CONTENTS
| Korea I | Korea II |
JOURNAL
25 June 2006 Romance
My kids asked me a few weeks ago at school whether I had had a haircut. I looked at them seriously and replied that I had been washing my hands in a nearby river when a crocodile lunged at me and grabbed me by my head. I wrestled with it and managed to beat it away, but it took some of my hair in the process. Laughing, the children all screamed at me one word: NOOOO!
"Okay", I admitted. "What really happened was that I was walking home in the evening when out of the twilight came what I could only describe as a flying saucer. It locked me in a beam of light and tried to teleport me into the craft, but perhaps I was too heavy or something because all it got was my hair." Again, they screamed, "Noooo! That's not true!"
"Would you believe that I was walking home when a crazy Korean man carrying a katana [the famous Japanese samurai sword] jumped out and started slashing at me wildly?", I confessed; with elaborate gestures to help me demonstrate my traumatic experience. "I jumped and ducked, avoiding every stroke of his weapon, but I lost some hair in the process." Still, they wouldn't accept my explanation, and still their shouts continued.
"All right then", I said, looking at them imploringly. "What really happened was that first a crocodile attacked me, then a UFO attempted to abduct me, then, as if I hadn't been through enough already, a crazy Korean man with a katana attacked me while I was walking home". Somehow, this didn't satisfy them either. "Okay", I asked them. "What do you think happened?" They seemed to think that I had been to a hairdresser's. It's a sad thing that there's no trust in this world anymore. Why would I need a hairdresser's after being through all that?
So, I now feel quite comfortable with each of my groups, and I enjoy the challenge of teaching most of my lessons. They like to call us English teachers ETs, with these initials relating both to our professions as well as to the famous Steven Spielberg movie of the early '80s. I often let them choose team names for their groups, but sometimes I like to choose them for my students so that they can learn something new. I introduced them to Tigabbits, Kangaphants, and Lionodiles. My explanation went along the lines that if you get a father kangaroo and a mother elephant, their children will be kangaphants. They didn't want to accept this either, so I had to admit that there is a reason why I don't teach Science. They seemed to like an anagram of mine that holds that 'Korean teachers' can be abbreviated to Koreachers (or creatures). I'm not sure whether my colleagues like this too much though.
I have been feeling more and more impressed with Korea in the last few weeks. As I have said, I love it that they are such sensible and considerate drivers, and this reflects the fact that I love many things about their moderate and gentle personalities. Their food continues to appeal to me considerably. I have said that perhaps they could experiment a little more with cuisine from other cultures, such as Chinese and Indian. For whatever reason, they seem determined not to like Chinese too much; although there are quite a few Japanese sushi houses around the place, and they seem popular. What I particularly like, however, is the way they prepare the foreign food that they have taken to as a nation; and these include bread baking, making pizza, and cooking Italian-style pasta. There are many excellent German and French bakeries around. I haven't eaten bread this good since Poland and Germany. My only criticism is that sometimes they put too much sugar on croissants and things like that. Their pizzas are great, although prices at Pizza Hut are exorbitant, and their pasta is better on average than I have had in any other country. Although I haven't yet made it to Italy, they easily compare with pastas that I tried in other parts of central Europe. I feel just as satisfied after spending five or ten dollars at a pasta restaurant here, as I do after cooking pasta for myself. I'm still not exactly sure about what it is that keeps Korea distinct from its neighbours, but somehow their being capable of perfecting the things that they do borrow from the outside world isn't slowing them down.
For a while now, I have been observing what seems to me like curious little oddities in my Korean friends. One of them is their frequent habit of putting a sound like 'ih' at the end of many words when they speak Englishih. Other examples include bagih, sixih, and speakih. I have not yet figured out why this might be. I have noticed that women and even young girls often put their hands in front of their mouths when they are talking. I know that they're purposely trying to cover their mouths, but I don't know whether this is to shield their breath or to shield their teeth. I know that it's a matter of being polite. Both men and women also have a strange way of saying a drawn-out and pitch-rising eeaah after certain exchanges in conversations. One lady at the shop I go to always offers me this after I reply to her original hello. She gives me a formal ung yung he say yo, I say the same back, and she says eeaah. I have had boys do this as well when I have been shopping. I wonder what that's about, and whether they're even conscious of it. Based on some Koreans that I taught while I was training in Sydney, and then later when I was teaching in Auckland, I used to think that Koreans commonly had difficulties pronouncing the oh sound in words like go, slow, and coke. I haven't noticed this at all since being here. The ones I knew used to pronounce the oh more like the o in words like sock and flock. If you think about it, you will see that it sounds quite amusing when at a cafe they string together, "May I please have one large vanilla coke?"
