Math(s), pyjamas, stabbings, Snikcers

Now. This video may make me look like a bad teacher. I'm not, really. But I do find this kid hilarious. I used to teach maths every Tuesday and Thursday with my kindergarten (technically I don't now because my schedule changes from Tuesday). And I say teach, I mean I give them books and they generally get on with it. When they need help though I'll help them, and this guy needs lots of help. This was a pretty simple problem, so I wanted him to get it without any help. He got the previous answer without much trouble. This is his attempt to work out eight plus five.

If you want to know what else has happened, read on. On Friday we had the annual summer pyjama day. Pyjama day is a day, well, a morning, when everyone wears pyjamas and plays games and stuff. I mean in our school, not the whole of Korea. It was quite fun, if a tiny bit weird. Not as weird as the birthday celebrations the school puts on though. I'll talk about them whenever we have the next one. This was a game.The girl with the balloon on the left is Jasmine. She's one of my favourite students because she appears to be stoned out of her tree 24/7. High as a kite. Last week another girl got angry at something, and apparently unimpressed with Jasmine's imperturbably chilled out nature, attacked her with a pencil. Missed her eye by about half a centimetre and left a clear graphite mark. Was Jasmine bothered? Was she balls. Having dealt with the offender I asked Jas if she was OK, and was met with a nonchalent smile and a wistful 'mmmmmmm', and she got on with whatever she was doing. If only they were all like that. Hmm. Oh yeah, right at the end of that video, that's Jasmine saying 'I love you!" presumably to her own hands.

The kid on the right is Noah, who, to quote a colleague, is "a total badass who's already cooler than I'll ever be" and he's probably spot on. He's already a hit with the ladies, and his shirts are just awesome.

And finally, this is the greatest pencil case ever. :D

Taxi

The cat got out. A man came to get it. Hmm.

This weekend has involved lots of drinking. Today I woke up at 5pm. On Friday I stripped. A bit. There were 159 photos on my camera from Saturday night. 159. About 130 of them were shit. There are photos on facebook - I don't have to post them here.

I said I got up at 5pm today. Well I went to bed at around 7.30 am. Itaewon does that to you. Would have been home earlier, only our cowboy taxi driver decided to take us on scenic tour of Seoul. Check the map. Considering that we live in north-east Nowon-gu, imagine our confusion to see a sign for somewhere in southern Yeongdeungpo-gu. Or rather imagine the confusion of the girl who's been here six months. Imagine my obliviousness. We had been out in Yongsan-gu.
So, we got a different taxi home. Here are some photos of the journey.

Cat

I was all alone in the staff room on my lunch break today when two Korean teachers came in and told me they needed my help. They asked me whether I was good with animals. Perplexed, I was led to the boys bathroom where a stray cat was hiding under the sink, scowling at all who dared approach. OK, so we had to get it out, but the first thing that I had to ask was how... HOW it got there. We're on the top floor of a seven storey building. Six floors in English money. The only ways up are by lift, which would've necessitated someone working on the same floor as me pressing the button for the top floor and sharing the small space with the mangy feline, which didn't happen, or the stairs. Can you imagine a cat climbing seven flights of stairs? Err. Mysterious.

So, the attempted removal. I will make clear now that I hate cats. I don't trust them, with their accusing eyes and constant licking. I made it clear that if I had to grab it and it scratched me, even a bit, I wasn't to be blamed if it was defenestrated. This one didn't trust me either, especially when the failed attempts to coax it out resulted in my suggestion to spray it with water. I thought it would run out of the door when hit with the cold shower. It didn't though. It only enmeshed itself in the pipes under the sink and made it clear it wasn't going to move. So, after more and more people attempted to speak to it and/or prod it with sticks, the door was locked and this deterrent sign applied: Which is just awesome. And incidentally, it wasn't 'a big cat.' It was a cat-sized cat. That sign implied it was a cougar.

What I described above happened at noon. When I left at 6 the cat was in the same inextricable position in the pipes. Ow. I'll bring you cat updates through the night if necessary. Unless it disappears first, or dies. It'll probably die.

Is there a KSPCA?

