A long rambling whinge which I never finished and never sent to anyone as it was rubbish!

(We were ready to come home when I wrote this; very ready).

It’s Saturday morning, five weeks before we leave. We start teaching summer school in three weeks then we’ll be free once again. It is looking unlikely that we will be nuked in that short space of time and my excitement is reaching trouser wetting pitch. [The nuclear standoff between North and South was a big issue when I wrote this].

Heidi is out mask dancing. As far as I can ascertain, it is a class that involves a lot of prancing around in a mask, she has also started constructing trinkets out of paper. The name of the art is Hanji. I’ll be expected to muster up a lot of enthusiasm when the first boxes start appearing in our apartment. The planned mask-dancing exhibition will no doubt leave me in raptures.

We have started teaching evening classes. They pay us nearly thirty pounds an hour to teach two hours a night three nights a week (so you can see why we agreed – well; why Heidi agreed and I acquiesced). Unfortunately it takes an hour to get there and the classes are from eight to ten in the evening. They are at Seoul Semiconductor Company. It is situated in the sort of place you would expect to find a semiconductor factory. God help us, it is miserable.

The first night on the job I was very dejected. I tried everything I had in my CD to cheer me up bag but it all sounded flat. It was raining that evening and people were converging from all directions to walk straight into me. There seemed to be so much noise, no matter how loud I had my music I could hear people yelling, sirens, airplanes, Korean pop music, loud voice speakers, I wanted to scream at the sky. There was a point when a motorbike passed me on the pavement as a train screeched overhead on a bridge whilst a plane roared into the air above it all, this was only slightly muted by the 4000 cars encircling me on my tiny island of pavement. I feel sure that this was not how humans were meant to live.

I did an irrational thing in the subway station. I was making my way off my train whilst trying to be as patient and polite as possible in the fervent crush of Koreans. One man, unable to contain his eagerness to get down the stairs seconds before I could, tried to push me down them. I looked at him; he was no more than five foot in height and about fifty years old. In a flash I salvaged my elbow from the throng and swung it into his chest; I felt the bony hardness of his ribs as it connected. He stared at me with murderous eyes. I have never walked so fast in my life. He tried to match my speed but seemed reluctant to break into a run and soon broke off his pursuit.

[Some days after I wrote this, Heidi gave the finger to a guy who’d nearly run her over. He stopped his car, ran over, punched her on the back of her shoulder, and then ran back to his car laughing.]

All this crap really takes its toll after a while. We forever feel the need to get away. Over the last few months we have managed this twice. The first time was a month or so ago when we decided to go ‘island hopping’ off the south coast. We should have realized that this was a wildly optimistic dream and used previous experience to determine that the plan was doomed to failure from the start.

We checked the map for a good starting point. We decided on a town called Mokpo, a six hour drive away, as it seemed to be coastal. We got there late, checked into a dimly lit, porn motel and slept. Next day we went to the tourist information and asked about boats. The lady (who spoke literally no English – not even yes and no) started motioning with her arms and rocking back and forth like a lunatic. She also made a cross with her arms – this as we’ve learned is the universal symbol for ‘no you can’t – please go away’. Eventually a businessman came over and explained that the sea was too rough and there’d be no boats for three days. What a happy co-incidence, we thought, that being the exact length of our holiday.

I looked outside and there were no signs of impending inclemency. We consulted the tiny map in the lonely planet for alternate plans. It appeared that there was an Island connected to the mainland by a road. It didn’t have a very good write up and the main towns population was 69,000, not as secluded as we’d have liked but better than nothing. It was called Wando.

The bus took a good two hours to get us thirty miles down the coast. When we arrived it looked like the kind of place Seoul Semiconductor factory might like to set up a regional office. Heidi became depressed. I thought it quite funny. We decided to stay at ‘by far the nicest hotel on the island’ – lonely planet. It was marginally less grotty than the motel in Mokpo.

