Ville d'encules

I'm questioning the wisdom of even writing this post, since it will make me unpopular with some, maybe even my own family, but this blog needs some spice, and so here it is.

Recently, an argument was made (keeping in mind that this is my interpretation and it was not an explicitly constructed argument) that it is unethical or irresponsible for a (male) teacher of English to seek a romantic entanglement (possibly short-term), with a (female) Korean native.

Their supporting points are :

1. a low level of communication means that your relationship is based on a physical level that doesn't permit of the hallowed meeting of minds that characterizes the vast majority of relationships between people who share the same culture.

2. because this sort of dalliance has none of the affirmative platonic joys in point #1 above it necessarily means that the Korean woman is using the foreign man to learn English.
Were there other arguments? If so, they escaped my notice.

These arguments are bollocks. For the first, it's up to respective participants in any friendship or marriage or booty call to decide how important deep conversations are.

For the second, we are all users or being used to some extent in any relationship with other people. If a woman decides she will sweeten her language exchange with a bit of all right from some sexy exotic Canadian English teacher, then where is the harm in that? Especially if he has some foresight into the inner workings of the feminine mind and knows that they are a variable race of breezy-headed whimsy and blithe contractors in all logical or passionate dealings.

I will state for the record that I am not now involved with anyone, but I do want to learn more about the Korean language and Korean culture. So, who is the logical choice for a guide? Am I a predator? A careless loon? Please explain how.

Friends (united in Booze)

It's always nice to get an email from my friend Boots Frasilay, even when it's a catch-all mass broadcast shout out to all the folks back home in their respective warrens. I was a fool to ever worry about him - he is one of that rare (maybe unique) breed of human who adventures not for amusement or even out of physical need - like an adrenaline junkie, but because it is the Good life. It is a moral imperative, assigned by the God of examined living to explore the out of ordinary.

So it should come as no surprise that he is now loving life in Van City - the lotus of my eventual return. I wonder if I will sort things out as well as he has?

In the next few weeks he will take a canoe to the headwaters of the Milk River and travel to Regina in time for Fudgie's wedding there. How cool is that? It is a romantic dream that I always wanted to pursue (although I wanted to go all the way to New Orleans).

So here, is my paen to friendship - espcially the small but loyal cadre of hard-drinking, deep-thinking graduates of the Bunker.

I would spend all the time I posibly could with them, but for one simple, and powerful truth about the way we get together. Think on it : What is the one thing that has held the tenuous associations of our past and present endeavours together - the magical ingredient that sustains conversations, and improves long term memory while suppressing the inhibitions that are anathema to good times and orgiastic good times at that.

It is Booze. Boozing. We can't put two of us into a room without a bottle of something being cracked and consumed in the time it takes us to find our chairs and the easy ryhthm that is the hallmark of a good friendship. It goes on without me, and it happens whenever we reunite for a wedding, or whatever else might seem important enough to close the distance (geographic, psychic) between us. I can't do it anymore. I was never particularly famous for sheer fluid volume (especially in this group) but with the advancing years I find I can't even swill more than a few bottled domestic beers without coming over all queasy, and regretting the social mechanism that forces me to fatten my liver and tax my bankroll.

I am sure some day we will develop a taste for a snifter (maybe three) of cognac in a well furnished library with more wood than can be ethically justified by current planetary depredations, and by then, hopefully I will have someting interesting to tell them. Let me then renew my vow to devote as much time as I can to keeping our ties strong, and united in storytelling.

Intensives Suck

Ok, I said I wasn't going to bitch about work anymore, but ... gawd, it's so cathartic!

So, apparently I was the only person who didn't go to work on the Saturday before Intensives started. That was the reason that my director asked me to come in early on Tuesday. Hey, teachers, grab a brain - when you willingly overwork yourselves for no pay, the rest of us have no leverage to enforce the contract. That is one reason that the Dogok branch was so nice to work for - the teachers ruled that goddamn roost.

Don't get me wrong - I really like the people I work with, it's just that there is some sort of competition to see who can be the patron saint of Stoically bending to some messed Tyrannical Confucian Ideal. Did you read in the newspapers that Korea switched to a 5 day work week? Then start acting like it!

