Spoon with Koreans

America: Same Same but Awesome

2007-10-14T06:25:00.000+09:00

I've been home for a week now. However, even though I managed to escape Korea, it still likes to taunt me. I have not yet rid my body of all the harmful toxins that ate away at my soul over the last year. Everyone has a nasty hacking cough in Seoul, but when I get this going at home, people are genuinely disgusted.

The school probably ended up shorting me a few hundred bucks but when you're dealing with the Yellow Man, at some point, you just roll over and take it in the ass. And overall, I can't complain, I know a lot of people get screwed a lot harder by their schools. The last batch of photos is here, along with a couple videos at the bottom. One video is 15 minutes long, please do not watch it.

The flight home wasn't terrible, but I couldn't get to sleep, despite taking enough xanax to kill a small horse. When we landed in NY, the plane's parking spot was blocked so I had to wait an hour before getting off. It was like God's last evil trick of the year, "Ryan, I know you've dealt with these Asians for an entire year, but now, just for laughs, I'm gonna make you stay inside a metal tube surrounded by the bastards for another hour."

I was all paranoid about going through customs, since I was smuggling in about a 5 year supply of prescription drugs. But I guess I was white enough to not get picked out for inspection. I did declare the two liters of soju I brought home but when I tried to pay the tax at the cashier, the guy told me "Don't worry about it, thanks for being honest." I haven't had the stomach to crack open the soju yet, I'm saving it for when Bender is around, at which time, drinking soju will at least seem somewhat acceptable.

The day after I got home, I went to the supermarket and all of the white people and English was enough to almost get me to curl up into the fetal position, stick my thumb in my mouth and fall into a peaceful sleep on the floor. It was that enjoyable. I even saw three fat high school girls walking around the store together in their pajamas. That was pure American and it was beautiful.

It has been kind of weird getting used to New Yorkers again. Koreans bury their emotions and back down at any sign of conflict, and I sort of adopted that same mentality. But here, everyone is crass, in-your-face, if you look at me the wrong way, I'll kill you. I love it, but I'm still a little bit scared of New Yorkers right now. In Korea, people looked at me with apprehension in their eyes, I was that white thing to be stared at and analyzed. Here, I'm just another douchebag. And that's perfectly OK with me.

I got a job with the local Democratic committee. Basically, for the next month, I walk around town, knock on peoples' doors and find out if they are voting for the good guys. Even though I only go to houses where the people are registered Democrats, most of them want nothing to do with me. I'd say a good 20 percent of the houses I go to, the lights are on, TV blasting, but when I ring the bell, suddenly no one is home. The most depressing thing is how few people know anything about local politics. Who is that guy? I've never heard of him. I just want to smack these people.

That's all. Good to be home. To my buddies still in Korea, the next time you see a table and a pole, dance on it for me. Oh, and for the record, I've only been to Taco Bell once since I got home. Let's just say when you toss a few grande soft tacos into a body accustomed to only rice and vegetables for a year, turns out it doesn't work too well.

Homeward Bound (and Gagged)

2007-10-03T20:42:00.001+09:00

Post #92 from Korea, and the final one. I'm throwing up a hot four-way of videos, which I don't expect anyone to watch, I couldn't even make it through them. I was trying to get the kids to be cute and say goodbye into the camera, and that just went terribly. In the first video, I had just told the kids that when I got home, I wasn't going to get a job but instead I would just steal my parents money. So they had a blast grabbing the camera from me and delivering that message to my parents. In the second one, it captures one of the rare times where I've been genuinely pissed off at a kid. When I utter the words "not funny", after a kid draws on my face and shirt with a marker, that could be translated into adult speak as "@$#@ off".

So yeah, I've got two more days of work, then I collect my huge final paycheck and catch a plane out of this place on Saturday. The school paid $1800 for the plane ticket, because they are retarded, but that's not really something I worry about. The only two things I have to worry about between now and 7:05 Saturday night when the bird touches down at JFK is making sure the school coughs up all the cash I'm due (but don't deserve) and deciding how many drugs I can take on the plane without lapsing into a coma.

Final thoughts on Korea? Don't care? That's OK, I'll give them to you anyway. My feelings towards this place have changed a lot since I first came, the first few months were all just new experiences and it was exciting. Around the 4th month, I really loved it here, it was getting easier at work and I wasn't feeling so isolated. And then there was a problem. You stay in Korea more than six months and that's enough time for the country to really bear down on you and beat you with its culture.

Simply put, foreigners just aren't treated properly in Korea. Screw the excuses about cultural differences and how Koreans aren't used to be around foreigners, you're either nice to people or you're an ass. And Korea is full of asses. The racism isn't blatant and it isn't in your face, probably one of the reasons I didn't really pick up on when I first got here, but dig a little deeper and it's there, and it's not a pretty picture. I've always felt alone in this country, even when surrounded by Koreans. It's tough to describe, but anyone whose been in Korea for any length of time knows that feeling I'm talking about.

The worst isolation, by far, has come at work. Nathan and I are up against a great beast, in the form of a bunch of Koreans who have no desire to even be remotely friendly towards us. It's easy to just say, so what, just ignore them, do your job and go home. And I convinced myself to do that a long time ago, but it still eats away at you, day by day. Somehow God forgot to give Koreans the gene that controls showing compassion towards people of different races. Here's an example, the teacher who will replace me will get here on Saturday night, just as I did last year. Then at Monday, at 2pm, still jet-lagged and probably awake since 5am, he'll be thrown to the wolves. He will walk into that office and the Korean teachers will look up from their desks for a second, smile and say hi, and five seconds later, all will be calm again. He will just be the next white guy. Besides Nathan, nobody will help him, nobody will ask him anything about his life, about how he's adjusting to Korea. He will be expected to teach 30 classes a week and teach them all well, without any direction as to how to teach, what materials to use, and if he doesn't do this, he will be looked down upon and treated like an idiot. It's an awfully difficult situation to come into, and all I can do is wish him the best. Although, for his sake, he better not see this blog until at least his 6th month here.

If I could do it all again, I wouldn't. As in, I wouldn't have come to Korea. Living abroad is an amazing experience and I think everyone should do it at least once in their life, but the world is full of incredible places and cities, and Seoul, South Korea is not one of them. I knew before I came here that I was choosing money over the experience and I also kind of knew before I came that would be a mistake. I should have gone to Thailand, but what's done is done and getting out of where I was with my life in America last year was still the best decision I've ever made.

I'm heading on a prolonged blog break, although I might post a few more photos and videos once I get home. Honestly, I appreciate the comments people have made about this blog, especially the ones that exaggerate my writing ability, which I will still accept at face-value. To any potential future employers, who will inevitably find this blog: Today (insert future date here), I'm a much different person. I don't even remember that douchebag who wrote this stuff. Please hire me. I'm probably very poor.

To everyone else, until next time, it's been fun. But not real fun.

Last night out downtown

2007-09-30T20:30:00.000+09:00

Am I still here?

2007-09-27T15:49:00.000+09:00

Any gains I made at the gym were wiped out over the past five days, with multiple trips to McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut, plus 85 beers, 15 jager shots and 10 gin-tonics. It had to be the first vacation I've ever had from work were I just wanted it to end. That wouldn't be the case if I wasn't 10 days from going home, but since it was, I tried my best to sleep 20 hours a day, waking only for alcohol and food intake. Before the holiday, I decided that I would hit up a few of the touristy sites around town during the break. I don't know what I was thinking, though. I had no desire to do that. There are two cool things to check out in Seoul, and that's Seoul Tower and the Korean War Museum, everything thing else is either a crappy temple or just crap.

I made my last trip out to Itaewon the other night and thankfully, it left with me with that dirty nasty taste in my mouth like always. On the bright side, we did go to this country bar uptop of Hooker Hill, where they seriously had every country song ever made. It was almost like being in Nashville, just chilling out and listening to some quality music, except there were $10 whores right outside the door and my friend was plowing his Korean girlfriend in the bathroom.

At Woodstock Tuesday night, unfortunately, I met a Korean guy who spoke perfect English and had traveled the world. And if there's one thing worse than a normal Korean, it's a douchebag who has been other places, comes back to Korea, and still has the nerve to defend Korea against it's insular, pure-blooded, f-the foreigners, attitude. He said Koreans have cause to discriminate because of poor behavior by American soldiers, namely when they ran over and killed a few people several years ago. I honestly almost brought up the VTech shooter, not because I believe for a second that would justify any sort of backlash against Koreans, but because that is the kind of ridiculous logic that flies in Korea.

Another foreigner posted this on a web forum, and it sums up the experience of white guy perfectly, and the fact is, if you don't agree with this as a foreigner, you're either drinking too much or you've got thicker skin than a elephant:
"The constant endless little things are what get to a person. Each tiny racist or discriminatory thing builds and builds. Imagine a paper cut and everyday you get a new paper cut on the same place...that's Korea."

Going out to lunch with my co-workers last week was about painful as expected. Me and Nathan were put in our little imaginary cage and separated from the rest of the group. Credit to the new Korean teacher, though, who planned the event and pretty much did talk to us the entire time. I worry about her, though, since she is constantly violating Topia's most cherished rule: Make the foreign teachers feel as unwelcome and uncomfortable as possible at all times...or face death.

Not much else to report, this is the homestretch and I'm just trying to make it through it alive. This weekend will be the last, which only means I won't remember it. Nice life.

Old Korean guys honestly don't have penises

2007-09-20T21:21:00.000+09:00

That top photo basically sums up just about every experience I've had at tinpan in Hongdae. I get there and there's nobody dancing on the tables. I promise myself that I will not get on the table under any circumstances. But incredibly enough, after double fisting a couple jack and cokes and just a little peer pressure, well, that picture is what happens. They really shouldn't let people dance on the tables at that place. Since it's not really a table, but a two foot wide bar, and people tend to keep their drinks on top of it. Also, take a look at the girl hanging from the pole in the other photo, I almost wanted her to fall and die. Almost. But I've done the same thing. Basically it's just a terrible terrible place. (That I love).

I went to the gym here for the last time today. Somehow I made it an entire month, I really didn't think that was possible based on past observations of myself. My body fat percentage dropped from 13.8 to 9.3, which is amazing considering how much ice cream and sausage egg mcmuffins i eat. My body is still pathetic but I like to think I could beat up a 12 year old girl now, or at least keep it close. So, goodbye, gym, I probably won't be near one of you again for a solid 5 years.

Tomorrow was supposed to be my last day at the gym, but another awful work event has taken its place. The new Korean teacher, who is actually friendly to me and Nathan and makes an effort to treat us like humans and not white circus animals, suggested that the whole office go to Outback tomorrow for lunch since a five-day weekend is on tap for Korean thanksgiving. While this might be a nice thing for other places/offices, going out to eat with the office at my school is usually worse than getting your man-sack chomped on by a bulldog. Honestly, I'm not sure which I prefer. The worst part is that since it's for lunch, I can't get trashed, which is usually the only way I can remain even partially insane for these events.

One would think that with only a few weeks remaining here, or 7 more work days, I'd be able to just coast through my classes, happy to finally be able to see the end. Turns out, not true. Today I threw a kids notebook across the room. I wanted to hit him in the head, but I suspect not doing so was for the best. I'm trying to keep my brain on about 25 percent power at work, but even though I'm ready to relax and call it quits, kids are still kids and Korean kids still treat foreign teachers like they're some homeless guy lying on the side of the street. The racist attitude is branded into these kids at an early age, all for the purpose of setting them up to fit right in with their awful parents when they get older.

I spend most of my time in class now explaining to the kids what English words are curses and which ones are acceptable. Example, today I taught them that "Oh, shut" was fine to say when frustrated or upset and that "Oh, shit" should never be used, when adults are around. They have been having some trouble understanding how "Son of a Bitch" works though. First, they pronounce "bitch" as "beach" so I had to get them over that and make sure they knew how to spell and say bitch. Next, since most of them never heard the word "bitch" before one of their douchebag friends told them about "son of a bitch", they don't understand that the word "bitch" on its own is in fact a bad word. After I told them to stop saying s.o.b., they simply just starting shouting "Son of a" or just "Bitch". This does not work. One girl, in an attempt to annoy me, wrote on the board simply "Ryan= Son". I have never been less offended when someone has tried to insult me. So these kids have some serious work to do if they are ever going to properly curse someone out in English. I think I've at least explained the basics to them, the good words and the bad words. But they might need another lesson. At the end of class today, when they finally understood that bitch was a bad word, one kid said, "What about fuck?"

I've probably got two more blogs in me before I head home, which is a damn relief at this point, who is reading this crap, really? But more importantly, I have a solid 8-9 days of drinking left to do in this country. Because if there's one thing I haven't done enough of in Korea, it's drink soju alone in my apartment and blackout. The bartender at Showbar, who has grabbed my ass at least 5 dozen times, kissed my hand last weekend. And then, since I was drunk, and I'm gay, I kissed his hand. The bartenders said they are going to have a going away party for me, and if that does actually happen, I just can't imagine returning to America as an anal virgin anymore.

13 days left of work until 3 years of unemployment

2007-09-12T15:23:00.000+09:00

Warning: This video contains children using the term "son of a bitch" repeatedly and also relentless mocking of the crusifiction of Jesus.

I've resigned myself to routine for my last month here. There was time, many many months ago, where I enjoyed the excitement of new things and new experiences in Korea. But now I'm perfectly content with gym-work-sleep during the week and going to the same two bars every Friday and Saturday night. Really, the only thing that changes is the names of the one-night Korean friends I make at the bars each weekend.

The end is near, which has caused needless worrying on my part. I stayed awake for about 3 extra hours the other night trying to figure out how I'm going to exchange my money before I get home. Teaching contracts are also heavily backloaded, meaning you gets most of your cash and benefits right before you go home. My school has given me no indication that they plan on screwing me over, but still, I won't be able to relax until I'm on that airplane flying across the ocean. I also obsess about the price of the flight. Which is absolutely retarded. Because the freakin' school pays for the ticket! Why the hell do I care? I blame all of this on the internet. I have too much free time and too much stupid, pointless information to consume.

In nearly a year here, I still cannot understand this: Why is it that Koreans will never, ever, never, hold an elevator door for you? If I walk into the school building and see the elevator door open before I'm right next to it, I already know I'm not getting in it. I could be sprinting towards the thing yelling and screaming and it wouldn't matter. Koreans won't even look up. They are like robots, get in, hit button, do not pass Go and definitely don't hold the door. In fact, I bet the open door button has never been pressed by a Korean unless it involves pushing a foreigner out and down into the elevator shaft.

"Teacher, do you like to masturbate?" That one is real.

2007-09-04T21:00:00.000+09:00

Video- the small girl in the pink t-shirt is pure evil. prior to this video, she had already smashed me in the balls twice when i wasn't paying attention.

One month. Solid. I'm starting the mail-it-in period at work. Which means a lot of hangman and also a lot of kids drawing pictures of me on the board with a beard and turban and labeling me "Taliban". During a use a verb in a sentence with a different tense thingy, one student insisted on saying "I love Jason. I loved Jason. I will love Jason." He insisted he was not gay, although Jason was clearly embarrassed by these homoerotic gestures. I told that class to make up a story for homework and I already know one of the topics is going to be "Ryan is gay." I know this because at the end of class one girl said "I'm going to write about how Ryan is gay." I'm cool with that, though. If these kids can write a story in English, I don't care what it's about.

Last week, two students, twins, came into the office and said "Teacher, do you know masturbate?"I made them repeat it about six times before my brain was able to acknowledge what was going on. They said they learned it from a friend, and even though I don't think they know exactly what it means (One of them asked today if "masturbate is a movie?", they think its hilarious because I turn red whenever they say it. Actually, now that I think about, one student did ask me "Does masturbate feel good?" Too much. Even for me. These kids are 10 years old. I didn't even know I had a penis when I was 10.

I've cut out drinking during the week, even though I wasn't really doing much of it before anyway. Wait, actually, I got drunk last night. But that doesn't count because I was out with my co-workers and the alcoholics who work at the front desk kept pouring beer in my glass. I can not be to blame for that. But anyway, the result of this lifestyle change has only been to make me blackout more on the weekends. I have to make up those missed beers somehow. So that happened last Friday night when apparently I met a bunch of Koreans at a bar, hung out with them for a couple hours. Then I went back to the same place on Saturday, saw the same people again and had no clue that I had met them the night before. If that doesn't make me a terrible person, then I don't know.....screw it, I'm terrible.

The Korean government, and therefore, a large majority of Koreans have no clue how the world works. In order to get the hostages released in Afghanistan, they basically exposed their vagina and fucked over the rest of civilization. Sure, remove our troops, no problem. Want a hospital? We'll build that if you want. $20 million? It's all yours. All Koreans care about is other Koreans, and they don't even do a very good job at taking care of each other. I guarantee if the offer from the Taliban was "We'll release the 20 Korean hostages in exchange for the deaths of 500 " the Korean government jump on with a full hard-on. I wish I was exaggerating, but that is a fact. That is how this country operates and that's the mindset of most of its people.

Even though I'm more than ready to go home, it's kind of scary. Home means real life decisions and crap. Sign a contract and teach in Korea for a year and all you need to worry about is showing up for a work less than an hour late and remembering to brush your teeth. At home I'll have to get a car and crap. I don't even remember how to drive. Thankfully I do remember how to play video games and sit on the couch all day, and if there's one thing Korea has taught me over the last year, it's that I love videos games and the couch. And I'm sure they miss me too.

"Teacher, how old do I have to be to get some sweet-ass poon?"

2007-08-27T23:03:00.000+09:00

This blog is suffering. I literally have no more photos. So here's a classic horsehead shot. When you're in a bind, you can never go wrong with the H-Head. I went out to Woodstock by myself on Friday night, just planning on having a couple beers and getting to bed early. But it was not to be. Two drunk girls started talking to me and they somehow convinced me to go with them to the crappy dance club in town. This is pretty unusual in the sense that it’s routine for drunk girls to talk to me just for their own amusement, then they tell me to call them and I don’t because they are either terrible or awful. But to actually leave a bar with two girls, they must have been really really drunk. Once we got outside, they insisted on holding my hand so I’m walking down the main drag in town in between two Korean girls. I was incredibly scared. Walking around town at 2am past a bunch of Korean dudes while two Korean girls are hanging on you is basically like me just kicking every single one of those guys in the balls. So I’m surprised they didn’t kick my ass. I might as well have challenged them to a “Whose got a bigger Schlong?” contest. That’s how embarrassing and deflating it is for a Korean man to witness white-on-yellow love.

I think the school director cut off the wireless internet in the office. I would ask about it, but they would know immediately I don’t need the internet for any work related purpose. “Um, hey, what’s wrong with the internet connection?” “Oh, I don’t know, Ryan, do you need it turned on so you can dick around the web watching baseball highlights and poking people on facebook? You asshole.” They wouldn’t actually say that, because even they aren’t retarded enough not to think it. So yeah, things have been rough at the office. I’ve been forced to download movies at night so I can watch them the next day at work. And that’s just inhumane.

I joined a gym last week for the sole purpose of losing 10 pounds so I can gain that all back in a week eating Taco Bell when I get home. Nathan, the other foreigner at my school, goes to the same gym so he’s helped to not look like a complete idiot. I still screw things up a lot, though, so the Korean trainer guys have to come over and yell at me all the time. I hurt my left arm, probably from doing too much the first couple of days after I forget I that the most strenuous workout I had ever done before that was pushing through my mother’s womb in 1982. So now I can’t touch my nose with my left hand. I may soon decide that I was right, and that exercise only ends up hurting you in the end.

The first day at the gym, an older guy helped me out when I accidently put about 200 pounds on a machine, instead of 20. So I was thinking alright cool, nice guy. Then last later on after I got out of the shower, the same guy comes running over to me pointing at the ground in an attempt to tell me to dry the floor. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Koreans, they will jump at the first chance to order around a foreigner. Nevermind I had gotten out of the shower 20 seconds ago, (and it is wet in the shower), and I had ever intention of drying the floor after I was dressed, I thought this guy was going to strangle me. Next time I see him in the shower, I’m going to smack him in the face with it.

A bunch of my classes this semester are speaking classes. But instead of having the kids actually use theirs head and converse with each other, they just read dialogues from the book for 40 minutes, it's plain torture and I'm surprised the students don't just say "Teacher, get the F out of the classroom, I could learn more watching English pornos all day." (Note- They probably don't watch porn. At least not the good kind.)

I love it when they broadcast soccer games where all the players are 5 years old. They have two announcers and it's pretty professional looking, besides the whole Blind Date type pop-up bubbles that spring up above a kid's head. Not being able to read the bubbles actually makes it more entertaining because then when a fat kid falls on his ass and it pops up, you can just make up your own caption. Like "I'm such an ass" or "I'm never gonna laid when I get older."

Who loses their virginity to a prostitute? You guessed it, more than half of Korean men! So romantic!

2007-08-19T20:32:00.000+09:00

This video is of the kids playing heads up 7-up the other day. It's not that good, but if you have 10 minutes to kill, well, enjoy. I used to let them play it all the time, but then it quickly fell apart. Some kid would inevitably smash another kid in the head or one kid gets picked like three times. I know these kids don't understand much of what I say, but, come on, it's a pretty simple game. Listening to my voice on these videos is getting kind of creepy. I speak terrible English, basically just short phrases, usually not sentences, like "Light on! Light on!" and I also seem to have picked up a weird Asian accent.

As I was walking home from a bar last night, I saw a Korean guy punch a girl in the face. She fell down in the middle of the street, crying. After a few minutes, the girl got up and ran away. The guy stood next to me and said something like "That's Korea." The sickest part of it all was the crowd reaction. All these other Korean guys just standing around and watching. If a guy punches a girl in the face in the middle of NYC, he's getting tackled, plain and simple. I wonder what would have happened if 9/11 took place in Korea, would people just crowd around the rubble for a few days, stare at the victims, and then go home? The basic lack of human compassion in this country is pretty unbelievable.

The girl drawing on the board in the picture above is destroying me at school. First off all, it looks like she drew of picture of me getting run over by a truck and that's kind of cruel. During class, she's in her seat for about 20 seconds and usually that's because I'm holding her down. One of her favorite things to do is to get behind me and use her hands to give me angel wings. The 10 other kids in the class love this. In fact, they are entertained by just about everything she does. I've made a mistake of just trying to ignore her, figuring she'd get tired if I just didn't give her any attention. This has not worked. I've tried to kick her out of the class 10 times, but she's smart and calls my bluff every time. Usually I'll go outside and tell her to follow me, she then closes the door and locks me out. A new semester starts this week, and if there is a God, any God whatsoever, she will not be in my class. Otherwise I've got another seven weeks of torture.

I know the end is getting near since I've been having dreams lately about what life will be like in America when I get back. And let me tell you, the skies are blue, the air is breathable, edible food can found and there isn't a Korean within a hundred miles of me. Sorry, that's harsh. 20 miles.

Video Blog, Bitches.

2007-08-14T02:01:00.000+09:00

This will piss off millions of Koreans. Niiiiice.

2007-08-10T18:17:00.000+09:00

Another crappy article of mine gets published in the Korea Times. I might not show this one to the teachers at school though, they won't like it: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2007/08/137_8093.html

Here's the text if you're too lazy to click the link:

I’m no fan of George W. Bush. In fact, I’d put him right near the top of the list of America’s worst presidents. But when I opened up The Korea Times on Thursday and read Tom Plate’s column calling for a hostage-prisoner swap with the Taliban, I was, for once, in complete agreement with Bush.

To call America’s longstanding policy of not negotiating with terrorists a ``dumb ideology” is naive and callous.

My heart goes out to all the Korean hostages and their families, what they are going through is an awful, despicable experience. And it’d be wonderful if we could just release a few prisoners and send those hostages back into the arms of their loved ones where they belong.

Unfortunately, the world we live in today is bit more complicated than that. Plate says that terrorists don’t need any encouragement, that they will find ways to attack us no matter whether we negotiate or not. That’s like handing over a bag of cocaine to a drug addict who’s suffering from severe withdrawal.

