r.i.p. hodge podge

Today I went to a wedding. But this is Korea, so it was no ordinary wedding. For a start, it was at one of the huge wedding chapels scattered around the city - big ol' buildings made of icing sugar, with minarets and little statues poking out of them. We arrived a full thirty seconds before the ceremony, leaving just enough time to go and see Kate, the bride, on a ceremonial chaise-longue thing. She looked stunning. Given the conservative nature of Korean society, we were all expecting a pretty sombre affair, but as usual our expectations were dashed on the event. The whole thing was fairly bizarre, involving soldiers with swords, bubbles, dry ice, disco lighting and bird sound effects, but it was definitely a fun time. Kind of reminded me of a big sophisticated noraebang (karaoke room). Not bad for my first ever wedding, despite the lack of drunk bridesmaids. The ceremony was followed by a tasty lunch, and everyone left in a good mood.

It was also a chance to test-drive my new trousers, which I picked up yesterday from a madcap tailor in Itaewon after a week-long rigmarole involving lots of measuring and fitting. The guy had made clothes for Pavarotti and George Bush Senior (those Persian Iraqis had better watch out now), and seemed to have a thing for Florence Griffith Joyner - "Black lady. Very pretty! Very fast!". His impression of Flojo running, complete with convincing sound effects, could be a ticket to showbiz stardom if he plays his cards right.

Friday night was epic as usual, and resembled an alcoholic safari supper across town, comprising Itaewon and various parts of Hongdae. We all had an awesome night, but there was a melancholy note to the evening as this weekend saw the swansong of Hodge Podge, my single favourite place to be in Korea, which is selling out and moving into bigger premises. Hodge Podge is - was - the clubbing equivalent of a much-loved but wayward child. Sure, the sink in the bathroom was a bucket of water and a hosepipe, the dancefloor was packed to the rafters, the beer was pricey, the music ran the gamut from the Baha Boys to the Violent Femmes, the clientele included everyone: GIs, backpackers, K-Girls, B-Boys, TEFL Trash... but I defy anyone to show me a club anywhere with such a reliably electric atmosphere. So here's to Hodge Podge - good luck in the corporate afterlife.

Of course, I'll be going to the reopening party at the new location on Club Night next Friday. Ahem.

By the way, I'm getting curious recently about who's been keeping up with this blog - I keep hearing about new Mystery Readers, so give a shout out on the comments page and identify yourselves! Anything you (don't) want more of? Feedback is good.

And so to bed.

P.S. Props to The Chad, most Mysterious of all Readers!

i shocked the sharif

"Have you no fear, English?" -- Omar Sharif, in Lawrence of Arabia.

Yesterday was Teachers' Day, a quirky little holiday which, at home, might be marked with a verging-on-ironic "Happy Teachers' Day" or, at most, a couple of cards. But then, this is South Korea, Land of the Corporate Holiday (remember "Pepero Day"?), and so to my pleased astonishment, Thursday and Friday came with a deluge of gift-wrapped goodies ranging from a bouquet of flowers the size of an advertising blimp to Calvin Klein socks, vitamins, tea, a leather belt, and silk handkerchiefs. My favourite? A 100% genuine T-shirt from the unlikely fashion house of Omar Sharif!

The presents really made my week, and probably had a hand in my decision to go out on Friday night with a nasty cold, which was probably ill-advised (ho ho) but hot diggety dang, who doesn't need a stiff drink after a week of playing the "responsible adult role-model" game?

And it has been a long week at that - one of the more irritating moments being the interruption of my first class at Gunam Elementary School on Thursday by what seemed at first to be a fairly innocuous, if long-winded, announcement by a woman over the tannoy system: "...blah blah blah blah video blah blah blah blah blah TV blah blah...". Immediately my teacher spell was broken, and packs of cards, comic books and mobile phones were plucked from a dozen schoolbags. The announcement finished, I cleared my throat, and got about as far as "Who can tell me -" before my words were cruelly mown down by the voice of somebody very senior over the tannoy.

