Profile #3:
this is shjon. it's pronounced shawn. when we got our bank cards the bank teller had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to pronounce his name just based on what it looks like. shjon's from portland oregon. he's crazy about koreans, and he'd love to get a korean girlfriend. i saw some koreans staring at him in the elevator. i think it's because he's 6'3, and western. they don't stare at me as much because i'm 5'6 and i have black hair and brown eyes.

shjon was the first western teacher i met when i came here. or as i affectionately refer to every foreigner, wiguk. i heard shjon can left 1000lbs. actually, i don't have a lot of anecdotes about shjon at the moment, so i need to make things up. and today is 'nice' day. i just decided that, so i can't say anything bad about anyone. ooo, here's something. shjon has a mac laptop, and his ipod is not compatible with my pc laptop.

shjon is telling me some new things to say about him. he played college football, he was in the marine corps, and other stuff. horray.

profile #2

This is michelle, she is the other half of the dynamic duo. michelle and Rebecca were friends back in Niagara falls, and they worked in Korea together last year. Michelle is generally the instigator that gets Rebecca to do the stupid things when they’re drunk. Michelle is like me in that she doesn’t know how to control her facial expressions all the time. It’s particularly funny when she runs into a bad smell, she starts doing kung fu moves on it. She’s also like me in that she’s a vegetarian too.

Michelle has an identical twin. However, they’re apparently quite different. It’s funny how it works out.

Michelle brought her dog, dexter, here to Korea. It’s a real brat that will not stop wrestling with you, and it likes smelling guy’s pants for some reason. Not the crotch, just a pant leg. The one time dexter got in the apartment hallway and he ran into someone’s room. The dude was apparently pissed off, but you really shouldn’t leave your door propped open in case a dog runs in.

Michelle really likes dill pickles.

so here's the setup,
i work with other teachers. and now i can introduce you with this crazy invention called the in-ter-net. and another invention called a kam-er-ra.
so i'll introduce one teacher at a time, starting with...

Rebecca


Rebecca sits right beside me. The Korean kids call her robocop. Actually, there are no kids around, so that's not true. Rebecca taught here in Korea last year. Her, and another teacher here have a lot of funny drunk stories. such as the time she put a chopstick down some tough dudes pants, and she had to hide in a restaurant kitchen from him for about an hour, or the time she rang a doorbell in italy at 4am and when went to run away she thought she could fly and she just jumped on the pavement pretending she was superman.

she's really funny. i can't get enough of how she says 'ya, i know'. i'm gonna record it. she's also the head foreign teacher here. and that's rebecca.

MARY CHRISTMAS!!!
(bad korean translation)

So i chilled with brayden christmas eve. i knew him from york, and he's teaching in korea too. this was our tree.


awesome.


you adopt friends quickly when you're in a foreign country. i adopted brayden's friends. we went to TGI friday's and i got a loaded baked potato. and i made sure there was no meat. and then they brought it out with bacon bits. and i sent it back. it's too bad korean's don't really understand vegetarianism. they scraped the bacon bits off, although there was clearly still bacon bits all around it. ugh.

and here's the best, on christmas day a bunch of us teachers were supposed to meet at a buffet for dinner. of course it was a seafood buffet. me and this other vegetarian teacher opted out.


christmas day in the morning was good though. i went for a really long walk, and it was amazing. there were speakers setup out front of a number of shops and they had dance music playing and girls dancing, and talking into microphones advertising for the store. and i found it hard to keep the smile from my face. it was so funny. and i decided at one point to buy a bunch of socks and candy to give to the other teachers as stockings. i figured it would be a nice gesture, especially considering that we're all far from family.

and that was my christmas.


oh, and here's the extent of the graffitti i've found in korea.

i'd just like to take a break from korea for a moment and say that this was one of the funniest bathroom writing conversations i saw. it was at york university. i'd just like to add someone else wittingly responded to it by writing, 'wouldn't you have a serious shitting problem, not a fucking one?'

in other news, i need to go on a photo hunt taking pictures of all the corporate art, and the best konglish. i'll post it when i got it.

My Apartment...



this is my entrace.

this is basically my room, and all there is to it.


this is my kitchen which opposite my bed.

and this is the bathroom. look , the sink is in the shower. i now brush my teeth while i shower.

and this is just one little pic of my area. it's ridiculous big and packed full of everything. and i swear it's gonna take me the whole time i'm here just to discover all my neighbourhood.

The wonderful world of internet connections. Me and the internet have this fun game. I can’t get the internet in my apartment, but I can get it just sitting right outside the apartment.

Apartment pictures…

(gah, they'll come later... they're not load very good. that goes for all the other pictures too)

Oh right, guess what, it just snowed in Ilsan! It’s so beautiful, and so cold, and I don’t want to sit outside for too long.

I went for a walk the other day to find out where I could get an internet signal. I ended up sitting just outside a church at 7am. Finally when I was done internetting, I decided to go inside the church to check it out.

Church….

funny thing, I should’ve just went inside to begin with. It was comfortable and warm, and probably the biggest fanciest church I’ve ever seen. No joke. This thing had an escalator leading to the sanctuary that was probably 50-75metres. It had its own cafeteria, and a ton of other rooms that would’ve got me lost if I explored. It looked almost like an office building with a cross on top from the outside. I think the web address is www.bethel.co.ko I went to the 10am service. There is a headphone piece that you can pick up that has a translator speak into it. You go into the church and they show you where to sit, and pack you in good. I didn’t exactly like it, but then I realized why they needed to. The church gets completely filled. Every seat! There’s even people standing in a glass room at the back with their kids, and probably people sitting in the cafeteria listening to the sermon there too. I did a quick count/estimate and I think there is seating for at least 1500 people. It was ridiculous.

