Socks, Charlatans and Cynicism...

It is cold. Very cold and now also quite snowy. I find this irritating back in England, but at least it is generally cold for about eleven and a half months of the year there; so you become numbed to the bleak reality of it all, like someone trapped in a loveless marriage with such an apathy towards life that they can't be bothered to leave.

That's what I like. A grinding existence that means no matter what annoying incident occurs on a given day, your general melancholy meant you half expected it anyway.

But here I was subjected to ludicrous heat and oppressive humidty. Ever the adaptive man I learnt to deal with this and embrace constant perspiration and sporadic sunburn. I have been locked in a private war with mosquitos from June until late November, and then one day they were gone. I had killed all the mosquitos in Daegu and I strutted around my apartment with my chest puffed out and the sneer of an all conquering hero.

But it turned out that it was not me and a magazine that had suddenly rid Daegu of the whining blood suckers, but the fact that in the space of a day it seemed to have gone from warm and muggy to freezing cold. It has been bitterly cold for weeks now and I am ill prepared.
I left many warm garments in England and came out here with sunglasses, flip-flops and a pair of shorts that are too big for my chicken legs.

They say Christmas is a time for giving, and on that note if anyone feels like donating to a good cause, I could do with socks. My socks invariably have holes in them because they are old and I wont buy new ones. Little Spoon made an unrequested suggestion that I buy new socks. She can be quite the revolutionary thinker, but I reminded her that if I wanted her opinion I would ask for it.

I will not buy new socks as that money can and should be spent on either beer or Makgeolli; the latter is Korean Rice Wine and my favourite thing about Korean culture.

My money is limited and it should be spent on me, and not on my feet. I already pushed the proverbial boat into deep waters by buying gloves and I lost those within a week.

So I am cold and in bad spirits, which is a slight downturn from the summer months when I was hot and in bad spirits. This general malaise is not helped when my students try to pull the wool over my eyes and make a fool of me.

Last week a class of the little reprobates was set a project to invent a potion or special cure for a problem in society.
They were to tell me the active ingredients, who they were marketing the product at and what problems it would solve.

I like a good magic potion as much as the next man and given that Korea is packed with magical produce I was expecting big things. Let's not forget that Kimchi (the fermented cabbage dish they all eat) stops people from getting HIV. I was delighted when I found this out and vowed to not only never purchase a condom again but to contemplate intravenous drug use.

When you live in a land of such wonders your expectations are raised and I was alive with the prospect of hearing about how Korean carrots could cure Ebola or the tap water extended life by two score years.

Imagine my anger when two boys lie not only to me but to the public who they are selling this potion to. An unreasonably large boy named Rocky delivers the so called facts...

Rocky: "Our potion is sold to anyone but mostly historians. Its ingredients is water, metal, fairy blood and dragons horn..."

WHOA WHOA...hold on a minute there "Rocky". Hairstyle aside, do I look like an idiot to you? Are the public idiots? Fair enough, most of the public are idiots, but are historians idiots? What sort of arrogance makes you think you can list a mythical ingredient in your potion and then claim it has healing properties?

Water, metal, fairy blood...fine. But Dragons Horn? You're a con man and what is worse a stupid con man; because if there is one group of people outside of zoologists who are not going to fall for the idea of there being dragon horn in this elixir it is historians.
Historians have studied everything there is to know about dragons and I am sure that they are as aware as I am that dragons did not and do not have horns.

Of all the animals to claim you have horn material from, you choose the dragon. You could have said a Rhino or a Unicorn, but no you chose to be deceitful. I don't know what it actually is that you have put in there Rocky, but whatever effect this quack remedy has is at best a placebo.

I was rightfully livid. Placebos make me even more angry than cold weather and threadbare socks. I noticed a friend of mine called Kelly had written on her Facebook about feeling a real improvement in her backpain since going for acupuncture. A lot of our mututal friends responded positively and asked how much it had cost out here.

It was nothing to do with me but I felt the need to pontificate, so I told them all it was a load of crap and the only effect was placebo. They respectfully disagreed, I disrespectfully informed them of peer reviewed studies that showed it to be as much of a sham as the dragon horn in Rocky's now discontinued magic potion.