Well, hey, the addict was going to find his next fix anyway and if you can make his pain go away immediately, it’s just the humane thing to do. Or so Plate would seemingly argue.

It’s basic common sense that if one rewards bad behavior that behavior will usually find a way of repeating itself. Here’s another example: Say you tell a child not to eat cookies because snacks cause obesity. The child disobeys the order and instead of being strong, taking a stand and punishing the child, you instead give the child a container of ice cream.

Being strong and determined not to back down to terrorists is what should be beating through every Korean heart today. The second you decide to negotiate with terrorists, you recognize them as legitimate, you suddenly make their hatred worthwhile.

Plate suggests that it’s a ``fair trade” to swap the hostages for female muslim prisoners. A fair trade? We’re not talking about a couple baseball players switching uniforms.

Let’s remember who we are dealing with here. The Taliban aren’t a bunch of lunatic nobodies trying to make the headlines. They are cold, methodical killers, always looking for their next shot to spill blood. Release any Taliban prisoners and not only is there no guarantee the terrorists will uphold their end of the bargain, but it’s also a stirring defeat for freedom and liberty all over the world.

One of my students told me the other day that America was being ``selfish” by not stepping in to solve the crisis. Although he’s only 12 years old, I know that sentiment is shared by many people in this country. All I can say is, it’s not going to be easy, but Korea must find the strength to look at the big picture.

Three years ago, the Korean government rejected terrorist demands to remove its troops from Iraq after civilian Kim Sun-il was kidnapped. Thousands of Koreans protested to urge the government to give in. To their credit, Korea’s leaders refused. Kim was killed.

As difficult as it may be to seemingly turn our backs on innocent people begging for our help, the facts remains this: to show weakness towards terrorists is to only invite them to come back for more. Freeing a couple dozen hostages at the expense of putting countless more lives in danger at the hands of emboldened terrorists is something that should not, and can not, be done.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live here forever, and then I wake up covered in blood and soaked in my own tears.

2007-08-07T17:33:00.000+09:00

I’m at work on Saturday and the Internet is down. I can’t imagine many things worse than that scenario. I’ve got a five day weekend next week, but as is to be expected in Korea, holidays aren’t really holidays. I guess it’s a good tradeoff, one Saturday for three days off during the week, but right now it’s pretty awful.

I almost fought a kid in my class this morning. All he does is say how much he hates America. Bill O’Reilly would call me a far-left America-hating Kool-aid drinking liberal douchebag, but despite my lowly status, I still feel the need to defend America, especially in a country like Korea. This kid was going on about how America is selfish because it hasn’t helped free the Korean hostages from the Taliban. Well, look little kid, it’s the damn Taliban, what do you want America to do? Go up to them and ask nicely? Koreans would love it if the Afghan gov’t gave in and released the Taliban prisoners in exchange for freeing the Koreans. There’s a reason, though, why you don’t negotiate with terrorists, and it’s basically common sense. You make that swap, and guess what happens next week, and the week after that, more hostages, more demands. The thing is Koreans wouldn’t care if next month 100 Italians or 100 Americans were taken hostage, it might not even make front page news. As long as the almighty Koreans are free, all is well in the world, screw everyone else. I read an article that said the incident might sour U.S.-Korea relations. At this point, maybe that’s a good thing.

I never posted this on Saturday and it’s now Monday afternoon and I’m waiting at the dentist office for my 100^th appointment in the last couple months. I spend more money at the dentist than most people spend on food every year. I wish someone had told me when I was 13 that drinking 5 cans of soda a day and brushing your teeth once a week will cause serious problems a decade later. But I’m not leaving this office until they’re done, I just spent five minutes arguing with the receptionist, who kept flipping through the calendar and saying “appointment, appointment.” No chance, I need a two month break from the dentist. I’ll sit here until Wednesday if that’s what it takes.

A new semester starts at school in a couple weeks and the head Korean teacher called me out into the hall today to get my opinion on some of the books she’s looking at assigning. Earlier in my contract, I would have just said fine, whatever, they’re all great. But at this point, I figure I might as well tell them when they are being retarded, for the sake of the kids. The book she showed me had a bunch of newspaper articles in it followed by simple who, what, when, where questions. The book was 25 pages long. I could finish teaching that book in about a week. I told her it was way too short, another Korean teacher, who’s a moron, argued the book was fine, you could just give the kids tests to take up the time. What they should have known about my teaching methods by now is that I prefer, in fact I insist, that I put in the least effort possible. Making up tests takes time = I don’t do it.

I hate any kind of surprise gathering/lunch/dinner/anything involving me having to sit around a table with my co-workers. This happened on Saturday afternoon as I guess the director was feeling bad for making us work. So she ordered everyone Chinese food. I really just wanted to take mine, sit at my desk and watch a movie, but that probably would have pissed everyone off. The new foreign guy, Nathan, got his first real glimpse of what it's like to eat with these people. "So what's the weather like in New Zealand?" "Well, it rains a lot more there". Korean, blah blah, whine whine, blah. Five minutes later...."Do you like chicken?" "Yeah, it's great." Blah, I'm terrible, Korean, blah. At one point, Nathan told the director how the kids are always surprised when he tells them children in New Zealand only go to school from 9am-3pm. Director: "You didn't go to academy after school?" Nathan: "No." Director: "You must have been poor."

I lost my new camera over the weekend. I assume it was when I was grinding up against a pole again or jumping up and down in a giant circle jerk with Korean guys. So that means crappy photos posted here for a while (aka Bender half naked), unless I decide to go buy a new memory card for my old camera, but I’d have to leave the 1-mile radius around my apartment to do that, which doesn’t happen unless I think I have a chance to get laid.

I just read something online that said Rudy Giuliani’s daughter was in a ‘Barack for President’ group on facebook. Not only has his son to told him to screw-off, now his 17-year-old daughter is lining up behind a diehard Democrat. Now that’s just hilarious. It’s one thing to have a few family problems, but jesus, Rudy’s family is more messed up than a couple of crackheads living in a box trying to raise 9 kids. If he’s gets the Republican nomination with that kind of track record, Republicans will pretty much have to scrap the whole “pro-family” mantra. Oh, and the best part about Rudy’s daughter’s facebook profile. She’s interested in men and she’s looking for: random play, whatever I can get. Holy Shit. That’s what douchebags like me put in their profiles. The only chicks who do that are either really fat or really big sluts. Either way, I think I’m going to poke her later tonight.

"Bad Teacher I Hate you"- my last text message

2007-08-02T00:05:00.000+09:00

I made a few videos at school today. I purposefully tried to plant the camera in the corner of the room so the kids didn't know it was on, otherwise they go nuts. However, this discreetness led to a number of closeup crotch shots of myself, and I apologize for that. The first video is of a class of 10 girls, all about age 8. They speak very little English and you can see they get frustrated at times and you can also see they pay absolutely no attention to me unless I'm standing right over them. This is one of those classes that if I had it when I first started teaching, I would have ran out of the room and started crying. Even watching the video now, afterwards I need to take a nap. The other two videos are just singing. A lot. I sound like I'm drunk in them because I sing way too loud and off-key. Like I've said before, I enjoy singing more than the kids.

I'm still pretty sick. I've coughed up enough phlegm in the last month to drown a small child. I still refuse to go to the doctor because even though it will only cost me 3 bucks, the doctor will look at me, probably prescribe the wrong medication and then I'll end up dying. Sorry, Michael Moore.

I have to work this Saturday because you can't just get vacation days in Korea. Kids must be learning English at all time. I'm supposed to meet the beat married chick at Woodstock on Friday night. I'm not sure why I agreed to this. Last weekend, her husband left and she kept touching me again, which was gross, and then later, even though she doesn't speak english well, she said something like "So we are just friends?" I wanted to say Yeah, I'd rather my manhood remain outside my body instead of shriveling up and dying inside my stomach. But I might meet her anyway, solely for entertainment purposes.

Since all of my poker income has dried up (Thanks, Bill Frist), I've been trying to think of other easy ways to make a lot of money sitting on my ass. Surprisingly, this isn't that easy. I did some research on currency trading, it seemed easy enough, I would just bet against the U.S. dollar since it's been in a freefall. So I signed up for an account but I didn't deposit anything, figured I'd try it out first with a free account. They gave me 50 G to work with. I lost 35 G in about three days. In light of this, I've decided it might be a bad idea to deposit money. If anyone knows of another easy way to make money while I watch movies and sleep, let me know (I already teach English in Korea).

I watched a lot of Dane Cook at work today. As much I watched it, though, I just kept trying to figure out what parts were supposed to be funny. I tried really hard to find the appeal because apparently college kids love him and I like to think I'm not THAT old yet. But man, for the most part, the guy just runs around the stage like an idiot, makes a few mediocre obvious jokes and then the crowd starts having seizures. I've been to few parties in America where everyone's been drunk and someone will be like "Hey! guys lets watch this Dane Cook DVD. It's hilarious, man!" And I laugh because I want to fit in and be cool, but wow, Dane Cook may be the least funny guy in America. It's similar to my feelings on Entourage. What came first? Did people watch it and actually say "Shit, this is a good show" or did it become so damn trendy to watch that once people did catch it, they were forced to like it or risk having to sit in the corner crying with no friends. Actually I shouldn't bash Entourage right now, since last Sunday's episode admittedly was hilarious, but you get my point. Shut up.

If one more Korean kid tries to stick their hands up my ass...

2007-07-27T11:10:00.000+09:00

I posted my resume on the main Korea teaching job boards and I got an email the next day offering an interview for a job next year paying about $2500 a month plus 13 weeks paid vacation. I actually was considering it for a couple hours, but then I realized if I came back here again it would be solely for the money. I would jump at an interview for that job. In any other country. There's a reason why foreign teachers get paid so much here, they have to offer absurd amounts of money in order to lure people away from the rest of Asia. That being said, there's a price that I could be bought at. Maybe a university job working 20 hours a week plus $60,000 a month. Yeah, i think it'd come back to Korea then.

I've made up for my lack of skills with girls by becoming best friends with a bunch of middle aged Korean men. I met one guy last Sunday at Woodstock while he was watching a soccer game, he told me to meet him there again on Wednesday for the next game. So I did and as expected I didn't pay any money but got way too drunk for a Wednesday. Korea lost the soccer game so him and his buddies were all depressed. During the game, they all just yelled out "Shibbal" (Fuck) or "Geseki" (Son of a Bitch) over and over again. It took me a few months to figure out that geseki was really a curse word. The students say it in class all the time and they told me that it was a "dog baby" so I just thought that was cute so I decided to say it all the time, too. But lucky for me, it seems the kids don't go home and tell their parents their white teacher curses at them all the time.

There was a married couple at Woodstock with my new old friend and it was the wife's birthday. She was 31 or something. But I told her that her face looked 24. That was a lie. Her face was awful. When we left Woodstock, she was pretty tanked since the bar kept giving her free shots and as we're walking to a soju place, she's hanging all over me. The husband was walking up ahead and this girl keeps telling me I should have a girlfriend. She told me I was shy. I'm thinking yeah, you know your husband is drunk, he's about 250 pounds, and there's no chance in hell he likes you molesting some white guy you just met. As I was going home later that night, she ran outside and asked when she would see me again. I said maybe after all the bruises heal after your husband beats the shit out of you tonight.

I went to another bar after that by myself, just planned on having one gin tonic. But then more middle aged Korean guys wanted to be my best friend. They challenged me to darts, loser buys the other beer. I almost wanted to lose, thinking about the next morning but they were the worst darts players I've ever seen. I'd say they only hit the board at a 1/5 clip. So I beat them twice and arranged for a gay threesome on Saturday. It's funny (or tragic) how easy it is for me to hang out with dudes while it's such a pain in the ass dealing with girls and requires way too much effort on my part.

I woke up at 8 on Thursday, still pretty drunk. I was thinking wow I feel ok maybe it wont be so bad. It was by 10 when I got to my first class, which turns out is the one with 12 of the youngest kids, where I was ready to start throwing them and myself through a wall. I quickly remembered why I instituted the no drinking during the week policy after my first month there.

I've got 10 weeks left here and I'm not expecting to be productive or do anything meaningful during that time. I've got three days off next month and then another week off just before I come home, but I have no real desire to travel anywhere or see anything else in Korea. I want to sleep, watch movies, play poker and drink heavily. I have bronchitis again and my eyes burn everyday, the air in this city has raped my body. If you are currently in America, as you take your next breath, full of clean delicious oxygen without toxic chemicals, think of me and pray.

Lesbians.

2007-07-21T18:57:00.000+09:00

(This the only column I wrote for the college paper that I did not submit to be published. You might be able to figure out why.)

There comes a time in every man’s life when he must lie in the arms of lesbians. Check the list of needs for any normal guy and it looks something like this: 1. eat 2. sleep 3. beer 4. lesbians (not necessarily in that order). The problem with lesbians is well, they are lesbians. You can not touch them, you can not play with them and you surely can not have sex with them. Despite what you may have seen in Chasing Amy, let me assure you that sweet talking a lesbian will not cause her to immediately forget about her sexuality.

Why do guys wet their pants when they see two girls going at but women would be traumatized for years if they witnessed gay guys getting down? A complex question for sure, but the answer is surprisingly simple. Men actually believe (I do not know why) they can someday bag a lesbian. Therefore when they watch lesbians what they are really seeing is two naked girls rolling around who will one day tickle their pickle. Two naked guys, well, that’s just a little too much hair to be visually appealing. If I were a girl, and no I don’t imagine that more than 4 times a week, I’d totally take watching lesbians play in the mud than watching gay men hammer around. Now could you ever imagine a straight man uttering the following statement: “Oh yeah, I love watching Steve and Mark make sweet love. Lesbians just don’t do it for me.” Thus we have the paradox of gayness.

The whole point of this column was supposed to be how I hate lesbians and maybe hate is not a strong enough word. I despise lesbians. Why would God make beautiful girls who only want to be with other beautiful girls? Talk about holy torture. (Yes, I realize that not all lesbians are smoking, but I live in a fantasy world). While I hold out hope that some of them are just playing a cruel game of hard to get, I realize I will probably be forever cursed to being with only beautiful straight girls. It’s something I must deal with every morning when I roll out of bed and if the numbers are correct, over 42 % of men are suffering from “I’ll never nail a lesbian” syndrome.

I know you are all thinking this has nothing with the University of Richmond, for surely lesbians are way too diverse to attend this school. However, this assumption would be wrong. They are all over the place. They work at the library. They work at D-hall. And at last count, 17 professors were suspected of being hardcore bush hunters.

To give this column some legitimacy, I did a little research by searching for lesbians on Yahoo. After weaving through (weaving = not looking at for more than 10 minutes) the more raunchy sites, I finally came to the first one with some real information. Disregarding the address of the site, lustydevil.com, I read about how recently out lesbians could generate a white lesbian name in order to “cast off the name of their oppressors”. A noble idea indeed. My white lesbian name, and I am not making this up, Pony Windynut.

Back on topic, for those few men out there who still believe they can get a lesbian to give up their lifestyle for a piece of their meat, keep this in mind: Lesbian DO NOT like penis. Actually, this may be the reason why they are lesbians in the first place. It is a known fact that 5 % of all women suffer from an intense fear of the penis (Note: Figures may or may not be accurate). The chances of converting one these girls inflicted with peniphelia is worse than your chances of finding at bargain at the school bookstore. That said, if someone out there does manage to achieve the impossible, let me know and I’ll give you a trophy or a cookie.

I could have sworn I was dancing with girls on the pole

2007-07-18T21:46:00.000+09:00

Korean girls tend to hit the bars in groups of three. Typically, each one fits a different mold. One of them is hot, this one will speak almost no English. The second one is average looking and speaks great English. Her job is really just to serve as the translator as I try to talk to the hot one. The problem is always the third girl. She is not good looking and it doesn't matter if she speaks English or not, because she'll either just keep trying to dance with me or just ask repeatedly "You girlfriend, no?" I was in the middle of this situation twice this weekend and not only did I blow it with the hot girls, I'm now supposed to meet both of the "third girls" on different nights this weekend. The soju is going to have to be flowing at unheard of levels.

Not that Bender is gone, I head out a lot more by myself, but like I've said before, you don't stay by yourself for long if you're white in Korea. Actually, you meet a lot more people if you go out by yourself, Koreans tend to be intimidated by groups of white people (ie more than one). So while I miss Bender dearly, it's not bad hanging out with new people every time I go out. On Saturday I brought the horsehead out to woodstock, which is probably what scared the crap out of the hot girl. They had a dance contest, so I went out there, the bartender told me I couldn't wear the horsehead but I told him to play the damn music. He did, I dryhumped the floor and that was the end of my chances with a girl and any dignity I had left for the day.

Had off from work yesterday, so I went downtown Monday night. I thought we were going to Hongdae, but turned out to be Itaewon, and it was just as dirty as I remembered it. Things were pretty chill until we got to Spy, where i was expecting the usual crowd of Russian models to be, but it was dead. So I went on a pole dancing rage (see above) and had to be dragged off the pole and out of the club at one point (sorry zaida). A korean guy in a suit came into the place surrounded by 15 young girls. I tried to hand a few of the girls money. I feel bad about that now.

For a country that doesn't believe in gay people, Korean guys love to act gay. In the last week, one guy fed me for five minutes, another full on two handed ass groped me up an entire staircase and another kept his hand on my thigh for what seemed like an hour. For a guy who spent the ages of 15-24 acting gay at home for a cheap laugh, it's quite odd when an entire country acts that way but has no idea they're doing it, nor do they like it when you laugh.

Next week we move to the early schedule at school which means a 9-5 deal, looking forward to that. Not the first few days when my body is going to be screwed up, but there's something nice about seeing the sunlight during the summer. Cause right now, it's hot and humid so when I get home at 11, all I want to do is pop a sleeping pill and wake up at noon the next day.

I've gone an entire two days without saying a word to a Korean teacher. That is splendid.

Coughing up Green Stuff, Welcome Back to Seoul!

2007-07-11T20:42:00.000+09:00

There's a subtle difference between Thailand and Korea. In Thailand, you are a person, just one of many roaming around and unless you have purple hair, tattoos on your face and your pants down, people leave you alone. In Korea, white skin scares people, you're a monster, and it's not the stares that bother me anymore, it's just the all the time feeling that I'm being watched, even if I'm not being stared at. And it's not a friendly feeling, most of the time. Of course, there are plenty awesome Koreans, one guy downtown this morning helped me find the dentist office for a good half an hour in the pouring rain, but there's too much negative b.s. in this country to deal with. Younger Korean guys, forget about it, they act like 12 year olds if they see a white guy even look at a Korean girl. If there was ever a country, that, collectively, just needed to get laid, it is Korea. Loosen up. Chill out. Just try to be a little bit cooler.

Anyway, Thailand was an awesome experience, even though the weather was brutally hot and I dropped a ton of cash. We went to some of the seedier areas in Phuket and Bangkok, mainly because seedy is fun, if used in moderation. Which basically means you go into a bar, a girl is sitting next to you within 30 seconds. They ask you the general rundown, name, age, location, 15 minutes later, they think they have you on a string, they ask you to buy them a drink. That's when you tell them to F-off and wait for the next dumb girl to come over. That was all cool, but in Patpong in Bangkok, we were definitely in a lady boy joint, where half the girls in there did in fact have penises at one point. But you walk in there, and maybe 3 or 4 are obviously guys because they are 7 feet tall and have hands bigger than my head, but the other 100 are hot. Like really hot. Some of them I would stake my life that they were chicks, guys can't be that hot, or I'm gay, but it did cause some serious reflection the next morning when I tried to figure out if I had been heavy-petted by guys all night. On the last night in Bangkok, we hung out with 19 year old German girls, I felt like their grandfather.

The beaches in Phuket, especially Laem Singh were incredible, I was tempted to just sleep on the beach for the next five years. We spent two nights on Phi Phi Island, which is about a two hour ferry ride from Phuket. Something like 2,000 people died there when the tsunami hit in 2004 and that kind of creeped me out. We bought a lot of crap from small children during the trip. It's a great strategy. If a kid begs you to buy something enough, even if it's a rusty old fork, you'll end up giving him twenty bucks for it. We thumb-wrestled a few of them to try to get out of buying a crappy looking rose, but these kids are poor, they put up a good fight and when you've already drank a bucket of Thai Whiskey, well, you lose.

For all the hype around Bangkok, it wasn't as amazing as I was expecting. Some parts even look dirtier than Seoul, and that's sick. The touristy things were OK, but I get sick of looking at crap pretty quickly. I like to do things. Like sleep. Our hostel also would only run the air-con from 6pm-11am, which was annoying. Who the hell wakes up before 11am? The most amazing site in Bangkok wasn't the palaces or temples, but instead the 50 year old white guys walking around with 18 year old Thai guys. Not just walking, but holding hands, hugging. Not behind a wall. In the middle of the mall. I'd give anything to see something like that in Korea. Now I'm certain that I would have had a better time if I decided to teach in Bangkok, but the place isn't cool enough for me to justify the cash I'm going to leave Korea with, not even close really.

Monday was an awful day at work. I got off the plane at 7am, back to my apartment by 11 and then to work at 2. I had missed the kids a little bit, but it was still painful. I made one girl cry because she was being a bitch. Things are better now, I can see the end now, less than 3 months, and all I really need to worry about is going to every doctor and dentist possible here since I probably won't have health insurance in America until 2012.

I brought back a dozen of these little dolls from Bangkok for the Korean teachers. In typical fashion, even when you think you're doing something positive, something bad will probably come out of it if it takes place in Korea. I handed out the dolls on Monday. On Tuesday, the head Korean teacher told me the school director was "sulky" and "pouting" because I hadn't given her a doll. Fact is I rarely see the director plus I just kind of forgot. So now I have the last doll on my desk, just waiting until the director comes into the office again, which will hopefully be sometime before October. I also gave a doll to the girl who gave me a birthday present. Not surprisingly, since she's great, she wrote me a thank you note that I got a few minutes ago. It just says "Teacher, thank you give a doll. It is very cute. Thank you." But then under the note, pre-written on the paper, is "I wish fall in love with you." First off, kind of strange. And second, why don't Koreans get native speakers to spell and grammar check the crap they post all over the city? And also, apparently on the little post it notes they make? Koreans will pay a million bucks to mass produce something that looks completely retarded to anyone that really speaks English. Great business strategy.

Oh, I almost saw a 90-year-old nipslip in Phuket. That would not have been hot.

A bunch more photos from Thailand up top. And yeah, the last one, thats me with the same guy from the banana video, probably taken just moments before I got under a table and simulated fellacio with a pole.

Thailand: I think I feltup a ladyboy last week

2007-07-09T19:53:00.000+09:00

Back from Thailand, and here are some of the photos, should be pretty easy to tell which are from the beaches and which are from Bangkok. I'll post more later after I get readjusted to the toxic air in Seoul. I will say this though, the video posted above is not PG-rated. In fact, nobody should watch it, if you do choose to do so, I will state once again, that while my actions may suggest otherwise, I am not gay. Stick around for the 1:15 mark, that's when things get really ugly. Two quick notes, the girl Bender is dancing with is a prostitute, despite what he may claim, and the guy across the table from me is 100 percent gay as I had just seen a photo of him in a bikini before the video was made.

NewsFlash: Tall White Guy Plans to Shag 29 prostitutes in Bangkok

2007-06-29T00:35:00.000+09:00

The slight goodwill I was feelings towards Koreans has evaporated within a week. Not really a surprise there. The new foreign teacher, Nathan, big improvement over David, like he doesn't show up to work drunk. Minor things like that. Anyway, he's been a lot more friendly than I was when i first got here, trying to start conversations with the Korean teachers and generally just being nice to them. But of course, they are cold, ice-cold, either that, or they are mentally impaired. Which is quite possible since teaching at a hagwon here, if you're Korean, is liking working at the Burger King of the education system. No one takes it seriously, especially the kids, it's their after "real" school playground. So yesterday one of the Korean teachers started, I won't say scolded, but telling him in a not so sweet way, that he had to give more tests to his classes. But here's the thing, nobody ever told him how things work at the school. I filled him in on most of the details, but there's no orientation, none of the bosses explain how to teach. But still, the Korean teachers get all pissed when he does something wrong. It's like if you took a carpenter, threw him on jumbo jet, told him hey you're a pilot now, then after he crashed the plane into a mountain, you bitched about how could this possibly happen? Didn't he know how to fly a plane? Sometimes I honestly think that all Koreans were born with some kind of genetic disorder that makes them act in the most retarded way possible.

