Streets of Ha Noi

We traveled to a bar in Ha Noi whose online review promised rats. We didn't find any. We did find lots of beer. And when our beer was inside of us, our new friends, Nam and Dat, treated us to theirs.

There are three things men are good for, according to Dat: "Drinking, gambling, and fucking." This was just a piece of the wisdom that was given to us on that night.

I tipped a helpful man in the bathroom, and by doing so created a dangerous precedent, evidenced by his later attempts to earn his tip from Gus. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. And when in Asia, don't tip, unless you want your friend to get a neck massage while he pees.

Finally, don't eat Indian food in Ha Noi, particularly the one suggested by the Lonely Planet. The sweetest revenge of the trip was steering a curious couple away from these overpriced curry mongers. Eat outside and drink outside, on the streets, that's what Vietnamese culture is all about.

On the streets, I arm wrestled twice and lost twice. I also leg wrestled, which hurt.

Hong Kong: a 7/10th to scale person's dream

Hong Kong is the least spacious place I've ever been in. Although Gus assures me that New York is more crowded, I don't remember it that way.

(photo of the room)

Here's our room. Two people can comfortably stand in it at the same time, but if one of them started dancing it wouldn't be good. We are in the legendary Chungking Mansion - an enormous and compact monster of a building that smells much better than it should - like incense and indian food (the indian food here is amazing).

Nick took us out to Happy Valley. Hong Kong's famous horse racing track. We blew a few hundred Hong Kong dollars on some statistically sound wagers (horses with funny names), but luck was against us. Our losses will be the city/country/administrative state/whatever it is of Hong Kong's gain. The money goes towards public works, or something positive like that.

We had more luck in Macau - the Vegas of Asia. We sat down at a 10/25 HKD table (roughly 1.5/3.5 US), with buyins of about 2500. I was running pretty hot the whole time, and got up to nearly 5000 by the time I cashed out.

The table was full of Chinese, excluding Gus and I. Unlike the Walker Hill Casino in Seoul, although the dealers all speak Korean, the official game language is English. Here, the game was conducted in Chinese. It was still easy enough to follow, and if we didn't understand something, the dealer or someone at the table would explain again in English.

The Chinese players were good. It felt like it could have been any 1/2 or 1/3 game at home.

a racist on the mountain

I'm three days into unemployed life, and already I need to call a mulligan on yesterday. It's been a while since unemployment for me, and I guess I forgot how to do it. The only time I left the house yesterday was to buy some groceries (mostly booze).

Today I woke up early and went on a short hike on Cheongryung Mountain. An older man gave me a nasty look and muttered something in a mean tone when he saw me walking off the pedestrian trail. I was startled at first because it took me a moment to realize that he was talking to me. And by the time I realized this, he had already passed by.

I was annoyed at him, and I couldn't help but feel there must be some racism behind his anger toward me. I don't really have any evidence, except that I can't imagine why else he would be upset at someone walking outside of the path. It's not like he owns the mountain, or is liable for me hurting myself, or that I was walking on someone's garden or something.

I will admit that he may have had his reasons to associate negative stereotypes with foreigners. I'm embarrassed sometimes by stories about things that foreigners do in Korea. Maybe he saw me as just another out of control "waygook" who doesn't give a shit about the rules, even one as simple as staying on the walking path.

But renegade foreigners or no, there's no excuse for having a sucky attitude towards people you don't know.

Looking around at the other Koreans on the mountain, smiling, many with their families, I took comfort that the man before was a rare example.

I decided that I need a purpose for my next two or three months. So I decided I'm going to learn as much about Korea as I can. I've already got a start on the language, and I certainly know more about the people than I did a year ago, but now I'm going to make learning more about those things a priority.

I acquired two new classes yesterday, putting my total up to three. I'll be working about 9 hours a week, and making about 2/3 of my old salary. Not a bad way to end this chapter.

The job market here is absolutely ridiculous. Since quitting, I've gotten about one new job offer a day. Granted I did a little bit of job hunting, but nothing major. From what I hear from people who have been in Korea longer than I, this is a bad market for jobs. If this is bad, I really can't imagine what the "good days" were like.

Unemployment

Today is my first day of unemployment in Korea.