This wonderful day just happened to be my birthday. We took a bus to a pebble beach and found what we thought was a charming ‘minbak’ (hostel). We decided to move there the next day. We went back into town and out for a drink. Just after we ordered Heidi became nauseous. I told her she should go home and leave me there. She was really tired and the hotel was just next-door. After some protests that she was ruining my birthday she left me. I rang my friend in England on my mobile and chatted for an hour whilst finishing up the jug of beer we’d ordered (Hello Finnuala!).

I got to bed at about one I think. We’d noticed that there was some construction going on over the road when we arrived, the Korean equivalent to a JCB was parked across the street. It is called a Hyundai, as is everything with moving parts in Korea.

Guess what time they started work on a Saturday morning? I mean guess what time about 20 men showed up started up the machine and started yelling to each other at the top of their voices? Eight o’clock you might say if you were a bit pessimistic. I often wondered why Koreans are always falling asleep on buses and trains; the reason could be that they started at five. It was a Saturday and they started work at five AM.
Neither of us could sleep after that so we were both wrecked for the rest of the day. Heidi it turned out had been violently sick 3 times whilst I’d been finishing off our beer in the bar. She was feeling weak and traumatized. We headed off for the minbak next to the beach.

Before going on I feel I should update you on the teaching situation. I’ve finished with the first half of my lecture course – the history part. I got from 5000bc to the Second World War and I learnt many things. I hope my students did too. I am now on the culture section and contrary to what I had thought this is harder to teach and less interesting to learn about. I never realized British History was so interesting.

It is very hot now, around 30 degrees all the time. This has affected my attitude somewhat. I’ve developed a more laissez-faire approach. I have become fearless. I feel, if I were given a few hours to prepare, I could speak in front of any number of people on any subject and I wouldn’t get nervous. I may not do a great job but I could do it. It is very liberating to know that. Of course things don’t go swimmingly all the time, it’s just that when things do go wrong I don’t let myself get too flustered.

One day last week I’d finished covering the British political system and was intending to show them ‘Question Time’. I’d recorded an episode at Christmas as my ex-boss said he’d been so impressed by the transparency of British politics and specifically by that programme. Korea has no equivalent and he thought it’d be good for the students to see it.

I took my tape to the ‘jogyos’ (student assistants) the day before to get the tape converted to NTSC, the Korean standard. We, of course, have the PAL system in Europe so the tape was incompatible. I explained what needed doing three times to make sure the girl understood and left. I have always done it myself before because the Jogyos, as sweet as they are, tend to make a mess of things.

Sure enough the next day before class I went to collect the tape and there was a note on it saying that the tape didn’t work and they couldn’t copy it. The girl had just pretended to understand what I’d said three times and didn’t realize it was a European tape at all. I was furious and for about the tenth time and swore never to ask them for any help ever again for the tenth time. I think they get really nervous around foreigners and just want to be rid of us as quickly as possible. For this reason they say yes to everything.

That was my lesson ruined. I went to the office of my old boss, as I knew he had a video of Princess Diana, which I thought I’d show them instead. I’d done the royal family the week before so it wasn’t a completely arbitrary choice. I wrote up some questions for them to think about in my last few minutes and rushed the tape to class. I explained to the students that I’d had technical problems with the tape and that they were going to watch a video on Princess Dianna instead. They seemed happy enough about that. Until I played it that was and found out it was dubbed in Japanese.

That put me in an extremely sticky situation. Having a hundred students staring at you waiting for your next move is unnerving. I asked them what they wanted to do. They said they wanted to watch a different video. All I had to offer was the first ever episode of ‘Da Ali G show’. I explained why people originally found Ali G so amusing in England – the point of the character, which took a surprisingly long time, and I got very confused, then I played it. They seemed to like it a lot. Probably more than they’d have liked question time. Except, that is, for the one student who walked out half way through in disgust.

One or some of my students in the British History and Culture class keeps bringing me a can of beer. I find it sitting on the desk when I arrive in the classroom. The first time they/he/she did it I drank it whilst I was speaking and started to feel an effect toward the end of the lecture. Heidi wasn’t impressed and reminded me that this was a Jesuit university and that I should comport myself accordingly blah blah blah… Last class there was a packet of snacks with the beer so I just ate them and brought the beer home.