We got pretty wrecked last Friday, which is always the recipe for a worthless weekend. Since Bender was making his last rounds around town, we got a bunch of free drinks. Apparently I also drank one of the bartenders drinks and then immediately forget because when they tried to charge us for it, I bitched like a little girl. We had big plans to get downtown and dance with guys on Saturday, and I was gonna try to sneak out the horsehead, but instead we woke up for 20 minutes to get dinner and then went back to sleep. I hope Bender's last weekend in Korea was all he ever hoped it would be.

It's monsoon season now, which means it's 85 degrees everyday with a humidity level of "I can't get them off my leg" on the well-respected Sack-Stick scale. It also rains everyday, and even when it's not raining, old ladies insist on putting up tent-sized umbrellas over their tiny heads. Then they just stand in the middle of the sidewalk all day waiting for me to try to get around them. Actually, Koreans basically love to use umbrellas for pretty much all weather conditions. If the sun is out, umbrella time. (Hats and sunglasses have not yet been invented in Korea.) If it's cloudy, it might rain and god forbid a drop of that nasty water touches their skin, umbrella time. When it's really raining, the umbrellas are up and Koreans immediately seek safe, sturdy shelter.

One more day of work tomorrow than it's off to Thailand for a week, where my life will be awesome. However, since this trip will involve four different flights, that means there's at least a 95 percent chance of me dying in a fiery wreck so for my own comfort, I just want to say goodbye now. So goodbye and I love you. If I do get lucky and make it back to Seoul, when I do, I will be under three months left in Korea, at which time I will be able to taste America.

Suck my Toes.

2007-06-22T23:10:00.000+09:00

J.K. Rowling Hints At Harry Potter Date Rape

Al Qaeda Also Fed Up With Ground Zero Construction Delays

These videos are from the Onion, and they are hilarious.

I have to give Korea some credit here, right when I was about to write it off as a terrible country, it produced some nice surprises for my birthday on Wednesday. After work, grabbed a few beers at Woodstock and out of nowhere, this girl I had met before around town, popped up from the side of the bar with a birthday cake. Then yesterday, the Korean teachers got me a cake and we had a little party, I didn't tell them it was my birthday pretty much to avoid just that, but it was a nice gesture anyway. Although, as was to be expected, I got to my party and then just sat there listening to them speak Korean for a half hour. Today one of the students gave me a present, it was a picture frame that says "Nice memories" on it. That was nice, but I may have actually shed a tear when I read the note she gave me "To Ryan, Happy Birthday to you--Happy Birthday to you--Happy Birthday Dear Ryan Teacher--Happy Birthday to you. Sorry!! I'm late! But, always thank you. I'm meet you very happy :-) I wish you a lot of happy day--always smile--and many many Happy Birthday to you"

I went to the dentist yesterday. I had a good one picked out I found online, it said he went to Harvard and spoke good English so I was all excited. But then I got off the subway and couldn't find the building so I just wandered into this random place. It said dental clinic on it and after 3 hours of sleep the night before combined with xanax, I would have been fine getting a root canal from a drunk guy on the street. That is what I needed though. I'd prefer to go to the dentist when I got home, but a root canal here costs $6. As I expected, since the dentist was Korean, he did not wear gloves at first, but his soft skin in my mouth was quite soothing. He put them on later for some reason, which was a bit of a letdown. Luckily I have five more visits lined up with him, hopefully he doesn't have AIDS though, otherwise I have a 110 percent chance of getting it. But I don't think Koreans can get AIDS, since they are not able to die.

Hold on, is this my second post this week? Oh, forget this. It's Bender's last weekend in Korea, we should be on the sixth bottle of soju by now.

No you steal icepop, silly white man!

2007-06-18T20:13:00.000+09:00

One of the worst decisions I've made in a while was not putting on sunblock at the beach this weekend. It's not even that I'm burned that bad, but I failed to remember that part of job requires my back to serve as a punching bag for kids everyday. Maybe they are just being bitches today because they seem to be hitting me just a bit harder than usual. And while I usually pretend that it hurts when they do it, today it actually did, so I guess it's my fault.

Busan was a good time, though. Spent basically all of the time just sleeping on the beach. I sleep a lot. I had heard that the people in Busan were more friendly than the Koreans in Seoul, and I'll agree with that, although I still would have preferred to share the beach with an entire different race. One impressive thing was that the trains that run here are all so efficient, like down to the minute. Always leave on time, get you where you want as scheduled. Not really that big of a deal, but when youve taken the train in America dozens of time and every time it's 2 hours late, and it takes you 12 hours to get home for what was supposed to be a 5 hour trip, well then, the system here is pretty amazing.

Took it easy on Friday night since Bender forced me to wake up before 10am on Saturday, but during the short time I was out, I was still lucky to encounter some of that lovely Korean racism. We went into a convenience store, I bought two icepops, put them in my pocket and then waited for Bender to get his vaginal cream. As I'm standing there, just being white, a Korean guy starts yelling and pointing at my pocket. Eventually I realized he was trying to tell the cashiers that I hadn't paid for the icepops. So I took them out, waved them in front of the cashier, for a second terrified that this was some sort of conspiracy and the cashier would call the cops, but the cashier told the guy, that I, in fact, had no just stolen two strawberry icepops. We left the store, and as we got outside, just for a minute, I knew what it was like to be black in America. And it sucked. So to that drunk Korean guy who had a stuffed monkey wrapped around his fat neck, you win this weeks "Worst Person in the World" Award, which has now been given to a Korean for a record 75 straight weeks.

In my last class, a girl cried because I told her to stop hitting the girl next to her. At first, I thought she was faking it, so I was all pointing at her and telling the class "Oh, she's not really crying, I can see her laughing." I did this until it became quite evident that teasing her was just making her cry more, which it seems is what she was doing the entire time. The one good thing about making kids cry is that means they will be quiet the rest of the class, and this girl is really active, so it's about a wash on the guilt-benefit to my sanity scale.

Up top are a bunch of pics from Busan, a nasty stuffed animal threeway, along with a classic college video that will be amusing to, well, the other three people in it.

Dirty whores, horny animals and pretty pink flowers

2007-06-14T21:19:00.000+09:00

One of the advanced classes was debating today whether children should be required to help out with household chores. Four of them were suckups and said they should and the other two were honest about it. One girl said that children were too busy studying to do chores, plus "doing work in the house is the mom's job." Before adding, "If I helped my mom clean the house, she would get lazy." I tacked on a couple points to her test score for that gem. Do Korean kids really do that? Their mom asks them to set the table and they turn around and say "Nah, mom, I don't want you to get rusty."

I'm down to about my last 100 days here and while that's not right around the corner, it's enough to get my through almost anything terrible that happens from here on out. As anyone who has even skimmed this blog recently can tell, my opinion of Korea and the culture in general has taken a nosedive in recent months. While I saw friendly, smiling faces when I first got here, now, I see nothing more than the awkward glance, no hint of warmness. I imagine nothing has changed here, the people are still the same, but I've been here long enough to be well past that euphoria of living in a new place. Now I just see Korea for what it really is, and to be honest, it's really a depressing place. Nobody here seems happy. Which is why I'm considering smuggling five of my favorite students in my suitcase when I'm heading home. Kids are happy anywhere, but man, sometimes it's tough for me to look at these kids and not think, man I wish you could grow up somewhere else. What are they doing in school at 10pm? It's freakin child abuse. Pull them out of all these pointless academies, sign them up for a soccer team, maybe teach them what a TV is. This whole society is so warped in what it considers important in life. Yeah it's one thing if working 80 hours a week and torturing your kids is a satisfying experience for you, but all it does here is make Koreans kill themselves.

Whenever we go out and decide to drink an obscene amount at one bar, it always leads to lameness. On Friday, we ordered a pitcher of gin and tonic at this place, because hey, it was only $22. All this did was make me arrange stuffed animals into inappropriate poses and then make awesome song requests, see Nsync's masterpiece It's Gonna Be Me. It was club night at woodstock on saturday, which is weird, because woodstock is not a club. I didn't get there until 2am because I was sleeping until 11pm, but anyway, within 10 minutes of being there, this really short Korean girl started dancing with me. I think she was just like "Oh foreigner, this will be funny". But it was weird because I'm not sure how you dance with really short girls. Are you supposed to come down to their level or just let them lick your nipples for a half hour?

I almost forgot that there was one really funny part about last Friday night and of course that happened at McDonalds. I went in to get a massive and Bender, like usual, pretended he didn't want it and started walking back to my place. 30 seconds later, he walks back in with what can only be described at the grossest Korean ever, and man, that's saying a lot. The picture above with her hand moving up his leg doesn't capture the nastiness. She only had two teeth. That's not a joke. She might have been a whore, but Bender didn't have enough money. She asked us if we were gay, and I don't know why, but I have never answered No to that question in my life. So I said sometimes and then told her Bender likes little boys. I believe in the photo Bender is trying his best to explain that he doesn't in fact like little boys, and instead prefers them to be around 15 or 16. When we got back to my apartment, I smeared sausage and egg all over my body...

We're heading to Busan this weekend, which is 3 hours south of Seoul on the bullet train, which apparently goes 7000 mph. Staying at a place on the beach, which should be a nice appetizer for Thailand in a couple of weeks. However, we booked a $56 hotel and my confirmation email said "Reserved 1 Twn" Now if twin stands for one twin bed in our room, I suspect I will no longer be an anal virgin after this weekend.

If they served McDonalds breakfast all the time, I would be 600 pounds.

2007-06-08T00:54:00.000+09:00

The textbook for one of my middle school classes is designed for college students and this always leads to awkward situations in class. "Teacher, what does cleavage mean?" Ask your mom to show you, kid, I'm not touching that. One of the suggested writing topics today was to choose a side on the debate of "Should colleges hand out free condoms to students?" First of all, I don't think Koreans learn about condoms until they're 35, and also, it's one thing if the kids already know the meaning, but if a 13 year old asks you to explain what a condom is, especially if I'm the person who will be doing the explaining, either the kid is going to be traumatized, I'm going to jail, or both.

My buddy Jacob got his leg busted open by a cab last week. Now it's one thing if you're walking around in the middle of the road, but he was standing on the side, when the cab driver just lost complete control the car, brake failure or something, and ran over him and his girlfriend. The girlfriend escaped with a few bruises, but Jacob is holed up in the hospital for a while. That's a picture above of him pounding the soju bottle outside the hospital. If you're in the hospital here, you're still free to leave whenever you want. Broken arm? Bleeding from the head? Doesn't matter. Just keep your IV and wheel this bag around and you can go outside, have a cigarette, go to the local bar. You just can't get out of your hospital bed in America and be like "Hey, I'm leaving." Well, maybe you can, but I've never seen someone rolling around an IV or pushing it into a 7-11, and if I ever do, I can almost guarantee it will be a Korean.

Yesterday was some holiday here, memorial day maybe, which just meant saturday night activities on a tuesday night. in one of the funniest things i've seen here, as we're sitting at the bar at woodstock, talking to a couple of Koreans, one of them, the girl, suddenly just falls backwards out of her chair. yeah, it's not that funny when it's a normal chair, at least two kids do it at school everyday. but damn, this was a bar stool, she was a good five feet in the air. i almost died. afterwards, she was quiet the rest of the time, probably suffering from a mild concussion and definite retardation. showbar, where we always go late night to play darts, is my favorite place in suyu, the bartenders are all cool guys, and it's guaranteed that at least one them will be completely tanked. they might hate us though, cause we never order more than one drink there since we've usually already polished off a handful of soju bottles.

what is weird though, is one of the bartenders, Terry, is usually a pretty chill guy, but whenever I leave that place, as I'm walking up the stairs, I get sexually assaulted by Terry. One time as we were paying he thought I said F-you to him, but I explained that I was in fact just saying this to Bender, so we're cool, but then he grabs my ass like three times on the way out. And then the other night, he runs over to the stairs again, and I'm thinking oh shit, he reaches up under my arms and goes to town on my man breasts. It seemed like he was trying to honk them or something. I'm not sure what the deal is, I don't really mind if he wants to play around with my boobs, but on the stairs? Well, that seems a little dangerous.

We went to the Korean War Memorial on Sunday, where a bunch of the photos were taken. Definitely one of the nicer places to see in Seoul. And then we went to Itaewon, definitely the filthiest place in Seoul. Even after 8 months here, we're still idiots and spend countless hours walking around in circles for no reason. There are restaurants everywhere in Seoul, but we'll still look around for the perfect place. And then as an added dose of stupidity, we will end up at a burrito joint. Which is exactly what happened on Sunday.

I'm so sick of Korean food right now. I can only eat like three things without feeling terrible or wanting to slice off my tastebuds. Thai food is the biggest appeal right now of the trip there in a few weeks, I plan on packing on at least 30 pounds while there. Hopefully I can just live off that fat for my last three months here. If ever even catch a glimpse of a piece of kimchi after I leave here, I'm going to rip my eyes out with a rusty nail.

Fun with a Camera

2007-05-31T00:01:00.000+09:00

New camera arrived today so I went a little crazy. It's the last two days of the semester so all my classes are having snack parties and playing games. This is different from the rest of the semester only in that there aren't always snacks. Another Jenga video here, not too interesting, but I like it because a kid asks me to give him a "headshot". And I love headshots. Actually, most of my classes didn't play any games today, they just draw pictures on the board, almost all of them tearing me a new one. My favorite is the one labeled Ryan's Girlfriend, with the word crazy over her head and a huge bottle of soju in her hand. I'd love to meet that girl. She sounds amazing.

Korea Everyday Same Same

2007-05-28T17:40:00.000+09:00

I love it when two Koreans walk into each other on the sidewalk. They both shoot their best evil glance at the other. What neither of them can understand and what I would love to yell at them each time this happens is "Look, you are both retarded. That's OK. You were born this way, but accidents are going to happen when you walk with your head down in a constant zig-zag motion." Walking to work today, I made an attempt to pass a young Korean guy. Just as I caught up, instead of moving in the other direction, he in fact decides it'd be a good idea to move closer to me, which caused some serious man-on-man hand touching action. Not what I'm going for an hour after waking up on Monday. I'm seriously contemplating quarantining myself in my apartment whenever it rains as the only thing more dangerous than trying to cross a street with a million Koreans is trying to cross a street with a million Koreans carrying umbrellas. They should at least sell Korean-proof umbrellas, maybe put some padding on those medal rods that have many times nearly ended my quarter century of eyesight.

I don't mean to sound racist here, but every Korean should probably be paired up with a white person. Like some kind of buddy system, where the white person's only job is to make sure the Korean doesn't put a kid's life in danger. Everyday I see at least five motorbikes go by with a helmet-less child somewhere on it. Look, if you put a 5-year-old on a motorcycle without a helmet and then weave into traffic in a major city, you shouldn't have that kid. And you should probably check yourself into the nearest hospital. It's like Dear Korea, if you want to be recognized as a civilized society, you need to actually start doing civilized things.

Friday night was Bender's last trip to Club Night so we celebrated by doing the same thing we do every club night, getting train-wrecked. I didn't spray any white liquid onto Bender's pants this time, mainly just because someone didn't give me white liquid to spray. You have to be careful at bars, and especially clubs in Korea, when you leave a drink at the bar. Not because someone might drug it or even drink it, but because the bartenders seem to enjoy pouring out half-full glasses. I couldn't have been more than two sips into a gin and tonic when I turned around and it was gone. I did my best miming to the girl behind the bar, who in turn pointed to another girl behind the bar, I think meaning that girl had ditched my drink. So I did what I always do when confronted with frustrating Korean people. I twirled my finger next to my ear, told her she was crazy and walked away. (Side note- There's a 75 percent chance I had finished the drink and I'm an idiot)

Anyway, I spent most of the time at the club standing up on stage by myself flashing some kind of homosexual surfer's sign with my hand up in the air. Every few minutes an Indian guy back in the crowd would look up and give me the attention I was craving. Sadly, my desire to turn everyone in the club gay didn't work out so much. On the bright side, I didn't get thrown off the stage like usual.

One of my classes continues to act more immature than me, and that's tough to do, even for 9 year olds. They constantly ask me questions like "Do you want to die or girlfriend's clothes blow away (insert boob honking gesture here)"? Sadly, I always have to choose die in these situations. I also should not have answered the question "Do you want to kill America or kill Korea?" That was some hardcore screaming. I love that class though and I'm not teaching them starting with the new semester on Friday. I'm hoping the school will get a ton of complaints like "The new teacher won't allow my son to point to his junk all class and yell out the Korean word for penis." I'm sure I'll get them back.

Oh, then there was this classic from last month:
Me: What can you buy with a credit card?
Student #1: People
Me: You can't buy people.
Student #2: You can buy black people.

Awww, Koreans hate black people. Their blatant racism is so darn cute.

Weekend Terribleness Update: McDonalds-1, KFC- 1, Ice Cream- 2, Custard Pie things- 5, Nerds- 1, Packs of Skittles- 2, Girls- 0.

I eat my Ramen hot. With a side of naked.

2007-05-23T00:13:00.000+09:00

Alright, I'm only posting because Heroes hasn't finished downloading yet. Korea has been getting on my nerves lately. I'm sure I'm partly to blame, but during the week here life is a lonely and isolated existence. There's just no meaningful connection taking place with anyone, especially at work. When I go out to the bars during the week, it's often a good time and it's also often with good people, but I'll be 25 next month and the whole drinking every night just doesn't work for me anymore. As much as I loved college, that's a time in my life that has now long since passed and it's just not a lifestyle that's all that appealing to me anymore. Most of all though, yeah, I just miss those simple connections with people. I saw two older Koreans guys sitting outside before, sipping on a beer, and just enjoying the interaction. There's just not enough of that here for a white guy, especially for one who knows about 3 words of Korean. It's kind of tough to explain to an audience that hasn't spent 8 months surrounding by millions of people who speak a different language, but that outsider feeling can take its toll and I've been feeling it lately. It's not that I want to leave Korea for good, but man, a week on American soil would be glorious. Just not glorious enough for $1700 and 16 hours on a plane.

Anyway, onto other crap. Sometimes I do wonder if Koreans were created by God just to drive me crazy. I went into the store today to buy new headphones for the third since I got here, after the other two broke. Great, only 4 bucks, i can handle that. Get back to work, open the box and the cord to the right earphone is about a foot longer than the left side. Back to the store. I lay the thing on the counter, the cashier seems to understand the problem, so I grab a different $4 set off the rack. I'm feeling more confident with this one because the genius Koreans who made the package were sure to include on the front "Good Design for Human!" That was huge, since I hate it when I pick up a pair of headphones and they are specifically designed for cat ears. Start walking back to work again, break the box open and same damn thing. One cord much longer than the other. At that point I chalked it up to Koreans being Korean, sucked it up and went back to work. Really, what could possibly be the rationale behind that? Are they trying to save a few cents by making the cord shorter? Do some Koreans have ears that are a couple of vertical feet away from each other?

Quick side note, how great was that Sopranos scene where Tony put the guys mouth on a table and then kicked him in the back of the head? That was just gruesome, and amazing. Anyway, as far as what Bender reports about my actions with the Canadian girl on Friday night, I will plead no contest to the facts. I am terrible. But going out with me in any situation, especially one including alcohol, comes with an inherent disclaimer, one that states that I will inevitably cause you at least some embarrassment through the course of the night. The extent of this embarrassment can range from reactions of "Wow, that was a little stupid" all the way to "Wow, there's no way I should be your friend" and the incident on Friday night falls closer to the latter. However, in my defense, the Canadian girl is a bitch. Bender also did get his revenge when he savagely beat me with a little Chinese doll over and over again, which caused minor internal bleeding.

On Saturday night, we went to the hip-hop club right around the block from me, it's was pretty much a I guess we have to check it out once since it's right there kind of thing. There was smoke everywhere, and man, I love smoke. But seriously, the horsehead got no attention. It was almost as if there had been a huge horsehead party at the place the night before and everyone just thought I was the loser who got the nights mixed up. So that was depressing. Damn it, the horse head demands attention. Later in the night, a Korean girl started yelling to her friend at the bar who was on the other side of me and Bender. She must have done this for a good five minutes. Either she didn't know the girl or she was trying to make me break a bottle over my head. The girls there were all pretty awful, i.e. they were very Korean.

I've been weak with the pictures lately, mainly because I hate my camera and well, all of Korea looks the same now. I plan on getting back on the photo train once my new beautiful camera gets here. We have off this Thursday for Buddha's Birthday, which is great, because Thursdays are the worst day of my life. Ah Heroes is ready and I need to get the ramen in the microwave.

Great Man of the Week: Buddha

Blow me, Elliot Choi

2007-05-15T20:40:00.000+09:00

Today was Teacher's Day, which is apparently kind of important here. It now seems to me that it may be geared more towards female teachers as today I got a rose, some face wash, makeup and some sort of liquid that smells good. It might be perfume. The best thing I got was a laminated ribbon with a lion's face pasted in the middle. That was cute, even though half the kids still don't know how to spell my real name. The girl who gave me the ribbon also wrote me a note, it reads: "To: lion teacher, Hi My name is Judy. Teacher thankful. Teacher thank you." I bet the real teachers, like the ones at the public schools the kids go to in the morning before they go to english, math, science, piano, history, food, animal academies afterwards, get much cooler stuff. Since all the kids that come to school tomorrow will be different from today, I'm hoping for a gift card to KFC or at least a half dozen bottles of soju.

McDonalds breakfast is so good I waited there from 4:30am until 5 Sunday morning just to get the Massive. What was kind of gross was that Jacob, the guy I met at Woodstock last month and have been hanging out with a bit now, ordered a Big Mac meal at 4:30, finished that in about 3 minutes and then waited until 5 with me to get a breakfast meal. I pleaded with the cashier to not serve him, but quickly realized I was not speaking Korean.

Saturday night was a giant white party in Hyewha, probably the coolest place near my apartment without going all the way downtown, I think even the owners of the place were white and I'm not even sure if that is legal. I thought you had to be either an English teacher or military in order to live here. But anyway, great advertising on their part, a ton of people there. The Koreans looked out of place and that's just a tough thing to pull off in Seoul. They also gave out a ton of free shooters, which couldn't have contained a lot of alcohol, otherwise I wouldn't be typing this right now. It was weird that it seems like Bender and I have now been here much longer than most of the other white people we talk to. One guy just got here two weeks ago, I have no idea what they could feel like. It's one of the reasons I'm glad I keep this thing somewhat updated, otherwise this whole experience will just be a blur within a week of going home.

Sunday went to Seoul Forest, which is basically Seoul's attempt to create Central Park in Korea. But really it was just a lot of trees, a lot of walking and a ton of deer. There's seriously a huge area roped off with just deer in it. Deer might be the lamest animal ever. Fuckin deer eat the plants in front of my house, people do not want to go some place to watch a stupid deer roam around. There was a giant fountain there that had a bunch of kids running around in it and that was awesome, but as you can see from above, my picture isn't as good as the one on Bender's blog. That's cause we only stayed there for 2 minutes, then Bender promised, he did, that we could come back later. But he broke my heart. When we got back around 7:30, the kids were gone, the fountain was off, and Bender was still a bitch.

