Introducing ...

Now that we've got a name for him, we can do this properly.

Ladies and gentlemen (and the rest of you), I would like to introduce our pet: Kee-do!

Kee-do was the name of the student who gave Jon and I the pup. Well, it was his 'English' nickname. Call it a hybrid name, if you will. We decided that Kee-do the dog should be as much a hybrid as his puppy-hood - part Korean, part English (although he'll be trained to respond to English commands, as long as we have him. We had considered making him bilingual, but don't know much Korean ourselves ... shame, shame).

Still haven't decided for good whether or not we'll be keeping him ... as Sallianne said, it may be too late to get rid of him now! We're in love! And at 7 weeks, he can play fetch!!! He sits at my feet looking towards the spot in the kitchen where I usually throw his knotted rope dog toy. What a quick learner!

Are there any dog tricks you suggest we teach him? Or ways we can teach him to stop jumping onto a low-lying bed while we're working? :S The problems begin ...

Bus crash in downtown Seoul; business continues as usual

With a few small variations, Jon and I take the same route to work every day (ok, now that we've got the puppy, it's more like three or four times a day). We walk down the hill from our apartment, make a right down one street or the next and eventually weave our way to the main street, Road 41. Here, we walk towards one of the zebra-stripe crosswalks, wait until we have the right of way, cross the five lanes to the median, then the other five lanes to the other side of the street. It takes about 5 minutes - double that if we get a red light, even if we're late, because jaywalking in Korea is a mighty dangerous thing.

Interesting that motorists don't have the same respect for a pedestrian's right of way.

It's not uncommon in Gangnam - or elsewhere in Seoul - for a car to run a red light, be it accelerating through an intersection to avoid a long stop, rolling through the crosswalk during a red and before pedestrians are able to cross, or, like many motorcyclists do, anticipating the green far in advance. Heck, the fact that taxi drivers careen through red lights at 130 km/h in the evenings is celebrated because it keeps the fares low. Absolutely terrifying.

There are, obviously, many reasons for this. As many students have told me, the police presence in Seoul is pitiful. In addition, it is tedious to wait for a mass of unorganized pedestrians to cross 10 lanes of traffic and filter through an equally large group of people approaching from the opposite direction. Traffic is generally revolting - especially in Gangnam - and the temptation to get around a massive bus early in the green light race is very great. This is especially true for motorcyclists, who are the most vulnerable - and dangerous - motorists in the area, travelling along crosswalks and sidewalks as often as the road in order to get through the city faster and more safely. It's better to run down and terrify a pedestrian than to be hit by a bus, is it not?

Jon and I stood across the street from these pedestrians, and the buses crashed into each other in the foreground of this photo. Wish we'd had our camera on hand to give a real idea of what happened!

Standing at the zebra crossing, Jon and I heard a useless honk before the crash. A blue bus had crashed into a red one in the middle of the pedestrian-only zone. The red one had been trying to avoid a motorcyclist who - we can only presume - had anticipated the red and made a u-turn in front of the bus from either the oncoming direction or from the sidewalk. The motorcyclist was unharmed, if a little stunned, and the bus passengers seemed just fine. The tough old red bus suffered a dented bumper, but the blue city bus suffered a broken headlight and a badly smashed windshield.

And we still needed to cross the street.

So, after gasping in tune with our Korean crosswalk crew and wispering a few words of shock, we did what all others had to do. Cross the street. Mind you, we didn't walk through the one-foot gap between the buses as dozens of Korean businessmen and shoppers tried. That crash site was a bottleneck of pedestrian traffic littered with glass. Rather, we crossed far in front of the accident with the rest of our posse, leaving the bus drivers to have it out with one another. The motorcyclist, a tanned and wrinkled man of middling age, sat on his bike, stunned.

Our students were unfazed by the news that two buses had crashed a short walk from The School. Teachers, too, seemed unfazed. And when we walked home from work over eight hours later, across that same zebra crossing, we still noticed some glass underfoot.

Thank goodness we can't drive here!

A final note to my dad: if you do take your bike worldwide, don't ever come to Korea. The driving really is terrible.

Biculturalism

For those who are interested, here's a neat link about the synonimity of culture and language, and how it changes personality:

A split in linguistic personalities, by Colleen Ross (a CBC Radio producer in T.O.). In her article, she argues that a person's personality is dominated by the language that they speak. Those who learn more than one language also develop more than one personality, which can develop into an internal identity struggle (for the linguistically gifted, of course. Ross herself is trilingual).

Now, it may not be the best article out there, but Ross's personal examples are probably helpful to one linguistic theory or another.  If you've got a few extra minutes, it might be worth your time to browse readers' comments.

Enjoy!

More pictures!

