Breakout!

 
For only the second time since I arrived here in September, this weekend I will be leaving Seoul for another Korean city. Now, despite my fears that I may not encounter any white people for 2 days and I may have only the briefest glimpses of the Golden Arches, I am excited about the prospect. I'm ready for a break.

I'm going to Gumi. Heard of it? No, of course you haven't. I haven't heard of it and I've lived in Korea for over 18 months. From what I can Google, it's a small, industrial city about an hour's drive from Daegu. Which, in itself, is quite annoying as Daegu is one of the few places in Korea I'd like to visit and haven't. And I won't have time to get there.

But why, Smithy, you handsome bastard, would you travel to within an hour of a city you wish to visit in order to visit a city which you have never heard of?

Well, we are attending a wedding.

The gloriously cheesy, outrageously contrived union of The Canadian's friend, Annie, and her beau will take place on Sunday afternoon and, since Queen Kendrino of Canuckistan has been invited, I'm being dragged along kicking and screaming going too.

I haven't been to a Korean wedding before so I suppose it will be an experience. From what I've heard it will be in a large, characterless room with hundreds of people there (the larger the guest list the more impressive your character, apparently, so Koreans find themselves sending invites to people who once tiled their bathroom) and the most incredible tat can be found at these occasions. My mate PJ once went to a K-wedding and found himself singing a duet with the Bride's best friend. As part of the ceremony. I've seen footage. It wasn't pretty. I've heard tales of moving walkways and fake, flying doves as well. I hope I see fake doves.

Anyway, that's how I'll be spending my weekend. Mr and Mrs J-Mao will be looking after the mutt (who, after a 10 minute separation, had his big stupid collar replaced after using the time to lick his poor little nut-sack red raw) and we'll be enjoying a welcome break from yellow sand and desk-warming.

Before I go, have a bash on this game. It's totally addictive. I just managed 1101. If you can beat me - and prove it - you get a special, smithyblogs style, prize.

Chopper - Flash Game
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Add Games to your own site	More Flash Games!

And, come on the Scousers! If you beat Chelsea this week, all will be forgiven. Well, not all but, you know.

Love, Smithy x

Quirky Contestant Number 3!

How have you been coping without me? I hope you managed to keep the tears to a minimum. I'm sure you've missed me more than I've missed you.

I'd like to say that I've been taking a little break because my life is simply too filled with thrills, spills and automobiles to blog, but I don't like to lie to you. Truth is, I've been working as a double agent in order to infiltrate the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education and prevent what are believed to be grandiose and underhand schemes to make their English education programme the least-effective syllabus the world has ever seen. So far, I have failed in my task.

So, what have I been doing?

Well, I've taught the dog how to shake paws. I can't get him to lie down yet so I might skip that and just move on to teaching him how to make me a fucking cheese toastie.

"Make me a fucking cheese toastie, Maroo."

Shouldn't take too long.

The Korean blogosphere, now officially the largest and most pathetic group of self-important geeks the world has ever seen (of which I do not count myself a member, by the way), has been up in arms regarding a blog called Lousy Korea. It was removed by it's author this week following a number of death threats towards her and some of her users. Lousy Korea was a tongue-in-cheek look at the frustrations one faces as an expat in this country using quite graphic and crude language in order to get it's point across. Now, the girl lived in Korea and in fact extended her contract beyond the 12-months she originally signed on for, so she can't have hated the place that much. In fact, I think she's still here. But, as anyone who has lived here for any length of time knows, irony and sarcasm are not qualities celebrated, or even understood, in the ROK.

"Teacher, teacher, it's raining and cloudy today teacher!"
"Yes, lovely day isn't it?"
"Err..teacher...it's rainy and cloudy! You crazy teacher! You crazy!!"

Korean Rum Diary posted a long, drawn out and emotional post the other day where he bemoaned the loss of free speech in Korea and reiterated over and over again that Lousy Korea should be able to write whatever she wants without receiving death threats and that Koreans are to sensitive and stu......

