Alien cowboy, me!

I'm posting earlier than I expected, but a couple things happened I wanted to tell you about. Yesterday Andy finally took me out to the Immigration Office to get my Alien Registration card. First we had to go to the hospital to pick up my physical exam results (which involved Andy making a creepy joke about AIDS which I'm just gonna assume was his way of saying things are fine), and then we drove all the way out to the docks where the immigration folks are.

My favorite part was when a long, loud announcement came on over the intercom -- all in Korean. In the, ya know, Immigration Office. Where we're all immigrants and probably don't, ya know, speak Korean.

My other favorite part was when they took my passport and told me I would get it back in two weeks with my AR card. No, wait, not "favorite." The other one. I mean that was the part that sucked.

So, aside from I'm broke and don't know the language and don't know the city, I also have no ID, so I guess I really am holing up in my apartment for the weekend.

The other thing that happened was that I have an official nickname at the school now. I'm "Cowboy Teacher." Yeah. It's no secret that I'm from Texas, but that's not it. (There is a reaction, but I found out it's because the Red Light District in Busan is called Texas Street. Because that's where the Russian sailors hang out. I know.) Those of you who saw me last month probably recall my extremely stylish straw Panama hat. Well, I wear that regularly here, too, 'cause I look friggin' awesome in it. But I guess they don't have Panama hats in Korea, because here it's a cowboy hat, and I am Cowboy Teacher.

I really am, too. Ian, one of the other teachers, had this conversation with a student yesterday:

"Ian Teacher, do you know Cowboy Teacher?"

"Cowboy Teacher? You mean Niko? That's Niko. Ni-ko."

"No Niko. Cowboy Teacher."

Yee-haw.

Know Future

Wow, shoot. It's been a week already, huh. Sorry about that. I'll have you all know, however, that it's difficult coming up with something entertaining every week. Despite all your flattering comments, I'm not actually a very good writer.

Which is too bad, because I have rather a project coming up this weekend. This is vacation weekend in Korea, and it means four days off from work. Now for most people (including me, in most circumstances), this would be cause for celebration. But, as I've said, I'm broke and effectively illiterate, and I live without basic necessities like television; so this is meaning four days of sweet f. a. for yours truly.

(Actually, I've been invited to the beach at Haeundae this weekend "to dip my toes in the South Sea." So I'll be doing that, I think. Unfortunately, since Korea is shutting down for the weekend, so will about six hundred thousand other people. I give it about ten minutes before the claustrophobia sets in and I go back and hide in my apartment. Or start swimming for Hawaii. If I don't post next week, you'll know which direction I went.)

Fortunately, I've sort of got my computer working again. I still haven't gotten the transformer I'm convinced I need, but I have pursuaded my plug adapter to work, finally. I'm still offline, of course, but I'm not entirely without entertainment. For one thing, I have the Spore Creature Creator, which is the second most entertaining thing in the universe. (The most entertaining thing will be coming out this fall.) The other wonderful thing I have is "Max Headroom."

I'm sure most of you have at least some residual memory of Max. This should help, I'm sure. Now, those of you who are my age or older may recall that Max had a TV show on ABC when we were kids. It came on after "Moonlighting." Max is a computer-generated simulacrum of an intrepid investigative journalist (Matt Frewer, who also played Max -- you young'uns will know him as the obnoxious neighbor in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or the guy who gets bitten by the zombies in the remake of Dawn of the Dead and wants "every last second of it" when he dies before he turns into a zombie and Ving Rhames has to blow his head off), who works and lives in a hellish future where TV and consumerism are all that matters, and gigantic media networks rarely think twice about offing people if it means getting their ratings up. Ripping good 80's dystopian sci-fi stuff. Punks with scary hair. Computers with tiny screens and huge, blocky keyboards. Rollerdeathball -- with spikes. Tongue planted so firmly in cheek it's taken root and grown into a great, green Tree of Cynicism that blooms every spring and drops irony berries. Naturally, it got cancelled after twelve episodes. That show was some ballsy noise, and the surprising thing about it is not that a show that great came and went in under a season, but that a show that cynical and critical of TV was ever made in the first place, let alone shown on primetime, by a major network for as long as it was. I miss the hell out of that show. Turns out, there are a number of other people who do, too (Thank you, Dan).

So I've decided to bring it back. I've mentioned this to a few of you, the handful of you geeky, nostalgic, and bitter enough to care. I think we're all agreed that the last few years (Let's pick a random number liiiike...eight. For instance.) have been pretty shitty. Ecomony blah. Environment blah blah blah. Bad guys blew up New York, and we, ya know, didn't do anything about it. (Oooh, I know I'm asking for it with that one.) And you know my favorite thing to do is complain. I figure, times is ripe all over again for Max Headroom and a little snarky, self-righteous satire.