Nothing briefly raises my spirits like pissing on someone elses parade.

Kelly told me that she read the stuff and went back anyway, but this time it didn't work. Effectively I had ruined acupuncture for her, removed the placebo effect with my facts and she is back to reality with a painful back.

As pleasing as it is to be proved right once again, even I don't wish painful backs on my friends, so I need to try and think of an alternative cure. Hmmm....I am pretty confident that Kelly is not a historian and so with that in mind, perhaps I should give the schools confidence trickster Rocky a call.

All socks can be sent to The Monkey Roberts Cold Foot Campaign, Daegu. Plain colours or striped patterns only please.

The Season Of Good Will And War...

Somehow another year of my pathetically short life has already passed and I find myself once again staring down the barrel of the gun that is Christmas. For the past few years I have suspected that Christmas is now held every six months as it definitely used to take a lot longer to get from one frantic, falsely festive holiday to the next.

I used to love Christmas. But that was when I was a child, and as we all know children are stupid. Babies don't know a damn thing and small children are only slightly more informed, which is why I decided to come and teach.
No matter how dreadful my lesson, no matter how little information I provide these little runts with, they will leave knowing a lot more than they did when the little idiots walked in at the beginning.

I have a small amount of good will and it has to stretch across a whole year (or possibly six months if my suspicions are correct) during which I am bombarded with cretinous behaviour, and forced to smile at people who I would like to set on fire.

I'm not a festive man. I feel for Scrooge and share his passion for delicious humbugs; Christmas would be more fun for me too if I could have my own Tiny Tim Cratchit to sneer at.
So it is with some joy that I have spent the build up to this saccharin sweet time of year in Korea, a nation with very little Christmas spirit and absolutely no Christmas music piping out of every shop and haunting my dreams with its vile tweeness.

Sure I'll miss my family, but they're not going anywhere and at least I haven't had to help decorate a tree. Trees belong outside, where trees live. Why kill one, hang shiny crap on it and prop it up in your front room, where it distracts you from watching the television properly? We could start killing other things that belong outside and dressing them up as a yule time jape.

What's that? Oh that's just a squirrel I ran over and put some sparkly trousers on, he looks good on the mantelpiece doesn't he?

In fact I would not even have known it was Christmas if it weren't for one of my youngest students presenting me with a handmade Christmas card yesterday. In fairness to her, it is pretty impressive and far better than I could have managed with my miserable lack of any artistic ability whatsoever. In fact if you were to look at any picture I have ever drawn, you would question whether the artist even had opposable thumbs.

Inside the card began "Dear. Hello! Teacher I'm Alison nice to meet you."

I know who you are Alison, I've been teaching you for 6 hours a week for the past month, but it appears that either you don't know my name or you are just calling me "Dear" which is a little patronising given that you are 8 years old and barely over 3 foot tall.

At the end it said "Bye Bye" and then "From Alison" but in brackets, almost as an afterthought that the teacher might be such an imbecile (an understandable concern in fairness) that he hadn't realised it was from Alison.

Still I like the card and because she started writing the word "Christmas" too close to the edge, she had to stop at "Christ" and then write "Mas" underneath which gives it a deeper, more religious tone that as an atheist gives me a perverse pleasure.

Afterall, Christmas has become far too commercialised of late and I like to see that the small Christmas spirit that is here is taking it back to basics. It was heartwarming to hear North Korea threaten the South with a "Holy War" yesterday. I read it, sighed and gave a wistful smile. Holy. That's more like it. Back home I would be reading about price wars. Not here where Christmas is given it's true meaning, no we can look forward to a Holy War.

No expense spared mind, apparently nuclear weapons are on the cards too and I said before I came here that I wanted new experiences. A nuclear war is definitely a new experience for me, as I have never even been bombed, let alone by a nuclear bomb. Obviously the downside to this experience would be that I will die. That said so will my boss, so ever cloud has a silver lining and all that.

But in seriousness, it would be typical of my luck if during my first Christmas without nauseating music, office parties of part time drinkers annoying me and all the other irritants of western life, I ended up having it all ruined by being blown up in a war.