Olympic fever

Korea loves Olympics. Maybe it's a consequence of the 1988 games, which if you don't know were held here in 1988, but they are hard to avoid. For me this is a good thing: I love Olympics. I love watching sports I've never heard of, I love flags. Everything... I ignore the politics. People watch the games on the subway on their TV phones, shops have portable TVs behind the counter or outside on a pile of crates, which allows a crowd to form during a really tense point in the ping pong or something. You can watch weightlifting while you eat your galbi or go for a drink and watch some badminton. In fact badminton won out over the Premier League in the local sports bar. Given how popular English football is here I was quite surprised.

Interesting thing is though, every single one of my kids, boys and girls, age 5-11, are transfixed by the games. They can name pretty much all the Korean medal winners, from swimming to archery to women's weightlifting. All of them can. I have to repeatedly stop them from talking about Park Tae Hwan and Chang Mi Ran and get back on topic. I can remember the Barcelona Olympics when I was seven, and maybe watching Linford Christie and Sally Gunnell, but doubt I was aware of what was going on elsewhere. I'm impressed anyway - I think it's good that these guys are aware of what's going on in the world. I made a bet with a kid last Thursday that GB would end up above Korea in the medals table. I was starting to get a bit scared before the weekend, but it's looking better now. Mmmmm.

Feeling olympicsy, I wandered down to the Seoul Olympic Park on Saturday. It being Saturday, it rained. Here are some pictures.



I did say my kids are aware of world issues. Well, not in all aspects. Having read a picturebook about how everyone in the world is fundamentally the same and that, I discussed with my advanced kindergarten class different parts of the world. I asked what people were like outside of Korea, and my kids talked about Britain, America, China and um, Guam. When I brought Africa up, little Jenny piped up: "People from Africa are very very very different and they are dark and I don't ever want to meet them because I don't like them." Had to nip that little bit of racism in the bud...

Here are two of Korea's biggest Olympic heroes: Park Tae Hwan (weiring the world's greatest shorts) and Jang Mi-ran (big weightlifting lady).
One way to humiliate a badly behaved boy is to accuse him of being in love with Jang Mi-ran. One way to embarrass a badly behaved girl is to accuse her of having a crush on Park Tae Hwan. :D

Korean swimming commentry

To my delight they just played this again (see post from the 10th of August). I had my camera to hand, so here's the last 150 metres of olympic babo-ness* from the swimming cube. The epic music at the end really completes it, don't you think?

*babo is Korean for 'crazy', taken literally in this country to mean 'mentally retarded', but I still call my kids babo all the time.

Post script: while uploading that I saw an advert for a mobile phone company using that footage. They got that out damn quickly - it only happened yesterday!

Misc

In the absence of anything all that interesting to write about, I'm going to cover several unconnected events that have happened in the week just gone.

1. Today I noticed, when sitting outside Little Jakob's, that there is a bright swastika sign above my window. The whole hakenkreuz as not a nazi thing idea is something you get used to quickly. Still just a touch disconcerting, though.
You'll have to click on the picture for a closer view.

2. It's really really hot. The weather said it was 36 degrees today. I took a nice shady walk to Nowon earlier. Took about half an hour. Wisely got the 1142 bus back. Here's a bus! And some shade!


3. The Olympics. Yesterday I was a bit hungover, and spent pretty much all day supine on the sofa,watching the olympiad. All the best events too: mainly judo, shooting, women's handball, basketball and fencing. When Korea won gold in judo, I had the window open and a roar that was, considering that we're talking about judo, very loud indeed, came up from the galbi place downstairs. We won in the swimming today as well. I'm trying to find a video of the commentary because it was awesome. Reminded me of that commentator's moment of climax screaming when Steve Redgrave won his gold in 2000.

4. I had chicken galbi on Friday. That was quite nice.

5. Woman. There's a woman that works on my road, clearing boxes from the shops, sweeping, generally keeping the place in order. She looks I'd say 70, or older, and I'm pretty sure she works every day of the week from dawn until very late at night. I see her every morning on the way to school, and I can often see her from my window after midnight, still diligently tidying. Here's a picture of her tidying diligently after midnight.

6. Before I finished this post I was invited out to a DVD bang*, but couldn't find it and ended up in a different bang: norae. This of course necessitated soju, which on a Sunday night may prove foolhardy. I'm now watching the community shield.
*As noraebang is singing room, DVD bang is, well, guess. I'll discuss at length another day. This post is too long already.

