guess I don’t like to blog anymore

It’s been another long break since the last blog entry I’ve written. A few things have happened, but most wasn’t enough to get me to sit down and write about it. I’ve also been more bitter and jaded than usual and I haven’t felt like venting bitterness in my writing because I can’t imagine anyone would want to read it. It’s coming up on October and we’ve only got three weeks left here, so most of my time has been spent counting down the days. We’ve mostly kept quiet and tried to save more of our money by doing less, as the reality of no longer receiving a paycheck starts to feel more imminent. I’ll talk about a few of the things that have happened in the last couple months.

It was an excruciatingly hot and humid summer, with weeks at a time of conditions that can realistically be described as living in a sauna. We stayed inside and didn’t do much socially, because going anywhere meant hanging out drenched in sweat and smelling like it. When the weather broke, we decided we were long overdue for a visit to our Filipino friends. It had been since that random trip across the country since we had visited KP Mart, which is the local Filipino store that they congregate for socializing on weekends. When we first walked in, they asked us how our vacation had been and assumed that we had gone back to Canada (without notice) and were only now returning. We had to explain that aside from a week-long trip to Japan, we had been in Naju the whole time but had just been anti-social. Considering we generally spend little to no money hanging out with our Filipino friends, it was impossible to explain away our absence and the atmosphere quickly became tense. We spent an hour or two saying almost nothing as the few people present lounged around or kept busy preparing dinner.

I was beginning to think that we had lost our friends from apathetic negligence when somebody we hadn’t met arrived with her child and started talking to us. She taught at a high school in Naju and knew the Filipino teacher who works at our academy. We got talking and soon enough they invited us to stay for the meal they were preparing. It was the dish ‘bangus’ which is something that was recommended for me to try before visiting the Philippines, but I’d never gotten the chance. It was delicious and I ate a lot of it. This tends to be my strongest point when making friends with people from other cultures, as I enjoy eating almost anything from any culture when it is cooked well. This turned the situation around onto its head and they invited is straight away to a gathering they were going to later, which would be a “going away” party for one of the men who had finished his contract and was heading home. They had purchased a goat from an acquaintance and had slaughtered and butchered it and had spent all day preparing different recipes.

Leta and I both agreed to go and we taxied thirty minutes out of town to an industrial park on the edge of Naju where we learned that most of our friends worked. There we met up with a dozen or more of our buddies and had to start trying to explain our absence once again. Explaining our long absence was made more difficult by the fact that they are all very proud to have American/Canadian friends and it is deeply engrained in their mindset that they are somehow intrinsically inferior to westerners. I tried my best to explain that we had been overwhelmed by the weather and staying at home feeling sorry for ourselves. Once they brought out the karaoke machine and we all started singing, things loosened up a lot and people got into the spirit of the evening. They kept bringing dishes out prepared with different parts of the goat in traditional style and each of them was very good. I wasn’t a huge fan of the recipes using the skin or the intestines, but I ate a lot of all of them. Eventually I got talking with one of the guys that I hadn’t met before about our lives before coming to Korea. He had been a tour guide before coming to Korea and that I had changed jobs a lot but that none made any use of my university degree before this one.

The conversation quickly diverted to the disparity in opportunities between people from our two countries and why I thought this was outrageous. I often get into this conversation with my friends from the Philippines, most of which are thirty years old or older; many of which were teachers or had other more specialized careers before they came here to work monotonous “fast work” (as it translates) jobs. These jobs are often dangerous and many times they are treated as lesser human beings by their employers. Even the process by which they come to Korea as foreign workers is rife with exploitation. Their only chance to secure a job like this is to go through an ‘agency’ that puts you in line with other people seeking these types of positions until your time comes. They offer some basic language training and operate as their liaison between the workers and the Korean Ministry of Labor. For this service, the workers are to pay anywhere from 2-4 million won ($2200-4400 Canadian and around the same American these days) from the money they will earn here. Considering their salaries, even working 12 hours a day 6 days a week hard industrial labor, this easily amounts to a quarter to two-fifths of their total income here before taxes. Essentially, their potential wages which seem relatively low to begin with are gouged and then taxed by their own government, leaving them with a lot less than you might think from hearing their income. And these positions are coveted by most Filipinos, who put their careers on hold to be able to feed their families. These are also one-time opportunities and once they finish these contracts, they are no longer eligible to return. You can probably see how the more that I flesh out the details of these situations, the more I get angry about it. So I got into a discussion about how it is foolish to hold on to a sense of nationalism, to be “proud of your nationality”, to put faith in your nation to provide for you and others. Nationality in this sense only divides people who would otherwise recognize their common interests and also creates the illusion that our interests are tied more closely to the rich and privileged in our own society than is the case. This only becomes more acute as the world becomes more globalized and less regionalized; in other words, the less that peoples interests intrinsically depend upon the communities in which they live. Great night, but I had some gastrointestinal trauma the next day from the abundance of goat I had consumed. It was worth it and a good reminder that we have faithful friends here that make great company.