So yes, I went into work 10 minutes late and yes, they called me, and yes, I didn't apologize and yes, I was wearing shorts and sandals (without socks - I mean, please) since it was pandemonically hot. Eat it!



Also, today I was enraged to find that after the serviceman had been let into my apartment to fix the air condititioner all he had done was to COMPLETELY RE-ARRANGE MY PERFECTLY ARRANGED COMPUTER NOOK and to clean out the filter all over my bathroom floor. Do you know what happens when you re-arrange perfection? It becomes much less perfect. Perfection is only attainable in one instance. Do you know what happens to big chunks ( too big for the shower filter) of black goop that had accumulated in my air-con filter and have now mixed with the shower water on my bathroom floor? They become an alien lifeform that I cannot even bear to touch much less look at. Still, I photographed the horror so you that you can be equally indignant. If that weren't enough - this guy went into my tape drawer and used about 5 feet of my double-sided sticky tape. For what????!!! For those of you who know me, you will know that is a pisser.

Ambassador McFatty

This was originally a comment in BlueShoe's blog, but it's more interesting (and shorter) than most of my blog posts, so I reposted here.

It's seriously embarrassing how our major visible contribution to other cultures is fast food. Koreans totally identify 'Dunkin Donuts' and MacDonalds and 'Burger King' and Starbucks with the USA and North America. I think it totally sucks. I hardly ever eat fast food here anymore because I'm embarrassed to be a foreigner in these places.



I also hate how these 'restaurants' are used as landmarks for every map that is intended to be used by non-Koreans. For one thing - they are a supernumerous blight on every city so they aren't reliable as landmarks. Oh, is this the Subway (sandwich shoppe) that I'm supposed to turn at, or is it the one to my left or the one right across the freakin' street???

Why couldn't we (Namerica) have exported something more enlightened? Why did we create this massive crap as our identity?

Discipline problems

I am postponing my big Sex in the City post because at work two bad things happened. I think this will be my last 'bitching about work' post no matter how bad things get (well, unless they get theatrically worse) since that is what most Korea bloggers do and I'm trying to keep up with the intellectual standards of Exhibit A and Exhibit B. There is no room for the mundane in a blog!!

Ok so the bad stuff:

First, I forgot that the schedule was changing today and that my J5 class is using a different book, and therefore I started the class without having this particular book handy. It's a book I've used before, so I actually knew the story pretty well already. However, the quality of follow-up questions obviously wasn't there, and it was really a pretty bad screw-up considering the amount of effort necessary to have avoided the mistake. In the event that I was being monitored on camera, I took the old book (which has the same cover) and folded it over and pretended to work with it. One of my students busted me though.

At the break (thankfully there is one) I went to change books and discovered to my horror that there were none available in the staff room! I snuck around to the front desk and asked the director for the new book.

"But I don't understand - when did your schedule change?", she asked, sensing weakness. This might or might not have been a good time to lie, but in my new incarnation as a straight shooter I have basically stopped lying.
"Today." I may or may not have stared at the ground.
"I don't understand - you didn't check for this book before the class started?"
I twisted my heel with hands locked behind my back.
"That is correct, sansaengnim."
She didn't say anything, at that point, and fetched the book, which is good because I almost lost my temper for making me twist in the wind during my entire break.

I slunk back to the classroom and resumed teaching. After the break the class was completely ignoring me - students were talking and building things and playing games on their dictionaries and basically being a bunch of little rotters. I hastily drew a new seating plan on the board, spent ten minutes making them change seats, roundly chewed out the main offenders and resumed teaching, only to have my class interrupted ten minutes later.

Another teacher was ushered in to sub, and then one of the assistant counsellors whisked me into the hallway.

"Who are the worst students in this group?"
WTF? Shouldn't we talk about this later, like when I'm not, you know, in the middle of a class?

