Some thoughts from the last few weeks to a firend of mine:
So, anyway, re: Korea. I dunno. At first I was like HAHA EVERYTHING IS SO CRAZY but at some point it's like STOP BEING SO FUCKING CRAZY ALL THE TIME. It's just like everything is at cross purposes. They gave us a budget of like $5,000 for odds and ends this year. I usually just have my kids decorate the room- I have like big, labeled displays of "Christmas!" and "Winter" and "Spring" and lots of vocabulary with images and whatever.
Well, this inspector came in and was like THESE ARE NOT OFFICIAL CURRICULUM DECORATIONS and so OVERNIGHT they came in and fucking shredded them. Then they spent like $1,500 on the offical cirriculum decorations. They're awful. They're full of broken English, mis-spellings and just plain weird dialog (SAMPLE "Father, how are we going fortunate?" "Son huuuu we are good for everything". They also feature a black kid named 00). And the inspector comes back and is like FINALLY SOME ENGLISH AROUND HERE.
I will tell you that bar-none Koreans are the WORST English speakers in the world. They're unbearably pig headed. And like a lot of these things in society they PRETEND it's really super fucking important and then they just cancel all your classes or give the kids 100 on the exam regardless of how they do. It's stupid and silyl
OR LIKE JUST FUCKING RIGHT NOW I had a huge bottle of water on my desk. I came back and it was missing. I'm like "Where'd my water go?" and they all polay this game where they like to pretend that SUDDENLY no one can speak English. So I'm like "Guys, there's was a bottle of water on my desk, where'd it go?" and the teacher says "Oh, Vice Princiapl said the office was messy so we had to throw it out".
Shit like that is mindbending and frustrating and absolutely infuriating. It will drive you gonzo. And it does! I saw a car HIT a kid last week driving through a red light (Red lights are like suggestions here), get out to see if the kid was okay and the FINISH BLOWING THE LIGHT. I actually just kind of lost it on the middle of the sidewalk and shouted "Are you fucking kidding me?".
So, yeah. It's a zany place. But the pay is really good and, honestly, these kinds of things make up a petty minority of the time spent here, even if they make up the vast majority of assorted agonies. Weekends are great- There's a cool, young neighborhood nearby that's like what new York must have been 10 or 15 years ago. People just open cafes and businesses in alleyways and their basements and whatever. Bands play the basements. It's cheap as shit. You remember how broke Mary & I were- We spend with absolute frivolousness here and still bank between 1.5 and 2k a month.
So, I dunno. Some days I'm like LETS STAY FOREVER and the other days I'm like LETS LEAVE TOMMORROW, but I think New York was like that, too.
