2013, A Year in Clover.

From Hamlet - "When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."

Very true, William, very true. 

It wasn't all bad. It never is. But the landmark occasions this year were all pretty terrible.

Jobs: My current job is, in fact all my jobs in Korea have been, very nice - no complaints there. But when I first started this one, it was a disaster. The previous teacher wouldn't move out my apartment for a week. When he finally did the school was late delivering any furniture so I had to sleep on the floor. The heating broke down, the washing machine wasn't plumbed in, and the hot water stopped being hot. On top of all that, my co-teacher had a nervous breakdown when my vice-principal jokingly accused her of having an affair with me! I'd been in the job three days at this point. She was furious with him, her husband called the school and everything. It was a right shit-storm. She was never the same with me after that (distant, abrupt) and I was honestly happy when she got pregnant again and quit. My new co-teacher is a lovely woman. So all's well that ends well, I guess.

Dating: been on several dates this year, all of which either ended disastrously, or got cancelled, or didn't lead to a second date when I wanted them to. All in all, dating wise, this year was a total fucking disaster. I've ended the year as I started it. Except I'm a year older.

Friends: Made some great new friends this year, especially up in Haebangcheon in Seoul, but lost a few too. A couple of fall-outs lead to some unhealable rifts with one or two long-standing friends, which is never good, but c'est la vie. The biggest news, friend-wise, for me and many others this year was undoubtedly the loss, due to a climbing accident, of the dear, lovable, funny, surreal, hilarious and warm Kevin Andresen. Never in all my life have I heard so many people cry, so loudly and for so long. And I never want to hear that again.

Holidays: Went to Cambodia. Fell down some stairs. Got sick, including passing out, throwing up, going blind (twice) and for the first time in my entire life, shitting the bed, due to the muscle relaxants the hospital gave me.  Cost me a fucking fortune in hospital fees when I got back to Korea too. Holidays this year? Meh.

And finally, the biggest news of all for me was the loss of my mother, after a two year battle with cancer. It came as no surprise in the end, as she was given just a few days, but lasted three weeks. My Mum had her faults like all of us, but she was always there on the end of the phone if you needed a shoulder to lean on. I miss my Mum.

I'm a realist. I'm not one to mope about going 'life is terrible', despite laying it all out, above. Like most, I'll get morose occasionally, but I tend to laugh at it all in the end. And anyway, it wasn't all bad this year. I finished my Masters Degree before my Mum went, and I know she would have been proud of that, not to mention the personal sense of achievement. As I said above, my job is great, I have some amazing, wonderful and funny friends, and generally, I'm pretty happy with my lot. I hope, though, that the landmarks of 2014 are less harrowing and upsetting than this year's were, and that there are a lot less tears and a lot more smiles. 

Why Seoul Taxi Drivers Are C*nts

I shall relate to you some of my experiences with Seoul’s least upstanding citizens, the utter cunts that drive the cabs around here, but before I start, let me state in no uncertain terms that these cretins in no way reflect the general behaviour or attitudes of the general population of South Korea.

Episode 1: Getting charged the equivalent of a 20 mile journey for a 2 minute ride. So, it’s late, I’m drunk, I hail a cab. “Please take me to a cheap motel you know, thanks”. He says “OK, 20 000 won” (about a tenner UK). I’m thinking ‘that’s cheap for a motel, they are usually around 30 000’, and proceed. He takes me about half a mile down the road, and asks for the money. Suddenly it dawns on me in my drunken state that it was some kind of finder’s fee! Fuck this guy. A large argument ensued, during which, let me say, I negotiated a substantial discount. The hotel was 100 000! I went home. Cunt.

Episode 2: Given the runaround.

I exit Yongsan station, one of Seoul’s biggest, and go to the taxi rank. I get in and say, ‘take me to Itaewon please’. He says ‘you need to go from the other side of the road’. So I do. What do the taxis on the other side of the road say? You’ve guessed it, ‘you need to go from the other side of the road’. They laughed at me at both sides. Names were called.