"Which students should I speak to in this class? Would it help if I spoke to all of them?"
It was very hard for me to say. They are all pretty bad with one exception. I know that the character of a classroom can change pretty radically with the removal of only one or two students but to ask me to name the worst...
"Maybe..Tom and...John?" I felt like a witness at the McCarthy trials. Give us the names of your known miscreants!
"What about with the girls?" That would be Jenny, but I was reluctant to give her up since she already accuses me of persecuting her.
"Jenny."
We had a quick discussion about the behavior problems they had seen.
"What are you going to do about this class?"
Again I didn't know if tact or truthfulness should be the order of the day.
"I was thinking about going home to Canada."
This had the effect of panicking her (and the whole staff), although I didn't know it yet. Anyway, I wrapped up the class and then Sue and I had a long discussion with some strategizing about what to do with the J5s.

She offered to take me out for a drink and talk about it some more (wow - they really really don't want me to quit), at this point I was through talking. You don't interrupt my class without someone being violently choked to death, either myself or one of my students.

During our 'pep talk' Sue did recommend one thing that I thought was a good idea. Get them to work on a project and then present it in front of one of the counsellors and the parents. I thought they weren't ready for parental prime-time but a live class presentation in front of Sue would terrify them AND shake their schedule up enough to make it interesting.

So today is the big presentation day - I have a lineup of nervous kiddies with their best pencil crayon on bond paper in hand and what does Sue do? She goes on vacation. Love the hagwon! It's a matter of life and death and these chillunzes lives are on the line!! BUT it's really not important at all, my job is only to create stress in you.

Today I debated the merits of quitting with a coworker but she brought me around to the logical conclusion. I'm almost done. Face the challenge. Stiff upper lip and all that.
Aye capn.

Today my director asked me to come in 3 hours early NOT including the 2 hours of prep time. Please come in and work 5 unapid hours, as a sort of dry run for the 11 hour work day hell you will experience next week. ##@@@!

겹다 !!

Before I turn this wee hamlet into a Springeresque hotbed of controversy, I thought I would try to disarm my critics by showcasing the artistic, discerning and sensitive side of this humble correspondent. To that end - a brief photographic essay.



I believe that I have entitled this post 'cute' in Korean, and if I am mistaken, I beg the pardon of my faithful Korean readership (# confirmed : 0 -ed) who may perceive that I am still a novice, and heartily making egregious errors of spelling and grammar. * (Is it spelling in Hangul?)

*This is the way to enlightenment, devoted philosophiles - dance like nobody's watching, type like nobody's reading, because (almost) no one is. Self-consciousness can only lead to contrivance! Then again, a moderate self-censorship might help me keep my friends and job, and avoid a lynching back home.



The theme of this montage is East Asian fascination with the cutesy cartoon ambassador. It took me no more than a 5 minute stroll outside my villa to record all the logos you see in this photo. Most of them are straightforward, if whimsical depictions of the food one can reasonably expect to dispatch within the establishment. There is a certain unsavoury compact between the mascot and the viewer, the one urging the other to sample the delights of its 3D brethren. A hospitable grin becomes a fiendish leer as the damnable traitor's complicity in entreating us to devour his compatriots emerges at the forefront of our conscience. And yet, the lure of gastronomic delights overcomes all objections in the end, doesn't it, friends? We won't tell, will we? No, for we are hungry, so very hungry. (reptilian susurrations here)

One might think that with such an endless environmental barrage of the cutesy and saccharine that the Korean mindset is frivolous and higgledy-piggledy. Not at all! Possibly higgledy, but definitely not piggledy. Let no man say I ever even hinted at piggledliness in the national character. (I must pause here to determine if the screaming woman in the apartment immediately across from mine is being beaten to death or merely beaten to histrionics. Why are there no AFN commercials on what to do in the event of almost witnessing horrendous domestic abuse? Gawd, I wish I could call the police. )



Speaking of which -the usefulness of cartoon symbols in Korea is not limited to restaurants and bars, since the symbol for the Seoul metropolitan police force is none other than a helpful, optimistic and friendly rat. The ever-vigilant and industrious SMPF could not have possibly chosen a more fitting representative.