I know the voice belonged to someone senior because it was male (the concept of the glass ceiling here is not widely known outside of horticultural circles), theatrically stern, and punctuated by the peculiar little intakes of air through the teeth that only Very Important Korean People seem to do. This announcement did not sound innocuous, and after five minutes was definitely threatening to stray over the DMZ from long-windedness into tedious territory. A helpful kid informed me that the dirge was "student radio", although if this guy rambling on was a ten-year-old he must have had a serious hormone problem. I was becoming agitated, but not as much as the class' teacher, who knew full well that the school was not paying through the nose for me to stand there and listen to the radio. I motioned to my watch, and she told me in Korean that the broadcast would last "oh, maybe twenty minutes. Or thirty". But hope for the childrens' competency with imperative verbs was not lost, as she had an ingenious solution: why not just teach over the sound of the mumbling ajushi? At this point, I handed her a pile of worksheets for the kids and retired to the Teachers' Room.

Twenty minutes later I was glad I hadn't tried to finish the lesson to keep her sweet, as the voice was replaced by a couple of punky K-pop numbers, followed by what were unmistakeably advertising jingles. Yes, they start them young here. As the final class bell rings, dozens of hawkers and advertisers cram around the school gates and flog their wares - plastic toys, mobile accessories, even live chicks - in exchange for the kids' lunch money. Well, the rest of the morning went well, and as long as I get paid and it doesn't happen again, I'll put the radio incident down as an unfortunate one-off.

Anyway, back to the weekend. My dabblings with going out while ill have had mixed results - sometimes beer acts as a magic wonder drug, and all is well with the world, and sometimes I feel dizzy and have to take a taxi for one. Fortunately, Friday night's result was the former, and we kicked off the night by watching a breakdancing competition. My favourite was knocked out in the semis, but it was all good clean fun and was followed by a spell at a basement bar called Bricx - cheap beer and the most friendly bar staff in Korea. Saw some friends I hadn't met in a while and we all went to dance at Limelight.

At some point the tequila came out, and my memory only resumes at about 4am, when Marcy and I stopped to gaze in wonderment at a lamppost which was coated in this outlandish, spiky plastic stuff. Of course, it was unanimously decided that a sample of this bizarre material had to be obtained in the name of science, and we set about trying to remove it with feats of ingenuity which ranged, remembering that we were not entirely sober at the time, from clawing at it desperately with our fingernails to kicking it in the hope it might flake off like tree-bark. All to no avail, but enter a mysterious Middle Eastern gentleman whose presence, being suited, booted, and patently sober, on the seediest street in North-East Asia at 4am, was questionable. Perhaps he was the spirit of Omar Sharif, emerging from a mirage like he did in Arabia... Another suspicious factor was that he identified himself as Persian - now my history is patchy at best, but I thought Persia ceased to exist about sixty years ago. When I put this to him, he looked a bit embarrassed and said, "OK, I'm from Iran." To put him even further at ease, Marcy accidentally referred to him repeatedly as being from Iraq - and not in hushed tones as might be expected in the middle of one of the highest concentrations of (drunk) US troops outside of America. Oops.

Being supernatural and all, he was duly recruited to the cause, although I must say that for some reason he didn't appear quite as intrigued in the rubbery alien lamppost skin, nor indeed in the invention of means for its removal. But he did politely stick around for a good five minutes, if only out of aghast curiosity. When he finally shimmered off back into the desert haze, we adandoned hope and I consoled myself with a crazy feeding frenzy.

So, if the ghost of Omar Sharif is reading this, I would like to extend my humblest apologies - I am a great(ish) fan of yours and, though I haven't read the book, I have seen the film, and, since Friday afternoon, I even have the T-shirt.

i'm turning korean i think I'm turning korean i really think so

"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." -- Nietzsche

Just got back from a spot of downtown shopping where I got a cool pair of trousers. Way too long for me of course, so I had them shortened - a simple process, but one that in the Republic of Korea nevertheless requires two hours. Perhaps they had to harvest and spin the cotton first. Anyway, here I am waiting to test drive them in Itaewon, and I've started to realise something - for all my small island 'them 'n us' mentality, there is a small part of me which, inevitably and irreversibly, is becoming Korean. The evidence is clear as day: I will happily jump in front of any dawdler in a queue; I can't go five minutes without a fix of caffeine; I have a cute plastic figurine dangling from my handapone (mi an hamnida... "mobile phone"); last week I bought a pinkish tartan tie (actually quite funky, and nowhere near as horrible as it sounds now I've written it down!). The list goes on.

