tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74743169911084731942024-03-07T22:31:18.034-08:00Monkey Business in KoreaThe life and times of Monkey Roberts Teaching English in Daegu.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.comBlogger52125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-30714368759213577062012-09-21T23:45:00.001-07:002012-09-21T23:45:59.269-07:00Art Displays And Fatcat Frank...Another month or so has passed since I last dredged up the energy to prattle on about my meandering existence in Daegu. As always I have taught some English and socialised with some people. But I did drag myself to something a little cultural for once.<br />
As renowned as I am for my total lack of interest in doing anything constructive or unusual, I agreed that it was time to visit another of Korea's incessant "festivals" and moreover one that revolved around art.<br />
<br />
If you don't know me, then you won't be aware that by and large I am indifferent to most art and hate some of it. I do like Dali and I did like Tony Hart as a small child. But then we should not forget that as a small child I wanted to be made from clay and live in a cave, so my endorsement of an artist at that age does not denote a guarantee of quality.<br />
<br />
As it happened this festival was being organised by my friend Kimmy. She is Korean. That's not me bragging about having made a native friend, but I just thought I'd let you know. And I mean a proper Korean. One who uses the Korean language as her first choice of communication...madness I know.<br />
Kimmy asked me to check her English for the official rule guide and timetable for The Daegu Body Painting Festival.<br />
<br />
I checked it. It was fine. Now if the story ended there it would be a farce, but as luck would have it, there is more to come, although as I write this I realise that it in no way constitutes a "story". It is really just me telling you that I went to a Body Painting Festival. But, this was an artistic festival and was not in any way an excuse for gratutious nudity. As a horde of fellow teachers wandered about Duryu Park drinking beer, we would be led to the painting displays that were surrounded by a mob of middle aged Korean men with huge cameras taking pictures.<br />
<br />
What was this? The press? A local celebrity? Surely there had to be good reason why men with huge telescopic lens on their cameras were crammed around one or two tents and not the multiple tents of women having the final touches put to intricate and impressive body paintings.<br />
<br />
There was a good reason. The women in these tents had not yet got much paint on, or anything else for that matter. The men were not from the press, but evidently felt that a massive zoom lens was a necessity for taking a shot of a woman who was 6ft away. Now, I would provide you with a picture, but that would supporting such lewd behaviour, so I will instead give you an image of a finished painting.<br />
<br />
I have to include the caption "Daegu International Body Painting Festival 2012" because according to the rules that I was asked to check for English mistakes, failure to do so on any unauthorised or unofficial media would result in me being sued. I don't fancy being sued, so...<br />
<br />
Daegu International Body Painting Festival 2012:<br />
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What I immediately noticed was how few of the models were Korean, but many were white and blonde. I asked Kimmy where they were from. <i>"Russia"</i> she said. Hmmm...no xenophobic stereotypes please, so I asked <i>"Ah ha...and what are their jobs?"</i> to which I was told<i> "They said they're English teachers".</i><br />
<br />
Not the best cover story that these women could have come up with, given that only people born in an English speaking country and with a passport from said country can come here and teach. Their genuine line of work was also one that involved not wearing clothes but, I imagine, rarely staying still for such long periods of time.<br />
<br />
And it is with such thinly veiled references to prostitution that I move onto the topic of a new student of mine. At this point you may well be alarmed at what link a new student of mine and prostitution could possibly have, and I assure you it is nothing of concern. My new student is about 10 years old. I think. However, being in my lowest level class his English is so poor that you would think his only lessons had been taught to him by someone from...I don't know...Russia or something.<br />
<br />
Because my new student, who is called Frank, can only say one thing, "Okay Teacher". This is said in a voice that is almost as deep as mine and it is said to answer pretty much any question.<br />
<br />
<b>Me:</b> <i>"Hello Frank"</i><br />
<b>Frank:</b> <i>"Okay Teacher"</i><br />
<b>Me:</b> <i>"Do you have your pencil Frank?"</i><br /><b>Frank:</b> <i>"Okay teacher."</i><br />
<b>Me:</b><i> "What colour is your T-shirt Frank?"</i><br />
<b>Frank:</b> <i>"Okay Teacher."</i><br />
<br />
I'm not convinced that Frank is as clueless as he acts, because first of all, although he is officially a child, he looks to me like he could well be the owner of a major multinational corporation. He is a huge, round lump who chuckles with a sinister, raspy laugh. When I look over to see if Frank is colouring his picture of a car, he is leant back, smiling with his arms stretched out. He looks as if he should have a cuban cigar in one hand, a glass of cognac in the other and perhaps a freshly trafficked Russian prostitute perched on his lap.<br />
<br />
Frank could well be 45 years old. Granted he is short of stature, but he swaggers down the corridors, has the face of a bonafide fat cat and despite the fact I've overheard him use other English, any request or enquiry is still only met with "Okay Teacher".<br />
<br />
I tried this with his year of birth. I wrote every year from 2000 up to 2004 (as that has to be his age ranged for this class) on the board and asked what year he was born in. He smiled. Probably remembering the time he sealed a merger in a board meeting, before kicking a homeless man to death on the way home. <i>"Okay Teacher".</i><br />
<br />
I point at 2000 and say <i>"This?"</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>"Okay Teacher".</i> I try 2001....<i>"Okay Teacher."</i><br />
<br />
1965 Frank? Does that ring any bells? Or how about the mid 1980s when Saddam Hussein's regime bought chemical weapon components from the US? Know anything about that "Frank"?<br />
<br />
<i>"Okay Teacher".</i><br />
<br />
It is infuriating to try and teach Frank, but what can I do? If I get frustrated or give him a poor grade, he will probably have my house torched and withdraw all of his UK based investments, crippling the ailing economy still further.<br />
<br />
But there is a glimmer at the end of the tunnel. Because the other day he identified two pictures, the first was a can of coke, which he should know given that he runs the distribution wing in Southern Asia, and the second was a car. <i>"Okay Teacher...Car."</i> Genius.<br />
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Now, my old sparring partner Phillip the Loathsome is due in class shortly....<i>"Erm Frank, you know what a car is now, do you think you could push Phillip in front of one?"</i><br />
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Just say those two words of yours Frank...<br />
Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-47307601536265900892012-08-15T07:13:00.000-07:002012-08-26T21:29:11.714-07:00Insulting Students And Baby Sitting.It's been over a month since I posted, and this time I don't even have the excuse of having done anything worthwhile, such as getting my TEFL. In fact, I wouldn't even have written this blog today if it weren't for a young wench called Emma who practically begged me to write something new in order to distract her from life back in England. All hate mail for Emma can be sent to me, and I will ensure it is passed on.<br />
<br />
The past month has however, been slightly eventful. I learnt the Korean word for monkey, which has obviously proved invaluable when out and about ordering food or trying to talk to Koreans, and a rat found its way into my apartment by coming through the drain in the bathroom. All in all a wild few weeks that make for some gripping stories to tell my grandchildren.<br />
<br />
There has however been one major change in my work schedule and not one that I enjoy. I have been given the task of teaching earlier classes to the youngest students. These are the "little ones". And no doubt if you saw many of them, you would let out an "awww" and coo like a complete cretin, because many of them are indeed what could be described as cute.<br />
<br />
But this is really not the whole story. Because the whole story, is that whilst on the face of it many of them look like cartoon characters, a great number of them are in fact a bunch of gibbering, slack jawed, primordial scum.<br />
<br />
It is easy to suggest that six and seven years need to be cut some slack, but if I learnt one thing from Neville Chamberlain it is that appeasement does not work. If you encounter a belligerent piece of filth, you should crush it before it's too late. You might think that teaching is not the career for me, but it's the only one I have, and if you met Phillip who I now teach three times a week, you would probably have yourself immediately sterilised just to be on the safe side.<br />
<br />
Phillip's mother says he loves having me as his teacher. I guess it's a love-hate relationship then, as I'd like to impale Phillip on a particularly blunt chopstick. And frankly the fact that he loves having me around doesn't mean very much. He also wrote that he loves kittens, but I wouldn't ask him to feed my Mum's pet cats if she was away on holiday, because he probably loves being around kittens so that he can gouge out their eyes with a hot teaspoon.<br />
<br />
Moreover, the lowest level of these classes has a company guideline attached to the course outline that says <i>"Should be taught by a bilingual instructor"</i>. Presumably they heard about how I recently added the word <i>"monkey"</i> to my threadbare Korean vernacular and were suitably impressed. Either that, or they just thought it would funny to watch me tell children who are barking and licking chairs to <i>"sit down"</i>, when they don't know what the word <i>"sit"</i> or the word <i>"down"</i> means.<br />
<br />
After one week, I was told that I would also be guiding them through 3 weeks of intensive classes that also included field trips to a theme park, indoor rock climbing and a day of archery. Archery you say? I'll mentor Phillip if that's okay?<br />
<br />
Before this three weeks of frivolity could ensue, the children had to sign a bizarre contract and chant out each point of it in unison. There was a translation in English for each numbered pledge and as the eldest child read it aloud, the rest would repeat it as a mantra. I felt like I had walked into North Korea, as this assortment of midgets chanted in Korean that they would <i>"Strive to conquer any mountain in search of my best"</i> and <i>"Be thankful to Korea and my parents for this opportunity".</i><br />
<br />
There was an almost Hitler Youth type atmosphere that would have warmed the heart of even the most demanding anti-semite. Granted, none of the pledges involved genocide or racial purity, but every indoctrination program has to start somewhere.<br />
<br />
In one months time, I will officially be moved to teaching this rabble permanently, but for now I still have the respite of my older students and my higher level classes. Teenagers with genuine wit, and topics to teach that vary from history to science, politics to mythology and not just the word <i>"shoe"</i>.<br />
<br />
I decided to make the most of my final few weeks with these students, get to know them even better, give my all to class and buoyed by my recent advances in Korea's mother tongue, I thought I should learn some new and hilarious insults for the traditional banter that they so enjoy.<br />
<br />
With many of these classes, students hand out faux compliments as a form of desperate bribery, and light hearted insults when this fails. In turn I will use the usual fall back of <i>"Babo"</i> meaning stupid or rename a child on the computer to something ludicrous. The long nights can fly by as you might imagine. But I needed to step it up, because every teacher in Korea knows <i>"Babo"</i>. Luckily for me, my good friend Cooper Trooper has been seeing a Korean girl and learnt a fantastic new insult.<br />
<br />
<i>"Sakajee"</i>. Cooper Trooper explained it to me as meaning <i>"unkind student"</i> or<i> "arrogant student"</i>. These things often get lost in literal translation, but his girl assured him that it would make them mildly indignant, surprise them and yet not cause any real offence. Perfect.<br />
<br />
I wasted no time, as fourteen year old Lilly came to say hello...<i>"Hello to you too....Sakajee".</i><br />
<br />
Wow.<br />
<br />
This was far better than I could have ever hoped. Lilly erupts, stamping her foot like a toddler, shrieking at me <i>"NOOO, No Sakajee"</i>. She glares, shakes her fist at me and heads off to her classroom. I'm beaming from ear to ear and in come some of my favourite students, all fourteen and fifteen. I begin to check homework and perfect, Kelly hasn't done hers. I shake my head and say <i>"Ah...Sakajee".</i><br />
<br />
Fantastic response, indignant cries from her and both her friends. This is the best insult ever, why has it taken me this long to find?<br />
<br />
I was so delighted, that I decided to spread the wealth and met a group of friends from other schools downtown for some drinks at a bar run by one of Korean friends. I explained the pronunciation and the reactions, and all around me faces once dulled by education were alight at the prospect of insulting those we are paid to help.<br />
<br />
Then someone says <i>"What does it actually mean?"</i> and as I struggle to explain the exact meaning, I decide it would be far easier to ask our Korean friend, so I shout him over from the bar...<br />
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<b>Me:</b> <i>"Hey Minseok, what does Sakajee exactly mean?"</i><br />
<br />
<b>Minseok:</b> <i>"Oh...very bad, very bad word."</i><br />
<br />
<b>Me:</b> <i>"Yeah yeah, but what does it mean?"</i><br />
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<b>Minseok:</b> <i>"It mean like the girl who likes to always do thing with her mouth...erm...you would say it like 'Cock Sucker'"</i><br />
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What? No, no, no, no, no.<br />
<br />
No. NO...OH GOD NO!!!!<br />
<br />
I've been strolling into class, smirking, pointing at a teenage student and saying <i>"You're a cock sucker"</i>?<br />
<br />
Why do I still have a job? Where are the police? What in the name of Vishnu was Cooper Trooper's girl thinking of? As it turns out apparently if you say "Saah Ga Jee" it means arrogant student, or whatever vague slur I intended, but if I say "Sakajee" it means the aforementioned sexual expletive.<br />
<br />
Now thankfully, it appears that either through innocence or by way of understanding my intent, the victims of my unwarranted attack understood my meaning, either that or they have now decided that anything goes when in my presence, as I am regularly greeted by "Saah Ga Jee" and mock fury.<br />
<br />
Now if I could just find two similar sounding phrases, where one means <i>"Good job Phillip"</i> and the other means <i>"Jump out of that window"</i>, I would be the happiest bilingual instructor in Daegu.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-12649529784397824032012-07-04T00:18:00.000-07:002012-07-04T00:18:38.493-07:00Student Wisdom...As absolutely nothing has happened in the past two weeks, I am forced to create a blog entirely from the hard work of others. It is certainly not the first time I have used the wisdom of my students to pad out my writings on my fairly uneventful life and it certainly wont be the last.<br />
<br />
But this time feels a little worse and a bit more of a cheat, perhaps due to the dizzy heights that were reached when I got to pepper spray Eric. For once I felt like I had achieved something and left behind a weekend that didn't feel wasted. I haven't got to assault anyone in the past two weeks and I haven't even managed to victimise a Korean woman. Times are hard.<br />
<br />
However, as you may recall I was recently referred to as a "jackpot" by a Korean stranger commenting on a girls picture of me, which is probably the highlight of the past 10 years if not my entire life. And yet it got better thanks to a random encounter with a student named Austin, who has now got a number of students bestowing me with other nicknames.<br />
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Austin is an interesting character. On April Fools Day he wrote his mother a suicide note and hid in his wardrobe, and expressed surprise to me that when she ran screaming and weeping into his bedroom she did not collapse into fits of laughter when he leapt from the wardrobe shouting "April Fools".<br />
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I sympathised with him, Korean mothers just have no sense of humour.<br />
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Austin has also expressed an interest in western culture, as he told me that he wants to become fluent in English so that he can...<i>"Travel to the UK or America and smoke marijuana and do some cocaine".</i><br />
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I was a little taken aback and he looked at me with hope and expectation, before asking:<br />
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<i>"Teacher have you done drugs?"</i><br />
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<b>Me:</b> <i>"No Austin, why?"</i><br />
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He looks wistfully into the air and an almost dreamlike and peaceful expression settles upon his face...<br />
<br />
<b>Austin:</b> <i>"I would like to do the drugs one day. It would be nice, but I must finish the school first."</i><br />
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That's right Austin, you must finish the school first, and once you do, why nobody in their right mind would stop you from fulfilling your lifes dream of doing the drugs and I think you'll do them just great.<br />
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Despite Austin's liberal approach to illegal drug use, and his love of playful pranks involving the cause of huge distress to his parents, he apparently has a more conservative view of gender roles. Because like so many Korean students, he seems to think that if a male is walking with a female who is not family, then they must be in some form of sexual relationship. If only this were true, because I regularly walk along the road with females and sometimes we even have lunch together!<br />
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As it happened, one bright Sunday afternoon I was walking along with Chef and another female friend we shall call "Mallory", basically because that's her name. So Chef, Mallory and I strolled through the sunshine enjoying a cold beer, and although I don't recall the conversation, I'd imagine Chef was saying something ridiculous and Mallory and I were laughing at her and calling her names.<br />
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At this point, Austin strolls into view. Not a crack pipe in sight, and this would be such a nice day for him to be smoking crack too. He sees me and his eyes widen, he smirks, looks at my companions and quickly says "Hello" before jogging off into the distance.<br />
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The following week at school and suddenly I am cornered by a gaggle of middle school girls, some saying that I am a "windy boy" which means playboy. Others are calling me "Casanova Teacher" and one girl approachs looking very unhappy and says <i>"I am very disappointed to you"</i>. I look at her and realise that such grammar is unacceptable even if she is upset, <i>"It's 'I am very disappointed IN you' and why are you?"</i><br />
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Austin has told them I have two girlfriends who I take out to get drunk on the street. I explain that they are not my girlfriends, just girls who I am friends with. I carefully avoid tackling the getting drunk part, but Austin appears beaming as happily as the day he convinced his Mum he had killed himself.<br />
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<b>Austin:</b> <i>"Ah teacher, I told Jenny teacher she should not speak with you, because you will suck her in."</i><br />
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<b>Me:</b> <i>"They are just friends Austin, not my girlfriends."</i><br />
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<b>Austin:</b> <i>"Hmmm...okay, but you were drinking the beer on the street."</i><br />
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<b>Me:</b> <i>"Yes but I'm old enough to drink beer, it's not a problem."</i><br />
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<b>Austin: </b><i>"But on THE STREET!"</i><br />
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<b>Me:</b> <i>"I always drink on the street at home if it's a hot day and I'm going somewhere..."</i><br />
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<b>Austin:</b> <i>"AH HA! But you are in Korean now"</i><br />
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<b>Me:</b> <i>"Yes, but...."</i><br />
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Austin sees me faltering and his face lights up...<br />
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<b>Austin:</b> <i>"When in Rome teacher."</i><br />
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And with a triumphant smile he strolls off, leaving me to face a barrage of questions about how many girlfriends I have and how many of them I have "kicked" when I found a new one.<br />
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Despite this set back in my carefully crafted school persona, it was worth it to hear a 14 year old correctly use "When in Rome", even though in Daegu I see middle aged men constantly drinking on the street, but perhaps this would come to an end under Austins rule. No drinking on the street, but free narcotics for anyone who finishes school.<br />
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There were two other moments of student wisdom this past week that spring to mind. The first one is most pleasing as today is American Independence Day. As much as I like my American friends and will happily drink on the street for 4th of July, it is good to see that some of the students recognise the inherent beauty of the English language spoken as God intended.<br />
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In a high level class last week, 15 year old Kelly told me how happy she was that I was her teacher because I had British English. I agreed that it was quite the blessing for her and then she summed up exactly my thoughts on American English...<br />
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<b>Kelly:</b><i> "The other teachers are all American, and I don't like this American English. It is dirty and we should learn British English. When I hear this American English...uggghhhh....it is just like, it is like....an earthworm. It is like an earthworm to me. Take it away."</i><br />
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American English IS like an earthworm. All these years I had failed to put my finger on what it was that was not right, and now a moment of clarity. It's like an earthworm. Of course.<br />
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And if you thought that was a tad surreal. This last one is even better. This was a homework check in which students must write an original sentence using a word. The word was "similar" and the student was 8 year old Victory. What a name.<br />
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I open his book and read: <i>"My little sisters dream is similar to Pat Boone's".</i><br />
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I looked at Victory and said<i> "Pat Boone?"</i>, to which he replied <i>"Rock and Roll"</i>.<br />
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That was all the explanation I could get from him, but I highly doubt that a little Korean girl shares the dreams of a 78 year old former singer whose main beliefs now appear to be that President Obama was born in Kenya and that gay rights are the biggest threat to the USA. Still, perhaps I'm understimating Victory's little sister.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-58446043536141157522012-06-20T05:01:00.000-07:002012-06-20T05:01:35.023-07:00Prejudice And Pepper Spray.What? Pepper Spray again, I hear you shout. Oh yes indeed, pepper spray again. You may recall that only two blogs ago I spoke about how a young girl in my class had been given pepper spray and how I loved the stuff even though I had<br />
<i> "Never been pepper sprayed or pepper sprayed anyone". </i><br />
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Well that statement was true at the time, but only half true now. Because last Sunday I pepper sprayed a good friend of mine, and it was all that I could have hoped and dreamed it would be. He yelped, he ran, he winced and he cried hot peppery tears.<br />
<br />
After moving apartments with my co worker Jenny who was being stalked by a low level sex pest, she also invested in some pepper spray and it turned out that my friend Eric had always wondered what being pepper sprayed would feel like. It therefore seemed an ideal opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and fulfill a life long ambition for each of us.<br />
<br />
I got to pepper spray someone and he got to be pepper sprayed. There really are no losers in such a scenario, only winners. It was a huge victory for me and one firey shot in the eye for all those people who no doubt felt I didn't have it in me to temporarily blind a friend for no good reason. It was also a winning situation for Eric who will never again have to face the ignominy of admitting to others that he has never been pepper sprayed in the face. It was even a win for our friend Jacks who filmed it all and laughed as heartily as you might expect a man to laugh when he sees two friends achieve one of their lifes goals together.<br />
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It was a fine ending to a fine week and if I was a more pun based blogger of prose, I might be tempted to say it spiced things up a bit in Daegu. But I'm not that sort of blogger, so I'll just say that there's nothing quite like causing a friend immense pain on a Sunday afternoon. I politely asked him if he had ever been bottled or beaten with a bar stool, and whilst he admitted he had not, he felt that it was not the time or the place to further our breaking of social boundaries and achieving of personal goals. Fair enough, another time perhaps. Although if anyone in Daegu can find me a taser, then Eric is definitely getting electrocuted.<br />
