A quick fix for coffee, boos, and dare I say, cigarettes

Caution 1, Take 1

Well things are getting habitual. My routine is simple. I wake up at nine, brush my teeth, eat cereal, take a shower, watch Korean television, and write up my lesson plans. Lately, I have been writing a lot of poetry. It tends to be pretty bad, mainly because it drips with sentiment. This weekend I went into Seoul to try to find a coffee grinder. It was a shot in the dark and lady luck was not on my side. I searched the underground COEX for two hours. The COEX is this giant monstrosity that is far too large to be called a mall. I am unsure what to call it, but I like the behemoth. In it you can find your heart’s desire, whether that’s Gucci, Prada, electronics, or overpriced aquariums. Asian capitalism feels a little different than American capitalism. In America, we binge on quantity, buying as much as we can as quickly as we can. In Asia, capitalism has a glisten, an uber clear sheen of style, efficiency, efficacy, and utter misinformed modernism. Money is spent, but it’s spent for status. I don’t know, this is a little too philosophical for my tastes, but I woke up early, so my brain is kind of working through this tangent.
I really miss good coffee. It’s slowly eating away at me. I am planning to go to Costco to get some whole beans and some loose leaf tea. For now, I have been surviving on the premium roast of Dunkin Donuts. Unfortunately, I believe I can only hold out for another week. My friend assures me Costco has whole beans, so for now I wait. On the day after Christmas I got food poisoning. It was fun. I threw up and did some other things which will not be discussed. Classes are going well. Their fairly mundane. There’s not really too much to report. Seoul’s subway system is incredible and it really makes me want to live in a city where public transportation is king.
On Christmas when I was riding the subway down to Suwon I met not one but three drunken Korean men. They stared politely, smiling as if I were something bright and shiny from the candy store. Often they shake their heads and laugh saying where are you from? I tell them I am American. They laugh and speak Korean. I don’t understand. But it provides for interesting side into the world of Lost in Translation alla Bill Murray. Alas, I think I am too young for that pony. Anyways things are good and I hope all is well, peace in the land of the enchanted.

Erik

The world of the meta-competative

Well, what do you get when you cross protestant competition with eastern discipline?  Why, it can only be the meta-competative.  In college we all went through competitions with classmates.  Whether we were film students, history students, or literature students we all wanted the best grade on that paper, project, or dissertation we worked oh so hard on.  But in Korea this friendly academic competition is taken to a new extreme.  Recently, in all of my classes, I have introduced a point system for participation.  Before going on let me explain it to you.  Each time a student participates I give them a point.  If they give me the correct answer I give that student another point.  This system works great because it gets the students interested in class and keeps them engaged with the material.  Up til now, I have given the top student 20 CDI points and the second place student 10 CDI points.  This system has worked, but I also feel it has its draw backs.  My students are now point hounds.  They will do anything to get a point.  This leaves me a little disturbed and I want to find a way to turn back the hyper competative nature of my classroom.  Any thoughts?

On another note,  I have read four books in the past two weeks.  It has been a little extreme, but with no television my only option is to read.  The first book I read was William Gibson’s Iidoru.  This was an interesting cyber thriller that I greatly enjoyed.  It raises some great questions about technology, cyberreality, and that dreaded word, simulation that I would greatly enjoy discussing.  I also recently read the Savage Detectives.  This book is devastatingly good, so good I may reread one more time just to pick up on the things I missed.  Roberto Belano is a godsend and definitely one of the best contemporary writers.  The other book I read, and be forewarned, I am ashamed to admit it, but I reread The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  C.S. Lewis, where to start, he is creepy and his Christian leanings greatly disturb me.  In rereading the story I felt on every page he was surreptitiously and deviously pushing his Christian agenda on to the impressionable minds of young children.  Now, I don’t want to sound too harsh, but I would like to make a comparison.  Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is unashamedly atheistic.  However, unlike C.S. Lewis, it does not hide it in fantasty and mysticism, he lets the reader know that he is battling against the pitfalls of the catholic church.   On the other hand, C.S. Lewis has little aphoristic moral lessons that each of the children learn in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  This lessons initially come off as quaint, but when looked at more thoroughly it readily becomes apparent that C.S. Lewis is trying to push a deeply Christian agenda onto the young minds of children.  As a final thought I would like to say that I am torn in making this post.  I greatly enjoyed the Lord of the Rings trilogy and this was a series that had some huge Christian overtones.  This may mean I am a hypocrite, but I still feel like C.S. Lewis is doing something different.  The last book I read was Nabokov’s Pale Fire.  And I am going to leave it at that.  I think I read this book just to say I read it.  I am not proud of that fact, and I couldn’t offer you anything more.  It was confusing, boring, and not nearly as enjoyable as Lolita.

