My Ol' Dumpster Divin' Ways

Ever since my time I lived in Madison, I have had an obsession with second hand furniture. Every moving day was a few days of torture, but the silver lining every time was the shear magnitude of furniture thrown to the curb. Some of this was garbage, sure, but there was a good amount of only slightly used pieces that just wouldn't fit in the owner's new apartment. This is when it became mine. By the end of my time in Madison, which was about six years, nearly every piece of furniture in my apartment was at least second hand. Now, a lot of this was still in really good shape, although it makes me look like a bit of a hobo. Also, much of it was taken for a girl I sublet from and all of that stuff was top quality.

This leads me to now. I found these two couches, a chair, and a bunch of cabinets outside of a restaurant. I regret that I didn't have room for the couches, but I did make off with this nice end chair which fits on the end of a couch. I put it next to my bed for watching movies, etc. Behold the genuine imitation leather:

I think, also, a lot of people enjoyed watching the crazy foreigner carry a chair on top of his head.

Mascots Ep. IV, insert title here

I actually forgot about doing this for a while until it struck me today that I really need to put out another installment. Here, for your viewing pleasure, Mascots Episode IV:

"I'm as confused as you are!"

"You know, technically I'm drinking my own pee"

"Go ahead, stick your nozzle in my mouth, bro"

"Together at last, Bunnies and Chicken!"

"Alright, who stuck my head in a basketball?"

"Upon smelling this meat, I can only smile up at the heavens!"

The Post in Which I Describe Eating Octopus

Curious about the octopus in Korea, I asked my boss Jay about whether he liked eating raw octopus. His answer was always "yes, it's very good. We should go and eat it with Matthew when he gets back to Korea." Matthew is the owner of the school. So Matthew finally got back to Korea a few weeks ago, and we set a plan. This plan was cancelled and delayed for a week, and the other foreign teacher, Chae, cancelled due to being too afraid to eat octopus, but finally we set out.

I wasn't sure exactly what to expect when we got there. We went to a place with it's own octopus farm so they had some high quality eight tentacled sea creatures. (Actually it's a place with pictures of the octopus with the mortar board on which I liked).

We took off our shoes and sat indian style around the table with a burner in the center. First, we were served a bunch of side dishes while we waited for the octopus to be prepared. Actually I'm pretty sure the only preparation was chopping it into a bunch of pieces. We were brought out a plate of squirming chunks of octopus tentacles, as shown below. I took the picture a little late, there was a lot more on the plate when it was brought out.

I said it looked like a plate filled with a bunch of live worms, and my boss told me "oh, I've tried worms." I said, really? and he replied "just when I was five or something." I didn't care a lot for the raw octopus. Actually, my first bite I tried to chew for a while, then when I swallowed part of it went down my throat and the other part was stuck in my tooth and wouldn't go down. This all happened while my boss was explaining that the younger person always pours for the older person when their glass is empty. They noticed I was looking sick so they allowed me a minute before pouring.

After we finished the plate of raw octopus, they brought us a plastic container filled with about eight live octopus. These were to be placed into the stew which was boiling at the center of the table on the burner. About three were put in at a time, and you could hear the suction cups clinging for dear life to the plastic container as they were scraped off into the death pool.

These were allowed to cook for a few minutes until they turned a nice pink color. Then, they were held by the head with tongs and cut just below the eyes with some scissors. The tentacle parts were then cut into manageable bites with scissors for eating and the head was allowed to cook for longer. The school owner liked to pop the entire head into his mouth without clearing the insides. I tried it too, although my boss didn't like to do it. I really liked the cooked octopus much better than the raw because the texture is just day and night (rubber and seafood). I told Matthew about how I had tried cooked cow intestine in Africa, and he one upped me with a story about how he was served raw cow brain at a business meeting and had to eat it or the deal would be lost.

Overall, it was a good time. I definitely like cooked octopus, but raw not so much. I think it's fairly cruel to cut an animal up with scissors like that. Actually, I kind of want to get an aquarium and keep one as a pet. I told this to my boss and he was like "yeah, and then you'll get hungry one day and eat him." Whatever.

This is What Happens

This is what happens when you Dong Chim the teacher (along with verbal and physical abuse of course).

What a Week

Well, I just finished up a pretty crazy week. Our school had parent teacher conferences for all of the Kindergarten students this saturday.

It started for me on Tuesday morning when the owner of the school walked into my room and said "are you ready for the video?" I said, "what?" It turns out they had expected me to know that they wanted to shoot a video of the kids for the conference and had expected me to rehearse some lines with them. All I had heard was when the other foreign teacher, Chae, told me that they were shooting a video with her kids the week before.