The Korean teachers have started to play this Korean crap music on the radio in the office. It's really loud and really crappy. No one has even gone near the radio in the last seven months and now suddenly, I'm working in a Korean dance club. It's tough to watch Heroes with that garbage playing in the background, but since I'm watching TV and the Koreans are preparing for classes tomorrow, I don't feel I have the right to complain. Next week we get off on Thursday for Buddha's Birthday and apparently I need to go to a picnic with my coworkers that morning. I honestly cannot imagine anything more awful than a picnic with my coworkers. Everyone once in a while I'll think oh ok, they're not that bad, but within five seconds it's back to wow how have you people not killed yourselves yet? Plus God I wish they were American.

Interesting note: 31 percent of Americans are obese compared to 3 percent of Koreans. Those are also the same percentages of people I can hold a conversation with without wanting to slit my throat.

Young Korean Moms Are Hot!

2007-05-10T21:25:00.000+09:00

I’m writing this on Word as the Internet is down the office, which always leads me into a minor bout of depression. I tend to just pace around the office and down the hall for hours until by the grace of God, it’s back up. I’ve had to wear “nice” clothes the past couple of days because a bunch of the parents have been here. Which just meant I threw on an old wrinkled long sleeved shirt and the same pants I’ve been wearing for three years. While I guess it’s kind of nice that all the parents are just herded into the biggest classroom and shown a bunch of gay presentations, but still, I would like to get SOME attention from them. But all I get is the shy awkward oh, there’s a foreigner glance that you get from everyone here. Although if their kids give them the recap of what goes on each day in my classes, then maybe I wouldn’t want to talk them so much.

For example, testing has been going on in class the past couple of days so I just pop in a tape and relax, which I’ve been doing with a copy of Rolling Stone. Well, one class finished their text and start going through the magazine and they found some, what may be considered, inappropriate pictures for 10 year old. Then they wrote all over the board “Ryan likes Showy!” which apparently means half-naked girls and “Ryan’s eyes are bad!” And that is accurate, I definitely do like half-naked girls. And actually my eyes are burning right now, so that is kind of bad. The pictures they saw were just advertisements and the famous one of Jane Fonda covering up her body with her hands. But then at the end of the class, there was one ad that had a bunch of covers of old Rolling Stones hanging up on the wall, and of course almost all of them have naked girls on them, including one of Janet Jackson where there are two hands grabbing her boobs from behind. Those hands not belonging to her. I just told the kids that the man was helping the girl cover up her private areas after a hurricane had blown away all of her clothes. Yeah so hopefully the kids didn’t go home tonight and tell their parents “Ryan Teacher was looking at naked girls during class today.”

Koreans are absolutely the most disgusting race on the face of the Earth. Today I’m walking to work, going stride for stride, next to this guy. He knows I’m there, hell I’ve been within 5 feet of him for a good 15 minutes. I drop a couple of feet behind and then he just spits directly in front of me. I had thought we were cool, you know, in the sense that we were both humans and we acknowledged each others existence on this planet. But I guess I was just too white and blended in with the sun. I can’t even write about this next thing without getting sick. I was packing up my dirty clothes to head down to the basement to do my laundry last week when I hear the distinct sound of a guy outside my door hacking up something and spitting on the floor. Despite this, probably because putting socks on would have required me to reach down to my feet, I didn’t. So I went out, saw the nice surprise the guy left in front of my door, maneuvered around it and got the clothes in the wash. On the way back up, I wasn’t so careful. And I knew the second my foot hit the ground. And whatever was in that guy’s throat did not come off of my foot easily. It was stuck there like it had become attached to my foot. Eventually I just took a shower and got the damn thing. So in conclusion, Koreans, what the hell is wrong with you? It’s one thing to spit stuff out on the street, hell, I do that now, it’s kind of a necessity living in a place where you the sun 3 days of the year, but inside a building on the floor where you know people walk all the time? You sick, sick people. Then there’s the hot girls you see at bars, all dolled up and covered in their favorite skin whitening creams. You look over and there’s some slime hanging out of their mouths.

Speaking of girls, the one I had hung out with a couple times texted me at 1am last week asking me to come to some bar, I was tired though. But I said I would do something that weekend. However, when I said that, she probably did not think I meant go out and get trashed with Bender and Jacob and then text her at 5am "Cock. Penis. Balls." So, she's done.

I read something in the New York Times the other day that said older people tend to be more emotionally balanced than younger people. Like at any point during the day someone who is 60 tends to be pretty happy with a little bit of sadness mixed in. But for people in their 20s, it's hit or miss. They could be ready to stab themselves at 9am and then by 8pm, they think life is perfect. And that's definitely where I am right now about pretty much everything. Everything is love/hate and it alternates about 10 times a day. I'm definitely a much more positive person since graduating 3 years ago and my appreciate for life in general has increased 10 fold, but damn it, sometimes I really wish I was 60. It seems like such a calm and peaceful life.

Ah Internet just clicked back up and I'm about 5 hours behind on checking the news at every possible news site. But a quick are you kidding me, during the Republican primary debate, only two of the candidates raised their hands when asked if they believed in evolution. How is that even possible in 2007? From the Democrat perspective though, you gotta love how it's shaping up, they already have a leg up since even Republicans consider Bush a cancer at this point. And if by some miracle we catch Osama on the day before the election, it seems the Republican elected could very well be McCain or Guiliani and compared to Bush, those two guys are waaay to the left socially. Hell, I'm pretty sure Guiliani has performed some abortions himself.

Happy Mother's Day! (not including Korean mothers)

The Three Most Important Things in the World: Rice, Ramen, Soju (Xanax)

2007-05-03T21:44:00.000+09:00

It's pretty amazing how much children here know about current events. In that respect, they make American kids collectively look like Sean Penn's character from I am Sam. And that guy was seriously retarded. For some reason, people here, including the children, really care about anything and everything involving Korea. I argued with seven 5th graders the merits of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) signed between the US and Korea last month. Of course, their argument was just "Korea is great, blah blah, we love rice" but still I bet less than 5 percent of Americans even know an FTA was signed. I was trying to argue that the FTA was a good thing but it was frustrating because I couldn't use dumbed down English to explain price competition and the power of the free market to them. One kid said Korea was sick of taking orders from America to which I turned to the old standby, you know, the one where South Korea wouldn't exist today if America hadn't saved its ass 60 years ago. By the end of the class, they all told me to go back to America and then they ran into the hall chanting "FTA Bad!"

For some reason I'm tired all the time during the week now. I've been tired my entire life, but just more so than usual, I'm getting a solid 8 hours of sleep a night and playing more than enough online poker, I don't understand it. At work, I'm in some kind of foggy haze, which I can only be snapped out of when a Korean teacher waves something in my face to get my attention. But I guess that's how most jobs work. You get there, turn your brain off for 8 hours and hope you don't kill yourself before the final bell rings.

Next week I'm back to teaching 31 classes a week, a nice jump from the quite enjoyable 26 I've been on for the past month. The school found a new foreign teacher to replace David at the end of the month. On that note, Bender turned me on (might be the wrong word choice) to the best tasting ramen in the world. The stuff is 80 cents but it tastes like gold. If gold tasted really really good. The only problem I can see developing is that I now eat it for no reason, meaning when I'm not even close to being hungry. I guess the real danger will start when I begin puking up noodles in my sleep.

Since Bender and I are apparently engaged in some kind of creepy "Lets See How Many Pictures We Can Post of Each Other on Our Blogs", here's another point for me. Short video, basically me singing much louder than the kids, which is kind of pathetic. But hey, some of these songs are really catchy. I agreed to meet up with the Korean girl who interviewed me for her homework on Sunday, mainly just cause I feel bad because she bought me a bunch of stuff and now I just kind of ignore her when I go to the restaurant she works at, which I'll probably do again tonight. But anyway, she said she's planning a trip with her friends, I have no idea what that means, but it sounds dangerous and possibly terrible. And if I miss out on a Spiderman movie loveseat with Bender to deal with terrible Korean girls, well, that would just be the saddest day of my life.

My bathroom is the dirtiest place in Korea

2007-04-30T00:11:00.000+09:00

Up top is a video of students teaching me Korean in class. That seems to be their favorite game to play, although I don't think their parents would be thrilled with the idea. I gave a girl in the class the camera and she had decent camera control. As is pretty obvious the boys in the class want no part of the video and are basically all lame. The one girl who keeps saying 'Teacher you very kind and nice' she's just says that sort of stuff all the time and really I appreciate it even if she had no idea what she is talking about. The fat girl in the class, though, she kills me. Every 3 minutes, she says "Teacher!" then I say what, and she goes "No!" I would throw her out the window if I was strong enough to pick her up.

Now let me get out in front of this story before Bender distorts things. Friday was club night so we went through the usual 3 bottles of soju. Later on in the night, as we were walking to another club, a white guy handed Bender a bottle of rice wine. It was a huge bottle full of a milky-like white liquid. So it was only natural and actually completely unavoidable that I would take said bottle and hold it near a certain part of my body and then, well, make the rice wine shoot all over the place. Around the 50th time I did this, I aimed it right at Bender, who was sitting down next to a Korean guy. (The picture above is Bender offering a Korean girl some of the rice wine, she declined). Anyway, I shot the white stuff all over Bender's pants and actually I think the Korean guy got it even worse. Bender then told the Korean guy to kick my ass, and he probably should have, but he just got up fast and walked away. I had to wash Bender's pants yesterday and the stains actually came out, although that's probably not a good thing because now Bender will keep wearing them even though they have a huge hole in the ass part, which Bender thinks is OK.

Last night Bender got sick after we ate about 6 pounds of rice at this restaurant we go to every weekend. So I got to drink his gin and tonic and also the beer he won after he beat the bartender at darts. Once he left, Koreans started talking to me, which always follows the same pattern. A white guy sits next to Koreans at a bar, they will be very skeptical at first and if they speak English, they will give away no clues. But once they're deep into the $200 bottle of JD in front of them, they will start talking to you and from there, you are best friends. But there's always one or two people in their group who can't speak English so they will get pissed that their friends are now talking to the white guy, but hey, they should learn English. This is Korea. I was talking to one girl for a while who had a Canadian accent because she lived there for a few years and that was amusing for me. After we left the bar, that girl threw up all over the place, and that was not hot. The guy in that group kept trying to get me to come to a nightclub with him, but that wasn't going to happen.

We went to another soccer game today and Seoul lost 3-0. So that makes it three straight games where Seoul hasn't scored a damn goal. I'm pretty sure a team of 12-year-old girls with downs syndrome could beat Seoul at this point. Yeah I took a ton of pictures at school on Friday obviously. I still have five months left here, but I feel like I don't have enough photos of the students, who really are the reason I love it here. They are all still young enough to not have become an insular closed-off to foreigners hardcore Korean. You can really connect with the students, but every Korean over the age of 20, forget it. You can talk to them, most of them are friendly, but they all keep you at distance, which is sad, but it does make the kids that much better to be around everyday.

Golden Showers Bring May Flowers

2007-04-23T17:53:00.000+09:00

My last blog was published in the Korea Times last week, which was a bit embarrassing in the sense that it wasn't really well-thought/I wrote it in 10 minutes. But I did send it in knowing it would make it into print simply because a foreigner wrote that Koreans weren't to blame for anything. So while I kind of wish I had done a better job with it, it's been great for my popularity at work. When the Korean teachers saw it, they went nuts and within a couple hours, the article was laminated and hanging near the entrance of the school. Really, I'm a whore for anything that will allow me to keep doing absolutely nothing at work besides watching TV and if it takes sending crap into a Korean newspaper, I am so not above that.

I'm not sure what's up with this Asian dust thing. I was expecting to walk outside and breathe in lots of delicious dust and it's just not happened. Apparently it's been really bad a few days this month, as in the Koreans won't leave their homes except to go outside to spit on each other. But I'm thinking white people can't see it or maybe are just not affected by it. My eyes have been bothering me more lately so maybe that is dust-related but more likely, it's because I was supposed to return to the eye doctor 2 months ago.

I was really going to make a solid effort to save some money here, but my spending trends are a bit out of control at this point. During the week, I usually only spend about $10 a day but I'm raping myself on Friday and Saturday nights. I am also eating terribly. KFC twice this weekend, McDonalds once, some ice cream, it all leads to me looking forward to getting back to work on Monday just so my body can get a four day break from awfulness.

At Cargo Friday night, one of the smaller dance clubs we go to a lot in Hongdae, I somehow ended up on the middle of the dance floor holding hands with a white guy and dancing around in a circle. Actually, the bartender was really hot so I said to Bender watch this, intending to fake grind with her I guess, which instead quickly turned into gay dancing event #485 for me. But to be fair to my remaining heterosexuality, the guy did grab my hand and kind of have his way with me. Later in the night I was holding hands with this guy again but this time he had a Korean girl on the other side of him, so um we were all jumping. But eventually the girl escaped so I had to break the sad news to the guy that I couldn't be doing that with just him. It was a tragic moment in gay history.

We went to a baseball game yesterday and while it was a cool experience, the action was painfully slow. We were there for two hours and during that time, 3 and a half innings completed. There was one black guy on one of the teams, which was enjoyable for me, because it means Koreans are being forced to share a locker room with a black guy. And really, that's gotta be a huge blow for the self esteem. We also sat in the retard section at the game, there was one guy in front of us decked out in a uniform, apparently thinking he was about to sub into the game. Two old guys next to us were a bit heavy on the male bonding, ie one guy had his arm around the other guy and his hand in his friend's coat pocket. Just hot. Soccer games are a lot more exciting, for me anyway, so next Sunday that'll be back on the agenda.

Alright, a 10 year old girl is trying to shove gross Korean food in my mouth and that cannot be allowed.

A Culture of Death

2007-04-19T12:59:00.000+09:00

The Korean student who shot dead 32 people on Monday spent his first eight years in an apartment about five minutes away from my current home. But where he was from makes absolutely no difference, it's just another excuse, another place to throw some misplaced blame. Blame the parents, blame the school, blame the teachers, blame the friends, blame whoever or whatever you want, and when you're finished, step back and take a look at the real problem. Guns are destroying America, stealing life, ruining families and all for what? So a bunch of middle-aged guys from Missouri with insecure grips on their manhood can stockpile killing machines in their closet?

Any death is tragic, whether a plane full of people crashes or a 90-year-old dies in their sleep, but what's so much more than tragic, what is damn near infuriating is when something so preventable occurs because of an entire country's fascination with piece of metal than can destroy a life in a split second.

Last year in England, where handguns are illegal, there were 56 homicides. In Richmond, Virginia, where I spent six years of my life, there were 81 shooting deaths. The population of England is 61 million. Richmond, 200,000. Do the math. More than 30,000 Americans wiped off this Earth every year by gunfire.

OK, so what? I can own a gun responsibly and I need it to protect my family. Hell, I'm an American, the right to bear arms is my constitutional right. It's what the founding fathers wanted and be damned if I'm going to give up any sort of freedom. It's a view that runs deep into the heart of American culture, but it's misguided to the point of lunacy.

The only reason people think they need a gun is because there are so many others out there with one, hell, if they have one, I better even-up the playing field. It's a terrible cycle. You buy a gun because you're afraid of what a bullet might someday do to you. It's so easy to get a gun in America that they might as well sell them in vending machines at the local supermarket.

In Virginia, if you have a pulse and driver's license, you can walk into almost any Wal-Mart and walk out a half hour later with a gun. A quick background check is about as much scrutiny as you'll get. Just had a big fight with your girlfriend, you're jacked up on coke, that bitch is going to get it. Well, hey, why not just give it to her now? You could be locked and loaded and back at her front door in an hour.

The right to free press, free speech, free assembly, those are freedoms I cherish, they are what make America such a great place. The right to carry a gun, that's not a freedom. Freedoms inspire people, freedoms bring people together, freedoms can spread joy. What they don't and what they shouldn't do is rip a country apart and spill blood all over its land. No thanks, I don't want that kind of freedom.

Sure, the Virginia Tech shooter, without access to guns, could very well have killed, anyway. There is nothing that is able to stop darkness and evil. So he snaps and grabs a knife, walks into that classroom, kills a student. Maybe even the professor. Then he's on the ground. There's only so much damage other weapons can do before people have time to react and stomp it out. A gun takes the flick of the finger and it can mow down a crowd in seconds. There's no excuse for allowing access to that kind of devastating power. Yes, someone made the decision to pull that trigger, but why did it have to be so easy to get to that point?

A lot of politicians will say now isn't the right time to pursue stricter guns laws, it reeks of political opportunism, turning a national tragedy into a circus. But America easily forgets. A couple weeks from now, what happened at Virginia Tech will fall off the front page, replaced by the next big story. If there was ever a time for a country to look inward, to really consider what it holds most dear, it is now. What is worth more? A gun or 30,000 lives?

Korea needs more Nappy-Headed Hos

2007-04-16T17:33:00.000+09:00

I think part of my job description should have included dealing with Korean girls who think that because I'm a young guy, I will instinctively fall in love with them so they can have their own private native English whore to hangout with all the time. I went out to dinner with two such girls last night, although I think just one them actually has a desire to learn. After texting me for two weeks, I had to give in and engage in a slightly heterosexual activity. This was the same girl who interviewed me a few weeks ago after I finished eating at the pasta place. Apparently my answers were not good enough, she said her friend's foreign guy gave longer answers. Well, that guy can blow me.

But anyway, the dinner was fine mainly because she was paying for it and she had already given me two pairs of socks when we first met up. Koreans think socks are the best gift in the world. But then we had to do the interview and I promised to try my best to speak for a long time. First question is What is your name and age? I respond accordingly and then just awkwardness. She started at me like she wanted me to elaborate on my freakin name. The awkwardness just continued as she'd ask a question and then shake her head like I gave the wrong answer. More likely, though, she just had no idea what I was talking about. I said New York City and Seoul were similar in that they are both big cities that also have a lot of stuff going on. She shook her head. Because she's been NYC before, right. After six minutes of torture, the camera came out. She made me put my arm around her. She had also asked me earlier "What kind of girl you like?" I said "Funny girls." So of course, after 40 pictures, she says OK lets do a funny picture. Then I took a few more pictures with her friend. I'm heading into dangerous territory here as she already said she'll come with me the next time I get my haircut so she can translate. After dinner as we went in different directions in the subway, I gave her this weird half high five half handshake. I'm not saying this girl is terrible, she's seems nice enough, but she's going to school to major in English, she wants to hangout with me for one reason only. And actually, if she was hot, I'd also want to hangout with her for a different one reason, but it's just always uncomfortable for me to deal with them.

We got on a random bus on Saturday afternoon because there's nothing great to see in this city so if you hop a bus, chances are you'll end up in a place that looks strikingly similar to every other area. Of course, somehow we ended up at this huge national park, but luckily it was getting dark, so I didn't have to fake illness or death if Bender had decided he wanted to go up any sort of steep incline. We went to another soccer game on Sunday, got there a little late because Bender refused to wake up on time, but hey, that's always an issue with him. Damn game ended 0-0. That should just not be allowed in sort of sport. They kick that freakin ball around for 90 minutes willing I have to deal with some guy waving giant nasty squid in front of me and no one can kick the stupid ball into the net, it's actually very frustrating to watch soccer. But it's a guarantee we'll be back at the next home game, because still we haven't seen a goal from Seoul and that's probably the exciting part of the game. Maybe.

We're in the process of planning an early July trip to Thailand, which if it actually does happen, is almost guaranteed to be the best week of my life just behind senior year Beach Week. That'll likely be the last trip out of Korea before I go home, which is fine, because I think I've seen enough, at least for someone as terrible and lazy as myself. If anyone has money to burn and wants to share a twin bed with two other guys, please come to Thailand with us.

I think I've been trading off excitement for comfort as the months have gone by here. Seoul isn't new or fresh any more. Dealing with crazy Koreans is just normal everyday fare at this point. But I feel at home here now, so much so that I have a pretty warped sense of America now. I know I lived there for the first 24 years of my life, but all of that seems so far in the past now. I've still got 6 more months here, but that day I get off that plane in New York next October, I picture it everyday. Not in the sense that I'm dying to get out of here, far from it, but I just know it's going to be a surreal experience. I'm happy here, but once you're away from America for long enough, you begin to see it for it really is, the best damn country in the world.

Soccer Balls and Soju

2007-04-09T16:34:00.000+09:00

I'm beginning to get the sense that my school could close down any day. Since I got here, we've gone from 6 Korean teachers and 3 foreigners to 4 Koreans and 2 foreigners. It doesn't seem like we've lost many students so maybe the bosses are just trying to squeeze out more money for themselves, but I still always get worried whenever the Korean teachers have meetings with each other. Like today, the head teacher handed a piece of paper to the other three and then they sat there mostly in silence for like a half hour, with one of them chiming in with something every 5 minutes. I thought that was it. I should pack my bags now. There's also a lot of books being taken off the shelves in the office for some reason. I'm probably just paranoid, the big test will be whether or not I get my paycheck tomorrow. Really, I just wish I could be kept in the loop a little more. The Koreans don't seem to realize or they just don't care that in no way do I feel a part of the social atmosphere at work. They make no effort to inform me of anything going on or really ever speak English besides during class. In the end, I guess I didn't come here just to make friends with a bunch of terrible Korean woman, but still, it'd be nice to have a clue sometimes.

We went to a Korean league soccer game yesterday at World Cup Stadium. It was rough getting there because of the early start, 3pm, but Bender forced me out of bed. It was pretty awesome, though, weather was great and by the end of the game, I was feeling almost as maniacal as the 60,000 Koreans in the stands. Sadly, Seoul didn't score a goal and lost 1-0 so I think we missed out on the place really going crazy. But it was 8 bucks for a ticket, so we'll probably be going again. Also, every kid under the age of 14 at the stadium brought a soccer ball to the game, so during halftime, it was a madhouse outside by the concession stands. Balls were flying everywhere. One of them, in fact, almost eliminated any chance for me to have children. The second the horn rang to signal the end of intermission, every one of the Korean kids sprinted up the stairs yelling "Second Half!" It was quite a scene.

Friday night was solid, pounded soju, took pictures with another thing that looks like a penis and then went to bar/club place where two Korean girls talked to us for a while so they could practice English. I offended a big white guy by doing something. That white guy left but his arab friend stayed. I pretended to hump the chair where the white guy had been sitting, arab guy was not happy. These things happen. Saturday continued the glorious routine of sleeping until 2pm. I (definitely not Bender) popped the Saturday celebration xanax, which every time, means I am going to sleep from about 7pm - 10pm. But man, what a glorious sleep that is. Soju war and finally ended up at the Show Bar, which is the best bar in soju. It's new but it's owned by four guys who all have giant pictures of themselves painted up on the wall. One guy, Terry, has been absolutely tanked both times we've been in there. I'm pretty sure the other guys don't even let Terry work behind the bar. We thought this guy Joy was the sober one who actually made sure Terry didn't set the place on fire but something happened. Joy was fine, but then he went outside for 10 minutes, and when he came back, he couldn't stand up. Basically, the place is great. Another guy Tops gave us free nachos and then I beat his and Bender's ass in darts. I'm much better than Bender now. Hopefully we remain the only white guys who go to this place, because if the slime that usually hangs out at DragonBar moves down the strip a little bit, it could ruin everything. Oh, I also forgot to bring out my key card to get back into my apartment building on Saturday night. So we sat outside the door for a good half hour eating McDonalds (see picture) and I think Bender also kicked me a bunch of times.

Asian Dust gets me so HOT

2007-04-03T15:52:00.000+09:00

Pretty weak on the blog lately. I think I've hit the 6 month Korean wall. I feel like I've already been here for three years and even though I like it here, making it through another 6 months could be a struggle. I miss being able to speak English at a normal speed. I'm going to have the speaking ability of a 5 year old when I get home because I have to dumb everything down, not only for the kids, but for everyone in this country. For example, people don't use or just don't understand how to use the word "a lot". Teacher, don't give us many homework. I ate many many food last night. I love many computer many many games. Now I mix that stuff all the time and every time I do, I want to kill a Korean.