It went on, believe me.

But yeah, of course she has the right to write what she likes. And yeah, Koreans are nationalistic and overly proud - nice observation. But the threats were made on an Internet forum. And you know who writes on Internet forums? Virgins. And you know who writes on forums like Korean Sentry, the English-language forum for people of Korean origin to vent their frustration against the evil white man? Korean virgins.

A death threat from them is like a declaration of war by Luxembourg.

The whole thing has been blown way out of proportion and can be used, I believe, as one more indication of how fucking boring life in Korea can be. That people actually care about a stupid little blog being removed because of a stupid little death threat by a stupid little Korean is shocking to me.

Lousy Korea was shit anyway. Not racist, not offensive. Just shit.

You want to see something truly offensive and, yes, maybe even a little racist? Allow me to show you a couple of stills I've stolen from a role-play video I've had to show a class of 6th graders from the chapter Where Are You From? I desperately wanted to show you the whole clip, but I am unable to extract it from the CD. I'm absolutely gutted, because the dialogue on these videos is simply too good to be true. You'll just have to take my word for it. I'm not making a single thing up. I swear.

The role-play is based around a talent show, where 3 different characters from 3 different countries have to come on to the stage and introduce themselves to the crowd. The first contestant is Korean.

Now, as you can clearly see, the Korean woman is being represented by a plasticine white man in a Hanbok. The host of the show, on the left with the microphone, is being played by Victoria Wood circa 1994.

Contestant number 2 is American. And what is the traditional outfit of the American woman?

Yes, that's right. The Gay Cowboy. This is the interview he gives to the American Gay Cowboy Woman Thing named Ann.

"Oh, you're from America, can you swim?"
"No, but I can play basketball."

What? How are those things related?? I am now going to make a point of asking every single American that I meet whether they can swim, and if they respond by saying that they can play basketball, I'm going to say, "Well, that's completely irrelevant" and throw them in the nearest pond and stand to the side, cackling, and screaming "Your basketball ain't gonna help you now, is it Ann??"

Finally, contestant number 3 is from Uganda. According to her interview, she is on her way to visit her uncle in Japan. This picture shown below is how the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education - the office for public school education in the capital city of the Republic of Korea - chose to represent the population of Uganda.

Now, unless I am mistaken, that lady is wearing a dress made from the skin of a Cheetah. She is also without shoes. Now, forgetting for a moment that this picture is demeaning, racist and condescending in the extreme...how the fuck is this woman getting to Japan?? She's not got any shoes! Are you trying to tell me that she's gone through the tricky administrative process required to obtain a passport, but she is manufacturing her clothing from the hides of dead cats?? And why has she got a black face but white arms and legs? Is she a minstrel?

The videos on this CD are certainly doing their job well, as long as that job is to make me laugh so hard that I have to take a change of underwear to school with me. I'm just not sure that any English is being learnt.

Love, Smithy x

Whoops!

It's always nice, from the other side of the world to see your home town making the headlines. I'm from Bury, a small town on the outskirts of Manchester, and we rarely make the papers beyond our flailing 2nd division football team and the odd reference to our 'world famous' Bury Black Pudding (you heard of it, world?).

It was something of a shock though, after I clicked a link labelled Testicle was cut off 'by mistake' to see that this took place at Bury's Fairfield Hospital! I was bloody born there! Although rumours that it was a mistake by the same surgeon that created my third, glittery testicle are unfounded.

Imagine going in for routine surgery and having one of your nuts chopped off. It doesn't bear thinking about, does it? Wasn't there a story about that on Scrubs once?

Anyway, before I go for 2-4-1 fish & chips with the missus (2-4-1 means 2 portions for 1 person, right?) I'll leave you with another awkward ESL video, maybe my favourite so far.

