Conmen 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here it is:

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

Great, time off from "teaching". The video begins.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Curse 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. Yet. 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.

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.

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. Yet. 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...

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.

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.

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?

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.

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...

Olivia: "I need my spray. Is very hot and good for the strange man and thief."

Me: "Your spray? What do you mean? Do you mean you spray a person with it?"

Olivia: "Yes teacher, and if it does, they shout 'Aggghhhhhh' and crying, it's a very good for me."

Me: "You mean Pepper Spray? You have Pepper Spray? Who gave it to you?"

Olivia: "Ah yes, the Pepper Spray. My Auntie buy for me because a strange man tried my window."

Me: "Wow. Okay and have you ever sprayed anybody with it?"

Olivia: "My mother. It was accident teacher, but I spray her and she goes to the hospital and then hit for me when she home."

Me: "You pepper sprayed your mother? And then she hit you when she got back from hospital?"

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.
This girl is also friends with my old student "Tiny Gangster" who you may recall had written me on a death wish list.

With Olivia's illegal arms dealing Auntie and Olivia's history of violence, the threat had suddenly become more real.

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".

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...

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..."What the fuck teacher?".

I stopped and looked at her in stunned silence for a moment and she said again "What the fuck teacher? What does this mean, what the fuck?"

Me: "Don't say that it is a very bad word."

Sally: "Oh, very bad?"

Me: "Yes very bad, where did you hear it?"

Sally: "Sorry teacher, I heard it at school. In my class, one human told this to me."

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".

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.

Brandy And Cobblers

I 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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

The words "North Korean Pear Brandy" have been said a lot recently. Usually in the sentence, "Would anyone like to drink this North Korean Pear Brandy with me?" 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
However, he clearly thought they were my shoes and yet these were a woman's shoes and no mistake.

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!

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 "These aren't my shoes mate, they're a female friend of mines and I'm just doing her a favour".

In fact it probably says more along the lines of "See those yonder mountains old man, I wish to walk them, but alas I cannot because my girly shoes are broken".

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.
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".

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.

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!

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

I spun around. Nobody drinks water with a turtle in it. Not even here.

I had no idea who this particular student was so I addressed him as I do with all new children..."Oi you, come here".

He came here. Obviously a smart one.

Me: "Why do you have a turtle in your cup?"

Boy: "Is a turtle."

So much for him being a smart one.

Me: "Not 'is a turtle' you say 'it's a turtle'"

Boy: "Yes is a turtle"

For fucks sake, anyone would think I was speaking a foreign language.

Me: "I know, why do you have it in a cup and why is it here in school?"

Boy: "My pet. I bring him today."

Me: "I see. What is he called? What's his name?"

Boy: "Name is Obama."

Interesting; a communist, Muslim turtle from Kenya.

Me: "What do you feed him? What do you give Obama to eat?"

Boy: "Beef burger, teacher. Get him big."

Beef Burgers? You won't get him big, you will get him dead.

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 "Sure, let's run with that."? 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 "No, let's get him some turtle feed"?

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But no sooner had one dream been crushed, than another was born in earnest.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

Sadly my attempts were as ineffective as my ghost catching machine made from a shoe box with a portable vacuum cleaner inside it was.

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.

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.

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.

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".

It has to be the most inapproproate and ironic placement of a single word that I've ever seen.

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.

Grammar 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!

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.

Oh I've definitely got you now...read on...

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.

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.

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?

Hailey just nods and says sagely "It's good idea".

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.

Hailey: "The snail is not barking like a dog teacher. He always has the good behaviour."

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.

I was and still am reluctant to give snails too much credit for their "good behaviour" 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.

To be honest if I ever found a snail that did 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.

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.

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.

Alex: "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."

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 "magic show" and "mouse is gone".

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.

Alex gestured to the floor and outlined the mouse and then said "Mouse is here, and then the magic show..." and he leapt into the air and stamped down hard on the imaginary mouse made an explosion sound and then said "Woosh, mouse is gone, magic show".

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.

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 "woosh".

For the rest of the lesson I could hear him sporadically mumbling "magic show" to himself and wooshing away with a deranged smile.

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.

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.

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.

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

Here was one question. Fill in the blank with the correct term:

If you have ever stood next to a rushing river you___________ the water hammering away.

The correct choice was of course B) may have seen.

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...

"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."

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!

General 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.

I suppose the same could be said for kids back home, but everything seems magnified here.
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.

I wowed a class of 12 year olds with my knowledge of capital cities. "Teacher what is the capital of Kenya?" why that would be "Nairobi". 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 "What is the capital of Wales?", I can say "Grimbinlop" and my audience are still stunned by my intellect and clap their hands with delight.

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.

But somehow I ended up asking her questions on capital cities and decided to throw her the curve ball classic of "What is the capital of Australia?".

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!

They don't however think outside the box like Little Spoon does and answer with "Madagascar".

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.

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.

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.

Capital cities did not come up! Nor did my other areas of expertise which are hip-hop from 1993-1997 and the question "Who was the infamous son of Agripinna the Younger?".

What a stupid quiz. We came joint fifth.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 "Flower, Happy The Sunshine Girls" I beg your pardon?

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.

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.
It read well despite one grammatical error and it told a dark, haunting tale that gave me food thought.

You could say that this was a truly profound pencil case and this snippet of literature may well change your life. Enjoy...

"The rabbit trying to trick the cat into sitting on her broken chair, while the monkey is pedaling along on his squeaky bicycle."

A SQUEAKY Bicycle. The Bicycle was squeaky! Think about that for a moment.

Umbrellas 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.

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...

"Don't worry, this adorable Korean baby doesn't really have narcolepsy".

Well that was a fucking anticlimax.

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 "very tired" and who "keeps waking up, smiling..." ahhh shut up.

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.

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.

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 "give whatever you would like".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 "Hold on, excuse me, why have they wrapped your daughter up like a pillow? It looks like she doesn't have limbs" might dampen the atmosphere some what.

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.

So to umbrellas. I tried to think of a clever link there, but umbrellas and babies just don't go together I'm afraid.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Polka dots were a long way from brawling beasts and turquoise is several shades adrift from trusty, masculine navy blue.

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.

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.

I could mug that boy.

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.

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.

She looked up and our eyes met. She couldn't be more than 5ft 2", I could definitely....NO.

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.

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.

So you owe me one.