<br />
But moving away from such family fun, I have to sadly address a more serious and somewhat sinister story that any of my friends out in Korea will no doubt already be well aware of. That is a feature that ran on one of Korea's major TV networks called MBC only a few weeks ago. The short segment was called <b>"The Shocking Reality About Relationships With Foreigners".</b><br />
<br />
What it consisted of was a long list of wild accusations about how westerners come to Korea to prey on Korean women, give them HIV, impregnate them and steal their money. Clearly, my friends and I were fucking furious to see this on national television, as it makes our favourite hobby of victimising Korean women substantially more difficult.<br />
<br />
There were of course a few holes in the argument, and I'm not talking about those that I put in my condoms to ensure the creation of HIV riddled infants. Rather holes in the entire piece of "journalism". For a start every foreigner working here has to pass a HIV test. Being HIV negative is on the face of it a good thing, but I can only imagine it is a real drag if you're off around Korea trying to give people HIV.<br />
<br />
The other major problem with the ludicrously xenophobic and frankly racist drivel masquerading as an expose, was that the "victims" they contacted were just women who had dated a non Korean man, and when asked said <i>"No I'm not a victim"</i>, to which the voice over said <i>"Many of the victims lie about their experiences".</i><br />
<br />
Brilliant.<br />
<br />
It made many feel concerned about how they were viewed here in Korea, but noticeably it did not seem interested in the notion of Korean men dating non Korean women...what's that MBC, a sprinkling of good old sexism to compliment the racism?<br />
<br />
It is grossly unfair to represent foreign men as dangerous and irresponsible, anyone would think we were hanging around drunk in the streets assaulting each other on camera for a laugh. I can tell you now, if anyone from MBC had the nerve to suggest such a thing to me, I'd pepper spray them in a heartbeat and have Jacks film it.<br />
<br />
Despite such uproar, I was far from concerned because a few days before myself and my friend Cooper Trooper had been out for a meal and drinks with two Korean victims...ahem...I mean women. They obviously trusted us just fine, but little did I know that rather than being viewed negatively I was about to get a quite glowing endorsement.<br />
<br />
The following day, I was tagged in a photograph on Facebook with the girl I had been entertaining with my sparkling wit and array of funny faces. I noticed that several of her friends had commented on the picture, in Korean of course. So intrigued I copied the first comment into Google translate and read:<br />
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<b><i>"Wow, foreigner. JACKPOT!"</i></b><br />
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That is frankly the type of response I expect everywhere I go from now on. To be fair, I am somewhat of a catch now I think about it, but in my infinite modesty, I'd perhaps never considered myself to be a prize worthy of the "Jackpot" status. Perhaps more of a "Second Prize in a Village Fair Raffle" kind of guy.<br />
<br />
But I was wrong. I am a fucking jackpot. Provided she doesn't mean jackpot in a monetary sense of course, because if she thinks I'm wealthy, she is going to be as disappointed as someone with a jackpot winning ticket who is then handed the second prize from a raffle. A raffle that occured at a modest village fair no less.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, I felt a surge of confidence at being bestowed such a high accolade, even if it did objectify me as a trophy, and I vowed to behave accordingly and prove prejudice wrong. I would be a paragon of virtue, a refined English gentleman who would prove MBC wrong and the random girl on Facebook comments absolutely correct.<br />
<br />
Then Eric said <i>"I'd like to know what it feels like to be pepper sprayed".</i><br />
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Fine, you win this battle MBC.<br />
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<br />Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-37562266974686077842012-05-26T00:10:00.001-07:002012-05-26T13:10:20.510-07:00Conmen And Inspiration.Korea is not known for its crime, in fact it is pretty apparent after a while in the country that there is not much obvious crime at all. You never see cars with smashed windows, people don't get mugged and all in all I've had very little opportunity to move from teaching into the life of a career criminal. The more astute amongst you may notice that I just used an ingenius play on words. "Career/Korea"...eh? Perhaps stand up comedy could be an alternative route to success with such witty linguistic feats.<br />
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Despite my disappointment at the general atmosphere of law abiding, good behaviour, I did at last discover that there was at least one serious criminal in the midst of Daegu. A man, or woman (equal opportunities etc), with not only a total lack of scruples, but a blatant disregard for the safety of children.<br />
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If you have read much of this blathering blog before (alliteration there, more linguistic feats), you will have noticed how much my life of teaching involves around talking about pets. I've had children with pet snails and children who have burger eating turtles called Obama. The younger children like to talk about pets and they have a catalogue of surreal reasons for their choice of pet. "Being quiet" was the reason given for why snails make better pets than dogs for example.<br />
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It was in a very low level class of particularly small, cherub faced children, that the topic of pets once more reared its bestial head. But this time the children had to draw their pet and tell me something about it. Enter gap-toothed Brian. I should point out that officially he is just called Brian, but between you and me, we can call him by his full name.<br />
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Brian told me in massively broken English that his pet kitten broke his house. I've never met someone whose house has been broken by a pet before and if I did and you asked me to guess what type of pet had caused such a calamity, a kitten would be right down near the bottom of my list of guesses. Probably a few places above a quiet snail.<br />
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However, when Brian presented me with his picture of his kitten, it became immediately apparent not only why his domestic reside had been so horribly affected but also that Daegu was home to a conman...or woman...of course. A conperson masquerading as a pet shop owner.<br />
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Because, it is quite evident from Brians picture that he has been duped, and was not sold a kitten at all. Now, I'm not a zoologist but my animal recognition skills are pretty sharp, I know my cows from my koalas. In addition, I have no reason to believe that Brian is anything other than a hugely accurate artist known in his area for almost photorealistic portraits.<br />
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Bearing these two things in mind, I would like you to look at Brian's "kitten" and assess for yourself whether Daegu's most crooked pet shop owner has sold Brian right down the river with no paddle.<br />
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Here it is:<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yl09wJ-OYTk/T8B6PAxJAlI/AAAAAAAAAIo/gX0dqCrXJ20/s1600/002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yl09wJ-OYTk/T8B6PAxJAlI/AAAAAAAAAIo/gX0dqCrXJ20/s400/002.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
Now, I think you would agree that it is patently clear, that poor young Brian has been conned. Because it is fairly obvious, that what he has in fact been sold, is a Velociraptor.<br />
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If taxonomy and the animal kingdom are not your forte, you might be unsure as to what a Velociraptor is. Usually, I would roll my eyes at your ignorance, but this time I will simply tell you to watch Jurassic Park clips on Youtube or google it.<br />
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It is now quite obvious just how Brian's home got into such a state. Because the upkeep and maintenance of kittens is quite different to that of a dinosaur that most people believed to be extinct.<br />
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I was obviously seething with rage at the sort of person who would take a young childs money and hand him a potentially deadly reptile under the guise of it being a kitten. But it does mean that there is a market for con artists in Daegu, which in hindsight is probably something I should have realised sooner given that I am currently employed under the job description of "teacher".<br />
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You might also notice if you look at the writing on Brian's picture, that in a moment of breathtaking inspiration he named his "kitten" Brian. Brilliant. And that reference to inspiration segues seemlessly into my next issue.<br />
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That issue is an "inspirational video" that my school told us we had to show to everyone of our classes before the final hour of study. This is not uncommon as videos espousing the benefits of English have been shown before, and inspiring the kids who often don't want to be there and would rather be at home playing catch with their dinosaurs, seems a fairly worthwhile goal.<br />
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So, I had to accompany every class to our seminar room, where they would watch a video to inspire them and then write their feelings and reactions on the board.<br />
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Great, time off from "teaching". The video begins.<br />
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It is a video of stills with monks chanting over the background. The stills are all of a Bald Eagle and then a Bald Eagle with a broken beak and finally a normal Bald Eagle flying. There is Korean writing that apparently tells a story of how Bald Eagles reach a certain age where their beaks and talons don't work so they smash them off on rocks and new ones grow and they are reborn and live another thirty years.<br />
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What the FUCK does that have to do with English? Not only that, but how does it inspire a student? I asked our boss if they were not concerned that if properly inspired some of the students might take to smashing their noses against their desks.<br />
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She smiled at me in a sympathetic way as if I might be a little unwell, but I'm not the one who thinks an urban legend about Bald Eagles will inspire Korean children to practice their subject-verb agreements and study for their vocabulary tests am I?<br />
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So the kids filed up to write in Korean (of all things!) their reactions. I sounded out the words they were writing and wondered if "bemused" or "uninterested to the point of mild boredom" had been scrawled up there. None of them seemed very inspired, but they liked the look of the Eagle, so I didn't want to break it to them the whole thing is absolute bollocks too.<br />
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Bald Eagles don't break off their beaks, talons or feathers to be reborn and live longer. It doesn't happen. So we may as well have shown a video of how Peter Pan escaped growing old by flying to fucking Nevernever Land. He did? Well knock me down with a Bald Eagle feather, I better go and work on my spelling then.<br />
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I don't know where this video nonsense originated from but I have a strong suspicion that it was made by a man (or woman) sitting in a pet shop somewhere in Daegu, selling off unusually scaly and cold blooded kittens. And I want that person to hire me. <br />
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<br />Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-17561645119898624092012-04-27T23:51:00.003-07:002012-04-27T23:58:44.305-07:00Curse Words And Pepper Spray.Yes, you read correctly. Curse words and Pepper Spray, which are two of my favourite things. I fucking love curse words and I also love (sorry I mean, I also fucking love) Pepper Spray. Granted, I've never been pepper sprayed or pepper sprayed anyone. <i>Yet</i>. But it sounds like a lot of fun and I like spicy things. I actually saw a Youtube video recently of a man who sprayed pepper spray into his own mouth to see what it was like.<br />
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It was pretty much as I'd imagine he expected it was going to be and it is probably not unfair to decide that he was an idiot. But not everyone with Pepper Spray is an idiot and thankfully not everyone who is an idiot has Pepper Spray. <br />
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So why am I talking about this? Well it's all thanks to a new teacher at my school who we shall call Jenny...mainly because that's her name, but also because I haven't got an appropriate nick name for her. <i>Yet</i>. You may have noticed that is the second single word sentence I've made from the word "yet" and I think it gives my writing an ominous and mildy threatening tone. As if I might pepper spray you at any minute. But I digress...<br />
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Jenny has been jogging recently, jogging a little too often for my liking, but not just for the hell of it, but in order to compete in a 10km race. This training appeared to be going well, until there was a bit of a problem one Monday afternoon. After her morning run, she noticed a Korean man outside the apartments. Now, being honest, Korean men are fairly common around here and whilst back home we would obviously be highly suspicious of such a phenomenon, out here in Korea, it's just one of those quirky things that you accept.<br />
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However, as Jenny left her apartment an hour later, this man was still there, and at this point, apparently he was masturbating and gesturing her over to join him. Now clearly, such an offer is on the face of it quite friendly and well meaning, but the Korean man in question had obviously got his cultural wires crossed, because he had failed to realise that this was a Monday. Westerners hate Mondays, and while on a Tuesday I'm sure Jenny would have appreciated his kindly overtures and politely declined, on a Monday with the first day of work looming she took it as any westerner would and was disgusted, appalled and angry.<br />
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But it got worse. Worse than public masturbation on a Monday you gasp? I know, it seems hard to fathom, that anyone could make a bigger faux pas and yet this man did. Because he repeated his behaviour and also followed her one day. It quickly became apparent to us all, that this man was not guilty of making a one off error of judgement, but was in fact a fucking sex pest. Notice how I managed to get a curse word in there, that's one of my favourite things you know?<br />
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Evidently, this deviant was a problem and so our school considered a few options. Jenny could switch apartments with me. Afterall, the likelihood of me being up in the morning and out running is exceptionally small, and therefore I would be unlikely to meet this chap. However, that didn't really solve the problem, because of course Jenny would still like to go out and run, and unless living in my apartment somehow imbued her with an essence of my laziness and apathy, this situation would be unlikely to change.<br />
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It was therefore left to one of my students to provide an unwitting solution. Olivia is only 11 or 12 years old but during a discussion about their favourite belongings the following exchange occured...<br />
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<b>Olivia:</b> <i>"I need my spray. Is very hot and good for the strange man and thief."</i><br />
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<b>Me:</b> <i>"Your spray? What do you mean? Do you mean you spray a person with it?"</i><br />
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<b>Olivia:</b> <i>"Yes teacher, and if it does, they shout 'Aggghhhhhh' and crying, it's a very good for me."</i><br />
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<b>Me:</b> <i>"You mean Pepper Spray? You have Pepper Spray? Who gave it to you?"</i><br />
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<b>Olivia:</b> <i>"Ah yes, the Pepper Spray. My Auntie buy for me because a strange man tried my window."</i><br />
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<b>Me:</b><i> "Wow. Okay and have you ever sprayed anybody with it?"</i><br />
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<b>Olivia:</b> <i>"My mother. It was accident teacher, but I spray her and she goes to the hospital and then hit for me when she home.</i>"<br />
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<b>Me:</b> <i>"You pepper sprayed your mother? And then she hit you when she got back from hospital?"</i><br />
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At this point, I realised I had repeated what she had said several times, and she might be beginning to suspect that I was a bit simple. But laughing away she explained how the accident had occured and yes indeed she pepper sprayed her mother. Not only that, but after much explanation and broken English, I ascertained that it is not legal to buy it here, but that her Auntie had somehow got hold of it "away from the police". Brilliant.<br />
This girl is also friends with my old student "Tiny Gangster" who you may recall had written me on a death wish list.<br />
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With Olivia's illegal arms dealing Auntie and Olivia's history of violence, the threat had suddenly become more real.<br />
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So I suggested to Jenny that perhaps we could procur an illegal weapon from one of my young students. I can't see any possible issues that could arise from such an arrangement. Either that or if she bumps into this excitable fellow again, she could perhaps just inform him that we teach at the same school as Olivia and her small friend "Tiny Gangster".<br />
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As I draw this to a close, you are probably wondering what the link is to curse words. Well, you probably were not wondering anything of the sort and were just wondering who the hell "Tiny Gangster" is, in which case you should have been reading my blog about 18 months ago. Go on, have a look...<br />
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The connection is actually in the very same class as Olivia. At the front sit two girls who are even younger and very hard working and enthusiastic. One of them is called Sally and as I explained something, out of absolutely nowhere she just said..<i>."What the fuck teacher?".</i><br />
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I stopped and looked at her in stunned silence for a moment and she said again <i>"What the fuck teacher? What does this mean, what the fuck?"</i><br />
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<b>Me:</b><i> "Don't say that it is a very bad word."</i><br />
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<b>Sally:</b><i> "Oh, very bad?"</i><br />
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<b>Me:</b> <i>"Yes very bad, where did you hear it?"</i><br />
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<b>Sally:</b> <i>"Sorry teacher, I heard it at school. In my class, one human told this to me."</i><br />
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One human? What sort of school do Sally's parents send her to, where she needs to explain to me that it was a human in her class who told her the swear word? I wanted to get to the bottom of this, but as I began to question her I noticed Olivia was miming a spraying motion at me and making a hissing sound like "Tssss...tssss".<br />
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I took that to mean that I had asked enough and so I don't know anything more about Sally's mixed species classroom. Yet.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-33216210918896400252012-04-21T01:37:00.002-07:002012-04-21T02:40:40.331-07:00Brandy And CobblersI am not dead. It is however, 6 months since I wrote a blog and therefore nobody will probably read this or remember who I am. I made a wild and foolish decision 6 months ago that destroyed any hope I had of maintaining my trivial musings on life in Korea.<br />
I decided to actually gain a small teaching qualification so that I could actually teach. As a teacher, this might on the face of it seem like a sharp and almost ingenious move; but in reality it involved having to do more work after finishing working. I don't like working. Working for no money is something I like even less, and so I procrastinated and moaned incessantly for 6 months as I learnt how to teach.<br />
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So much has happened that I don't know where to begin. Luckily none of what happened was really noteworthy to anyone other than myself, so I'll summarise some key landmarks. Christmas came. I'm not sure if you remember that, but it happened...AGAIN. My friend Huckle dressed up as Father Christmas to entertain the kids, but by lurking around the corridors and leaping out at them, it had more of a white bearded, paedophile in bright trousers feel to it than might have been intended. Still the kids liked it, must have been the trousers. Or maybe it was the beard.<br />
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Our Dear Leader Kim Jong Il died. And my own dear mother came to visit me in Korea. I should point out at this juncture that the two incidents were totally unrelated, in fact my mother is so left wing that she is bordering on being a communist anyway. If anything her arrival would have given the North Korean mourners some welcome support in their time of need.<br />
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My mother enjoyed Korea and her visit actually made me go out and see Korea. It was a whirlwind of cultural shenanigans, that included Temples, Stone Buddahs, Singing Rooms and much more besides. She also wanted to visit the North Korean border or DMZ as it's known, which given her political persuasions obviously raised my suspicions. I informed the CIA and then booked us both a tour, but the whole thing went off without any real incident and I managed to buy a bottle of North Korean Pear Brandy.<br />
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The words "North Korean Pear Brandy" have been said a lot recently. Usually in the sentence, <i>"Would anyone like to drink this North Korean Pear Brandy with me?"</i>
If I had never moved to Korea and someone had offered me North Korean Pear Brand I would have been eager and pleasantly surprised by their kind gesture. If I was offered North Korean Pear Brandy by a friend out here in Korea, I would be as happy as a communist, British mother being taken to the North Korean border by a son who had recently earned a suspect teaching certificate.<br />
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But so far, it sits sneering at me alongside my bottle of North Korean Soju. Wait a minute, I hear you shout, nobody told us about the North Korean Soju. Well now I'm telling you. I also have some North Korean Soju. I'm a veritable gold mine of North Korean alcoholic beverages.<br />
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In the time that I have been away working, studying and failing to entice people with the fermented fruits of Karl Marx's writings, several teachers and friends have left and several new additions have arrived and one in particular has been a source of great amusement so far.<br />
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As you are aware, I am very fond of mocking things. In particular ludicrous things that people say. People who don't think before speaking. My favourite hobby of mocking has been seriously compromised since Little Spoon departed back to LA and I had to make do with sporadic conversations on Skype to get my fix of gibberish.<br />
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That was until my little brothers friend arrived in Daegu and under his recommendation looked me up. Due to the fact that this young woman is also the worlds worst cook, I will give her the nickname Chef. Chef has been here a couple of months and has blessed me with a wealth of ridiculous statements and also earned her nickname after adding washing-up liquid to an omelette rather than pepper, frying tomatoes in vinegar instead of oil and making a sweetcorn sandwich with pieces of lettuce replacing bread. Because she had no bread.<br />
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I have no doubt that some of her nonsense will form many a blog to come, but for now I will share one story that actually does not involve her, but rather her shoes. Chef had a pair of shoes in which the sole was peeling away and upon hearing that a tiny old cobbler lived near my apartment she dropped off her shoes and asked me to have them cobbled.<br />
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If you are too young to remember the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, then a cobbler is someone who fixes shoes. This cobbler appears to have learnt his trade in around about the late 19th Century and there was therefore always a risk that if I did not get these shoes cobbled pronto, that he could well die.<br />
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There was of course a small problem that stood like a diminutive problematic thing between me and the cobbler. Language. Due to my commitments and my erm...pathetic lack of motivation in general life, my Korean remains woeful. My poor attitude to language skills seemed to be something that the cobbler and I had in common, as in his 110 years or so in Korea he appeared to have inexplicably learnt no English.<br />
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He probably thought he didn't need it, well what a load of old cobblers (apologies to Americans for the forced nature in which I squeezed in that dreadful pun based on an old British saying), because here I was stood before him with some women's shoes and not a lick of relevant Korean.