Episoide 3: Actually being robbed.

I took a long taxi ride home – about 30 minutes and got charged the usual, about 35 000 won, which is about 18 quid. I handed the guy a fifty (about 25 quid) and I’m waiting for my change. He leaned back and said ‘you only gave me a five’. Cunt. I knew I hadn’t as I’d only just withdrawn the banknote, and also knew, immediately, that I’d been stung good and proper. On knowing this, when I got out of the cab, I snapped a photo of the back of it, and reported this guy to the authorities. They got back to me a few weeks later saying that he’d been fined. Fuck you, you robbing cunt.

Sidenote: A friend of mine had a similar experience with a taxi driver and ended up fighting, which cost my friend a very hefty fine. This had only happened a few weeks before, so I was very careful not to just thump the dude.

Episode 4: Crazy bastard.

I’m with a couple of friends, taking a short ride, and the driver is weaving all over the place, doing handbrake turns and jumps over the speed-bumps. We were all fucking terrified. When we arrived at our destination, he tried to charge us extra for the ‘thrills’. Fuck. Off. You lunatic.

Taxi drivers in Seoul are complete dicks. Not all of them, but a disproportionate amount. Outside of Seoul they tend to be much nicer, and more honest. In Seoul, they’re a bunch of cunts, frankly. 

The Holocaust Pt II

It’s been a while, so my apologies for that.

I’ve been busy, finishing a course of study, so forgive my delay in writing anything in here.

I’m ill today too, with a bout of ‘flu (well I was when I originally started to write this, a couple of weeks ago). Hence, I’m sitting at home today with time on my hands.

I've wanted to blog about this particular subject for a few weeks, but due to the studying mentioned above, I really haven’t had time. Add to that that the subject matter for today’s entry is rather depressing and therefore I have had some doubts about actually posting it at all.

It concerns North Korea. I currently live and teach English in South Korea, so maybe more than many back home I take an interest in what goes on north of the Korean border.

A Little Background

About fifteen years ago I took it upon myself to read The Diary of Anne Frank, because I happened to see it in a book shop, had never read it, and I’d heard that it’s one of those books that everyone should read.  So I read it. Of the book, I was very surprised at how posh their family was. Otto Frank, Anne’s father was a banker, and their family was very upper-middle class, and this shines through in the text. They could afford to build their ‘secret annex’ and fund themselves to live there – many everyday Jews in Europe at that time would not have been able to afford such things.

Here is a sweet little girl, full of the chirpiness of youth; and with every revelation of her persona, in every page, you know that she will eventually die a horrible death in a concentration camp. It’s a heartbreaking read for anyone with even the slightest smattering of human compassion. Anne was a very high-spirited girl, not shy of an argument or a bit of back-chat. She was pretty and full of life - cheeky and cheerful. This is, of course, what makes the book so heart-rending, the effervescence of youthful life, contrasted with the knowledge of her death. You would have had to have been in a coma for the last seventy years to not know Anne Frank’s fate, so all the while, with every bubbling page of the typical trials and travails of a teenage girl, you’re confronted with horror. It’s like watching children die. At once she is brought vividly to life, and simultaneously starved to death. It’s what makes the book so powerful.

I was very moved by this book. I researched endlessly about the holocaust afterwards, found out everything there is to know about Anne Frank, watched every documentary, read every book, listened to and read every witness statement. To this day, there is something I do almost daily to remember it, and what it meant, and how moved I was by its words.

You may be wondering what this has to do with North Korea. Well I think North Korea now has its own Anne Frank. This girl. I don’t know too much about her other than like Anne, she’s dead before the story starts. But just watch this video and tell me your heart doesn't break at her condition, her small voice, the desperation and hunger in her eyes. Her name was Gang Rim Jin. And she’s DEAD.