With every major football event that goes by since I first watched the final German-Brazil game in the FIFA World Cup 2002, I have grown to appreciate and respect the game more and more. The Koreans are mad about it. They played about three games last week, and even when several were on over here at four o'clock in the morning, and even when one of these fell on a work day, they took to their local parks where they would watch the game for free on large outdoor screens among huge and excited crowds. On Friday night, I met up with a nice group of Korean friends at about midnight outside the J-Rock bar, and from there we went straight to the Daejeon football stadium. So I mixed all night with thousands of fans that couldn't have filled the stadium up more if the game had actually been played on the very field below us. I wore a red T-shirt with 'Be the Reds!' on the front, I wore glowing red horns on my head, and I banged the cylindrical red plastic balloons that they whack together, producing a kind of drumming, as they chant "Dae-Han-Min-Kuk" (Republic of Korea) and “Oh pil-seung Korea” (go fighting Korea). The game didn't start until 4am, but I had a great time and I really enjoyed the whole event. I thought that Korea played extremely well, but it takes goals to win, and unfortunately it was Switzerland 2-0 South Korea. According to the BBC, Korea still had 49 per cent possession of the ball, and I saw them make quite a few strikes for the goal. Everyone in the stadium took the results moderately. It was after 7am before I got to bed.
I promised in my last update that I would progress from the worst up, and so here's by far the best. I started flirting with the idea of leaving Russia somewhere around January. A friend of mine, Mark, wondered whether the right woman could make me stay. I answered that she could, but I hadn't met her in a long while. With one week to go before leaving Russia for South Korea, he asked me again whether finding the right woman this late in the day would induce me to stay. I was certain that it couldn't because I cannot identify such a woman in a single week. Even if I met someone, we wouldn't have enough time together for me to be certain that I should stay for her. Such a person would have to settle for being a pleasant memory. In a way, I was right. I didn't meet anyone new in that last week who could hold onto me, but I didn't realise that I had already known this woman for about six months. Her name is Ania.
There were times that I thought about Ania before I left. I didn't consider the possibility that she was thinking about me too. In fact, she's quite young for me, and so I had compartmentalised my feelings for her in such a way that they were nearly unconscious. I could have gone on for some time without doing anything about it. It seems that it was my leaving that encouraged a greater effort on both our parts, as she made me quite aware that she was unhappy when I told her I was going. In those last weeks, I began to dream about her more; not daring to imagine that something could actually come of it; an untouchable angel far out of my reach. We said goodbye in the last days, giving each other a hug. I phoned her at the airport to wish her all the best. We promised to write to each other after I had settled into Daejeon.
The fact that we are apart has allowed for the most pleasing courtship that I have ever experienced. Initially, our emails were just those between friends. After about a week of this, I decided I had nothing to lose by telling Ania how I felt. I wrote to her saying that she had come to mean more to me than was normal for friends, but that I would be happy to go on as friends since it was unlikely that she could consider, or had considered, being anything more. I think one part of me recognised that she had some feelings for me too, but another part of me very sincerely believed this unlikely. In any case, I rationalised that even if she did like me, she probably wouldn't like me enough to entice me to go back to Moscow. I still had a one-year contract to fulfil in a good job, so I thought she would just have to be that pleasant memory, and perhaps a vague fantasy for an unlikely future, but nothing more.
She wrote back to say that she had similar feelings for me. And so our early correspondence began. This initial phase of emailing was perhaps the backbone to our developing relationship; although I tend to look on this whole time away from her as the foundations for something wonderful to come. For about a month we wrote perhaps three or four fairly long emails to each other every day, and we covered vital territory in order to establish a basis for being together. Soon after my trip to Seoul, I connected my new Samsung laptop to the Internet at my home, and with that came a slight increase in tempo when we started using Yahoo Messenger to chat with each other. This was followed within a week, after purchasing microphones, by our move to free voice calls through Skype. For a couple of months now we have been able to speak to each other every day for free, and of course this has meant for several hours a day. Naturally, the ground we have covered during this time has been exponentially greater than what we got through during our emailing period, with it being possible for us to cover in perhaps ten minutes of conversation what would have taken us a whole week through written correspondence.
