Holly Would

Been bad at blogging. Can no longer write in full sentences. Funnies summarised below:

Fat girl in a tshirt ‘reads heavy and light’. I’m confused.

Defining rape and molest to a co-teacher. Then having to explain why leper and apple do not rhyme.

Big, huge, fuck off scary bees flying around like they own the gaff.

Kids admitting to liking a cheeky bit of vino. Not beer or Soju though.

Ambiguous lunches. Think tentacled lungs.

Speaking in a raised voice to stupid children for hours on end will eventually make you dizzy.

Cat Cafes = therapy.

Teacher’s Day. Presents expected. Presets received: a plastic flower wrapped in coffee sachets and multivitamins. Poor effort kids.

Makgoli is horribley addictive tasty rice wine with a jizz like appearance that makes you all kinds of crazy. And then all kinds of AIDs.

If you don’t know the history of something, make it up. I guarantee that version will be much more hilarious.

Koreans actually think a fry up and roast dinner look delicious. Pleasantly surprised. Wish I could return the compliment.

Rooftopping is the new planking.

Korean food can be good. When fused with Mexican it’s devastatingly good. Whodathunkit?

Some bus stops play ominous classic music whilst you stumble around the streets at an ungodly hour and make you question your sanity.

That’ll probably do for now.

Holly’s gone mad.

This week got off to a fairly rocky start. On Friday night, I stepped down off a stool only to tread on a bottle and catastrophically pull my ankle. I was pretty pissed and it still really hurt so I knew it couldn’t be good. But my obvious solution to the problem was to keep drinking until it became light outside. Fortunately I was saved by a Brummy and a Northerner and escorted home. The next day it became clear that walking would be an issue but my hangover (and the fact I wasn’t sure if my Korean medical insurance had come through) meant that I writhed around in tears most of the weekend and dragged my sorry leg to school come Monday. The fact that Nuclear Summit Security guards were a heavy presence at my subway station didn’t phase me as much as it should and by the time I got to school, distressed and sweaty (in temperatures of 5 degrees) I guess it was clear to my co-teachers that not all was well with Paulie.

I was swarmed by Korean women fussing and contorting their faces in various shades of concern. The school nurse numbed and bound me and suggested that I should go to hospital. My co-teachers had to teach so I was to rest in the office (read: Facebook ALL DAY in the office!) and that afternoon I was taken to an orthopaedic clinic. An x-ray concluded there was no break but it was clear from the swelling that something wasn’t right so I was given an ankle ultra-sound. Turned out I’d damaged some ligaments pretty bad, the doctor pointed them out but it just looked like pictures of the sea to me. And thus, I was given an obscene temporary cast and plastic flip flop to wear for the week. My first thought was ‘Is it still okay to go out and get drunk in this at the weekend?’.  As if hearing my thoughts, my co-teacher cried ‘Holly! This weekend, please no Itaewon or Hongdae!’ (our stomping grounds). Sometimes I wonder when my conscious will kick in out here. I was packed off home with a bag of hotdogs, seaweed and squid for dinner from my co-teachers as this is obviously the food of choice for someone sporting an injury.  The next day I hobbled into class and the kids asked me what I’d done. I asked them if they liked my sexy boot and that it was the fashion in England. One kid nudged me, winked and nodded whilst pretending to neck a bottle of booze and said ‘Holly Teacher, I think I know what you did’. These kids are tuned in.

Accidents aside, this week was one plagued by strange food situations. I have come to question everything I eat in my school lunch. I always felt it was ignorant people who declared they were being fed dog meat in countries such as Vietnam and Korea but I genuinely wonder sometimes because I’ve not seen pork like this before. One evening, Jay, Aine and myself decided to chance it in a little Korean dig behind my flat and order by pointing at the pictures that looked the tastiest. I was expecting some nice fried beef and veg, Jay was expecting some nice chicken and veg. But oh no, of course mine turned out to be some kind of innards with a texture that can only be described as distressing and Jay ended up with the classic Asian food faux pas: chicken feet. Needless to say I pretty much ate a plate of onions and the night had to be saved by a second meal of fried chicken. Even after that we ventured to Paris Baguette for some vaguely western coffee and cakes and ended up laughing at the turd-like pastries and vomit burritos.

I apparently have been participating in ‘department meetings’ with my teachers on Thursdays. As far as I’m aware, we just sit and eat and I teach them slang words and phrases. I’ve never seen people half the size of me eat more than me. It just doesn’t compute. We also now have to eat lunch as a whole faculty as opposed to with our department and you’ve never seen or heard such a massive fuss kick up. My co-teachers were literally freaking out at the prospect of eating in the same room and the principle because they have to bow a bit lower when they walk into the lunch room and see him. This week I’ve also tried octopus which is quite frankly shit. It’s more expensive than squid but tastes terrible and I don’t understand it. I also want to know what the brown bowl of water I get with EVERY meal is.

Since I’ve been wearing my cast, I’m allowed to sit with the old people on the train. On the Seoul subway, decrepits and the infirm have specially designated seats and unlike the London Underground, you can’t actually sit in them and give them up for the aforementioned criteria, you must stand and leave them available even if there is no one needing them. I’ve been told off (I think…he was talking Korean) for sitting here before when I didn’t know the drill. But I get a knowing nod from the olds that says, ‘We see your cast, silly waygook, you can sit with us until you’re better’. Thanks for that, olds. Since I’ve had my cast, there’s been a few occasions I haven’t been able to get a seat on a subway and I just can’t work it out, because some people can’t move out of their seat fast enough to let me sit down or they don’t want me walking upstairs unattended, then others are pretending they don’t see the blonde bird wincing, propped up against the subway doors.