I had few feelings for the North Korean government before this. But I positively loathe them now. How can a country starve its own people? A quick scout around the internet will reveal all manner of human rights abuses taking place up there. It’s akin to the holocaust – millions have died through torture, starvation and overwork in concentration camps. There are Anne Franks dying all over the country. We know it’s happening. And we should do something to stop it.

Anne Frank’s diary, and countless other testimonies, have taught us and reminded us what we as a race are capable of, that we should never forget the past, and that if we have the power to stop these things happening in the future, then we most certainly should.

North Korea enslaves, tortures and starves thousands of its own people every year. If we’d have known (and some say that we did know) what was happening in Auschwitz in the 1940s, we’d have stopped it. Well we know what is going on in North Korea, and it’s very similar to what happened in Auschwitz and other camps. A great many people are starved, tortured, murdered. People are killed because of who they are, who they are related to, or what they believe.

I had high hopes the change of North Korea leadership a couple of years would herald a change akin to that in Russia or China over the last few decades, but he seems as bad as the previous leaders – far more concerned about playing political games than feeding his own people.

Look at this girl’s face. This needs to end. North Korea could easily be as prosperous as its neighbours, with a well-fed and happy populace. War definitely is not the answer here, that country needs a sea-change in its outlook – a huge change in the alignment of its priorities. Feed your people and stop making bombs. It really is that simple.

If you want to do something, send a link of this video to your local MP, or representative in your country. Ask them to ask questions. Thousands and thousands of Anne Franks are dying every year, and we’re letting it happen.

Long have I grumbled…

…about the quality of the music in Korean bars and clubs. You can read a previous post about it here. I’ve also written my views on music before, here and here. I especially loathe, and really mean loathe, despise, abhor with all my heart and soul, the types of songs mentioned here. I went to a club the other day and still had to put up with all that shit, along with “let’s hear it for Nooooooooo Yawwwwwwwwwwwwwwk” etc and all that utter fucking garbage, with people swaying along and singing like it’s the best thing they ever heard. Music for people who don’t like music, is all it is. Fucking garbage. Utter. Fucking. Garbage. All of it.

Oh, and fuck Gangnam Style while we’re at it. I’m happy for Korea, because it is perhaps one of their very first true global songs, so that’s great for them. But honestly. Fuck that shit. It’s a comedy record for fuck’s sake.

During one of my many drunken rants around a bar table here, my good friend Ben said to me, ‘Paul, let’s do a Northern Soul night in Korea!’. Well, frankly, that’s the best idea in the entire history of ever. Fact. He’s done a bit of DJing before, and I have too, so the idea bubbled for a few days, and we still thought it was a good one, so went decided to go find a bar in Seoul that would have us. And we did. It’s called The Lounge in Hongdae.

Sometimes you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is. Whilst I can’t take credit for coming up with the idea, it was Ben’s, I certainly feel that it’s time to stop grumbling, and in the words of, well, everyone.

Do something about it.

Long story short. Short tempered Brit is inspired by friend to put money in cakehole.

We will be DJing soulful, funky, jazzy, dancey, swinging, cool,  and hopefully fucking GOOD music at:

THE LOUNGE, HONGDAE,

OPENING NIGHT: SATURDAY 8^th SEPTEMBER. 9pm till 1am.

Then weekly Saturdays.

Gangnam Style will not be getting played.

Why I Despise Boy-Bands and Girl-Bands, and ‘Teen-Pop’ in General

What’s wrong with ‘teen pop’? I could say that they don’t write their own songs. But hey, some do, don’t they? Most of them don’t though, so there’s that to begin with. Most don’t even choose their songs, they are decided by record executives. And on what basis are songs selected? Positive message? Rebellious spirit? Something to say? A message? Nope. Sales. And the market for this type of music is? Impressionable youngsters. I see boy- and girl-bands as factory produced shit designed to fleece money from school children. To me, it’s as bad as putting junk food machines in schools. It is cultural and financial robbery. 

It could be argued that they don’t play their own instruments, beyond that, I doubt whether these singers and terrible (I’ll come to this shortly) dancers have any input into either song selection, or musical arrangement. Puppets on a corporate string. 