We had heard a long time ago that some other students from SSU were planning to come to Korea soon, but only recently did we find out that some of our friends had moved to Busan. The one time we had visited Busan in June had been so much fun, so we decided to go for the weekend before Chuseok. We learned from the satellite TV on the bus there that there was to be a typhoon that would hit Korea that weekend, but that Busan was going to be near the fringes of it. The weekend was fun, but it rained the entire time and most of the walking around we did was with soaked shoes. Mostly it was just great to get together with Chris Seto and Becky Garrett and actually have a few decent conversations. It helped us realize how socially deprived our lives are here. While there we ate twice at the great Turkish restaurant we tried last time we were there and the food was extremely good as always. We also went to an underground aquarium near the beach which was pretty impressive, but not in a way that makes me want to talk about it.

We had a five-day weekend without work for Chuseok, which is the Korean version of Thanksgiving or the harvest moon or something. We were both really worn out from the week and I started the first two days of the weekend off with a migraine so the whole vacation was more or less sedentary. It was strange for Christmas and other holidays to have passed with barely any recognition from the world around us here, but it was even more depressing in a way to go through the biggest holiday of the year here without any way to celebrate it. We spent most of our time poking holes of doubt in our plans for traveling in Southeast Asia after our contract, worrying about how our money is going to end up getting spent and going stir-crazy from spending too much time indoors. The other teachers had gone away for Chuseok and so had our Filipino friends, so mostly we ended up wandering around Naju for something to do. We went into Gwangju to watch the Bourne Ultimatum, which was okay but nothing special, then checked at the foreigner bar we normally go to and didn’t recognize any of the few people who were there. The only redeeming thing about Chuseok was it helped me realize that there isn’t going to be much I miss about Korea besides the kimchi.

We enjoyed Busan so much that we decided to go again this weekend for Thanksgiving. It was good fun as usual, with a lot of hanging around preparing food interspersing conversations with watching TV. Just like last time, Becky was kind enough to let us stay at her apartment without even having to ask her. When the event dispersed and the leftovers were packed up, Leta and I decided we wanted to take a walk. We noticed there was this ‘river walkway’ type area (kind of a glorified ditch for grey water) that followed underneath the subway tracks in the direction we wanted to head towards. It seemed at first like the type of shady shadowy place that you don’t normally ever want to walk, but as we went on we noticed that quite a lot of families and average looking people were using the area to take walks or bike around. There were also tennis court, basketball and exercise areas interspersed along the walkway, as well as some really impressive graffiti in the tunnels that passed underneath roads or parking lots. So that night was a lot of fun and very memorable.

The next morning started off worse than any morning I can think of. We woke up to a call from our boss frantically talking about some “big water problem” in our apartment asking where we were. We told her we were in Busan and she asked why and then asked where our key was. She was distraught when we reminded her that Busan was five hours away and that we had no idea that we were the only ones with a key to this place. I asked her if we should come home right away and she just gasped and hung up saying “I’m not know what to do.” Naturally we had no idea what to do either. Leta went to grab coffee and I waited for another phone call that we would hopefully be getting. I got thinking that regardless of how this situation was to work itself out, we would need to go home early, so I called my friends and let them know. Our boss called us back and told us that we had “left our water filter on” and that it had flooded our apartment and had seeped down into our neighbors apartment and ruined all their wall(and ceiling)paper. As far as we understood, our water filter does not ‘turn off’ and you don’t turn it off any more than you turn off your refrigerator. She complained that all of this as well as the water costs were “very expensive” and hung up leaving us with NO idea what had happened. We packed up, took the subway to the bus terminal and headed back home. This was more than six hours of wondering whether our cat was okay, whether the people who had gotten into our apartment somehow had let her out, whether they were going to be distraught at the state of the apartment or what we were going to be coming home to. The bus ride was wonderful, with plenty of time to think about all the possible situations, not having a clue about what had happened or knowing whether to be angry or sorry. We got home to an apartment with the windows wide and screens all wide open and our furniture all moved out of the way from the location of the water filter, with all our bath towels on the ground having soaked up the extra water. Nobody was here, but our cat came out of hiding right as we were walking in the door and we have yet to receive a call from our boss about anything. I’m not looking forward to dealing with the whole situation and whatever costs were incurred, but thankful at this point that the cat was alright. The whole ordeal put a frantic tone on the weekend and I don’t look forward to going to work tomorrow, but I guess I never look forward to work so maybe it won’t be much different than usual.

23 more days.