I really had no idea what they wanted me to do until they showed me the video from the year before on Wednesday morning. By that time I only had Thursday to come up with what I wanted them to say and rehearse with them. I think it ended up OK, but there was a lot of pressure on the kids to memorize the lines and film in an hour and a half. One girl cried every time we tried to film her, but she finally was able to comply on Friday morning.

The conferences went well, but I wasn't too happy to give up my Saturday morning/early afternoon which actually ended up forcing me to sacrifice my Friday night for the sake of not being too hung over the next day.

Anyway, here's some pictures. On our last pool day I tried to take a bunch of candid photos of the kids, and I've been looking for a good time to put them up. I'm too lazy to bother with captions for them, though, but enjoy anyway.

Pretty Much a Korean Now

Here I am, just another miguk saram (American person) living in Korea. I do feel though that I am becoming somewhat Koreanized (just made that word up and it didn't pass spell check). I now always hold out two hands when I exchange money, which I found a strange custom at first, but it has grown on me. I'm pretty sure that this is done because when you are handing over something important you do it with two hands.

I also have the important accessories that a Korean person would. A bank account, health insurance, cell phone, etc. Below is my ID card, called the 'Alien Registration Card', and my bank card. Doesn't the term 'Alien Registration' have a welcoming tone to it?

Bank card and registration card. Not my best photo ever.

I also picked up this cell phone last week, which I'm pretty happy about. It takes video, has games, and even has a Korean/American dictionary on it. Another Korean custom is to have a little key chain type thing, or dangle as I like to call it, on your cell phone. I have heard that it is bad luck to not have a dangle on your phone, though I'm not sure why.

I got my dangle in Thailand from a deaf lady

I have also come to really like Korean food. Be it Kimchi, Korean barbecue, Korean soup, octopus, or whatever I'll eat it. My bosses and I have a plan to go out and eat octopus for dinner some night next week because I haven't tried it yet.

This stuff Kimchi is pretty interesting. It's actually rotting cabbage which has been buried underground. I'm not sure if it's still prepared this way or not but at least historically it was buried to ferment. It's Korea's most popular side dish, and it's so popular that the Korean space program developed a dehydrated version to take with on space shuttle missions.

Mmm, rotten cabbage.

I've also come to find that I can read most of the Korean alphabet, 'hangul'. It started because I saw the name of the town everywhere, and eventually memorized it in Korean. From there I worked a little with my students and learned some from a book that was left in my apartment.

It is actually a pretty cool way of writing. Hangul has 14 consonants and 10 vowels and they are arranged in a block character which is read clockwise from the top left. Each block character makes one syllable. For example, my name is below:

In Korea I am 'Bradley Teacher'

It actually takes four characters to write just my first name, mostly because they don't use the 'br' sound. My favorite part of the alphabet is that some of the letters represent the mouth as they are forming the letter. For instance, M is a box because your mouth kind of makes that shape to say it. N looks like an L because the tip of your tongue presses against the top of your mouth so that your tongue is shaped like an L.

A few of the other letters I learned easily are T, because in Korean it is an E. Therefore I just remember ET when I see the Korean E. I also remember H because the Korean character looks like a man with a hat on. The one that looks like a 2 (appearing three times in my name) actually stands for two different english letters. These are R and L, which aren't distinguished between in Korean.

It's a neat language, so check it out. I still don't know much about speaking it though.

Ouch.

So my town has a batting cage, conveniently located directly behind my school. Craving some baseball action, this Sunday I went for the first time. I only swung at about 100 balls, but I got this ridiculous blister on my hand. I was wearing the gloves that they provided, but they were these strange gardening gloves.

The batting cage is nice, thought there are three right handed cages and only one that caters to both righties and lefties. It's a super good deal to bat there because it's only 500 won for 20 balls (about 40 cents), so I did about five rounds.

The batting cage

my hand day 1

my hand day 2

So today (Monday) my rib cage was super sore and it hurts to twist in some directions. My hand still hurts a lot if I stretch it. We'll see if I go again this weekend.

Goodbye Thailand

My last few days in Thailand were really great. It turns out that I was supposed to spend one less day there than I thought and was a little late for my flight, but I'll get to that story in a minute. In this post I'll talk about visiting the Jim Thompson House, the story of my travel back, and some thoughts.

