dinner for people and nobody died
2)My co-worker Shaun was unfairly coerced, whilst steaming, to sing 'It's Raining Men' at a noribang. Needless to say, he was unenthusiastic and tone-deaf and he was out-louded by mine and Annabelle's exuberant tambourine thrashing.
3) I went to Suwon, about an hour south of Seoul and visited the Korean Folk Village. There was a hilarious moment when Mike was cruelly dunted by a goat about the height of a midget's shin. He now has an unhealthy fear of the creatures, to the point where he has named them the Devil's own animal.
4)A kindergarden student with a voice depth equivalent to that of Frank Butcher sang 'I can sing a rainbow' to me.

Imagine what he's going to be like when his voice-clenching hormones kick in...and even more amusingly, he was given the unfortunate moniker of Sunny. I had a child who wished to name himself Sunny but I convinced him that John meant he would get beaten up less.

Oh, and thank you to a Mr Murray, who sent me a dictionary definition of what a ramp was. My personal favourite was 'a concave bend in a handrail where a sharp change in level or direction occurs, as at a stair landing.' If that is not a definition that can be used to describe a person who has made a displeasing comment or has a general air of intemperance, then I don't know what is...

All is green.....

Ah St Patrick's Day. An excuse, worldwide, for people to get blindingly drunk and practice their 'top o' the mornins' until a real Irish person gives them a good hammering. It's strange to be away from Ireland for it, but I am surrounded by Irish people who were brave enough to try and explain what a 'shamrock' was to their students yesterday. I also attempted to tell my smarter classes what sort of holiday it was, and how much meaning it carried, but I lost them at 'well, the actual parade is really only for the underage....'

Our St P's celebrations are going to be in a hotel on Saturday night and there will apparently be in the region of 500 Irish people there, and a free bar. With Guinness. The black stuff is horrendous here, I have been reliably informed, but I'm sure there shall be many pints residing in the shaky hands of plastered Corkmen, and just as many on the floor, giving that familiar just-been-superglued feeling. I wait with great anticipation.

I read recently about an opera that is being produced in Russia, Rosenthal's Children, that follows the half-lives of composers cloned by a Jewish German scientist during the rise of fascism. He dies, Edward Scissorhands-like, and leaves these emotionally stunted creatures - Verdi, Mussorgsky, Wagner, Mozart and Tchaikovsky - to fend for themselves. It made me think - if I was a lonely old scientist with no funding but lots of bile and creativity, who would I resurrect? Would I bring back great minds? Great musicians? People whose lives had been unfairly taken away through genocide, murder, suicide, misery? It also makes you wonder if people would try to recreate the DNA of Jesus Christ himself. It would be wholly unsurprising, if over-ambitious scientists tried to remove samples from the Turin shroud for the benefit of saving mankind from itself, or to prove that he was a phony, a fraudulent prophet.

If anyone wants to come to the Bolshoi with me, I would be a very happy bunny...

You Dirty Pig....

That's the phrase my fellow co-worker Shaun is currently learning in Korean class. I can imagine it must have its benefits - for the irritating times that you get shushed on the subway as the Koreans frantically try to defend their right to sleep ON A CROWDED, NOISY, STOPS-EVERY-TWO-MINUTES-ON-AVERAGE train. That's right - you may have detected a note of bitterness in my typing. I am well aware that I am not the quietest of individuals - indeed, my voice tends to carry, airborne, and often through solid surfaces. Generally the waggling fingers and vitriolic rants punctuated by occasional words of English don't annoy me - in fact, my voice modulating skills are at an all time high. But sometimes, when you feel that you are being no louder than anyone else on a train full of children and university students, you can only shake a helpless fist at the cultural difference of it all....!

I have begun Korean classes, at long last. Working Saturdays and being inherently lazy prevented me up until this point, but I can now read sketchy pieces of Korean and identify most characters in the alphabet - yooooo! It's a pretty rewarding thing to do but, as with all languages, it needs quite a bit of work. Our teacher, a suave looking character called Stephen, switched randomly from the Korean seasons to verb structures whilst we followed wildly with our shaky character reading and writing skills. To add to the distraction, he has the highest waistband that a pair of trousers will feasibly allow before you get into dungaree and overall territory. To get a better picture, imagine the cat burglar in the Simpsons - he wears sneakers. For sneaking...! Only make him Asian. And the jumper a little tighter.

What are everyone's plans for Paddy's day? Who remembers the carnage of last year? And, more importantly, how can you successfully celebrate St P's day abroad? With lots of unnecessary green and swearing? Are there any suggestions on how to make it memorable? Needless to say, I wish I was back in Ireland for it, and that I had given up something for Lent...just so that I could break it on Thursday. After all (and the person this is aimed at shall remain anonymous - let's name her Ms Eela Dole), St Patrick most certainly has precedence over that secondary New Testament character, Jesus....!

Prescience

I always thought of myself as a child as being particularly clueless and inept. If there was something to fall into, then I would be in it. If there was a hapless poisonous snake on the loose, then I would be stepping on it.