Another positive point is that we are getting to know each other extremely well without sexual drive dominating our experience from the beginning. Being about 6737 kilometres apart helps to hold us in check, although the age of the web cam generously allows for perhaps more than quill and papyrus once did. There will be plenty of time in our future for us to cherish this aspect of being together, but it's nice that we're focusing on other things for now. I hope to go to Ania in September, by which point our relationship will have been maturing for half a year already. I believe our future together has a terrific amount of promise. She is an extremely intelligent (all-As) university student, she is very pretty, she is blessed with a perfect figure, and above all she is sweet and kind. We talk very well and I know her heart is true. She is such a positive blessing in my life that I feel as if I have hit the jackpot when it comes to trying to find someone to love. After letting career and adventure come between my two previous loves, I am determined to give this relationship top priority over travel and work-related ambitions. I could not be a luckier man if I won a million chocolate-coated dollars in apricot syrup.
This update is long overdue and I need to start by saying that I'm no longer in South Korea. I am making my update on this page because I don't have time to start a new one and there's plenty of space here. I will probably place my next update on a new and appropriate page.
To help justify making this update on my Korean page, I will say a few things about Korea before I move on. I ended up staying for five months in total and I liked my time there very much. I left on about 12 August. Before I left, I worked at school on a children's camp for two weeks and I had a really nice time. I will add photos later. I also had a really nice time with a couple of great girls who used to be my colleagues at the school. Their names are Thelma and Sunnie. They were extremely nice to me. We had several fun nights out together in my last week, and I even did a little karaoke (a special compromise just because they were being so lovely). As I was about to board my train to Seoul, they surprised me by showing up to offer me a farewell. I am pleased to have made two excellent friends in my time in Korea.
My last memories of South Korea are a little amusing. My flight out of Inchon was scheduled for around 9am, and so it was impossible for me to stay in Daejeon the night before. Instead of staying the night at the airport, I opted for spending the night in Seoul. And rather than paying around $45US for a few hours in a hotel, I felt pretty sure that I could simply stay awake, and sleep on the plane during the flight if I needed it. I also made this easier for myself by sleeping-in on the day before until around 1 or 2pm, so it wasn't as if it was going to be a long stretch. I decided to head to Itaewon, a district that I had been to once before and that I had heard good things about.
After arriving in Itaewon, I bought a Subway Melt with American dollars and then walked down the road until I found a friendly enough looking bar. Unfortunately, they didn't have the beers that I had grown to love while I was in Daejeon - Hoegarten and Leffe. So, after one or two beers there, I went for a walk up the street in search of an international bar with a larger beer selection. A few doors up the road a couple of very nice looking girls stopped me and asked if I'd like to drink in their bar. Speaking very good English, they assured me that they had Leffe. When I got in, one girl threw me down onto a couch in a private cubicle and behind us she drew a curtain. I think at this point I was fairly aware of what kind of place this was, but feeling a little embarrassed, I decided to stay for just one beer. Naturally, the beer was very pricey, of very poor quality, and it was most definitely not Leffe.
With a beer in my hand, the girl then asked if I'd buy her a drink. Not wanting to seem cheap, I obliged. This cost me $20 US straight off! I told her that we'd drink these together and then I'd be off because I only wanted to find a nice little bar where I could drink Leffe. At this, she did her very best to undo my belt buckle and pull down my trousers, and I had to put up quite a fight to stop her. She told me that she could do many things for me - anything I wanted! - but I insisted that I was spoken for and that I very certainly did not need to pay for such things. I was out of there a minute later. Needless to say, they were not happy with me and they were not pleasant about it.
I enjoyed my last days in Daejeon and my last night in Seoul. En route to New Zealand I stopped off in Singapore for around seven hours, and I took the opportunity to explore the city that I first saw when I was sixteen and on a trip with the school pipe band. On Sunday 13 August, after a very satisfactory flight with Singapore Airlines, I arrived back in Christchurch for the first time in all-but five years. It was also the first time that I had seen my family since I left for China at the end of 2001. I was pleased to see that my parents were looking about as healthy as they were when I left, but of course seeing my sister was a bit of a fright. Hairless, eyebrow-less, and in a wheelchair, Anna looked pale and weak, as you would expect of someone who had undergone around four or five months of chemotherapy. Still, she wore a bright smile and looked as if she had gained considerable strength of character during her ordeal.
