Korean Television

Two posts tonight. I'm in a blog mood. 

I have cable TV: 86 channels of movies, sports, other stuff and game shows. Lots of game shows. Actually, about 78 of the 86 channels air game shows.

I think they're game shows. Really, who knows?

Here's a snapshot of what's on on a weeknight . I really have no idea what I'm watching for the most part. If anyone reading this wants to point out any glaring inaccuracies, please feel free.

Channel 3 - Korean tourists in Japan, looks a bit like Wish You Were Here. They're looking at koi carp and posing for photographs with a bronze bust of man near a ship. Just what I plan to do next week.

Channel 7 - Shopping channel. Disappointly they're only flogging rice cookers tonight. Last week they were promoting something you eat that causes some kind of biblical enema, at least that what I gathered from the computer simulation of someone's intestines.

Channel 8 - Soap opera. These are always worth a watch for the often bafflingly amusing scenes that crop up. Currently there's an old dude staring dejectedly at a pharmacy. Not so good tonight.

Channel 10 - Ajuma Idol (?)

Channel 14 - Game show...? A woman appears to be making herself cry for the entertainment of a studio audience. What? To achieve this she's twisting the hairs on her temples? OK, now she's snapping chopsticks with her buttocks and picking up a fat man like a baby. I'm flicking channels.

Channel 18 - Super Action. Often shows watchable movies. Steven Seagal's Exit Wounds tonight though. Ow.

Channel 19 - What? Piers Morgan! Euugh, that was unexpected. It appears to be the Royal Variety Show. How odd. Off.

Channel 25 - Discovery Channel. Wait, it gets worse. Bear Fucking Grylls. I don't want to get started on him. He deserves his own post. His own blog.

Channels 34-37 are sports. One is showing a collection of own goals from English football from the last thirty years, another has international billiards. This stuff's hypnotic.

Channel 38 - Game show (?). This show appears to be on every day. All day every day. On multiple channels. It consists of perhaps five main guys, one of whom has peroxide blonde hair and is therefore instantly recognisable on this and countless other shows, performing arbitrary tasks. Tonight they're in a field, at night, taking hats, scarves gloves and boots from a box and putting them on. A man resembling a Korean Jesus is photgraphing them. What I can never fathom is how there's never a winner (though there's occasionally a loser). Watching it makes my head hurt because it's so confusing. Oh, now I think they're homeless men. Next.

Channel 42 - Man in a bakery, buying a cake.

Channel 43 - Monk, with a blackboard, doing maths.

Channel 51 - People playing computer games on TV. Like Gamesmaster with Patrick Moore, but a whole channel. Now it's the Sudden Attack master league.

Channel 63 - Golf channel. Golf, 24-7. Predominantly women's golf.

Finally, channel 86. This is a black screen with a white graph on it, labelled Cable TV Analyser, showing the MHz and the dBnV, whatever those are, along with the time, date and various other useless pieces of information. This is more hypnotic than the billiards.

Christmas in Korea

Just like back home, the buildings of Seoul are illuminated with gaudy plastic and colourful flashing lights. But, well, it's always like that. 

Christmas has crept up on me relatively unheraldedly. Nothing happened until December, which makes perfect sense, and since then I've been subjected to a few Christmas songs (but no Wizzard) and some tinsel but that's largely the extent of it. The churches are the only places to put any effort in in terms of decorations. I'm not one to shun the concept of Christmas - though I can see where Ebeneezer's coming from I really enjoy the food and the couple of days off work - it's nice though not have it rammed in your face.

At school however, you'd be forgiven for thinking Christmas had been cancelled. (It literally has been for the teachers: the annual Christmas meal we'd been told about has been shelved.) The place is currently undergoing extensive renovation meaning the thick carpet of dust on everything is the only vaguely festive thing on show. It's festive because it looks like snow. I suppose I wasn't expecting much but when you mention Christmas to the kids they do seem genuinely excited, and it's a shame not to share in their childish mirth. Especially when however many thousands of wons were spent on the Halloween decorations. 

