Experience of a lifetime

Today, I finished doing four weeks of Winter English camps. We worked straight through Christmas and New Year, so not much time for reflection and contemplation of events over the last year. I’m just so relieved that the camps are over. I feel like doing what Mel Gibson did in Brave heart, painting my face blue and running outside, thrusting my hands into the air and shouting, “Freedom!”

I now have five days off for that much needed reflection and contemplation.

Two years ago when I was thinking about going to a foreign country to experience a different culture, many people said that it was an experience of a lifetime and that I should go for it. Of course, what about 90% of the people conveniently forgot to mention to me, was that they had never done it themselves. Needless to say, taking their advice into consideration and equipped with English expressions like, “Fortune favors the brave,” to bolster my confidence, I took the plunge and here we are two years later.

Experience of a lifetime indeed. When someone mentions that to you, it conjures up images of excitement and adventure. However, it’s not all excitement, adventure and plain sailing. There are occasions where things do get a little rough and tough. But I suppose that is all part of the experience…the good and the bad. And I have had my fair share of both those experiences while I have been in South Korea.

They say you always remember your first time and trust me, I remember the first time I suffered from culture shock while in Korea. It’s etched in my mind. I don’t think I will ever be able to forget the whole going to the toilet story. I’m over the fact that most toilets consist of basically a hole in the ground surrounded by what one can only describe as a babies potty and then you have to squat over this while doing your ‘business.’ What freaks me out is the toilet paper story. In Korea, you don’t flush the toilet paper down the toilet; you place it in a basket next to the toilet. I know you are probably wondering how they dispose of it once the basket is full and so have I.  I have not asked and have no intention of asking. It’s a precautionary measure. Just in case they tell me it is recycled and then sold as toilet paper again. It will just freak me out all over again and cause more psychological scarring!

While writing this blog, my worst nightmare came true, my toilet became blocked. So now I would have to call the landlord and explain to him that my toilet was blocked. I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to explain how the toilet paper got into the toilet in the first place. I had broken out into a cold sweat and was frantically plunging away, using a toilet brush as a plunger, in the hope that I could clear the blockage. I was even prepared to try affirmations, power of positive thinking, prayer; you name it…anything to clear this blockage. Fortunately, the Gods were smiling on me, because after several “flushes” and further frantic plunging, the toilet miraculously cleared itself and the water went down to an acceptable level…just below, “it’s time to get out your life raft.” I know this should be a lesson to me and that from now on I should place the toilet paper in a bin instead of flushing it, but I’m sorry, old habits die hard!

Having put on almost eight kilograms since I have been in Korea, a few months ago I decided to join a gym and try and lose some weight. This was certainly an eye opening experience. When it comes to nudity there are some unwritten laws. Apparently, these laws are not applicable in Korea. I remember the first time that I went into the sauna. The sauna can probably seat about six people comfortably. Yet, while I was sitting on the bench, this one guy decides to get up, face me and start doing Jack Knives without warning. I mean for goodness sake! Besides the emotional trauma and psychological scarring this visual had caused me, didn’t his mother ever teach him any manners? After all, it’s rude to point! Koreans are also virtually hairless, with the exception of hair on their heads, under their arms and in the nether regions. The humorous adage, “You scratch my back, I comb yours,” would be lost on them.  Being a Westerner with hair on my arms and legs has caused much amazement, curiosity and ‘staring’ in the change room. I have even had people come up to me wanting to feel my “fur”! A peculiar habit that some of the men seem to observe, is that of drying their nether regions with a hairdryer.  And it’s not covertly done either…pretend you’re drying your hair and then when no-one is looking point it down in the direction of the nether regions and then quickly back up to the head and shoulders. No sir! One leg is thrust up onto the counter, the hairdryer is pointed in the appropriate direction, and the other hand starts to briskly ruffle the nether regions in a half-hearted attempt to speed up the drying process. If I didn’t know any better, I would swear they were just trying to ’play’ with themselves.

I’m sure I could write a book about my “experience of a lifetime” in South Korea, but all I can say is that it was all well worth it. Maybe you should give it a try?

Meaning of life stuff

I can’t believe that it was more than a month ago since I last wrote a blog. Time seems to have gone by so quickly. I have been so busy preparing for and teaching English camps that I haven’t noticed. I even started a count down calendar until my contract ends, which hasn’t been updated in a while. So, why the sudden urge to write a blog again? Nothing really. I’m busy with an English camp at the moment and I travel by bus to get back from the school. It just so happens that I caught an earlier bus which took a different route and just happened to stop outside my favourite coffee shop. So here I am sitting in my favourite coffee shop quaffing back Café Latte’s, contemplating the meaning of life.