My time in Christchurch was a mixed bag. Naturally, Anna has gone through an incredible ordeal, and seeing her like this was difficult for me. She has a scar running almost the entire length of her right leg - where they had to cut away cancerous muscles and give her an artificial knee bone. On the positive side, it may be that she's beating this beast and that she will one day walk fairly normally again, although she will very probably always have a bit of a limp. In the time I was back home, she grew back her eyebrows and around a centimetre of hair, was walking a little without crutches, was looking a hell of a lot better, and was feeling much more positive about things.
My mum intends to leave my dad, and although at twenty-nine I'm old enough to accept these things, the circumstances surrounding such decisions are never pleasant. It may be that the whole family and two psychiatrists are mistaken, but it seems as if my father is not entirely well. Family, friends, and counsellors would like Dad to back off with his beliefs and leave everyone to take responsibility for their own lives. In return, we're all happy for him to continue with his studies in the search of whatever it is that he's looking for. Unfortunately, as Dad sees it, if everyone (Mum, Anna, counsellors, psychiatrists, extended family, family friends, other friends, and I) could just see that he was right and give up their ignorant ways (which have us 'dwelling in Satan’), then 'his family' could be saved. In fact, if the rest of the world could just see that my Dad is right, the world could live in peaceful harmony, we could all find God together, and we could expect perfect health, immortality, and bliss as our reward.
So, it strikes me as mad that a person can come over and drive without doing any of this simply on the strength of their foreign endorsements. It's all very well and good when someone has a licence from a country that enforces similar standards - such as Australia, England, Germany, and (from what I could see) South Korea, etc. However, my Chinese girlfriend of a few years ago, Ting, got hers after spending a couple of days driving around in a car park! If Chinese standards officially demanded more, they were easily avoided by paying a bribe. On the roads in Auckland, I had to teach Ting how to drive from scratch. Even as passengers, most Chinese her age have spent relatively very few hours in cars, and she had absolutely no road concept - such as how to drive in a straight line, or that it's absolutely necessary to stop at red lights or when people are crossing on zebra-crossings, etc. Frequently, I had to grab the wheel and wrench us out of the way of oncoming trucks. When a police car pulled us over for swerving, we simply explained that I was teaching her how to drive. They asked us if I had a full licence allowing me to teacher her, and of course my full Australian was quite acceptable. Had it not been, we had only to point out that she was also driving on full privileges.
So here's how I see it: It is not unfair discrimination for a country like New Zealand to recognise that some countries (Russia, China) have licensing systems that fall significantly below our standards, and, based on this, it is not prejudice for us to deny driving privileges to people with certificates from such countries. This is not a racial thing either, as I'm not saying that New Zealand should discriminate against Chinese drivers who have fairly gained their endorsements from a country like New Zealand, Australia, or America. Nor do I believe that an Australian should be given driving privileges in New Zealand based only on a Chinese licence. It is the licence that I'm against, not the people, but I think NZ needs to be a lot more realistic about these kinds of things.
Back in Christchurch after nearly five years, I set about trying to renew my expired certificates. My full Australian one was rejected because it had been expired for more than two years. I hadn't been able to renew it while I was out of Australia because naturally I could not show that I was a resident of New South Wales. They told me that if I had been an Australian, and if I hadn't had a New Zealand document on record, I would have been allowed to simply upgrade to a NZ full. However, I'm a Kiwi. The New Zealand system wanted me to do everything again, starting with my learners, because my NZ privileges had been expired for about three years. After going all the way up the chain by asking to speak to the most senior person at the licensing authority, I was finally able to get them to agree to let me continue from the restricted stage. As a Kiwi who initially gained my restricted almost ten years ago, and having legally driven in NZ on full privileges back when my Australian endorsement was valid, I was once again not allowed to drive with passengers or after about 11pm. So, if I had been an Australian, or if I had paid a bribe for a Chinese licence when I was there, I would have had none of these problems.
Given that I had some time on my hands, I dropped into my old school, the Christchurch College of English, where my boss offered me two weeks' teaching with a group of Japanese students. This was a little nostalgic for me, as they were students from Edogawa University near Tokyo, and it was with similar students from the same university that I first began my teaching career five years ago. It was nice to teach Japanese students once again, and it was good to have something to do while I was in Christchurch. Other than that, I made use of myself by cooking dinner for my family probably one night out of every two.
With teaching in the mornings, cooking in the evenings, coping with family problems, and all the other things that I had to do, I was very busy during my month in Christchurch. Additionally, I had visas and flights to arrange to Russia, I had documents to renew, and I was still trying to catch up with some of my friends. As a reward, I bought myself a new 3G phone - which is no longer working! - and a very nice black leather (lamb-skin) jacket. I’m very pleased with the jacket. The leather is from NZ, but the jacket was made in Australia and designed in Italy.