Being a cobbler he sussed out the problem pretty sharpish. Some shoes needed fixing.<br />
However, he clearly thought they were my shoes and yet these were a woman's shoes and no mistake.<br />
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I don't know if you recall my blog from late 2011 about my incident with the feminine umbrella, but if not then be aware that I was forced to walk to work one day using a very feminine umbrella. It dawned on me that I walk past the cobbler on the way to work and there are not many white people in this area. If he had seen me with that umbrella and now I was here presenting women's shoes to be cobbled, by God I'd be the laughing stock of Daegu's pensioners!<br />
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I wanted him to know that they were not mine, but pointing across the street towards the mountains, pointing at yourself and shaking your head, simply does not say <i>"These aren't my shoes mate, they're a female friend of mines and I'm just doing her a favour".</i><br />
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In fact it probably says more along the lines of <i>"See those yonder mountains old man, I wish to walk them, but alas I cannot because my girly shoes are broken".</i><br />
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I gave up trying to make excuses and comforted myself with the knowledge that he would probably not be around long enough for word to spread too far about my dress code. I had managed to find out that they would be done within an hour, so an hour later I returned to collect my...er...I mean Chef's boots.<br />
It was at this point that I nearly compounded my humiliation, because although I can say thank you, I don't know the very basic term "very good". I do however know "Delicious".<br />
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As he handed the perfectly cobbled shoes to me, I immediately thanked him and as he looked up expectantly I thought I'd better let him know just how good his work was, and started to mumble the Korean for delicious.
Thankfully as the first syllable left my mouth, I stopped myself, otherwise I would have left an ancient cobbler with the impression that I am a man who collects women's shoes in order to taste them.<br />
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Not only that, but so discerning is my palate for leather based footwear, that I simply could not abide licking and chewing upon an old boot that had a peeling sole, and thus I would come to a cobbler for way of seasoning as it were. Ah yes, the soles are fixed back on these beauties, right off to the mountains with these for a picnic, delicious!Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-37107355811690294432011-11-16T02:30:00.000-08:002011-11-16T05:14:55.240-08:00The Dreams Of A Child.Children are a decidedly odd bunch and their brains work in an unsual way. I suspected this for a long time having once been a child and having to work with the little clowns has confirmed my suspicions.<br /><br />I arrived at school early after recently being told to arrive at school earlier. A simple instruction that I acted upon with great success and yet if proof were needed about the minds of children, I also told several of mine to not be late and they still arrived late. Idiots.<br /><br />As I made myself a cup of tea, one of the younger students walked past with a cup. This in itself is not that unusual I admit, and if the story stopped there, you would probably feel it didn't warrant mentioning. Luckily for you the story doesn't stop there, because unlike children I'm not the sort to tell you pointless bits of information. Stupid children.<br /><br />I looked at the cup to see what muck the boy was drinking and he was it appeared drinking some water with a small turtle in it. I turned back to put some milk in my tea; those kids always drinking weird stuff whether it's Aloe Vera juice, cold green tea or water with turtles....HANG ON.<br /><br />I spun around. Nobody drinks water with a turtle in it. Not even here.<br /><br />I had no idea who this particular student was so I addressed him as I do with all new children...<span style="font-style:italic;">"Oi you, come here"</span>.<br /><br />He came here. Obviously a smart one.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Why do you have a turtle in your cup?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Boy:</span><span style="font-style:italic;"> "Is a turtle."</span><br /><br />So much for him being a smart one.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Not 'is a turtle' you say 'it's a turtle'"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Boy:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Yes is a turtle"</span><br /><br />For fucks sake, anyone would think I was speaking a foreign language.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"I know, why do you have it in a cup and why is it here in school?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Boy:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"My pet. I bring him today."</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Me:</span> "I see. What is he called? What's his name?"<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Boy:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Name is Obama."</span><br /><br />Interesting; a communist, Muslim turtle from Kenya.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Me:</span><span style="font-style:italic;"> "What do you feed him? What do you give Obama to eat?"<br /></span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Boy:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Beef burger, teacher. Get him big."</span><br /><br />Beef Burgers? You won't get him big, you will get him dead.<br /><br />Who the hell in his family is going out and buying him beef burgers to feed to a tiny Turtle called Obama? What sort of person simply listens to the insane request of a little child and then thinks <span style="font-style:italic;">"Sure, let's run with that."</span>? If he wants to feed his turtle burgers on the basis that it will make it big, who am I as a parent to say something crazy like <span style="font-style:italic;">"No, let's get him some turtle feed"</span>?<br /><br />I began to think what would have happened if my parents had agreed to my every whim as a child. The first thing is that I would be dead. As dead as Obama the turtle is going to be in about a weeks time.<br /><br />The other thing that had me contemplating my wishes and desires as a child was a popular Facebook picture of John Lennon with a supposed quote from him about how when he was 5 years old his mother told him to aim to be happy and at school he was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and he said "happy". Then the teacher said that he didn't understand the question and he replied "You don't understand life".<br /><br />It is quite the quip and being a boring pedant I very nearly commented on the numerous postings of this quote to point out that Lennon didn't live with his mother when he was five. Moreover there is no evidence that he ever said what was being quoted.<br /><br />Thankfully for everyone concerned I managed to reign in my insufferable, know it all smugness and instead thought about what I had dreamt of as a five year old and it would not make for a very deep and meaningful Facebook status.<br /><br />If like my little friend with Obama I had also been allowed to try and follow my dreams at the age of five, I would have led one of the most fascinating and yet surreal lives imaginable.<br /><br />I only had three pressing dreams as a young boy of five or six. The first was to change my name by deed poll to "Robin" and move into a forest with a group of friends. Being five or six years old I presume the group would have been largely made up of "merry kids" as opposed to "merry men" and the goal was basically to live in trees and shoot people with arrows.<br /><br />A fairly noble goal for any child, but my desire to be involved in medieval conflicts as a chid outlaw was always going to be difficult given the era of my birth and my parents reluctance to set me loose into the nearest woodland.<br /><br />But no sooner had one dream been crushed, than another was born in earnest. <br /><br />Because I also had a strong desire to be changed into a Japanese boy. Being the worldly, educated man I am today, I refuse to buy into offensive stereotypes or wild generalisations. However, at the age of five I was a free thinker without the constraints of a politically correct world gone mad. I was of the firm belief that all Japanese people had an innate ability in Kung Fu and other martial arts.<br /><br />I wanted to be a ninja and years of dedicated training seemed a lot more tiresome than simply becoming Japanese. To think that any old person can get a sex change these days and yet science is still months, maybe even years from being able to offer children a race change. How difficult could it have been for someone to just make me Japanese for God's sake?<br /><br />My parents, Mr "not today" and Mrs "you can't do that" made absolutely no effort to make that dream become a reality either. Which brings me to my final yearning as a boy; a boy utterly devoid of a burger eating turtle or any sharp retorts for school teachers based on fictious life lessons. In other words, a boy in need of some excitement.<br /><br />My final dream came about under unlikely circumstances. I was watching an extremely old episode of a black and white Flash Gordon serial film. I was born a long time after black and white left our screens and have no idea why a film serial from the late 1930's was ever shown on British television. But it was, and it changed my life. I had to do some google research just now to find out exactly which film it was and it was Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars. <br /><br />In this episode there features an enemy called "The Clay People". They are people - and this may come as a surprise - made from clay. Only watching this atrocious pap on Youtube just now, they would surely have been better named "The Pyjama People". <br /><br />How any five year old, especially one as sharp and discerning as myself, ever watched a group of dreadful actors running around in loose pyjamas with some mud on their faces and thought they were convincing aliens is quite beyond me. What is even more beyond me is why that same five year old decided that his goal in life was now to become a clay boy.<br /><br />I wanted to become able to blend into rocky, clay walls and to live underground in a series of damp, dimly lit caves waiting to ambush unsuspecting explorers. I already knew my stupid parents would object and probably offer precious little support in this endeavour so I experimented alone. I tried sticking pebbles to my skin. I thought about making a suit with slate and mud stuck to it. <br /><br />Sadly my attempts were as ineffective as my ghost catching machine made from a shoe box with a portable vacuum cleaner inside it was.<br /><br />So I never got to live the dream life of being made from clay and rock. A dream that became so strong a desire that I all but forgot about any need to be Japanese or practice my archery skills for the inevitable stand off with whoever was the standing Sheriff of Nottingham at that time. <br /><br />A quick Wikipedia search reveals the sheriff at that time was Thomas Ball Edward Hilton. The name of a money grabbing, oppressor of the people if ever I heard one. No doubt he slept easier at night once word had got to him that I was focusing on the bigger picture, and looking to become a clay based alien life form.<br /><br />So while I look back at all the things I have failed to accomplish, I now get to see other young children telling me about their ridiculous dreams. It is almost like Karma. I'm being punished for my idiocy by smiling and nodding at the idiocy of the younger generations.<br /><br />Speaking of the nonsense that is Karma, I was on a subway the other day when a man in an electronic wheelchair got on. Now calm down before you think I am about to say something vile. I know the wheelchair community and I had a recent run in, but that is all behind us now. What happened was that as he reversed I looked up and emblazoned across the back of his chair in yellow font was the word "KARMA".<br /><br />It has to be the most inapproproate and ironic placement of a single word that I've ever seen.<br /><br />Now either that man has a very self deprecating sense of humour or somewhere there is a wheelchair production company being run by a five year old whose parents indulge his or her every wish.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-89571490275879464482011-11-04T19:01:00.000-07:002011-11-04T20:59:42.754-07:00Grammar And A Magical Mouse.Prepare to be disappointed. I am well aware that the title of this post is exciting, intriguing and full of promise. That was my plan though, draw you in and by the time you realise you've been duped it will be too late and you'll have already read half of my ramblings and decide to reluctantly finish. HA!<br /><br />That's not to say that I will not be discussing grammar, of course I will. I always discuss grammar, at breakfast, in the pub and right here. Who doesn't love grammar? To be honest it is the magical mouse that I feel is a bit of con, somewhat of a deception even. There is no magical mouse you see, there never was really, he was just a normal mouse who died in the name of magic.<br /><br />Oh I've definitely got you now...read on...<br /><br />This tale came courtesy of a small boy called Alex. He is very young and very small, and in fairness to him those two things often go hand in hand. He is in a class with much older and taller students due to him being quite advanced for his age; the only thing is that his English is advanced but the rest of his personality is exactly as you would expect for a small boy of precious few years.<br /><br />This leads to some bemused looks from the class when this highly confident kid launches into one of his excitable stories or begins to leap around the room as the teenage girls check their hair in their portable mirrors.<br /><br />We were talking about animals. Again. If you have read my blog in the past you will know that animals and pets feature in class quite often and here I was getting tiny bits of information from my teenage students about what made a good pet. I thought I could wow them with my tale of how one student last year had a pet snail, yeah that would have these moody 14 year olds laughing; a snail as a pet...whatever next teacher?<br /><br />Hailey just nods and says sagely<span style="font-style:italic;"> "It's good idea"</span>. <br /><br />Is it I asked. Why is a snail a good pet? What could possibly be a good idea about having a snail as a pet? To which she provided an answer so obvious I felt myself blush at my own stupidity.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Hailey:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"The snail is not barking like a dog teacher. He always has the good behaviour."</span><br /><br />Silly me. Of course! Snails don't bark, that's why they are great. But there are a lot of things snails don't do, in fact if we are going to praise snails for the things they don't do, then we could end up holding them in very high regard indeed.<br /><br />I was and still am reluctant to give snails too much credit for their <span style="font-style:italic;">"good behaviour"</span> as I don't feel it is down to discipline or resisting the temptation to run amock, smashing up local beauty spots. Call me cynical, but I think they are partly a bit lazy and partly a bit hampered by their lack of limbs.<br /><br />To be honest if I ever found a snail that <span style="font-style:italic;">did</span> bark then I think it would be a great pet. Arguably a barking snail would be one of the most brilliant things I can imagine.<br /><br />So here you are, still none the wiser about the mouse, but with - and I think we can both agree on this - an unexpected bonus of a snail story. <br /><br />Anyway, this talk of animals was too much for little Alex. He leapt from his chair and began to sort of jig in a circle, waving his hands about as he told us his story. Sometimes I will tell him to sit down, but this seemed like a time to let him jig, so jig he did.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Alex:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"I had the mouse. For the pet teacher, the mouse. But he go away in the magic show. My brother do the magic show and mouse is gone ha ha ha."</span><br /><br />Obviously he didn't actually say "ha ha ha" but he did laugh. He was breaking out into laughter constantly and kept repeating a sort of wooshing noise inbetween saying <span style="font-style:italic;">"magic show"</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">"mouse is gone"</span>.<br /><br />I asked him to elaborate on how his magician of a brother made his pet mouse vanish and it wasn't the sort of magic I've grown accustomed to.<br /><br />Alex gestured to the floor and outlined the mouse and then said <span style="font-style:italic;">"Mouse is here, and then the magic show..."</span> and he leapt into the air and stamped down hard on the imaginary mouse made an explosion sound and then said <span style="font-style:italic;">"Woosh, mouse is gone, magic show"</span>.<br /><br />I laughed. It's not even funny and it is certainly not magic. It is animal cruelty and if anything it was a murder show as opposed to a magic show, but everyone was laughing. Snail loving Hailey, the surly girls at the back who just comb their hair incessantly and me. United in mirth at a disgusting act of unprovoked cruelty and all because of how Alex told the tale. It was his mouse, and even he found it funny so cut me some slack.<br /><br />I did however point out to the class that killing animals was wrong and that I expected Alex's brother to end up in jail when he was an adult, as these sorts of people usually do. Alex nodded and said <span style="font-style:italic;">"woosh"</span>.<br /><br />For the rest of the lesson I could hear him sporadically mumbling<span style="font-style:italic;"> "magic show"</span> to himself and wooshing away with a deranged smile.<br /><br />Perhaps he will end up in jail too, but how the time would fly if you were his cell mate. For tonights entertainment please welcome to the centre of the cell the famous magician Alex taught by his older brother who is on the secure wing for lifers. With Alex tonight we have his assistant for the evening a local cockroach who is in here for bad behaviour having ignored the standards set to him by Daegu's snail community.<br /><br />All good animal based lessons must come to an end, that's just the way the world works, and I had to move on to serious subject matter.<br /><br />The following lessons involved preparing students for their level up tests and a new section we are supposed to review with them on grammar. There is a problem here in that none of the English teachers really know anything about grammar. We never learn the rules in school and just pick it up, or don't pick it up and never have to worry about what infinitives are. I bet you think because I used infinitive as an example that I know what one is. Nope.<br /><br />So I had to run them through some example questions which involved filling in a blank in a sentence with a word or a phrase from a choice of four options. Thankfully identifying which option was correct was very easy for me, what with being a native English speaker and all, but explaining why this was the case in terms of grammar rules was a little tricky. Luckily we had printed out explanations to give them<br /><br />Here was one question. Fill in the blank with the correct term:<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />If you have ever stood next to a rushing river you___________ the water hammering away.</span> <br /><br />The correct choice was of course <span style="font-weight:bold;">B)</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">may have seen.</span><br /><br />There were three incorrect options and an explanation for why they were wrong. One wrong answer was "saw" and another was "are seeing" and here is the explanation I was supposed to give for why these two were wrong...<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Since the present perfect tense in the dependent clause is used to express the subject's experience from the past to the present, the main verb in the main clause cannot be in the past tense or present progressive tense."</span><br /><br />In the present perfect progressive tense of this independent clause; I haven't got a fucking clue what that means. Or is that present perfect with a gerund? What's a gerund again? I'm going to take this grammar sheet and woosh, magic show!Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-54586266794732498772011-10-27T20:59:00.000-07:002011-10-28T06:29:11.160-07:00General Knowledge And The Profound Pencil Case.Korean education does not appear to have much time for general knowledge or creativity. While the children leaving the system are certainly doing well in maths, science and often a dab hand on the piano, it is often a narrow range of topics that they seem to learn. There are stand out children who have a wide range of interests and understanding of the world, but they always seem to have learnt this at home due to travelled and well read parents.<br /><br />I suppose the same could be said for kids back home, but everything seems magnified here. <br />Outside of hating Japan, viewing Africa as dirty and lauding Korea, many kids really have very little knowledge about the rest of the world. Which makes it very easy for me to appear far more well read and educated than I am.<br /><br />I wowed a class of 12 year olds with my knowledge of capital cities.<span style="font-style:italic;"> "Teacher what is the capital of Kenya?" </span>why that would be <span style="font-style:italic;">"Nairobi"</span>. And gasps of amazement. Of course the best thing in such a quiz is that the people setting the questions do not know the answers. This means that even if I am stumped by an outlandishly obscure question such as <span style="font-style:italic;">"What is the capital of Wales?"</span>, I can say <span style="font-style:italic;">"Grimbinlop"</span> and my audience are still stunned by my intellect and clap their hands with delight.<br /><br />I was due to go to a pub quiz or "trivia night" as the American organisers called it and this quick fire question round in my class was honing my skills. I got home and decided I needed some more severe testing but then got a Skype call from Little Spoon who is of course back in LA. Well I figured it would be similar to the quiz in my class and even if it was not testing, I could once more pretend I was a genius.<br /><br />But somehow I ended up asking her questions on capital cities and decided to throw her the curve ball classic of <span style="font-style:italic;">"What is the capital of Australia?"</span>.<br /><br />Of course she fell for it and went with Sydney. The fool. I sniggered and offered her a second shot. At this point people either remember the answer (which is Canberra by the way you ignorant scum) or they say something like Melbourne....pfffttt...as if!