Dimitri in Seoul

edit: I wanted to show you some cool photos today but the camera is off-line. I suspect a faulty usb cable. I suspect it was Loo-ni's fault (the person who 'borrowed' my camera last week).

I went to see Dimitri in Paris in Seoul at M2 last night. It was the second time in as many weeks that I have been to that club, and frankly I'm not entirely sure why. I go with Tall Paul, a cool guy from Winnipeg who is, I don't want to say desperately, but lustily pursuing Korean girls. We are neither of us having any sort of success.

A few other teachers at school tried to persuade me to go to Mudfest, a giant bacchanal in reverence to mud, a big beach party or something like that. I couldn't relinquish a whole weekend to frenzied partying, and frankly, I don't know how any other teacher manages it.

Dimitri was awesome, but like all live shows this one fell short of what I remember hearing on the computer. M2 is a typical house music club, dark and full of beautiful people, both Korean and not, but is it really worth 20k won to stomp your feet in somewhat agitated confusion for six hours? Actually, maybe.

We also went to a hiphop club upstairs, which was smaller, but maybe more fun. They were playing all sorts of old skool standards from the Beastie Boys to House of Pain to Cypress Hill. I have no earthly business being in these clubs, at my age, but I'm still not the oldest foreigner there, and let's not forget why we go to these places - because we are silly.

Focus on students I

The best and worst part about teaching is working with students.

Most of them have small, yet fully developed personalities that are, like their adult counterparts, a mix of the delightful and damnable.

For example I have one junior student that I teach who is convinced that I dislike her and that I punish her in disproportion to her misdeeds. She is what one teacher calls 'bipolar'; jubilant and rowdy one minute, and then, stinging from a rebuke, real or imagined, she pouts the rest of the class and can't be coaxed to answer any questions. I hope I'm not prejudiced but she uses her mood swings as an excuse to be lazy in class, to not do homework and to encourage others to misbehave by picking fights with boys and so forth.

...

I am not one of those teachers who believes that through superhuman application of my will that I can force unwilling students to learn. Some of them are too young to understand that learning is their decision, and some of them will come around later in life; some of them never will. Some of them just plain hate English class, and that is not something that can be overcome. The parents who are forcing Nicole to come to the academy every day are plain foolish to think that it's doing anything besides ingraining her future distaste for language learning, and they're wasting their money to boot. Get these kids out of academic classes - get them working as mechanics, nail artists, salon owners, professional golfers, or whatever they were meant to be. Why do we (West and East alike) cling to the idea that all our children should be skilled pianists, bilingual ballerinas with pre-med degrees? Pick what you're good at, pick something you like, and stick with it.

...

A few days ago I roared at my entire class of Junior 5 students. They are my only 3 hour class, and unfortunately, they are the most difficult to control. I scared them, and they behaved a bit better the next class, but I felt rotten for a day afterwards. I know it's irrational to feel bad about something that they forget minutes after leaving my class, but I have a deep-rooted hatred of yellers. There has to be a better way to manage a class than by shouting. Mr. Babin never had to yell to keep his class in line, but then again, that was High School.

...

Now that it's summer time and I'm wearing short sleeves, some of my students have developed a fascination with my arm hair. Koreans don't really have any body hair to speak of, so when my students first see it, their usual reaction is wide-eyed astonishment. When they touch my arm, they're usually repulsed, but then, like a cat, they can't wait for me to pass their desk so that they can pet me. One of my Basic students tries to generate as much static electricity as he can by grabbing my arm and rapidly rubbing it with the palm of his hand. Another boy has noticed that I occasionally dye my arm hair blonde but he isn't sure if I am shaving it or what. I'm not letting on, since I have no idea what parents would think about such a bizarre weiguk fetish.

Birthday

So in 6 minutes, Korean time, I'll arbitrarily advance one calendar year. It's the most completely meaningless birthday ever. I've lied about my age to everyone I've ever met, and I've frequently lied about the date. I entered an unholy alliance with the school counsellor in charge of my records to NOT have a party at work. I'll have to see if they come through. I am psychopathically defiant about the passage of time, and frankly, it seems to be working.