Which is why I can't help but to be a little concerned about my students, who act as if they could survive for prolonged periods of time on deserted planets with only desiccated coconut for rations. Admittedly, Korean children aren't even close to being as bad as the skallywags that prowl our streets at home, looking for an old person to steal from, or throwing water/egg bombs into local video stores. But it has gotten to the point where I had to ban the word 'homo' from one of my older classes, and have had to defend my choice to be unmarried at the past-it age of 21. So what has happened? Is it the diluted remnants of the Pill in our water supply that is causing hormones to fluctuate wildly to the startling result of getting breasts at 8 (and it's probably not just the girls judging by the well-endowed chubsters in my class)? Or are we just getting subjected to knowing winks from the media about our sexuality and our range of life choices which children, who are obviously way more perceptive than I could have ever hoped to be, inevitably identify for themselves? Tis a chin scratcher....

I am hoping for a quiet weekend of much chocolate consumption and maybe some low impact walking around Seoul. You know you have been overdoing it when you sleep for nine hours straight and wake up with the pounding-headache 'the daylight burns!' feeling. I have been promised some much needed lessons in bumming, which I have realised, after three years of a pseudo-degree, I have surprisingly lost the knack of. I do remember manys a lazy morning watching Dick Van Dyk solve murders in his billowing white medic's jacket, followed swiftly by the barely concealed, British sleaze-fest Doctors. Needless to say, such quality television is sadly lacking over here.

Tee....aggressive fingers....

I have just read an article on BBC news in which cunning Canadian scientists from the University of Atlanta think they have found a link between male finger length and aggression. Apparently if your index finger is considerably longer than your ring finger then you are more prone to violent behaviour. To the opposite end of the scale, if your ring finger and index finger are of similar lengths, then you are distinctly more feminine, and may suffer from depression. Wow. These findings were tempered, however, by the assertion that you could not definitively use finger length to determine if the person would be suitable for a certain job, which is pretty disappointing. I measured M's finger length and he is most definitely on the feminine end of the scale which explains his uncanny ability to mince, and the fact that all of his students are convinced that he is with child.

The weekend was messy, as anticipated. Emma has selective repression about the entire night and there was some grotesque dancing, the most of which was probably carried out by me, to classics such as 'Intergalactic' and 'Come on Eileen'. I also had tequila for the first time since my 21st birthday which I still have absolutely no recollection of. It was great fun, though, and like any good night out, it had the full spectrum of human drama, from unprovoked face slappings to jealous stares and whisperings across tables.

I also went to my first game room, where all the Koreans go to play board games in rowdy groups. We played a game of Scrabble, in which my opponent attempted, brazenly, to pass off the word 'baldo'. I still won. Also, can anyone inform me of what a 'quire' is? I allowed it, merely because it probably could be a word and said opponent is still bitter at me for opposing 'gals' as being thoroughly illegal based on it being American slang.

Ah, back to teaching. Can anyone actually believe that I am partly responsible for the education of minors? Nope, neither can I....

100 new names to learn...

Ah, bless school schedule shakeups. I now have nearly all entirely new classes, and there will be two Sarahs, Davids and Marys to every 10 students. I think I shall just point indiscriminately for the first couple of weeks. Is it ok to just say 'Hey, you!' in an accusatory tone?

And skiing was hilarious - Cara was absolutely fearless as she bombed down the steepest of slopes, yoooo-ing the whole way down. I didn't fall once, but I know that the curses of Snowlor, malevolent god of ice and stalactites, shall have his revenge. Probably by sending a crushing fall of snow at the end of March, as apparently happened in Seoul last year. We get snow, but as Belfast-ians know, city snow is not like ordinary snow. It is a specific shade of murky grey, with all manner of things mixed into the sludge that are just unmentionable. It reminds me of walking through St Mark's Square in Venice, where the water was 25% H2O and 75% dissolved pigeon poo.

This weekend promises to be messy because it's one of my fellow co-workers birthdays. She is a formidable drinker so I shall simply struggle to keep up. The problem with drinking in Korea is that if you are out with a group, the norm is to buy a huge pitcher of beer for about 10000w, which is about 5 pounds. These unfortunately keep coming to the table, and your glass keeps mysteriously getting filled and the end result, at least in my case, is illness and sweating and dancing to dodgy 90s dance hits that you once thought were tolerable. They aren't.

I have just returned from the faculty room to witness one of the Korean teachers eating cereal out of a china mug.

Tuesday was Korea's Independence Day and there was much vitriolic flag waving and fist shaking at the dark shadow of Japanese occupancy. Korea is quite unsubtle - and rightly so - in its derision and bitterness towards its just-about-neighbouring island. The word 'plundered' often comes up in descriptions of the complete and wholehearted destruction that the Japanese brought with them, whilst tempered with iron edged determination for future peace. It's fascinating how Koreans shy from any comparison with Japan, despite the countries' in question having quite a lot in common. Indeed, Tokyo has been slashed out with biro on the school atlas...!