There’s an English expression, “The world is your Oyster.” I kind of feel like that…not like an oyster that is, but more like I have an abundance of opportunities that lay ahead for me. Now when I say abundance, I’m not referring to a couple of buns up on stage doing a cabaret number either. I don’t know, maybe I’m just feeling this way because of the sudden caffeine rush that I get every time I drink coffee. Come end of March though, I suppose we will see if it was a caffeine rush or not.

So why do I feel so optimistic…caffeine rush aside!

I’ve spent almost two years in South Korea in a career which I have no formal qualification. It has been a steep learning curve with many ups and downs…none of them sex related I might add. During all of this, the most learning and “aha” moments have come during times of severe stress and suffering. It was the Mamma’s and the Papa’s who sang that, “the darkest hour is just before dawn.” They obviously had not taught at my school because on some days, the darkest ‘hours’ were between 9am and 4pm! Even though some of those times were stressful, they pushed me to improve myself or the situation further. There have also been many wonderful moments that have left me all warm and fuzzy inside, but for me, little learning has come from these moments.

So why does all this make me feel optimistic about my future? If I look back at my career history and all the jobs that I have had, the greatest learning’s have come from the most difficult jobs that I have had to do. Every time that I have struggled with a particular job, it has pushed me further out of my comfort zone, which in turn has enabled me to master that job. This reminds me of another expression that I have learnt along my journey through life, “There is no failure, only learning.”

So even though I am trying my best to do research and plan my life from end of March onwards, it doesn’t really matter. I can tackle any job or other endeavor safe in the knowledge that I cannot fail; I can only learn and grow. After all, history has a habit of repeating itself.

Hhmm, do I suddenly feel my optimism waning? “Waiter, another Café Latte please!”

The end is near

The school officially closes on the 29^th December. However, it’s as good as over. My students start writing exams this week. Once the exams are finished, there are only two weeks of school left. No point in teaching them anything new, as they would have already finished the syllabus. So it looks like movies and games for the two weeks of lessons leading up to the end of the semester.

The school year has flown by and I really don’t know where the time has gone. Teaching 900 students’ week after week might seem like it gets a little monotonous, but I really have had some good times. If I would have to choose which is my favorite grade to teach, I would have to say my 1^st graders. These are your 12 to 13 year olds. I’m given carte blanche when it comes to designing the lesson plans for 1^st graders and don’t have a set curriculum to follow. Sometimes it can be a nightmare to come up with new ways and ideas to teach them English, but it’s worth the stress when you see the results the students come up with. The 1^st graders are straight out of elementary school and aren’t afraid to express their creativity. When it comes to some 2^nd and 3^rd graders, they seem to feel that it’s beneath them to get too excited about being creative in English.

I started thinking back to some of the lessons that I had done over the last few months. Some of them were quite memorable; some had their moments, while others were quite a nightmare to manage. I remember one of the first ‘creative’ lessons I tried. It was near the beginning of the semester and I wanted to teach students expressions around rules i.e. things you can do, things you can’t do and things you are allowed to do. So I gave them a few examples about rules of the road, at the library and in a restaurant. I then split them up into groups and asked them to draw up some rules for the classroom. They seem to have gotten the idea. We had rules about not fighting in class, keeping quiet while the teacher was talking and paying attention, etc. Although, there were some odd ones like no drinking alcohol or smoking in class. Bloody hell! I should hope not, especially if you are not going to share with the teacher.

No alcohol?

Spurred on by the success of the ‘rules’ lesson, I decided to try and get them to write a story in English. It involved a few pages of clipart. The students were put into groups and had to choose six pictures from the clipart. They then had to place the clipart in a sequence and write a story about it. Majority of the students wrote stories about marriage, divorce and extra marital affairs. One wonders where these kids come up with their ideas. Never under estimate the power of television and Korean soap operas.

Korean soapies?

One of my favorite lessons was the one about fashion. I taught the students new vocabulary relating to fashion accessories, clothing and how to describe what a person was wearing. I then split them up into groups and gave them a pile of magazines. They had to cut out pictures of clothing and accessories, stick them onto a cut-out person and then describe what the person was wearing. The girls took to this lesson and came up with some really creative designs. And what about the boys? Well, boys will be boys. They were cutting out all the pictures of panties and bra’s and making their near naked models.

Fashion

After each lesson I will always put some of the students’ endeavors up on the board at the back of the classroom. I couldn’t help but notice that some of the boys were always going to this one picture and lifting up the dress and looking under it. My co-teacher must have also noticed and eventually glued it down. Now I’m not sure what the students had put under there for them to be so curious, but I wasn’t about to go and look for myself. Can you imagine if I did go take a look and someone just happened to walk in or notice me doing it? How do you try and explain to them that you were just looking to see what the students were up to, without them suspecting you of being a pervert!

What's under that skirt?