Apparently the South Koreans made a small reconciliatory gesture after the monumental war maneuvers, by erecting a giant Christmas Tree on the border of North Korea.

Great, just what we needed. Now if only I had a direct line to Kim Jong Il, I could gleefully tune into CNN to see a baffled reporter announce that in breaking news, the North Koreas had just set up a huge dead squirrel in sparkling trousers on their side of the divide.

Oh yeah, for what it's worth Merry Christmas.

Children vs Old Men...

The title is a bit misleading as sadly I have no tale of a street fight between children and pensioners, although I would pay good money to see such an event. This is really just a comparison between my interaction with Korean children and my relationships with Korean pensioners. Both of which I have worked hard to foster.

Excluding Tiny Gangster who was discovered to have written a whole page in her notebook saying "Kill Monkey Roberts Teacher", I have so far got on well with most Korean children. And even Tiny Gangster seems to be softening her homicidal stance on me, as she actually smiled at me the other day and told me that her mother had told her to shut up when she was crying. I smiled too, it was a heart warming tale.

Outside of my students, I work hard to nurture my standing in the local community and each day sees me make a new and no doubt profound connection. Take yesterday for example, as I ambled down the street in the chill morning air, I had a fascinating conversation with a boy of about eight years old and it is these types of moments that show me I am reaching out and building a rapport between the alien worlds of east and west.

I was passing a school and noticed a cheerful little scamp staring at me. I stared back, two can play at that game you little short arse, let's see who blinks first. He did. But he also broke the tense silence of our stand off...

Stare Out Loser: "Hey!"

Me: "Hey!"

I'd thrown him a curve ball and he had to think for a moment...

Stare Out Loser: "Hi"

Me: "Hi"

Stare Out Loser: "Bye"

Me: "Bye"

Building Bridges.

Now compare that situation (which had gone from a hostile face off to a lifelong friendship) with my encounter later that day with Old Man Suit. Old Man Suit is an old man who wears a suit. The clues are in his name to be fair, but things are not always what they seem out here so I felt the need to clarify.

Old Man Suit goes to my gym and he either waits until he sees me walking in before appearing or he lives in the gym and never leaves. Because no matter what time I go, Old Man Suit is there. I'm a generous man and whilst it would be nice if the owners kicked out all Koreans during my workouts and gave me the place to myself, it is not something I expect and certainly not something I have demanded.

I can live with waiting for the odd machine, but I am rapidly growing tired of Old Man Suit. Firstly he "works out" in a suit. Why would anyone do that? That irks me almost as much as people in wheelchairs driving on the roads whilst the motorcyclists ride on the pavements.

Secondly Old Man Suit watches me with suspicion, as if I am the freak for coming to the gym in shorts and a t-shirt and carrying a water bottle. Old Man Suit drinks green tea in a transparent flask whilst "working out" and after each sip will shoot a mildly dissaproving look in my direction.

Now you may wonder why I have put speech marks around working out for the actitives that Old Man Suit conducts. Well I shall tell you, and in doing so explain my third and final reason for hating him.

He spends around 25 minutes on a single machine. "And why is that?" I hear you chime. Because he puts so little weight on the machine that it cannot reasonably constitute exercise anymore than putting on your socks in the morning classes as a workout. I'm no Arnold Schwarzenegger, (if anything I'm more Democrat than Republican) but Old Man Suit removes all the weights until he is just moving the pulley or the bar on the machine, over and over and over again.

He would get a more vigorous workout by making himself a large sandwich and repeatedly lifting it to his mouth to only take teenie, little bites and then returning it to the plate before another lift. If he used a heavy sandwich filling like cheddar it might double the mass that he currently lifts at the gym.

So I have to wait. I wait for a machine or I use one I don't want to, whilst this staring, suit clad weakling performs pointless tasks for what must be five thousand repetitions.

I hate you Old Man Suit and I shall not be building any bridges with you. Anyway, even if I tried he would probably spend a decade building his side of the bridge in miniscule steps, all whilst wearing a suit instead of workmen's overalls.