So I've been taking notes, and I'm gonna write me a pilot. Two-part miniseries. One of the things I'm wanting to do out here is write, and this weekend it's gonna happen. Do I know the first thing about writing a teleplay? Well, no, but I said the same thing about teaching, and I still have a job. I figure I can at least pound out a first draft.

And hey, maybe (maybe) it'll be good. Maybe (maybe) I'll shop it around. Maybe (don't bet on it) something ("something") will happen. Mostly, I'll just be pleased if it turns out I can write ninety consecutive pages about the same thing and it doesn't all suck.

Oh, also -- because I know you're all wondering -- I think I'm going to do some laundry. Like I said, I have four days off.

Dirty laundry

All right, I give. You got me.

It's true, I was warned. I was warned that things would be different. That the secrets of the East were many and profound. And I have kept an open mind and sought, if not to understand, then at least to accept and adapt to the new world around me. But this. This, man.

Seriously. For the love of god. Where is the friggin' lint trap?

Two weeks, and I found something that bugs the hell out of me. To be sure, there are a few things, minor things. There are no trash cans on the street, so if you decide to have a Coke outside, you gotta hang onto it all the way home. The public bathrooms are, shall we say, more public than I would like. There's that whole plug adapter thing. But I've got a year of struggle and hardship ahead of me with my washer/dryer.

The good news is that I have a washer/dryer in my apartment. It's kind of weird, because it's a single unit: you wash your clothes in it and then push a button, and dry them in it too. But hey, whatever, right? So the good news is that I have something more than a tub, a board, and some lye. The bad news is...everything else.

First of all, the thing holds three kilos. I'm still struggling with the metric conversion, but I think 3 kg works out to something like five and a half socks. Seriously, this thing is small. So I'm faced with washing my clothes every other day, or a fourteen-hour laundry marathon. That's the other thing. It takes literally (really actually literally) three hours to do a load of clothes, because it takes an absurdly long time to do anything. "Standard" washing time is over an hour. "Standard" drying time is an hour and a half. This, incidentally, does not actually dry your clothes; it just gets them hot and damp, like some tiny fat man went jogging in them for ninety minutes. Real dry, you're looking at two, two and a half hours, and it turns all your shirts into balled up newspaper. During which time, of course, you can't start any more laundry because there's only one damn machine.

And -- of course -- all the controls are in Korean. Natch.

Yeah, that was fun. I washed my sheets three times trying to get them dry before I caved and spent the next two hours translating all the controls on my console. Well, "translating." I figured out that the fourth cycle is the "agitate" cycle (or, literally, the "anger" cycle, as in you anger your clothes, which I like). But what are the spin-dry settings: "river," "standard," and "medicine"? And I understand the setting for "synthetics" but not the one below it for "noisy."

It's a good thing everything I own is cotton. And my place comes with an iron, which is probably the best way to get things actually dry -- and pressed, for that matter.

So I figured, this is how I spend my weekends. Two shirts at a time for six hours a load. Whatever. And then yesterday I spend two hours with a load in the dryer, and it comes out piping hot and soaking wet. So I throw it in for another hour. Nothing. So it occurs to me that I might need to clean the lint trap. Only I can't find the lint trap. There's a "drainage atmosphere" setting for "filter cleaner," but I can't get it to respond. There's a sort of a panel on the front, so it's probably under that. But I can't get the panel off, of course. So then I get worried, because aren't dirty lint traps fire hazards or something? I mean, it's one in the morning, and I still have a load of darks, but I need this thing clean, or I'm gonna burn down Korea.

I asked a teacher about it this morning, and he said, "You know, I don't think there is a lint trap. You probably just put too many clothes in."

Oh. Ah.

Well, another bout with that bastard, and I might just burn down Korea anyway.

I have no life, which is still pretty cool.

Weird. People are actually reading my blog. And commenting and stuff. I mean, I know I've been handing it out like I was campaigning for prom queen, but I didn't expect an actual audience. The pressure's on, I guess. I gotta be regular and interesting and all.

That's no problem at the moment, fortunately. Aside from work, I have very little to do. I don't have my Immigration Card yet, which I need to set up my Internet access and my cable. So I can watch one fuzzy channel in Korean, or doot around on my laptop, offline. And even that's been denied me, since my plug adapter went tits up a couple days ago.