My last full day in Thailand, Eve and I decided to visit a place called the Jim Thompson House. It was built by an American architect with that name who vacationed in Thailand while with the military, and then decided to move there. He was so taken with the Thai silk that he had the idea to ship some back home and ended up building a vast fortune. He then used this fortune to build the complex which is about 8 small traditional Thai houses with an absolutely breathtaking collection of statues, paintings, furniture, and well pretty much everything associated with luxury. The tour is very enthralling to see all of this stuff and hear Jim Thompson's story. Only a fraction of the complex allows photography, so I'll get to that.

One of the houses in the complex

This is a Buddha statue from the 7th century. The arm broke off some time ago, but it used to be raised to mean "stop fighting"

Eve in front of some ceramic wall covering

a purdy flower

Me with Eve's fan in the restaurant

Jim Thompson was a man very interested in horoscopes. He had one which told him that he needed to be very careful during his 61st year. When he turned 61, he took a vacation to Malaysia and was never heard from again. That is just part of the Jim Thompson lore, I definitely recommend visiting this place if you are in Bangkok.

Well, I'll get to the exciting part now. My flight was at 7:10 in the morning on Tuesday, so I had thought. I got up that day and checked my flight itinerary, and much to my surprise, the flight had been the day before. That's right, I missed my international flight by a day. This is the kind of moment where your heart stops and your life flashes before your eyes. My biggest concern was that I had to teach the next morning. Luckily, I had Eve with me. We got a cab, and Eve told him to take the express way and step on it. This was fun, the cab cruised to the airport at 140 km/hr while Eve gently slept on my shoulder.

We got to the airport, and unfortunately, none of the customer service stands were open for the airlines. We had breakfast while the sun rose. Finally the counter for Japan Air opened at 6:30 and I asked them about getting a flight. They didn't have anything direct to Seoul so I would have had to book two flights with them. I checked at the Thai airways counter, my airline, which opened at 6:45, and it actually turned out to be no problem at all to get me on another flight. They put me on a flight leaving at 10 in the morning getting to Incheon at about 8:45, no extra charge, no hassle.

The terminals at the Bangkok airport were shaped like the inside of a giant airplane wing

The rest of the travel from there is kind of a blur. I made it to Incheon fine, but the last bus to Seosan left at 6:30 that evening, so I caught a bus to Seoul. I got to Seoul at about 9:45, and it turned out the last bus left at 9:15, and I would have to wait until 6 the next morning. With this time to kill, I spent about three hours in a PC room, about an hour in a Burger King, and then I went to the bus station to sit and wait.

I did get a few hours of sleep at the bus station, and some on the bus, but my combined sleep for those two nights was about 6 hours. I arrived in Seosan at 7:40 with my first class being at 9:40. I was fine teaching in the morning but later in the afternoon I was super drowsy. I would be reading to the students out of a text book and nod off in between sentences. They made fun of me but I got over it. As for recovery from this I slept from 8pm to 8am that night.

Overall, I can pretty safely say that this trip to Bangkok was my favorite vacation I've been on. Meeting Eve was the best part. When we met there was this instant connection and we spent pretty much all of our time together when she wasn't working. She works at a traditional Thai dancing theater, called the Siam Niramit show. I didn't get a chance to see it but it looks pretty good. Leaving her was tough, but I'm going to try to bring her to Korea for a while.

A cutout at the movie theater at MBK

Some tasteful graffiti in Bangkok

This last photo is a good image for how I view Bangkok. I feel like this city is like New York City but on crack. NYC at least has some square streets and all the taxis have meters, but Bangkok is all just so unpredictable. In a way I think that Bangkok is just an airport and a temple surrounded by gift shops. So much of this city just depends on the tourists for their money and so many of them just want to scam tourists that it makes it very hard to trust anybody, but very easy to buy a whole bunch of souvenirs.

I did get to try two new forms of transportation. One, I rode in a tuk-tuk, which was super fun. I also rode on the back of small motorbike with a total of three people on it. That wasn't my favorite experience ever, but it was quick and cheap. I might have peed myself a little.

It was this vacation that I started to really feel like a world traveler. I realized this when I looked in my wallet and had currency from three different nations, and none of them were the USA. For the record one of the bills was from Rwanda, and it doesn't really make sense to still have that in my wallet.

Good trip though, good trip.

One Night In Bangkok

I wanted to save a title as deliciously cliche as this one for the right post. I'll tell you right now, this is the right post. Actually, this post is very PG-13 rated, so you know, put the kids to bed or whatever.