Talking of exercise, I have set a date for my race with Little Spoon. If your new to the blog, please do read all the back history it's really riveting stuff, but as a heads up, Little Spoon is small, says stupid things and runs about five miles a day. I have always opposed running and even walking is known to grate on me.

But in April we will run a half marathon. I might do it in a suit.

The topic of running leads me to my students once more and whilst not funny, this case once again just left me feeling that half of the time I teach it is just a little surreal.

The kids in one of my classes had to come up with a new sports team for a class project the other day; devise the name, choose the sport and design a uniform for them. One group actually chose a running club, and offered a good explanation for why they chose running and for why the club uniforms were red. But they offered not a single word on why the clubs name was "Passion of the Monkey".

As great a name as it was, I felt it needed some explanation and yet when asked for the reason for the name, they just shook their heads and said "just because".

I let it go, due to my fondness for monkeys and crowned them the winning group in a totally unbiased judgement.

Goodbye for now, this was Monkey Roberts.

Road Rules, Rip Offs And Pasta.

An eclectic bag of issues for you today, mainly gripes, no actually all gripes which might be surprising given my usually sunny disposition. None of these issues are a huge concern in reality, but I like to make mountains out of mole hills and feel that I have been far too culturally sensitive so far. It's time for a little sneering superiority and Brit abroad complaining.

The first issue is the way these people drive. Not just how they drive, but where they drive. Where? I hear ask. Well on the roads obviously. WRONG. If you ride a motorbike, you ride it wherever the hell you please, which means as much on the pavement (sidewalk) as the road.

As I saunter along the street, whistling and waving to the countless little scamps who shout hello at me as I pass, a motorbike will come tearing around the corner and veer out of the way at the last minute.
I look around, perhaps I'm drunk again and have been wandering down the middle of a busy highway. No. I am on the pavement. On the pavement and contemplating buying a large stick to ram into the wheel of passing motorbikes.

Because most of them don't wear helmets either. Let's see how many pavements you ride on when you have brain damage and two broken legs genius.

This is a constant irritant and yet I have not once used my stick, such is my good nature. Even more baffling is the fact that I keep seeing old people in electronic wheel chairs. And guess where they are wheeling about? Yeah on the road.

Perhaps the wheel chair bound road hogs were previously pavement riding motorcyclists who met with an angry western man and a large stick.

The second issue is not one that is often a problem here, given how everything is cheap. In fact rip offs are few and far between, but my school likes to stand out from the crowd and if we can do something on the cheap, you better believe we will.

A very brief introduction to our "system". Kids are awarded bonus tickets for doing their homework, winning class presentations etc and in the past these tickets could be used to buy a couple of marks on a class test to avoid retesting. However, that has been scrapped much to the horror of the overworked slave children who have to get 75% on any given test just to avoid staying behind after a three hour class to resit.

Instead we were told that at the end of the term there would be a market, with gifts, sumptious spreads of food and a veritable gold mine of activities and games for the kids to spend their tickets on. The mind boggled at what delights would await these lucky children.
Over the weeks as they worked their little fingers to the bone for more of these precious tickets they pressed me on what gifts there would be to buy. I had heard of other schools doing this system where Mp3 players, DVDs and even a Nintendo Wii were up for grabs.

I assured my kids this would be a day to remember.

So it was with much anticipation that our staff gathered to hear the details of this Saturdays market. It started off well, not only was there to be the market but in addition a flea market. I seemed to be the only one who didn't know what a flea market was, but there were signs all over the school. Apparently it would have second hand and novelty items for sale. Erm....right.

So what of the culinary delights in the food market? What cutting edge gifts would we be selling? Out with it, I cannot wait any longer.

Crisps (Chips to you Americans)
Gummi Bears
Coke

And not even the good sort of coke. The crappy black, fizzy liquid type.

Pathetic. Oh well at least they can buy gifts. What's on offer?

Even I was not expecting to hear what I heard. Such a range, such imagination. In all honesty I felt we might have gone too far, pushed the boat out a little too much, and were frankly spoiling these kids.