<br /><br />They don't however think outside the box like Little Spoon does and answer with <span style="font-style:italic;">"Madagascar"</span>.<br /><br />So I went to quiz night a little unprepared. I was with my friend Tanya who recently told me that when she first met me with her fiance Steve she hated me so much that she told him if he wanted to spend time with me in the future he would have to do it alone. I was delighted to see that I have not lost the knack of providing people with an excellent first impression of myself. <br /><br />Apparently she had thought I was sexist and ignorant! Bless her pretty little head, it had probably been that time of the month. But since then she had learnt how wide of the mark she had been and we were now a brilliant quiz duo.<br /><br />We bumped into my friend Minix down there and with his degree in classics and ancient history we stormed through the history round. Tanya blitzed a music video round with two more team mates Ariella and Natalie and I was biding my time to unleash my plethora of wisdom.<br /><br />Capital cities did not come up! Nor did my other areas of expertise which are hip-hop from 1993-1997 and the question<span style="font-style:italic;"> "Who was the infamous son of Agripinna the Younger?".<br /></span><br />What a stupid quiz. We came joint fifth.<br /><br />There was a bonus round where one person answers a question for a big cash prize. It was something about Laotian mythology. I was in Laos not long ago, but only remember tubing, laughing at hippies and nearly being decapitated by a small masseuse. Why didn't I pay more attention to their mythology?<br /><br />If only there had been a question like "What is the most surreal answer to the classic question, 'What is the capital of Australia'?" then perhaps I could have claimed the jackpot. More depressing was the fact that although I say capital cities did not come up, there was in fact one question on the subject. It asked what the capital city of Greenland was.<br /><br />I didn't know. Apparently it is "Nuuk", which sounds suspiciously like the sort of answer I would give to my 12 year olds if I didn't know. I looked at the quiz master closely for signs of deceit, but he appeared to be playing straight.<br /><br />So I will be back next week, this time with Dubs as another team mate. Until then I will make myself feel smarter by another question round with my kids later today. This particular class don't know shit! Ha ha. I'm the worlds most learned man in that classroom.<br /><br />But although they don't know much about the world outside Korea and although they struggle to create stories in their projects or be imaginative, they do have a variety of pencil cases and t-shirts bearing almost poetic prose. <br /><br />Because as anyone who has lived in Korea or many other parts of Asia will know, people have English words and phrases on all manner of clothing and more often than not it is a random stream of unconnected words that means nothing. For example <span style="font-style:italic;">"Flower, Happy The Sunshine Girls"</span> I beg your pardon?<br /><br />But I looked at one girl named "Hotdog" who always sits near the front and has so much energy that I feel like spiking her chocolate milk with Valium, and saw her pencil case was decorated with what appeared to be a poem. <br /><br />It was written in fancy lettering within speech marks, so I picked it up to read, and it was not a random string of words.<br />It read well despite one grammatical error and it told a dark, haunting tale that gave me food thought. <br /><br />You could say that this was a truly profound pencil case and this snippet of literature may well change your life. Enjoy...<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"The rabbit trying to trick the cat into sitting on her broken chair, while the monkey is pedaling along on his squeaky bicycle."<br /><br />A SQUEAKY Bicycle. The Bicycle was squeaky! Think about that for a moment.<br /></span>Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-22813640177450192362011-10-18T21:21:00.000-07:002011-10-18T22:46:51.125-07:00Umbrellas And Korean Newborns.I bet that was a sentence you never expected to see. Even as I typed it out I felt I might be on to something pretty unique. So I googled Umbrellas and Korean Newborns to see if was truly a pioneer; a sole voice on the world wide web who dared break conventions and place Asian infants alongside the worlds most popular instrument for keeping dry in rainy conditions.<br /><br />I wasn't. But the first link sounded extremely promising. It was apparently a video of a "Happy Narcoleptic Baby". Narcolepsy is always good for a laugh and babies have their moments so this sounded exactly the sort of thing I needed on a Wednesday. I clicked on the link and scrolled down to read the following information above the video...<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />"Don't worry, this adorable Korean baby doesn't really have narcolepsy".</span><br /><br />Well that was a fucking anticlimax. <br /><br />I wasn't worried, I was looking forward to it you deceitful bastard. In fact the only reason I clicked your link was to see a baby with narcolepsy who had maintained a positive disposition and outlook on life. Now I was faced with a video of a baby who was just <span style="font-style:italic;">"very tired"</span> and who <span style="font-style:italic;">"keeps waking up, smiling..."</span> ahhh shut up. <br /><br />All babies are very tired and they all wake up too. I should have known this video would be a con. Babies are some of the laziest people on the planet so you could never diagnose narcolepsy in the little, stunted, workshy layabouts.<br /><br />I have digressed slightly and you may wonder why I was including Korean newborns in this title to begin with, and I can assure you it was not simply to have a go at infants.<br /><br />Upon my return to work I was informed that one of the Korean teachers had just had his first child. His wife had given birth the day before and we were given a card to sign and then asked to put in some money for a gift but to just <span style="font-style:italic;">"give whatever you would like".</span><br /><br />Hmmmm. That might not work. If I were to give whatever I would like, I would give you absolutely nothing. In fact, if this baby has a savings account set up for him or her, I wouldn't mind borrowing from it to be honest. Provided whatever I borrow doesn't ever have to be paid back.<br /><br />Some donations seemed very generous. Too generous to go towards someone who will be happy playing with a piece of wool for the next 12 months and then get immense joy from cardboard boxes for at least a couple of years after that.<br /><br />But I have a reputation as a generous and thoughtful man to maintain so I wrote a heartfelt message and threw in a bundle of notes. After our meeting we clapped the new father into the room and were then shown a video from the hospital. For one ghastly moment I thought it might be a Korean tradition to share videos of the birth with co workers, but thankfully it was just a nurse holding up the baby after it had been cleaned and wrapped in a blanket.<br /><br />And this is where Korea or perhaps just this one hospital takes things too far. The wrapping up. Because the blanket was wrapped in a tight square around the baby which meant it just looked like a small pillow with a human head attached. A cute little head belonging to a baby, but the body was just a pillow. No arms or legs could be seen. Not even the shape.<br /><br />Which means that either his child had no limbs and he was delighted with this outcome or Korean hospitals wrap up babies like little pillows and just leave their heads poking out. I decided the second possibility was more likely. Why do they do that? <br /><br />I didn't want to raise the question at that moment as everyone was cooing and clapping and shaking his hand, so to shout out <span style="font-style:italic;">"Hold on, excuse me, why have they wrapped your daughter up like a pillow? It looks like she doesn't have limbs"</span> might dampen the atmosphere some what.<br /><br />So I still don't know. If you are Korean and read this, please leave a message and tell me if this is the norm.<br /><br />So to umbrellas. I tried to think of a clever link there, but umbrellas and babies just don't go together I'm afraid.<br /><br />The problem I had was that it had not rained since I returned and I had no reason to believe it would. Rainy season is over and the weather has been great. So I have not concerned myself with getting an umbrella, and I was happy with this arrangement.<br /><br />Until I woke up to hear the rain. Pouring rain. The type of rain that would make you quite wet indeed if you were to say walk a ten minute trip to work in it without so much as an umbrella for protection.<br /><br />I began to ring co workers in my apartment block. No answer. They were probably outside with their umbrellas talking about how terrible it would be to be a person without one in this sort of weather. They were talking about me. I should resign...no, no, too drastic. I should just try and find an umbrella or accept going to work like a drowned rat.<br /><br />My new apartment was previously lived in by a girl who I used to work with. She had very kindly emailed me about leaving useful things behind if I wanted them, and I had been lucky enough to get a fair bit of food, cleaning products and an iron etc. She had not mentioned an umbrella but she was the sort of person who might well have owned one. The more I thought about it, the more I seemed to remember her always being dry even during rainy weather.<br /><br />I began to open every cupboard and draw in the place. Seeing as I live in a shoebox apartment that was not quite the epic search you might have envisaged, and in the last cupboard I opened....triumph. An umbrella!<br /><br />Oh but the triumph was short lived. Because of course this was a girls old apartment. This umbrella had a brightly coloured handle, and huge turquoise polka dots all over it. It was a quite incredibly feminine umbrella. I am a man. A man who likes rare steak, films with gratutious violence and holds many outdated and offensive views.<br /><br />I needed a man's umbrella. One in no more than two colours, and ideally one solid colour, which should be either white, black or navy blue. If there had to be some sort of emblem or picture on such an umbrella it should be something like a skull and crossbone or a lion punching a rhino.<br /><br />Polka dots were a long way from brawling beasts and turquoise is several shades adrift from trusty, masculine navy blue.<br /><br />So quite mortified with my appearance I began the walk to work; hunched under my garish, girls umbrella, not daring to look at passers by in the eye. Until I saw him. A young boy of no more than 8 years old.<br /><br />He was stood outside a shop eating chocolate and holding an umbrella above his head. A Spiderman umbrella. Spiderman is a hero. In fact, he us a "super" hero and not afraid to use violence to resolve problems. A Spiderman umbrella whilst slightly childish was infinitely more acceptable for a man of my standing than the one I had now.<br /><br />I could mug that boy.<br /><br />I could walk up and make him take my umbrella in exchange for his. He might put up a fight, they learn Taekwondo here...but...I fancied my chances. He looked up and our eyes met. He couldn't be more than 4ft 1" tall, I could definitely take him.<br /><br />Then he turned to the sound of a womans voice and I cursed under my breath. His mother had come out of the shop and was with him. She looked up at the rain and took out her umbrella. She opened it. It was navy blue. A single solid navy throughout its manly frame.<br /><br />She looked up and our eyes met. She couldn't be more than 5ft 2", I could definitely....NO.<br /><br />I dragged myself away and scurried to work under my parasol of shame and immediately switched it for a blue and white one I found in our staff kitchen.<br /><br />But never again will I make such a mistake, although if this had never happened I would never have discovered the video of a narcoleptic baby that doesn't have narcoplepsy. A video which you are all no doubt watching right now.<br /><br />So you owe me one.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-74372651750601221732011-10-12T01:11:00.000-07:002011-10-13T02:36:43.605-07:00To England and Back.So here I am. Where is here you ask? A good question. In Korea. That puts an end to your pestering questions but it doesn't tell the full story. The full story is astonishingly dull, so I'll give you just a vague outline. I finished travelling with Little Spoon and I returned to England. Little Spoon returned to LA, my friends Chocolate Orange and Chess Champ went to travel the world and Rude Boy Yatesy moved to Seoul.<br /><br />Then I came back to Korea after 3 months of doing nothing but entertain my family and friends with witty anecdotes about life in Korea and how cheap beer is in comparison to cheese. The hours must have flown by for my nearest and dearest who cheered in the streets upon my arrival in England and wailed and beat the ground upon my departure.<br /><br />So what high jinks did I get up to over the summer months in glorious England? Very little. I embarked upon a new fitness regime that involved jumping across a rug in my living room and doing press ups on a kitchen chair. That lasted two weeks, which is two weeks better than not embarking on any fitness regime at all.<br /><br />Other than that, I went to a friends wedding in Poland, gave a brilliant, erudite best man's speech, then got so pathetically inebriated that I almost knocked a giant speaker onto the brides sister. It would have killed her instantly had it fallen, and generally put a sour note to the days events.<br /><br />Thankfully I was escorted out by embarrassed friends and the brides sister is alive to this day.<br /><br />So that was England. Oh and Poland. It was early September that I returned to Korea, to the same school as before, for a nice pay rise but without many of the people who had made last year such fun. I still had good friends, but those that had left, had left Daegu for good and so it was with some sorrow that I waited to board my flight. I was to fly to Dubai, where I would change on to another flight that would whisk me to Korea, a long and stressful journey at the best of times.<br /><br />So you can imagine my mood taking a turn for the worse when an official announcement rang out...<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Ladies and Gentleman there will be a slight delay to boarding, because we have several passengers in wheelchairs who need some assistance and will be given priority for boarding."</span><br /><br />WHAT? I spun around and sure enough, there they were. The several passengers in wheelchairs who needed some assistance. Only there were not several, there was at least twenty of them and they all had matching tracksuits. They appeared to be some sort of sports team. Since when do sports teams "need assistance"? I walked over to have a closer look, and my anger began to rise.<br /><br />They all had legs. All of them. Not only that, but full, strong looking legs in tracksuits no less. There was not a withered leg amongst them and they were smiling. I wasn't smiling, but then again I wasn't getting priority boarding with assistance whilst relaxing in a snazzy tracksuit was I?<br /><br />As they wheeled away I fought to control my fury. If I walk onto this plane and find that they are in first class, someone else is going to be in a wheelchair by the end of this flight. As I began to walk towards the plane I became convinced they would be swanning about in first class, drinking champagne and laughing at the able bodied. <br /><br />Surely I was not the only one annoyed by this discrimination? I looked about and everyone else seemed cheerful and calm. Where were the obnoxious and the arrogant? This flight was going to Dubai for Gods Sake. Surely it couldn't be hard to find someone vile on here, afterall 99% of people who holiday there are repugnant scum aren't they? I should be in my element.<br /><br />Nothing. Just smiles and laughter. Probably looking forward to making fun of some Arab custom or spending their loose change on a sex slave from the third world whose been shipped into one of the 14 Star Hotels. Heartless Bastards.<br /><br />Ah YES...no wheelchairs in First Class. In your face wheelchair team, get back into economy with the rest of us. It's not like you need the leg room anyway. Arrogant swines, I bet they tried to demand first class; with their new tracksuits and...I dropped my hand luggage. A friendly man in a wheelchair picked it up and handed it to me.<br /><br />I thanked him and contemplated saying what a disgrace it was that his team hadn't been given First Class when it was not even full. But he might think that patronising and I wouldn't want anyone to get the idea that I was ignorant.<br /><br />There were no more incidents of note on my journey and I arrived in Seoul to go and visit Rudeboy Yatesy for a few days of merriment, before I headed back down to Daegu to meet some new teachers, and to embark upon another year of pretending to be a teacher.<br /><br />If you have missed the internets most asinine stories, then rejoice, I will be back once a week. If you were glad to see the back of them, then I hope you stub your toe whilst walking down a busy street. Until next time...Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-15046336919405757842011-07-22T04:26:00.000-07:002011-07-22T06:00:45.214-07:00Halong Bay And Away.After our ingenious method of tubing, Little Spoon and I had to make some moves. Moves back to Luang Prabang and then Hanoi where we had planned a trip to yet another UNESCO World Heritage site called Halong Bay. UNESCO owe me some sort of sponsorship given the dedication I have shown to visiting their various sites, and I may have to bring this to their attention.<br /><br />Several things happened on our journey back to Hanoi and I will summarise them briefly. A truck crashed in the mountains spilling fuel all down the dangerously narrow and high roads, meaning our cramped bus was stuck for several hours in choking humidity. That was excellent. Even better was that Little Spoon had obviously been so impressed with my ability to act as a human water tube, that she clearly felt I would also make a great pillow, so I spent the hours cramped against the window with a small baffoon lying across me completely unconcious.<br /><br />Luckily I had her I Phone with the worlds greatest game on it. Angry Birds! I may be late to the Angry Birds party, but I'm glad I got there eventually, because slinging cartoon birds at rocks, monkeys and green cartoon faces is one of my favourite ever pastimes.<br /><br />Outside of Angry Birds and truck crashes the following events stick out as note worthy...<br /><br />Little Spoon screamed and nearly destroyed an entire table at a roadside cafe because a dogs tail brushed her leg.<br /><br />That's it. That is the extent of the "events" that I remember from our journey back to Hanoi. Gripping travel tales at their best.<br /><br />Once back in Hanoi we booked a trip to Halong Bay. Here is a picture of Halong Bay so I don't have to bother describing it using words. Afterall they say a picture says a thousand words, so without this it would a very long and tedious blog.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wZ8D3Hmjd8k/TiljNkssT1I/AAAAAAAAAD4/s-ABW4m6ZRQ/s1600/halong.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wZ8D3Hmjd8k/TiljNkssT1I/AAAAAAAAAD4/s-ABW4m6ZRQ/s320/halong.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5632141893844094802" /></a><br /><br />But before we got to the bay with it's rock islands, caves and floating fishing villages (you now know all the key points of the bay) we had to get on another bus with our cheeful guide. He was unsurprisingly Vietnamese and introduced himself with a name that was fairly incomprehensible but then added <span style="font-style:italic;">"But because Vietnamese is difficult I have chosen an English name that is easy for you to remember and say, so you can call me Nicky."</span><br /><br />I already liked Nicky. He had recognised that his own language was frankly ludicrous and that the name his mother had bestowed upon him was somewhat of an embarrassment, so he had wisely chosen a slightly effeminate western name. But at least it was in English, which was undoubtebly a huge relief to the rest of our tour group who were from Russia, Slovakia, Singapore, Japan and Germany. In fact Little Spoon and I were the only fluent English speakers there, and that's being generous to Little Spoon.<br /><br />And to think some people look back on English imperialism with shame. I nodded with smug satisfaction as I listened to various nationalities forced to ask questions in English to "Nicky".<br /><br />So as the bus started off, I got settled in for the 3 hour trip to the bay. Water? Yep, nice and cold. Pringles? Yep, Little Spoon had got those for about $20 from a trinket salesman. Angry Birds? Definitely. I focused on the latest level and began to play...<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Okay guys so right now we are going past Hoan Kiem lake which is the centre of the old town in Hanoi and..."</span><br /><br />What the hell was going on? Nicky was talking for some reason. I paused the game and looked up to see what he was babbling on about and learnt about the lake and a few facts about the old town. Fair enough Nicky, some interesting stuff there and it is a nice lake.<br /><br />Ten minutes later and Nicky is getting on my nerves.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Nicky:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"My city is called Hanoi, which means 'River in the city', because Ha means river, Noi means town or city so it is river in the city...and this is where I was born and I love my city. But this is not the Hanoi city tour so I will stop now and we can get on our way to Halong Bay."</span><br /><br />Yeah, you're right Nicky this is not the Hanoi City Tour, so shut the fuck up because some of us are trying to complete Angry Birds and your incessant yapping about this ancient city and it's temples and lakes is hardly helping me concentrate.<br /><br />Thankfully Nicky gave it a rest and I completed 10 new levels by the time we arrived at Halong Bay. I had forgiven him for his constant waffling earlier and put it down to the excitement of having a real Englishman in his home town. I was glad he had kindly chosen a name that was "easy to remember and easy to say" for English speakers, because I had to check a couple of things about the days events and when I got to go kayaking through some caves.<br /><br />Little Spoon also had some questions that she needed answering.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Hey, can you ask Roger what time we have the seafood lunch I'm quite hungry."</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"I beg your pardon, what are you talking about?