A Brief Moment of Perfection

I got very little sleep last night. Mylo decided my sleeping was unnecessary and proceeded to wander around the apartment, banging his stupid plastic cone against any surface he could find. He seemed to be searching for loud, rattling ones. My Canadian girlfriend didn't stir. At sometime around 3.30am she rolled over long enough to tell me, "I think he needs to go to the bathroom", which left me with two viable options - sulk or get up. I did both.

After observing that a rat had gnawed through our garbage bags and, in my coma-like state, allowing Mylo to piss all over my new Stan Smiths, I went back to bed and snatched a few hours rest. I hesitate to call it sleep.

I ghosted through my classes this morning - "Teacher, teacher! Panda eyes!" "Sit down, nobhead" - and am now tapping this blog out in that vaguely-stoned way you get after having nowhere near enough sleep. It reminds of me of when I used to write essays at Uni, pulling an all-nighter as I'd left it till the last minute. I'd work until dawn, chain-smoking and drinking tea, then somehow get to Uni and hand it in. Only difference is, I wasn't vaguely-stoned then.

I'm in a fairly shitty mood if you can't tell. We might have to give up Mylo after a visit from our landlady over the weekend. My plan to avoid this is to pretend that we didn't understand what she was saying and play the dumb cracker. Although, since she crossed her arms into an 'X' and said, loudly, "Dog! No!" I'm not sure how that's going to fly.

But life is about the little pleasures, right? Like, I've just been given a Dunkin' Donuts Americano for example. Completely out of the blue. It made me smile inside, and probably gave me another hour or so of consciousness. Excellent. And we're having fajitas for dinner tonight. Again, this is a good thing.

But sometimes, the stars align and create something so beautiful, so awe-inspiringly perfect that it makes my belly fizz. A sometime Atheist, it takes moments like these for me to give even the slightest consideration to the existence of God/Allah/Buddha and the rest of those guys. Today, I logged on to the BBC website, clicked onto what appeared to be an innocuous link, and experienced one of these truly religious moments. Only a supernatural force, beyond our human comprehension, could have engineered a situation whereby these simple words could be scrambled into the following, breath-taking sentence.

An Australian publisher has had to pulp and reprint a cook-book after one recipe listed "salt and freshly ground black people" instead of black pepper.

Hallelujah.

Love, Smithy x

Cranium, Cones and the tears of a C**t

My head hurts today. I blame Jim Beam. And soju. And shitty Korean beer. Last night we went to our favourite Korean BBQ restaurant with friends and grilled up a whole load of beef. Then we were still hungry so we grilled up a whole load of pork. It took me a while to come round to the idea of samgyupsal but now I'm fully converted. And this place does fantastic kimchi which, if placed at the end of the samgyupsal grill, collects all the pork fat and starts to fry in that juice, making it crispy and porky and delicious. Me and J-Mao have quite a taste for the soju so we threw at least 2 bottles of that down. To be honest my memory is a little hazy.

After the meal we came back to the flat (picking up a bottle of bourbon en route) to play Cranium. You know it? It's basically an amalgamation of a million different parlour games which, when combined with booze and cool people, is a lot of fun. Luckily, we had both of those things last night. In a room full of North Americans, I was flying solo as the lone Brit and I'd like to say that my extra level of culture gave me the edge in a closely-fought but thoroughly deserved victory. I'd like to say that. In reality though, I don't even think we finished the game.

What I do remember though, is having the United-City game on in the background as I was using a fully-grown Canadian male as a puppet to demonstrate the concept of robotics to Ken-deezy. You may have noticed a slightly defeatist tone to my previous blog regarding United's chances for the rest of the season. I couldn't see us getting a victory away at City considering our form and I certainly couldn't see Chelsea dropping the 4 points required for us to draw level with them at the top.

Well, even I can be wrong sometimes.

A dour, scrappy game at City ended with Paul Scholes - the planet's greatest living Ginger - nodding in the only goal of the game 3 minutes into injury time. Celebrations were muted because, as necessary as it is to keep reminding City of their secondary status, the result would mean nothing if Spurs couldn't do the goods for us against Chelsea.

