This is a store in Myeong-Dong. It's the store for underachievers!

Art, in Jo's hagwon building. So pretty... the pretty colours... being... drawn in... can't... re...sist.... the .....pretty....col..... ZAP!

There is a superstition in Korea about the number 4. Supposedly, the Chinese character (or "hanja") for the letter four is "sa", which means "death" or "die". Therefore, the number doesn't appear on hospital elevators or the elevators of older buildings. Pictured here, there is no four on this giant watch advertisement.

Jo and I went to a sushi restaurant about a month or two ago. The place was called Sushi-Sushi. Pretty creative, huh? We had a great time. The sushi rotates around the restaurant on these little conveyor belts, and you pick up the ones that you want. Then, when you're finished gorging yourself on delicious sushi, they count up the different kinds of leftover plates at your table and charge you that way. I tried a bunch of different tasties... like shark's fin seaweed wraps with caviar. Yummy!

It's a sushi-surprise! What's inside box number 1? Yes, you guessed it! It's RICE!

Catch it while this cold sushi is HOT HOT HOT! It's so popular, it's flying off the shelves! Why, it's selling so fast that we TRIED to take a picture, and all we got was this!

Tadaa! Rotating food.

Sea-oddity, served on a bed of ice. Mmmm. Seriously, this thing looked like something that came from a sci-fi movie. It was squishy looking with spout-like bumps covering its entire surface. I wasn't sure if I should eat it, or if it would eat me... so I left it. Bye! And away it conveyered.

It's SOJU-MAN!!!!!! Soju is pretty much Korean Vodka. This guy here is pretty much the adult's equivalent of every boy's idol. A word on the history of soju... originally it was made from rice, until there was a serious shortage of rice in the kingdom, so a certain prohibition came into effect in an effort to save food. The large companies that made soju then made a deal with the government to sell soju made from sweet potatoes instead of rice. These days, alcohol is distilled to its pure form from who knows what substance, then mixed with water, and a slight sweet potato flavouring is added. Because of its constituents, it tastes very similar to vodka.

Here's (from left to right), Jo's friend Mi-Ja, Jo, and Jo's friend Hi-Yeon.

A finely aged scotch... check out the price tag!!! Keep in mind that it's in won (so knock off 3 zeroes), but STILL! This scotch had its own security guard. I took a picture and she told me no pictures allowed. I think she also told me to respect the scotch. Love the scotch. BE ONE with the scotch.

Here is the Mall at Express Bus Terminal. It extends so far into the distance that... you could watch you dog run away through the crowd for 3 days!

Delectible plates of scrumptious sushi. The best sushi, in my humble opinion, is tuna. It's in the middle.

It's sushi-man!

My life is a wild party. I like pigeons.

Lovely Work

Sick today.

I was sick last night also... puked. Lovely. There was blood in my puke. Lovelier.

Last night I called in to work to say I wouldn't be in for the night classes. I spoke to the director over the phone. She said that she would talk to me later. No call came. I went to sleep for the night. The next morning, at 7:00, I received a call from the school's secretary, telling me "Hurry, you're late for work!" I again explained that I was sick. She sounded surprised. Nobody had told her. 15 minutes later, I got a call from my director telling me that I'm irresponsible for not calling in to let them know that I wouldn't be in to work. She said she was "disappointed in me". I texted her back to let her know that the feeling was mutual.

By the way, did I mention we don't get any sick days at our school? I'm going to have to make up for this on an off-day.

That's all for today. I'm waiting around for my night classes. I don't want to go into work - not so much because of the work itself, but rather because I don't have the energy to argue with my director about how ridiculous she is, and to defend myself against unmerited blame. I'd rather be at home, getting better, but then I suppose I'd be "irresponsible", and I don't want to spend my entire weekend at school making up classes.

Absenteeism

*sigh*....

****SIGH****

Anyway, that kind of is a good description for how I've felt recently. As you can probably tell from the total and utter lack of e-mails and blog updates, I have been completely exhausted. I thought I could do it, but I just can't take it anymore. The school's schedule is just too rough on me, and I have run out of steam.

Basically, I wake up at 5:45 every morning, get ready, go to work, work until 1:00, work on other things in the afternoon, then return to work at 6:00 and work until 9:40, at which point I go home, go to bed, and repeat.

