Episode 60: In Which DFM Finds An Outhouse With Its Own Temple And Eats So Much Seafood He Starts To Waddle

I woke up in a panic today.  The temperature inside my room was very hot (28 degrees was the reading on the thermostat) and I thought for sure I had slept in 'til the afternoon.

In actuality it was not the afternoon it was 6 in the morning.  After eating some breakfast I decided to pass the time until everyone else got up by going for a walk around the luxury golf resort at which we were staying.  It had rained the night before, so there was a cool mist in the air and everything looked especially green.

While on my walk I saw four ten year old boys playing basketball and a rather humorous situation broke out.  One of the boys began double-dribbling quite badly.  A second boy started yelling at him (in Korean), and I guessed that he was telling him to stop double-dribbling.  Shortly after this a boy on the other team started doubling dribbling and the boy who originally double-dribbled yelled at him to stop double-dribbling (again, in Korean).  The second boy came over and shoved him and started yelling at him, which I took to mean that he was telling him to stop being such a hypocrite.  The whole situation reminded me of when I was that age and I threw a basketball at a girl's head because she wasn't paying attention on the court.

After lunch at Jee-seon's home in Ulsan, we headed to the beach.  Ulsan is located very close to the East Sea - between Korea and Japan - and while it is not technically the Pacific Ocean, it was close enough for me (same water).

After visiting the beach we drove back towards Gyeongju, to the mountain Unjesan.

I know it looks nice, but that's not a temple in the foreground it's a really smelly outhouse.

After a shady hike up Mt. Unjesan we came to an unnamed temple.  Of all the temples I've seen this one had the nicest looking buildings.

Back near the outhouse we found another temple, Oeosa (pronounced "Oo-oh-sa").  Everything was still decorated for the Buddha's Birthday season, which meant hundreds of lanterns.  Each one had a candle inside and at night some poor soul probably has to walk along and light them all.

This is probably the best looking pagoda I've seen anywhere in Korea.  I love the blue roof.

The pagoda was not just notable for its blue roof though.  Inside it housed Korea's oldest bronze bell, Oeosadongjong.  Built in 1281, Oeosadongjong had been lost for many decades, perhaps centuries, before the severe draught of 1995 though dried up a nearby river where the bell was found lying at the bottom.

Baby Buddha's Belly! 귀엽다

After a long day of sightseeing, April, Sun Hee, Jee-seon and I went out to a seaside restaurant for some sashimi.  Sashimi is very fresh raw seafood.  The meal I had featured a crab platter, a shrimp platter, a sliced raw fish platter that was humongous, and a large serving of maeuntang ("may-oon-tang").  

Maeuntang features fish that is boiled with various vegetables and then doused in both chili pepper and Korean red chili pepper paste (because one hot condiment wasn't enough).

After eating the maeuntang, Sun Hee filled the pot with the remaining raw fish to turn them into half-cooked spicy fish.  I was over filled by this point, but the half-cooked spicy fish was delicious so I kept stuffing it down.

After dinner my leg had cramped/locked up quite badly from sitting cross-legged for four courses.  I must have looked quite silly as I waddled back to the car, but I didn't care.

Episode 27: In Which DFM Causes Koreans To Fight

Day 2 of being The Korean Kindergarten Cop.

I get to the school a half-hour early every day, and then I drink some nokcha (green tea) in the front office while I am told to "relax relax."  This beaming girl was one of the first students to arrive and she sat by the office smiling and waving at me for about twenty minutes.  We shared a rudimentary introduction she had learned and then she showed me her collection of stickers for being a good student.  "Good job!"  I told her.  She smiled so hard I thought her face was going to crack.  Later in the day, after I took her picture in one of her classes, she gave me a thumbs up sign like she had seen me do many times before and said "good job!"

I went back to my nokcha, but she came over and gave me one of her stickers.  It didn't really stick well, but I figured that it was one of her good student stickers and she had removed it from her sticker page to give to me.  I was touched, so I balanced it on my watch so that she could see how much I liked it.  Smiles do not know what language barriers are.

My four year olds were learning about things you do in the morning.  The children cut out letters and pictures and placed them on larger images that depicted scenes of "brushing teeth," "washing face," and "combing hair."  I'm not sure what the letters had to do with anything, but at this age pretty much all they can do in English is sing their ABCs.

The cute girl in the pig tails was really smart and could list some colours and also pick up a basic understanding of constructing sentences.  In this assignment she had the motor skills to cut her A out in the shape of an A.  Contrast that with the boy to her right who decided to cut out everything, including the pictures to which the pictures were supposed to be glued.

The five year olds were working on naming the parts of a house.  This boy had the World's best house, complete with flying sharks guarding his lawn.  Mail carriers, you've been warned.

I had told all the children on the first day that I was from Canada, so on my second day I decided to bring something Canadian to show them.  I had a small key chain with a Canadian flag on it and the children kept wanting to see it.  They would point at my pocket and say "Canada" while they hopped up and down or vibrated wildly with anticipation.  Louis was very fond of The Canada and didn't want to share it.  There was a bit of a fight between these two boys when Louis wouldn't let him hold it, but they were back to being best friends and hugging only moments later.  That's how boys settle arguments; pay attention girls.

