We were sitting on the subway when an older Korean gentleman sat down next to us, sandwiching my friend between him and myself. He stared for a minute, leaning over her, as if amazed to see me, as if I was some mythical animal he was sure didn’t exist.
“I’m a bloody unicorn,” I thought bitterly as I stared back, making it clear I knew what he was doing. He finally spoke.
“Russian?” he said, tentatively, hopefully. “Russia?” he said again, a little more forcefully, still leaning over and gazing at my blonde hair, eyes flicking down occasionally to my cleavage.
“No!” I said, angrily. I got out my teacher voice. “Anniyo!” I said again, then turned away from him. He backtracked a little, though the sad cow look did not leave his face. “Where are you from?” he asked.
I refused to answer, but my friend, after looking at me quizzically, turned to him and gamely started to chat to him in her new Korean. She was stumbling through, giggling, and he was responding but still staring at me. I elbowed her a few times, hissed her name, but she didn’t understand why I was being so rude to this man and continued to talk to him.
Finally, the subway stopped and I pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go,” I said, shooting a dirty look at the man, who continued to gaze sloppily at me. “Hurry.” As we waited for the doors to open, I stared right back at the man, eyebrows raised. The challenge didn’t work: he thought I was gazing into his eyes, and continued to stare.
The doors opened and I pushed through before they’d opened all the way, tripping as I did so. “Fuckl!” I swore loudly, frustrated.
“What the hell?” she asked. “What’s wrong? Why were you so rude to him?”
“..Seriously?” I said.
“He just wanted to know where you were from….”
I looked at her unbelievingly, realizing nobody had told her and she thought I’d been unspeakably, unnecessarily rude.
“Sweetie,” I said. “In Korea, ‘Russian’ means ‘prostitute’. He was openly asking me if I was a whore. He wanted to know if I was open for business.”
Her jaw dropped. “Oh shit,” she said.
“Goddamn,” I said, looking around. “This is the wrong fucking stop.”
Yesterday, a student threw an eraser at my face. It bounced off, I blinked. “OUT!” I roared. Then, my counselor made him cry.
Another kid got up to pour pepsi on a classmate’s head. When he sat down, his chair had been pulled out and he landed on the floor.
Karma’s a bitch.
Filed under: travelling
I decided to stick around Asia for a little while instead of fucking straight off to Europe.
I’m trying to act really nonchalant and worldly when i talk about job offers and interviews. I’m trying to drop Hanoi and Bangkok into conversation like it was Toronto or Edmonton. I’m trying to sound like jumping around the world is no big deal to me, and having job offers in 3 different countries is par for the course.
The truth is, when I say that I have a job interview for a position in Thailand, I’m squealing like a little school girl inside. I can’t quite believe that it’s possible, or that it will happen, or that it is in any way a wise or responsible thing to do, to jump on a plane (again) to go to a job I know nothing about (again) in a country with a foreign language and a city I will probably lose myself in (again). I can’t quite believe that I’m qualified or grown up or cool enough to be a ‘globe-trotter’, or to casually accept jobs on a different continent. I’m not entirely sure that, in 10 years, when I have a resume of countries but no real career prospects, I won’t regret settling down sooner.
I have 2 interviews for jobs in Bangkok this week, a job offer in Thailand, and there’s a school in Hanoi that is considering me for a six month contract. I’m on waiting lists for schools in Taiwan and Kuala Lumpur.
No big deal.
A little while ago, we level-tested all of our students. We put our senior level students through an extra oral test so that we could rank and stream them into new classes.
Right before the test, I caught a kid with a water gun. Water guns are not allowed, especially not in an unsupervised classroom, so I confiscated it. I’m a grownup, and confiscating toys is part of my job.
Then I left my students to write essays and wait their turn to be tested orally (‘oral test’ was starting to sound gross), and I went into the testing room with the other teachers.
I still had the water gun.
The students, nervous and quiet, filed in four at a time and sat opposite four teachers with marking schemes in front of them. Every time they opened their mouths to talk, a new little number was added to the marking scheme of all four teachers. “Ye have been judged!” that little number said.
They were not happy campers.
On the way out, each student got squirted with my water gun.
Later, as the testing was finished, I started spraying the other teachers, and it turned into a bit of a water fight in the hallway. When I got into the classroom, my pent-up students jumped on me, got the gun, and I definitely got a revenge-soak.
Later, one of the Korean staff told me that carrying a water gun around school was not exactly professional.
Obviously. I spend my day with 12 year olds. How professional do you expect me to be, exactly?
Filed under: idiocy (other people's)
The BFF and I were at the office one night last week, drinking beer and telling rude jokes after work. We were joined by Jordan, a man the BFF knows better I do. Probably because the BFF is a lot nicer than me, and has a much higher tolerance for annoyance.
Jordan is a rare breed of man. He is one of those that ignores me because I’m a woman. He talks over me, cuts me off, and pretends he doesn’t hear. There is an unusually high percentage of these men among the expats in my city. I react by saying more and more outrageous things which have the BFF smirking into his beer but which Jordan doesn’t pick up on.
But, as snarky as I am, even I get tired of this. Jordan tried to tell me that the discovery and creation of America was so much more interesting than that of Canada. “Uh…” I said. “Before the American Revolution, they were the same history.” “I took a course,” he said – wait for it – “In the eighth grade”. Eventually, I drained my beer and told the BFF I was going to jet.
“What are you gonna do?” he asked. “DJ a bit and go to bed?”
“Yeah – it’s been a while,” I said.
“You’re a DJ?” asked Jordan. “My friend’s a DJ.”
“Uh, yeah….” I murmered.
“That’s cool.”
“Yep!”
“But you’re going to DJ in your house? Alone?”
“I certainly HOPE so,” I said.
“That’s SO WEIRD…..why are you laughing?”
I had to get out of there, because any minute I was going to demonstrate why ‘DJ’ is a nickname for masturbating, and he would NOT have liked that.
Later, the BFF told me I probably shouldn’t laugh at him. “He wasn’t supposed to get it,” he said.
“That couldn’t have gone better if you’d SCRIPTED it!” I howled.