A more recent lesson I did, was one about Halloween. I gave them a picture of the various parts of a skeleton. They had to cut out the parts and then assemble the skeleton and paste it onto a sheet of paper. The students would name the skeleton and then tell a little story about it.

Britney Bones

The boys seemed to have fared a bit better than the girls this time around. However, this didn’t stop some of them getting up to mischief. One of the groups had taken one of the leg bones of the skeleton and placed it in the centre of the skeleton’s body to represent a male sex organ. They could not contain their excitement to show me their handy work. “Look teacher. Scary Skeleton has a big penis!” My co-teacher was well aware of this groups endeavor, but still chose them to present their artwork to the whole class. She came to me afterwards to say how embarrassed she was by their presentation. Hello? Why then did you choose them to present?

Scary Skeletons

Even though there have been ups and downs throughout the year, all in all I think it has been a good year of teaching. I will always have fond memories of teaching my 1^st graders.  Let’s see what the new semester brings.

Kidney stones

It was Monday morning and the start of another long week. I hadn’t been feeling well the night before and I thought I was coming down with flu. I had a huge headache, was nauseas and had incredible pain in the right lower side of my stomach. I decided that I wasn’t going to take chances with this new H1N1 flu and asked my co-teacher to take me to hospital. The doctor did his poking and prodding and suspected Appendicitis. He wanted to take blood and some x-rays. After having done that, he told me they couldn’t find my appendix. Well, so much for the Appendicitis. He said that I should monitor the symptoms and if they continued, I should come back again.

The following morning, the headache, nausea and pain had increased beyond bearable limits. We rushed off to hospital and went to the ER. A doctor examined me and the next thing I knew I was hooked up to a drip and been given an injection. I was told further x-rays and other tests were needed. About three hours later after all the tests were done, I had another session with the doctor. I was told that I had a 6,25mm kidney stone in my right kidney. Apparently, any stone over 5mm requires medical intervention. The thought of an operation and having to spend time in a Korean hospital scared the hell out of me.

Let me put things in context here. A Korean hospital is run a little differently to a traditional Western hospital. There are nurses, but the majority of them work an eight to five day. Obviously they have a skeleton staff that takes care of emergencies. However, if you are recovering in a Korean hospital, your family takes care of you – no nurses! Furthermore, there are no meals that are brought to you; you need to provide your own. In other words, all after care is the responsibility of your family. So if your like me, a foreigner in a foreign country, chances are your family are back in your home country. The other noticeable thing is that Korean hospitals are not as spacious as Western hospitals, with very little privacy. The space between the hospital beds is probably less than 0,5m. Two people standing back to back in the space between two beds would find it a tight squeeze. The other thing that I noticed while lying on one of the beds in my pain drugged filled haze was the amount of beds that had dried blood stains running down the sides of them. I assumed this was from where peoples’ drips had come unstuck.

As terrible as all of this sounds, I would rather spend time in a Korean hospital just to get rid of the pain. One person had this to say about the pain of having a kidney stone, “Imagine someone punching you in the stomach, kicking you in the groin and then stabbing you numerous times with an ice pick. When you can imagine this type of pain, and then multiply it by ten!”

As ‘luck’ would have it, I would not require any surgery. I was to undergo Extracorpeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy (ESWL). It costs around $450 (R3500-00) and uses microwave shock waves to shatter the kidney stone into smaller pieces, so that it may pass easily through the system. If you lucky, it will work first time around, otherwise you have to have repeated sessions at $450 a pop.

Extracorporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy

I was given two more injections for the pain and then sent to the room where I would receive my ESWL treatment. I lay down on the table while the doctor was pulling me this way and that way to try and position me over the ‘sensor’. He started the machine up and it started making this gentle whirring sound. I thought this was nice and soothing. The doctor walked around the machine a few times and then left the room. I could have sworn he locked the door…although the drugs could have made me imagine it. The initial pain that I experienced was excruciating. Imagine that your kidney is a piñata and the excited kid with the baseball bat is the machine and the kid is repeatedly bashing the piñata to try and get the candy. This is what was happening to me. The machine was repeatedly ‘shooting’ these microwave shock waves directly at the kidney, trying to smash the kidney stone. At one point that son-of-a-bitch doctor sent in my co-teacher to tell me to breathe normally and stop holding my breath as the treatment wouldn’t work. He knew if he came in and told me, I would have probably given him a quick sharp ninja kick to his groin. The pain was so intense that I was holding my breath trying to brace myself for the next wave of attack! The whole process lasted about forty minutes, although it seemed like forty years. At the end of the session I felt like a million bucks. No headache, nausea or pain…the drugs had definitely kicked in!

It has been almost a week now and I still have not passed the kidney stone. The pain comes and goes and one just has to try and manage it the best way you can. I’m due back at the doctors in a day or two to check whether the stone has passed through my system or not. If not, they want to do another ESWL treatment. There is an English expression, once bitten twice shy. They’ve made my right kidney a piñata once before, I think I will give it a miss this time around and try some natural home remedies instead…if the pain will let me that is!