You might as well click the play button

One night in Bangkok, Eve and I were thinking of what to do. She brought up Patpong, known infamously to travelers and residents as the dirty spot of Bangkok. Since Bangkok is known somewhat as a dirty city, you can only image what the dirty spot would be like. One of the claims to fame in Patpong is the "ping pong ball trick." Let's just say that ping pong balls are fired out of an orifice. I went ahead and said "OK, I don't see why not." I had read about this area and was curious.

We got there after the cab ride to see all of the bright lights and people. The main street seemed to be all bars with bright neon lights and then market stands in the center.

A real creative name

You can get about anything you want

As soon as we exited the cab, a man came and said something like "blah blah blah, ping pong ball trick." We were like "OK," and we followed the guy to this shady looking upstairs go go bar.

Upstairs was just a club, with a bar to the left and a stage to the right and tables along the wall. Eve and I sat down, ordered some drinks, and were on our way to enjoying the show. Now, by enjoying the show I mean barely being able to look because these are women who had seen much better days and nobody would pay to see them. They danced for a while, a few girls came to us and asked for me to buy them drinks. I said OK a couple of times.

Anyway, they finally get to the ping pong ball trick. We are sitting there, and this lady lays on her side on the stage. I could hear a distinct "pop" and bam, a ping pong ball comes flying at me. I literally had to use an empty cup from the table to deflect these balls away like a lightsaber reflecting the laser blasts. Many were headed toward my face. I caught one in the cup.

Finally, this whole ordeal was over, and another woman came to the table and slapped this bill down on the table. It read:

Drinks: 1600 baht

Looking fee: 2000 baht

And there we were, stuck with a 3600 baht bill. Now I literally started to panic. I rifled through my pockets looking for money, knowing I only had about 2000 baht and some change. I thought I was going to spend some time in Bangkok prison. They said "just get out what you have" and I did. Eve started yelling at them, and the second she mentioned calling the police on them (this was all in Thai) they stuffed the bill into their pocket, grabbed the money, and shuffled us out of the bar. That was that. What they were doing was illegal and the mention of the police frightened them pretty badly, so they were very happy for what money they got out of me.

So basically I learned a nice expensive lesson. Never go to the ping pong ball trick in Bangkok. Or at least go to one with a cover charge so you know what you have to pay up front.

Just to break the seriousness, here's a nice mascot I saw in Patpong:

"I'm a pretty little octopus, aren't I?"

Stuffed Animals

Seosan can be a strange and interesting place. Sometimes walking around can lead to finding something like giant piles of garbage made out of chairs. Or about any other item you can think of. On Saturday I was walking and just looking for a nice place to sit for a while, and when I found it I also found these two adorable little dogs. These things looked just like little stuffed animals.

Hey there

Smiling for the camera

Just a few buddies hanging out

So I continued walking when it was obvious that these dogs were afraid of me. I cut down a side street in the residential area I was in, and the strangest object caught my eye. I had to break my string of Thailand posts and put this up because this was the oddest thing for me at the time.

Whats that? (oops...you can see my shadow)

"Won't anybody love me?"

This poor stuffed animal was left for dead next to a dumpster with it's back to one of the best views in the city. I'm not sure why it was thrown out, because it seemed to be in good condition and clean. My only conclusion was that some child urinated on it and it had to be thrown out.

Oh Pattaya

OK, how about some more photos? Eve and I decided to go to the beach on Saturday, and this town called Pattaya was the closest to Bangkok. It also serves as a huge tourist trap with a 'Ripley's Believe it or Not,' plenty of beach space, and a dirty nightlife area. We ended up visiting all of these things. Pattaya seems like generally a nice place, but as I mentioned, a big part of it is dirty go-go bars and sex workers. Let's just say there are tons of gross old men wandering the streets, and the primary street is called 'walking street.' Actually there is a popular t-shirt there that says "Good boys go to Heaven, bad boys go to Pattaya," so that pretty much sums it up.

Eve on a beach in Pattaya. Really beautiful beach except for all of the junk on it (jet skis, tents, garbage).

This guy is payed to sit in a box at Ripley's haunted house and look scary. I tried to get him to smile but he's very good at his job.

The world's biggest tire or something like that.

We took in a show called Tiffany's which featured songs and dance from many countries around the word. Afterwards all of the girls were outside where you can get your photo taken with them.

Someone posing for a photo with two dancers. The required tip to a dancer was 40 baht.

Eve with one of the dancers. I swear this girl had so much plastic surgery that she now looks like a gecko.

Later we went to check out walking street. They at least had very good ice cream there.

We stopped and got this caricature done and the guy did a really good job for 150 baht. In this scene, Eve is rescuing me as I am lost and confused in Bangkok. A small dog witnesses.