My Grade 4 nippers have had me in stitches this week. We’re doing the demandingly named subject ‘I Want Some Chicken’ so this week we did the story of Hansel and Gretel as the house is made from food. The kids decided they wanted to go in groups of four so that meant one wouldn’t have a role to play so I suggested this student was decorated with pictures of food and posed as the house. Seeing small children running around with crudely drawn cookies stuck to their jumpers and chicken drumsticks sellotaped over their eyes and flapping about is truly a hysterical sight to behold. The kids have decided they all want to know me now and shout hello to me and offer me snacks from their dirty little mitts and stare at me expectantly as I eat the goodies wondering what kind of disease I’ll contract from them. I think it’s also something to do with me showing them awful 80s videos that teach English phrases from YouTube, they appreciate the cheese-factor as much as me.

I’ve lost a bit of commitment to padding out strange things so I’m just going to list the rest:

·         I was asked if I was French at a nightclub by a Korean. I don’t believe I did anything to imply I was French, I don’t think I ever have.

·         There was a Scaletrix championship outside my flat.

·         Weird Koreans want to talk to me all the time on the subway and add me on Facebook.

·         Whoever thought a sandwich that is egg and tuna mayo wrapped in ham is a good idea needs to be shot.

·         I finally have a sim for my phone and no longer feel I live in the dark ages.

·         As I write this, there is an announcement in Korean in my apartment. I wasn’t aware there was a speaker and I don’t want this to happen again. It’s quite disturbing.

So I’m going to cut to the chase and fill in the void between this blog and the last. I taught in Thailand, I pissed about in Southeast Asia for a bit, I went back home for 2 months and since 1st March, I have been living in Seoul teaching English. I have missed a whole heap of situations to dramatise in blog-form but rather than fill in the three week backlog, I thought I’d begin with some thoughts, observations and situations from this week at school. And I’m no longer ‘Teachaaa Ho-LEEEE’, I’m just ‘Holly Teacher’. Or Paulie, sometimes it really sounds like they’re calling me Paulie…

I have developed a record in my head (mostly for my own amusement) called ‘Ways to Impress a Korean’. As you can imagine it features note-worthy things I have done to impress a Korean. The list so far is as follows:

1. Eat everything. Even if it doesn’t taste of anything, say it’s delicious. NB: It’s ok to draw the line at intestines, as long as you try it.

2. Get pissed. At school dinners, make sure you show your principle or other high ranking faculty member that you can drink a shit load of soju and not flinch. Then tell them you like vodka, the hard stuff.

3. Be tall. Just a genetic advantage I suppose…

4. Come to work when you’re ill. They’ll think you’re well ‘ard.

5. Don’t have allergies. The last foreign teacher did. It’s all they talk about.

6. Bring in snacks that you do not care for but you know they will love. Like the blandfest that is ricecake.

That’s the list for now. And in other news; I showed a picture of Queen Elizabeth to a class and asked who she was. Their reply was ‘Your Mum’ (not in the insulting way of British kids, they were genuinely being witty) and I was reduced to tears of laughter. In another class I convinced them she was either my mum, my neighbour or that I was Princess Holly of London.

My tastebuds continue to be confused by school lunch offerings. Once minute its soggy fish spine and possible dog meat soup, the next it’s delightful fried chicken or the obvious combination of spag bol with bread and jam.

The sexuality of my Grade 5 boys is becoming questionable. Show them a picture of a hot female pop star and she’s ugly. Show them a picture of Messi and they lose their shit screaming ‘Messi is handsome!’. They do like to fuck with my head. One class will be complete stroppy tweens (my oldest are 11) then my 9 year olds will be screaming they love me, in a somewhat maniacal fanboy manor, for no real reason other than the fact I’m foreign. 

Sometimes, it’s hard to take teaching seriously when given materials that features videos of awkward teenagers looking into the camera by accident and uttering unnatural, scripted dialogue. Also, the names of the modules, such as ‘I want some chicken’ cannot be taken seriously. Especially when it involves my nine year olds jerking about awkwardly like small robots attempting Egyptian/epileptic dance routines to a song called ‘Give me some potatoes’.

It’s also hard to teach when your co-teacher suddenly hands you a Nigerian, Nepalese and USA flag and ask you to explain their meanings to a bunch of ten year olds. Now to me and you it’s not difficult, but there is no simple way to explain the British colonisation of America and how the stripes represent the first 13 states to gain independence. They hear ‘colonisation’ and I can see an imaginary mushroom cloud form where their nuclear bomb brain once was as it has now exploded. Then my co-teacher says even she didn’t understand. What a waste of 5 minutes of flag meaning Googling that was.

I’ve had a bit of a cold since I’ve been here and figured after 3 weeks I might need to see the doctor. On telling this to my co-teacher, I was told I must go to hospital. It’s no wonder Britain is one of the few countries with an NHS, if Asians had it, they’d be up A & E for any old shit and pissing government money away on sherbet-like packs of vague vitamin C powder. After I said no to hospital, I was taken to a pharmacy. Talk about one extreme to another. At no point was the local ear, nose and throat clinic even considered by my colleagues.

To round off this erratic blog, I just like to share the news that classical music plays in our toilets, I have to say hello to the vice principle every morning even though he doesn’t speak English and gives me black coffee that I don’t like (too much awkwardness for 8.40am) and I have had my keyboard changed because apparently I type too loud. That, in no way, was an awkward conversation either.