Pencils. But wait, that was not all. Pencil Cases. Stop, stop this is too much, a case for pencils? I don't know if the children will be able to handle all this. It is one thing to feel the surge of adrenaline that every child gets upon receiving a brand new pencil, but to then realise that it is within your grasp to buy a case that can hold multiple pencils....

We were risking a riot here. What if we ran out of pencil cases in the initial rush of ecstatic children? Sure we had notepads for sale too, and no doubt that would satisfy a good number of them, as afterall who is not calmed and euphoric by a good notepad? But I still felt uneasy about these pencil cases. Sometimes less is more and we had definitely gone for the more is more philosophy.

We were told that the one small problem with this otherwise outstanding market was that we had nothing for the flea market. Apparently the posters were printed and put up before the Korean staff contemplated what would actually be on sale. So we were asked to donate things. I explained that I had a broken, hand held vacuum cleaner that I could donate or there was an unused sponge and half bottle of bleach that were also possible gifts.

These didn't seem to be what they were after. Unbelievable. So I have to buy things for the flea market? Brilliant. Now I'm being ripped off and this seems quite unfair given that there is no way the kids will be feeling ripped off when they turn up on Saturday with 3 months of hard earned bonus tickets and go home with a pencil and a can of coke.

Games wise...well there had been nothing planned or organised by the school so it was all put upon Tiny or Tiny Teacher as she prefers to be known. And thankfully she came up with a host of good ideas, spent a lot of time working it all out and so there should be some enjoyable distractions for the children to avert their attention from the flea market and the pencil stand.

Seeing as I am on a bitter rant about employers, I will end with another quirk of Korea that has good intentions but is misplaced. It all stems from what seems to be a recent obsession with pasta. Western food is pretty popular here anyway, especially amongst the kids, but pasta in particular is viewed as exotic and special. A large number of teachers have told me of how their boss insisted on taking them out for a special treat and it would invariably be to a pasta restaurant.

Two friends Josh and Nat were dragged out on a Saturday off to be carted around Daegu by their boss and proudly taken to some generic pasta joint. Their boss beamed at them and took them in as if these poor English people had never seen the likes of spaghetti bolognese before.

Oh pasta? WOW. I don't know what to say. I mean we haven't eaten pasta since...I don't know, last night at home. But before that it must have been...well at least 24 hours, because oh yeah we don't have a cooker, so by the time we get home from work at 10.30pm to use our little two hob stove, what do we cook? Pasta. Five times a fucking week and now here we are on our day off with the heart pounding excitement of eating pasta. Again.

Luckily for me, my boss despite thinking children love pencils, does know that western people love drinking and thus all our staff nights out have involved large amounts of beer and soju. Both things that the kids would probably prefer to what they will find at their school market tomorrow.

Dissed by Tiny Gangster!

It's been a busy few days and if you are perched on the edge of your seat wondering what on earth has been going on to classify my days as "busy" then never fear I intend to inform you.
However, I am not going to go into any real detail and so the explanation will probably leave you sorely dissapointed and moving back from the edge of your seat to the more comfortable middle area, maybe even the luxurious back of your seat.

A new term began on Monday. That's my explanation. New classes and new kids.

I was generally delighted to see the back of most of my kids and no doubt they were fairly jubilant at being freed from my idea of education. In fact I was recently shown a British advert aiming to cut CO2 emissions that was withdrawn after huge complaints because it showed a teacher blowing numerous children into bits with the push of a red button if they said they were not interested in some poxy school project to cut CO2.

After watching it, my immediate thought was "I'd love one of those buttons". Half of my kids would already be unidentifiable bloody chunks strewn across the walls.

That said there were quite a few kids who have been great and it's a shame I wont have them around. One of my favourites was of course the star of last weeks blog, the miniature little girl with huge attitude known to me as "Tiny Gangster". I'd long considered Tiny Gangster as good a friend as a small, aggressive child with broken English could ever be. Until our last class together.

It is still painful to drag up these memories but I think I need to open up and move on. It was a Thursday 4pm class like any other. The class idiot (who I renamed Humpty Dumpty) was putting on his usual show of cretinous behaviour to the amusement of a couple of fellow idiots who escaped from whichever village formerly employed them and the teachers pets were waving their homework at me as if they had a winning lottery ticket.