To quote my grandfather:
"It's an anniversary, not a celebration."



Have been very bad about keeping in touch with the family. I guess it's a combination of the usual factors - pecuniary embarrassment, sleep disordered schedules, the time difference and tragic lethargy. They have no idea how much I miss them, but I can't complain too much here nor any time because making people worry about you is just what a shitwad does.

Writing to a wall

I suspected as much, but the host of expatriate English majors are writing up a storm on the internet and the only outlet for their misguided creativity (besides blogger or typepad) is on Korean expat community websites. Here are some highlights I located after only a few minutes at Pusanweb (koreabridge):

A story about making a visa run to Japan that beasts my Osaka blog post all to hell: (sounds like I was lucky to avoid Fukuoka)
http://koreabridge.com/writings/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=88
And then from the man who edits Koreabridge and Pusanweb, a novel-length version of a visa run story, extremely literate and filled with arcana.
http://thormay.net/koreadiary/visarun.html
One has to question the good sense of writing a novel-length story about a fairly mundane event, but I guess there is a perverse Warholian satisfaction to be gained from COMPLETELY describing something.

Scott Liam Soper is difficult to read because he doesn't write well. Technically, he is longer-winded than I am, and he can't resist an awkwardly constructed phrase. However, this little analysis of OLD BOY, the Korean cult hit is worth a gander:
http://koreabridge.com/writings/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=150

This is more like a blog posting, but it's utterly fascinating for so many reasons. First, it details the nightmarish prospect of needing a doctor in a foreign country. Then it shows a tantalizing glimpse of what it must be like to be a Russian woman in Korea. Finally, it asks the question, "why does everyone need to be an asshole?" but one suspects that the writer, in her unfortunate mental state, is actually the antagonist.
http://koreabridge.com/writings/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=147

A fascinatingly vast and depressingly underappreciated wasteland of literary ambition (score: 0)

Osaka Giganta-post

I'm not sure what possessed me to ramble on so much. I couldn't get everything down in one sitting, so it became a bit less like blogging and a bit more like memorandizing. I guess I want to write more, and this blogging process is one way to purge and refine. Purge and refine. Hopefully it's a bit like priming a pump, and this rough, cluttered, contaminated ooze will one day give way to a clear, satisfying, pristine prose.



A nutty preamble:

Whenever I meet a foreigner (non-Korean) I invariably seem to group these exchanges into two emotional categories. The first is reserved for encounters with North Americans. I am sorry to report, Canada, but the only real difference in first impressions between the Yanks and us is that we tend to be a little lower-key. This might be a form of restraint or it might just be a lack of personality. Sorry, again, to confirm this stereotype. The other category is for anyone else.

I hate meeting North Americans. This is usually a lonely English teacher (I’m lonely -ed.) who wants to feel some kind of secret brotherhood with a similarly oppressed E-2 carrier. He wants to bitch about the number of hours he’s forced to work at his crappy hagwon (I’ve been coming into school almost an hour or two early every day, which seems to be keeping the Overlord happy, but I get nothing extra done. I eat lunch there now, mostly microwaved mandu with the free rice they give us. I think I should start bringing the laptop in and write a chapter or verse every day. In fact, it’s as good as done.) He might want to impress me with the number of years he’s been unable to leave Korea or he might just want to show me how friendly he is. Yes, you’re friendlier than I am; I never would have approached you in a million years, but you made the first move, congratulations Future Mr. Extroversion 2006. Why don’t you remember my name and call me by it when you ambush me in another few months, just to rub it in? Fuck you!