Some more photos of the puppy and what we do during our short-short weekends!  That's right, we're working on Sundays this month, so this may be my our post until next Saturday.

Jon and pup in the evening - he's only this sweet when we've woken him from his mid-morning nap or just after he's fallen asleep after midnight.

He's rarely this sweet, really. This is a good one chosen from many, many pictures that didn't work out.

Can't you see it in his eyes?  This little guy wants to see the world!  And who are we to stop him?  That, or he doesn't want us to leave him here.  I guess we won't go to Japan next weekend after all ...

Visited the new Hard Rock in Itaewon this evening for dinner at the request of a student of mine (his English name is Larry) who works there part time.  We could see this neat drum display pretty clearly from our very cool table - which was actually an enormous couch stretching the length of a huge wall and jutting forward far enough for us to stretch our legs out comfortably.  It felt more like eating dinner in bed than at a restaurant, even when the mediocre American rock band started their set.

Larry and I near the stage, after a huuuuge dinner of protein on a bun (with fries on the side).  At Larry's recommendation, I ordered a delicious pulled-pork sandwich (the pork was Chilean) that had been tossed in a fruity syrup.  Jon ordered the famous Legend Burger - a massive bacon cheeseburger (beef was from New Zealand, not the US).  We then gave into temptation and topped off our meal with a brownie sundae - delicious, but not guilt-free: I still wonder if Larry will slot me into his mind as yet another greedy westerner.  Ah, it's tough to escape the stereotypes!

Until next week: cheerio!

Down Home (Korean) Cookin'

Pay day took forever to arrive.  We had spent money as we needed in order to get through the tough early days, eating out often and buying a few things that would last the year; gym memberships, a table and two chairs, basic kitchen equipment and our cell phones.  We had put in the work to compensate for our spending, but had no money to compensate us for our work.  Phone calls were made home (at least on my end) to forewarn that help might be needed - how embarrassing! - and new friends were notified that our ability to join them on the weekends was unfortunately curtailed.

[Enter: Puppy.]

The Unnamed One: I want to play play play!  Yes!  She's wearing those big grey curtain bottoms!  I can follow her around and eat them while she walks!  How fun!

[Unnamed One licks Arla's pants, begins to eat them while she's making a late dinner.  She walks away while the Unnamed One continues to chew her pants, sending him flying across the smooth wood floor. This repeats nightly.]

Staying home instead of joining our bubbly (and some not-so-sociable) coworkers was easier done with an excuse to stay close to home.  We told Jon's parents, Sallianne and Dale that this puppy might even save us money.  Scoff.  I told my parents, Rick and Judy, that we might save money this way because we'd be less likely to eat out for lunch and dinner.  Got a pair of reserved nods, a shrug.

Well we may not have saved a whole whack of money so far, but we've been able to pursue other interests (reading fiction, mainly) while experiencing Korean culture on the cheap, and at home with the pup.

[Enter: Korean cookbook]

We began with the basics: rice=based dishes with enough new veg to make it feel authentic.  We were also hoping that the ingredients for a traditional dish would be local and reltively cheap.  A quick trip to the discount goods/food chain store, E-mart, was incredibly successful thanks in no small part to the sample ladies dotted around the store.  I would walk up to these grumpy hagima (middle-aged, often working, women) with my little shopping list, smile shyly as if I had interrupted something private and important, and continue a conversation like this:

Arla: Um ... door-a-jee?

[Hagima looks confused.  Arla points to the word, written in romanized letters, repeats the question.]

Arla: Door-a-jee?

[Lightbulb goes off in the mind of the hagima]

Hagima: Ah, doraji!

[Hagima runs off to another area of the produce section.  Arla tries to scurry behind her without bumping into another shopper's misplaced cart or hitting anybody's elbow.  The hagima speaks quickly to the woman working the open deli-type counter, instructs her to give me a certain amount of what I want - a soaking wet mound of purple-ish sea roots, also known as bellflower root - and the rest is completed with nods and smiles].

Welcome to my world as a slow-speaking, illiterate waygook among a sea of quick-talking, shopping-savvy Koreans.  Luckily for Jon and I, we don't mind smiling like fools and saying thank you, kahamnasida (pron: kam-na-say-e-da), at all the wrong moments ...

Bibimbap, our first rice-based dish, was a success!  After over an hour slicing beef, various types of marinated mushrooms, bracken (gosari), that weird bellflower root, cucumber, egg yolk and egg white into match-sized strips, and frying each ingredient separately in our only frying pan, we could sit down to enjoy our mock-gourmet feast!

The ingredients, clockwise from the yellow egg yolk: doraji, beef, egg white, shiitake mushroom, cucumber, gosari, and manna lichen mushrooms (seokyi beoseot) sitting atop a bed of rice and a dollop of chili paste.  Yummy!!!  So healthy and so tasty!  If I can find the ingredients back home, I'll make it for everyone!!!