But did they ever.

Spurs won 2-1 after a fantastic performance, and the gravy was provided by the sending-off of John 'The C**t' Terry. There is no more beautiful sight in the world than the unhappy face of a disgusting person. In fact, let's savour it for a moment.

Lovely stuff. That picture isn't even from yesterday's game but still, it's great to look at. I might get it framed.

So, the title race is wide open again. Chelsea are 1 point ahead and still have to play the scousers while we're away at Spurs next week to try and do what Chelsea couldn't. I'd obviously rather be in Chelsea's shoes - it is their title to lose - but this will go all the way to the last day of the season, I'm sure.

Finally, before I go, I'm sure you noticed that mutt in the above picture. No no, that's John Terry. The other picture. Well that's Mylo (I wanted to call him Plastic Cone but the Canadian was having none of it) a dog we've fostered from the local animal hospital . He looks like a fox with a weird curly tail and has to wear that ridiculous cone on his head as the poor lad has just had his nuts chopped off, but we've sort of fallen in love with him. Strict immigration laws in the UK (for dogs I mean, the door is wide open if you happen to be an eastern European rapist) mean that he'd have to undertake a 6 month quarantine on arrival so taking him with us isn't really an option. We'll be doing everything we can to find him a permanent home before we leave Seoul. It feels good to be doing even a little something to help the many poorly-treated and homeless dogs in Korea. I've posted a link on my sidebar to ARK, a fantastic charity that does so much to help a terrible situation.

If you're in Korea and have been considering a pet, give me a shout. He's a great dog.

Toodle-pip.

Love, Smithy x

News!

So, what's been happening on this filthy little planet of ours in the last week? Well, it would be impossible to ignore the earthquake that hit China yesterday, killing over 500 people and destroying the lives of many more. What an awful tragedy. An acquaintance of mine has recently moved to China so I kept my eye on this, although according to Google maps (which is fantastic by the way) he would appear to be quite far away from the epicentre. Is it me or are there more natural disasters happening recently? If you haven't seen the movie 2012 yet then I suggest that you do in order to get a quick insight into how our lives will unfold over the next few years. I'm not ready for the end of the world. I haven't skydived yet.

Barack Obama hosted a summit of the world's leaders to discuss rounding up all the 'loose' uranium in order to keep it away from all the baddies. From what I can understand, the most important deal to come out of this conference is the turning over of some of Canada's uranium to the United States. Yeah, great. I feel safer now. What are the peace-loving Canadians going to do with a load of uranium anyway? Once they worked out they couldn't smoke it, they were bound to hand it over to the US eventually. They probably traded it for a ounce of Cali-green and a bag of Cool Ranch chips.

Gordon Brown has announced that the General Election will be held on the 6th May. I haven't yet decided whether or not to go to the trouble of registering as an overseas voter. Mainly because I'm not sure if I'd vote even if I was in the country. I think the UK is going to shit and I'm worried for the future of my country, but I don't see a single person stepping up and saying what needs to be said. Brown's an idiot, David Cameron is a fucking idiot and I don't think that, yet, a Lib Dem vote is worth anything. I expect to see a Conservative government in place for the first time since I hit puberty, and I would not be surprised if the scumbags, racists and idiots rise up and spit their poisonous votes at the BNP. Back home, we need a complete revamp on our priorities, our beliefs and our politics and there is nobody standing for election who will offer that. It will be Prime Minister Cameron, mark my words, and the descent into chaos will continue unabated.

And finally, a quick word on United's results over the last week or so and how this leaves us for the rest of the season.

Fucked.

We crashed out of the Champions League - a two-leg defeat to Munich punctuated by a 2-1 loss at home to Chelsea -  and followed that up with a pathetic 0-0 draw at Blackburn that has left us 4 points behind Chelsea with 4 games to go. On Saturday we cross town to play City, a team who's current form is almost as strong as my hatred for them, and Chelsea are away at Spurs, who just beat local rivals Arsenal last night. We have to win all our remaining games (that aren't easy) and hope that Chelsea drop points. And they're ahead on goal difference. It's not looking good.