Kyle commented that I'm on an unemployment cycle. I work for about a year, then unemployed for some amount of time, and then work again. I guess it's been true so far, but it hasn't really been long enough to tell. You could also call it an employment cycle.

I woke up around 9:30 today. A couple years ago, when I had just quit my job at Mellon, I remember waking up the next day, feeling euphoric. Today I felt pretty good, not as good as when I quit Mellon, but still pretty good. I'm excited about the coming months.

Now that everything is actually over, I hope to write down some things that happened, and what they might mean. For the last year and four months, I have had an incredibly weird job.

The reason I'm unemployed now is because the school that I worked at, Break Away English Academy, has closed due to having no more money. I'll get more into that later.

Today I walked around my neighborhood. It was the first sunny day in at least a week, so I tried to soak up as much sunlight as I could. If there are such a thing as past lives, I was probably a plant in one of them. I'm pretty happy about just sitting in the sun and doing nothing, which is also what plants like to do.

I'm at a coffee shop now. I drink a lot of coffee these days. I was worried that I was drinking too much coffee, so I read about what coffee does to you. I think it's okay to drink a lot of coffee. There are some good side-effects too, and they say that people who drink coffee as a whole are less likely to kill themselves than those who don't.

My boss let me take some things from the school home with me. I took the coffee maker. I was really excited about getting it. In fact, I think I was more concerned about taking that coffee maker on the final day than I was about getting my salary. I could buy a lot of coffee makers with my salary, but for some reason getting a free coffee maker from work was really important to me. I think it's a silly way to think about things.

Next week I will start teaching a student from my school at her house. Her family is moving to New Zealand in January, so they want to cram before they go. I'm looking forward to it a lot, because they're a really nice family.

I think I'm going to miss a lot of my students. It just seems like another day today, but it will probably hit me later. Some of them I've taught since I arrived here last August. I gave my phone number out to some of the ones I really like. Not really for lesson purposes, but just to send me a message sometime. I wonder if that sort of thing would get me in trouble in the US? I think it probably would.

Notable Events of the last 4 or 5 Months

-Went to the border, stepped into North Korea for a few minutes. Saw a North Korean guard. He had binoculars.

-Ran a half marathon near the border. They lost my application so I ran under some Korean guy's name - Lee Gwan something or other. Didn't win. On the way home, I peed in a water bottle.

-Coworkers and friends went back to whatever place they came from, replaced by a new crop of bright-eyed, bushy eyebrowed people.

-Got drunk on the rooftop of my apartment building with some Mongolians. They were drinking Genghis Khan vodka. Is that irony or the exact opposite of irony?

-To commemorate my friend leaving, we dropped a bouncy ball from the twelfth floor into an alleyway. Amazingly, it did not kill anyone.

-A new bar opened up called "Liquor Burger." It's owned by a guy named Aaron and his Korean wife whose name I can't remember. They serve mini burgers. They have a foosball table. It's across the street from my apartment.

-Went to Korean Disneyland. It's called Everland. It has a bunch of Disney-like characters that just aren't quite right. It has a really awesome wooden roller coaster. Also, they sell beer and you can drink it anywhere.

-Went to a waterpark named Caribbean Bay. They also sell beer there.

-Ate some pig intestines. When they went on the grill, they squirmed and puffed up and something dripped out from inside them. Probably poop. They didn't taste great. Very chewy.

-My school is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and has been for some time now. I will get into this in greater detail when I am more removed from the situation. It's probably not all my fault.

-Saw a live Starcraft tournament. It's a computer game from the 90s that Koreans play extremely well. Korean teenagers dream of becoming pro players. Some of them make it and play in front of hundreds of cheering fans. It was one of the more bizarre and awesome things I've seen here.

Hwacheon Peace Marathon

Hwacheon is a beautiful forest area, somewhere near the North Korean border.

The course was mostly on the main road of the town. They didn't close the roads off completely, so sometimes cars would be allowed through and would drive past us.

The first leg of the marathon slowly climbs up the base of a mountain. There is probably about 8-10 km where we were gradually climbing. At the half-way point of the marathon, we turned around and ran back to the start, using a slightly different path.


The first half was fine. The second half was like I was in my own hell.

