Filed under: being foreign, food, idiocy (my own), idiocy (other people's), moral outrage
I just spent the weekend in the hospital. WELCOME TO THAILAND!
As part of the process to get a work permit and extension of stay for my visa, I need to take a course in Thai Culture. A two day course. The module on culture takes an hour and a half. I don’t know if that’s more insulting to me or to the Thais. I was signed up for this course, which was to take place in Bangkok very early in the morning – requiring a 4:30am wake up call and a 5:30 meet up. The gentlemen who were accompanying me and I had decided to travel together to split costs and to help each other find the way – one of them has a Thai wife that was coming along for the ride.
Both were shocked that I managed to make it to the meeting point without getting lost and, I imagine, simply giving up. The people I work with think I`m a helpless idiot, but that`s a story for another time.
At 2am, shortly before my alarm went off, I was curled in the fetal position in the bathroom, sure I was going to die. My stomach was killing me. However, this has happened before, where my grogginess in the middle of the night has led me to paranoia, and I went back to bed. In the morning I was rather sick, but I chalked that up to getting up at 4:30 in the damn morning and sucked it up.
By 7, I`ve taken a cab, a van, and another cab into central Bangkok where the kindergarten that was hosting the course was. The others went off to find some coffee; I wilted. And got dizzy. And couldn`t keep my head up.
Shit, I thought.
Finally, weighing my options, I went to the course instructor to ask him when the next time one of these courses would be offered: would it be worth waiting for the next one, or should I suck it up? He did me the enormous favour of having me sign in for the day and sent me home to bed.
However, not long after reaching home and getting to bed I realized that I was, in fact, dying. I won’t go into the gory details, but it turns out that I did in fact get food poisoning, and the stay in the hospital was not one of my high points. I needed help to shower, and that wasn’t the worst it got.
Now I’m at home, hoping I can go to work tomorrow, with a plethora of medications, each on a different schedule. The nurses were kind enough to get instructions printed for me in English, so I know when to take the pills, but I have no idea what they are. I have gotten used to taking mystery medicine from doctors who don’t have enough English to explain.
I wish that I was writing about some exciting Thai adventures or mishaps, crazy food or tourist attractions or trips but! alas – a hospital visit will have to do.
Gross.
Well, they’ve declared a state of emergency in Bangkok.
I have, as ever, perfect timing.
I can barely pronounce the street I live on well enough for cab drivers to understand me. I have to point and yell “THAT WAY!”, and that only works when I know where I am.
Now I might find myself in the middle of a violent protest, wandering around helplessly repeating “thank you” and “hello” and “delicious!”, because so far, that’s the only Thai I know. I didn’t think I’d need to know “Please, don’t shoot!”
Christ.
I have unreliable internet and no tv, so staying on top of the the news is difficult. I don’t know my way around or how to find my way home except for from a very few places. I haven’t found my feet yet. And now there is a bloody state of emergency.
They’ve closed the domestic airports. The international one may close as well.
On top of all that, I have found myself in a much different working environment. I was the youngest foreign teacher I knew in Korea, but at least we were all of the same generation. Here I am the youngest by far and one of only three in my twenties. The rest are career teachers, middle aged or near retirement, with families and wives and children. I don’t want to be desperate enough to ask the other two young ones to please, be my friend!, but I don’t know what else to do. I was always socially awkward, and this is not a situation where making friends is easy.
damn.
I also had a major setback in my war against the ants today. They got inside my sealed bag of sugar. The bag was ALIVE, people.
Filed under: being foreign
Here are two instances of Korean strangers being exceptionally kind to me even though they couldn’t speak to me.
1. Last night, I was walking home in the rain. I had left my umbrella at the pension office, so I was getting wet. I’ve had Korean women share their umbrella with me before – walking beside me until I get to my store or the subway station. But this guy saw me and wasn’t going my way, so he just handed me his umbrella and smiled. then he ran through the rain in the other direction.
2. I was packing, and I started to bring my garbage bag down to the first floor. It was a 100litre garbage bag – it was about as big as me. I dragged it to the elevator, and when I got to the elevator there happened to be a delivery man in there on his way back from a delivery – with an empty wheelie cart. He took one look at me, smiled a little, and took the bag from me. He heaved it onto the wheelie cart and took it to the dumpster, and heaved it up into the dumpster for me. Then he smiled and walked away.
Filed under: being foreign, idiocy (my own), idiocy (other people's), students, travelling
Two weeks tomorrow, I will:
- be finished working the asshole who says ‘black people look like monkeys’ and ’some rape is consensual’, the dumbass who needed help to buy condoms because at 24 years of age, she thought the pink box was for girls and the blue box was for boys, and the girl who knew a few Koreans in Chicago and thinks that trumps a year’s experience in the country. Seriously, in her first week, bitch corrected my pronunciation on my kid’s names.
- be finished working 12 hour days. Whoever thought 9 hours of teaching a day was a good idea was clearly smoking laced crack.
- be finished trying to impress middle school kids. Somehow, when I’m telling jokes and nobody’s laughing for three. hours. straight. I feel like the most uncool kid in the classroom. I’m the teacher.
- be finished packing.
- be on a plane to MOTHERFUCKING BANGKOK.
Reasons I am excited for Bangkok:
- the name.
- Tigers and elephants and monkeys, oh my!
- A more diverse city, including a visible gay community and more races than ‘Korean’ and ‘English Teacher’.