Bargain hunting…

After church I walked a LOT. I walked to Emart, which is the walmart equivalent I guess. I wanted to buy a printer, and the cheapest they had was 40,000 won. (conversion tip: think of that as $40.00 american) so I asked for that one, but they only had the display model. And then it was funny trying to arrange the sale when his English sucked, and my Korean is non-existant. He got the box out and everything, and was getting ready to sell it to me, but he kept trying to convince me that it wouldn’t be a good buy because the ink had been sitting too long, and maybe it would be frozen, and stuff like that. Eventually, I just decided not to get it. Then for the next 3 or 4 hours I walked around looking for a guitar store. I stopped and asked any western looking person I saw if they knew where one was, and finally I found one. John helped me out. I bought one from a couple that didn’t speak any English at all. And I inadvertently bartered for it. I got it for 95,000 won. And now I feel comfortable being here, because I have a guitar. Oh, and the other thing I found is a pizza hut right outside my apartment. And the only thing that was strange about my pizza was the potato wedges on it, which weren’t too bad. And it was only 5,000 won. So I think I might have pizza once or twice a week. It lasts 2 or 3 days anyway.

And those are my adventures so far. Oh, and the cross walks are really annoying. They leave pedestrians standing there for forever! And I’m not sure if this one dude was a really bad driver, or if they’re allowed to turn left on a red. And also, they have cross walks, but I don’t think drivers stop for them, so you kinda have to wait til it’s clear, and then run across.

The next blog I’ll make it a full fledged picture blog. Regretfully I don’t have pictures of strange Koreans because a) I don’t think I could ask to take pictures of them, and b) there aren’t really any strange Koreans. They all try to dress really nice. There isn’t even any grafitti anywhere. I did see a dog with it’s ears dyed blue though. And I saw the saddest looking homeless person. He was laying down on a rolling cart that was about 6 inches high, and he shuffled around with his arms on the ground. There are also plenty of military people around. I guess there’s a military base nearby. I’m in a city called Ilsan which happens to be right on the border between North and South Korea. I’m not too worried, I figure they wouldn’t want to bomb anywhere so close to them, it’d affect them too. Here’s something about ilsan, I haven’t actually read it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilsan

If it didn’t say it in that little write up, you should know that Seoul’s subway system is extended to Ilsan, however I was told that it’d take about an hour to get to downtown Seoul. So that’s that.

I walked around, and I wrote a list of things to comment on.

Mean girls…

I was told that because of the loose copyright laws they sometimes use some western images without care. For example, there was a blown up image from the cover of the movie ‘Mean Girls’ used out front of a strip club.

Smoking…

There are also no laws prohibiting smoking that I know of. So far I’ve only seen one restaurant with no smoking signs, and they had to draw them themselves. This is something that really really sucks. Although, interestingly girls generally don’t smoke in public. Someone told me that he once saw a girl have a cigarette ripped from her mouth by a strange because she was smoking in public.

Water…

Apparently I’m not supposed to drink the water.

Walking across the street…

I still haven’t figured out when I’m supposed to cross the street in some places. I guess I’ll just follow everyone else. But so far my impression is that Korean drivers are a little crazy, and traffic is ridiculous.

Singing…

Koreans love singing. I’ve seen at a couple different Koreans just singing outloud as they walked. And they don’t care if they’re out of tune.

there's too many of these personal 'expression' type of sites.
this one(blogspot)
livejournal
facebook(which can sound like facefuck if the wrong person is saying it)
myspace
msn space
youtube(if you're a video poster)
purevolume(which is strictly for music)
plentyoffish(for dating)
flickr

ugh

it's so hard to keep up with the trend on this stupid internet thing.

as a sidenote, i've realized that facebook is probably the best one for uploading images so far.

guess what! i rediscovered what my user name and password were for this blog. now i can actually write on it again.

i had a lot of fleeting thoughts that i intended to post before. but fleeting thoughts are rather fleeting. so now they're just relegated to that world that thoughts fill in their free time with while they wait to be discovered again.

i will say this, i just finished reading Maus. it's a quick read as most graphic novels are. and i don't think i've been affected like that by a book before. maybe i should read more.

Maus is a true story about nazi germany as retold by a jewish survivor that went through some of the worst of it. it is from the point of view of the comic artist interviewing his father, the survivor, about his experiences. the jews are drawn with mice heads, the germans with cat heads, the poles with pig heads, the one french guy had a frog head, and i saw a couple of british with fish heads, and some americans with dog heads.

A couple things really stuck in my head. One was a scene describing how the nazi's took jewish children often around 2 or 3 years old by the ankles and swung their heads into walls so they would cry no more. Another scene that really got me was the father describing how he got typhus. and many many others got it too. he would have to go to the bathroom all the time, and there would always be people lined up, and the halls were piled with the dead. he would slip his footsteps over the slick heads of the dead piled so high. and he would be sleeping next to the dead. and it was the absolute base of human existance just looking to survive when even stumbling over the dead becomes happenstance.
i want to do something, but i don't know what exactly. these events happened over 50 years ago, but there's still shit constantly going on. there's statistics like 33% of the world does not even have a clean source of water, and 50% is malnourished.

sorry, i didn't mean to be so heavy.