There aren’t any ugly ones either. Appearance has always played a part in pop music. I doubt Elvis Presley or the Beatles would have been as successful if they looked like me. Today though, looks are a prerequisite for any budding pop star. You may get a token ugly one in a ‘band’ like the ginger one in Girls Aloud, but that’s beside the point. Knowing a female who’s a mechanic doesn’t alter that statistic that most mechanics are males. Having a male friend who’s kindergarten teacher doesn’t….you get the picture. We used to get ugly pop stars purely because they were talented. Not now. Now you look at the ‘music’, not listen to it. 

Dancing. What is good dancing? Now I like dancing, I am hugely impressed by amazing dancing. I want to see dancing that makes me go “Wow! I couldn’t learn that dance if I practiced for a decade.” Anyone who knows me well knows that I have spent some considerable time on dance floors. I like dancing, I’m not great at it, but I’m not one of those stiffs who looks totally out of place on a dancefloor either. Dancing has been a big part of my life for a long time. I’ve been a big Northern Soul fan for longer than I care to remember, I wore out my bedroom carpet as a teenager practicing moves, I’ve DJ’d various genres of dance music, in short, I know a bit about it. I’m quite old now, and times and styles have changed since my heyday, but I still think I know good dancing when I see it. And I DO NOT see it in these boy- and girl-bands. What they are doing is synchronised, and I stress the word ‘synchronised’, rubbish. The next time you see one of these ‘bands’ perform their dance routine, look at just ONE of them and imagine them doing it alone, and compare it to a break dancer from the 80s, or a lindy Hopper from the 40s. They look pathetic. Also, I firmly believe that any semi-competent dancer could learn any of those faux-dance moves in a day. IN A DAY! There has been fantastic dancing in and around pop music since the 40s. Now we are spoon fed crap and told it’s steak by suits in factory-offices. Better not make it too complicated, they say. If the kids can’t do it, they won’t buy it. If we took this attitude to sport, we’d lose. 

Music, or at least youth culture oriented music has always been about change. A voice, an ethic, a stance, something to say. Hippies wanted peace and sang about it, punks wanted change and screamed about it. Now we have this abomination. It actually doesn’t matter if the songs are any good – no doubt a few of them are – that’s not the point. We have been silenced by corporations. Punk happened because they were sick of shitty disco (not all disco is shitty) and shitty prog rock noodling. But punk also only happened because they captured an underlying spirit – the people themselves were pissed off with the same things. Who are those people today? The life has been sucked clean out of the popular music industry, and we’ve just stood by and let it happen. Granted not everyone – I know several musicians from back home who have spent years honing their crafts, they have certainly not stood idly by, but where is that underlying zeitgeist of rebellion? Of change? Of creative expression? Not all music has to be furiously rebellious like punk, look at the hippies, they did it with flowers. Music and cultural movements like hippy and punk felt like they were government toppling behemoths, changing the world. These boy and girl bands, teen pop in general do nothing, and say nothing. They are, nothing. Shitty dancers with auto-tuned voices and pretty faces, sucking the culture out of the world. 

You may think I’m taking this too seriously, that I should lighten up. It’s only pop music right? And everyone has different tastes. That’s true, and despite my stance laid out above, I have certainly, over the years, succumbed to a cheesy pop song. Many times in fact.  But there is no rebellion. The teenagers seem to have given up.

Maybe I’m just old and don’t get it any more. But this is how it seems to me. Teenagers today seem like a homogenous culture vacuum. When I was young, ‘cool’ mattered. I wasn’t that cool, but I admired and looked up to those I thought were cooler than me. 

It’s about time suits in offices stopped deciding what young people listened to. It’s about time something changed.

Simple Things

[This is an article I wrote for the school newspaper. Please bear in mind that it is aimed at young teenagers, whose first language is not English.]