Bender isn't going to have convince me to keep the horse head at home this weekend. There were no gross girls or flashing last weekend, more like just 10 korean guys and a lot of water. When I did break out the horse head at the chinese restaurant in hongdae Friday night, I got a little excited and Bender recorded what may just be the worst video of all time. It's even too inappropriate to post on my blog. Let's just say I repeat "I'm going to some bitches tonight" over and over. I don't remember saying any of that so I cannot be held liable for those comments, but I am an ass. It was club night so we could go to anyone of like 15 clubs. Naturally, we went to the same two we go to everytime. The horse danced a lot at the first one. Um, the other one, was wet. A bunch of white people warned us that'd we'd get soaked, but at the time, I don't think I knew what water was. We walked right into the ocean. Within 30 seconds of getting into this portion of the club, the three of us (a former Korean teacher from my school was there) were wetter than Bender's vagina. We then continued to get soaked from the overhead drenching machines every couple of minutes. I used the horse head as a makeshift umbrella but all that did was attract fat Korean guys who took advantage of my lack of visibility and got a bit frisky. I think I danced with a bunch of people, each time I hoped it might be a girl, but then I'd take the head off, and I'd be surrounded by a pack of Korean college boys. The cab ride home that night was the most uncomfortable experience of my life.

I woke up at 3pm on Saturday. Bender woke up at 11am. I don't know what is wrong with him. That night checked out a few new places, got fed by a Korean guy, ordered a Big Mac at 5am and that was that. It was a good weekend, and exciting things clearly still do happen here pretty much everyday, but I could just as easily hop on a plane and go someplace else. I'll stay because I do usually enjoy the job, I can write this blog at work, and mainly, I can save a lot of money. Plus if I went home, I'd be high and surrounded by a pile of Gordita wrappers in about 30 minutes. And that would be awesome. Hmm....

Disrespecting The Penis at City Hall

2007-03-28T20:54:00.000+09:00

Korean girls love Horses- some too much

2007-03-27T00:16:00.000+09:00

This weekend was one of the more, um, interesting ones. Friday was pretty weak since we drank too much soju at two restaurants, completely forgetting that normal people go out to bars on weekends. But Saturday made up for it. After a riveting game of soju war, we headed down to Itaewon. I decided to bring the horse head along because the horse head can only create good experiences. The most amazing part was watching the people on the subway react to it. Most of the time Koreans look absolutely pissed on the subway, but that horse head brought so much joy and laughter to our car. It was truly a community service. One girl jumped back about three feet when she saw Bender sitting there with it on.

Although I wanted Bender to keep the thing on all night since it's much funner watch the horse head instead of wearing it, we got to this barbeque thing outside a bar in Itaewon. My coworker David had invited us, but it turned out to just be like 5 people standing around talking about prostitutes. Hung out inside for a while until David decided he wanted to fight me outside. I decided that was a bad idea, the owner asked me if I knew David and I was like, "yeah, I see him everyday." David almost got tossed, we hung around for 20 minutes and then got the hell out of there.We went to Spy Basement, where all the models in Seoul plus me and Bender hangout. I've never seen more attractive girls in one place, ever. So clearly the only to do in that situation is to toss on the horse head, dance around like an idiot and hope one of the girls is into bestiality. Just to be clear, you can not see a thing out of the head and it's hot as hell, but as it has before, it took ahold of me. I think I did about two different hour long stints with the head on. Everyone loved me and Bender hated that I was getting all the attention. Bender says that at one point a hot Korean girl was dancing with me, but I had no way of knowing that, plus there was no way I was taking the head off.Well, the end of the night gets a little bit dirty. I had the head on, of course and I feel somebody grinding up against my leg. Alright, fine, I'm just hoping it's a girl. She moves behind me. And let's just say she reached around me and grabbed something. Something that a random girl probably shouldn't grab of a guy wearing a horse head. I left the head on again, but the horse just wasn't that innocent anymore. When I did finally take the head off, Bender, being the douche he is, had to point out the Korean girl who molested me. And to no one's surprise, she was not one of the hot girls at the place. She acted and looked like someone who would commit female rape. It was around 5am at this point, so the place had cleared out and we were really just watching this beast run around the club with no shoes on. She kept coming over to try to sit on our laps and who knows what the hell she was doing, but there is one memory, actually two, that have forever ruined the concept of boobs for me. I didn't speak a word to her all night and I was just staring at her in "you are seriously messed up" way, but I guess she thought I was interested. She stood like a foot in front of me, lifted up her shirt, and stole all of the good thoughts I've ever had about girls.

Bender and I were stunned, and again, she may have taken these looks of amazement to mean that we were digging her show, because a couple minutes later, she did the exact same thing again. I've had nightmares about that nipple for a couple nights now. Oh, at one point, she also leaned over to me, made some awful makeout face, and almost knocked me off my chair. It was mighty tough, but I resisted, mainly because I would have made Bender castrate me if any bodily fluids were exchanged with that girl. It was a sketchy night, but also pretty amazing. I'm just glad I didn't drink so much that the whole night would just be a hazy fog (see- every other Friday and Saturday night).

I got a small raise at work, basically by threatening to quit. They also agreed to give me a week off in July, which will hopefully be spent on the beach in Thailand. So I got what I want and it should all be smooth sailing for here on out. The biggest thing I need to decide in my life right now is whether or not to bring the horse head out to Club Night on Friday. Sometimes it is really tough being me.

Photos- from top- me and douche, me and Bender and City Hall downtown.

Best Video Ever Made

2007-03-25T06:30:00.001+09:00

Video Blog: Part I'm Gay

2007-03-23T02:20:00.000+09:00

Don't Even Watch This One

2007-03-22T14:43:00.000+09:00

An awful club night video from last weekend. I'm only posting it here so I can delete it from my computer. It could possibly entertain me in 10 years.

Britney Spears No Panties Pics Inside!

2007-03-19T14:07:00.000+09:00

Sorry, I need that title for google search related reasons. It's important.

Somehow I managed to not go to KFC at all last week, and really, I'm a bit disappointed in myself for that. I've made it a goal to get in there at least twice this week. It's been warmer here lately, it's basically in the 50s everyday now, which is warm enough for me to wear short sleeved shirts. This always manages to make the kids go nuts, who like to point and say "summer clothes, summer clothes". I'm OK with that.

A former college buddy, Damian, was in town last week visiting Seoul, so I met up with him in Hongdae Friday night, along with Cathy and an old teacher from my school. Went to one of the usual clubs, which is always fun, but somehow I banged up my knee pretty bad. The details are quite sketchy as to how that may have occurred. Got home around 530, played some poker, ate McDonalds, drunk-dialed my Dad and fell asleep at 8am. I guess that all sounds pretty terrible, but it's what I do every weekend so I've come to accept it all as somewhat normal.

Bender almost raped me on Saturday night. He took one shot of soju around 11pm, at a bar in Sinchon, and he was finished for the night. Granted, he was sick all week, but if he had went home at that point, I would have either been stuck downtown until 6am or had to pay more than $20 for a cab ride home. Thankfully Bender toughed it out, though I had to finish the bottle of soju on my own, which wasn't that bad. We were supposed to only go to new places, since we've fallen into a habit of going to all the same joints over and over, but of course, we concluded the night at one of the old standbys. The place above the white bar, where Bender likes to make obscure music requests and a ton of white people come to sort of pre-game for dancing with dirty Russian whores later in the night downstairs. Some Korean-American douche molested us at one point. He was from the north shore of Long Island and he kept using all these douchey words like "Money!" We did join him and the fellow whiteys for a car bomb right before they all left. Afterwards one guy asked Bender and I to pay $8 each, to which we just ignored him until he forgot. I think we chipped in $1 for the tab. Maybe we should have paid though cause a few minutes after they left, the fat bartender, who I also said "I love you" to during the course of the night", ran outside to chase them, assumedly to collect the money Bender and I did not pay. Poor douches.

I forced Bender to go to TGIFridays for lunch yesterday. We had successful managed to stay away from overpriced chain restaurants for a long time, but sometimes, after eating so much freakin lettuce and rice, you need a big juicy chunk of meat in your mouth. So I shelled out $20 for a burger and a coke and then felt sick the rest of the day because I was determined to eat everything on the table.

I'm meeting up with ex-boyfriend is gay girl after work. I can only imagine I will find another way to make her scream. Hmm that's doesn't sound right, but it wasn't meant to be dirty. I swear. I returned her call earlier tonight and was just about to tell her I was tired tonight and would rather hangout later in the week, but as I've already come to realize with this girl, you don't get in a word on the phone. Combine that with the fact that she probably only understands about 70 percent of the stuff I say, I pretty much get my ass kicked on the phone. So even though I'm not fully recovered from the weekend, I will proceed to tear apart my body further. I am an idiot.

Photos- Damian and Cathy at the Club and Bender ready to request a song at Upstairs White Bar.

Fat Girl Gets Water in NK

2007-03-14T23:28:00.001+09:00

Hiking my face off

2007-03-13T14:26:00.000+09:00

Alright, I'm sober now so I'll try to give a rundown of North Korea. We left Seoul on a bus around midnight on Friday and we didn't get to our hotel until 10am. So that was pretty terrible. At one point, we sat in a parking lot for 2 hours. Going through North Korean immigration was also a joke. There was no building. It looked like a giant catering tent. Bender and I were the last ones through after about another 2 hours and after 3 million South Koreans had already gone through. The hotel was like any Western hotel and they even had CNN, which was a bit surprising. Driving through the DMZ and then along a heavily guarded road with soldiers every hundred feet is a bit depressing. Because you can see outside the fences the poverty the people there live in, but yet you're on a bus driving to the one place in the country that looks anything like a modern civilization.

I didn't sleep at all on the bus and then we didn't eat breakfast for some reason. So clearly after that, it was the perfect time to climb a freakin mountain. It was cold and snowing and Bender was way ahead of me most of the time. He's a douche. The most pathetic thing was watching all the 70 year old Koreans blow by me. At one point coming down the mountain, a Korean lady with a 5 year old kid strapped on her back literally ran past me. I probably should have thrown myself over a cliff at that moment. Also on the way down, there was one spot that was covered in ice and everyone was going across it really slow. A bunch of people fell. The Korean guy in front of me was so adamant about not falling, he stood there for a minute kicking dirt onto the ice. He finally started moving and he was going along fine until out of nowhere someone slips and slides right through his legs. We both fell down. I thought he was going to kill me. After that hike, we skipped some other events because they sounded terrible and I wanted to take a nap. By the time we woke up and made it out of the hotel room, the lobby wasn't serving beer anymore so we went back to the room and watched a documentary on conflict diamonds. It was fascinating.

Oh, I haven't mentioned the douchebags yet. It makes me angry just thinking about them. There were about 6 or 7 people who were the worst people alive on the trip. Every time something went wrong on the trip, one of them was to blame. On the way there, they drank soju on the back of the bus so we had to stop every half hour for them to go to the bathroom. Then they woke up later on Sunday so we waited on the bus for them. And then, in what almost made my head explode, the biggest douche of them all had an expired South Korean visa when we were trying to get back to Seoul on Sunday. That held us up for another hour. When he finally got on the bus, as I had predicted, his fellow douches in the back, all started clapping. I guess the thing that was weird was no one else on the bus seemed angry. I would have joined in a riot to kick his ass if anyone else showed any kind emotion. Somehow we always ran into the douches wherever we went. Every time we tried to use the elevator, they would all be in there, making terrible jokes. One guy asked us if we wanted to "join the team" as they were "on the prowl for girls." It was nice to get to the invite, but apparently none of these guys had looked at any of the girls on the trip. Let's just say most of them were about as large as a minivan. I'll post a terribly inappropriate video I made of one of them trying to get water from the mountain later.

The hike on Sunday was much better, although we couldn't go all the way to the top because we didn't have spikes on our shoes or something. I wasn't that disappointed. Overall, it was a good experience even though we saw so little of the actual country. The whole hiking thing almost killed me and I don't plan on ever going near a mountain again, but I guess physical exertion is important sometimes.

Bender forgot to mention this in his blog, so let me get out in front of this first. Two minutes after we got into the bus on Friday night, I made a joke referring to how it was all white people on the bus. There was another bus on the trip so I said "It would be funny if there were all Africans on the other bus." Of course, the one black girl on the trip was sitting right next to me. Needless to say, I didn't speak to that girl at all.

On a side note, before I made that terrible video blog last night, I saw Min Hye at a bar. This is the girl I met a few weeks ago and then I was supposed to meet up with her last Sunday to eat nasty Korean pizza, but I was tired and going on a date with Bender. I was actually having a decent conversation with her, but then she mentioned her ex-boyfriend again. That's when I did something just downright cruel. I told her that her ex-boyfriend had made out with a guy. At least that's what I had heard. Man, I've never seen a girl freak out like that. She kept screaming oh my god over and over. Then she would say "No, my boyfriend is not gay." To which I would reply, "Well, maybe just a little gay." I also told her that I thought he was gay when I first met him. So yeah, I'm an asshole. She did tell me to call her as I was walking out of the bar, so maybe she likes torture.

I love Beer

2007-03-13T03:42:00.000+09:00

Here's a portion of a North Korea video blog before the battery died and I just didn't give a shit anymore, maybe I'll post more later....

(Editor's Note- WARNING:This video contains a completely unnecessary amount of profanity. Watch at your own risk.)

North Korea Photos

2007-03-12T22:30:00.000+09:00

Titles Take Too Much Effort

2007-03-05T17:26:00.000+09:00

Mixed response I guess on the video blog thing. It does seem like a cool concept, but I do understand that people generally only want to check my blog at work when there's absolutely nothing else to do. So I'm gonna mix it up. Video sometimes, archaic written posts sometimes.

I'm writing this from a PC room in Gangnam while I wait for Bender to turn up. He's out with a terrible Korean girl. I met a Korean guy who's studying law in China at Woodstock on Wednesday night and then I saw him again last night. So I sat with him and this girl, who apparently dated a former white teacher at my school. I didn't tell her this, but I have met this guy before and he's kind of a tool. I also heard that he hooked up with a dude. Which might make him gay. Anyway, the guy left Woodstock after a while, leaving me to discuss my feelings with the girl. Seriously, she was going on and on about how she really missed her old white boyfriend and how they had planned to get married. It was god awful. And then she would ask me if I ever felt like that. The only thing that I felt at the time was an overwhelming desire to smash my beer glass over her head. I couldn't tell if it was awful because she is Korean or because she is a girl. No offense, girls, but you talk about a whole lot of boring shit that guys have no desire to listen to. So the next time you're with a guy and you're thinking, oh maybe i should tell him about -insert anything that involves feelings, ex-boyfriends, clothes etc.- please make sure the guy is either sleeping or in a coma first. After all that, I'm supposed to call this girl tomorrow so we can meet up and she can buy me some kind of gross Korean pizza with squid and onions on it. I will likely be a dick and send her a text message informing her that I can't make it. (Update- I did blow her off, choosing instead to go out to dinner with Bender. Say what you will about that decision. The girl responded with this text "That's OK. Don't care about it. We have lots of time....Have fun."

Speaking of strange Koreans, this guy Wilson, the guy who promised me the world a few months ago in the form of free plane tickets and other goodies, is back on the radar. At first I thought he just took me for a ride, since I did lay out $25 the first night I hung out with him, because he hadn't received his $10,000 a month allowance from his parents yet. But then I never heard from him again, leading me to send an uncalled text message stating "You owe me money. I will kill you." So when he finally did call me a few weeks later, that was awkward, with me having to reassure him that I did not actually have intentions to kill him. He called me last week, said he was going to New Zealand. First he gave me some girl's phone number, who he said "likes white guys." He called back two minutes later to see if I had called the girl yet. Then he asked me if I wanted him to bring me back a "present, like a necklace or sweater." I swear if this guy wasn't always talking about girls and giving me random phone numbers I'm never going to dial, he'd be the Korean Clay Aiken. I declined his offer for a gift after explaining to him that I thought it would be a little weird, since I've seen the guy twice in my life. He called again today while I was in the cab on the way to work, but I didn't pick up. The guy chews through my prepaid phone minutes. Even when I explained how a prepaid phone works, he started rambling about how he could get me a new phone with 100 hours a month on it. Even if he was serious, I would never go for that because that'd basically mean I'd have no excuse to not spend 100 hours on the phone with him. Eh, he'll probably be my best friend when Bender leaves.

The new semester started Friday. I'm teaching 31 classes a week now, which means I'll get an extra $80 a month in overtime. It's pretty brutal though teaching 7 classes a day, by the 5th class in a row, the kids just aren't getting me at my best and really, my best is still pretty terrible. I spent every class on Friday going over new rules for the semester. I figure if I can just eliminate the yelling and screaming in some of my classes, I won't drop dead before June. Basically if the kids speak korean, don't do their homework, get out of their seat, talk when they don't have the reading ball, or just generally annoy me, they have to write 100x that they will never do that thing again. They will, of course, do that thing again, but at least by making them write during class, it forces them to shutup for a little while.

Went to a club on Saturday night where a Korean guy knocked a drink out of my hand on purpose. I was a bit drunk at the time, but it was still pretty shocking. I don't remember what he was saying to me beforehand, but there was my drink all over the floor. I just sat there thinking about how I would have fought him if it weren't for the whole you go to jail for 10 years if you throw a punch, but a few minutes later, I saw the same guy jawing with a British guy. At that point, I helped the British guy convince an employee to boot the guy. The amazing thing about it is that at this club, there's never a lot of people, but the number of white guys always far outnumbers Korean guys. I guess this guy just wanted to screw with white people for no reason. Maybe he caught a glimpse of a white guy at the urinal and he felt the need to pick a fight to make up for his, um, lack of manhood.

(Photos- All from around Gangnam)

Korean Jenga

2007-03-03T14:14:00.000+09:00

Thank god this isn't the game I lost on like the 3rd try. That was super embarrassing.

Club Night- Bender in Action

2007-02-28T00:04:00.000+09:00

My First Video Blog

2007-02-27T00:02:00.000+09:00

A Terrible Korean Commercial

2007-02-26T02:06:00.000+09:00

2007-02-23T12:15:00.000+09:00

2007-02-23T00:20:00.000+09:00

2007-02-23T00:13:00.000+09:00

Alright, here we go. Let's get the Tokyo blog over with. Bunch of pictures up top followed by a few videos. All of the videos are from the Shibuya intersection, which is the largest in the world, according to my research. I had made a great video, but Bender deleted it. That may be because the video was of him getting dressed after he got out of the shower. I know it would have been a huge hit with my female readers, but he's too bashful.

I stayed up all night on Friday since we had to be for the flight on Saturday at 5am and my usual bedtime on a Friday is closer to 8am. Grabbed a "Massive" at McDonalds, one of three trips for the weekend, and hopped the bus to the airport. We got there a solid 2 hours ahead of the flight, which was fine, because the Seoul airport is absolutely the nicest place in the city. I bought some ice cream from Baskin Robbins at 7:30 am, which disgusted Bender, but it was necessary at the time. Popped a xanax for the flight and went off to la-la land for a few hours.

The Tokyo airport is also way to far away from the center of the city. We were on the train for a good hour and a half to get to our hostel. The first thing you notice about Tokyo is how damn clean the place is. There is no garbage anywhere. In fact, there aren't even trash cans anywhere, which proved to be a pain in the ass at times. The 6-person mixed dorm at the hostel wasn't as eventful as I expected it to be. We met some Indian guy right when we got there and that was basically all the interaction we had with the people in there. Besides on Saturday night when both Bender and I knocked on the door at different times, waking up the same European guy, who didn't seem too pleased. We only had one key, though. Bender had it in his pocket and still knocked on the door so I blame him on that one.

The best night of the trip was Saturday, by far, so it kind of setup the rest of our time there are a bit of a let down. We smuggled five bottles of soju into Japan, and that saved us hundreds. We drank a couple of bottles on Saturday in the hostel lobby, where a Korean guy warned us that we should be eating spicy food while drinking it. Man, he so doesn't know us. We went out with a couple girls who we met in the lobby and then were all over the place with a whole bunch more random peeople. Great time, though the night did end terribly. Bender disappeared and I ended up leaving this club with a Korean girl. She was absolutely the worst Korean I've ever met. How ironic I met her in Tokyo. First we went to Starbucks, I guess she was thirsty. I don't even remember what she was talking about, I just know it was god awful. The subway finally opened back up and I sat there wondering how I got myself into that situation. Once again, I blame Bender. He was probably passed out in an alley somewhere. So me and dumb bitch get to the hostel stop and at this point, it's pouring. Then we got lost. By the time I finally made it back to my room, I was soaked. We saw the Korean girl in the hostel lobby again on Monday and Bender got to see first hand the incredibly moronic behavior I was abused with on Saturday.

Woke up at 2pm on Sunday, popped another xanax, which was probably a mistake. I'm generally a lazy guy, so self-medicating with something that makes me want to sit down a lot and pretend I'm on a cloud, while on vacation, not a smart mix. Hmm, I don't really remember what we did during the day on Sunday. Also pretty terrible. Maybe we walked around somewhere. That night was about as weak as it gets. We went to all of the foreigner hotspots and even paid $20 to go about 2 miles in a cab, and nothing. Just nobody out. The most exciting part of the night was running up and down these outdoor escalators in the wrong direction. We also ate McDonalds twice that night. That captures the night pretty well.

Woke up at 3pm on Monday. Really when it comes down to it, it was a typical weekend for us, just in a different country. The only thing I'd change about it would be Sunday night. I had no problem with not hitting many of the touristy attractions. Yeah, they might be good for taking a few pictures, but otherwise I find most of them a waste of time and money. Just walking around the city Monday night and taking it all in, that's enough for me.

Since we needed to be once again at 5am for the flight back to Seoul on Tuesday and because we didn't have an alarm clock, we stayed up all night on Monday, playing games in the hostel lobby. Bender kicked my ass in chess. I continued to beat him at Life. Around 4am we tried to go to Denny's but they were closed, which was complete B.S. But we ended up going to a better story. Walked into this empty place with bar-like seating. We sat down and the one guy working there just pointed towards the window. We thought he was pointing at the menu hanging on the window, but in fact, it was towards a vending machine. All the foods were listed on it like a bunch of candy bars. We were a bit afraid to use it because we didn't know if soup and crap was going to come flying out of the opening. That didn't happen. We just put money in and got a ticket for what we wanted and then handed it to the guy. Can't say I understand the point of the food vending machine, but I don't think I'm supposed to.

Tuesday may have been the worst day of my life. I knocked myself out on the plane again, but then on the bus from the Seoul airport to work, I woke up in a stupor and got off the bus at the wrong stop. Thankfully the driver knew I was an idiot and directed me to get my ass back on the bus. I actually got to work on time at 2pm, but I kind of wish i had been at least an hour late. I'm not sure what i did with my classes on tuesday. I think I taught for 5 minutes and then gave them a deck of cards and told them to leave me alone. One student asked me why we were stopping so early, I told him it was because his teacher was very tired and he didn't feel like standing anymore. He understood.

A few more observations on the trip: Korean girls remain the hottest of all the slanty-eye races. Bender's mind got corrupted in Japan because he thinks he saw a ton of hot Japanese girls, but I'm pretty sure most of those girls were either just not attractive or Korean girls on vacation. I'll agree with Bender that i think Seoul is better than Tokyo, but at the same time, i know I think that only because I've been here almost five months now and there's just a certain comfort level with Korea now. If I was teaching English in Tokyo or Shanghai and I took a trip to Seoul, I'm sure I would find this place pretty repulsive. Seoul is filthy, the entire city smells bad, people spit all over the place, nobody can walk in a straight line, but the place has got character and that, above all, makes it pretty damn cool to live here. As will be evidenced tomorrow on Club Night when I'll be on top of the world once again. And hopefully not on top of Bender.

2007-02-17T00:34:00.000+09:00

Pre-Tokyo Video. Quite possibly the worst video ever made.

2007-02-15T00:57:00.000+09:00

Here's another video, which is really just one boy hitting me for two minutes because I'm making a video, but there have been requests so here it is. While I'm making the video, the students are doing a Valentine's Day word search. God, I love any sort of Western holiday. I just throw in the holiday plus word search into google and I've just managed to kill a solid 20 minutes of every class for the day. I've been meaning to get a video of Bender and I on the dance floor, but I'm afraid if I actually watch that after the alcohol wears off, it could ruin the whole club thing for me.