There are Christmas activities tomorrow but I've inexplicably been left out of the fun, I'm just teaching normal lessons. To compensate I'm bringing "presents" for my homeroom class and sweets for everyone else. Presents is in inverted commas because they're pretty shit: I just went to Lotte Mart and spent W12000/six quid* on seven stocking fillers. But my children are easily impressed. One of the presents is a set of castanets. 

Hmm.

*July exchange rates. I'm not mentally strong enough to check what the pound is worth at the moment.

It started snowing earlier too. I could've experienced my first white Christmas had I not been leaving the country on Christmas eve. Can't envasage much snow falling in Tokyo either. According to the internet it was 17 degrees there today. I'm taking my shorts.

"Teacher, so... do some people love dead people?"

A question posed to me by Kelvin last week, Kelvin from my smart afternoon class.

My Friday class is currently all about strange creatures - the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, giant squids.. 'Bat Boy' - and last week we'd digressed onto the subject of zombies (or 'jombies'), which led to the electronic dictionaries being taken out. As I was explaining the concept of being undead, Jenny looked up the Korean word for corpse and showed Kelvin. A few seconds later a combination of amusement and horror passed over his face as he scrolled down a couple of entries in the list to the Korean word for, erm, necrophilia. It had a short description and everything.

Now how do you respond to that one? It's uncomfortable enough to explain away a question about sex.. normal, living people sex.. but there's no way to get around cadaver love.

OK. Next page, come on. First one to finish gets twenty stickers. Just don't ask me any more questions.

Not much to report

A day after last month's payday, I bought a new laptop, a holiday to Japan and a curry. I was consequently constrained by a tight budget which prevented me from doing all that much. Fortunately, I was able procure all five seasons of TV show The Wire, thus satiating my lust for entertainment without the need to leave my apartment. Sixty hours of my my life well spent.
I have been outside though - don't assume I've become a hermit - I've just been more localised. I've discovered chicken hofs. Chicken hofs are great. They sell fried chicken, and they sell beer, that's mostly it. I think. They may sell more, but the menu is all in Korean, and I can read what chicken is because it's the same as English. The one we frequent regularly is the immodestly named Best Chicken Hof, but there's as many, if not more than there are Noraebangs and English schools within a literal stone's throw.

This weekend was cold, very, very cold. Minus figures. This is not unremarkable, nor would it usually be much of an inconvenience: I quite like the cold, in fact my last few holidays have been to Nordic countries, and it's finally cold enough for me to break out my favourite sweater. However when the coldest day of the year coincides with the inexplicable disappearance of running hot water and heating, it gets a bit annoyong. It wasn't just that the water didn't get hot, there was no hot water. When you turned on the hot tap, nothing, literally, came out. Then, after the ouside had warmed up and everything, it came back. If this is going to happen whenever it drops below zero I'm going to have to complain. I mean, tell someone who speaks Korean to complain for me. Still don't have heating.

And it's not only the temperature that's been dropping: so are our numbers at ECC. The kids are dropping like flies, not through illness - not even through overwork which is commendable - just disappearing... to other schools, to concentrate on their elementary school exams, I don't know. The reasons are often unforthcoming and always vague. The kids themselves tell you nothing - they just cease to turn up one day, and after a couple of days of absence you have to go to your Korean partner teacher to enquire as to their whereabouts. Three afternoons a week in November I taught a class of 12 followed by a class of 8. These have now been respectively decimated to 6 and 4. In the first class I lost a lot of good guys, but I can't say I'm in any way concerned about the removal of half the second class. They were shit.

Right now I'm counting the days until the Japan trip, which will finally provide a reason to put some photos up on here. So apologies for all these lines and lines of letters. As it happens I'm meandering along quite nicely. My life is constructed with healthily equal amounts of optimism and pessimism, love and hate. You'll be aware if you know me that I'm very much the misanthrope and there's ample cause for, and opportunity for release of, those sentiments here, but its more than balanced with all the good things. Work isn't that taxing, I still have my grotesquely long lunches which, coupled with the well-structured blocks of between seven and nine 40-minute lessons a day, ensure that the days and the weeks flow with disarming haste. I was asked today what my plans were for next July. My reply was that it's seven months away and yeah, y'know, it'll work out.

But really, I should start weighing stuff up.