Sleep Until 1 O'clock!? No Dice!

Korean lavatories 101:
-In my experience I have not seen too many bathtubs here in Korea, mostly just showers that share the same floor as the rest of the bathroom. Meaning that there is no partition between your showering area and your toilet or sink.
- All surfaces are covered by tiles and generally when I finish a shower the whole, rather small room, is splattered with shower water. This seems to be a blessing so far because cleanup is a cinch. The whole floor is swept daily with water and it exits down the same drain as the sink via a little recessed trough at one side of the bathroom.
-The pain with Korean bathrooms comes from the lack of shower partition. If you have taken a shower earlier in the day and then go into the bathroom in stocking feet without putting on your little plastic slippers you will find yourself soaking up all sorts of little puddles.

Back to the work-day. Still frazzled and tired yet unable to sleep I went with Brian into the bracing cold. We got into his cart and zipped the few blocks over to the school. We were the first ones to get there and unlocked the front doors. The school is on the fourth floor of the Woongshin Cinart building. This building also houses two other language schools on the same floor as well as a movie theater and countless, smaller ground level shops. Oh yes, and a Starbuck’s. Go figure.
Brian asked if I wanted some coffee, I accpeted the offer and it was over to the water cooler. A slender, plastic package was produced, being a 50/25/25 mix of instant coffee, non-dairy creamer and sugar. Hrm, not what I was expecting but I just wouldn’t try it again. Brian graciously said, “You must be hungry too, huh? I’ll be back, I will get bread for you, don’t worry.”
My first taste of Roti-boy was like eating a butter soaked cloud from heaven. There are two different stores in the same building here, Roti boy being a smaller offshoot of Papa Roti. Papa Roti is affectionately monikered the King of Buns. The name Roti probably just referring to the pan-Asian term for a sort of bread. These buns however are not flat like it’s like named counterpart but they are soaked with butter on the bottom. Add some sort of cinnamon-sugar mixture and your good to go.
So, I had my chemical coffee, my butter-soaked bun. What else could top off this ambrosia? Shrimp-flavored fries of course. Brian also bought a bag of this delectable snack food for us to suckle some sustenance from. As I got some food(?) in my belly the Korean teachers started to show up. I met each of them as they started to pour in. Ten in all, and then I met the foreign teachers I would be working with. Katie from San Diego, Wes from Boston/Texas and Ashley from Canada.
Today I was to sit in on some of the other foreign teacher’s classes and observe. I found out a month later that these were not actually “normal” classes as they were at the end of the month. The classes we teach attempt to wrap up the teaching of one of our slim volumes of text each month. This meant that I sat in on two or three classes where playing Uno and coloring were to be the most pressing tasks of the day.
While I was sitting in on Wes’s class I was wondering if I would indeed receive the ten day’s of unpaid training that they wrote about in the contract. I would learn later that day that I was to come in the next week and start teaching my own classes. This didn’t bother me too much as I wasn’t looking forward to tedious training, let alone the unpaid kind. Therefore, my training consisted of playing Uno with Wes and a little boy of perhaps six or seven years of age that can speak barely a smeck of English. The kids call Wes “wrestling” teacher because they can’t properly pronounce Wesley.
As I did not have my own schedule as of yet I was just floating from class to class. Wes took me out on a break we had for lunch. We went to what has become a staple haunt of mine, Kimbap Chunguk. Perhaps the closet American Analouge would be McDonald’s but sheerly for the positive reasons. It is a small, quick-service restaurant that has a menu of eighty-seven different dishes. All brought to you within about five minutes along with a cup of miso soup and at least three side dishes. There are usually kimchi, some sort of pickled radish, seasoned bean sprouts or egg soufflé provided as sides.
On this, my first, outing to what the foreign teacher’s affectionately call the “Orange” restaurant(because most of us can’t read the Hangul sign) Wes suggested I get a kimbap and a bowl of bi-bim-bap. Bap translates to rice, the staple food here besides red chili paste. A kimbap is the Korean equivalent of a Japanese maki roll of sushi. Differences being the inside contents, no raw fish, in place of this there is a strip of neon yellow pickled radish, a strip of Spam-like meat, a smathering of seaweed, strips of carrot and perhaps lettuce. They can also be filled with other ingredients at a cost. Bi-bim-bap is rice with a dollop of red pepper paste, lettuce, seaweed, dried seaweed, bean sprouts, carrots strips and it is topped with a fried egg. Pretty delicious stuff for my first experience. I’ll tell you, the constant pickling of veggies gets to you after a while.
After the lunch of new and different foods I went back to the school with Wes. I finished out the day and, it being Friday, was ready to go back to Brian’s apartment and maybe catch some shuteye. Brian told me that he would have to stay for a number of hours and gave me the key to his apartment. I was pretty sure I knew the way back and would be able to find the apartment. What I realized when I got back to his apartment building was that I had either forgotten or misheard Brian about what apartment number it was.
I went to the floor I believed it to be on and upon stepping out of the elevator started to second guess myself. There wasn’t a kid’s bike in the hallway next to his door before… why would there be now? Brian doesn’t have any children… hmm. Okay deductive logic tells me that his apartment would not be below this floor. I remembered the day before. Looking out of his window as he explained how to get to the school. It seemed as if we were at least seven, eight floors up. Okay. Breath, think and you’ll be alright. This is the right building isn’t it?
I got into the elevator and went down to the lobby. I was now even doubting that I had chosen the correct building. A quick look outside and yes, this was the right building, for sure. Now I had to figure out what floor. I decided to walk up the stairs and check out each small floor and see if anything struck me as familiar. Each floor had only two doors leading into their respective apartments. This couldn’t be that hard could it? Check the elevator, how many floors are there. Eighteen, oh great, let’s just go floor by floor.
I started from floor five on up knowing that it had to be above that level. I began to notice as I was going up that there were bikes scattered on some floors in the hallway. Brian definitely didn’t have a bike outside. I eliminated those floors. I got to what I thought was the floor by a process of elimination and guesswork. I steeled myself and knocked gingerly on the door, heard what sounded like a T.V. behind the apartment walls. Could he have gotten home before me? I rang the bell beside the door and seconds later an elderly Korean man answered, still pulling a robe over his undershirt. I apologized and excused myself.
I was almost sure that was the door and then began to panic a bit… then I remembered the apartment key in my pocket. I had noticed on some of the doors a keypad locking device while others had just a keyhole. I used this to narrow down my search also. I looked between the eighth and twelfth floors knowing it had to be within that range of floors. I looked at the door handles and decided to chance the ninth floor door that had a keyhole instead of keypad.
I glanced around, no one in sight, the neighbors across the hall watching a blaring television. I knocked on the door sheepishly. Crossing my fingers that there wouldn’t be another aging Korean person to pester on the other side. No answer. I began to slip the key in millimeter by millimeter just in case I had the wrong apartment and someone sleeping on the other side of the door might wake and call the cops. I got the key in and remembered that it had been a very stubborn thing to even get the key to work that morning. Brian had given me the key and wanted to make sure that I could get in. I tried three full force turn of the key and handle. Beginning to sweat a bit, feeling like a burglar… wait burglars don’t use keys do they? Until finally the handle gave way and I found myself in the relative safety of Brian’s apartment. After about an hour and a half ordeal I was ready to shower and crawl into the unfamiliar bed in his apartment…

written by  Native_Kurtz on January 30, 2008 from Pusan, South Korea
from the travel blog: South Korea - Busan - Teaching Abroad
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