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"The lunch stupid. Ask Roger when we have it."</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Who the HELL is Roger?"</span><br /><br />Little Spoon frowned. She bit her lip and then enlightenment shone across her face and she rolled her eyes at me...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Okay okay, I don't know why I said Roger. Kenny. Ask Kenny when we have lunch."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span><span style="font-style:italic;"> "Who the fuck is Kenny and how does he know when we get lunch?"</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"KENNY! The guide Kenny! Who do you think?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Do you mean Nicky? Nicky the guide? Nicky who chose the name Nicky because it was easy to remember? That Nicky? The Nicky who is not called Kenny and has definitely never been named Roger?"</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Oh. Yeah him, ask him please."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"No. I'm playing Angry Birds, you ask him. Or ask one of the Russians they look like they've been paying attention."</span><br /><br />As it happened the lunch was very soon served as we sailed through the peaceful waters of Halong Bay. The picture does not really do it justice, and when the clouds moved away it was truly beautiful. We kayaked, I got some customary sunburn and then Kenny oops sorry Nicky took us to a recently discovered island with some caves inside. Apparently there were many stalagmites and stalactites that looked like animals.<br /><br />He carefully pointed out the one that looked like a dragon <span style="font-style:italic;">"if you use you imagination" </span>as he put it. Indeed,if you also used a large dose of LSD it would probably be helpful too; as the stalagmite looked pretty much like a stalagmite, arguably you could say it looked like a a bunch of stalgmites.<br /><br />The one that "looked like Buddah" looked like a blob of ice cream. Still they were quite nice caves and I also got to see an idiotic woman wearing high heels twist her ankle on the slippery rocks which was nice.<br /><br />A relaxing day came to a close and after our journey back to Hanoi we headed out for Bia Hoi and prepared ourselves for the return to Korea. Little Spoon's mother was due to meet us in two days and then I had ten days of living with Chess Champ and Chocolate Orange before I would return to England.<br /><br />A round up of Korea and back again will be with you when I can be bothered. Goodbye for now.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-18496653251735779582011-07-07T04:28:00.000-07:002011-07-07T05:56:59.750-07:00Tubing In Vang Vieng.You may have noticed that I added some photographs to my last two blogs. One of the infamous Luang Prabang massage/decapitation centre and one of Little Spoon wielding her giant lollypop as a baseball bat. Due to the inane content of my blogs, I felt that it might help make them mildly more interesting if I included some uninspiring pictures of people you don't know and signs of places that mean nothing to you.<br /><br />With that in mind, you can expect this blog to follow suit and there will be a photograph of a hippy I briefly spoke to and a water slide above a river. I can only imagine your excitement and I'm pretty sure some of you have already scrolled hastily down to soak up these images and have now lost your sentence. Back yet? Good, I hope they were all you had dreamed they would be.<br /><br />Little Spoon and I were on a bus to Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is a small town in the mountains of Laos that is famous for people getting in tubes (rubber rings in the UK) and sailing down a river whilst stopping off at river side shacks to drink beer and maybe smoke drugs. It is also incredibly beautiful and whilst it is certainly more spoilt than it was 7 years ago when I last visited, if you are in the off season I think it is still quite mellow and well worth a visit.<br /><br />It is purely for backpackers. This was great news for me as I had a backpack. Little Spoon had a suitcase on wheels and looked as out of place as a person with a huge lollypop wearing a traditional Vietnamese hat might have looked.<br /><br />As she dragged her suitcase across the uneven terrain it struck me that we should stay in the exact same guesthouse that I had stayed at with my friend Montgomery Burns seven years before. Montgomery Burns and I had travelled around for 3 months, slumming it in any old dump and we had both sported backpacks. I don't recall either of us wearing any hats or having oversized confectionary, so I felt duty bound to give Little Spoon a taste of real backpacking.<br /><br />The only stumbling point was that the place was a bit of a hovel seven years ago and the only redeeming feature I could recall was a laminated picture of some horses hanging from the wall outside our room.<br /><br />I booked us in. Little Spoon was appalled and terrified. The room was squalid and most rats would probably avoid the bathroom for fear of catching something. It was going to be difficult to win Spoon over, as she had already started ranting and had taken her hat off to show she was serious.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"No. No I wont stay here. This is not funny. Uggghhhhhh....I wont shower in there. Why do you want to be here?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"I don't want to stay here, I just thought we should."</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"What? Why? If it was crap seven years ago, then why come back? Are you stupid?"</span><br /><br />I resent being called stupid by someone with a wheely suitcase in a town clearly delineated as a "backpacker" destination. But the filth and dilapidation was hard to justify. And then as we stood arguing outside our room, I saw it. The one thing that would win her over. Incredibly after seven long years, it was still there. The laminated picture of some horses. Not a photograph, just a badly drawn piece of "art" encased in thin plastic and now curled at the edges but still taped onto the wall.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"The HORSES! Spoon. Remember the horses I told you about. Look at them, come on, that's a piece of history right there. My God, when I email Montgomery Burns about this, he will be cockahoop."</span><br /><br />She seemed stunned by my combination of misplaced enthusiasm and use of the antiquated term "cockahoop".<br /><br />We agreed to stay there. I don't know if the horses won the day or if she was too tired to move on, but we left the room and made our way to eat but not before she had used her new favourite word. A word that she seemed to try and use at least once an hour. Shaking her head at me in disgust...<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Erroneous. You're erroneous."</span><br /><br />I feel her use of the word erroneous is quite often...well...erroneous, but I let this one slide.<br /><br />To sum up Vang Vieng it is best to just explain that in the central point of town you sit on beds eating food and drinking while TV screens play episodes of Friends and you play Connect Four as you look at vast swathes of jungle covered mountains. It's a bizarre juxtaposition but very enjoyable.<br /><br />I had obviously ignored the leaflets offering anything to do with elephants, but we were all set for tubing the next day. We took a Tuk Tuk up to the starting point at the top of the river and before we embarked we joined a gaggle of hippies in drinking buckets of cheap whisky with red bull. Amongst the hippies were some normal people who I was able to discuss normal topics with. Things like politics, beer, evolution and the use of horse based pictures in the hospitality industry.<br /><br />But the hippies kept distracting me. They were spray painting words and pictures on peoples backs. Random words and shit pictures.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Hippy:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Hey man, I'll spray something on you, I've got all these templates."</span><br /><br />I looked at his templates. They said "Ooo La La", "Sexy" and "Pimp". I wasn't sure that men who controlled sex workers really fell into the usual category of love and peace, but apparently it was ironic. Looking at most of them, I assumed that "Sexy" was also being used ironically.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"No."</span><br /><br />The Hippy looked forlorn. Good, maybe I would tell him that I didn't believe in global warming too and that I was only at the river to dump my old fridge. He looked at Little Spoon. Oh great.<br /><br />Little Spoon and I wandered towards the river edge to begin tubing. She was just up ahead of me as I'd bought another bucket of whisky, but the bright red "Ooo La La" across her back meant I couldn't miss her. Oh and here is a hippy playing with a local child...<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-60RNw82_z0o/ThWjq8QPlAI/AAAAAAAAADo/zEk5bDkugpc/s1600/hippy.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-60RNw82_z0o/ThWjq8QPlAI/AAAAAAAAADo/zEk5bDkugpc/s320/hippy.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5626583267593393154" /></a><br /><br />There was one problem with our plan to tube. We hadn't hired tubes. Somehow in our haste we had ignored the instructions to hire tubes in the town and thought we could get them at the river bars. Our assumption was quite definitely erroneous.<br /><br />So we had to go tubing without a tube. Little Spoon was very worried as she is not much of a swimmer. However, I began to feel it might not be so bad. As a young boy at school I experienced a devestating school rule that banned footballs in the playground after a window was broken.<br /><br />Unperturbed my friends and I organised football games without a ball. Twenty small six year old boys running around the pitch screaming and arguing about who had the imaginary ball. There were many contentious decisions and some heavily disputed results, but I scored some of my greatest ever goals with that non existent ball and put in more man of the match performances than I ever managed once a ball was re-introduced.<br /><br />With this in mind, I felt that tubing without a tube might turn out to be brilliant. So Little Spoon clung to my back like a baby monkey and I played the role of a tube perfectly. Swimming down the river and stopping at bars to top up on alcohol and watch maniacs slide headfirst into the often shallow waters of the river. <br /><br />Drinking and swimming down a river with no safety regulations in check is hugely enjoyable and hugely stupid. People drown every month apparently. Oh well, I'll assume they are all hippies with stupid slogans sprayed on their body, and shrug it off as a blessing to the gene pool.<br /><br />I didn't drown and neither did Little Spoon. And apart from one moment in a strong current with rocks where I cut my knees to ribbons it was great being a human tube. <br />I could waffle on about Laos for many a blog to come, but it would only interest me, so I will spare you the details but leave you with a scintillating picture of a water slide from which a hippy knocked out all of his teeth the day before we arrived. Ooo La La!<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-I0ZqsAGdyas/ThWqmwstcTI/AAAAAAAAADw/ETIYXgthXeg/s1600/slidelaos.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-I0ZqsAGdyas/ThWqmwstcTI/AAAAAAAAADw/ETIYXgthXeg/s320/slidelaos.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5626590892353483058" /></a>Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-4157333922740858102011-06-28T11:03:00.000-07:002011-07-06T12:38:07.711-07:00I Will Not Train Your Elephant.The title is self explanatory and I don't see my position changing anytime soon. Moreover this stance is not confined to elephants in Laos so any readers in Thailand, India or elsewhere need not get any ideas. But I will come back to this later.<br /><br />Little Spoon and I had flown from Hanoi to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Luang Prabang in northern Laos for some relaxation from the moped madness of Vietnam's capital.<br /><br />And it was certainly relaxing. Luang Prabang is beautiful, sedate and so relaxed that everything closes by 11.30pm. For a young go getter like myself this would usually be a major issue but I was happy to wander around looking at monks and drinking fresh fruit juice while Little Spoon took photographs of everything of any interest and everything else too.<br /><br />We knew our visit was brief and that we would soon be moving on to Vang Vieng but it seemed worth investigating what activities Luang Prabang had to offer. Three things seemed popular and initially all were fairly appealing. First of all visit a waterfall in the jungle and swim around in the pool at the bottom. Granted this might not sound thrilling on the face of it, but everything closes at 11.30pm remember? If Britain was the same perhaps there would be less teenage pregnancy and more day trips to waterfalls.<br /><br />But the trip looked a bit short, with too much traveling on a bus and not enough time waterfalling.<br /><br />The second option is where the elephants come in. We had heard all about elephant trekking and although it is clearly a bit of a gimmick it looks interesting enough. Little Spoon collected the most professional looking leaflet with a huge amount of information about what we could expect for our money.<br /><br />I opened it up wide eyed and expectant. I finished it furious and in the knowledge that I would have to take a firm stance on elephants from this day forwards.<br /><br />Allow me to summarise the fun and frolics on offer for a fairly expensive package...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">"Day 1: Learn how the elephant handlers train the elephants. Practice their techniques, collect the elephants food and feed it. Take the elephants to their enclosure in the jungle. Return to your cabin for the night."<br /></span><br /><br />Hmmm...my suspicions were already arising. This day one sounded worryingly similar to a day of work. I came to your jungle to relax and possibly galavant if the terrain permits it; I didn't come to learn techniques let alone practice them. I read on, perhaps day two would involve riding the elephant to a fun fair or watching them dance while enjoying a nice lie down in a hammock.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">"Day 2: Rise at 6.00am"</span> <br /><br />I beg your pardon? I double checked, yes it definitely tells me to rise at 6.00am on my FUCKING HOLIDAY! Now I was angry, there had better be a very good reason for why I was expected to pay money to be woken up at 6am and it had better not involve practicing anything.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">"...make your way from your cabin to the elephant enclosure and bring the elephants back to camp, clean them and give them their breakfast."</span><br /><br />Right. That does it. Let me get this straight, I have come on holiday to one of the world's most beautiful towns to relax and soak up the tranquil and idyllic surroundings. I am now expected to pay money to train your elephants, feed your elephants and fetch them back and forth from their enclosure? Sure. <br /><br />While we are it, perhaps I could enroll on a "Hotel Cleaners Camp" where I can pay for the privelage of learning the best techniques for scrubbing shit off a toilet, how to fold towels quickly and then I can get up at the crack of dawn to work for free.<br /><br />If you elephant trainers didn't want your elephants you shouldn't have bought them from wherever you buy elephants from. You want the elephant to come back from its enclosure? You fetch it. You want it to have its breakfast? You feed it. I was half hoping the elephants might bring me breakfast not vice versa. Am I expected to put them on my back too and carry the lazy, long nosed swines up the mountain?<br /><br />I hurled the leaflet away and told Little Spoon we were not going to be a part of such a swindle. But I could see she had been dazzled by the pictures of elephants and was still eager to embark on this madness. So I reminded her that it involved getting out of bed at 6am. Little Spoon is someone who finds getting out of bed at 1pm a trifle taxing and would probably be quite happy if she was reincarnated as a cat and could sleep for 18 hours a day.<br /><br />That sealed it. She was now more opposed to elephant training than I was, and given that I now put elephant training courses on a moral par with racism, homophobia and kicking the elderly it was fair to say she felt strongly on the matter.<br /><br />That left us with the last option. Massage. Several traditional massage venues were scattered along the picturesque streets and the prices were very reasonable. The only issue was that Little Spoon had become convinced that every massage available in Asia involved a "happy ending" if the client was male.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Oh so you think massage is a good idea? Yeah I bet you do."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me: </span><span style="font-style:italic;">"Spoon, this is an UNESCO World Heritage Site, not the red light district of Bangkok. If anything we will probably get in there and have to learn how to give a massage, change the towels and sweep up."</span><br /><br />Despite her reservations, she had been out of bed for a good three hours and the lure of being able to lie down again was too much for her to resist. We went inside the place that looked the most traditional. Having no idea what a traditional Laotian massage joint looks like, we based this on the amount of wooden carvings and plants they had.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-21ZrP9YhbR4/ThS5gdtU4WI/AAAAAAAAADY/E_ZR2jf4u7s/s1600/massage.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-21ZrP9YhbR4/ThS5gdtU4WI/AAAAAAAAADY/E_ZR2jf4u7s/s320/massage.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5626325801874284898" /></a><br /><br />We both chose a one hour massage with oils that was said to "Relax, Rejuvenate and Increase Blood Circulation".<br /><br />The first 50 minutes were brilliant. It was the first time I had ever had a proper massage and it was indeed relaxing and rejuvenating. However, the final ten minutes were obviously where the tiny masseuse decided to increase my blood circulation. I have always been pro increased blood circulation, but ideally I would like it to circulate inside my body. But her techniques seemed focused on getting it to circulate all over the room and to splatter the white washed walls and fine wooden carvings.<br /><br />She tried to pull my head off.<br /><br />It was not a head rub. She took hold of my head and tried to pull it off. Off from my neck. Where my head has always been.<br /><br />I grimaced and quickly thought through my options. I could punch her. She was very small afterall and I was feeling pretty rejuvenated so I could probably take her. Or I could bank on my neck being stronger than her arms and stick it out so as not to incur any fines for beating up the masseuse.<br /><br />I chose option two. It was a fairly close call, but my head remained where it belonged and I hastily got dressed and came outside to find Little Spoon eyeing me like a detective might look at his chief murder suspect.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon: </span><span style="font-style:italic;">"So...enjoy that did you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me: </span><span style="font-style:italic;">"Well yeah, until the last ten minutes, because then she tried to do the old increased blood circulation thing and..."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon: </span><span style="font-style:italic;">"I knew it! You got a happy ending didn't you? Didn't you, you filthy animal?!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me: </span><span style="font-style:italic;">"NO! Don't be stupid, she just tried to remove my head from my body and it hurt. Surely you had the same, didn't she try to decapitate you too?"</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Little Spoon: </span><span style="font-style:italic;">"Erm...maybe, I'm not sure, I fell asleep after about 15 minutes and she woke me up at the end."</span><br /><br />Brilliant. So I paid to have a generally enjoyable time that culminated in being assaulted by a tiny Laotian girl and Little Spoon paid to essentially go back to bed but in somebody elses house. Albeit a very traditional house with nice carvings and an outstanding array of plants.<br /><br />Our time in Luang Prabang was drawing to a close and we booked our bus journey to Vang Vieng; home of the famous tubing, opium smoking hippies and drunken tourists drowning. It sounded great.<br /><br />Until next time...Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-83508555885826750502011-06-16T01:13:00.001-07:002011-07-06T12:41:29.761-07:00Monkey Roberts Hits Hanoi.Do not be alarmed. Hanoi is not another abstract name for one of my students, so I have not resorted to beating any of them into a bloody pulp of bones, skin and Hello Kitty clothing. Anyway if I was to thrash one of my students it would have been 'Fred Flintstone' or a massive oaf called John who claims to be 14 but appears to be 36.<br /><br />No, Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam you ill informed oiks and Little Spoon and I decided to travel there and beyond now that our contract was finished. We woke up at 5am to get a bus journey to Incheon airport, bristling with excitement at the prospect of visiting a country where a glass of beer is about 15 pence and where there are also some bits of history, culture and other afterthoughts to soak up too.<br /><br />We were pushed for time because we booked an early flight and because we are miserly beggars who opted for a cheap bus rather than a rapid, expensive train to the airport. But when your destination sells beer for 15 pence, every penny counts.<br /><br />The bus breaks down.<br /><br />Of course it does. God couldn't possibly let me have a nice holiday just because I'm an atheist and refuse to acknowledge him. Little Spoon seemed fairly unperturbed as she had bought a stupidly expensive new camera for the trip and was now able to get some stunning shots of us stood on the side of the road with a broken bus.<br /><br />So at least when we missed our flight, never went on holiday and returned to Daegu, hot, tired and forlorn we would have crystal clear images of Korea's motorways to dazzle our friends with.<br /><br />Stupid Korean transport system. Yeah so every bus and train is always on time, there are never delays, it's good service and there are multiple journeys to every destination all the time. But now look at you with your broken bus, having me stand on the road for no good reason.<br /><br />Three minutes later and the replacement bus arrives and we're off again. Okay Korean transport system you win this battle, but I'm keeping a close eye on you. As for you God...HA! Nice try pal, but I've been tempting fate and refusing to knock on wood my whole life, so you're going to have to do better than this if you want me to accept you.