Nun-chucks and second breakfast.

Korea III: The Ugly is coming, but I have momentarily run out of witty repartee so you'll have to wait. In the mean time a ton has happened on the road!

After Cambodia we went to Vietnam for a couple weeks to a place called Mui Ne. Not much to say about it, it was wonderful and beautiful and relaxing and not in the least exciting. The only real thing of note was the guy (Vaughn) that ran the resort we were staying at. To start off with he was New Zealander, and thus a few screws loose already. 

We were making some small talk with Vaughn one afternoon and I had mentioned about the fact that I had been stung by a jellyfish earlier that day. So he starts telling us about going out snorkeling underneath the fishing boats a ways out from shore. Quote: "Ye gotta be careful of the buggas, you'll be swimming around  watching them on the bottom and then bam, one will getcha roight in the eye!" Apparently he's had a couple run-ins with them. One where he did in fact get stung in the eye, and another where it started eating away at the muscle in his arm. Yikes. To give you a further description of this character, I look out our window the next day down at the sand on the beach and there Vaughn is, swinging around nun-chucks with a decent amount of dexterity and skill. 

Nun-chucks, endorsed by both ninjas and New Zealanders.

The other great development in Vietnam was second breakfast. Not as exciting as ninja-New Zealanders, but still worthy of note.

Next was a short 2 day layover in Bangkok. It was a bit of a trip. Not the good kind. Some people like hoards of scantily dressed, trashy europeans, lots of flashing neon lights, and drinking copious amounts of cheap, terrible tasting liquor until 6am. Those are the people that like Khoasan Road. I don't heart Khoasan, but when in Bangkok... *smack-pop*... ping-pong show?

Lesson learned: While in places like Egypt, even if just the airport, do not wear booty shorts and thin t-shirts. I figured this one out after seeing women in hi-jabs and burkas and getting more than one disapproving look from men with thick mustaches and headscarves.

South Korea, Part II: The Bad

*Disclaimer: These posts are for humorous purposes. They do not encompass the entire Korean population and a have met quite a few lovely Koreans that are the exception to all the rules.

Alrighty then. Onto part deux.

The Bad

1. Rudeness/Personal Space:

So granted, this is not completely their fault as the cities are mostly overcrowded and space is a luxury, not a right. HOWEVER it happens way too often that I will be walking down the street, minding my own business... as happens I cross paths with someone. As my parents raised me to be polite and courteous I take a small step to my right and keep walking, assuming that they would do the same and we would pass each other without incident and be on our way. Instead... WHAM, I get some short, boney Korean shoulder in the chest because they haven't moved an inch. This is an easily forgivable offence if it;s a crowded market, but when we're the lone two people on a path that's 3 metres wide it is just infuriating. This is especially bad with Korean business men because apparently they believe themselves to be divine and we should count ourselves lucky to even cross paths with them. I hit a point a good 4 months before my contract ended when I'd had enough. From then on I refused to move if the person that I was walking towards didn't show the same inclination. My tactic was to brace myself and speed up a little. In fact the high point on my runs were when I would come across a group of holier than thou Korean business men. All of the things that my highschool rugby coach taught me came right back. Drop your shoulder, elbows out, don't slow down. On a good pass I could run right through the middle of them and clip the first two real good before the rest got the idea.

2. Privacy:
Privacy is non-existant in this country. You learn that real fast when you first get here from the many questions that your co-workers ask you...
"Why aren't you married?" - Uh... cause I'm 22 and am far ways away from being responsible enough for that.
"Your arms look fat today." - Ya, well I'm 1000 miles from home and I've been indulging in some comfort eating, thank you very much.
"I brought cake! Have some." - No thanks.
"Why you no eat?" - You just said I was fat.
I brought a bag from the pharmacy into work a couple weeks ago as I had gone to pick up some bc pills. My boss being the ever so observant one sees it as I discreetly try to bring it in. "Oh, you went to the pharmacy, what did you get there?" uhh? The worst instance of this happened on my very last day of work. I had been up all night trying to get a bunch of stuff finished up. It was 9am and I had a glorious half hour of sleep that I was cherishing before I had to get up and do some more last minute trips to the bank, ect. Out of nowhere someone starts knocking on my door. Now I'm in bed, naked as the day I was born and the last time I did answer the door in the morning it was some old ajumma jehovah witness; so I ignore it, expecting the person to go away. Instead I get some even louder pounding on the door which doesn't really bother me that much as most days I could sleep through a nuclear holocaust. So I start drifting back to sleep and suddenly my landlord unlocks the door and barges into my place. As he sees me sit up startled he jumps back out the door. I'm pretty deeply annoyed at this point and what happens next? He starts knocking again, at which point I'm kind of obliged to get up and answer the door because  he knows I'm in there. So I do, eyes half-closed, hair standing out at every angle and I'm sure a little drool still hanging from the side of my mouth, (You KNOW you do it too.) and in the politest way possible tell him to fuck off and please come back later.