Back to Wando now and our minbak (hostel): we got there around mid-afternoon, went for a walk on the beach again then went to our room. It was horrible. There were dead insects on the floor, no Beds, just a heap of dirty blankets. The windows were narrow slits near the roof and the only light was a weedy fluorescent bulb, which had to strain to illuminate the dank space. It was like solitary confinement.

As the day progressed the skies started getting a little grayer, then a lot grayer, then it poured with rain until bedtime. We found a restaurant to eat at just around the corner. The restaurant had a motel above it. We asked for a look at the rooms and they were fabulous. They were much better than the ones in, ‘the best hotel on Wando’ – Lonely Planet. We vowed to move in the next day and went back to our dungeon. We arrived home soaked (we had no umbrella).

Outside the dungeon were two dogs. One had a rudimentary kennel fashioned out of breezeblocks and a bit of fiberboard. The other dog had some staging it could crawl under if the rain got too bad. Unfortunately the water seemed to get under there and it had to sit in a puddle. It was so ineffective in fact that most of the time it just sat out in the rain. It rained for the majority of the next 48 hours and the dog had no respite. It was never let off its chain. It is raining outside as I write this, weeks later. The dog is still there.

Throughout the night it howled and whined letting the whole world know how wretched it felt. The other dog gave it the odd conciliatory barking fit from its kennel, maybe to assure it that it wasn’t alone. We found ourselves thinking up plots to end its misery. We could release it, but where would it go? It was an Island after all. We could let it into the minbak so it could have at least one nights sleep It could dirty the place up a bit then the bitch that ran it would have some work to do. My final thought was to cut its throat and put it out of its misery, Heidi didn’t like that one, so, rather inevitably, we did nothing at all. We got no sleep. Again.

Next morning we moved to the nice place. We had a restaurant, tea room, karaoke room, satellite TV, a hairdryer, a bed, a fridge with water in it a bathroom with shampoo etc... All this for an extra 5 quid a night. We watched some trashy movie, read a bit and went to bed.

We stayed the next night too. It had taken us so long to find somewhere nice that we couldn’t leave after one day. On our second we’d been on a very long walk. We walked from the beach on one side of the Island, up and over the tallest mountain in the middle and down the other side. It took 7 hours and we’d had no breakfast. There were no cafés or restaurants all the way up or all the way down the other side. In fact we got lost coming down the other side and ended up walking through thick undergrowth for an hour, getting covered in dirt and scratches. We were the only people on any of the paths or any part of the mountain. We found true isolation, and boy did it suck.

For sustenance we drank from mountain streams and shared six little shell shaped chocolates I happened to have in my bag. We had one each every couple of hours. There was a 5-hour window in the rain that morning and the sun shone hazily through the mist throughout our accent. Heidi noticed after a while that my neck was purple. It seems the sun on Wando is the most powerful on earth and I got ferocious sunburn to prove it. Once the sun had burnt me though it must’ve felt its work was done as it clouded over, the temperature dropped to a very uncomfortable level (we only had T-Shirts), then it started raining. It didn’t stop until we were both soaked. When we reached the other side of the island, starved and soaked. There was no restaurant.

We got a bus. It was the wrong bus. It took us to the wrong side of the island and there was no restaurant. It was now five-o-clock and all we’d had to eat all day were 3 chocolates each. I felt dizzy and sick. We waited half an hour in the freezing rain for the bus back to the main town on the island. When we got there we found a restaurant, ordered spicy cabbage soup and ate. It was really, really good.

One day on that trip I had spicy cabbage soup (Kimchee Tchigae) three times. I had it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. There was not a lot of variety out in the country. We were happy to leave the following day and ate western food for the following two days.

Back in Seoul now… One of the girls from our university put a note on the staffroom door announcing her wedding and inviting everyone in the department. A rather strange thing to do I thought. She also asked Heidi if she could come to our wedding?! ‘Erm… yes, er if you like...’ was Heidi’s response or something to that effect. I had never spoken to her before. We got the details for her wedding and decided we’d better go. What the heck anyway it’d be a cultural experience.