Or they might just be complete psychopaths, like the guy from Nova Scotia who started talking at me in the airport coming home from Osaka. He starts with a banality about coming back from vacation, and then commits the cardinal sin of assuming I’m an English teacher. Yes, I’m white, I’m leaving Japan and I have a man-bag, but c’mon. At least make the effort to ask me what I do, as though there were some slim chance that a guy dressed like me, bathed in two days of sweat, could possibly be a salesman, or a male prostitute. As Bruce aptly pointed out, the only job worse than English teacher in Asia, is military. (I guess I’m slowly moving the family up the chain, but I still don’t have that 2k I owe them for this month.) Anyway, he staunchly keeps the topic of conversation fixed on himself until he sees the Korean girl he’d been styling moments before, and he stops, mid-sentence mind, to turn around and work on this lass. This conversation is OVER! Ok, whatever, I have My Country, and I’m reading the story about Gun-na-noot, a man who took no guff from anyone, red or white, and got away with the perfect crime. Fantastic stuff.

But, this, individual, is speaking loud and indiscreetly (a common Namerican* trait, after all what ignorant savage here could understand what we’re saying?) so I have no choice but to devote 15% of my mental processor to his bilge. He’s studying Tae-kwon-do here in Korea (yea whatever doughboy), and he was an actor before that; he plays guitar in his spare time (oh please) and he was in Edmonton for his brother’s wedding. This last tidbit he had told me before, and he made a face when he pronounced Edmonton. At least he didn’t say Deadmonton or Edmonchuck cuz I likely would have punched him in the head, delaying my flight, maybe. The worst part is – she’s eating it up. She just got back from a year in New Zealand, her English is not bad, and she’s going to university in Suwon (!) She sounds perky, bright, confident, optimistic. At this point I have to bookmark and peer over my shoulder – hmm, well, she’s too good for this troll anyway.
* yes I just coined that

You may have noticed that I used the masculine when describing these extemporaneous rendez-vous, since I don’t get approached (so alone) by random female weiguks (foreigners) very often. I guess I would change my tune if they did.

The other group of encounters is with assorted folks from New Zealand, Ireland, Russia, even Cambodia. I had a short conversation (in French!) with a Cambodian in front of Suwon James and Cornell Ben. Could I have been any cooler than at that moment? It was hard to understand him because of his accent. Cambodian French is straight out of Star Wars, but he was telling me the name of the current PM, and the trouble with the Khmer Rouge. He was a lonely guy too, but I was more than happy to make my friends wait while I played the friendly Canadian, since, well, this was just different. I guess the difference between group 1 and 2 is that the one is commonplace and plays out on the same themes whereas group 2 conversations could be like the one with the New Zealander who was escorting two Romanian models (I need a girlfriend) back to Seoul from Osaka. “I’m bringing these two with me – they’re models!” he whispered conspiratorially. Yes, I can see that. Well, I’ll see you on the plane, and maybe they can set me up with some shorter friends … then again, I think I’ve flirted enough with the Eastern European ‘passion’ (read: anger).

To sum this part up – as long as you are exotic, I will like you, otherwise I am a complete jackass? No, that can’t be right.

Osaka – (feel free, at this point, to grab a coffee, finish a worksheet or come back in the morning -ed)

My first intercultural Japanese experience was to explain in Korean to the person at the information counter that I don’t understand Japanese. I felt some of the frustration that language students must experience when they get to Canada and realize that all their training is for nought since we speak too quickly and use a lot of SnoopDoggery. I can’t even ask where something is. I can’t even be sure I’m saying ‘konnichiwa’ properly. Ach!

Then I tried to decipher the subway ticket machine. Impossible to get right the first time. Luckily, all I had to do was say “Namba Nankai” and shove a yen note in the teller’s direction.

Then it was off to find the Korean embassy. It is supposed to be opposite the Holiday Inn, but I could not make head nor tails of the … Jason (Jason is one of my Basic4 students – he insisted on typing his name here. **) directions that came with my ticket. The directions rely on the directed to use a particular exit, but that exit was not indicated by a number. I resolved to correct this oversight upon my return. After searching fruitlessly for a few hours (I have nothing but time to kill at this point) I buckled and asked the taxi stand attendant (who speaks perfect English) for directions to the Holiday Inn. “The name has changed – but it is over there.” Well there you go – what chance did I have? The new hotel name is Riva Nanka (as in Nankai) and I also updated this inconsistency upon my return. Can you see how the perils of navigational failure were strewn across my path at every turn? If I had arrived on the correct flight I assuredly would have missed my appointment with the embassy so there is no further doubt in my mind that the whole adventure was a blessing in disguise.
**Yes I'm blogging on company time. It is a quintessentially ME thing to do. But don't worry excessively about the quality of my student's education - all my prep is done.