3. Pollution:
Not much to say about this one. The smog in the city can get so bad that you can feel it blacken your lungs. Littering is just as big of a problem. They have no garbage bins around the city. I'm sure it's due to some paranoia that they would be used to start fires in some youthful, rebellious uprising.

4. Racism:
Being on the tip of the peninsula, South Korea has perhaps been a little isolated from other cultures. This has invariably, alongside their strong national pride caused them to be somewhat... wary of people from different countries Added to all of this, foreigners working as teachers can be pretty douchey a lot of the time. They drink excessively, leave messes all over the place, sleep around with a ton of Korean girls, act obnoxiously and generally re-live their freshman frosh-week for a full year, (Of course there are the exceptions to the rule, you all know who you are.) all the while making loads more money than the Koreans and working half the time. BUT! Through all of that there is still a disturbing level of racism ingrained in a large portion of the population. So behind that old ajummas smile while she's handing you that plate of kimchi and bbq-d, she's really thinking about how much she'd like to ship you out of there for good. There were way too many instances in class where a young child would see a picture of someone with different coloured skin and make a comment that I would only expect to hear out of Mel Gibson's mouth. You eat cabbage that's been sitting in vinegar out in the hot sun for the past 5 years... who's dirty now?

Stay tuned for Part III, the epic conclusion. Included in the final installment: Sexual Repression, Fashion,   Safety Regulations and more!

Lazy Days in Phnom Penh

Before I continue with my South Korea rant I thought I'd send word about Cambodia.

I made it here alive after some problems with immigration in Korea and then some more problems trying to take out cash to pay for my visa upon arrival in Phnom Penh. Met up with a my extremely bearded man and made it back to the hostel. It's been a great week. Kept things low-key after not sleeping for the past two weeks in Korea and we spent the first day wandering down the Mekong and grabbing cheap ($2 cheap) mojitos at a riverside place. Best part was walking around Wat Phnom and coming across an elephant... just chilling and what not... and then even better was feeding the elephant. I helped a brotha out, snuck him some bananas.

Being in the city feels like going back in time a bit. It's very old-world asia, with crumbling french colonial buildings mixed in with the Khmer palaces and temples. Tuk-tuk drivers seem to lurk everywhere as do small, surprisingly pushy children selling books about Cambodia.

Made it up to Siem Reap and toured around the temple for a good 3 days. Saw a lot of different temples - Angkor, Roulous, ..... the Tomb Raider one. We had a good time with Toi, our tuk-tuk driver and had almost as much fun sitting in the tuk-tuk, watching the countryside go by as we did seeing all of the temples. That might have been partly due to the fact that I had some rough food poisoning the entire time and I may, or may not have thrown up in Angkor Thom.....

So right now we're back in Phnom Penh. We decided to go down to Mui Ne beach in Vietnam instead of Thailand since apparently they've been having some trouble with flooding... However we had to wait over the weekend to get our visa's sorted out. It was an interesting bus ride back from Siem Reap. A group of five Cambodians that seemed to be the ringleaders of the bus group packed as many people as possible onto the bus to make a few extra riels. It got to a point that the entire aisle was full of people, plus there were people just standing, hanging around the front of the bus. The toilet stop... was interesting to say the least.

2 hours to go until we catch the next bus down to Ho Chi Min City. By tomorrow afternoon I should be sitting on a beach, looking out towards the South China Sea. Oh, and don't worry, I've got the next part to my KOREA rant all written out and just need to type it up. Till next time!

The Good.

Alright, so after much deliberation and taking out the things that were just downright inappropriate, here it is...

KOREA:

The Good.

The Bad!

THE UGLY!

I'm going to do this in parts. So first!

The Good.

1. Yoogane Chicken Galbi:

Now you've got to understand that gourmet cuisine is not one of South Korea's highlights. They tend to scoop up anything they find and throw it in a pan with an overdose of hot pepper paste.

*Anything = Roasted butterfly larvae to this underwater slug thing that looks like an uncircumcised penis to eels that they skin in front of you.

