Winter's End and New Beginnings

Well the winter term is coming to an end, and it’s been an interesting with new people arriving and old people leaving. This past weekend was Alex’s two co-workers going away party and it;s sad because they're some of the first people we met here. But this is the nature of working in Korea; people do go home. It’s crazy because these people are going home and they have no idea what they are going to do. This has to be a scary thought because I don’t know if the economy has gotten any better. Hopefully, by next February the job market will have gotten better.

Although people have been leaving we’ve still managed to do some interesting things around here. A few weekends ago Alex and I went to a Dr. Fish café. For those who don’t know Dr. Fish are little fish that eat dead skin. It was definitely an experience. The first few minutes are weird because visually there are a billion fish going to town on your feet, and after a while it feels good. Now, I don’t know if there are any health benefits to it; we just went because we thought it would be fun and it only cost 2 dollars for 20 minutes. But afterwards, your feet feel amazing. The cheapest foot massage you’ll ever get. We also dedicated this night to our friend Dinkin, who left us (you suck if you are reading this) because he lived in that area, and we went to his favorite bar “Hollywood” and had a white Russian for him.

Also this past week was Valentine’s Day and we went “Mr. Pizza,” which is an upscale pizza chain that’s slogan is “Health for Women.” Not really healthy, but kind of funny and really good weird pizza. We had a shrimp, crab, potato, and chicken pizza. Everything but the potato was really good. Actually potato pizza is really common and big here, so is corn in the pizza. The funniest thing that happened there was 80% of the people there were women, and when I stood up to pay literally every women was staring at me because I’m tall, white, and have a beard.
Work has been fun but a few stressful episodes lately. I’ll give the annoying news first. So they are putting in a new education system, and last Thursday they called a meeting and went: Joe did you ever break your nose, Dave you need to shave, Joe Dave is a better teacher to you, and you both need to go to an all day seminar on Saturday. Really late notice, when we both had plans for Saturday. Also the weekend is when we can really relax, which is something that Koreans don’t really understand. I truly believe they feel there is a contest to see who can work the most. But we stormed out of there and the next day after work asked our manager are we getting paid for this? They said no, and that they aren’t happy either because they had plans too and the Director feels very bad, which is something that makes me angry that they think by saying the director feels bad everything is ok. But we basically ended the conversation with we don’t work for free. I’m glad Joe has dealt with them before because they go we will tell you tomorrow. Joe was like no you will call us tonight, and the workers really didn’t want to tell the director this because she will just take her anger out on them by saying why didn’t you talk them out of it. But she then offers to give us off Tuesday morning, which I already had off because it is graduation. So we say “no, you need to give us another day off.” They call back and say we just don’t have to go. As we assumed it turned out to be a snooze fest with everything double translated into English and Korean. They summed it up in a twenty minute meeting after work. It’s annoying that the Korean workers don't stand up for themselves and get taken advantage of because we look like jerks when we make a big deal out of stuff like this. But in the end, we are the reason why parents will pay more money to send their kids to this school versus one without foriegn teachers.

But because this is the end of the winter program both Alex and my school have had performances. My school did a choir show. They rented out a huge auditorium and each grade did 3-4 songs. They dressed the kids up in suits and traditional Hanbok outfits that look hilarious. They did a rendition of “O, My Darling,” a couple Chinese songs, a couple Korean songs, and a drum beat to the “Pirates of the Carribean” beat. Alex’s work did a huge musical, which was really cute. The kids all dressed up in little costumes and did a bunch of songs. The funniest was this one kid was a prince from America and played as Michael Jackson and did a moon dance and some spins. Unfortunately, I didn’t get this on video, but here are some videos of each event.
The odd bit of Korean culture that I want to talk about this time is safety. Korea is crazy and it’s a matter of time till accidents start piling up and laws start to get introduced. Today, I was walking around my school and saw how they got stuff into apartment buildings. In the big high rises, they don’t bring stuff in through the elevators. They bring in a huge crane that has an open platform that rises up and down. The platform doesn’t have railings and they don’t even strap the stuff onto the platform. My co-worker said he saw a box fall 20 stories last year. In addition, red lights are considered stop lights here. This could be one huge factor to why there were so many accidents the day it snowed in January. They do construction work in the open with power tools. I’ve had to walk through sparks flying everywhere before to get to work. It’s kind of insane, but interesting coming from America where there are rules for everything.

Finally, the weather is getting warm again. It reached 45 today and I actually could walk around the area and saw all these really nice parks. Hopefully in the next couple months I’ll be able to get around and see the sights.