<br /><br />The next few hours are about as dull as life gets, so I will save you the details of my sandwich in China during a 5 hour stop over to change planes, and spare you the hilarious problem with Little Spoon's shampoo at customs.<br /><br />We got to Hanoi and it's mental. I'd been to Vietnam years ago and remembered the local people's love of courting death on the roads, but I never made it as far north as Hanoi and clearly up here they take suicidial driving very seriously indeed. Everyone rides motorbikes and nobody drives on a set side of the road. <br /><br />We were in a people carrier so I was confident that any of the almost certain crashes we would have on the way to the hotel would at least only result in maiming or death to the unfortunate families of 4 on their mopeds and leave me happily protected in my first world transport.<br /><br />So comforted, I chose to warn Little Spoon of the various scams and rip offs we would encounter. I carefully explained to her that people would hassle us constantly to buy badly made trinkets, pose for pictures for money, push unwanted snacks and tours upon on us and generally try to get us to part with our cash.<br /><br />She nodded sternly and practiced her "No Thank You" line carefully. We worked on the stern shake of the head and dismissive wave of the hand.<br /><br />Two hours later as we walked along Hoan Kiem lake in Hanoi, I looked at Little Spoon in her traditional Vietnamese hat, wearing two locally made bracelets as she carried two bags of pineapple and a giant Chupa Chups lollypop and wondered when she would first get to use her hand carved ink stamp of an elephant.<br /><br />A picture of Little Spoon using her lolly as a baseball bat. Well of course.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3_YArFYJuh0/ThS59neKuGI/AAAAAAAAADg/bjDlybdZxjo/s1600/spoonlolly.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3_YArFYJuh0/ThS59neKuGI/AAAAAAAAADg/bjDlybdZxjo/s320/spoonlolly.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5626326302711265378" /></a><br /><br />I was not best pleased with my own efforts at haggling and avoiding rip offs either. I had been reliably informed that a beer from a Bia Hoi venue would be about 15p and sometimes cheaper and yet so far today I had paid 25p and 45p!! I'm not Bill Gates for fucks sake.<br /><br />But fueled by our extortionately priced beers we went out into the manic Hanoi streets to find a restaurant and to my delight I found a place serving a delicacy I had to try.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Spoon, let's go here"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Stop calling me Spoon. Why?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"I've been calling you it for 12 months, it's not going to stop now is it? Because look it sells baked tortoise."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"You're an idiot. Oh my God, that's horrible, I'm not eating a turtle I used to have one as a pet, my Mom calls them 'tootles'"</span><br /><br />I stopped her at this point and explained the difference between a tortoise and a turtle, as clearly only a savage, uncouth degenerate would eat a turtle (or a tootle for that matter) but dining out on a tortoise baked in its shell is every Englishman's dream.<br /><br />I could be overstating the passion for tortoise based dishes in England, but I have grown to hate the lazy little leaf chewers over the years. And I'll have you know this is not an irrational hatred. Far from it. In fact it is a hatred born of a love that was not allowed to flourish. Allow me to explain.<br /><br />As a young boy, fresh of face and yet dour of character I had a few things in life that I yearned for with a growing intensity as each month passed without them in my life. Each of these things would make my Christmas and Birthday request lists for many years until it became clear that my heartless parents would never indulge me.<br /><br />These things were a Giant Tortoise, A Rifle, A Dog and a metal platform that you could screw to the side of your house and access via a rope ladder. I am sure that most readers would agree that aside from the dog, none of these requests was particularly unreasonable or outlandish for a small boy.<br /><br />But my stick in the mud parents clearly didn't realise we were in the 20th Century and that their straight laced, killjoy attitudes were an embarrassment to them both. So never did a young Monkey Roberts get to sit 30 feet in the air on a steel ledge on the side of his house, taking pot shots at the local kids as his dog played cheerfully with a huge tortoise.<br /><br />And for this reason, I came to resent tortoises. I don't like the fact that they live a long time and I don't like their work ethic. I would like to bake one and eat it on the streets of Hanoi however.<br /><br />But once again I was to be denied. Little Spoon would not eat it and instead I had to settle for a delicious meal of marinated beef with local dips and vegetables. I bet if I wanted to buy a rifle she would say no to that too! But it's alright for her with her hat, stamp, bracelets, fruit and impossibly large lollypop.<br /><br />We walked through the bustling streets to find a bar and I fumed at the injustice of it all, especially as Little Spoon had everything she wanted from here and more besides...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Oooo look, that man has balloons. Can I get a balloon?"</span><br /><br />Ah ha! Justice.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Erm...no. No you can't have a balloon."</span><br /><br />Never let it be said that I am a petty man. Because if it's said I will find a way to get you back, no matter how small the vengeance is.<br /><br />As the first leg of Hanoi came to a close, it was time to look forward to the delights of the World Unesco Heritage site that is Luang Prabang in Laos...<br /><br />Until next time.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-32608692893165757112011-05-25T04:43:00.000-07:002011-05-25T05:49:45.095-07:00Say Hello And Wave Goodbye.Well here I am. My year in Korea has somehow come to a conclusion in the blink of an eye and as I approach the end of my contract so does Little Spoon, Tiny and Justice. Little Spoon and I are off to Vietnam and Laos for a holiday, while Tiny and Justice are travelling the world. But before we depart this coming weekend, I felt it proper to fill in the blanks of the last few weeks.<br /><br />A new teacher Huckleberry arrived. A man with experience in teaching for this company before. A man who has travelled half the globe and worked in orphanages in Africa and South America. A man who has to replace me.<br /><br />I smirked at the idea that a worldly wise, orphan helping, experienced teacher could possibly fill the void left behind by someone best known for eating around 24 eggs a week and smelling of alcohol up until about 2.30pm on any given day.<br /><br />This year he spent time in the Middle East meeting people in Yemen, Oman and elsewhere to discuss issues around American foreign policy and to talk about the recent killing of Bin Laden with a diverse group of individuals.<br /><br />Fair play I guess. Earlier this year I completed a gigantic burger challenge in a new bar record of 23 minutes! Four half pound burgers, eight rashers of bacon, eight slices of cheese and side orders of fries and chilli. A NEW RECORD! My picture was taken by the bar and put on their facebook page. I'd like to see an orphan try and beat that sort of time.<br /><br />But as it happens Huck (a clever abbreviation of Huckleberry I'm sure you'll agree) is actually a very good replacement for me. Because as it happens he also likes to drink, is mildly misanthropic at times and doesn't actually have any real qualifications that should allow him to teach.<br />He also stood on his head on a table in a bar on the first night.<br /><br />Give the man my job.<br /><br />The only real concern was breaking the tragic news to my kids. How would they take it? Badly I was guessing. I explained to one class of 10-11 year olds that I would be leaving as I marked their homework. This work consists of them being given a word which they must use in an original sentence and then a phrase or short sentence which they must use in a longer, original sentence.<br /><br />I took 11 year old Lilly's book and gave her a reassuring smile, I felt that she might take the news harder than most, such was her affection for me and my quirky take on education. Let's see, she had to use the word "possibility" here...<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"There is possibility I kick Monkey Roberts Teacher"</span><br /><br />Interesting. So how did she use the word "imagining"? <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"I imagining I'm rich and Monkey Roberts teacher is the beggar"</span><br /><br />Clearly my zany sense of humour had rubbed off a little, but it was all light hearted fun. I read on "Use the phrase 'A long way to go'"...<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />"Monkey Roberts teacher still had a long way to go after the operation for his terrible accident of losing the legs."</span><br /><br />I look up at her now. She is smiling and nodding <span style="font-style:italic;">"Funny teacher?"</span> I nod slowly, yes they're fucking hilarious Lilly. Okay what's the last phrase? Ah she must use "Full Tilt" in a sentence. I'd like to see you get in some cruel jibe at me here.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Monkey Roberts teacher came full tilt against the electrical fence and went to dead."</span><br /><br />But Lilly was so proud of her work she showed the rest of the class, and now 50% of them write their sentences based upon my demise. Well, I'll show them. I'm coming back. That's right, I will ramble around Vietnam and Laos with Little Spoon and then I will have a couple of months in England, but then I shall return!<br /><br />And when I do, I will be coming into class "full tilt" you little rat, and "imagining" how I can make my lessons even more monotonous; oh and there's a "possibility" I will spill hot tea over your face. You've "got a long way to go" with me yet Lilly.<br /><br />And it is that type of creative writing that landed me this position in the first place, a position I feel forced to return to on the basis that I have no other options other than perhaps becoming a human guinea pig for pharmaceutical companies or an armed robber. Both options I will mull over this time next year.<br /><br />It has overall been a great year mind you and I will be sad to see Little Spoon, Tiny and Justice not here when I return. But they have to go and have new drugs tested on them and hold up banks so I wish them the best.<br /><br />You will be relieved to know that I intend to blog about Vietnam and Laos and even about my return to England, so there's a light at the end of the permanently long dark tunnel that is your collective lives.<br /><br />So before I go and eat some eggs, I will leave you with as always some fantastic free thinking from the students of Daegu. The first was a speech in response to my question of how we could help people with disabilities and why we should. After listing the various conditions such as blindness, paralysis and so on, there was a heartfelt plea from twelve year old Julia for everyone to care for each other and then this succinct conclusion.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"So look after disabled or you get the punishment. Perhaps chop off the arms."</span><br /><br />Have you been reading the Old Testament again Julia? Yahweh would be so proud.<br /><br />And finally in a class of younger students, we somehow taught them about conditioning responses in animals. I thought them a little young for Pavlov's Dogs, but they got the idea and then had to choose an animal for a pet and one trick they would like to train or condition it to do.<br /><br />Lena chose a mouse but not without reservations.<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />"I want to pets the mouse. Because I think it is very cute, genius personality and smart with the tricks. Also it eats the cheese. However, mouse is small and very dirty so I sure to cleaning the mouse and want to condition it and say 'Don't be eating the cheese everyday and you just wait!'"</span><br /><br />Yeah mouse, always eating the cheese, learn to wait you dirty, small genius.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-59589452152157263762011-05-04T05:07:00.000-07:002011-05-04T18:28:22.163-07:00A Week Of Royalty And Retro.Well what an exciting week it has been. Two complete strangers engaged in the highly rare and unique ceremony known as a wedding last Friday and I for one was beside myself with delight. When your life is interminably dull, there is nothing more soothing than living it vicariously through others, and if those others happen to be very rich for no good reason then even better.<br /><br />It was a crying shame that being stuck out here in Korea I missed the hype and frenzy that apparently built up throughout Britain and many other countries in the build up to the big day. I was told that one lady interviewed on British television had flown in from the USA solely for the wedding and had camped out for four days to get a prime spot for watching the procession. What determination, what enthusiasm, what a woman. <br /><br />Just before the procession came fully into view she caught a glimpse of Prince Williams red jacket sleeve and fainted, was put into an ambulance and missed the entire wedding. What tragedy, what misfortune, what a cretin.<br /><br />And that was a moment I would have paid to see and treasured for always. In years to come I could sit my grandchildren down and tell them where I was on the day an American half-wit feinted and ruined her entire holiday. Being a huge fan of schadenfreude, this heart warming tale lit up my rather stale week and I told anyone who would listen about the <span style="font-style:italic;">"best moment of the Royal Wedding"</span>.<br /><br />As it happened, during the actual ceremony I was teaching a group of 14 year old students in my usual jovial fashion. One of them asked me if I was sad that I "cannot see the Prince's wedding" and I had to gently explain that I was not sad because I was a republican who would like to see the Queen beheaded in a violent, bloody uprising. He nodded solemnly and continued to work on his presentation about creating a movie; a movie which his team gave the tag line:<br /><br />"If you see this movie, you will piss your pants".<br /><br />It sounds like the sort of movie experience that the fainting American tourist might enjoy. Night out at the cinema? Well sure, but only if something extremely embarrassing will happen, you know how I like to spend my leisure time.<br /><br />Talking of Princes, I was accused of having a syndrome carrying this very title only a few weeks ago. One of my female students complimented me on being <span style="font-style:italic;">"very handsome today teacher" </span>and I of course replied <span style="font-style:italic;">"Yes I know"</span>.<br /><br />Given that this rather regular false compliment is given out by students almost every lesson in the futile hope that it will result in you letting them play games rather than work, you would think my reply would be brushed aside. But it was not. A group of four girls erupted in high pitched screeches of amazement and fury...<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />"No no, Prince syndrome. Teacher you Prince Syndrome."</span><br /><br />Prince Syndrome? I immediately thought of the singer and stopped in my tracks fixing this gaggle of shrieking adolescents with a steely, yet intellectual stare. I have Prince Syndrome do I? Are you trying to insinuate that I am a short, scrawny, weasel of a man who enjoys wearing velvet suits?! HOW DARE YOU! I am <span style="font-style:italic;">not</span> short.<br /><br />I demanded an explanation and it turned out that Prince Syndrome basically translates to arrogance. A boy or man with this affliction thinks of himself as a Prince and is hugely conceited. I assured my class that I did not have Prince Syndrome, as frankly it sounds like a weakness in someones character, and I simply don't have any weaknesses in mine. Moreover, of my numerous virtues, modesty is one of my strongest points.<br /><br />But I did think of Prince Syndrome last Friday when the students asked me about the Royal Wedding. Can a Prince have Prince Syndrome? There's a deep, philisophical question for you to ponder.<br /><br />Despite the wedding not getting huge coverage here, it was certainly covered and it made the front pages of the newspapers. But then archaic institutes like the Royal Family should be popular here, as despite their love of technology, many Korean children in particular seem obsessed by objects that are at best quite retro and at worst outdated.<br /><br />I see some cheerful young teen wandering the corridors of the school with his Rubiks Cube in hand and give him an approving nod. But in the classroom their obsession with pencils and pens is even more bizarre. Every child seems to pride their reloadable pencil; the type where you put flimsy lead sticks into it and can then press a button to make a nib appear, only for it to break as soon as you start writing and then press the button again.<br /><br />They love a good pencil these kids. But the other day one of my students 'Homer Simpson' upstaged the entire class with his prize possession. A Parker Fountain Pen. <br /><br />Now, I have no idea if Parker pens were popular in the USA, but back in about 1992 when I was at school, Parker pens were very much sought after. But this was in 1992. It's now 2011. I felt that perhaps I should let Homer Simpson know that we now lived in a world of DVDs and the Internet, but he was too busy holding court to an amazed mob of small children who were fawning over his pen. <br />A pen that leaks. A pen that makes a blotchy mess everytime you use it even slightly carelessy. A pen that can break very easily and needs to be refilled all the time.<br /><br />Now I know how much retro attractions carry weight in the classroom, I am thinking of ways to impress my students. Perhaps I could leave my I-Pod at home and swagger into work with a Walkman. The kids were go mental. I could show them the old cup and ball on a string game, throw away your Wii kids, all you need is this and a spinning top to be the pride of Daegu.<br /><br />Imagine if I rode to school on a Penny Farthing! I can imagine the scenes of jubilation now. Crowds of children cheering, Korean parents awe struck at my British extravagance, and fellow teachers lining the roads to take a picture of me gliding to work in style. I would just have to hope than none of my American co-workers fainted before they even got to see the little wheel at the back.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-40959572634998547592011-04-13T04:46:00.000-07:002011-04-17T07:46:05.526-07:00Korean Manners And The Meaning Of Dreams.Many westerners who have spent some time in Korea would tell you that Korean manners is an oxymoron. Koreans don't queue in shops, they push in. The older Koreans spit on the street openly and push you out of their way if they are trying to get somewhere.<br /><br />But there are in fact many rules of etiquette that are just different to our own. Obviously I ensured that I was well acquainted with most of these as soon as I arrived so that I knew the best possible ways in which to be obnoxious and offensive to people around me.<br /><br />For example it is a huge faux paus to write someones name in red. Red means death and only the name of a dead person should be written in red ink. I found this out in my first week by the screams of protest from my students when I wrote their names in red marker, and I have heard it every day since then, when I cheerfully select a big red marker anytime that I have to write one of their names.<br /><br />This may seem unnecessarily cruel, but it is actually necessarily cruel. The only time I have to write their names on the board is when they are misbehaving, and as I'm not allowed to thrash them with sticks in the manner of a Korean teacher, a small death threat seems quite fair.<br /><br />But despite my deep knowledge on Korean culture and manners, I was shocked to learn of one of the necessities of good manners a couple of weeks ago. My students had to create a poster guide on Korean Manners to inform foreign people of how to behave. The usual by-products of Confucianism were all there...<br /><br />Bow<br />Older People Eat First<br />No Shoes In The Home<br /><br />And then a rule that stunned me and reeked of horrendous prejudice.<br /><br />TWO HANDS.<br /><br />I looked closely at the poster, and sure enough there was a drawing of exactly two human hands next to the rule. How did this physical norm become so important to being seen as well mannered? Was there a dark time in Korea's past, when a rabble of vile, one handed bastards tore through the cities and towns with repulsive behaviour?<br /><br />I began to imagine this mob of one handed scum and the disgusting acts they must have carried out. But they are long gone, surely Koreans must move on and recognise that you can be courteous and well behaved and yet only have one hand.<br /><br />What if a one handed person wished to visit Korea to do good deeds or spread their wisdom? Imagine someone like Britain's own Abu Hamza, fresh from prison and simply looking to visit South Korea to speak politely about global jihad and to respectfully rant about his hatred of Jews? Why, he would be seen as rude and abhorrent simply because he has only a single hand.<br /><br />It made me wonder how many iconic and great one handed figures of literature and history may be reviled in Korean culture. Captain Hook, Luke Skywalker...perhaps even Jeremy Beadle?!<br /><br />The explanation for this two hands demand was that it actually meant you should always hold a bowl or cup with both hands when passing it to someone or when a person is filling up your drink etc. That's the official line, but I'm not sure I buy it. Afterall I have not seen a single person with one hand or less since I have been here, and that seems somewhat suspicious if you ask me.<br /><br />I wondered whether I had stumbled across a hidden, dark secret of 21st Century Korea.<br /><br />Talking of wondering, a day dream is also a type of wondering and a day dream is in many ways closely linked to dreams, which brings me smoothly onto the topic of dreaming and dreams. That sort of seamless, literary segue is the type of talent that most writers can only <span style="font-style:italic;">dream</span> of.<br /><br />But whilst by day I am a blurring whirl of activity, educating, quipping and pondering; by night my brain evidently takes some time off, because my dreams appear to fall into two categories. Needlessly violent or mind numbingly mundane.<br /><br />The violent dreams have seen me punch walls and wake up flat mates or neighbours with my expletive riddled rants. Until recently I had never been able to remember what these evidently terrifying and brutal dreams consisted of and then I swore so loudly in one of them that I woke myself up. I remembered the dream and what had caused me to become violent, and I'm not sure if I should now feel relieved at the content or more concerned.