But the one thing they did get right is chicken galbi. It, like everything else is covered in a sauce so hot that you have an immediate understanding of what a blowtorch would feel like. However, after the first couple bites your taste buds are singed right off so you don't notice as much. From then on it's just spicy-sweet chicken, rice and noodle goodness!

2. Nampo-dong and its Endless Amusements:

Way at the southern end of Busan, in an area known for its Russian prostitutes and strange fish markets lies the sprawling, writhing mass of Nampo-dong. You can find anything here, designer clothes, wool, books, liquor, more strange Korean food. Anything at all... if you can find yourself first. It's a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon, if you're not claustrophobic. The only way to move through the hoards is to elbow the old people out of the way.

My favourite moment here was when Mike and I stood in awe watching this couple haggle over the price of live octopus for their dinner. The woman selling it was having a hell of a time; she was trying to stuff the octopus (still alive) into a plastic bag while it was trying desperately to crawl back up her arm.

3. Power-tripping on students:

Ok, so you probably read that heading and scoffed in disgust... But hey, pleasure in the little things. No, wait! That came out really wrong. Ahh... maybe you've had a really bad day, gotten into a fight with your boyfriend, ect. Problem is that now you're at work and you have no one to take your anger out on. Now I'm not talking about bringing a whip and exacting a blood price, but there is an alarming amount of satisfaction to be gleaned from shutting up an entire room of overly boisterous, misbehaving children with a few choice words. I felt bad about losing my temper maybe once afterwards.... then I passed by a Korean teacher going to class with a switch in her hand. 

The Catch-up

So I realize that I am terrible at these things. But I'm getting to the end of my time here in Korea. As of today, only three weeks until my last day of work. So instead of giving you a play-by-play of the last months I thought I would touch on some of the highlights.

Christmas
It was definitely a different experience having christmas in Korea. There wasn't the normal brouhaha that dominates North America. Without all the marketing and advertising, and having no family around; it was actually harder to get excited about the holidays. Mike and I decided to try to make it as traditional as possible. After a tree debacle in which Mike (with the best intentions) brought home a black christmas tree of death, which prompted me into a crying session over aforementioned tree; we went back out and got a few things to make the apartment a little festive. With the help of our parents back home we even had a big christmas brunch and classic christmas dinner... from a box of course.

Moving
So Mikes employers decided to screw him out of his pension and bonus, so they fired him at the end of January. Which in turn screwed us out of an apartment. You'll now find me living underneath the subway line, down the street from a scrap yard and just around the corner from a drug-muling operation. The good thing is that the place has unlimited hot water. The bad thing is that I'm desperately needing money and conveniently leaving the country soon...

Snow Day
In a city that normally doesn't drop below freezing, we somehow had a snow day on Monday. Don't get me wrong, there was a fair bit of snow, but coming from a country like Canada.... come on! I remember snowdays as a kid. I would be told to buck up and get my ass to school, walk through a blizzard uphill both ways (it really was uphill both ways... I lived at the bottom of two hills) just to get to school and find it closed. So in comparison, this Korean snow day seemed a little silly. They just didn't know how to handle it. Cars were skidding all over the place, korean girls in stilettos were skidding all over the place and for some strange reason everybody was holding umbrellas..... because apparently that will stop the snow from getting on their winter coats?

Run-In at Costco
So I was hanging out at Costco two weeks ago, just about to sit down to dig into a piece of pizza when this tiny Korean girl-child comes running out of nowhere (they don't exactly keep a close eye on their kids over here) trips over my foot and falls face first into the bench that I was about to sit on. She stopped and gave me this 'WHAT have you DONE' look and then ran off. About five minutes later this shadow eclipsed the table and I looked up to see this hulking four-hundred pound Korean man looking down at me while leaning over my shopping cart. He stuck one of his short, chubby fingers in my face and started going off at me in Korean. Now, after eleven months I have had just about enough of all of the sexism and racism thats glaringly prevalent in this country so I started going right back at him. We yelled back and forth at each other for a while before he got frustrated and stormed off. Three seconds later there are Costco employees running around like headless chickens and trying to placate the blob. After watching this guy yell for a while longer and point at me I went over to Jabba the Hut and told him exactly what I thought of him and his parenting skills. Grr.

Stay tuned for the next installment of my bitter monologue... "The Best, Worst and Most Interesting Things About Korea." It'll be a no holds bar rant on the country that I've been living in for the past year and will probably heavily border on blatant racism and kimchi-fueled delusions. It's the best thing since Charlie Sheens flaming fists!