so after all that freaking out everything's okay. i had a quick meeting with mr. han yesterday morning where he gave me an envelope. "please take that home and read it, think about the offer i've given you".

i walked up to my classroom and read it. now the average wages here in korea are around 2.1 million won a month. due to the strength of the won vs. the canadian dollar as of late, that's about 2300 canadian dollars. i currently make 2.4 million. 2,400,000.00 KRW South Korea Won = 2,703.957 CAD Canada Dollars
according to http://xe.com/ucc.

i was prepared to get my wages cut down to 1.9-2.1 million won, in keeping with national averages. we are an above average school in an above average neighborhood, but the tuition cap is pretty insane.

the letter stated "we hope you understand that we are in troubled times, blah blah blah", and said that "if this offer doesn't meet your needs, we will give you a month to find a place where your talents are better suited" or something like that.

then the offer. 2.35 million won. the dude cut my pay by 50,000 won! 56 canadian dollars!!! i sat in my classroom and laughed hysterically for about 2 minutes. other people who are making more than me (people with their MA, B.Ed, or more experience) got their pay cut from 2.6 to 2.5... but still, it seems so ridiculous to make a big deal out of fifty thousand won.

what's more, the wage drop doesn't come into effect until february. my contract ends in march. therefore i get a month and a half of lowered wages.

i still want to go to japan though.

more-i'm going to a punk rock show tonight.



i'm really quite excited about the fact that there's a band called FUCKERS EVERYWHERE.

here's something that i find rather interesting.

it's a satellite photo of the korean peninsula. i don't think i really have to tell you which half is north korea. the white stuff is heat and light sources.

for a zoomable version go here:
http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://epod.usra.edu/archive/images/kofija.gif&imgrefurl=http://epod.usra.edu/archive/epodviewer.php3%3Foid3D87488&h=1024&w=1024&sz=175&tbnid=pGyo1JsE_DwJ:&tbnh=150&tbnw=150&start=6&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522satellite%2Bphoto%2522%252Bkorea%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D

i've tried this blog update twice, and both times my connection went down as i pressed "publish post" and when i returned, everything i'd typed disappeared. i want to punch somebody.

president roh is a dirty communist. he's put in a new tuition cap that i think is a strategy to undercut the private education industry. it limits the abilities of a hagwon (hagwon=studyhouse - the word for private after-school academy) to charge higher tuition. with the crappy economy as it is, it seems that the drop in enrollment in hagwons in general, especially the higher-priced hagwons such as ours, who cater to LG and Samsung executives' kids on their way to harvard/yale... it seems that we could be a dying breed. given my largely socialist thinking, it's not such a bad thing - but forcing it on a country that is so used to an unregulated market fuelled by chaebol cronyism... i think the president is going to make a few enemies if he keeps making policy like this.

we had an emergency meeting about the tuition cap on monday and we learned the planned course of action.

first, our classes are going to get shorter, and we'll be cutting out the literature portion of the class. that's not such a bad thing, because korean kids are so caught up in rote learning that literature is often lost on them. there's little to no ambiguity with the way these kids think - you pose an abstract question to even a higher level kid, and he clams up. the "race to get the right answer" will never be won when there's 2-3 different interpretations of a story. especially when that story is an AMERICAN story like 'sounder' or 'rip van winkle'. korean kids could give a fuck about the US.

second, our classes are going to get bigger, which sucks. the 40% of kids who actually get something out of our classes are going to have even more obstacles in their way - because the class clown element is going to increase exponentially in a 7-9 student class. it's one thing to shut the one annoying spoiled gangnam brat up. to shut him up when he's got 2 or 3 buddies in cahoots is going to be a real waste of a shorter class.

third, our wages are most likely going to go down. perhaps only about 200 bucks, but that's still a drag.

wages are higher in japan. of course the cost of living is higher in japan, but all i do is eat, work and work out anyways. ok i drink beer too but beer is the one thing in japan that is the same price as in korea. everything else is about 10 times the price. plus, japan has a better music scene. it was originally the place i wanted to go most.

my contract is up march 18. i hopefully go to japan with aram and the champion squad directly; after which i will be in vietnam for a month. we'll see what happens next. korea has been a fun ride for sure, but i really could leave it now.

ok. beastorizer is my new band. we play video-game-metal.

it's been a weekend of giggles, folks. giggles, giggles, giggles.

do you all remember the story i told about monster making a kid pick through garbage for coins he'd thrown away that amounted to about 17 cents canadian? rememember that punk bitch's rationale for abusing that kid? "oh, money is very important in korean culture... it's very rude to throw away money". yeah, and female genital mutilation in africa is "just culture". and hating homosexuals and unchecked capitalism is "the american way". culture is gay.

well, we did this experiment on friday night that proves this "korean culture" thing about money to a fucking T.

it's korea, you know... so on a friday night there's pools of vomit any-old-where. most drinking establishments will have urinals full of vomit - the nightclub we went to had 6 urinals, only 2 were usable.

anyways, we're at our favorite watering hole, "pop's" which is just a nice little pub. the bathroom is, like in many korean places, down the block in another part of the building. there's a nice big pool of vomit in the hallway. i remembered the andong garbage-picker story and pulled out a chun (1000 won bill, about 1.10 canadian) and stuck it in the barf, which looked like pureed kimchee and cheez whiz. gingerly, i pressed it down with my shoe, being careful to not get any barf on my shoe. i then ran in to take a whizz.


derek went to the can not 10 minutes later and said "sean, the chun is gone."

someone pulled the equivalent of roughly one canadian dollar OUT OF A PUDDLE OF PUKE!