There are several things I miss about being at home in England. The first is something English people drink a lot of. In fact it’s been the most popular drink in England for over two hundred years. 98% of people drink it with milk, and around 30% of people, including me, drink it with sugar. Can you guess what it is? Did you guess coffee? You guessed wrong! The most popular drink in England is tea! Not green tea, but black tea, which in England, we simply call ‘tea’.

In England, when you take a break at work, it is often called a ‘tea break’; this is because when most people take a break, they drink some tea.

This is the thing I miss most about England because tea, or black tea as it is called in Korea, is very difficult to find here. One time, I was in a store and I noticed that they had some black tea, and I bought all the black tea they had in the store, about six months’ worth of tea. I was very happy to have some tea.

In England, the average person drinks about 2.2 kilograms of tea per year. If you compare this with the USA, they only drink about 0.2 kg per person per year, as Americans prefer to drink coffee. They are missing the benefits of a relaxing cup of tea.

As you can see, the English like their tea! In fact, England is the seventh biggest consumer of tea in the world. We had tea shops over one hundred years ago, which are much like today’s coffee shops, except they sold only tea and snacks. It is customary to have a sandwich or a scone (a type of heavy cake) with your tea in a tea shop. Tea shops are very polite places, and it is normal to see ladies sitting alone drinking tea in a tea shop, but they would not go to a coffee shop or restaurant alone.

The other thing I miss most about England is chips. Chips in England are like what you would call French fries, except they are much bigger and softer, and made from real potatoes. The potatoes are peeled, and cut very thickly, then cooked in oil or fat. Fat makes the chips taste better, but you can cook them in vegetable oil too. The most famous food in England is fish and chips, but it is not ‘haut cuisine’, it is very ordinary food, which English people love, maybe like kimchi and rice in Korea – that is, it is everyday ordinary food, nothing special or exciting. Some days I wish I could just go to the ‘chippy’ (slang for a shop that sells cooked fish and chips) then go home and eat them with a nice cup of tea, with milk and sugar of course!

I like Korean food, but I really miss some simple English things like chips and tea.

Is Christianity the Biggest Threat to Korean Culture?

A simple conversation with my co-teacher got me thinking. He said that at Chuseok, he and his wife do not honour the spirits of their ancestors in the traditional Korean way (see below), and when asked why, he said it’s because they are Christian. I found this both shocking and sad.

Chuseok, a kind of autumnal harvest festival, is the biggest holiday event of the year in Korea, equivalent in magnitude, to Thanksgiving in the States, or Christmas (not an especially religious Christmas!) in the UK. In Korea families flock home to perform traditional ancestral worship rituals, be with their relatives, visit the graves of the recently deceased to tidy them and offer gifts of thanks (food etc.). 

Currently around 30% of Koreans are Christian, a number that is growing year on year since the ‘conversion boom’ of the 1980s. It’s an actively expansive religion, and if you don’t think so, ask yourself how many times someone has handed you a leaflet in the street, or knocked on your door, asking you to convert to Christianity. Atheists don’t do that nor, for that matter, do Confucianists. Confucianism, like Buddhism, is as much a way of life as it is a religion, a peaceful way of life that is embedded in Korean society and culture, even the everyday greeting ‘hello’ (ahn-yeong-ha-seh-yo) is literally translated as ‘are you in peace?’. 

The land of the morning calm does not need the ‘wrath of god’. Korea should stick to its own traditions and culture, which, frankly, are considerably superior to anything Christianity has to offer. Christianity is not ‘bad’ per se, good things may come out of it like charitable donations – let’s be clear, most charities are not religious - but Korea has its own, beautiful, peaceful way of life already, steeped in Confucian tradition and wisdom. That they would even dream of swapping that for flawed (look what the USA is doing with it) Christianity is heartbreaking. 

To adopt a spurious, faltering and flawed religion from another world will bring nothing but conflict and irreparable damage to Korea’s identity and culture. If you’re a Christian, you should think twice before attempting to convert anyone else to your belief system. You may think you are doing something awesome, but you might only be damaging centuries of culture.