The day of the wedding we went for a walk then came home early to get ready. It was at five pm a short subway ride away. I decided not to change as all my clothes are the same level of smart/casual boringness and I wasn’t going to wear my suit (it is too big and makes me look like a junior undertaker). Heidi spent two hours prettyfying herself. I caught her pouting in front of the mirror at least a dozen times. She dug out a summer dress and did her hair – the works. As a concession I polished my shoes.

In fact, Heidi spent so long in the bathroom that we were running very late by the time we set off. The wedding was at five and we arrived exactly on time. There was a problem though as the venue seemed no more than a big shopping mall. We dashed around looking for signs totally perplexed. It looked like there was a hotel above the mall so we headed for that. Sure enough when we were approaching the hotel reception we found a sign for a wedding hall 4 floors above us. We ran for the elevator.

We pressed up. The elevator was on the 6th floor and slowly came down stopping on each floor all the way down to the 4th basement. B4, then it started on its way back up again. B4, B3, B2, B1… then it didn’t stop for the 1st floor. It stopped on every other floor except ours all the way back up to the 6th. 5:04pm. We were irate with tension. There was, as always, a crowd around us to transform tension into acute madness. Back down it came, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 we decided to get in on the way down in case it didn’t stop on the way up again. B1, B2, B3, B4, B3, B2, B1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 stopping at them all, even the first on the way back up. 5:12pm. We extricated ourselves from the tangle of Koreans and ran towards the wedding. But which wedding? There were many weddings happening simultaneously all around us.

We ran over to a desk and showed our invite. A man pointed to one of the rooms at the far end of the hall and held out his hand. He was in charge of collecting wedding presents. We gave him an envelope with twenty-five quid in it – 50,000 won. Apparently this was the least we could give (the gift has to be cash). 10,000 is an insult, you can’t give an even number as that is bad luck, which rules out 20,000 and 40,000. 30,000 is not enough either so that leaves 50,000. Twenty-five quid isn’t worth grumbling about anyway, it’d be very cheap for England (take note future wedding guests). I should imagine there were a lot of envelopes with 50,000 won in them.

We went over to the room we’d been pointed to noticing what we thought was another wedding on our left. In the room itself there were lots of tables seating about 15 people, each filled with people eating. We were confused and assumed we had the wrong wedding. Either that or we’d missed the whole wedding by being 15 minutes late.

We heard someone shouting our name and looked around. It was the other teachers from the university. We did have the right room. We went over, sat down, and tried to find out what was going on. Where was the wedding (there was no bride and groom in sight)? They pointed behind us to the back. A faint image was being projected against the white wall, you could just about make out the bride and groom and some others stood around them. Now we were really confused.

To explain: we had indeed missed the wedding (which had lasted five-minutes). The people in the room we were in were the unimportant guests and had to watch a projection of the ceremony without sound. The wedding we had passed next door was where the real 3D festivities were taking place. One of our fellow teachers said she’d tried to peer through the door to see what was happening but was ushered away and told to sit back down in the other room. People had already finished the first course of there meal, which was served during the ceremony. People apparently talked and ate right through the ceremony. The bride and groom later came through our room and received applause from the guests table by table.

The rest of the courses were brought out, each one more disgusting than the last. It was western food (it apparently cost them 40,000 won a head for the meal (20 quid), and they’d had 300 meals prepared. We were given a few stringy bits of iceberg lettuce and a solitary cherry tomato with a watery version of Thousand Island dressing. Some smoked salmon. An inedible steak – nobody could chew it. A small carrot with the texture of chewing gum and a sprig of raw broccoli (the only thing I ate from this course). For desert a fluorescent green square of sludge.

We’d arrived at 5.15. At 6.00 we were the last two people sat at our table, everyone else had gone home. We were both in a state of shock. ‘That was so shit… That was so shit…’ kept going through my mind. My tolerance and appreciation levels of Korean culture hit an all time rock bottom, I was just reeling. These people are mad!

