Merry Christmas or Bananas are Always Phallic

Christmas Adventures with My Family in No Particular Order Pt. 1

Christmas Eve...

On the morning of Christmas Eve, I had to buy a couple of things for Sally’s Christmas present and for Amber’s secret Santa gift. I just bought Sally some coffee from the Lotte Department Store (I had already bought her a Joo Ji-Hoon calendar in Insadong, he’s a babe). I always felt classy shopping at the Bay downtown in Winnipeg. The Bay Downtown has nothing on any Lotte Department store. It took me a while to find the coffee section (I think there might be more than one) and then when I did, as soon as I appeared to be interested in coffee one of the employee’s was all over me. She showed me a sale that they were having and then she shoved some coffee beans under my nose. I took her up on the sale and decided to keep one pack for my self, now I have buy to coffee maker, at least a French Press. She also gave me two samples, one of which I put in Amber’s gift. But the lady put the coffee in a nice bag and smiled a lot, just walking around the store makes me feel classy, all the products are super high end and expensive. They carry all the big labels. I hope the coffee is good.

After the classy classy department store, I went to the Korean version of a dollar store and bought a few more random things for Amber and some chocolate for the teachers. I wanted to bring chocolate, fruit, and nuts for the teachers. In the end I didn’t go through with the fruit, but I could chocolate and some almonds to share. I ended up eating most of it. Unlike at home, chocolate at the dollar store here is not expired or old. It is just fine and fresh and delicious.
The gift I got for Amber was either awful or awesome. I think Amber will think it was awesome, I would love to get such a gift and I think she would agree. I just bought her a bunch of random things. The gift had a 30,000 won limit and seeing as I bought most of the things at the dollar store and in markets, it was actually pretty tough to meet that limit. I had a bag full of presents and I still don’t think I hit it. I gave her a couple of funny notebooks, some Band-Aids, some tissue (with some awesome English on the package), coffee samples, sparkly pink shower sandals, nail polish, samples from the beauty stores, two of my books that I had already read, a lot of chocolate, Big Bang socks (Tae Yang, yea!), more samples from beauty stores, a key chain, and some other stuff. I also made her a kick ass Big Bang Christmas card that took way longer than necessary to make, but was tones of fun. A lot of the stuff was free or very cheap, but I wrapped everything individually in a Korean Buy and Sell and gave it to her in a Lotte Mart grocery bag. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be at the party to deliver it in person because I had to hang out with my lame family, but I hear she thought it was pretty nifty.

At lunch time the family came over to my place. There were seven people in my apartment including me. That is way to many at one time. They all came in and started taking off their shoes and coats in my tiny tiny apartment. I thought they were going to drop of the suitcase of things I love and that would immediately go for lunch. I didn’t think they would want to hang out. Of course they wanted to explore my apartment. My closet-sized apartment. (Things I hoped they noticed: the two free condoms I got at Rubber Seoul, the two packs of cigarettes, the dirty haiku on the fridge, and the picture of de Beauvoir, Sartre, and their harem that I drew and hung on the wall.) They brought me a suitcase full of delicious and useful things. I’m not sure what I was most excited about Grandma’s chocolate peanut butter chip cookies or the nailbrushes from Lee Valley. Delicious vs. clean nails: super tough call. Anyway, there were also books (!!!) and chocolate, and tea, and raisins, and banana bread, and pepenate (pepper nuts for the Englishmen, a Christmas treat I claim to not care for, but it was the first thing I finished off, they were from Auntie Eddie and they were delicious), and big candy canes, and oatmeal, and granola. It was a treasure chest of all my favourite things. And there was snowman poop from my cousin Jackie. And the bag contained a present from Bryan’s mom, Rose, nice smelling lotion and body wash and a calendar from Katie H. A calendar of hot pin-up girls, I love pin-up girls, especially hot ones. After enough ogling and many expressions of how adorable my apartment is we finally left for lunch.

I tried to take them to a restaurant that I had been at a few weeks ago for Wednesday night madness, but it was closed. So I had to take them to the expensive place by the school. It is super delicious and very comfortable. We had samgupsal, which everybody loved. It is a fun meal to eat and it is a tasty delight. I wanted to get something really Korean for their first full meal here. This place is perfect because you have to cook the pork yourself over hot coals they bring to the table. Of course, the servers and the manager actually did all the cooking for us foreigners. They don’t trust our BBQ skills.

After lunch, I showed them the school. It is not really impressive but they were all impressed by it. We met Tasha and one of the part time teachers coming in, a part time teacher whose name I didn’t know. Which lead to a super awkward introduction, There was no way around the fact that I did not know her name. Apparently her name is Cindy (and she is totally a babe, by the way and she frequently gives me sweets. I like her I just didn’t know her name.). Anyway, Tasha and Sunny fawned over my brother again. They were both very excited that I had brought him around a second time. Seriously, it was as if a celebrity were visiting the office. They are silly.

Tasha is going through a Twilight phase right now, she has seen the movie three times and has read almost the entire series in less then two weeks. She ordered the books in English but couldn’t wait for them to arrive started reading the Korean versions. Alas, the newest one, Breaking Dawn (?) hasn’t been translated yet, so when she finishes Eclipse (which will happen today) she will have to wait for her English set to arrive before she can finish the series. She is in love with Edward, both the character in the book and the actor who plays him in the movie.