The revolving doors

The revolving door is both reality and obvious metaphor here at The School.

Students sail through one of the two circular things on their way to and from class.  Teachers must do the same, as does upper management.  It's a one-at-a-time process, unless a couple is silly enough to squish together and shuffle through at a snail's pace, causing many to scoff and enter or exit through the other door.

From what The School's recruiter had told us, the company depends on a high volume of students to make its profit.  Apparently, the government has capped what a hagwon (English language school) can charge students - $6 per 50-minute lesson.  Given its prime location in Seoul, the operating costs of the air conditioner in the dead of summer and the huge volume of free food and School-brand gifts, the school needs the doors to keep turning from morning to night.  And they do.

It's not only the students flowing through these doors.  Teacher turnover in this industry is incredibly high - and, if anything, seems lower at The School than at other hagwons.  While some teachers have taught here for four to five years - some are married or engaged to a Korean - others, like ourselves, only intend on staying for the duration of our one-year contract.  June through August are holiday months for Korean university students, and are consequently The School's busiest training/teaching months.

There's a simultaneous purge at the other end of the contract.  At least three teachers left the school at the end of last month, necessitating combined going-away events.  True to Korean corporate style, drinking into the wee hours is the best way to go out with a bang!

So out we went to a going away costume party with a latin theme - a cross-dressing Shakira greeted us alongside our host, a proud Matador, and various other characters using the costume party as an excuse to showcase their favourite physical attributes (modesty was not the order of the day).  

Known for hosting such extravagant going away parties, The Matador in an apartment overlooking the American army base in Itaewon, at the centre of the city.  I tried to sneak a peek over the wall of the base - after a few drinks I even walked up to the brick wall and jumped a foot or so in the air to try and see over the top of it - but to no avail.  Lights were off and nobody on patrol. I shouldn't have been surprised.  If I had stopped for a moment beforehand to consider the stagnant presence of the US in Korea, I would have expected - in the most exciting scenario - a parking lot.  All presence and patrol - no real action.

As my high school French teacher used to admit, I digress.  If you would like to read news regarding ongoing Korea-US relations, check out the Korea Herald.  Top story of the day: "Bush arrives in Seoul: accompanying security forces outnumber ongoing Army presence" (Kidding, kidding ...)

Ah yes, the party ... the party moved to a local bar in Itaewon, Bar Nana.  Low lighting and deep red walls created a cozy atmosphere that made most teachers feel comfortable sitting cross-legged on dirty pillows.  The smoke was inescapable, and the music turned up too loud in order to compensate for an otherwise empty bar.  The vets among us seemed to fit right in, chain-smoking and shouting as if they'd done so each weekend since they'd arrived.

The following week was the last full week for Liz (American?), the only black teacher in the school.  A vivacious woman, I think that she was a force of social change in Korea, where (I've heard) people with dark skin are often dismissed as inferior to Koreans, considered theives, and sometimes even feared.

A 5-year veteran, Jodey, has moved onto teaching business English at a nearby university after putting in far too many hours at The School.  Two weeks after his final working day, he was still interviewing new students, advising new teachers, and spending most of his days in the teachers' lounge.  Must be hard for him to adjust to a quieter, more serious working environment.

The bad news came at the beginning of the week: Irish John, a tall, gay and eccentric English major got a call from home, telling him that his ill father had taken a turn for the worse.  He flew home the following day, skipping the last few classes of the month in order to be with his father.  We found out the next day that John's father had died while he was on the plane home. Rob, a teacher seven months into his term, broke the news quietly and sincerely (having lost his father only a few months prior, I believe) to teachers and managers. I don't expect to see John at The School again.

So, for better or for worse, seniority at The School is relatively easy to come by.  I recognize a certain frantic look on the faces of new teachers - even those who have already taught elsewhere - and am learning the names of new coworkers alongside the names of this month's batch of students.  I have a few students in my classes for a second month, know that others have also re-enrolled, and have caught word about which teachers are leaving at the end of August.  It's no wonder that The School invests heavily in marketing and teacher recruitment, trying to make sure that there is a replacement for each student and teacher that walks out its revolving doors.

Let's see it!

A few pictures ...

First off, I've posted a larger version of the blog photo to your right.  Taken right behind The School, I think it shows Gangnam's nightlife well - one that doesn't reserve fun for the weekends!  This is a street that is home almost exclusively to bars, restaurants and convenience stores.  I don't think that I'll ever have the time (or money) to try it all, but it's great fun to be in one of Seoul's several entertainment districts.

The second photo is a quick glimpse of our flat: newly renovated and modern.  Great glass doors to divide the kitchen/bathroom and bedroom/office/living area.  Is now much messier than when this photo was taken, since we've little furniture to store our things in.