It was really terrible. If this were my first marathon, I'd probably be inclined to not do it again.

Here were some things that contributed to making me so miserable:


1. It was really hot, and there was no shade.
2. The hill.
3. I was recovering from a cold.

Number 3 was probably the largest factor in my misery.

Looking back at it now, with several days past, it doesn't seem as bad. I know I've forgotten it just how awful it was, and my mind is drawn to some of the more fond memories of that day, such as meeting some cool people in the expatriate running club I joined.

For the first 12 kilometers I ran alongside a guy named Chris. He's one of the few foreigners here that's neither in the military or an English teacher. He's a reporter, who focuses specifically on North Korean issues.

He's had lots of prior marathoning experience, so I decided it would be wise to run with him.

He told me from the beginning that he'd just go at my pace. He wore a watch, and every kilometer sign we passed, he would announce our time. I imagined that he was judging me a little bit, so I tried to speed up a little bit.

We finished 5k in about 26 minutes, five minutes faster than my first 5k in my last marathon. So I accidently ran faster to try to impress my new friend. I'm sure that it affected me later on.

He peeled off for a pee break at about 12k, and told me he'd catch up later. And catch up he did, but not until the final 5k.

I on the other hand did not pee. I had the urge to pee at the beginning of the race, but I didn't do it. After a while, I didn't have to pee anymore. When the race was over, and I drank a bunch of water and gatorade, I still didn't have to pee. It wasn't until the 5 hour bus-ride was over that I finally peed.

I sweated like a Korean taking an English exam. My entire body was covered in a layer of my own salt.

In the last 8k stretch, we ironically ran next to a river. For some reason this is the stretch that was most stingy with the water/wet sponge stations, or maybe that's just how I perceived it.

It was also the stretch that had the least shade (being none at all). It was between 12 and 1 PM when I was running this part. I think it was nearly 90 degrees. It shouldn't have been exceptionally hot for a Tucson bred man such as myself, but yet it was. It was probably because I'd been running for 3 hours already.

My pace slowed down considerably here. This is where Chris caught up to me at a water station. He started walking, and so I did too. "One on, one off," he said. Meaning we'd walk for a kilometer and then run for one. "It's about as effective as running really really slowly anyway, and it keeps your body temperature down."

I guess my body was about to overheat or something, because I felt much better when I started walking.

Chris checked his watch. "You can still PB (personal best) if you put your ass in gear."

So I reluctantly started running. As soon as I thought that I was out of Chris's sight, I walked again for a little while, and then ran/walk to the end, where our group cheered my on for the victory lap around the stadium.

I didn't PB: I missed my previous time by about 2 minutes. Not bad, considering the conditions.

A pregnant lady fetched my complimentary finisher's medal and snacks for me, as she was clearly in better condition to do so than I was.

Since Chris and I were the only ones stupid enough to run the full course today, once he finished we got on the bus and had a 5-hour bus ride back into Seoul.

Something to note about this bus that we privately chartered: it's a nore-bang bus (karaoke bus), complete with TV and microphone. We sang songs on the way back. Or rather, I listened and tried to pretend I was asleep or in too much misery whenever they elected a new singer. Usually I'm all over karaoke, but at this time, I actually was too miserable to sing.

Another interesting thing is that is not even the first nore-bang bus that I've been on. I think it's standard for buses in Korea to be equipped with karaoke equipment.

Bad Teacher

Now I don't do this very often, but sometimes my students are so unintentionally cute with their incorrect English that I don't correct them. Sometimes I will even encourage their mistakes, because they are just too adorable.

Does it make me a bad English teacher to ignore and/or encourage my students' incorrect English? Before you answer that question, let me show and tell you some examples.

Two 3-year old girls both thought that "zero" was "zebra," so whenever I would count down from five, they would join in... "five, four, three, two, one, zebra!!!"

They still don't say "zero," but they've gotten a little bit closer with "zebro," which is great too. It makes me think of a fraternity loving zebra.

Here's the notebook of a girl named Bella. I don't know what her 8-year old life is like outside of English hagwon, but I like to imagine it's full of champagne, expensive cars, and gold jewelry.

Sometimes they are unintentionally obscene and racist as well. I do correct them when that happens, but first I make sure to document it: