DAEGU HO!

Here's a New Year's Resolution: more posting in this thing, maybe. Also at some point the arrest story. BUT FIRST and more importantly, the story of how I got to Daegu! When last we left our intrepid hero, I had just finished training, and had to indeed lug all my luggage to the training center for the last day. After we finished and were given our contracts, I am basically given a ticket, a taxi, and a time to catch my train. Of course, I misread the time for my train (military time?! what is this, a 3rd world country?!) which leads to a very stressful 10 minutes in my taxi, only to get to the station and realize my mistake. I spend the next couple hours monstrously hungry but too paranoid to leave my baggage, and use my laptop to fuck around on the internet and pray I'm even getting on the right train.

Well, I do, and I spend the train ride watching some-movie-or-other on my mp3 player, which funny story is also Korean. That's the story, my mp3 player is Korean. At the Daegu station I'm met by someone who I hope is really from my school, because I'm totally not in the mood to get scammed for 160 bucks again. That would be pretty lame. BUT! The Korean dude is legit, and he drives me to my apartment. Most cars here I've found have this GPS/Media player device on the dashboard, and during the ride he uses one to show me this:



I am informed that this blonde fellow is a Genius, and my 32-year old driver is a big fan. After more light conversation in broken English about G-Dragon, we get to my apartment where I'm shown how to work my heating, I don't understand at all, and then I'm whisked to the academy where I'll be working for the next year.

At the school I'm given some towels, fruit, and a sandwich which my overly-maternal boss insists I eat while she watches. There's some action with my contract, and then I'm taken back to my apartment and which point oh fuck it PICTURE TIME:


Oh, hello! I almost didn't hear you come in to my FABULOUS KOREAN APARTMENT. Why yes, this is a pink apron the last tenant left behind that I'm wearing, so kind of you to notice!


Living room central! From here you can see the sliding doors to my bedroom on the left, and my patio/washing room on the right! Also, couch and TV! Yes!


3 locks and a peephole on my door! Double yes!


Next to my living room we have my kitchen, with bathroom on the left and bedroom on the right. I know you're jealous of my pillows, and that is okay.


Bedroom!


Free condiments! Score!


A shower that isn't separated from the toilet! Uh...neat.


And that shower points directly at an open electrical socket! Wow, that's spectacularly dangerous!


Free Thai bootleg DVDs! ...And no DVD player! Surely the parade of free stuff the previous tenant left will never end?


Uh oh. Ever walked 10 blocks downtown through a foreign city carrying a jumbo pack of toilet paper? Oh man is it super fun. Just a great time.


But at least I got sweet Christmas lights around my bedroom window! Some awesome adult times are gonna be had here, maybe!

Well, I'm running out of old pictures of my apartment to share, so I'll leave you with this fun bit from my last day of training - we got the medical results from our physicals back, and we had all passed but I noticed my results had this little note in Korean where no one else's did:



So if you can read Korean, you now know something weird about my body! I bet it has to do with my urine!

Until next time!

Training Week

Alright. I know a lot of you are probably expecting me to talk about my recent arrest, and while that's certainly a story I will eventually share, right now I want to get caught up in my timeline. It's my blog, screw you! However, where I last left off my week of training was starting, and since that was boring and tiring I'm just going to throw some random anecdotes and funny pictures at you, my darling readers. Enjoy!

-Some stuff about sex: massage parlors (both legit and otherwise) will often advertise themselves with a barber pole out front. You can insert whatever sexy haircut joke pleases you here. Brothels also like to advertise themselves as coffee shops where you can "rest", because one often associates rest with caffeine. So if you ever wander into a dimly lit cafe and the old woman in a fancy dress working there scowls at you when you order coffee, congratulations because you could be paying for sex! Another thing to watch out for is parking a car on a busy downtown street at night:



Because soon your windows will be covered in little prostitute business cards, like the fliers on a Vegas street. This car got off lucky compared to some of the others I saw completely covered with these little porn ads.

-Korea is a really big leg culture, so even if it's 20 degrees out you'll still see girls in miniskirts and hot pants. It's kind of wonderful, but also sad because none of them have an ass. A girl in my training made the interesting observation that it is specifically because these girls have no ass that they can wear such short skirts, because they don't have to worry about them riding up. Very interesting.

-I would leave the spice channel on in my room because, well, what else was I going to do in a love hotel room, and I happened to catch a weird porno where the actors seemed to be text messaging other people on their cell phones during sex. It was kind of awkward and off-putting. That's the story.

-I got an elderly Korean woman's number! The jist: I was getting food with a couple of my coworkers, and we were accosted by an old woman who insisted we go in the restaurant next to her. We didn't give the slightest of fucks, so we ate there and came back out. Being considerate foreign strangers, when we saw her outside I told her the place was pretty alright, which was apparently a cue for her to launch into a series of questions wherein she tried to recruit me as an English tutor. She was asking for my name, nationality, phone number, how much I charged, and when I said I didn't know the answer to (most of) these, she gave me her name and number like so:


(Numbers lazily blacked out to protect the innocent)

Of course, teaching outside my company would be in violation of my visa, but there's always a good chance I'll get deported anyways RITE GUYS?! If I'm ever back in Seoul, maybe I'll give her strange ass a ring. It's not like I could get in MORE trouble, our narrator typed, knowing exactly how much more damn trouble he could get into.

And that was a weird thing that happened in the middle of the street. So, a week went by and on the last night of training all of us went out for dinner and drinks and received this rad pitcher of beer:



wherein the beer is kept cool by dry ice. I thought it was pretty fucking neat. Anyways, the next day I passed my training and hopped on the train to Daegu, so my next post will finally have pictures of my apartment and hilaaaaarious stories about teaching little Korean kids. Or maybe I'll spill the arrest story for you vultures, who knows. But right now, I say farewell to Seoul and the Hotel Major, with your illicit salaryman affairs passing through at all hours!



We had some good times, old boy.