- Beaches
- Rainforests
- A city where drugs are available. No, I am not planning to partake – sounds like a great way to get the HIV or find myself sentenced to death, but Korea’s weird – drugs are literally not available here. Bangkok, for that reason alone, will attract a much different crowd.
- A civilised work schedule. Breaks between classes? No high school kids? Less than 4 teaching hours a day? Sick days? Sign me the fuck up.
- A more adventurous crowd of expats (hopefully) instead of the incestuous douchebaggery reminiscent of a high school cafeteria.
Reasons I will miss Korea:
- The willingness of the Koreans to bend over backwards to understand me, as long as I don’t attempt to speak their language.
- The women who walk beside me to share their umbrella or their fan when I forget mine.
- Drinking with strangers who offer me drinks on my birthday.
- Knowing all my bartenders personally.
- Children who are respectful and polite and carry things on the elevator for me, right before counting my fat rolls.
- Public drunkeness. Seriously. That will never get old. A new electronics mart opened across the street from work the other day, and their promotion? Giving away free beer. There I was, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, walkind down the street with a paper cup of beer.
Funny things I have done recently
- Had a class full of eight year olds running around with their hands clapped over their ears shrieking “No potato, teacher! No potato!”. I told them their ears were dirty enough to grow potatoes.
- Had a class full of seven year olds with gold stickers all over their faces. They got a sticker every time they got a word right and I had nowhere else to put them.
- Got away with watching ‘Mulan’ in a senior class.
Yesterday, I was playing chopsticks with one of my students. I have no idea how to play chopsticks. I lost before he told me the rules. Then he yelled “You LOST, you WAYGOOK!” He was delighted with himself.
“That was pretty rude,” I said. He didn’t get it.
“But…that just means you’re not Korean!”
“I know it means foreigner,” I said. “But listen to this: ‘you got the answer wrong, you stupid Korean.’ Same thing, right?”
“Oohhh,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
(This is the same student who wrote ‘waygookin’ on my arm – in case people didn’t know that I’m not Korean. I couldn’t stand out more here if I tried.)
Knowing my luck, though, that was the precise minute that my boss turned the camera on in my classroom, heard only that line, and thinks I’m a bloody racist.
Awesome.
Filed under: being foreign
I went to get my hair cut today. The hairdress took one look at my hair and said, “oh, no!”. She ran her fingers through my hair, clucking disapprovingly.
“Cut off?” she said. “Very damagee. Cut off?”
“Anniyo,” I said. “Just trim.” My hair is damaged because you bleached the hell out of it, I thought.
“But your hair is so weak and thin!”
THAT’S BECAUSE I’M WHITE, ASSHOLE.
This weekend I was in Daechon – a town on the coast that I’ve never been in before. I was there for the mud festival – a two week party on the beach.
We were walking down the street, covered in mud, carrying beers, when we saw a bar with a Korean man standing outside. “NO FOREIGNERS” said the sign on the door.
“Really. REALLY?” my (drunk) friend asked.
He glared us, nodded.
I have no words.
No wait. Yes I do. Here they are: FUCK. KOREA.
Filed under: being foreign, idiocy (my own), idiocy (other people's), moral outrage
I just got the scare of my fucking life.
This morning, I saw the sun rise for the third consecutive morning. It’s like I’m nocturnal! But with a day job.
I was not at a bar all night yesterday. It was a work night. Seriously, I would have been home by 3am. I AM RESPONSIBLE. No, I was in the emergency room all night with my friend. Middle of the night scares are never fun: try them in a foreign fucking country.
I left her there at 9am, sure she wasn’t going to die, happily drugged out, no longer awaiting any scary tests, and with someone new on the way to take over for me (I left, but I’m not the callous bitch I felt like, ok?). I slept for 4 hours, slept through my alarm, and took a cab to work.
Moral Cursader and Hero To The Masses that I am, I then led a (slightly sleepy) protest to make sure that said friend’s classes were covered. I work at a school with no supply teachers or back-up plan for when a teacher is sick. That means: I have taught with a bleeding urinary tract infection and with food poisoning. The girl who spent the night in the emergency room, had a meningitis scare, still didn’t know what was wrong, and had a choice between debilitating pain or being seriously drugged out and high was told “not to worry” as she could miss an hour of her prep time.
No fucking way. Annnnndddd – Moral Crusader wins again! Which really means, I have a semi-reasonable boss who realized her mistake when I told her, In No Uncertain Terms, that there was no fucking way in hell that said friend was ok to work. It helped that I had, without consulting either the teachers who were to teach, the friend who was on her way to work, or the boss, drawn up a possible schedule for coverage. (I swear I’m not a control freak under normal circumstances)
Then I drank six pepsis and I don’t remember much of what happened in class, except that I’m pretty sure I was upright for most of it.
Which is all a LOT of backstory for why I am so fucking tired and susceptible to scares tonight.
Because of the six pepsis, I was finding it hard to play the Passing-The-Fuck-Out game, which is one of my favourite games. I finally did: an hour and a half ago. Sweet, sweet release. Then, half an hour ago, Stupid Motherfucking MSN Messenger (SMMM) ran an ad for “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”. Yep – I left my computer on, my MSN running, and the volume turned up. The video clip of the explosions started at approximately 3AM IN THE FUCKING MORNING.
“HOLY SHIT!” I thought, sitting bolt upright, “KIM JONG IL IS HERE.”