Third is a shot of the street we work on, Road 41, which runs north to south.  Four car lanes in each direction, with at least one bus lane on either side as well.  A long wait to cross the street with hundreds of other Koreans (and a few waygook-in, or "foreigner people").

The next photo was taken in our favourite cafe, Paris Croissant. Pastries comparable to the real Parisian stuff - incredible!  Despite what the open umbrellas would indicate, it wasn't raining when I took this shot.  I've been very impressed with umbrella usage here - they're used for heavy rain, light rain, as parasols and to win some extra space on the crowded sidewalks.  Just watch out for pointy metal bits at eye-level!

More photos to come!

Just testing a new Post method

Please ignore this post!  Thank you!

Korean Food Culture and the Unnamed One

So, the first month here at The School has finally come to an end. It was hectic and confusing with more to learn in a short period of time than I've ever experienced, both during and outside of work.

Like I might have mentioned, the challenges began on the first day, when we taught 7 hours of class after our brief training: sitting in on 2 hours of classes taught by new teachers. We picked up where substitute teachers had left off, found out days later that we needed to have completed a syllabus within three days and submitted it to our managers, that we needed a name tag (and still don't have one) and just winged it from beginning to end. Over the month, we've learned that most teachers wing it in SLE (Speaking, Listeneing, Expression) classes, because there is no homework to assign and because there are few lesson plans to complete (The School recommends working out of the textbook). But at first, we had put a lot of pressure on ourselves.

After settling into our routine a bit, we've voluntarily thrown a wrench into the works. We've rescued / adopted / begun fostering a puppy. The funny thing is that to explain our reasoning, I have to start with Korea's food culture.

Korea's food culture has changed dramatically since the country began to develop rapidly in the 1980s. Nowadays, young Koreans eat yougurt for breakfast, a sandwich or spicy chicken dish for lunch (often with rice, of course), and something similar for dinner. And always with kimchi, a spicy appetizer of pickled cabbage. Costco is busy, the E-Mart department store used to be owned by Wal-Mart, Starbucks is absolutely everywhere (although declining sales have caused it to shut some stores) and pizza is a big hit. Jon and I have even found some of our favourites - a certain kind of granola, a specific type of yougurt - more available in shops here than at home.

But not all Koreans have changed their dietary habits. We sampled dried minnows in E-Mart last weekend, I knawed on chicken neck when out to dinner with a student, and I've begun to realize that kimchi is omnipresent. Universally linked to celebration, some foods are eaten at a certain time of year. This past week, from July 28 to 30, marked the three hottest days of the year. The appropriate food for this fest? Dog. Mixed breed only, please.

Conveniently, we met our little mutt on the first day of this festival. One month old and weighing under 800g, he had been brought into one of Jon's classes in a plastic bag by Kiddo, a student. Puppy had been a gift between a couple he knew. The couple soonafter broke up and Kiddo was charged with finding a home for the little guy. Not exactly an animal person, Kiddo was en route from picking him up and on his way to the gym, where he was going to put the pup in a locker while he worked out. Yikes!

So, after class, Jon brought Kiddo and the pup to our apartment. He handed me the puppy, all smiles, and asked me a few times, "What do you think?" I was confused until Kiddo walked into the kitchen with a food dish and some kibble. Clearly, we were keeping him.

We have since done all the new-parent things: taking lots of pictures, telling all our students about it, and waking up in the night to calm the crying little guy. We've also realized some constraints that we face - work being far from the most major concern. With broken up shifts, our jobs are actually quite good for this sort of situation, with one or two hours between 3-hour teaching blocks. Neither should our desire to travel be a problem: with lots of teachers living nearby and some sorely missing their own animals, we have volunteer dog-sitters. There are also pet hotels nearby which, although a bit expensive, might be a great option for when we take a longer vacation.

Now that both his body and his voice have begun to grow (within days we've seen lots of change) our most major concern is our living quarters, and whether this is suitable for an energetic dog.

Living in a nice little studio apartment, we have a lot of space for a little pup. By the time he is full-grown, our flat will be relatively small. We have yet to find whether we can keep an animal in the building, although students have suggested that quiet pets are tolerated. I'm not so certain that we'll qualify.

So now we have to make a difficult decision - and soon. Option 1: we find him a home with a dog-friendly family very quickly so that he can adjust to a new living situation at a young age. We will be lonely without him, but free to move around and keep our cash from the pet hotels. Option 2: we follow through with our commitment to keep the dog and stick close to home (for the mostpart). We get a barking collar for him to reduce his barking while we're at work, and bring him home with us to Canada, which should be no problem - $30 plus proof of rabies shots in English is all we need.

Will let you know what we choose to do ... advice and recommendations are welcome!!!