<br /><br />To cut a medium sized story short, I met a girl and agreed to add her on Facebook. I should point out that this is what happened in the dream, obviously in real life I don't meet girls and certainly don't add them on Facebook.<br />Anyway, as I was adding her, the ghost of her deceased father entered the room and told me not to add his daughter.<br /><br />Now she had not even told me that she had a dead Dad, let alone that he would start interferring in our blossoming friendship. I ignored him. So he began to pull my foot and insist I stop adding his daughter, which I found quite rude. In fact he could not have been ruder if he had had one hand.<br /><br />So I kicked him in his ghost head and screamed "Fuck off".<br /><br />I fully understand if at this point you decide it is probably best to never read one of my blogs again, but please rest assured that my more vivid dreams are not so unusual. In fact there have been times when I have had a dream and not realised that it was not something that really happened until days later. The most recent example being so dull that even my own brain must have been kicking itself for coming up with such a dreadful dream.<br /><br />I dreamt that someone I knew couldn't wink. They would try, but it always resulted in a blink. That's it. I got to work and couldn't remember which teacher couldn't wink, so I asked around and sure enough everyone could wink. It gradually dawned on me that I had actually dreamt the entire cannot wink episode complete with the identity of the poor individual being forgotten.<br /><br />What sort of person dreams that someone they know but cannot quite remember, can only blink? Apparently the same sort of person who dreams of overly protective, dead fathers and dreams that kicking their spirit will resolve a conflict.<br /><br />In contrast, both Little Spoon and one of my students known as "Hotdog" have had far more interesting dreams of late. In the past week, Little Spoon dreamt that she was a detective on a murder case, the local mayor and in an upgrade from the mayor, also that she was running as the next US President.<br /><br />Ambitious? Or delusions of grandeur? Neither could apply to a man who dreams about winking.<br /><br />But the dream of the week must go to 10 year old Hotdog. One of the most energetic and talkative students that I have, she interrupted the opening gambit of Tuesday's lesson to tell me about her dream and she even managed to insult my general knowledge with her initial question.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Hotdog:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Teacher, you know Hitler?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Yes Hotdog I know who Hitler is."</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Hotdog:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"I have the dream of Hitler teacher."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Really? What happened?"</span><br /><br />At this point, Hotdog leaps from her chair and proceeds to act out the rest of her dream to the classes delight.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Hotdog:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"I see the Hitler, kick him, kick his leg, and kick the hand. He says 'No no, sorry, I am sorry', but I kick him again. Then computer...you know computer? Computer to crash on the Hitler's head. So dead."</span><br /><br />So even a ten year old ADHD sufferer has better dreams than me. She got an apology from one of the 20th Centuries most evil men simply by kicking him, and then killed him with a computer over the head.<br /><br />I didn't know what to say, so I just said "Well done<span style="font-style:italic;"></span>" and decided that when I had to write her name on the board, I would use green instead of red. She deserved that much at least.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-79552025370369910382011-04-06T04:21:00.000-07:002011-04-06T06:57:25.185-07:00Food Poisoning, Rules and Korean Salt.Well it has been a month since I last blogged. After such a triumphant return you would think that I would have leapt back into the hustle and bustle of my teaching life and been eager to share it with the handful of people following my exploits. You would have been wrong to think such a thing.<br /><br />I have been so busy that I felt sick at the mere thought of sharing anything with you. In the mood I was in, I would have spat in your face if you asked to share a light snack with me, nevermind my innermost thoughts and feelings.<br /><br />My school gave me a horribe schedule. No surprises there and then I got food poisoning. It is difficult to explain why getting food poisoning is worse for me than for other humans, but I will attempt to enlighten you. Up until September 2009, I had never had food poisoning in my life and I had certainly tried. I ate from squalid road side huts in Cambodia, I ate old yogurts at home that were 2 months past their use by date and I even ate a sausage from a barbecue that had been left on a plate in my backgarden over night.<br /><br />And not a hint of food poisoning. This led me to announce to anyone who would listen that I was "immune to food poisoning". A number of people tried to reason with me and suggest I had been fortunate. I mocked them and ridiculed their way of life.<br /><br />Then one fateful night in September 2009 I bought a chicken (yes a whole chicken) from my local kebab shop. I ate it, as one tends to do with chickens. I got salmonella. I was obviously very ill, but more importantly I was psychologically damaged. My world view had been rocked and I was not the man who sneered at salmonella and scoffed at E-Coli; I was a normal man, a man who could get food poisoning.<br /><br />My critics crawled out from under the rocks they had been hiding under and told me that they had tried to explain to me that my boasting was foolish. You would think that I would be humbled and begrudgingly accept my folly. You would be wrong to think such a thing. That is the second time in one blog that you have thought something and be quite wrong about it, but I shall not hold it against you.<br /><br />So disgusted was I at my bodies weakness to salmonella that I masked my insecurity with more bravado and proclaimed that I would "never again get food poisoning". My friends and family shook their heads and sighed. I laughed, waved my finger and told them that I was indeed tempting fate but that I would never get my comeuppance.<br /><br />My comeuppance took less than two years to arrive and it arrived promptly on Sunday March 20th after I had just been to Seoul to watch Little Spoon, Rudeboy Yatesy and Chocolate Orange put in an outstanding effort to complete the Seoul International Marathon.<br /><br />The Friday night before this, our two faced, money grabbing employer had tried to sweeten us up with a meal out. A meal of seafood. A meal that involved watching a slug like, shell fish being cooked alive on a grill. If you are prejudiced against slug like, shell fish you would love this. As a man who has long admired slug like, shell fish I felt slightly uncomfortable watching it spin and writhe on its shell and attempt to crawl off, only to feel the even greater heat of the grill and jerk back onto its increasingly hot shell.<br /><br />Some of the teachers chose not to eat this poor little blighter. I however, decided that his suffering should not be in vain and I ate a good deal. It tasted nice, and Little Spoon and Blancquita tucked in too.<br /><br />But the tortured slug was to have the final laugh. Because moments after Little Spoon finished her marathon, she began to feel ill. Being a general know it all and self proclaimed medical expert, I informed her that it was simply dehydration. She began to vomit violently. I nodded. Definitely dehydration. Then Blancquita began to be sick. I raised my eyebrows, because she had not run a marathon. Just a coincidence then.<br /><br />Then I was sick. And as it turned out so was everybody who ate the little slug like, shell fish. When I find out the correct name, I will inform you, but I also intend to return and eat one again. Because we are now mortal enemies. You might be thinking that I would stay clear of something that gave me food poisoning, but let's be honest you have not been very accurate with your thoughts so far have you? As it happens you would be wrong for a third time, because I am not in the least concerned about getting food poisoning again, for a simple reason. <br /><br />I will never get food poisoning again. Ever. That is a bold claim, but one I make, confident in the knowledge that I will never get my comeuppance.<br /><br />Talking of unusual Korean foods, I should warn anyone planning on coming here about Korean Salt. I'll be honest, I had not encountered any problems with Korean salt myself, but a major one was drawn to my attention by Little Spoon.<br /><br />As you may recall she likes to eat limes with salt. As you may also recall I had smuggled a bag of limes into the country at the risk of five years imprisonment, and Little Spoon had bought herself a large bag of salt for the occasion.<br /><br />I watched her prepare her ludicrous snack in the way you might watch a beetle on its back struggle to get back onto its feet. But I did not envisage the problem that was to emerge...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Mmmmm....hmmmm...strange."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"What's strange, other than this entire snack?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"It tastes different than at home. It's not horrible, but...it tastes not right."</span><br /><br />She frowns a little and then dips her hand into the bag of salt and tastes it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Yep, it's the salt. Korean salt is weird."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"It can't be, salt is just salt."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"NO, Korean salt is weird, come here and taste it if you don't believe me."</span><br /><br />So I did.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"You're right. Korean salt is weird. Korean salt is sugar."</span><br /><br />As you can imagine this issue with Korean salt is quite inconvenient. It could ruin an entire trip and certainly would ruin many meals. But thankfully I have found a solution. If you fancy something with salt on it, then don't use Korean salt (because it's sugar remember), just use Korean sugar. Because Korean sugar is salt. Strange eh? Well either that or Little Spoon just picked up the wrong bag, but I doubt that could have happened.<br /><br />So as another week began at work on Monday, it was time for another staff meeting and a quick reminder from our employers about what was expected of us. The usual things were mentioned, such as make sure you are on time. Finish student reports by the deadline and a few guidelines on grading.<br /><br />But then a bombshell. A totally unreasonable and outlandish demand. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Remember not to touch your kids".</span><br /><br />WHAT? Don't touch the kids? You will be telling me I have to wear trousers during lessons next. Everyone seemed a bit surprised to hear that we shouldn't fondle the children, but if that's what the Koreans want then fair enough, when in Rome and all that...<br /><br />Anyway I am off to have a cup of Korean coffee. That's tea to you and me.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-69150296190840490082011-03-09T04:58:00.000-08:002011-03-09T08:51:27.442-08:00A Triumphant Return And A Triumphant Return...That's two triumphant returns. The first one was of course my return to Manchester, England. A return that was generally deemed to have been fairly triumphant by all those polled.<br /><br />There were of course small issues that hampered me slightly. One of which was that many of my friends saw me for the first time at a mutual friends wedding. For some reason everyone seemed to be paying the Bride and Groom a lot of attention and the photographer who I had assumed was there for me, spent most of his time taking pictures of the newly married couple.<br /><br />Despite this insult I had a fantastic day and even managed to forget that the very next morning I was off to the airport to fly back to Korea, hungover and facing a new nightmarish schedule of teaching.<br /><br />My alarm woke me.<br /><br />It was the next morning. I had to fly back to Korea, hungover and facing a new nightmarish schedule of teaching.<br /><br />I packed quickly, just the essentials really. Trousers, Shoes, Wash Bag, Limes, Underwear, Cheddar...<br /><br />The limes were for Little Spoon. She eats them with salt. She is a freak. She also eats apples with salt, but Korea has plenty of apples but not a lime to be found. The cheddar was for me. I am not a freak. I eat cheddar with bread and grated onto pasta.<br /><br />My adoring family sped me to the airport with plenty of time to spare and after checking in, I had some time to kill, so I headed for the shops. At this point something happened. Nobody is really sure what. I certainly don't know and as nobody else I know was there, it seems to safe to say that nobody is really sure.<br /><br />Whatever happened, I lost some time and never got it back again.<br /><br />As I queued to buy a bottle of nicely chilled Ribena I heard one of the announcements for those idiotic passengers who are holding up their flight by not being on the plane. Morons. I say delay the plane and let the cretin get on and then at 10,000 feet throw the worthless sack of excrement out of the emergency exit to plunge to a long overdue death.<br /><br />I was almost at the front of the queue, the only person ahead was some impossibly wizened old woman buying a magazine I couldn't quite decipher; Coffins Monthly or something no doubt. The bell sounded for a repeat of the late passenger announcement. I shook my head with disgust...<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"This is the final call for passenger M.Roberts, repeat the final call for passenger M.Roberts, the gate will be closing now."</span><br /><br />The idiots name rang a bell. It was a huge bell and it was ringing very loudly indeed. Oh fuck. I hurled my Ribena at the prune like woman and ran. In hindsight I could have just put the bottle down and ran, but at the time throwing it seemed the right thing to do.<br /><br />Now I was sprinting. It had been warm, so my jacket was under one arm and my rucksack of assorted gadgets and books for the flight was over the other shoulder. I refused to allow these hinderances to slow me down. I tore through Manchester airport like Usain Bolt. <br /><br />As I sped by, I would catch glimpses of stunned faces, frozen in shock at the speeds I was reaching. Perhaps they thought I was Usain Bolt. It would have been an easy mistake to make; I caught a reflection of myself in a mirror and sure enough I looked like him. Yes I was shorter, whiter and he doesn't usually run with a folded up jacket and rucksack...<br /><br />But the pace was there.<br /><br />I made my flight. It was only a quick one to Amsterdam before a change, but long enough to get glowering looks from all the other passengers. <br /><br />The next flight was far more sedate but irritating in itself. First of all I had people sat next to me. I've never been a big fan of people and within 10 minutes of sitting down one of these obnoxious scumbags had spoken to me quite uninvited...<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Hello, sorry. Excuse a me please. Sorry"</span><br /><br />He wanted to go to the toilet. Should have gone before we left shouldn't you? Still it was to be a ten hour flight, but heaven help him if he decided he needed to go again at any point. Everyone around me was Korean, but the captain announced that the languages spoken by the staff on board were...<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />"English, Korean, Dutch, Russian, Mongolian and German".</span><br /><br />Mongolian? Do Mongolians even speak Mongolian? Apparently they do. I wondered if there were any Mongolians onboard. Possibly sat next to a German. I could envisage it now, the two trading war stories, bragging about their genocidal histories. It made me sick.<br /><br />Thank God I came from a nation who had never started wars or ransacked nations for their wealth and resources. I ordered some English breakfast tea from an airhostess who could possibly have been Mongolian but if she was, she wasn't letting on.<br /><br />I idled away the flight imagining my second triumphant return. The return to Korea. I was to meet Little Spoon, Chocolate Orange and Rudeboy Yatesy in Seoul. They had been running a half marathon. Wait until I told them about my sprint in Manchester Airport, they would LOVE that story. They would probably be quite impressed too, as I'd imagine I was hitting speeds that they did not get close to during their little mid morning run around Seoul.<br /><br />Last thing to do before I landed was fill in my declaration on anything illegal I might be bringing in. Guns? Not this time. Drugs? Nope. Endangered animals? Nah. Fruits or Livestock products? No...erm...hang on.<br /><br />I had a bag of limes and two blocks of cheddar cheese. Extra strong cheddar cheese too. I scrutinised the form. <br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />"Maximum Penalty for false declaration, FIVE YEARS in prison".</span><br /><br />Oh fiddlesticks.<br /><br />Imagine if I got five years in prison?! That would be a quite untriumphant return. And "untriumphant" is not even a real word, but it would be it, if I went to prison. Five years in jail would put a huge dampener on my return to Korea and it would also do my long term prospects of being an underworld boss no help at all.<br /><br />Imagine years from now if I was in a seedy bar talking to other career criminals about my past...<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />"I did five years in the joint motherfucker"</span><br /><br />Because I see my criminal life based mainly in America.<br /><br />One of the crime bosses would undoubtebly ask what I went in for? What would I say? <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Erm...smuggling....yeah, that's right homie, one whole bag and two blocks of the extra strong shit; I came in with the Mongolians"<br /></span><br />Maybe I could pull it off. However it would not be necessary as I got through customs undetected, a free man and still with my contraband intact.<br /><br />I went to meet my friends, and they were there, including Chess Champ and Dubs. It was in the end a most triumphant return.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-76278483532478600172011-02-22T00:34:00.000-08:002011-02-22T08:14:52.746-08:00Back To England.That's right I am back in England for one week. As such you will not being gaining any deep insight into the subtle nuances of Korean culture from this entry and you will instead have to make do with a riveting account of how I got home.<br /><br />I'm guessing you think I flew home. You'd be right, so well guessed. I leapt on a bus from Daegu to Seoul first and spent a delightful 5 hours watching Korean comedy shows on the coach television. Korean comedy is a joke. It is also the same joke over and over again and the down side is, that the joke wasn't funny the first time.<br /><br />Think less satire and more "Knock knock, who's there?" The answer to which is "A Korean actor with a terrible joke". <br /><br />You might think I am being a sneering, condescending bigot, and once again you would be right. But I could turn even the most culturally sensitive of you into an arrogant, patronising scum bag if I could only get you alone for 5 hours with a television and a DVD of Korean comedy.<br /><br />I arrived at Incheon airport unable to laugh anymore. I have not laughed since and it was three days ago. This morning I regained the ability to smile but my recovery is going to be a long and arduous journey.<br /><br />I needed a drink. Not a problem I hear you say, afterall you are in a huge international airport. Well this time your assumption would be wrong. Seoul's, Incheon airport is a disgrace to all aviation. It has two bars in the entire, vast expanse of glass and marble. One of those was nothing more than a Guiness stand that sold pints of Guiness for £11 each or to my American friends about $150 give or take a penny.<br /><br />The other "sports bar" was closed by 9pm. How? How is this possible? There was a however a prayer room open. Great. So you have catered for those who wish to go and have some spiritual fulfillment, but you cannot even provide my kind with one open venue to have a spirit with a mixer fulfillment?<br /><br />I was livid. Perhaps a strongly worded letter would show them that this discrimination against British people was simply not acceptable in 2011. I had two hours to fill and the only entertainment available was praying to a deity I don't believe in or watching Korean workers close down their shops for the night at a stupidly early time.<br /><br />I decided to write my letter and went to an internet point that was remarkably still open. But when I went to use the computer, guess what? The instructions were in Korean. The nerve of these people never ceases to amaze me. I slammed my crisp British passport against the counter in fury and looked around for someone to remonstrate with. <br /><br />I don't mind you people using that ridiculous language in your own time, but if you are not going to provide alcohol for less than the price it costs to vaccinate an entire third world village against river blindness then you better at least have your computers set to English so people can construct outraged letters of complaint.<br /><br />Instead I sulked for two hours and then made my way on board the plane.<br /><br />I was travelling home to be the best man at a wedding. I believe this title to be quite literal when I have been given the role and I decided to use my 16 hours of flight time to work on some outstanding jokes. The Emirates flight crew kept me well fed with the following meals...<br /><br />Scrambled Eggs and some excuse for a sausage.<br />Chinese Chicken and noodles.<br />Omlette with potatoes.<br />Chicken and Egg sandwich.<br /><br />Those were the four meals I ate. Did Mr Emirate get some special buy one get one free deal on Chickens and their eggs? I like eggs and I like chicken. In fact in Korea I normally eat both quite regularly. Perhaps too regularly. But even by my chicken and egg dominated standards, that selection of meals seemed very egg heavy with a pretty large nod to Chicken too.<br /><br />I had a few beers, but eyed the first one with suspicion. Just to make sure the air hostess had not slipped in a hot wing or a hard boiled egg when I wasn't looking. I also watched the film 127 hours about a man who falls down a ravine, gets his arm trapped by a boulder and then cuts his own arm off with a pen knife after spending 127 hours (coincidentally) drinking his own urine and crying.