Food 2

I was going to talk about dog soup today. We were invited out for a meal last night, and planned to meet all the people in Jonggak. We transferred to Line 1 at Dongdaemun where we were stuck on a stationary train for twenty minutes, so we missed them. Neither of us knew what dog soup was in Korean, so wandered, hoping to see a big dog on a sign. Unlikely.

So we had chicken.

Food

Now, I'm no chef, but in my old apartment I often rustled up ricey-seaweedy-tuna stuff with a hot sauce from a bottle, and really enjoyed it. In my new place, however, I have hot plates that don't even reach the temperature required to boil water in a pan. Which is annoying.

Food is readily available on the high street though. A roll of kimbap is a pound, or go into any convenience store and for about 35p you can get a triangular prismic block of kimbap-type stuff. I usually get the latter for lunch when I'm at school. In fact here's a photo of my typical lunch.
There's a place that does beautiful bagels down the road, and if you're really in a hurry, street vendors are ubiquitous - you just point at what you want, and hope it's edible. Once I ordered a lightly battered sausage on a stick, and the ajuma asked me if I wanted it with ketchup... or sugar. Er.

My favourite place in the world, though, is Little Jakob's. I live directly above it here, and can get there in about 45 seconds if I jog. They sell chicken and ham sandwiches full of chicken and ham, and fresh lettuce and mustard. And it is good. I had one today.There it is. Half of it.

Yesterday, Sean and I went to Dongdaemun and had food in the large food thing on the top floor of the Doota mall. You order your meal at a till in the middle of the room from a choice of seven menus from seven separate kitchens: western, Korean, western, Korean, western, Korean or Japanese. I chose Korean. So I took my ticket to the relevant kitchen to pick up my meal: a hot plate with a big pile of rice and spicy cheesey kimchi stuff with pieces of octopus in there, side dishes of kimchi, something else and seaweed soup. This cost £2.75. I was happy.

Can't really do kimchi on its own, cold, but hot, with stuff, it's much better. Well, I can eat it without gagging anyway.

Going for something more adventurous tonight. Let's see how that goes.

Football

Last night Sean and I went down to the World Cup Stadium (see a couple of weeks ago) for the auspicious under-23 international friendly clash between Korea and Australia. When we arrived we circumnavigated the whole stadium searching for somewhere to buy tickets. We found nowhere, and with the match already having kicked off we were considering finding a TV. Then we were approached by a tout exclaiming: tickets! You want ticket?! Man won! Man won!

A fiver? Yes please.

OK, so we get inside, wait around needlessly for a warmish can of Hite and, twenty minutes after kick off, make our way to our seats, high up in the rafters. We sit down, praise the view, lament the empty seats and within about thirty seconds, before I'd even turned my camera on, promising striker Shin Young-rok cuts inside onto his right foot and curls a lovely shot into the far corner of the net: the only goal of the match.

Timing.

The rest of the game was less than thrilling, both sides obviously not wanting to overexert themselves before the Olympics. It did come to life in the last ten minutes, with Australia hitting the post and coming close a couple more times, and one Korea counter attack which resulted in the ball being desperately cleared off the line and the whole crowd rising to their feet.

My camera's battery failed me, but I managed to get some shots. Which are below.
Immediately after the goal. Just look at the.. euphoria.

Me playing spot the Leeds player. Then I realised Neil Kilkenny only came on at half time.

The maniacal fans with their flares and flags and chants of 한국! 한국! (Hanguk! Hanguk!) (Korea! Korea!) to the tune of Go West. This was where most of the volume was coming from. The majority of the other spectators were families and young couples, each with their complimentary commemorative paper fan, which when wafted by 20000.. uh, fans.. in unison, gave us from our viewpoint the impression of flowing water. Erm, yep. Bye!

Video

I'd forgotten that I made this video a couple of weeks ago. This is the class of brainboxes I have every afternoon. In order of appearance: crazy Mark, super-smart Kelvin, shy Jackie, moody Jenny and Clara, for whom I can't come up with an apt adjective. They're so much fun, and they work hard too, usually. I sometimes have to use my ninja tae kwon do moves on Mark but he gets on. On Monday Kelvin was teaching me about the American revolutionary war. I mean come on! You're Korean and you're nine! He couldn't grasp the fact that I was pro-William Howe, and called George Washington a pussy. But what are you going to do?
Video: