The last month

Wow. It's been a pretty full month.

My flight got in on Friday afternoon, and after a few hours rest and cleaning of airplane grime off of myself, I headed to Seoul to play a gig at Woodstock. Our resident percussionist Mark wasn't so pleased to give up the reigns on the set, but, it's my band, so he just had to deal with it. Matt, the other original member of the band is back in Korea for six weeks, and he came up to do a few songs with us. It worked out really well, because he and Chris gelled really well with each other. Saturday was another big day, because I was supposed to go to a work meeting, but when you sleep until 7pm, you tend to miss a lot of stuff. At night, we had Kris and 혜경 (Hye Gyung)'s wedding party to play, which was really good because it was in Ansan, so I didn't have to schlep gear all over town. We played at GTR, which used to have the worst drum set ever made, but they made a huge upgrade with a plethora of cymbals and roto toms to play with. My only problem was deciding what to do with all of it.

The next day was Kris's wedding near the war memorial in Seoul. By near I mean "in the middle of". It was nice. Beautiful thoughts surrounded by death and destruction. I found it highly appropriate. I would have many more pictures, but my battery died as the ceremony started. In true traditional Korean wedding style (well, at least the two I've been to) it started pouring in the middle of he ceremony. This wasn't as bad as when Dan got manacled, because the workers had the sense to prop up the tents and eliminate the pools of water to stop them from collapsing.

After the weekend began three weeks of camp. I had to leave the house every day by 7:45am, and I would get home at 9pm. Apart from the hours, camp went great. Everything ran smoothly, my kids were awesome, and I just recycled all of my material from the last camp, so I didn't have much prep work to do. Camp is divided into three parts. The first week we prep for the song and chant contest on Friday. The kids are always homesick the first week, and there's a lot of spontaneous crying. That coupled with the fact that all of the kids have their cell phones taken away, they can't use computers, and can't watch TV makes for some tense moments. One of the older kids ran away one night and spent the night at his friend's house. I'm not sure how he accomplished that feat, because they take their money away from them on the first day as well. I did Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps which has been done by numerous people, but I chose the Cake version, and changed it to 몰라, 몰라, 몰라 (I don't know, I don't know, I don't know). My class (the Konglish Killers) worked really hard and did well in the competition, and ended up getting 3rd place. Unfortunately, so did two other classes, and I'm crap at rock, paper, scissors, so we didn't get a prize. My class was gutted, and there were many moist eyes as the teachers left to celebrate being done with the first week.

Week two was human bingo. The kids had gone to Everland (a theme park) on the weekend, so they were all pretty happy with camp by now. human bingo is just a glorified pub quiz, and for this week, we have to teach all of the other classes our material. I was in the younger kid half, so I had to teach the kids learning phonics as well as the better kids. I had a few moments where I almost lost it on them. For the youngest classes, I was having them color in the different continents. One moment went something like this:

Me: OK, this is Asia (pointing to map)
Student: Teacher, teacher!!!
Me: 기다려 (wait)
Student: Teacher, 질문 (question)
Me: 기다려 (wait) OK, Asia. Everybody see Asia?
Student: Teacher, teacher!!!
Me: 기다려 (wait) Asia! Everybody OK? (seeing nods of assent)
Student: Teacher, teacher!!!
Me: (trying to stay cool) OK, what's your question?
Student: Teacher, Asia where?
Me: (buries his head in his hands and tries not to cry)

At the bingo, my class got every question right, and even got a bonus question right. I wasn't taking it easy on them just because they were my class either. The young kids got questions like "How many continents are there?" My class got "What is the capital of the fifth largest country in the world?" despite getting everything right, my class tied for second place, because the youngest class (the Asia, where? class) got every question right as well, and they were younger and so were given the win. If you're keeping score, that's twice my class didn't get something they deserved. Once again, they were suitably upset. This was the most competitive group of kids I ever met.

Finally we had the play week. I did Treasure Island, only slightly modified and abbreviated in order to have 14 lead characters. My class gradually improved their "Aargh!"s as the week went on. On Friday, they did a really good job. This wasn't due to my writing skills, but rather to the amount that my TA and GA drilled them in the time that I wasn't in class. On Thursday night, we had the going away party, or "crying game" as we like to call it. Everyone gets up and does a little dance (the teachers did the chicken dance followed by celebration) Then candles get passed out and they show a slide show of everybody from camp. After that a TA gets up and delivers a speech carefully worded to get the kids bawling. Lots of "we met great friend here and you're NEVER GOING TO SEE THEM EVER AGAIN!!!" Usually, that's where the kids lose it. However, this time, for some reason (the candles play a large part, except for the little pyromaniacs) the kids started bawling when the slide show came on. It's really fun to watch (in a twisted sort of way) because you always have the nice little girls, who you expect to cry, but then you have the little boys that have been acting hard as nails all week break down. Then you always have the little kids just melting the candle onto the floor to see who can make the biggest puddle.

And that was it. Camp is done.



For the last two weeks, I've just been relaxing and settling back into regular life. The Olympics are on, which is cool, but I have to watch them on Korean TV, which sucks ass. If there isn't a Korean likely to win a medal, they will show the final minute of an event. Everything that Korea wins get replay after replay after replay. 박태환 won Korea's first ever gold medal in swimming, and he already had seven commercials on TV. I don't know where he found the time to make them all. There was one point, where instead of showing the actual Olympics, they showed 박태환 hanging out in a 노래방 (Karaoke room) with some actresses and models.

Korea's TV coverage is all due to their uber nationalism, which can lead to xenophobia. Koreans get all indignant whenever foreigners do the slightest thing wrong. Sure, sometimes things happen like when the two little girls got run over by a tank. However, they ignore problems in their own society. One big thing is that Korean delivery guys drive scooters at maximum speed swerving around traffic without wearing helmets, talking on the phone or smoking a cigarette. This is usually high school kids working these jobs. In the second week of camp, a sweet girl from my office, 이주희 (Lee Ju Hee) stepped off of a bus and got smacked by one of these idiots. After a couple of days in a coma, she finally passed away. She was 24. If a foreigner had hit her, people would be spitting at foreigners in the street. As it is, nobody cares, except those of us that knew her. Forever relegated to the past tense by utter stupidity.