<br /><br />I liked it a lot and if it hadn't been for my harrowing, humour sapping bus journey, I have no doubt I would have been roaring with laughter.<br /><br />Eventually the plane began its descent to Manchester, England. My home. And it was during our descent that the captain dropped a proverbial bombshell about the weather in our destination, news so unexpected that I could barely believe it to be true...<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Ladies and Gentlemen we are making our descent to Manchester, where the local time is 12.30pm. The weather is 4 degrees celcius, overcast and cloudy with light rain."</span><br /><br />Yeah right, I'm not falling for that one.<br /><br />So here I am. A week with no teaching, no Soju and no old people looking at me as if I am a 19th Century Circus Sideshow attraction. It feels surreal and yet a welcome respite. I will fly back on Saturday to arrive in Seoul on my birthday. Little Spoon, Rude Boy Yatesy and Chocolate Orange are all running a half marathon that day, and will be there to offer me a sweaty greeting upon my return.<br /><br />I'm enjoying the home cooked meals and fully flavoured beer, but part of me is excited about the flight on Saturday. Chicken and Eggs with a small side of Eggs and Chicken please.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-5836145592886298802011-02-05T21:28:00.000-08:002011-02-07T21:29:04.799-08:00Seolnal: Happy New Year...Again!Yes I have had two New Year celebrations. I believe most of you reading this had a pathetic one. One New Year celebration? That is so last year. I'm more of a two New Years type of man and Korea has given me the opportunity to be who I always knew I was deep down.<br /><br />The reason for this is something to do with the Moon. I would give a more indepth and informative explanation but that would have required me to be culturally sensitive and actually learnt a bit about what I was celebrating. So you will have to rely on Wikipedia.<br /><br />I believe it happens at pretty much the same time as Chinese New Year, which is somewhat of a shame, as I could have had the option of making this a year of three New Years. Something that would surely have been ground breaking?<br /><br />Of course there is one let down to all this New Year shenanigans and that is that I hate New Year. Sure, I go out and "celebrate" with friends, but really I despise it. Another year closes and I look back at the twelve months I've wasted and then buy another drink at a bar that is crowded with grinning baffoons wanting to shake my hand when they don't know me at all, and if they did, they would think twice about shaking my hand.<br /><br />But it was time off work and an excuse to once more travel to nearby Busan with Little Spoon an affable chap you shall know as Mason and the British couple previously known as Josh and Nat. As with all of my friends, they demanded an idiotic nickname and as such I would like to introduce you to Chess Champ and Chocolate Orange.<br /><br />Nat is known as Chess Champ, because whilst at school Josh and his friends heard a rumour that she was Russian and a genius at Chess. Both rumours proved to be false, or so she says.<br /><br />Similarly a young fool at Josh's school misheard his surname as Terry and called him Terrys Chocolate Orange after the fantastic chocolate gift that I would buy both of my parents every year for Christmas until I was about 15.<br /><br />So we cut a merry quintet as we headed out full of Moon induced New Year vibes and the rather familiar delights on offer in Busan. I like Daegu, but Busan has several things that Daegu does not.<br /><br />Firstly it has numerous beaches.<br /><br />This makes it very popular with a lot of people. I'm not one of those people as I hate the beach. Sand annoys me and I don't really like water that has salt in it. Secondly it has an Irish Pub that I would not normally give the time of day back home but is quite welcome for a change out here. But I feel I should go back to my dislike of salt water for a moment...<br /><br />I have pondered over my issues with salt water and believe I have traced the origins back to when I was four years old and being a culinary radical pushed the boat out into uncertain waters by eating a toadstool. My mother and my aunt were clearly a bit squeemish about "exotic foods" and rather than admire my worldly attitude, tried to make me throw up the offending funghi.<br /><br />So what did they do? Made me drink a pint of salt water. But to a man of my iron fortitude, even at only 4 years of age, this brine like solution simply helped wash down what had been a hearty meal. So eventually a spoon was stuck down my gullet and I was indeed violently sick.<br /><br />I only began eating mushrooms around two years ago and still frown at the sea when I see it. <br /><br />However I do like Busan. I like sitting in a cocktail bar just in sight of the beach, where I can pretend I love the beach and that I am not sat there simply to indulge a slight drinking problem.<br /><br />Mason had never been to Busan before and I didn't want him to stumble off on his own and end up finding all the wrong things like the museum, the aquarium or the old China town area.<br />So I'm sure he was glad to have me as a tour guide. Off to the classy "Fuzzy Navel" bar. Chess Champ and Choc Orange are fellow fans of Busan and Little Spoon is a fan of most things provided you suggest them in an excited tone of voice.<br /><br />Unsurprisingly it turned into a good night, and a better night than my regular New Year too. Perhaps I need to think about bringing this "Seolnal" celebration back with me to British shores. <br /><br />As the night wore on, Chess Champ and Choc Orange challenged Little Spoon and I to a game of Beer Pong. For the uninitiated this involves facing each other across a table with 10 holes cut into it on each side. Cups of beer are then placed in the holes and you throw a ping pong ball at your opponents cups; if it lands in the cup, they must drink that beer.<br /><br />The winner is the one who removes all their opponents cups first. Simple. Simple and easy. We lost. Again. In fact whenever I play this game, I seem to lose despite having exceptional hand eye coordination and a competitive spirit to rival the greatest of sportsmen.<br /><br />We sat and discussed the epic match and an interesting conversation ensued...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"So Chess Champ, I have to say you were pretty good at beer pong, were those your chess tactics coming into play?"<br /></span><br />Chess Champ laughed, because I'm a naturally witty man and my chess quip was both timely and relevant.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Chess Champ:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"No, I never even played Chess, but yeah I'm pretty good at beer pong, I always do well at it."</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Little Spoon:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"It's hand eye coordination, are you good at driving?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Chess Champ:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"No not really, I had a few lessons but..."</span><br /><br />At this point, Chess Champs loving partner raised his head from the pint of Guiness he was gulping down and made an incomprehensible word/sound to interject into the conversation and then offered his darling a touching tribute...<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Choc Orange:</span> "Oh No. No she can't drive mate, no awful at driving. But yeah you're right she can play beer pong. She's really good at beer pong, but she's ABSOLUTELY SHIT at everything else. Everything."<br /><br />I look at Chess Champ and she is frowning...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Chess Champ:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Well I'm not bad at darts. I mean I'd never played it really, but when we've played it here I'm not bad."</span><br /><br />Choc Orange mulls this over for a moment and then begins to nod. He's a very fair man and is always happy to admit if he might have made a mistake.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Choc Orange:</span><span style="font-style:italic;">"Yeah to be fair babe that's true, you're alright at darts."</span><br /><br />He looks over to Little Spoon and I and concedes he made an error...<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Yeah she's right, she is okay at darts, so yeah she is pretty good at beer pong and darts but she is ABSOLUTELY SHIT at everything else. Everything...just shit, really bad."</span><br /><br />Chess Champ nods in agreement and we order some more drinks. The worrying thing for me is that I am absolutely shit at beer pong and darts too, and there were never even the smallest rumours that I was a genius at chess or anything else for that matter. It is a good job that I'm not trying to woo my friend Choc Orange or I would be doomed to fail before I had even begun.<br /><br />It was thus with a heavy heart that I returned to work on Friday after two days of merriment and beach gazing. But as I asked my students if they had enjoyed their new year and was met with a cacophony of negative feedback I began to feel that I had been almost blessed with my experience of Seolnal.<br /><br />I did however find one student who had a good time, my old friend Rocky from one of my "middle school" classes. Although what Rocky considers a good time is perhaps a little different to most people.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"So Rocky did you have a good New Year?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Rocky:</span><span style="font-style:italic;"> "Yes teacher, good. Went to see the body go to ground."</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Me:</span><span style="font-style:italic;"> "You went to see what?"</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Rocky:</span><span style="font-style:italic;"> "Erm...the body, dead body. Put to the ground."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span><span style="font-style:italic;"> "You went to a funeral? Somebody died and you saw their body buried in the ground yes?"</span><br /><br />His pockmarked face lit up and he nodded <span style="font-style:italic;">"Yes teacher this"</span><br /><br />I didn't know what to say really, but I'm glad that he enjoyed spending his New Year at a funeral, may all his future holidays be blessed with death and the chance to view the disposal of the deceased's mortal form.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-28036574731729274762011-01-26T03:25:00.000-08:002011-01-26T04:52:36.069-08:00Testing Times.It is that time again. The backstraight of a term in which the students take their "level up tests" which shall determine whether they remain in their current class or move onto a higher plane of English.<br />It would be nice to think that whether a student makes the cut is based purely on merit, but of course it is not. If a lazy, disruptive little rodent of a child has failed several times previously the school will level them up anyway in order to keep their parents' paying the fees.<br /><br />This is the by-product of a quirk of Korean culture. I say culture, but really it is just stupidity and misplaced pride. The saving face culture is fairly common in South East Asian nations and no more so than here, where a parent would rather their child earnt meaningless A grades and yet learnt nothing than faced constructive criticism and received genuine hard earnt B grades.<br /><br />For example I have to give an A+ for homework that is 100% completed even if every question is wrong. Suits me fine, as it means I don't have to check any of the answers or actually do my job.<br /><br />So we enter the level up tests and understandably the children loathe them. A droning 35 minute MP3 plays out tedious conversations that they must answer questions on to prove their listening skills. There are then reading tests, speaking tests and writing tests. All packed back to back in an avalanche of misery and boredom.<br /><br />But not misery and boredom for me. I drink tea and read articles about Britain's fattest man on Wikipedia. Whilst my students screw their faces in concentration and apply themselves dilligently to the task at hand, I have just learnt about a monstrously large man from the 18th Century who was best friends with a Polish midget.<br /><br />This is what I dreamed teaching would be like. And I get a stop watch to hang around my neck so I can pretend briefly that I have the hand to eye coordination to make the cut as a PE teacher.<br /><br />Level Up is good to me. I settle down to sip my tea and peruse as many puerile Wikipedia links as possible when some of the test conversations somehow force their way into my conciousness. Read out in the most whining American accent imaginable these rambling conversations somehow become essential listening.<br /><br />It dawns on me that the characters created in these audio exams are so irritating and odious that if they were real I would have to track them down and bludgeon them to death with a lead pipe.<br /><br />The MP3 booms out <span style="font-style:italic;">"Question 42, listen to the conversation and answer the question"</span>.<br /><br />The conversation unfolds where a boy named Mike eagerly tells his female friend at school that he has great news. His older brother Matt has moved out from home and now Mike will get his big brothers bedroom which is far larger and has a great view.<br /><br />I don't mind Mike, he seems a reasonable chap as these conversations go. But his friend Sarah replies:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"That's good news? Really? I seem to remember that Matt was very messy. I don't even know how you put up with him for so long. You think it is good to have his room? I don't think so, you are going to have to tidy the awful mess that he no doubt left behind. I don't envy you at all."</span><br /><br />The narrator on the MP3 intones: <span style="font-style:italic;">"Question: Why does Sarah think Matt leaving is not good news?"</span><br /><br />I almost leap from seat and scream <span style="font-style:italic;">"Because she's a lazy, miserable bitch."</span><br /><br />Fuck you Sarah with your snidy sarcasm. And don't assume that Matt left the room a mess, he was moving out and probably took all his things with him, you whining Mary Poppins wannabe.<br /><br />I looked around the room, and was startled to see my own rage wasn't shared. The kids were just writing away, oblivious to how much I wanted to reach into the speaker and throttle "Sarah".<br /><br />It is foolish of me to get so animated during the one week in which I can afford to do nothing. Next week I will be back to teaching, back to trying to engage with the children and nourish their minds with knowledge. But I am not the best at being cheerful and chirpy, something that might not have been lost on you.<br /><br />I need tips. I need to listen to other teachers talking about their lessons, and garner useful ideas and techniques.<br />I listen to two such characters on a subway journey downtown. I've never seen these two westerners before but they're teachers and they're discussing cutting edge techniques for the first day of class.<br /><br />I should take some notes as it is only a few weeks away before I start first day classes all over again.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Teacher 1:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"So what did you do for the first day last time around?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Teacher 2:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"I did a great little thing where each kid has to ask the one sat next to them what their name is, how old they are and then what they want to be when they grow up. Then they introduce each other to the class."</span><br /><br />Well, well looks like I might be in the presence of genius. Teacher 1 certainly seems to think so...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Teacher 1:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Oh yeah that is excellent, really interesting idea I should do that one next time around."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Teacher 2:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Definitely, it's interesting and a lot of fun for the kids."</span><br /><br />Yes it sounds like a right barrel of laughs. I am sure it is interesting and fun for the kids, provided that the kids' idea of what is fun and interesting is watching paint dry.<br /><br />Grey paint that is. Slow drying, grey paint, that has been painted onto a featureless wall during a particularly drab and overcast day.<br /><br />I take a swig from my open bottle of Soju and shake my head. Those two are a disgrace to teaching.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7474316991108473194.post-29313716484842626852011-01-19T03:37:00.000-08:002011-01-26T08:51:45.564-08:00Holiday Heroes And Animal Insecurities.I have just returned from an interesting discussion with my favourite class of students. This particular band of smiling little scallywags actually seem to enjoy being in class and work incredibly hard. <br /><br />The more they work, the less guidance they need, which means the less I have to work. It seems to be a fair trade off; afterall there is surely a finite amount of effort that can exist in a place of learning at any one time, and therefore if the limit is reached by dedicated children then who am I to risk upsetting scientific laws by also working hard?<br /><br />Today I taught them about Christopher Columbus and we debated whether he was a great man or a slave driving, Christian fundamentalist with the navigational skills of a blind man whose guide dog was replaced with a mole.<br /><br />They decided he was great and that without him there would be no President Obama. Whatever kids. Anyway, the final presentation involved them inventing a new national holiday based on famous people from either the past or present and explaining why.<br /><br />I gave them a quick introduction to the idea and then asked them to give me some names of famous people who changed history. It rapidly became apparent that Christopher Columbus' transgressions were never going to shock my hardened band of pupils into denouncing his right to hero status. Oh no, because the first two names suggested for a national holiday packed a little more punch than our sea faring Italian chum.<br /><br />The most vocal student in class, a girl named Sollia, spoke first...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Sollia:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Genghis Khan"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me: </span><span style="font-style:italic;">"Genghis Khan?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Sollia:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Yes Mongolian teacher"</span><br /><br />Yes I know where he is from you patronising little squirt, I was just questioning whether a man who butchered millions and spent his life pillaging and enslaving really needed a national holiday.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Well he did change the world, but he killed a lot of people too"</span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Sollia:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"I read he didn't kill many people"</span><br /><br />Since when has not killing <span style="font-style:italic;">many</span> people been so worthy of praise? <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Well he did. He killed millions and sometimes had entire cities destroyed"</span><br /><br />The class laughed. A hearty laugh. The sort of laugh one might have as they razed a city to the ground and watched its people run screaming from the flaming ruins.<br /><br />I shook my head and thought to myself "Sure and while we're at it, why not have a Hitler day?" <br /><br />At which point a boy called Neo piped up <span style="font-style:italic;">"Maybe Hitler teacher"</span>.<br /><br />Great.<br /><br />I have now got Genghis Khan and Hitler written on the board. This lesson is being filmed on CCTV and will be watched by my head instructors. I realise these two guys were a little misunderstood but I just can't promote national genocide day.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Guys, look I know these people were famous and changed a lot, but this is for a holiday where you all celebrate them, so they need to be good people okay."</span><br /><br />It worked. And I ended up hearing about a Korean ice skater and Manchester United player Park Ji Sung. These two heroes of Korean culture may never know that they were second choice to good old Genghis and affable Adolf.<br /><br />If they ever knew I'd imagine they might be mildly traumatised but not as traumatised as some animals apparently feel. That seamless link brings us smoothly to another class presentation from the same group a couple of weeks back where their projects were based on the concept of Dr Doolittle.<br /><br />Each group had to choose animals that may have issues of suffering and then imagine that they could relate them to Dr Doolittle.<br />I was not expecting the list of insecurities that appeared. Animals I had previously believed operated on instinct alone are actually quite self concious and often depressed.<br /><br />What daily worries do you think affect the life of a worm? Being eaten by a bird? Wrong. Being sliced in half by the spade of an enthusiastic gardener? Wrong again. No, a worms main concern is that due to having no legs and thus no feet it can never purchase shoes.<br /><br />Without wishing to stereotype too heavily, this point of trauma was unsurprisingly raised by the girls. Oh the woes of being a worm and not being able to go shoe shopping.<br /><br />I tried in vain to steer the discussion towards more advanced forms of life, the chimpanze, the dolphin, even a dog. Nobody seemed interested. Well come on, at least give me a vertebrate form of life.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Mike:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"An ant teacher, many problems"</span><br /><br />Of course an ant.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Me:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Fine an ant, and why would an ant be upset?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Jenny:</span> <span style="font-style:italic;">"Because he cannot sing"</span><br /><br />So the inability to engage in karaoke was the major stress in the life of an ant. I wanted to know if this was a problem specific to ants in the kingdom of insects. Perhaps my ears are not what they were and wasps, beetles and flies have all mastered the art of song in the past few years. Whistling moths, cockroaches humming to their I-Pods and the poor, forlorn ant sat atop of his ant hill tone deaf and unable to hold a note.<br /><br />It puts my own problems firmly into perspective. Why, I bought some shoes only a couple of months back and I do believe I was singing to myself in my monotone drone only last week whilst having a shower.<br /><br />Life is good afterall.Monkey Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13860216395223124833noreply@blogger.com3