Yeah, I bought this swanky, $30 plug adapter the day before I left. It's got, like, six different plugs for sockets in every foreign country you might visit EXCEPT Korea. Well, sort of. It has a European plug, which is exactly like a Korean plug, only the prongs are, like, two millimeters skinnier, which apparently means it fits the outlet okay and trucks along fine -- until a week goes by and it, I don't know, gets all awkward and shy and quits working. So I went to Mega Mart (which is like Korean WalMart -- I suspect it may even be WalMart), which has every damn thing you could want, like plug adapters that are also the wrong size. And none of my teacher friends here are any help, because they all bought computers here. (Joke's on them, though, if they ever leave the country and suddenly discover the world's outlets ain't interested in Korean plugs.) But I've been doing a little research, and I think I've found some electronics alley in Nampo-dong that carries transformers (no, you dork), which I think will work. In the meantime, much of my four-hour lunch break is spent here at the hagweon, checking email and updating the blog.

Furthermore, I'm also wicked broke, despite the shot in the arm Dad gave me. After the initial necessities-of-life outlays, I've got about $150 to last me until 10 August, and, while Korea is pretty cheap compared to the U.S., $150 doesn't make me king. Naturally, the solution to this is to go out drinking after work tonight, preferably at the pricy American joints around Busan National University. Yeah, fine, look. It's just for tonight. It's the first drinks-with-the-teachers night of the month, plus there'll be other Americans and stuff at the bar -- let's call it networking, a career move. After this it's gimbap and yoga for the rest of the month, promise.

Whatever. It's awesome and you know it. Halfway across the world and penniless, cut off from modern technology, surviving on cheap, unidentifiable local cuisine until I can teach my way into a paycheck? I'm so the hottest person you know, so don't even.

Okay, so sometimes I like pretending I'm hot shit, just to see what it feels like.

Even better than New Fine Arts

So observations are over, the training wheels are off, and I'm a day and a half into my new job. My cool new job. My new job which I -- gasp! -- like. Yeah, didja get that? One more time: I like my job. And you know why? Major reason: for once, I'm proud to tell people what I do. So, please, if you could all bear with me for a second while I introduce myself.

*ahem*

Hi, my name's Niko, and I'm an English teacher.


I'm going to get so ragged on by the other Americans here. It's true, I'm still fresh and starry-eyed and I still love all my students, and I'm sure I'll be jaded and grouchy and hate everything and everyone inside of a few months, 'cause it just ain't cool to like stuff, but for now, fuck cool. Fuck it, man, I'm having a great time, and I'm pretty much exactly where I want to be. This morning, I actually did that thing where you look in the mirror and go "I'm a teacher" and get all pleased with yourself and grin and do a little dance. And then I went to work (!) at the school (!!) where I'm a teacher (!!!).

I have six classes: 10 and 11 in the morning, and 4, 6, 7, and 8 in the evening. It's kind of a wonky schedule, I know, but I just pretend I'm in college (only now I stay sober if I have class in the morning). The age groups are all over the place: I've got college kids in the morning, 4th-graders at four, high school kids at six and seven, and a pair of retired bankers in the evening. And every last one of them is K - U - T - E, kute! 'Struth, kids, Koreans are wicked kute. You talk, and they nod and go "ok" and then it's their turn, and they get all shy and quiet and color up and mutter something brilliant or maybe just something goofy, and your insides just goosh and it's all you can do not to just scoop them all into a sack and take them home and set them on your mantlepiece.

Oh, Koreans. *sigh* They're like kittens, only people.

Across the pond

Guess what, kids? I really did quit my job and move to Korea. Like, here I am, good and proper, with an apartment and a job and all. It actually happened.

And I'm not completely insane anymore, which is nice. My last post was at, what, four o'clock the morning of my flight? Brain shattered with nerves, internal organs fighting over which one got to be the first to leap out of my throat, desperately trying to sort out one more way to keep from packing and making all of this real, sleep profoundly not an option... By six, it was pretty much all over. Mostly because I was too tired to muster the energy to freak out anymore. I just finished packing and took a shower and waited for Dad to get up. I got a lovely early morning call from Dave and Ashley wishing me off. And everything was just, you know, fine. Or at least I couldn't do much about it anymore if it wasn't, so screw it.

