Training and the Wisconsin Kid.

Monday May 31st

I wake up. Something is niggling at me in the back of my mind...

Ah shit. It’s time to go to the “horrendous training”.
Thankfully Jay Hendrix is asleep and the guitar is nowhere to be seen; so I can get ready in peace and avoid any awkward explanations for why the Green Tea Ice Cream and frozen beer are untouched.

I head down to the hotel lobby to meet my fellow trainees and I’m greeted by lots of friendly faces. In fact one perhaps a little too friendly. No, not perhaps, definitely.
A gangly baffoon who looks like Tom Hanks in Big is far too chirpy and friendly for my liking. I introduce myself to him last and he is grinning at me like some simpleton who just found a cake.

His name is irrelevant, so from here on in I shall refer to him by his origin. He is the Wisconsin Kid.

He is also a fucking pain in the arse.

As we get onto the bus he is peering at random Korean signs and translating them, much to the delight and amazement of the Korean American trainees.
It turns out the Wisconsin Kid bought a Korean phrase and alphabet book a month ago and is already able to read a fair amount of Korean and speak fairly well.
That is impressive and highly irritating in equal parts.

He then turns his leering face in my direction and after reading some sign through the window says “Ah man, I just can’t make out that last word, my Korean is embarrassing.”

I grit my teeth and look around to see if anyone is on the verge of stabbing him, nobody seems too angry, but I catch my reflection in the window and realise my lip is curled and I am actually snarling at thin eye.

This false modesty and fishing for praise continues throughout the day. We sit five tests. The Wisconsin Kid passes all five, and is the only person to do so.
I fail the faculty codes test by getting a question on what classes as sexual harassment wrong.
Great. This bodes well.
Why did I think putting your hand up a colleagues skirt was not harrassment?

Next up, we are taken to a hospital to be tested for drugs, HIV and various other crap and to undergo some military style medical. I am sat in the waiting room and who should sit down next to me? Yeah it’s my best friend the Wisconsin Kid.
The kid gives me a half smile and says“Hey.”

I narrow my eyes, turn to him and say in a flat, sardonic voice “Hey”.

The Kid: “So how many languages do you speak.”
Me: “One. Sort of.”
The Kid: “Oh why sort of?”
Me: “I can say rabbit in German, but I wouldn’t say it’s a second language”.

The Kid nods and looks at me with sympathy, as if the hospital check had just revealed I had pancreatic cancer.

“Oh I see. I speak five languages.”

I look at him for perhaps 5 seconds without speaking, and then turn away and pretend to look hard at a Korean sign on the wall.
I’m waiting.
If he offers to translate it for me, I’m going to grab the oxygen tank off the dying Korean on the nearby hospital bed and beat the Wisconsin Kid to death with it.

The rest of the week was a blur of boredom, frustration and the growing certainty that I was going to fail training and be back in the UK within a week.

Friday arrives.

Somehow I have passed.
Excellent, now I can go and rerun this week over and over again (only infront of children) for the next year of my life. The excitement is too much to bear. But at least I can start to pay off the crippling debts I ran up when I decided to embark on this little jaunt.

There is some other fairly good news. The results from the blood tests came back and I don’t have HIV.
That’s pleasing, as if I had failed and been told I had HIV this would have gone down as one of the worst Fridays of 2010.

Then comes the bombshell. One person in the group has failed.

Oh Wisonsin Kid, how could it be?

You immersed yourself in the culture, learnt the language and had a passion for teaching.
You speak five languages, and passed all the tests on the first day with no need to resit, and yet you’ve failed. It’s back to Wisconsin, with nothing but a Korean alphabet book and stolen memories of blood tests and bus rides.

If only you had been more like me.

Replaced your excitement and enthusiasm with my miserable attitude and apathy.
Spent less time grasping the language of our host nation and more time drinking cheap beer and complaining.

If you had done these things my friend you too could be on a train to Daegu and not a plane to Wisconsin.

This was Monkey Roberts.