Speaking of fights... the girl with the pink hair band is as much of a camera hog as Louis, and she didn't take it lightly when the boy in the silver coat tried to jump in front of one of her pictures.  Check out her left hand.  Are those claws?  She's definitely going for blood here.

  

The six year olds were working on a picture of a map of Korea.  In the corner of the sheet with the map outline was a satellite image of the Korean peninsula.  The objective was to rip up coloured pieces of paper and glue them to the map so that it looked like the satellite image, and all whilst learning words associated with basic geography.

Tiger-claw Fight Girl (from above, and seated at the bottom right) would teach me proper Korean pronunciation, while Sticker Girl (beside Fight Girl in both pictures) spent a good chunk of the class giving me gifts like paper hats and pine-cones, and writing my name on strips of paper with hearts surrounding them.  She made sure I stuck all the gifts and papers with my name on them in my pocket, and would make sure to periodically check that they were still there throughout the class.

After work I went over to meet with Mr. Kim.  He wanted to talk to me about the next day's lesson plan, which had changed a bit.  He gave me some special teaching materials his company had made and wanted me to see if I could use them in the lesson.  Mr. Kim also needed my help editing a book his company was making for teaching grade-two English.  One of the assignments contained directions that were really quite tricky to put into words, even for a native English speaker, but after a lot of humming and hawing I finally came up with what I thought was the best compromise of brevity and accuracy.  DFM, international educator and editor.

Mr. Kim also told me that the children all thought I was their old teacher, Seth.  Never mind that Seth had much longer hair, "us white people all look the same."

The most important reason for bringing me over though, was that Mr. Kim wanted to extend to me the offer of a four month contract with the school starting in May.  As much as I love teaching at Mr. Kim's school, I had to tell him that I already had prior arrangements for the summer months back in Canada.  Mr. Kim said that in Korea a man's word is his most important possession, so there was no way he could ask me to renege on a contract I had made (even verbally) with my current employer.  I asked him if I could come back at a later date to teach for him.  "Any time," was his response.  Oh, and a four month contract with Mr. Kim also includes a "mandatory" paid week in Japan for a "cultural trip."

Mr. Kim next asked me to continue teaching three days a week for him for the remainder of my stay in Korea.  He even opened the bank to me and told me that I was free to negotiate with "Mr. Lee" (Young San) regarding my wage.  I wasn't sure what he meant, so he said "you just tell Mr. Lee what you need.  You might say 'Mr. Lee' I need more money for traveling and he will give it to you."  For a guy who lives off of rice and kimchi and has spent most of his life working for less than $10/hr, I had trouble grasping how I could ever need more than $100 a day (what he was currently paying me).  I told Mr. Kim that our previous arrangement would be just fine.  If I do come back after teaching in Canada I will think more seriously about what I ask for as a wage.  Mr. Kim finished by saying he would write me a letter of recommendation on official company stationary after my month working for him (I had only been working for him two days at this point).  I tried to stay away from teaching while I was hear, but I love it too much.  I think I'm going to accept.

Violence Solves Everything

It seems today that there's a lot of discussion around bullying in schools. The government of Canada even has a website about how to prevent it. The thing is, bullying has been around as long as prostitution so you'd think that we'd have mastered it by now. Our schools haven't, but do not fear because DFM has.

The solution is to teach children how to fight, although the actual act of fighting is not what is important. What really matters is that the child thinks he/she can fight. I was bullied as a nine year old. My dad taught me some kung-fu moves he had learned. I was never bullied again. In fact I never even had to use the moves, my bully just magically disappeared. When I was ten and eleven I used to lose every fight I got myself into. When I was twelve I started watching WWF wrestling. I was ready to sharp shooter the next kid who looked at me wrong. Never got in another fight again. My brother was being bullied recently. I taught him how to box. Problem solved. Notice a trend?

In all three of these situations there was never a punch thrown. The reason it works is that when you feel you can fight, you become more confident. When you're more confident you don't get as bothered by minor issues and you walk a little taller. Bullies stop picking on you because you don't get riled up anymore and you don't look like you're about to cry, so there's no point in wasting their precious bullying time. Furthermore, you look like you wouldn't take it if they did try, so the bullies will go pick on someone who will.

The reason bullying seems so bad now is that there are not enough males teaching. Males tend to understand that a punch to the face isn't a life threatening situation. Most of the females I've known don't even know how to throw a punch let alone what one feels like. If schools really want to stop bullying they just need to set up a "fight club." Every Friday after school, anyone who wants to fight goes to fight club and has it out with giant, over sized gloves and head gear. Nobody gets seriously hurt, everyone gets really tired, and the problem is solved. I used to be an amateur boxer. Boxing is probably the most fun sport in the world, but I don't want to do it every week. Three times a year is fine for me. Plus, the school could charge admission from the other students and really boost its budget.

My dad said that there was a shop teacher in his school who actually did this (the boxing, not the ticket sales). My dad's recollection was that bullying went way down. In my school, a teacher threatened to bring gloves to school so that we could fight out our aggression. She never did. Bullying went up.



(These boys must be well adjusted young adults by now.)