Landlords and other fine occupations

Some strange things have been happening in my apartment lately. For one thing, my bathroom light has been playing up. Every time I try and put the light on, it goes on for a brief second and then goes off again. When I put the extractor fan on, the light mysteriously comes on for another brief second and then it goes off again. The other thing that I have noticed, especially in the kitchen, are things that I can see darting or scurrying away from out of the corner of my eye. Upon further investigation I don’t seem to find anything. Now I’m not for one moment suggesting that I have poltergeists, ghosts or anything else that might be classified as paranormal activity in my apartment. Although, sometimes when I hear those blood curdling cries from my neighbours below I begin to wonder. But these things are strange all the same.

Having project managed the building of my own home; I have a little experience in doing some home maintenance or repairs. So it would seem that my bathroom light must be a loose connection and can’t possibly be a fused bulb, otherwise it wouldn’t come on. As for the darting and scurrying that I’m seeing out of the corner of my eye, well that must certainly be cockroaches. Under normal circumstances I would try and do the repairs myself, but when it comes to electricity, I will rather let the experts do the job. The cockroach infestation is another thing. When it comes to buying insect repellant or poison in Korea I am a bit hesitant. Everything is quite potent. They upgraded our English room earlier this year and we are still getting headaches from the paint and glue fumes. I suppose that would also explain some of the bizarre behavior that goes on in the classroom. I don’t want to go and buy some cockroach spray or poison and find that after spraying it in my apartment, about a week later I start to grow a third nipple or something. Looks like I will have to get the opinion and help of my co-teacher again.

I explained the problems to my co-teacher and asked if she would contact the landlord and let him know about the issues in my apartment. The issues of the bathroom light and cockroaches, not the poltergeists, in case you were wondering. My co-teacher seems to always start to give her advice with a question, “You know what you should do?” I’m not sure why she does this, as clearly I would not ask her if I did know what to do! She suggested that I catch one of the cockroaches, tie them up, torture it and then let it go. This way the cockroach will then go and tell all the other cockroaches and then they will leave my apartment. I smiled politely. I felt like going home and catching a few cockroaches and putting them in her handbag and watch from a distance as the fun begins. She started with her rhetorical questions again; “Do you know what cockroaches are afraid of?” Then went into ‘charades mode’ and started making the motion as if she was brushing her teeth. I must have had a momentary lapse of sanity because I answered, “Teeth!” Well, I thought it would be a logical answer because why would they be afraid of people brushing their teeth? It turns out cockroaches, well at least Korean cockroaches, are afraid of tooth paste. The advice was to put some toothpaste into a spray bottle with water and spray the cockroaches. This apparently kills them. This makes me wonder what the hell is in the Korean toothpaste!  We agreed to leave all the issues up to the expert and decided to call the landlord.

When I arrived home that evening the landlord was already waiting for me at my apartment. I showed him the ‘haunted’ light switch in the bathroom. I also pointed out all the dead cockroach bodies as evidence of a cockroach infestation. He immediately went into the bathroom and started working on the light. No holy water or exorcism was needed to fix the light, just a new light bulb. My ego and reputation as a handyman had taken a serious knock. So much for the loose wire theory. He then proceeded to explain that the cockroaches were coming from the restaurant that was two floors below my apartment. Obviously they were tired of restaurant food and wanted a home cooked meal. I can’t think of any other reason why they would want to climb two floors for food when they are living in a restaurant, especially in this cold weather. I showed him the cockroach traps that I was using and that were clearly not working. In fact I think the cockroaches were using them as their holiday homes. The landlord proceeded to walk around the apartment and place these bait traps in ‘strategic places’. Very strategic, so much so that I hope I don’t get up during the night and accidently stand on one. Apparently, I have to check the traps regularly and apply more bait when the cockroaches have eaten all the bait.

I got up during the night and went to the kitchen for some water. There perched on the roof was this huge cockroach. It didn’t even move when I approached it. Now I’m not sure if they had already eaten the bait or whether they were just eyeing out the bait. Even though it is fake food, I was assured that the cockroaches would find it delicious. Maybe the cockroach was doing a Homer Simpson number. You know the one. He sees delicious food and then his arms fall at his side, his head tilts back, drool starts to pour out the side of his mouth and all he can muster is, “aaaarrgghhh!” Now I’m not sure how this bait works. For all I know they could eat the bait and then explode. So I was not about to kill this one. I would rather wait and see what happens. I have great expectations of this bait and have now declared war on the cockroaches. I still have to decide how I’m going to record my “kills” though. Maybe I will just carve a notch on the side of my fridge for every kill I get? I will keep you posted.