Finally, update about this weekend.  I went into Seoul and hung out in the Hong Dei University district.  It was a good time and I greatly enjoyed it.  I also did some other illicit activities, but I will keep those veiled until the next post.  I hope all is well and I hope I did not bore you too much with my rant about the books I have recently read.

Adventure and the loss of innocence…

Well my second week in Korea has gone much better than my first.  On Tuesday  my classes went really well.  My kids were participating, they were laughing, and they, as remarkable as it sounds, were having fun.  Before going on with this post I think it would be good to give you a break down of my classes.  My first class is EC-3 or English Chip 3.  They range from young kindergartners to third and fourth graders.  Each class  we read from a story book called the missing coins.  This story, in my opinion, is kind of boring and not very much fun.  In the story a shopkeeper loses a set of coins.  Are you titillated yet?  Two students traveling come across the shop keeper and help him solve the mystery of the missing coins.  If your interest is aroused my hat goes off to you?  The story bores the crap out of me and my students. I try to make the class more lively through dumb games, word associations, and spelling races.  This often works and I think my students are starting to expect a game every day at the end of class.   My second class is bridge.  Bridge is your standard language class.  We read a passage, discuss it, etc.   My students are mostly middle schoolers and they’re going through that awkward stage of self discovery.  Most of them don’t talk and I am left drifting alone in awkward silence.  On Tuesday I told my students I would fail them if they didn’t participate.  This livened them up a bit and we began to talk about EPL.  This was very exciting and I found out that none of my students like Manchester United.  Hell yeah.  There isn’t very much else that has happened this week.  Last night I went out with some American and English chaps and drank a little.  We talked about Spaced, british television, and recreational drug use.  It was stimulating conversation.  This weekend I plan on going to a Buddhist temple to get my Zen on. WOOT WOOT…..

Well I’m here

The adventure of korea is ongoing and constantly changing.  I am adjusting to the challenges of being a teacher, a foreigner, and a walking sign of Americanness.  So far, I have only met my fellow teachers.  They are nice, driven, and very helpful.  I have had only one drunken foray, and that was relatively uneventful.  It involved the movie; True Romance, starring Christian Slater, Derryl Hanna, and a whole multitude of cameos; a few bottles of soo ju and me, revealing deep, personal, intimate secrets about my love of comic books and bruce lee films.  True Romance was not a good film, but the others I was watching with disagreed.  They believed this film to be paramount cinema lexicon.   I disagreed, but kept my mouth shut, sipping my soo ju as I slowly drifted into the beginning ebbs of drunkeness.  I know this sounds dull, but things have been relatively uneventful.  I am tight on funds at the current moment, so I am tracking every won I spend.   Each day I wake up, put on my running shoes and my awkardly high running shorts, and go for a run along the streets of gimpo.  As I run past koreans gawk at my pasty white legs and car drivers make it there vendetta to run me over.  The weather yesterday was nice, rainy and cold.  It was a nice transition from the hazed, brown tinted skies that have been populating my first few days in Seoul.  I have not ventered into the big cit yet.  I have plans to do so this weekend.  Unfortunately these plans pend on me deciphering the Korean bus system.  The Korean bus system is a huge challenge.   It is a labyrinth, born in the fiery pits of Mordor, and I am terrified to use it because a) I do not speak a lick of Korean and b) I don’t have any acquaintances at the current moment who can help me navigate this vast, incredible puzzle.  Until my next post I hope all is well, and I apologize for the lack of pictures.  I left my digital camera at home, and will not be acquiring until after my first pay check.  Good Luck and Never Surrender.  Erik, over and out.

The adventure begins…

I would like to begin this post with a quote.  Unfortunately, I am too lazy to look up a quote.  So, I will quote a stanza from one of my favorite poems by W.B. Yeats.

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

I know this sounds rather depressing, but it seemed strangely appropriate.  I am teetering right now and my nerves are ringing so loudly I believe I can feel my ear drums begin to bleed.  Yeats he is a fun one, but lets get more to the point.  I am about to step into a new country, begin a new life, and I must say I have absolutely know idea what to expect.  I have been out of the country before.  This, however, feels different.  I am teaching, I am working, and I am not a student.  My excitement is definitely there, but my worries are also great.  I would love some reassurance, but since this is my first post I am fully aware that this will get lost in the grey duldrums of internet chatter.