On top of that, I am completely frustrated with the complete lack of sense on the part of the school. Coming back to Korea this year, I thought I was well prepared for the lack of infrastructure, management, time urgency, and common sense, but really, I was fooling myself. You never really get used to it. It seems like every other day, I end up shaking my head over some stupid little detail that could easily be solved in a reasonable way, but that ends up being something ridiculously unreasonable. Bobbi, my coworker, talked before about how everything in life is a matter of economics, and now I can really see how she is totally right. The smartest people in life really can identify what they are trading for what, and make deals that are worth it, but the unhappy people in life don't realize what they are trading for what. Over the last 6 months, I have come to realize that I've been trading all of my free time, my health, and my happiness for a lump of cash, and frankly, that lump is looking much too small these days. So, I decided last month that it needed to change or I was outta here.

Originally, I asked a simple request to my boss - could she work the schedule a bit so that I could have more than 8 hours between my night and morning shifts (so I could get some more sleep at night)... after all, she was able to manage it already for Bobbi, who doesn't work early early mornings. There was obviously some sort of miscommunication going on because my manager (despite speaking nearly perfect English) misconstrued "rearrange" to mean "eliminate". So, the deal I was offered was to have 30% of my hours eliminated and make 45% of my original salary. Now you don't really need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out... unless you use Korean math. Anyway, my response? No thanks.

On top of that, I haven't been too impressed with the way that the school operates... more specifically, how my medical insurance came 4 months after my starting date, how I was asked to work illegally for 2 months without a visa, how the school fakes actual salaries to save money, how it clumps housing into teachers' salaries for some sort of strange reason (I think it has something to do with putting teachers' salaries into a higher tax bracket), how it tries to move teachers from apartment to apartment to save money, how I asked for some sort of change to my schedule because I was miserable all the time and in a month nothing happened, how I was asked to work a month LONGER than the 30-day-notice that I had given to the school as a "favour", and how I was asked to look for my own replacement as a "favour", despite the argument I had to have just to get my visa release letter, which the school has no reason to withhold, and how the school conveniently "didn't know" about the law that states that all employees must get pension, and so on and so forth. There are other reasons as well, but I'm starting to get frothy at the mouth just listing these few.

By the way, my manager just called me a second ago to tell me she had rearranged the time of one of my classes this month so that "I could have a longer break in the middle of the day"... without asking me first which I would prefer... which means that she's probably concealing the real reason for switching the class time and trying to pass it off as her being generous (she told me I should thank her). We'll find out tonight from my student the real reason for changing the class time... This kind of blatantly obvious disguised motive happens all the time - for instance, when the manager of the Indian restaurant downstairs invited everyone at my school to a free lunch (to make the restaurant look full on the day of a news story shoot), and our manager "invited" us all to this lunch while failing to mention that it the restaurant itself that was footing the bill (I alone knew about the real state of affairs because I got the invitation from the manager the night before who told me to pass on the message).

Anyway, the bottom line is that I'm not going to be working at my school anymore from April on. I'm going to find a school with better hours and I'm going to be much much happier. The whole process has been a real learning experience for me, so I'm really glad that I went through it. I think that I'm more able to say "no" to ridiculous requests and point out exactly how the person asking me to do that is being ridiculous. DESPITE circular logic, to boot! :-)

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to formally apologize to everyone out there for being so out-of-touch for the last 5 months. I will be more in touch come April. I promise.

Thanks for reading over my rant.

Before I end this post, let me clarify something... working in Korea is not a bad thing - after all, I came back for a second helping despite these things... but make sure that if you do come to Korea, expect gross illogic, sneaky practices, and just be strong and look out for yourself. With no solid and reliable infrastructure in a country (ANY country), this sort of thing happens. Korea is a beautiful country with great food, great people, and a great culture. It's just that hagwons (private institutes) are not quite up-to-speed in terms of ethical workplace practices, and often tend to fall into deceptive practices. It's something that I'm trying to change a little bit here and there - for instance, the school has agreed to give pension to its employees after I made a big stink about it all. I hope they hold to that and it comes into effect after I'm gone. There are friends who are still there, so they should see its effects.

Well, it's about time I got to work. Yay work.

"...just focus on the goal... focus on the goal... don't look down... don't look down..."

Cheers