I made my way around this collection of midgets checking their homework and offering feeble reprimands to those who had done nothing. And then I got to Tiny Gangster. She was busy scribbling in a notebook.

Hmmmm...what was this? It could be a hit list of some sort, perhaps she was doing some sums on whether her latest cocaine shipment was well priced. I decided to take it off her and look at it. Big mistake. She shot me a look of cold hatred and sneered at me, but 3 months of seeing her act like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas had hardened me to such visual barbs.

But when I opened the book my self esteem was in tatters. Inside was a fairly good sketch of Justice Teacher. If you have only just started reading, Justice is a friend and co worker who used to have the honour of teaching Tiny Gangster. The caption to this picture read "Justice Teacher, Small Handsome."

Picky little bitch. But whatever, I turned the page, there was another sketch and again it was pretty good, but the caption sent shock waves pulsing through my frame. "Monkey Roberts Teacher, Very Ugly".

WHAT?! Very ugly? I put the book down with trembling hands and walked back to my desk. How long that journey took I couldn't say, I was dazed, confused and terrified of catching a glimpse of my reflection in the computer monitor.
Very ugly? Surely I could have at least qualified for "Distinctly Average"? In fact at that moment I'd have settled for "Moderately Ugly", but VERY UGLY?

Tiny Gangster we were supposed to be friends. But then again, she was the girl who last week told me she wanted to punch her mother in the face for being ugly. I wonder if her mother has also stumbled unwittingly across sketches of herself that have been so cruelly labelled?

As the class ended I needed to consider my options. Plastic surgery is popular and quite cheap here in Korea. If I stopped wasting all of my expendable income on alcohol then I could perhaps save up and sort my Elephant Man face out. But before I made such a rash decision I was given a boost of confidence from one of the older students who is in one of the highest levels.

I briefly taught Anna who some may remember told me it was a scientific fact that men were better drivers than women. I had warmed to her for her healthy realism and now she was to save my shattered ego.

Tiny Teacher (Justices wife) has Anna for her high level listening class. During this class, Tiny informed me that Anna had asked the class if they knew Monkey Roberts Teacher. She then proceded to tell them that I was incredibly handsome and brilliant. Tiny then played a game with the class where they pick a card with an adjective on it and have to choose something that reflects this term.

Anna picked a card with the word refined on it. And in a heartbeat said "Monkey Roberts Teacher". And according to Tiny the conversation went like this...

Tiny: "What? Monkey Roberts Teacher is refined?"

Anna: "Yes teacher, so refined, so handsome and he is the perfect height."

Tiny: "The perfect height? Really? No?"

Anna: "Yes Teacher, the perfect height and so so handsome."

At this point in the story I stopped Tiny and scolded her for playing Devils Advocate with a girl who clearly knew her heights and had a strong sense of what constitutes refinement.

But Anna stuck to her guns and whilst her attempting to hug me in the corridors and telling me that she had a dream about me is about as unnerving and inappropriate as it gets, I do admire her excellent taste. My confidence is back to its best, brimming with arrogance I felt like tracking down Tiny Gangster and giving her a brief talking to...

"Well well well, Tiny Gangster you must be feeling pretty stupid right now. Because Anna says I am perfect and very handsome and as you may note she is the highest level, thus very intelligent...

Need I remind you that you are the lowest level and in the same class as Humpty Dumpty, so I think we can both agree that you are wrong and Anna is right. I'd be pretty embarrassed to show my face around these parts again if I was you, now off you trot and don't kiss your teeth at me."

So with my ego back to form I embarked on my new classes with a fairly positive attitude and have immediately found a group who clearly share my sense of humour.

On Wednesday in a lesson about Regenerative Medicine we had to hear a tale about a 69 year old man who was working on a model aeroplane when his finger got sliced off by the propellor. As the MP3 lecture told us that the old man got too close and had his finger torn off, the class erupted with laughter.

I was delighted. We all found a pensioner being disfigured for playing with toy planes funny. It's going to be a good term.