I had my worldly belongings crammed into four huge bags (which I had to pay extra for -- yet another way for the supposedly cash-strapped airlines to wring yet more money out of us), and stopovers in Minneapolis and Tokyo; so plenty of opportunities to lose everything I own on the way to Korea. Which didn't happen, but that, pretty much, was what I was allowing myself to worry about. It was nice to realize that, too: that it wasn't the "Holy Christ, halfway across the globe" freaking I'd been doing, it was the just the usual worries traveling anywhere elicits.

And then, eventually, sixteen hours, "Horton Hears a Who," and the International Date Line later, I ended up in Busan. Andy, my boss, met me at the airport and drove me home to my new flat, showed me around, gave me 20,000 won "survival money" (1,000 W to the dollar or thereabouts, so, like, 20 bucks) and told me to be at work the next day at two. So okay.

Andy, I should say, is great. I mean, airport, survival money -- plus, he got me set up with a local bank account the next day and took me to the hospital for my immigration physical, and he's going to help me with getting Internet access (I'm using the Institute's computers for the time being) and cable ("Yeah so like uh, here's the TV and like uh...." -- here flipping through channel after channel of fuzz -- "...two fucking channels man, we gotta get you cable.") and a cell phone. I mean, sure, he's hired me and all, and has a vested interest in my having a positive experience, but he really seems sincerely interested in making sure the teachers are taken care of. I'm sure it's all in the service of maintaining a good reputation for the hagweon (the language school), but, hey, no problem. Let me say unreservedly that the World Foreign Language Institute is a good school that takes care of its teachers, and anyone interested in teaching English in Korea should apply here (preferably through Madeline Moon at Teacher Tech in Albuquerque -- she kicks ass).

I probably should mention that I start my actual job tomorrow, so the endorsement above is perhaps a bit premature. Whatever. They've been pretty awesome so far.

One more thing (I'm observing classes this week, and I have one in about five minutes.): On Tuesday, after a long sleep, I got up for work. And yeah, I'm a bit nervous, and I've just spent my first night in Korea, with a year and a career left to go, and I gotta make a good impression and all, so I shower and put on my Nice Clothes, and step outside. And the first thing I get from Busan -- from Korea -- are two grade school kids going past my building, who, as soon as I step outside, spin around and shout, in unison "Hello!"

Cutest. Ever.

I think things'll be okay here.

Blind panic and you're all invited

Uh-huh. So.

I know, it's been a while. Well, ya know, there's been stuff going on. And I should tell you about all of it -- the surreal Boston-Dallas drive punctuated with rest stop catnaps and gas prices that bleed you like Civil War surgery; David and Ashley's amazing wedding with vows that quoted Mr. Show; my Kafkaesque adventures in visa paperwork that have taken me on day trips to both Austin and Houston and finally landed me a visa yesterday; Anxiety Dream Marathon Week -- I should tell you about all of this, and perhaps I will, but I'm preoccupied at the moment. See, in case you haven't heard, I'm moving to Korea. Tomorrow. Kee-rist.

Funny, ya know, 'cause I've been "moving to Korea" for a while, and I've been plenty anxious about it for a while. And I keep hearing the "Gee, that's coming up soon" and the "Wow, you're really doing it" and "That's far" and "That's a long time" and I know, I know, I know, but now I really freakin' am, and I'm doing it to-freakin'-morrow and it's not in quotes any more.

And I still don't know a friggin' word of Korean, or how I'm gonna teach anyone friggin' English, or anything else at all, frankly... but what the hell, right? No one knows anything anyway, and I'll figure it out somehow or another, right? Ya know, a few days ago I was checking out the ESL forums trying to get some tips on how to survive and coming up totally empty. On one site, I kept finding all of the useful questions had been dominated by some guy who kept posting notes on Korean fauna; another was just horror story after horror story of not getting paid or getting fired and how Koreans are corrupt cheats and hate us anyway. And then I found some blog by some African-American woman who was heading off to Korea (has gone by now -- the entry was a couple years old) and checking forums and had seen the same dispiriting stuff and had finally concluded that most of the posters seemed to be disillusioned white kids who'd never (surprise surprise) had to deal with cultural prejudice before. And there was a comment from another African-American woman who was teaching in Seoul and having a great time and turns out Koreans are really nice, even if you're black and a woman. So, there you are: no one knows anything, and I need to quit worrying.

Oh, and speaking of comments, I finally got one, and fuck all y'all, 'cause it's from some random blog junkie who likes what I have to say about capers and not anyone I actually know. So to Lorenloo I say, stay tuned, it's just going to get weirder. And to everyone else, write me back, fuckers, or you're just going to get more of this nonsense.

One more thing. Ronnie, so you know, I didn't give her the tape after all. She got a book, and it makes much more sense.