The kids gave me a whole bunch of chocolate for Valentine's Day, which was surprising because I thought Koreans just celebrated Peppero Day, or at least that was their version of V-Day. I hate how they they give me chocolate and then immediately ask me for chocolate in return. This isn't a two-way road, kids. You give me stuff. I give you homework. There's a photo below of some of my candy. Actually, one of the chocolate bars is from the owner of the pasta place. I think he's in love with me.

A middle school class had to write a paragraph on what they do during the first hour of each morning. A girl wrote, "Next I put cream on my face so that it will look whiter and cleaner." It makes me wonder if Koreans hate really tan white people. That's what a lot people go for in the US, but here, Koreans would be pretty racist towards tan people. The lighter your skin, the better, the darker, the more they hate you. I think if a Korean ever saw an albino, that would be like seeing Jesus for them.

Headed to Tokyo this weekend, should come home with a bunch of pictures and maybe herpes. I have no idea what the exchange rate is over there, so I might blow through a grand in about three hours. Once Japan and N. Korea are through, I'm gonna make a real effort to cut back on spending for a while. You can't live in South Korea for a year and not save a good chunk. It's not a cool enough place to be here just for the experience. The cash is a major factor. The cash and the gay dance contests, they make it all worthwhile.

2007-02-11T23:40:00.000+09:00

This weekend was probably a bit too overloaded, especially with Tokyo on the horizon next week. But I'm a club addict at this point. Friday it wasn't the plan, but we ended up in this basement club in Itaewon, where all the stereotypes of it being the dirty part of Seoul, were tossed out the window. It was basically full of European models, which really serves no useful purpose for us besides making us want to kill ourselves. At one point Bender asked this girl next to him a question and she said she didn't want to talk to him, goodbye. Then I gave said girl the finger. She returned the favor and probably yelled various obscenities at me. Later on in the night, we entered the dance contest because it seemed like a great idea at the time. Now granted, we were the only duo of guys dancing together, but man, we were definitely the best. Apparently I promised Bender I wouldn't do anything gay on the dance floor, but once it was our turn, almost immediately, I made it a top priority to crawl through his legs. I attemped this and was rejected so many times, I tore up my knees pretty good. The crowd already loved us, and I just know if Bender had spread his legs just a little bit more, that could have really put us over the top. All of the other contestants were pretty awful, as they were not acting nearly gay enough, but somehow we didn't place in the top 3. The Korean lady who was running the contest said we had "lost face." Luckily we made friends with the third place team and they bought us shots with the free drink money they had won. Then I danced with a fat girl and Bender told the models they were beautiful. That was Friday.

Yesterday I woke up at 4pm. Then I took a nap from 6-9:30. Does that make me a terrible person? You make the call. I was about to just chuck the whole day in the trash, but then I remembered just in time that I like alcohol. Bender, Cathy and I met up in Hongdae for a drum and bass show at this club called Cargo. Don't ask me what drum and bass is. All the club music sounds the same to me, and I use all the same retarded spastic dance moves to all of them. Anyway I felt terrible when we first got there, probably because I had just slept for 40 hours and only eaten a ham and cheese sandwich during the day. But I guess I woke up around 3am, at which point I was a number of vodka tonics deep. I was talking to a Korean girl upstairs at this place when her friend comes over to the table and goes "I hate foreigners." She was pretty adamant about this for a while, but then in some kind of drunken twist of fate, those two girls along with two more girls plus a korean guy were all sitting on my apartment couch at 6am. I'm not really sure what the hell they were doing here. Well, let me clear that up. I'm not really sure what ALL of them were doing here. My apartment is a good half hour cab ride from the club and although I tried to explain this to them, they all still got in the cab. Once we got out of the cab, we stopped at Mini-Stop, one Korean girl bought two massive bottles of beer, of which about a half of one would be drank. Got to my place, they smoked about 20 cigarettes each, one girl ate my ramen, they taught me how to say the names of colors in Korea, a girl drew a picture of me, another girl put my thermometer in her ear and then asked me why her temperature was only 92 degrees, the guy remained quiet and creepy the whole time and then around 8am, they went home, thus concluding a pretty twisted night. I woke up at 5pm today, went to KFC, and here I am.

Four months down, eight to go.

Photos- My counter to Bender's smoking photos. And I do wear the same two Lacoste shirts every weekend. I have no problem playing into the rich American stereotype. Plus I'm a giant douchebag.

2007-02-06T14:56:00.000+09:00

I think I have a fever, but I'm still here at work because a fever does not count as a deadly illness and I'm not spilling blood everywhere, the only ways to justify a sick day here. I just went to the store to try to find a thermometer, but when I tried to explain to the guy there what I wanted, he directed to me to an actual thermometer, one just a bit too large to fit in my mouth. Then he said they had a thermometer for your feet, at which point, I just left. Now I've decided I don't even want a thermometer because if I find out I'm at 102 or something, it's just going to make getting through the day even harder. Obviously all of my classes with be playing Uno today while I'm laying on top of a desk somewhere.

Went clubbing again this weekend. I was thinking how I never want to go clubbing in America. Because if you go to a club in America, you're pretty much just a douchebag, but here, if you're white, you are able to go into the club elevated to just a notch above a douchebag since you do have some sort of mystique among the throngs of Koreans. So basically I love it, though at the end of the night on Friday, I remember telling Bender that I wanted to go on stage (after we'd already been kicked off a few times) so we could get thrown out of the club. You know, instead of just walking out of the place, I insisted on being a douchebag. Thankfully we didn't do that. Apparently all American military have now been banned from the club area because one of them decided it would be a good idea to rape an 88-year-old woman last month. I don't know what this means for me, but I guess it means I have less of a shot of getting raped.

Photos- top- on from on the stage at M2, right before I was scolded for taking a picture. other photo is more Koreans dancing. exciting stuff.

2007-02-02T14:32:00.000+09:00

All of the kids write these diaries each week. They usually don't make any sense, especially the ones from the younger kids. It's quite entertaining to read them, although sometimes the kids are just evil. One girl wrote that her mother yelled at her and said "You are not my daughter! Go Away!" I can't imagine that's actually what she said, but then the next diary this girl entitled it "I hate my mother" and wrote that she really wanted to hit her mother. Maybe I should refer that diary to the police, something isn't right there. Today one of the boys in the smarter classes wrote about how a new student joined the class. "A new student came to class today. His name is Tony. He is not very handsome, but he is as smart as me." I showed this to a Korean teacher, expecting her to say something like "Oh, that's horrible, why is he commenting on how a fellow boy in his class looks?" Instead, and I should have known, she said, "Well, it's true." Oh, Korea, you vain vain nation.

As part of a homework assignment, one class had to write about what would be the best gifts for their family members. One boy wrote next to both his mother and father: a gun. Apparently he was just confused, and that's what he wants to get from his parents. That's great. Another kid thinks the best gift for his father would be a necklace. He may just have two dads. A girl said she'd get her father "Lotto". Because "he really wants to be rich." I hope that girl is getting fed at night.

A middle school girl told me the other day "Teacher, I like your sex." She meant to say snacks, but for a second there, I was about to run out of the school screaming, "I didn't do anything!" Short blog, I'm at work and I've got to watch some TV shows online before class. Happy Groundhog Day!

2007-01-30T17:45:00.000+09:00

Bender and I have been playing card games the last few weekends. Basically we play War and then whenever someone loses a war, that person takes a shot of soju. It's a dangerous game (see that weekend Bender went home after I passed out at 6pm), but it saves us a hell of a lot of money. You can't find a bottle of beer in this country for less than 4 bucks, a mixed drink is 7 or 8 so if you happen to have a drinking problem, you can easily drop $100 on a night out. Drink a few bottles of soju and head out and bingo, you just cut your bar tab by 80 percent. I think we spent more money playing darts at the bar Saturday than on beer. I'm pretty sure the bartenders hate that. But I don't care because they are Korean. Oh, last weekend we tried to play slapjack, but that ended quickly after Bender slammed the table so hard that it knocked over any sort of liquid on the table.

We finally found the decent club downtown on Friday night for Club Night. I won't get into the gay details, you can see Bender's blog for that, but let me just say that every white girl in this country is absolutely hideous. It was 3am and we had been drinking all night, but this one white girl who was dancing with us looked like her face had been ran over by a train. One Korean girl, who I think was on ecstasy, kept stroking my face and then a half hour later, she told me she didn't like me because I didn't speak Korean. I punched her in the face. It's amazing how packed these clubs get, when we left at 530am, the entire dance floor was still covered with people.

I've been making my students write a lot lately, as that is the only punishment that I ever feel like using. Every day in this one class, these two twins don't have a pencil. It pisses me off so much. I mean, really, who the hell comes to class without a writing utensil? So I end up giving them one and then they write 100 times, "I will bring a pencil to class." They'll be quiet doing that, but they still find other ways to annoy me. Instead of writing the "l" in pencil 100 times, the one kid just drew a giant line all the way down his paper. At the end of the class, before returning my pencil, he used it to scrape dirt off the bottom of his shoe. In another class, I made a girl write that she wouldn't cheat in class after she stole the teacher's manual during the break time. I told her to write and then get the paper signed by her parents, but at the end of the class she crumbled up the paper and threw it at me. I told her I was going to have a Korean teacher call her parents, and then she said, "If you do that, I will quit Topia." Now I'm her little bitch because I never actually get their parents on the phone, because, well, that would require extra effort that I'm not really into.

We do these tongue twisters with every student at the school once a week. Something gay like "A proper cup of coffee from a proper copper coffee pot." Well this week one of the words in it is the name Willie. I explained to the kids in one class that this was just a name so there was no need to look it up in their electronic dictionaries. But they did so the next question was: "Teacher, what's a penis?" I told them it was a magic spaceship. Actually I just laughed and we moved on very, very quickly.

We booked a 6-person mixed dorm room at a hostel in Tokyo. That should be interested as I've already decided that any girl that willingly signs up to stay in a mixed dorm when an all-female dorm is available, is the dirtiest and sketchiest girl I've ever met. So basically, I will probably fall in love in Japan.

2007-01-25T19:48:00.001+09:00

I just got back from getting my second haircut since I got here. I was gonna wait and go with Bender, because, well I feel weird doing anything without him, but I couldn't take it anymore. When I have to convince every class that I didn't get a perm, something must be done. The place I went is right next to my apartment and I'd been scouting it out for a few weeks. You know, making sure there weren't any white people in there. I can't be competing with other foreigners for attention at the barber. I showed the guy a few photos so he didn't screw up my hair too much, but of course I'm an idiot and in each photo my hair is at a different length. Didn't turn out half bad though. It was kind of weird that three other people who work at the place were standing around my chair for the duration of the cut. And then of course, you have to get your hair washed here after the cut, and of course, I got the guy. That was fine until he started playing with my ears a bit too much. Not even just playing with them, but putting his fingers in them. I'll just assume that's normal in Korea and thank god I wasn't too turned on by the whole ordeal.

I'll give Elliot props for this one: Yesterday, I made my middle school writing class watch the State of the Union address. It was a great idea. I didn't have to teach them anything about writing and they were all quiet for 45 minutes. Well, except to tell me every 30 seconds that they couldn't understand anything Bush was saying. Sorry, kids, not my problem. One boy in the class did say "Bushie, very handsome". He was joking, I hope. Apparently the Korean president has had a ton of plastic surgery. It just seems weird when the leader of your country is so into plastic surgery. I read something that said 50 percent of Korean females and 30 percent of guys get plastic surgery at some point. It also said that nose jobs go for about $1,500 but you can get big discounts, so Bender and I are gonna do that soon. I want my nose to look a lot more Asian.

There's four more workdays before I'm back on the 2-10 schedule. I'm still getting killed in the morning under the current schedule because my body physically can not fall asleep before 1am unless I pour a more than suggested dosage of Nyquil down my throat. Overall though, it does seem a lot more healthy to be working 9-5, to come out of work into the daylight is nice and it means I can actually do things. I mean, I still never do anything after work during the week, but it is possible.

I think I have bronchitis. I assumed coughing up green crap was just some nasty kind of cold, but then the Internet pointed out once again that I'm a moron. I'm probably fine though, it's just that the air in Seoul is like smoking a dozen packs of cigarettes a day. A girl in class today was coughing and out of the corner of my eye I see something come flying out of her mouth. It landed on top of her book. She then turned the book over, told nobody to look and asked if she could go to the bathroom and get a tissue. Sorry, that was gross. But it highlights my point, which is it's impossible to be healthy here. And also Korean kids are nasty.

Tokyo is booked for next month. Now we just have to figure out what part of the city is the best to stay at. So if anyone has been there and has any ideas, your comments would be appreciated. I'm listening to Dashboard Confessional right now? Is that gay? Don't answer that.

2007-01-23T11:55:00.000+09:00

I went to bed at 9pm last night. That was awesome, until about 9:30 when someone from the gas company kept ringing my door bell. I was in a half stupor so I was about to just open the door in my underwear, so I did that. Of course, it was a woman at the door. I think she was checking for a gas leak, but I was being a total bitch to her. I was pretending I didn't understand any of the Korean she kept speaking to me.

On Friday, we saw Korea at its worst. It was probably around 4am and we just hanging out at a restaurant, basically waiting for the subway to reopen. A couple minutes after we sat down, this couple starts screaming, the guy takes off, leaves the girl at the table. Alright, the end of that. No so much. Now what happened next, I don't care what your culture is, but this behavior isn't acceptable anywhere. Period. The guy came back a few minutes later, yanks the girl out of the booth, she slams her head onto the side of the wall. I remember yelling "f--- you" at the guy over and over again as he was walking out the front door. I've never been in a fight before, but if that guy had turned around, it was on. There was something so repulsive about seeing something like that and more so, the muted reactions from the other Koreans in the place. One huge Korean guy nodded at me and smiled after it all ended. It was small consolation. I'm sorry, something like that would never happen in America. That guy wouldn't have made it out that front door.

I spoke to the school director yesterday and told her I wasn't pleased with the current work schedule, namely me teaching a lot more than John Mark Karr. She made the strong point that my contract states that I teach 30 classes a week and I'm currently at 29. But it's not about the contract, it's about the blatant unfairness of the current situation. And she understood this, apologized profusely and assured me that she is "considering doing something" about John Mark. The point obviously being that old man perv monster may be shipping out of Korea in the near future.

Haven't done much lately, but I'm content with that through the winter. Every time I think maybe I should go outside and do something, the natural human instinct to want to remain warm and in front of the TV takes hold of me. Next month I should get to Japan, followed by a trip to North Korea in March, that should be enough to hold me over until the spring arrives. Until then, I have sooo many old TV shows to watch online.

2007-01-17T19:13:00.000+09:00

Here's another video of Korean children. During this class, we basically sing songs all class because it means I have to do less work. Of course the kids insist on banging on things while singing, but that doesn't really bother me. Actually, usually I'm banging on my desk, too. Around the 30 second mark of the video, a piece of a kid's pen goes flying across the room. Sometimes the people who work at the front desk come take a look in my class, I guess just to make sure the kids aren't involved in a riot.

I got screwed over a bit at work yesterday. Since all of the kids hate John Mark Karr II, of course their parents call all the time and complain about him. Whatever, doesn't matter to me, but then I got hit with it yesterday. One class that I taught last semester complained so much, I think the director was afraid some of them would quit. So they gave me that class. Not a big deal, I thought. But then I realized there was no switch, I now just have two more classes to teach each week. It comes down to this, John Mark is a terrible teacher so now he gets to teach fewer classes. He has 23 a week now. I'm at 29. In a sense, I can't complain because my contract is for 30 hours a week and I'm glad the kids liked me enough to request me to be their teacher, but I'd rather be rewarded for being a good teacher instead of being nailed in the balls. I told David that I'm going to take my pants off in every class, except for two, so that I'll only be left with two classes and old douche will have 50. I guess I just have to pray John Mark gets fired soon, and that does seem to be a strong possibility.

A couple Korean Kids Say Silly Things: In writing class, the topic was to write a paragraph about your best friend. One girl goes, "My best friend is Michael Jackson." I didn't touch that one. In another class, a boy wrote something in Korea on his desk and asked a girl what it meant in English, she yells out "Sex!" Thankfully, I'm pretty sure they have no idea what it means.

The weather has been pretty decent lately. The high has been in the 30s the last couple weeks. Besides a few days where it was too cold to physically move, it hasn't been nearly as bad as I expected. It's also only snowed a couple times, and that is huge. Just two more months of cold, I can already taste Spring.

I went this eye doctor center yesterday, mainly because I can't really open my eyes in the morning. I waited a solid hour in the waiting room, but apparently you aren't allowed to make an appointment. I could tell all the doctors were looking at me thinking, "God, I hope I don't have to speak English to that guy." When I was finally called in, the first thing the doctor does is ask me if I can speak Korean, in Korean, of course. He was obviously slightly retarded. On the bright side, the doctor and two prescriptions cost me $4.50. My eyes also feel better, but I think I'm pouring steroids into them now. For some reason, I doubt this medication is approved by the FDA.

Apparently it was my birthday on New Years Day. As well as for everyone else on this peninsula. I am now 26, Korean age. I knew that when people are born here they are already 1, but then they turn 2 on New Years Day. So Koreans have two birthdays, really. Their real birthday on whatever date and also on January 1st when they actually add a year to their age, along with the rest of the country. That could explain why some of the girls in my elementary school classes claim they are 14, when they look about 10. It doesn't really make any sense.

On a side note, what the hell is with Jack Bauer? He's such a racist. There's no way he needed to shoot Curtis! And then he runs off and starts crying by a tree?!?! If I wanted to watch that kind of crap, I'd watch Home Makeovers or some other gay show my parents watch. I just hope the rest of the season finds its way onto the Internet and it involves a lot more of Jack Bauer chopping through peoples' necks and less of Jack Bauer being a giant pussy.

2007-01-15T00:11:00.000+09:00

Here's another video. This one having absolutely nothing to do with Korea. It's just something that needs to be posted. (That's not true at all. This is gross.)

2007-01-14T19:29:00.000+09:00

So I made a short video in class last week. It's nothing special, but it does capture a bit of what I deal with everyday. Namely children yelling things in Korean and then me telling them to speak English. It's a vicious cycle. Hopefully I can get some higher quality videos posted on here soon. I am kind of excited about it. It could be a real spark plug for my blog, which is already an international phenomenon.

I met with this Korean guy Wilson last Tuesday and he's definitely a shady character. Among the things he told me: his parents won $250,000 on a slot machine in Atlantic City. His friend's dad is the boss of Korean Air so he can get Mike and I free tickets to Japan. His parents think he is in Japan going to grad school right now so they send him $5,000 each month. He spent his 5G for January in two weeks, mainly on bottles of expensive liquor. I was kind of intrigued by it all but some things just don't add up. Mainly he says he lived on Long Island for eight years, but when I asked what other towns were near Syosset, he couldn't name one. He borrowed $25 from me to buy drinks that night. He then said he'd pay me back by buying bottles of liquor at a booking bar this weekend. He never called. All in all though, I think it was a fair gamble. He'll probably call me to hangout tomorrow night after which I'll tell him for the hundredth time that I don't get drunk on Monday nights. Really, I just want the free plane tickets. Oh, he also told me he would come with me to Thailand, in September.

I made the mistake of letting the students get a hold of my cell phone. So now they all call me. Or send me text messages that say something like "Happy Birthday!" or "You Crazy Lion." One girl sent me a text at 11pm last week as I was getting ready to fall asleep, it said ""RYAN IM SALLY CALL ME WHAT ARE YOU DOING CALL ME SORRY". I was actually really impressed this girl could even write that much in English, she's a pretty terrible student, but despite her commendable efforts, I didn't call her. I think all the Korean teachers think I'm retarded now because students call me while they are in the school, about 20 feet away from me. Despite this, I still answer my phone. The kids then always hang up immediately.

I've come to the conclusion that a solid 90 percent of the white people in this country are douchebags. I'm sure they all view me in the same light, but they all have this nasty attitude about them. In Itaewon Friday night, some guy was lecturing me about how he knew five languages or something. Earlier that night, in Sinchon, we hung out at the same whitey joint we spent New Year's Eve out. I'd been drinking soju (so anything that follows here is completely acceptable) so I decided to attempt to hand the bartender a piece of paper that said "2 8===D's, Please." Bender didn't allow that so I slipped the paper underneath a few music requests in front of the DJ. We didn't stay long enough to find out if they ever played my song. Anyway white people, I asked this white girl where she was from and she said Canada. Then since I'm terribly lame, I probably said something like "Oh, it's really cold then." So then we got into a fight, with her claiming wherever it was she lived in Canada was actually warm and me refusing to believe anything she said. She was a bitch, I think. Then last night as a white guy is leaving DragonBar, a bartender looks over and waves to him. The white guy gives him the finger. Maybe that was just an inside joke or something, but sometimes it's easy to understand the anti-westerner sentiment over here.

I stole a stapler from McDonalds on Friday night. I'm not really sure why. I have no real use for a stapler over here. We also went to McDonalds last night. And when I finish this blog, I'll probably go to KFC because apparently I have little desire to ever be even remotely healthy. KFC is amazing though. Yeah, I'm hungry now. This blog isn't nearly as good as the spicy chicken sandwich.

Photo- This one is looking down the street my apartment is located on. It's absolutely gorgeous.

2007-01-09T17:16:00.000+09:00

I'll post this right before I head out on what may be a huge mistake. I'm meeting this Korean guy Wilson at DragonBar. His parents lived in America. Got kicked out of NYU when cops found weed in his room. He calls me all the time and since I'm not working til 2 tomorrow, I agreed to grab a few drinks. Here's the issue, he asked me to pay for his drinks tonight. Apparently his monthly allowance from his parents hasn't arrived here yet. Now usually if this was a guy I met once in a bar, I'd tell him to screw off, but I actually do believe this guy has a ton of cash. He says he hasn't had a job for six months and he went on a two week vacation to New Zealand last month. So yeah I'm buying this guy drinks tonight. I'm just gonna bring 40,000 won to the bar, though, so he isn't tempting to order a bottle of Jack Daniels, which it seems all the Koreans do in that bar. He also told me he wants to bring me to a "booking club" some time. I think I need to experience this to be able to explain it, but apparently you pay a ton of money for a bottle of booze and it's the waiters' jobs to get girls and literally push them over to your table. The more you drink, the more you pay, the more attractive the girls become. Just a bit sleazy, but hey, if Wilson wants to pay for it all and I get a written guarantee that I won't be raped, I could be enticed.

Oh, obviously I got another white guy's phone number this weekend. That was after Bender ditched me when I passed out from taking 10 shots of soju at 6pm. That was lame. At Woodstock, I got a few free drinks, including one called a MonkeyBrain. I was really scared at first because all the bartenders were surrounding me and when I asked what was in it, one of them said, "Have you ever tried Ecstasy?" But I drank it and I didn't start feeling up the white guy, so I think it was just alcohol.

Work is a breeze right now, mainly because of the whole working 32 hours a week this month. It's nice to get off work at 5pm too and actually has some of the day to work with. I thought it would be awesome not having to work until 2pm but that means by the time I get off at 10, eat dinner and get home, it's already midnight and there's no chance I'm leaving the apartment again.

I asked one of my classes what the word "graceful" meant today and they said it was a "sexy dancer". Not exactly. One girl told me she didn't do her homework because she was in the bathroom. In the bathroom for an entire week apparently. She should probably see a doctor about that. Sometimes I really would like to know how to speak Korean, if only to understand what the hell the kids are saying all class. I confiscated a huge piece of paper from one class and told the kids to read it. They read it as everyone else cracked up. It was basically just a big list of curse words written in Korean. I took it away and threw it in the trash. I could have shown the head Korean teacher, but she would have maimed the kids and plus, I'm the cool teacher. No one gets in trouble.