This train of thought can be traced back to this morning when, to my horror, my phone ran out of battery on my way into town. I was plunged into a mild fidgety panic. I actually contemplated calling a couple of friends from a payphone just to check they hadn't tried to text me about tonight's plans, before I realised how idiotic this was. Now, I read an article in The Guardian last week about text message addiction, suggesting that heavy texters can suffer withdrawal symptoms. Much scorn was poured on these hapless techno-mugwumps - after all, I consider myself a recreational user of text, but maybe I have fallen foul of addiction. Have I found myself, like the fabled clumsy Egyptian, in denial? After about an hour of cold turkey, I was feeling quite liberated - my first sense of isolation in six months - but I am genuinely quite scared that I am becoming an information junkie. A few weeks ago Marcy (quite rightly) told me off for going off to check my email at a shopping mall. I had checked my email maybe half an hour previously, and would be home fifteen minutes later, but I couldn't resist the urge, just in case.

Epilogue: Lost - and Phoned

Last Saturday a Korean friend was munching on some o-deng (Korean fishcakes) with Marcy on a night out, when Marcy's phone rang. The caller ID indicated it was our friend's phone, although she was clearly chomping away and evidently not in a position to be calling anyone. Now, to me, even a very drunk me, the conclusion to be drawn is obvious - she had dropped her phone and some kindly citizen was going through her recent calls list to try and find the owner. This feat of logic, however, had evaded her, who couldn't understand by what mystical means she was making phone calls without removing her phone from her pocket. Fortunately Marcy was at hand to take charge of the situation, and the phone was retrieved, but not before our friend, panicking, had made the poor guy hang up on her by gibbering at him in English. If it hadn't been for Marcy, her phone would have disappeared in a puff of ineptitude.

I don't blame our friend at all for her inability to cope - it seems to me that Koreans just lack the ability to cope in a crisis, no matter how big or small. You would think that, in a country living under a Sword of Damocles with a nuclear warhead strapped to it, "contingency" and "plan" would take turns being word of the week. In reality, the opposite is true - no "Duck and Cover" for these guys, just a vague sense of impending doom. In fact, the only plan in place that I know of is to get everybody important south of the river and smoke the bridges. They are already wired with TNT for this purpose, and word has it that the military base opposite my house is responsible for pushing the plunger. So far, so immaterial - as a foreigner, in the event of Blitzkrieg I give myself about ten minutes before some crazed ajuma sticks my brain with a chopstick, but this mentality pervades every aspect of life.

A few months ago, there was a small fire in the building where ECC is situated. Nothing serious, someone probably dropped a cigarette butt in a waste paper basket or something, and it was put out in a couple of minutes. Last month, I remembered the incident and realised that, if it had been a real fire, I had no idea what to do. We've never had a fire drill, there are no muster points or lists of instructions, and I couldn't remember having seen any fire extinguishers. I put this to my boss. She kind of looked thoughtful and more than a little embarrassed, before confessing that we can't have a fire drill because the parents wouldn't like it. To be honest, given the number of educational sacrifices we make daily (such as not being able to change bad students' classes, or write bad grades on their report cards) in the name of business, I wasn't surprised by this.

Still, I pressed the issue - I really wanted to know what to do if there was a fire, say, that afternoon. Her answer? "Um... get out of the building...?". As fast as possible? "Oh yes, sure." And the kids? "Yeah, them too." All of them at once? "Uh... I suppose so." Every hour and a half, every day, at ECC the bell rings, signalling the changeover of classes. The ensuing two minutes in the stairwell are a free-for-all. I have seen kids trampled, shoved and tripped - there's usually at least one minor injury a day. I've even ended up on the floor myself after being pushed aside by a gang of eleven-year-olds. Throw in the factor of fire, not to mention six floors' worth of businessmen trying to get down the same narrow flights of stairs, and the scene turns very ugly indeed. So ugly, in fact, that you can almost empathise with the very Korean urge not to think about it at all.

bloggers can't be choosers

Another Monday, another opportunity to reflect on the sins and excesses of a weekend which has burnt a £250 hole in my pocket. Worth every penny though, as I had two damned good nights out and came out the other end with a couple of phone numbers, a funky pair of Nikes, some cool trousers and a silk tie. Oh, and a necklace, which I am not looking forward to returning to its owner...

