Being a Tourist for a Day

I have written about our days at the local spa often and frequently.  Honestly I count those times as some of the best and most relaxing times that I have had here.  Now I know that these places are all over and our local one is one of the larger establishments, but there are others.  We made plans and decided to try out one of the larger and more tourist friendly of these places. 

Dragon Hill was not difficult to find, but it was out of the way for our usual weekend spa trip.  This place was massive.  Our normal place isn’t small by any means, but this place was a virtual palace to comfortable self-indulgence.  What amazed me the most was the amount of stuff that they had there.  Video games, restaurants, massage parlors, nail salons, and of course baths.  We were even treated to a magic show from an in house magician.  Like I said this place was huge and it had everything. 

Now at some point I’ll more than likely head back there with a larger amount of cash, and engage in one of the most self-indulgent exercises that I can conceive.  The locker room even had an in house barber.    What was strange to me was that there was a lot of areas modeled after a pseudo Greco-Roman and Egyptian art styles.  A few heated rooms in particular were pyramid shaped, and decorated with hieroglyphics.  The baths were tiled in a lovely shade of green and decorated with busts and other statues, giving it a real air of class.  It is worth considering that even with all of this decoration and so on and so forth that there is still a level of artificiality, but it is nice. 

One of the other attractions that I particularly enjoyed was a heated “salt sauna”.  It was this burning hot stone room with pits filled with heated salt rocks.  As strange as it sounds it was actually very quiet and soothing.  There was as sign posted on the door that said you must always wear socks inside, but of course no one ever did.  Again it amazed me at how many different things there were.  Down in the basement, there was even a makeshift movie theater.  

Is this a place that I will be going to on a regular basis?  No.  But it is a great place to visit, and more than likely I’ll be taking any folks that visit us there.  

Viva La Revolution

Remember the French Revolution?  You know where French nobles were lounging around being French nobles, saying “Oh this is a perfect world, and it is the best of all possible worlds”.  Meanwhile in reality, people who didn’t have enough to eat were every so often being covered in feces, via the chamber pots of the well to do noblemen.  Now this is a blog about South Korea, and here I am going on about the French Revolution.  Allow me a little latitude if you please.  Now as I have said before, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.  Turns out it’s the corpses of the 4 people who quit in the last 5-6 weeks.  Now this isn’t a large school, and there are really only 12 or so people that work in the whole building. 

When the locals start abandoning ship, I begin to feel like one of the passengers on the Titanic, watching the rats all heading in one direction, thinking to myself “Hey, where are they going?”  Now, I have known some of this for a while, but it wasn’t until very recently that I realized that our boss is completely oblivious to how much damage she is causing.  The week in question started off so well too.  For you in the states it was Memorial Day.  Over here it was Buddha’s Birthday, so we got our Monday off too.  With a four day week to look forward to and no weekend classes in sight, Rachel and I were feeling pretty good going into Tuesday.  That was before we had to start demo-lessons. 

Now practice lessons are all well and good, and sometimes they provide useful insight into another teacher’s methods and offer some useful tools and tricks.  These demo lessons appear to be more of an exercise in public humiliation.  I was fortunate to not have to go the first round, but two of our Korean co-teachers, Rachel, and John (the 3^rd foreign teacher) were not so lucky.  When all was said and done, the end product felt more like a monkey dancing on a stage to a monkey master.  Now have you ever tried to give feedback to a monkey?  Really think about what that conversation would be like, especially from the monkey’s point of view.  For others of you readers that are old enough to recall the peanuts cartoons, conversations with our boss are just like anything that adults say to the peanuts.  “Wha, wha, wha wha, however…wha, wha, wha, class-uh…wha, wha, blah blah blah, bitch bitch, bitch, bitch…bitch”.  No, seriously that’s how she sounds.  I know that it’s English, and I can understand (most of) the words that she says, but there are times that she makes absolutely no sense.  The best example is how “staff page” magically transforms into “step poo peggy”

Now I have had some positive experiences with our “Misses Marie A.”, but they are few and far between.  Rachel on the other hand had trouble right from the beginning.  The week demo teaching began, our boss lost serious respect, from me.  While we were going through these demo-lessons, we were requested to make comments and write feedback on each teacher.  I thought that it was inappropriate to be in a position where I would have to judge Rachel.  I asked if I could not write comments about my partner.  My boss looked at me as though I had grown a stick out of my forehead that had stupid written all over it.  I begrudgingly agreed.  When the lesson was over, Misses Marie A. (that’s not her real name, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent, and so on and so forth) asked to see me alone for a moment.  She was offended that I didn’t want to write feedback.  Specifically she was offended that I grimaced when she ordered me to write said feedback. 

Fast forward another week, where another local teacher and I had to do our sample lessons.  Now, I have no problem getting in front of people and doing what I do.  “Marie A’s” comments were short, to the point and of mixed usefulness.  Little things such as making sure that doing things in a particular order have their uses.  Other things, such as doing their reward/classroom management system, are less than helpful.  I decided to use a different system because I don’t think the other one has much use, and rewards too few students.  The local teacher had a very different experience. 

My fellow presenter came back to the office after about half an hour, silent and in tears.  Rachel had a similar experience when she presented.  What both of these experiences have shown to me is that “our Miss Marie” has no grasp on how much damage she is doing.  Every single local teacher is intimidated and resentful.  Like I said the corpses are starting to pile up and I am not saying that we should break out the guillotine, but there are times that I lament the old days.  Sigh.  

Projects in Procrastination

I have come to the conclusion that Sid Meier is an evil drug pusher.  For those of you who are fortunate enough to not know who this man is, Sid Meier is a game developer and overall genius.  He is known best for his game series called Civilization.  It is one of the most well developed, involved, educational, and at time challenging games I have ever played.  Start with simple cave dwellers, struggling for survival in the Neolithic Era, to a highly advanced and sophisticated society.  Everything from developing the wheel, to constructing giant, death robots are part of this game.  One single game can take hours and hours. 

So this is why there has been no blog entry for the last few weeks. 

Now I have been asking for trouble for a while now.  I had been on a quest to find and locate a new game for weeks.  Now this is a lot more trouble than you might think.  I have a Steam account and there is no shortage of games out there.  But like everything we all have our tastes.  Now first I had problem after problem getting Steam to understand that I wasn’t a scam artist who was trying to get a free copy of Batman: Arkam City.  After that, it turns out that the game I bought ran so slowly on my computer that it wasn’t even worth it to play.  Well I have a copy now and I’ll play it at some point. 

Now South Korea has a number of obsessions.  The most famous of these digital addictions is the game Starcraft.  The people who make this binary cocaine are the same ones who are responsible for things such as World of Warcraft (which has worked both as the greatest contraceptive since the birth-control pill, and as a vehicle for pairing nerd couples), and most recently Diablo 3.  Now I assumed that I could walk into a store and buy a copy of Diablo 3 and select the English language version (just like you can select Korean in the US version)… foolish man.  You can select multiple languages for every version of the game, except for those purchased in China, Russia, and South Korea.  I was not happy. 

Back to stuff about Korean adventures.  A lot has happened since the last entry naturally.  Some of it has been downright terrible.  But as I said Sid Meier has been devouring a large amount of my time.  So I have a whole mess of entries that I have half written and will compile into one or two large entries.