I think I've given up ham and cheese sandwiches for good. Instead I'm going to Dunkin Donuts every morning. Yeah. It's so bad though, cause I order a blueberry bagel with cream cheese. Somehow it takes them a good 10 minutes to make this so naturally I am always 10 minutes late to work. Most days I also get a chocolate donut, but I try to hide that when I get to school so the healthy Korean teachers don't yell at me. I usually have a Korean call and order me lunch, which is always a great deal. It's like $3.50 to get a huge dish delivered in about 10 minutes. And of course, there's no tipping. Sorry, deliveryman, it's your culture. I always go to the pasta place around the block from my apartment at least once a week. The owner loves me and gives me a free cup of hot chocolate after my meal. But I always feel obligated to finish the drink, which leads to me feeling terrible when I finally leave the place. Whatever, it's still my favorite place to eat. I guess I'm also not eating much. I weighed myself for the first time since I got here when we were in China. I've lost 15 pounds. I thought maybe the scale was broken but the nurse at the doctors office confirmed it last week. I'm 66 kg or for normal people, 145 lbs. The smart money is on me gaining everything back within a week of returning home and returning to my old meal plan of three meals of Taco Bell a day. Alright, I have to go hangout with a sketchball Korean. Annyeong kyeseyo.

Photos- an old one from Lotte World (yeah, the sign says "With Lovers", perfect) and one of those things that are all over Korea.

2007-01-05T11:18:00.000+09:00

I went to Itaewon this week to get my eyes checked out. They've been all red and itchy for months now so I finally gave in and went to see Dr. Wang. Waste of time though. The douchebag didn't even look at my eyes. He just gave me a prescription for eye drops to use. Pretty much the same drops I used before I came to Korea, and they didn't work. The one good thing from the 45 minute subway ride there was I convinced him to give me some more xanax, which means I can travel some more without wetting myself on the plane. I think I'll go to a real eye doctor next week. With my health insurance, that should cost about 50 cents. I might just go to every doctor in this country before I go home and get every part of my body checked out. I don't plan on getting my dad's personal favorite though: the colonoscopy.

As I was walking back to the subway from the doctor's office, a couple of Korean girls ambushed me. They said they were university students and they just needed five minutes of my time. Since I was then on pace to get to work an hour early, I let them abuse me for a few minutes. I thought it was just going to be some survey or something, but instead, they were religious freaks and not from some normal church. One girl kept reading me verses from the Bible and she would ask me over and over"Gotta Mother?" I think she was trying to tell me that there were two Gods, a male one and a female one. I just agreed with everything she said, failing to mention I haven't been in a church in about five years. About 15 minutes, I lied and said I was late to work. I think they were going to come to work with me if it was close by, but thankfully, they gave me just enough room to escape from the alley they had cornered me in.

I'm on the early morning work schedule now, so that's been kind of rough. When I had to work at 2, I was getting a solid 9 hours of sleep a night. Now it's closer to 4 or 5. The kids are suffering because of this, as I am not nearly as nice in class when all I want to be doing is sleeping. A kid forgot to bring his book to class yesterday so I made him write 100 times "I will bring my book to class." Whatever, I have that kind of power. They shall obey.

You know how you always see people selling stuff on subways anywhere you go? And nobody every buys stuff cause it's all crap. Well, Koreans love crap. They buy everything. Usually the douche selling stuff with walk up and down the subway car yelling things for a few minutes and no one will move. He always starts the price at around 4,000 won ($4) no matter what he is selling. Then after five minutes of everyone ignoring him, he drops the price to 1,000 won and every damn Korean on the subway buys whatever it is. It could be a bag of dog shit, they would buy it for 1,000 won. They were selling a lot of crap in China too, but I almost bought their stuff. A few people had these blinking light wheels that you attach to your sneakers, essentially making your sneakers into roller blades. I definitely should have bought them. They were probably 3 bucks. Bender wouldn't let me though. He ruins everything.

I feel the need to take something back from a recent post, the one in which I said if you combine the looks of Shanghai with the friendliness of Koreans, you'd have the perfect country. While yes, most Koreans are friendly and they will go out of their way to help you out, the fact is Korea is about anti-foreign as it comes when you're talking about countries. It's just a certain feel you get walking around the streets. I read in the paper the other day about a new group in Seoul, whose only mission is to rid Korea of all forgeiners or what they call "low-grade Westerners". It's such a huge contradiction. The collective self-esteem of Korea is the same as that of a 14-year-old boy with a face covered in pimples and hair growing out of his ears. They try so hard to shed their own image, to become white in any way possible, whether it be by hanging out in Western bars or only listening to Justin Timberlake. And then at the same time, you have this anti-white attitude that pervades the country. This whole "We, the Koreans, are the superior race" type deal. Sure, I know it's the same in Europe where they suck up American culture but yet despise our country. But it's the different here because Koreans don't just want to listen to American music and watch English movies, they want to actually be white. Someone please explain to me how any of that makes sense.

I hit the three-month mark in Korea this weekend. The next two months are going to be brutal, only because cold weather kills my desire to do anything whatsoever. I enjoy walking around the city and exploring new places, but that's just not going to happen until spring. Until then, I'm going to drink soju on street corners, wander into the nearest bar, and offend Korean girls.

2007-01-02T00:01:00.000+09:00

Happy New Year and welcome to the 2007 edition of the worst blog in the world (although it still gets a million more hits than Bender's). Since cold sucks and we feared getting trampled, we stayed away from the hot spots on Sunday night. I think they ring a giant bell or something. Not really that cool. We celebrated the New Year with about 50 white people at this bar in Sinchon. The bar didn't even have a sign outside, but it was swarming with whities. A couple of Russian girls were going nuts on the dance and sadly, I got too many views of their underwear. They gave out a free shot to everyone at midnight, but somehow, mainly because I'm an idiot, I forgot to go up to the bar to get it. Since it was a big night, we then went to Itaewon, where you just go when you want to feel filthy. And we did.

We met up with my coworker David and a few of his buddies. One of those buddies almost managed to get into a brawl with a Korean bar owner. The owner was pulling down the metal cage as he was closing up the place and this guy runs up to it and jumps into the cage. The owner went nuts. It took him a good five minutes to realize he was outnumbered. I'm not counting myself. I ran away. Once we made it a bar, it was actually pretty chill there. Some guy from Idaho came up to me and said a Korean girl wanted to talk to me. So I did that. As is my life though, her English skills were quite sad. This girl's sister, who is married to said Idaho guy, was acting as a translator for a few minutes before I realized how sad the situation had become. So I gave up on that one. Got home at 6am and then woke up at 2pm Monday to catch the Times Square festivities on the tube. Pretty solid night, although New Years Eve Eve was probably more entertaining.

We went to Dragon Bar mainly so Bender could kick my ass in darts 10 more times, but then some sort of Korean tornado of drunkeness smashed into us. This guy and who we think was his girlfriend started talking to us. When Mike introduced himself, the guy went nuts. "Mike!! My English name is Mike, too!! Same name! Same name!" Then in some kind of weird Korean Groundhog Day, that same exchange happened about a hundred more times. The guy kept forgetting our names so whenever Mike re-introduced himself, he went crazy. He also gave us a bunch of shots of Jack from the bottle he bought, which I think pissed off the bartenders cause we got drunk and only bought one beer. The girlfriend, who the guy kept pointing to and saying "Very very very very very very no English," apparently only knew two words in English. Me Pretty? Over and over again. And we told her how amazing she looked for a good hour.

And in easily the gayest thing that's happened here, the guy started to feed me tomatoes and cantaloupe. First he told me he wasn't gay and then he cupped my chin with one hand and fed me. I let him do it because it's Korea and that's normal, maybe. And I'm gay. He then tried to feed Bender, who thank God did not witness him feeding me, and Bender refused to play along. Damn hetero. After this, I don't think the guy liked Bender anymore, although I think they might play basketball together sometime. I'm supposed to meet the girl at Dragon on Wednesday night for a language exchange. I'll probably go just to make sure she isn't there. And there's just no way she's showing up. It was an absolutely hilarious night. At one point, the guy went across the bar for a minute to talk to KC, a white guy we met last month who had just walked in, and suddenly he turns and shouts towards us "Mike Mike! Same name!" Before he left, he hugged each of us about 40 times, wished us a Happy New Year and he may have licked my ear. He is my favorite Korean of all time.

Made it to Club Night on Friday but no before a rocking party at work! One truly annoying thing about Koreans is that they have no conception of giving people notice of anything. As I'm putting on my jacket to leave work Friday, one of the Korean teachers goes "hey wait, we're having a party." It's almost as if they assume you already know everything. Party was actually decent though. A ton of food, even more alcohol. Only awkward thing was I was sitting next to John Mark Karr II and we didn't say a word to each other the entire time. I could tell some of the Korean teachers were a bit confused. The owners made everyone at the table stand up and say something, I really have no idea what it was about. It could have been about New Year's or chemistry, no clue. John Mark got all douchy and said something about cherishing every moment. Everyone was creeped out. I got up and said, "Annyeong Haseyo, Gamsahamnida." or "Hello, Thank you." Everyone loved that. I'm awesome.

I was thinking before just how much happier I am at the start of this year than the last. And really, it's a huge difference. Last year, I was rarely leaving my apartment, I was coming home from work early everyday and blazing. Now sure there are definitely times here when I crave that kind of lifestyle again, but those are very fleeting moments. Halfway through the year, I spent two days in the ER after forgetting my entire life, but really, I wasn't forgetting much because I wasn't doing anything with my life. That's changed now. And it's a great feeling.

Photos- Bender and one of his many Korean girlfriends, and a couple more Shanghai photos, the bottom one is from inside the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel, basically just a glorified way of getting across the river.

2006-12-28T21:14:00.000+09:00

So yeah. Shanghai, amazing experience. Our flight there on Saturday afternoon was an hour late boarding, but the Seoul airport is like a castle so I didn't bitch too much. Although Bender might claim otherwise. The flight was only an hour and a half and we gained an hour going there because of the time difference. Our hotel was a solid 45 minutes from the airport and really, you don't see much on the way into the center of the city. But when we got there, it was immediately impressive. First off, I could breathe in Shanghai. In Korea, I cough up disgusting fluids all day long, but magically I was healthy for three days in China.

Our hotel was right next to the Pearl Tower, which is a massive television and communications tower that's probably the most visited attraction in the city. At night when it was lit up, it made the Seoul Tower look like a piece of trash. And the Seoul Tower, sadly, probably is the coolest thing to see in Seoul. Our hotel, which was of the five star variety meaning we did not belong there, was along the river and we spent most of the first night just hanging out there taking in the view, making out. You know. I expected China to be different than Korea, but there is seriously nothing similar about them besides them each being home to a billion Asians. Shanghai is basically like going to Europe, minus people speaking English. Tourists were everywhere. The city is just way too clean for anything you expect from China. For God's sake, it's China. After a half hour in Shanghai, I was about to call my office and have them ship my stuff across the sea. But then, and it's a big but, we began to interact with Chinese people.

To put it simply, Chinese people aren't all that friendly. Koreans always seem to be smiling. That may be due to drinking excessive amounts of soju, but still, it's nice. Like last night at a bar near my apartment, there were four Korean guys sitting next to me and they told me their English names were Dirty, Crazy, Penis and Junk in the Trunk. That's good stuff and I don't picture that kind of interaction ever happening in China. The Chinese all seemed pretty cold and lame. While some of this may have to do with the fact that Shanghai has 400000x more westerners than Seoul so the people aren't all that excited when they see Americans, I just wasn't getting the right vibes from them. The worst part of the culture, by far, and yeah maybe it's just because we were in a touristy area, is that you can't go into a bar without being made into the waitresses pet project. You walk in and their only job is to talk to you, play games with you, do whatever to keep you in there and drinking. Within five minutes of walking into our first bar, there was a girl sitting at our table. Ten minutes later, she and another waitress challenged us to a game of foosball. I was still giving them the benefit of the doubt before the game started. They were already up 2-0 when one of them put this on the table: We win, you buy us a drink. You win, we buy you a drink. Bender may also deny this, but I think he was about to accept their offer. But being the huge nerd I am, I had researched this situation beforehand and I knew if we lost that game, we'd be out of money on the first night. Some Chinese girls approach foreigners, ask them to go to a bar with them, the guy buys a drink and the tab is something ridiculous as the girl works for the bar. In the end, it was the smart move to turn down the challenge as these girls had obviously been trained in foosball. They were making shots I'd never seen before and I think the final score was something like 10-3.

Actually, I was wrong. That wasn't the first bar we went into. The first one we got two steps inside and there was at least 40 girls sitting around the bar, all of them wearing Christmas hats. I'm pretty certain there wasn't a single set of twig and berries in there. So yeah, that was an immediate bad sign of the Shanghai bar scene. Later that night, after I refused to pay $10 to get into a bar not knowing what was behind the door, a guy outside led us down an alley to another whore house/bar. I'm pretty sure he promised us it was a normal bar, but no, not at all. There were girls everywhere. The shadiest was also all over the streets. At least every 10 minutes, some guy would come up offering some sort of love massage. The ones who really put in effort would first strike up a conversation, asking where you're from, what you're doing in Shanghai, before they'd hit you with "Do you like girls? No clothes?" Yeah, my favorite was when this young guy came up to us and asked if we wanted "Merry Christmas Sex"? I told him I was taken and continued to hold Bender's hand.

And yes, Koreans girls make Chinese girls look like they've all just gotten smashed in the face with a sledgehammer. No contest.

If you could combine the cleanliness and just plain beauty of Shanghai with the friendliness of Koreans, I think you'd have the perfect country. Overall though, Seoul definitely gets the edge. I could never live in Shanghai for a year. People in Korea leave you alone and let you go about your life and that's a damn big deal when you live there.

Shanghai was also a lot more expensive than I had expected. While we found a few restaurants where we just ordered everything on the menu because it was so cheap, for the most part, as far as beer and food goes, it was on par with Seoul. Meaning comparable to American prices. The best bargain was the $10 we paid for a Cuban cigar on the last night there. That was disgusting. While waiting for our return flight to Seoul on Tuesday, Bender and I each ordered a large orange juice from an airport restaurant after the waitress assured us that yes, in fact, "large orange juice, very nice." That large orange juice, which tasted like something I left sitting next to my bed for a week, ran 75RMB. Or more than $8. I can't imagine I will ever pay $8 for an orange juice ever ever again.

The flight back was also delayed close to an hour, which was great, since I needed every thing to run perfectly in order to get to work on time. Instead I got to work an hour later. Pretty sure no one cared though. For the month of Jan. my schedule changes so I start work at 10 and get out at 5:30. The great thing, though, is that I only need to be at the school when I'm teaching. A big change from the current situation of me watching Mad TV clips on youtube for about 4 hours a day. On Wednesdays next month, I work from 2:30-5:30. That is, well, pretty sweet. Tomorrow night is the monthly Club Night in the university area and I'm getting excited because it looks like Bender will show up this time and I won't be dancing like an idiot on a stage by myself for five hours this time. Who knows what goes on here on New Year's Eve, they might just all spit on each other at midnight. I saw a middle school girl spit on the sidewalk in front of me today. She's never going to get an American boyfriend acting that way. Unless she wants to date John Mark Karr II.

Pictures: 2nd photo- a view of the city from the observation deck of Jin Mao. 3rd photo- view of Jin Mao Building from down the street, the building right next to it being constructed will be bigger than Jin Mao when it's finished and will become the third tallest building in the world. 6th photo- Yu Gardens (that couple in the gazebo making out is not me and Bender.)

2006-12-26T23:12:00.000+09:00

I figured I'd post a few pictures from Shanghai. After waking up at 6, flying back to Seoul and then teaching six classes, I'm in no condition to form coherent sentences.

1) This is one of the Pearl Tower and our hotel. That part of the hotel is the convention center, but yeah, it was still awesome.

2)This was the view from our hotel room. The building on the right, Jin Mao, is the fifth largest building in the world.

3)This is a shot of the Bund, a row of historic buildings on the river.

4)Apparently Bill Clinton made a visit to this famous Tea House. That's probably why I love it so much.

5)This is the main shopping road in Shanghai.

More to come...

2006-12-22T00:24:00.000+09:00

I just walked arm-in-arm back to my apartment with two Korean guys. I don't know how this kind of stuff happens sometimes. Then I went into McDonalds and the cashier spoke fluent English and was a U.S. citizen. No offense to any Korean readers, but if you have U.S. citizenship, there's no good reason to be in Korea unless you are an English teacher or you really love kimchi. Cashier at McDonalds? No, definitely not a good reason.

I had my first crier in class yesterday that wasn't the direct result of me yelling at a kid. We do these word tests where the kids have about 10 words in Korean and all they have to do is write what those words means in English. Pretty straightforward. So this entire class did bad on their word tests. Obviously, I really didn't care. But then a couple minutes later, Jacob starts bawling. I asked him why he was crying and the other kids in the class said it was because his father was going to hit him because he did poorly on the word test. I think Jacob denied this, but either way, since I just wanted him to stop crying, I told the class they didn't have to get the test signed by their parents. In fact. I just told them they could rip up the test. I was not saying this literally, but I should have known better than to say this to eight Korean children. Needless to say, there was bits of paper everywhere.

Once I convinced Jacob that he wasn't going to get his ass beat that night, I attempted to move on with the lesson, but apparently crying is quite contagious. Because then Bryan started crying. This was because his head hurt. He said the light was hurting his eyes. Alright, so I turned the light off. Now I was teaching in the dark. Doesn't matter, anything to stop the crying. When Bryan stopped being a little bitch, the bug moved to the one girl in the class, Ellie, whose name is pronounced Allie. Right. She was crying because as she put it "all of the boys are crazy." Sometimes Ellie speaks Korean in class and all the boys get all excited and want me to make her write 100x that she won't speak Korean in class. What they fail to understand though is that Ellie is my favorite student at the school and she can do no wrong in my eyes. If she screamed "F--- You" to every other student in the class, I'd probably give her a piece of candy.

Everyone in my office is sick. I feel like I'm working inside a giant bubble of disease and grossness. The problem, of course, is that the words sick and day do not compute in the Korean language. You are simply not allowed to get sick. I asked one of the Korean teachers yesterday if she was sick after I noticed she looked like she had just been tossed down a flight of stairs and she goes "Yes, I have very high fever." That's just great. In America, she'd have been home for a good three days now. I remember Erika told me one time she was so sick that she couldn't move out of bed so she called in sick. The next day, all the Korean teachers tore her apart as if she had called up and said I'm not coming in today, I'm gonna go catch a movie. It's just a bit ridiculous. The problem, at my job at least, is that there are no substitutes. If someone doesn't come to work, it just means everyone else has to cover their classes and since everyone already thinks they teach too many classes, this causes utter chaos.

Bender and I leave for China on Saturday. I really have no idea as to what to expect from this trip. I'm just thrilled to be getting out of Seoul for a few days and getting a chance to see some more weird looking people. The hotel has a huge pool apparently so I might just stay in there all weekend drinking beer while Bender wonders around Shanghai in his pink scarf. I'm not allowed to sleep until 3pm on this trip, Bender said, so that might just ruin the entire vacation. As is the usual custom, I'm fully prepared for my death since I will be using that terrible form of transportation known as the airplane, but as is also a custom, I'm counting on Mr. Xanax to keep me sane. I'm sure I'll have a thousand pictures to post when I get back next week. And I'm sure 998 of them will include Bender. Until then, Merry Christmas!

Photos- A Christmas display in Jongno and the giant statue of the Buddha in Gangnam.

2006-12-18T02:48:00.000+09:00

John Mark Karr II was complaining all day at work on Friday and I made the mistake of opening my mouth. He kept mumbling stuff about how his desk was too small and he didn't have enough personal space or something. I mentioned, half kidding, that he could switch desks with me. I said this because I have the worst desk in the office since it's right next to the door, which means Korean children touch my stuff all day and things are usually flying onto the floor. I really don't mind it all that much, and since JMK was being all bitchy, I just threw the trade desks offer out there. He didn't really respond to the offer when I first said it, probably because he was complaining about something else by then, but 15 minutes later, when it was just him me and one Korean teacher, he yells something from across the room to me. It went something like this: "Blah blah blah I don't take shit from no one. After you teach for 12 years, 4 years in Korea, then you can negotiate for this desk." I told him I really didn't care where I sat and I just made the offer because he seemed so damn unhappy with his desk. I put my headphones back on and he rambled on for a few minutes. All I know is he is now off my OK to Socialize with List. I will never speak to the guy unless it involves something that is or could directly affect me. He also complained the to school director about David giving him orders, he said he will not have a boss and that's that. His attitude towards work is I'll do whatever the hell I want and if anyone says anything about it, I'll yell and bitch like a little girl.

Granted, I don't do much at work, but I understand that having a job means respecting some sort of authority and following a few rules. This guy would have been fired within three days if it wasn't such a pain in the ass/costs a lot of money for the school to recruit new Western teachers. Actually, I was playing online poker during one of my breaks on Thursday when I was supposed to be lesson planning or engaging in things they pay me for. It was going great until I got AK right before the bell rang and the herd of other teachers came storming back into the office. I think I lost $20 on that damn hand, as well any kind of respect I may have been getting from the Koreans in the office.

Another one of the Korean teachers told me how terrible China is last week. She said had heard I was going and she felt she had to warn me that it wasn't a nice place. I asked her if she had ever been there. No. She said Japan was much better. I asked if Tokyo was better than Seoul and she said they were about the same. Why do I have this strong suspicion that when I go to Japan, it's just not gonna have the wonderful smell of dirt and garbage that hovers over Seoul.

We actually out with a bunch of Chinese people on Friday night. Oh, and also one big fat gay American guy. The Chinese people all seemed like they were stoned and they provided the entertainment value of watching American Idol. Big fat gay guy redeemed the rest of the group with his not-so-subtle homoerotic remarks. At one place, he remarked about the snacks on the table, "Oh, these nuts are yummy." I almost lost it. At the end of the night, I think he was trying to get Bender and I to go back to his place to sleep on his couch.

It snowed for the first time last night. A lot. So obviously it was the perfect time to get stranded at a subway station. It was one of those times when knowing Korean would have been really helpful. We were ready to hop on the train, but then after realizing that each car was already about 50 people over capacity, we watched all the Koreans jam themselves into the car, thinking they were a bunch of idiots. No so much. It was the last train that was going on the way down its line. So we got on the next one, went two stops and then were ordered off by some dude. Then we met a Canadian guy at the station and the three of us attempted to hail a cab for about a half hour. The worst part about the whole situation was it totally ruined my grand scheme to get Bender to go to the QueensBridge hiphop dance club near my apartment. By the time we made it back, his enthusiasm for listening to Sexy Back for four hours straight had waned and thus I was devastated.

We went to Gangnam today, which is like the Beverly Hills of Seoul. All of the girls carry little umbrellas over their heads despite a lack of any sort of precipitation. Half of them were also wearing skirts. The high was 25 degrees today. The place was definitely a lot nicer than the rest of the city, it's got a distinct feel of class. But it's a good hour and a half from my place by subway, so any return trips will need to be accompanied by a few bottles of soju.

I wish my camera wasn't so terrible. These pictures are way too blurry. But that one on top is a real sign for a store in Itaewon. I also have no clue what Happy Walking 2007 means. The last photo is of the main strip in Suyu, about 500 feet from my apartment, during the snowstorm last night.

2006-12-15T00:18:00.000+09:00

There are some horrible books for some of my classes. One of them is what is called a think along book. We read stories in classes and the kids stop to answer questions in the middle of the story. The only problem is most of these questions are "What are you thinking about now?" It's the worst possible question. It's so pointless and vague that I can never tell the kids they have a wrong answer. A lot of times they'll just write "school" in the box. It doesn't matter what the story is about, they'll write "I'm hungry" or "I want to go home." Although today I did get one answer that was sort of related to a story in the book. The story was about a mother baking cookies and the question asked "What do you picture the mother wearing?" and one boy wrote "Only panties." I swear to God. The book we use for the top level class isn't much better. The entire thing is about planes and flying. Yeah, I now know a ton about how planes use their rudders and yokes and how there's something called an elevator in a plane, but I still hate my life every time I teach that class.