The natives are (rightly) feeling a little bit snubbed by the North Koreans, who are desperate for South Korean humanitarian aid, but only on condition that it comes the long way round by sea, not 80 miles overland. I almost see where they are coming from, as it is typically Korean - and, no matter what anyone says, not everything about Korea stops at the DMZ - not to be to familiar with the term "beggars can't be choosers". And all this notwithstanding the fact that they are supposed to be building a public, trans-Korean railway line any time now. What a joke.

Still, the whole affair, like everything in North Korea, is sitting under a mountain of Stalinist bollocks, so nobody really knows whether to send blankets, rice or mobile phone masts. I say just send over a ship full of Big Macs with a compliments slip from the American Imperialist dogs.

Allegedly (the story having been filtered through Beijing; Chinese whispers anyone?) a large number of the deceased croaked while trying to rescue portraits of Kim Il-Sung and his lovable sprog Jong-Il - yes, the very same who wrote six operas in two years, personally designed Juche Tower in Pyongyang, and whose birth was marked by a double rainbow and the sudden appearance of a new star. All seems more believable now, doesn't it? THe official North Korean news agency cites the case of one man who, having rescued seven children from the blaze, finally copped it trying to save a poster of the permed, bespectacled runt.

In fact, here's a little taster of what the North Korean Central News Agency has to say:

"Some media in the United States and South Korea slandered the DPRK, saying that it is responding in a passive manner to the strong willingness of South Korea and the international community to assist victims, there is an insufficient medical force in the north and it is indifferent to treating the wounded and it has sealed off the scene of accident to prevent journalists from covering news... These accusations... instead of expressing sympathy and sharing pain with its victims over the unexpected accident can not be interpreted otherwise than an act of the wicked."

In news not dictated by dictators, I was saddened but I must say not overly surprised, after sharing bar space with so many GIs over the past months, to read about the latest craze for torture and sexual abuse sweeping the expat community in the Middle East. Aside from the obvious, a couple of things jumped out at me about the reactions from the various groups implicated in the allegations. First there was the pathetic excuses of "we weren't properly trained/briefed", "just followin' orders" and "well, nobody gave us a copy of the Geneva Conventions". Absolutely pathetic and, I thought, almost as grotesque as the things they were doing to those poor guys - you don't need to read the Geneva fucking Convention to know that forcing people to strip and make human pyramids before wiring their nipples up to car batteries and posing them for photos could be seen by some as somewhat questionable.

Then there were the official lines from the top. Compare:

Downing Street - "The US army spokesman has said this morning that he is appalled, that those responsible have let their fellow soldiers down, and those are views that we would associate the UK government with." - clean, clipped, and political, of course.

George Dubya Bush - "I share a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated" - rambling and moronic, rather like the conclusion of a child's mid-term essay.

Which brings me back, like Ouroboros the tail-munching snake, to kids and the things they write. This afternoon one of my more conscientious students handed me his English Diary as every week saying, through a big, shit-eating grin, "today diary big!", before motioning for me to check out just how much he'd written. Clearly he was quite proud of himself, and rightly so, as he was so confident in his magnum opus that he was very keen for me to take a look at it while ten classmates looked on. This masterpiece consisted of about half a dozen sentences lifted from children's storybooks and stitched together, Frankenstein-style. The result: a ream of incoherent text which would have had William Burroughs scratching his sideburns.

You see, as any Asian teacher from Kowloon to Korea will tell you, the best way to acquire English is not to use it, but to steal it from someone else. Thus, when I was helping to judge ECC's "essay competition", my comment of "this is blatantly plagiarised" was met with concerned eyes. Whether or not the student in question had written it, I was told, was irrelevant. What mattered was that he had submitted an excellent biography of Benjamin Franklin. My protestations led to a compromise - write a comment gently suggesting to the student, in a parent-friendly manner of course, that he not rely quite so heavily on his encyclopaedia.

Of course, the essay won the competition, beating a naturally flawed but superbly imaginative biography of Charlotte Bronte (including a beautifully-written letter addressed to Jane Eyre) to first place. Another preciously rare spark of creativity snuffed in a puddle of Korean hypocrisy.

I feel drained just talking about it - sometimes it's easier just to do what everyone here does, and just pretend the problem isn't even a problem at all.