After they left, I bought out the Christmas treats that I had brought along and proceeded to make mounds of photocopies to give to my students. Christmas activities, that is, things to fill up the time that requires as little effort as possible from me. In English classes is OK to use the words Christmas and to learn about Christmas because it is all in English and everything contributes to a students vocabulary. So let’s use the words manger and Jesus next to Santa Claus and tree and present and joy and noel. I made one of my classes read this super lame Christmas story about Absalom the Reindeer Elf, it was way to advanced and they had no idea what was happening, furthermore, it's not even a good or well written story, but we pushed through until the end. Most of my classes did Christmas crosswords and word searchers and some word scrambles, but for the word scrambles I had to write the words on the board. They didn’t know most of the words. Jaemin and I made snowman paper dolls. I taught him the words toque, scarf, hat, tie, vest, and mitten. I gave him some Candy Canes and a some chocolate. He’s my favourite so only the best and most for Jaemin.

The next class I have on Wednesday's if full of little douche bags. They didn’t get Christmas activities because they still had work to do. I only gave candy canes to the two girls who were actually doing the dinosaur quiz that I made, the really easy dinosaur quiz that if anybody had even tried to do they would have easily finished and then could have done Christmas activities and everybody would have received a candy cane, but they are all douche bags and didn’t get anything. Seriously, a class of nine-year old douche bags. The last two classes of my day are two of my favourites. We are reading stupid lame versions of Black Beauty and The Lost World, but the classes are mostly well behaved and they liked the Candy Canes. Although, many of the kids were pissed that their candy canes were broken. How could one possible transport candy canes across an ocean without having some, if not all, of them break? I gave both of those classes a really lame word search, they are all too old for word searches, expecting that they would sit around and talk, but the Black Beauty class actually worked on it. However, The Lost World class (which also happens to contain one of my favourite students, John) did what I expected. Lisa and Julie flirted with John and everybody laughed a lot. There are only four students in the class. I like it because when Lisa reads she sounds like she has peanut butter in her mouth and Julie seems kind of badass and John speaks better English than some of the teachers, and Carly is quiet and doesn’t bother anybody. They don’t always listen as much as I would like, but I don’t blame them for not being interested in the boring and racist book. I haven’t read the original, but in this version, the “Indians” and the white dudes kill off all of the ape-men (all of them!!) the entire civilization and this is treated as a good thing. I was appalled. I tried to convey this to my students; it didn't really translate.

In talking to this class, I discovered that some of the students, although they don’t have to attend Kang Tae Woo on Christmas day, did have to attend some of their other hagwons on Christmas day. The Horror. They actually never get a break.

After school, I headed out to Insadong to meet my family. We had made plans to go to Seoul Tower and then out for supper. However, nobody expect for me had eaten since lunch and they were all super hungry and wanted Pizza fucking Hut and they wanted it now. Unfortunately, Pizza Hut was closing, as was Mr. Pizza (Made for Women, Love for Women) so we ended up an “Italian” restaurant that was full of couples on dates.

This was to become the theme of Christmas, couples. Suddenly Seoul was full of couples, only couples everywhere, all over the place. I guess Christmas is more of couples holiday than an family holiday. It’s like Santa pukes couples instead of delivers presents. It’s awful when your boyfriend is literally on the other side of the world. And Korean couples seem to be particularly affectionate, always touching and holding hands, hugging and stroking each other’s hair. These kinds of things are supposed to make me feel it because it’s disgusting, but instead they make me jealous, super, super jealous.

After supper it was pretty late and we all headed back to the hotel. Laura had helped me get a room at the hostel beside the hotel, Banana Back packers, I wasn’t sleepy and I knew that my book wouldn’t last an evening of reading, furthermore the subways were still running, which meant that the hostel wouldn’t be worth it if I went to bed right away. So I insisted that some more fun be had. Jamie and Laura were both tired, but Trav and Toban agreed to more fun. We headed over the area around the Jonggak subway station. there are tones of bars and hofs in the area around this subway station. It is super busy and there are no tourists. This is literally across the street from Insadong-gil, the main tourist destination in the city. Trav, Laura, and I had been there a few nights before, to be discussed in a later post. We wandered around a bit more and finally decided on the 70’s Radio Bar. There was a hof on the third floor and a bar on the fifth. We were not hungry and wanted the bar. However, it seems that we arrived on the third floor and sat down before we realized our mistake. Of course the cheapest thing on the menu was a fruit platter. The fruit and beer combination is starting to grow on me. We only stuck around for one beer each. Trav and Toban took full advantage of being able to smoke indoors.

Back at the Banana Backpackers, I found myself in a dark dorm room, one bed occupied by it’s sleeping occupant and the rest looked slept in even if there was nobody currently sleeping in them. They all actually looked like somebody had staked a claim, but there was supposed to be at least one for me. Earlier, when I had brought my bag to the room, I had asked a girl which one was empty, she vaguely pointed to one of the beds, but it could have been a couple of different beds. I just put down my bag and hoped to find out more information later. Later had arrived and I was even more unsure than before. So I finally just picked a bed, and hoped the former resident was either a chill hippy or gone. Anxious visions of a drunken girl coming back from Hongdae and trying to crawl into the top bunk with me kept me awake most of the night. Not that drunk babe would necessarily be a bad thing; I was more concerned about the angry kind of drunk girl. I slept real bad and was reliaved to finally get up in the morning....