PUKE! THE STUFF THAT COMES OUT OF YOUR STOMACH AND MOUTH WHEN YOU'RE SICK!!!

so we did it again. another chun, this time with a few 100 won pieces, about 10 cents each. we got a stick and pushed them right down into the puke. we returned a few minutes later AND THE OTHER CHUN WAS GONE. CHUN UPSOYO!!!

someone in korea thinks money is so important that they'd pick it out of a fucking puddle of puke. did i mention that the bathroom adjoining said puddle of puke doesn't have a sink where one can wash off the chun? i really have no explanation. monster does though... "money is very important in korean culture". so is being a flaming retard too, i guess.

next we're going to go to snooty rodeo drive in apkujeong and do the poo-dollar prank, only with 10,000 won. i hope to get video of that.

last night was rad too. we went out to yeonsinnae, the neighborhood where cynthia's cousin the amazing seok-ahn lives (say it sak-awn). we're always going to 'western' nightclubs in hongdae and itaewon, and seok-ahn wanted to take us to a 'korean' nightclub. it was his friend's birthday, and everyone wanted to go mental. sounded like a good idea to us, i guess.the club was perhaps the oddest experience in korea yet. they had a live band. a live band LIPSYNCING. badly, i might add. they had all this crazy stupid stage schtick and they played everything from bad K-pop neuter-squad love songs to the one popular korean punk song. i don't know what the name of it is.

then these two hiphop dudes got up and started doing covers of bad american hiphop like that DMX song "y'all gonna make me lose my mind, up in here..." or whatever it is.we got a little closer just as the hiphop dudes started playing "tutti frutti" by little richard and "the twist" by chubby checker. they both leaped down to the dance floor and started twisting. for some reason the people in the club DIDN'T think this was the funniest thing in the world and gave me dirty looks for giggling like a chipmunk. i guess i didn't understand. korean culture is about smothering everyone in a thick coating of GAY.

i've told you all about how touchy korean men are with each other, have i not? here's a photo of seok-ahn and his two buddies for proof (seok-ahn is on the right).





i've told you about how they're always cuddling and holding hands and rubbing each others' backs, and it's not seen as homoerotic behavior? you get used to it eventually. this one guy "sam" who became my new best buddy last night was talking to me in korean, not a lick of english, the whole time patting my inner thigh as if i was a girl he was hitting on. it was uncomfortable to say the very least, but hey, it's korean culture!

RD goes to take a piss in one of the two urinals at the nightclub that hasn't been christened by a volley of puke. one korean phenomenon is that dudes will always comment on how handsome a foreigner is if they're trying to make small talk... "oooh, bery hand-sommme, bery tall".

RD was placidly taking a leak when he gets this treatment from some weird korean dude. "bery tall!" he says, and then comes right up behind RD and hugs him, WHILE HE'S TAKING A LEAK IN A PUBLIC RESTROOM. he whispers some shit in RD's ear and then starts yammering to his friend in korean.

RD finishes up and the guy grabs him by the face and plants a big wet sloppy one on his face. a complete stranger, so stoked to see a foreigner in a very foreigner-free neighborhood of seoul... that he kisses him and hugs him while he's pissing. and i've had people try to prove to me that there's no gay men in korea... yeah. it's weird. but it's korean culture!

TRUCKS WITH LOUDSPEAKERS ON THEM ARE STARTING TO DRIVE ME NUTS. one of these days i'm gonna run down four flights of stairs in my boxers with a sledgehammer and pound the fuck out of one of these fruits. the rice guy comes around at 8am EVERY MORNING. imagine an ice cream truck, only without the music.

"buy my rice. yummy rice. everyone needs rice. rice is nice" over and over and over again. yeah.

it's getting pretty cold here now. warm in the day, near 0 at night. winter will be like a flip of a switch in about 3 weeks i think. all of a sudden it will be -30. i guess the puke will be too frozen to mess around with it. so sad.

TIGHT BROS FROM WAY BACK WHEN ARE MY FAVORITE BAND RIGHT NOW. it's like lo-fi AC/DC with janis joplin singing. but in this version, janis joplin is a dude and isn't dead. yeah.

funny stuff:

1. bush won. ugh. black humor at its best.

2. the election ended tuesday evening for us. cynthia got her absentee ballot wednesday evening.

3. matchbox 20 is still a band.