It's a strange thing being a United fan in your early (ish) 20's, because we have never known failure. I have never been aware of a time when United were not the most successful team in the country. My mum and dad, who grew up watching the Busby Babes of the late 60's, had to watch in horror as the team fell apart and descended into mediocrity, culminating in the previously unthinkable relegation to the old Division 2 in 1974. So, it can happen. And with the way things are - Fergie reaching the age where retirement or, I'm sad to say, death, are around the corner; the rise of the foreigner investment allowing sup-par teams like Chelsea and City the fast track to success; the huge debt that United are currently riddled with - I can see a time in the near future where this extended run of glory will come to an end and United will be another team fighting each season simply to stay in the Premiership and keep ticking over. A Tottenham Hotspur, an Aston Villa, or - god forbid - a Liverpool.

This is not a gross over-reaction to us failing to win the League this season - I know we can't win it every year - it is an observation of what is going on in modern-day football, and an acknowledgement that in the club's current situation, we are unable to compete. We can't pay the transfer fees of the top, top players and are relying on scouts to find us bargains. That's fine when you come up with a Cristiano Ronaldo, but that doesn't happen all the time. I hope I'm wrong, and that the club can find a way to evolve without selling it's soul like they've done at Stamford Bridge and Middle Eastlands.

But - and it breaks my heart to say it - I don't think it can.

Love, Smithy x

Tortilla Day!

As I've already noted, lunch at our school can be something of a disappointment. Mr Kriska and I have only opted out the one time, for a much-savoured Whopper actually, but we have wanted to on many occasions more. It's not that I don't like Korean food. There is some that I really enjoy. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Korean food that I like includes freshly barbecued meat, which is quite difficult to find in the staff room of an elementary school.

Because of this, our lunches generally consist of rice, a soup (watery, vaguely fish-flavoured) a questionable meat, a vegetable (normally an uncooked bit of bush) and shit kimchi. Kimchi is not all shit - some is actually very good - but this kimchi is shit. I dread lunch time most days. Never before has eating felt like such a simple refuelling exercise.

Except Wednesdays. Wednesday is known (by me alone) as Good Food Day. It's when we have something a little bit different from the norm. This has been known to include bibimbap, corn dogs, spaghetti and curry rice. Not exactly fit for a King, but certainly more enjoyable. For me at least.

Mr Kriska provided me with a menu the other day detailing the food we'd be eating over the next month or so. It's in Korean, obviously, and I immediately trawled through the Wednesdays to see what we could look forward to. I didn't recognise anything until I looked at Wednesday 14th. 치킨또띠아. I looked again. 치킨또띠아. I read it aloud to myself. Chi-kin-doh-dee-ah. Chi-kin-do-dee-ah. With a little manipulation, that could say Chicken Tortilla. I checked with Mr Kriska. He was reading it the same way.

Wednesday 14th April would be Tortilla Day.

Honestly, I'd prepared myself for a huge letdown because, after forcing down the world's most watery spaghetti and a corn dog with a sugar coating, I'd deduced that the school chef couldn't quite handle Western food.

What we received was a delight.

Now, these weren't Mexican food in any way, shape or form. What they were though were crispy pieces of breaded chicken with small, soft tortillas and a salad in a vaguely ranch-style dressing. Us pale-faces were allowed 2 of them. I can't tell you what a pick-me-up it is to eat some vaguely tasty food in the middle of the day after the slop I have to force down my neck on a daily basis. I feel great.

And Nigella Ontario is making her almond chicken tonight.

Yeahhhhhhhh baby!

I don't have lessons much over the next week or so, so I'd expect to be hit with some nonsense every day.

Tomorrow, News - United's Season is Over edition.

Happy Tortilla Day!

Love, Smithy x