After locating the embassy there was only one further objective – locate a hot English-speaking j-girl and mack down with her post haste. In my airport-haggard state, complete with day’s beard growth and accompanying veil of sweat, it would not be easy. In fact, I found the whole population of Osaka surprisingly diffident to foreign faces, although there were a few curious stares. I tried to find a club where I could dance a few hours away, but it seems that the most popular pastime in this part of town is to ride one’s bike (bravo to Japan! – there is no similar practical enthusiasm for cheap, non-polluting transportation in Seoul) with the girlfriend suspended on rear wheel posts, overlooking the riders shoulders. Cruising.

It was not without it’s appeal, and I briefly considered commandeering one of the many unguarded Western Flyers parked everywhere. I did not, since getting caught stealing a bike would probably delay my visa application.

After another few hours of aimless wandering I decided it was time to seek shelter. It took me only a few minutes to find a capsule hotel very close to the embassy.

I wasn’t entirely serious about staying at a capsule hotel, but having found one, I wasn’t disappointed by the experience. You literally sleep in a capsule. There are hundreds on one floor. The capsule itself has a radio, alarm and a TV, that is coin-operated. By the time I had shaved, done laundry, showered, sauna’d, eaten dinner and figured out the locker system and how to tie the communal bathrobe, I was too tired to check out what manner of ‘world class perversion*’ might be on offer.
*G. Wallace ca. approx 2001

It was interesting to see how much I could obtain without speaking a word of Japanese besides ‘arigato’. I think the concierge was getting a little tired of my constant appearances at the front desk, though. In the morning I put my bathrobe (everyone wears this, all the time) in the laundry bin, collected my civilian clothes and got my shoes out of their special locker, back into the massively overpowered Asian sun.

The visa application process was simple. I spent the rest of the day touring around the giant shopping arcades in Namba, stopping at a small cafe near the subway station, reading a book on the top flight of stairs of a seemingly abandoned futuristic building until my shade ran out and then I spent a good half hour deciphering the subway ticket machine to get to the aquarium and the Tempazon harbour Ferris Wheel.

For 700 yen, this was a bargain. A canned soundtrack in Japanese and English tells you some interesting facts about things like the suspension bridge (largest in the world) that spans Kobe and Osaka, and it’s (obviously) a great view. Crom curse me for a fool for forgetting the camera. I saw more cool images in 1.5 days in Osaka than I have in the whole time I have been in Korea. This is most likely due to the type of leisurely wandering that an unscheduled visa run encourages. The aquarium was a bit expensive, but I got to see some sharks and rays. Speaking of the largest in the world, there is some confusion about whether I was in fact, on the largest Ferris wheel in the world. I’m still not sure; a box of rice cakes to whomever can settle the issue.

After that it was rapito train back to Kansai airport. Goodbye Osaka, for now.

When I left the airport in Seoul I was gratified to see that Nova Scotia Nob had struck out with Suwon Sally and was taking the bus home alone to Sinchon. He didn’t return my cheerful farewell.

The times they are a Changin ...yet again.

Today one of my students asked me if I had heard about B.O.A., a Korean (or is it Japanese?) pop group. I HAVE actually, since I am just that cool, but of course I haven't heard any of their music. Korean music S - U - C - K - S. There is just no other way to put it. All of it - from every genre EXCEPT samul nori, which you have to respect, because it's traditional music. Also, my (possibly first) Korean friend, Suwon James, is a class player, among other things.

Anyway, this student asked me if I had heard a particular song - "Girls on Top". That's a Hoodoo Gurus song, I thought.
Then I went BACK IN TIME. And several years later I was back in the classroom but NO TIME HAD PASSED. freaky.

Anyway, I can't seem to find the particular song this student was talking about anywhere. I wonder where Koreans steal their music? It's academic since, as I mentioned above, the song will suck.