It's official: the new foreign teacher is John Mark Karr. Sure, he's a bit older but he's the creepiest old guy I've ever met. My opinion of him has fallen constantly everyday since he's been here. Tonight he solidified that I need shower feeling I get when I'm around him. I went out to dinner with him and David after work and he started talking about how he thought our waitress was really hot. Nevermind the fact that she wasn't, but she couldn't of been older than 20 and this guy is 55. He kept staring at her and smiling and I was ready to hide under the table. It got worse. He started comparing Korean and Japanese girls. "I think the Korean middle school girls look much better in their skirts." Yeah, so he'll probably be in a Korean prison by the end of the month. The guy also complains non stop about everything. He said a few times tonight that he was just waiting around to die. All I know is I won't be eating dinner again with John Mark Karr II anytime soon.

It's kind of ridiculous how nationalistic Koreans are. I'm sure it stems from the Japanese raping their country for years, but still, they have a very warped sense of what Korea is. I told Semi, one of the Korean teachers at my school, that I was going to China next week for vacation. I'd best describe her reaction as shocked. Shocked that I wasn't going on vacation somewhere in magical Korea. I tried to explain to her that I had wanted to go to Jeju Island, but that it would be too cold to go in December. She did not accept that answer. Sometimes I really think that all of Korea should take a national vacation to another country, you know, just to see what else is out there. I think they'd be amazed.

I forgot to mention Bender and I got a haircut last weekend. Although it had the potential to be a disaster, my students haven't yelled "ugly teacher" much this week, and that means it's good enough for my standards. I showed the lady there a bunch of photos of myself and then she just started cutting. It really wasn't all that exciting.

One reason I love George Bush: his amazing tenure has destroyed the value of the U.S. Dollar. And every time the dollar falls, my teaching salary goes up. Mmm mmm Bush.

Photo- Top- A shot of Myeong Dong and below, the The Season's Greetings 2007 sign around the block from the first one that pisses me off to no end.

2006-12-12T15:04:00.000+09:00

I've been to the Dragon Bar three times now and every time I've left with a phone number of an American guy. Two of the times, I actually left the bar with an American guy. Usually when I talk to other white people, I'm OK with them, but then by the next morning, I don't have much of a desire to ever see them again. The white guy this past weekend was pretty decent. He was wearing a pink shirt. He was insane, though. He kept going on about how there is no such thing as evil, how the U.S. should never have attacked Afghanistan and how North Korea is the best place in the world. I know I'm the most liberal guy on campus, but I was actually spewing Republican talking points to this guy. He was kind of funny, though. Maybe I'll call him sometime when I'm drunk and need a "white guy quickie."

I did blow my shot at a Korean girlfriend Saturday night. This girl was totally digging me and by that, I mean she probably had 12 drinks that night and was acting out some sort of dare to talk to the dorky looking white guy. But anyway, things were going great and Bender was all jealous, but then the bartender joked with me and said she was crazy. I, in turn, joked with the girl about the bartender saying she was crazy. And then she snapped. Calling people crazy here usually works fine in class and the kids love it, but apparently if you attempt to joke about crazy with a drunk Korean girl, your dreams of moving into a Korean home, playing rock paper scissors all day and eating kimchi for every meal, will be shattered. At least I got the white guy's phone number.

I do have to call Bender out on one thing and it involves his new pink scarf. In one of his recent blogs, he wrote that he wasn't the type of person to wear a scarf. Look this is just not true. He wore it all weekend, made me take pictures of him posing with it on and then violated my camera by taking pictures of himself wearing it. While he likes to point out that only a small part of the scarf is actually pink, it is by far the dominant color. Now it's OK for him to wear the scarf here. In fact, it may not be gay enough to wear here, but if he keeps this kind of behavior up he will never be able to return to America. He did give me jacket, though, and that wasn't gay at all.

It's been getting tougher to write blogs lately, I think because most things seem pretty normal to me now. I expect the ridiculous. I expect someone to give me a pair of socks at a restaurant. I expect the doorman at my apartment complex to chase me up the stairs at 7am on Saturday morning trying to explain to me in Korean that I need to give him money for some sort of utility bill. Now there's something I can't understand. It doesn't happen often, but some people insist on trying to explain things to me in Korean over and over even though I've made it clear in some way that I have no idea what they're saying. I don't think these people appreciate the value of the hand gesture. It's amazing how many things you can explain by pointing to things. I'll probably still point to everything when I get home and that will just be weird.

I was explaining to one class what a continent is today and I think they understood it, but their pronunciation was a bit off. They inconveniently replaced the "o" with a "u" and then insisted on yelling it about ten times. For second, I almost thought they were doing it on purpose.

One of my favorite things to do in class is tease the kids, especially if they are annoying me or if they didn't do their homework. The line that hits them the hardest is when I point to my head and go "Your head empty?" All of the classes understand what this means so they all laugh at the bad kid and that's the point. Don't mess with the teacher because I have no problem stooping to your level.

Bender and I both went to the Chinese consulate today to get our visas processed for the Shanghai trip next week. We did not, however, go to the same place. We apparently went to different consulates within a half mile of each other. Since it seems pretty unlikely that there are two Chinese consulates that close to each other in the same city, the logical outcome is either me or him aren't going to China. I think it's him though, cause they took his passport and 75,000 won today. My place took my passport, but I pay on Friday. He's so screwed.

While Bender hinted at the gayfest that was Friday night, let me just come clean here as something incredibly embarrassing occurred that I have sworn with never again be repeated. Yeah, we went to a karoake room together. That will happen again. It's what happened at the cashier of the karaoke place that makes me severely question my intelligence. Since we were going to be singing together and beer is required for that, I grabbed a couple beers out of the mini fridge next to the cashier. Paid three bucks for each one. I had finished about three quarters of mine probably while we were belting out our tenth Oasis song when Bender pointed to the can. Non-alcoholic malt beverage. Yeah, we were pounding non-alcoholic beer. I have two real problems with this, first, I could not tell IMMEDIATELY that it was non-alcoholic. And second, it brought up a troubling memory. The first weekend I really went out here is the weekend we sang karoake for the first time. At that place, we had more than one beer. Probably more like four each. And since I now believe, what I first dismissed as bs, that karoake bars aren't allowed to serve alcohol, it comes down to this: If I drank four non-alcoholic beers while singing It's Gonna Be Me while shaking a tambourine over my head while sitting on a giant red couch with Mike Bender, can I officially proclaim that night as the low point of my life, from now until the day I die? You make the call.

(Photos- top- tall guy and black girl and a couple students)

2006-12-07T02:33:00.000+09:00

After eating dinner last night at a restaurant near my school, as we got up to pay the bill, the owner of the place walked up to David and handed him two brown paper bags. Inside each of them was a pair of socks. Apparently it was a parting gift of some sort. A bit strange, but hey, I really needed socks so I'll take it. The floor of this restaurant was also just rocks and there were small trees all over the place. I felt like I was in the rain forest. The food was cooked on a huge black stone at the table. I don't particularly like that, the fact that you are expected to cook your own food at the table at almost every restaurant. If I really wanted to cook my own food, I would have went to the supermarket, bought the ingredients and whipped something up at home. It's that the point of going to a restaurant? So you don't have to cook your own meal? Really, though, we never end up cooking anything, anyway, because we just sit there staring at the food as it starts burning and the Koreans then realize we're morons and need some serious help. Once the natives remedy that situation and it's time to actually eat the stuff, things get quite barbaric. Koreans don't exactly have table manners. Generally they pile a lot of stuff, rice pork kimchi whatever, onto a leaf or piece of lettuce, roll it all up into a ball and then shove it into their mouths. I kind of enjoy it, but my mom would be disgusted. Also, know how it's rude to slurp your drink at the table when you're finished? Here, it's obviously a good thing. It means you really enjoyed the drink. Right.

I've been teaching a ton of classes this week because we're still waiting for Robert, the new old American guy, to get his visa stuff in order. So I've just been playing a lot of card games. None of the kids use the proper names for Aces, Kings, Queens or Jacks and I hate it. They just say A, K, Q, or J. I don't have many rules during game time, but I have established the refer to the cards correctly rule. The kids favorite card game is basically Uno, except they call it One Card. Whenever I try to play with them, I'm confused within 30 seconds. I think half the cards mean reverse, skip or spin around on your head. They always yell at me when I don't know whose turn it is. The thing about One Card is some of the kids are real assholes and they insist on yelling One Card a half second before someone actually has One Card. So then that person who was about to have one card draws about five cards and of course, the game never ends. I have yet to win a game.

Since it's a new semester, all the kids want to change their English names. And that would just make me crazy. I finally got every one's name down a few weeks ago. The attendance sheet is all in Korean at the beginning of the semester so I had to pass it around in my middle school class so the kids could write in their English names. And though I explicitly told them they could not change their names, many of them attempted to. Hestia changed her name to Mermaid, probably because she had a Little Mermaid eraser. Another girl wants to be called "Jan-n". I don't even know how to pronounce that. And then there's my favorite: Paris Hilton. I might even let that girl keep the name, only cause she's new to my class so I didn't know her name anyway. But I think I'd feel way too dirty and creepy calling a 12 year old girl Paris Hilton. There's probably laws against that.

Bender and I are locked in for a trip to Shanghai, China over the Christmas weekend. We're gonna be cutting it close though. Since we only have the Monday off, we're trying to stretch the vacation as much as possible so our return flight won't get into Seoul until 11:50 on Tuesday morning. Since Bender needs to be at work at 1:30 and me at 2 and the bus ride from the airport to our jobs is taking no less than an hour and half, yeah, no way we're making it. But sometimes you gotta cut some corners if you ever want to get a chance to breathe over here. We haven't booked a hotel yet, but I might try to get Bender to agree to sharing a king size bed. We practically sleep together every weekend, anyway.

Robert seems like a cool old guy, but he's also got a bit of a creepy edge. At dinner tonight, he said one of his favorite things about Korea was the girl. Ok, fair enough. But then he kept talking...the reason he likes the girls is because they are always exposing their feet. I think his words were "they were those thongs on their feet." Alright, I just met you, let's keep the foot fetish talk to a minimum, at least for the first few weeks.

In some ways, my work ethic here is the same as it was back home. I come to work, I fool around on the Internet all day and avoid work until I am absolutely forced to do it. Now that I don't really have a boss, I don't even pretend to be doing work in between classes. Sometimes I feel bad because the Korean teachers always seem to be making up tests or preparing for classes, but then I remember, I really don't care. Today I was watching "Saw II" during one of my breaks. I get the minimum amount of work done, I go to class, they kids have some fun, learn a bit and that's that. Although David mentioned tonight that we have to work on some Saturdays to make up for holidays and with that, I almost blew a fuse. So we get off for Christmas Day and then I need to come in the next Saturday to make up those classes? Hell, that doesn't seem like a holiday at all. Things got a little dicey in the office, but then I realized I might have been scaring the new guy too much, so I dropped it. But that's just not gonna fly. I know how much Koreans love to work, but personally, I enjoy having a life sometimes.

I think Bender might be dead again. He hasn't responded to my emails and he didn't pick up his phone when I tried to call him tonight. He's such a little bitch sometimes.

(Photos- top- a view of the city from a mountain, and Bender pretending to squeeze one out)

2006-12-04T01:45:00.000+09:00

The new semester started on Friday and it was ridiculous. I didn't get my schedule until Thursday night so when I got to work on Friday, I had about an hour to find the books for all my classes. You'd think that'd be plenty of time, but the book shelf is in no kind of order. Some of the books aren't even on the shelf. I found them all eventually, but then the schedule changed about six times through the course of the day. I was literally about to walk into a class when someone told me I wasn't teaching that class anymore. Luckily, most of my classes this semester are listening classes, which basically means I go in, throw in a tape and they listen to it. Those classes are golden. A whole lot better than teaching grammar, which just isn't something an unqualified smuck should be teaching.

The kids continue to astonish me with their cruelty. I showed a class a photo of my family and one girl looks at it and goes, "Ugly, ugly, ugly" as she points to each member of my family. Then at the end of class, this same girl has the nerve to ask me why I didn't give her the penny for being the best student of the day. What a bitch.

Erika missed her flight home on Saturday. She got to the airport at 10:15am for an 11:00 flight and they refused to let her check in. She stayed at a hotel last night and hopefully she's flying home right now. I could make fun of her here, but I love her too much and she'd probably fly back to Korea and kick my ass.

It's gotten really cold here over the last week. And I don't have a winter jacket. I've got my Richmond sweatshirt and a hat. I thought that would suffice and I could beat the cold, but I'm already losing that battle. Bender got a jacket from his boss for his birthday. Maybe I'll ask for one tomorrow. They'll probably give me a roll of toilet paper and tell me to wrap myself up.

One of the lessons last week involved naming Disney movies and since the kids weren't paying attention and probably making fun of me, I helped them out and suggested "Bambi." Bambi does not mean cute young deer in Korean, though. It means "Dung." So that was great. Sometimes I think the kids are just messing with me. I asked the Korean teachers what Bambi meant and they had no clue. Or else they were just trying to save me the embarrassment.

Bender and I went to Seoul Tower today, which is easily the most touristy thing we've done here. On the walk there, we got detoured a bit when Bender spotted a casino. So obviously we immediately went off course and headed inside. Thankfully the blackjack tables were full so I wasn't tempted. Bender, however, dropped $50 on roulette in about five minutes. The casino thanked Bender for the donation and we were back on track. Getting to Seoul Tower is a bit of a trek as you need to walk up and around a mountain for a good half hour. Not much of a problem if your body is accustomed to any kind of physical activity, but we were both ready to pass out when we reached the top. Once we got inside the tower and as the ticket lady was about to scan my ticket, the power went out. Lucky bastard. Once we got to the top of the tower, which thankfully involved no walking and just a 30 second elevator ride with about 500 Koreans, most of whom seemed to be making out, we got a stunning view of the city. I use the term stunning lightly because there's really nothing stunning about this city. Yeah, we were up high and you could see a lot of buildings and what looked like bombs going off near North Korea, it wasn't all that exciting. Plus Bender kept insisting that the tower was moving and there was a strong possibility that it would fall over at any second killing us all. The outside of the tower was much cooler because it changes colors every 30 seconds. I was fascinated but Bender kept yelling at me for taking too many pictures.

I'll probably have to work some overtime this week because the new foreign teacher is still in Japan getting his visa worked out. I'm not too bummed, though, cause I'm really enjoying the teaching at this point. Every class, even if the kids are covering my desk in chalk or pouring drinks on each other, provides me with a decent level of entertainment.

I haven't gotten a haircut in three months and while looking like homeless bum seemed kind of funny for maybe a month, it's getting out of hand now. The kids always point at me and ask, "Perm?" They are serious, though so I have to explain to them that guys do not get perms unless they are Korean. They also enjoy calling me "Ajuma" while laughing hysterically. Ajuma means old Korean woman. I guess my hair does kind of look like that, damn it. I'm afraid to go to a barber though because really, there's no way that's turning out well. Most Korean guys are rocking the mullet and that's just not something I'm going to be comfortable with. Maybe I'll just shave my head so I don't have to get a haircut for another six months. The kids would rip me apart though and I'd probably need to start seeing a therapist. Whatever, I'll figure something out.

(Photos- Erika's last night and Seoul Tower)

2006-11-30T01:42:00.000+09:00

The other day I was teaching the kids in my Beauty and the Beast class what the term "bent down" means. I did this by bending down to pick up something off the floor. Well, the kids went nuts. I thought maybe my pants had ripped or I was drooling. Turns out there was a perfectly good explanation. The word "bent" has a very similar sounding counterpart in the Korean language and the meaning of bent in Korean: panties. Yeah, so when I kept saying bent down over and over again in class, the students all heard "panties down, panties down, panties down." It took them a while to explain this to me, but when one of them went to the board, drew a pair of underwear and wrote "Lion" across them, I got the point. And then that lesson ended immediately.

I went bowling last night with my co-workers and it was awesome. There's actually two bowling alleys within a half mile of my apartment. The one we went to had 16 lanes. When I handed the cashier my sneaker, which is 10.5 American, her eyes opened wide. Well, they still weren't open because she is Asian, you know. But, um, they weren't as closed as usual? There was no one else there, really, so when I kept running down the lane and kicking things, my co-workers had to scold me. I don't what it is about bowling, but it always get me really juiced up. Maybe it's just all the horrible memories from Sparks Bowling Nights at home, where things (see Rob and see teenage girls on the lane next to us) happened that should never be spoken of again. All I know is I'm going to force Bender to bowl with me all the time, and he's gonna love it.

Tomorrow is the last day of work for three teachers in the office, including Erika. Erika's replacement is a 55-year-old American guy who seems like a decent guy, but there's always something creepy when you're 55 with no family and you've been teaching English in Asia for 12 years. My mom actually told me to take make sure he doesn't touch me inappropriately. Thanks for the advice, Mom. This guy also called me last week as I was getting on a train and he tells me he has a stock certificate that he needs mailed to a U.S. address and then sent here. Um, OK, so you'll get someone you know, a friend, a relative to take care of that, right? Yeah, no. He's now mailing this thing to my parents. My dad will probably throw it out.

I know people are worried about Bender, mainly because I said he died in my last post and because he has neglected his own blog. But let me clear this up: Bender is fine. He was never sick. He just wanted a story for his blog. So anything you read about him feeling sick or being ready to die or thinking about going home is complete b.s.

Something else I like about Korea: restaurant bills. You never need to ask for one. They are always already on the table. Whenever you order something they just add it to the bill. It eliminates the whole ask for the bill and then wait a half hour to get it nightmare. Most places also dish out free ice cream with your meal, and that is a big plus in my book.

Something weird: apparently they are no American-style parking garages in Korea. They have garages but you don't drive up them. You take an elevator. You drive your car into the elevator and it takes you up the garage. I mean, I guess I can see the point. Forget it, I can't. The elevator only fits one car at a time so if you're ever in a full garage and some concert has just ended, you're basically screwed. You might as well sleep in your car and head out the next morning.

(Photos- Erika and Lina at a bar and the city.)

2006-11-26T20:43:00.000+09:00

Bender died this weekend. I'm not certain about this, but it's the only legitimate excuse for him not sleeping on my couch. We were supposed to meet up with this Korean girl my friend Elliot from home knew from work. This was Friday night. I was pretty excited because it was Club Night and as everyone knows, I'm a huge clubber. Club Night it once a month in Hongdae, downtown where, um, all the clubs are located. It costs 15 bucks to get into a bunch of clubs and you get a free drink. Bender never made it because he was "sick". I get to the subway station at 11 and this girl, Lizzy, is already at a club. I give her a call, say I'm at the station, I need directions to the club. "Can't you just ask someone?" she says. Ok, sure. Only problem is I couldn't really hear her on the phone, she said she was at Club M?. I think there's a bunch of clubs that begin with M down there so I'm already off to a great start. I finally found a couple guys who spoke English who directed me to M2 and it then took me a good 20 minutes to get there. I'm standing outside and give Lizzy a call again, "Hey I'm outside M2, is this the right place?" "Noo, it's M-something inaudible." "Ok, I really can't hear you." At this point, I'm pretty sure she hung up on me. I send her a text message asking for the location. No response. So things were going splendidly. It's now 12:30am. The subway is closed, I'm a $20 cab ride from home and I'm by myself. So I did the obvious thing: I bought a bottle of soju and a can of pepsi from the convenience store and drank it out front. Now it's legal to walk around with alcohol in Seoul, but I learned that standing outside the mini-mart at midnight pounding a bottle of soju is not normal behavior. Everyone who walked by was laughing at me. This stopped bothering me after a few minutes, mainly because I put a dent in the soju. When I finished being weird, I walked into the nearest club. And then I danced until 5:30 a.m. I knew I was there too long when the same songs had been played three times already. Oh, I also met a German guy who makes Bender look like Gary Coleman. He was 6-7 and he could have palmed my entire body.

Last night I continued my explore Seoul on my own weekend. I went to the DragonBar around the block, where they were having a second anniversary party. Five seconds after I walked in, I was deep in conversation with three Koreans about how great video games are. In many ways, walking into parties or bars here reminds me of college. In college, everyone looked because I was that obnoxious newspaper guy who wrote about bodily functions. Here, they look because of my skin color. And just as it was in college, I have a love-hate attitude to the attention. Sometimes I revel in it and other times, I just want to be part of the crowd. Anyway, this DragonBar is like many of the bars here. It's not a normal come in order a drink and sit down kind of place. It's more of a freak show with bottles being thrown everywhere, fireworks (sparklers) being passed around, fire coming out of glasses. It's all good, except for when the bartenders are putting on this show for a half hour and it's next to impossible to get a drink. At some point during this mayhem last night, one of the bartenders put this blue drink in front of me and then everyone in the bar started looking at me and clapping. Some dude with a microphone said something about taking the drink as shot and then I'd get a prize or something. Even though the guy who had made the drink had definitely put the lemon that was now in the drink in his mouth, I couldn't turn down the challenge. So I pounded the thing, but someone said I didn't it Korean style, so I didn't get a prize, oh well. One of the Korean guys I met there kept asking me if I wanted to have a threesome. That was strange. Eventually I went to another bar with an American guy I had also met at Dragon. He came to Korea on vacation to visit his Japanese girlfriend. But when he got here, he found out she had a new job: prostitute.

(Photos- top- the bartenders at Dragon and a shot from Club Night)

2006-11-22T00:38:00.000+09:00

That's me on Monday night. There's a story to it, but it won't make it any less gay.

I have one class that has some sick fascination with the hair on my arms. They always come up to me and stroke my arm and alright, that's fine, they've never seen body hair before. But yesterday, a girl in the class starts rubbing her face on my arm as if I'm some kind of stuffed animal. This went on for a good two minutes. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to react in that situation.

I learned again today that taking pictures of Korean girls, even if they seem to be posing for them, is an awful idea. I broke out a few pictures from this club the other night while I was at work today. Two of the Korean teachers came to the club so they were in a bunch of them. The second I opened up the pictures folder, all hell broke loose. The two Koreans went nuts, yelling for me to delete them. "Oh no! My face is fat!" This girl weighs about 80 pounds. The other girl ran over to my computer and held her hand over the computer screen so no one else in the office could see them. It's so retarded. Hey, guess what, a photo captures what you look like. Everyone knows what you look like already. This isn't breaking news. I didn't run their photos through some morphing software and make them look like two-headed fat monsters. Stupid girls.

I continue to suffer traumatic abuse at the hands of preteen girls. One girl never pays attention and draws pictures all class. Of course, all of these pictures are of me. When she finishes one, she shows the class, they all laugh and then she gives it to me. Last week, she drew a picture of a girl and labeled it "Ryan's Imaginary Girlfriend." Now she's gotten even more clever and has begun writing Korean words next to the picture. This causes further anguish for me as I then must bring the picture into the office and have the Korean teachers tell me what it says. One of them today had a photo of me and some alien looking female with the words "Blind Date" written on it. Another girl in that same class said to me today, "Teacher, you're a lesbian." I'm pretty sure she doesn't understand the full meaning of that word. I told her that wasn't possible. Maybe I'll make it our discussion topic on Thursday. Can't get much worse than last week.

I'm still eating a solid two ham and cheese sandwiches a day from Mini-Stop. I have no ability to walk into a Korean restaurant and order anything unless there are well-detailed photos or English translations that make sense. Erika heads back to the US next week and that is going to force me to learn a lot more. I've done a terrible job learning Korean since I got here. I paid $40 for this software right before I came and the only thing I ever do with it is open it at work and make the Korean teachers tell me the answers to the test questions. I can't see how this is providing any benefit to me whatsoever.

Alright, I've got to get off this thing and do some research for the upcoming Christmas vacation. We get a Monday off! Bender and I are going somewhere on a hotmandatevacation and he cannot be trusted to figure out these kinds of details on his own otherwise I'm going to spend Christmas singing karaoke about 100 feet from my apartment.