On 14 September I hugged my family good bye once again, and took off bound for Moscow via Dubai. I had a great time in Dubai. In the passport control line I met a very nice Korean girl named Ju. She helped me get to my hotel, and then later that day she drove me round much of the city. It was interesting to see Muslims getting around in their white garb, and fascinating that Dubai should be a city of about 70 nationalities, with Muslims accounting for a minority of around 20 or 30 per cent of the population. What Ju did for me was a very nice thing for her to do.
My impression of Indian people didn't improve. I think they are the one race in this world that I fail to understand and, at the risk of sounding racist, I don't much like. I'm not saying that I therefore believe that all Indians must be like the ones I have met, but I reflect that whenever I meet them I have to deal with lies and bad behaviour, and this doesn't do much towards making me want to meet more of them in the future. If I meet a nice Indian one day who doesn't lie to me, I won't hold the others I've met against him or her, but I've yet to meet this one. I asked the last one I met in NZ whether he could recommend any new Indian dishes for me to try, and he said something like: "How can I possibly know what you'd like, sir? I don't know what you like, do I, so I can't recommend anything for you?" At the hotel, I asked them to phone my room at a certain time to wake me up. They said they would, but the call never came through. When I went down to the reception to complain, the guy looked me directly in the face and told me that he had called me. “Well,” I said, “how come I don't remember answering the phone then?” They were also supposed to phone me in the morning, just in case I didn't wake up in time; but of course this didn't happen either. I could mention several other gripes about the Indians in that hotel - the Rush Inn - as well, but I've said enough about it.
My highlight in Dubai - as I had around 28 hours there - was the safari that I did on the rolling sand-dunes out in their desert. We charged around at the top of these dunes in a four-wheel drive, and then we had good food at a Muslim camp whilst watching some lady perform a belly-dance. Very exotic for the one-day tourist. I wasn’t too happy with the airline though – Emirates – as their reputation had lead me to expect that I wouldn’t have such things as poor service and a broken in-flight entertainment system.
I've now been back in Moscow for exactly two weeks (where I’ve seen about ten car crashes already, including one not a hundred metres out of the airport), but I'll have to save most of my news for a coming update. Let me just say that I'm living in Rechnoy Vokzal - right at the top of the Metro's 'green line' - and I'm having a very good time. It takes me 20 or 30 minutes each day to get to Ximki, where I work, and I'm enjoying all my new classes. My students are very nice to me. Also, I'm studying on a new course designed to increase my awareness in grammar teaching. This will occupy 1.5 hours a week for eleven weeks. In a few weeks' time I'll be starting a Pre-DELTA course, as I hope to be doing the Cambridge DELTA by mid-next year. This will be very good for me. Naturally, I'm very happy to be with all my friends once more, and I've had some really nice times with them already. And of course I'm finally with my wonderful girlfriend, Ania. We're off to a brilliant start and she's treating me far better than I could have hoped for. I'm unequal to the task of treating her equally well, but I am trying my best because she deserves it.
I will do my very best to make my next update within a week or two from now.
Click here to see a candid video of me teaching my FCE students in Russia
Click here to see 12 new photos from Russia
01 October 2006 Korea-NZ-Russia
One thing that bothers me about New Zealand is that whenever I return I feel as if some things would be easier for me if I were instead a foreigner. This is not to say that I believe foreigners shouldn't be treated as well as NZ citizens - even though their rights may differ - but I don't believe that for any reason we need to give them better treatment. I have come to feel this over various instances, but the example I will concentrate on is that of the New Zealand drivers' licensing system. Like most English speaking countries, as well as other developed nations such as Germany, New Zealand citizens must go through quite a few measures in order to get a driver's licence. When I was young, first you had to do a theoretical learner's test, then, after six months or a year of driving with experienced family members and/or driving instructors, and after doing a practical driving test, you could get a 'restricted' driver's licence that allowed you to drive alone at certain times. A year or so later, you could upgrade to the 'full' licence. Nowadays I believe that there is even another practical driving test between the restricted and full.
The good points about being back in Christchurch included catching up with a few friends that I had not seen in a long while. I also put phone calls to some close friends living up in Wellington. Other than that, my time in Christchurch was a little lonely, as most of my close friends are now scattered all over the world.