‘So…’, people asked afterwards, ‘what did you think of your first Korean wedding?’ All I could think to say was. What wedding? There was no wedding. It was a sham. It was the worst thing ever. It was absurd. Are you crazy? It wasn’t even Korean, it was a very poor imitation of a western wedding with only the worst parts left in place. It was completely impersonal. It was the ultimate anticlimax. It was a complete non-event. It sucked! Stuff like that. So I lied and said it was nice.

The bride was back in work the Monday after the wedding. She’d have a ‘honeymoon’ the weekend after, probably in another shopping mall.Last weekend we were given yet another opportunity to experience Korean culture. This time though it was a little different. It wasn’t a random colleague who had invited us, but the owners of our local bar.

When we were studying Korean we found a bar fairly close to the class and started going there with a French girl from the course; Monique. Monique became our friend. We went to the bar about three times a week and built up a rapport with the middle age couple that ran it. Since finishing the course we’ve gone at least once a week.

The couple that own the bar don’t speak English and we don’t speak Korean so our relationship is often strained. Nevertheless they invited us to their country home, which doubles as a minbak for climbers in the tourist season.

The house is located near the demilitarized zone in the north of the country. Our host drove us up there last Saturday afternoon. He took us to the location of the inter-Korean railway that is currently under construction. He showed us the track that led eerily into the distance. We could see the mountains in North Korea from where we were but couldn’t quite make out any buildings. All the same it felt strange looking into the worlds most reclusive country. Like we could be caught and questioned about our intentions.

I kept trying to photograph the soldiers stationed in various sentry points. I noticed on leaving that there were NO PHOTOGRAPHS signs around the place. We saw a ‘peace wall’ with small rocks collected from hundreds of different battlefields throughout the world. There was a plaque with an optimistic message stating that the artist hoped his wall would make a difference to the plight of the two countries peoples. I have to say the wall seemed a pretty feeble symbol against the backdrop of soldiers and barbed wire. The side of the road leading to the place had been lined with barbed wire for miles and miles. Sentries stood in boxes every five hundred metres.

It was possible to walk right up to the train line. You had to walk over a bridge, underneath which was a swimming pool cast in the shape of the whole peninsula. North and South. There were photographs, flowers and messages of hope fastened to the fence that blocked the path to the tracks. There was also a stall selling North Korean products. It was interesting to see the bottles of liquor with their Communist labels written in Korean script. The script we’ve come to associate with unimpeded capitalism.

Back at the Minbak, our host prepared us a Korean style barbecue and some of their homebrew wine. It was sickly and sweet but I soon got used to it and things were looking promising. He told us that his wife was coming later along with a bunch of friends and there would be much merriment. He said that they’d be playing musical instruments and singing. This was at eight pm. We constructed a fire and waited for the festivities to begin. I started to drink a little faster. If there was to be singing I was going to need courage.

Four hours later at twelve PM Heidi and Monique were falling asleep. They went to bed. At 12.30 our congenial host told me that the guests wouldn’t be arriving until 3. I went to bed.

Breakfast was served at 10. I needed it too; I was weak from the hours of drinking and my head really hurt. I was expecting some kind of soup, though not ideal I was amenable to the idea, there wasn’t going to be any cereal and toast, of that I was sure. Unfortunately soup wasn’t on the menu. For this particular Sunday we were in for a treat. The eighty-year-old granny brought in two chickens, freshly boiled and pulled them apart with her fingers in front of us. The sound of the flesh and bone being forced apart was sickening at such an early hour. She also brought out a bowl of octopus curry, just in case any of us didn’t fancy boiled chicken for breakfast.

I took a piece of chicken and tore a string or two of breast meat from it. I covered it in salt and grudgingly forced it between my dry lips. That made me salivate, so I drank lots of water; that made me need more salt so I grabbed another piece of chicken, bigger this time and ate it up. This went on for a while until before I knew it I was dipping the chicken in the Octopus curry and eating whole raw chilies dipped in fermented bean paste. Marvelous. The remains of the chickens were boiled up with rice and served as lunch, bones and cartilage soup. Yum.