We went to Busan with Jake a couple of weekends ago and he took us to Jagalchi fish market which is HUGE! I have never seen so many fish and sea creatures in all my life- it was hard to believe that were actually any left in the sea. I know Japan is home to the world's biggest fish market, but this one must be in the top 5. It was a pretty weird and depressing phenomenem seeing tanks filled to the brim with fish, eels and shellfish of all colours, shapes and sizes- some were so full that you couldn't actually see the water in between the fish. I think animal rights activists would have a lot to say about the place... Still, it reminded me that I am in a foreign country which sometimes I forget and despite it being a pretty disgusting, smelly and cruel place, it was definitely interesting.
I met a Korean lady in a coffee shop last week. She is a Korean teacher in one of the high schools and her English is pretty good. She came over to me and started asking me questions about myself and took my email address. She then emailed me to ask me to go to dinner with her. I was slightly dubious, it's not often that I go to dinner with a complete stranger but on Tuesday evening I met her after work and she drove me to a beautiful Italian restaurant in another district of Gimhae. She bought her thirteen year old daughter along too who is most definitely the politest Korean teenager I have ever met and we had a wonderful evening discussing all sorts of things. We actually had quite a lot of common ground as she and her daughter had travelled extensively throughout Asia so we compared notes on where we had been. She was wonderfully open-minded which shocked me somewhat as it's not a trait I have often found in the Koreans I had met previous to her. She is one of the first Korean people I have known to openly compliment Japan on it's beauty and the Japanese on their kindness and generosity. Many Koreans are very hostile towards the Japanese because of they way that the Koreans were treated during Japanese occupation. When I questioned her about this she simply said, "The past is the past and I live for the future." I realised at this point that this is a woman who I liked. She also likes jazz music which pleased me greatly.Unfortunately she is one of the very few Koreans I have met that I can genuinely say has had a positive affect on my life. So many of the Korean people I have met here have been unhelpful, rude and hugely short-sighted (and I don't mean that they need glasses.) The businessmen here are the most inconsiderate, selfish, arrogant people I have EVER met, they will do anything in their power to scam you out of money and they just don't care about your views or your welfare. We've both had a frustrating time dealing with Korean people in the last couple of weeks and so this blog may turn in to a rant.
We have had lots of changed taking place at work but nobody informs us of the changes until they are actually happening and then they expect us to stay at school until 10pm to 'help out' whilst not getting paid. And our Hagwon is oozing with money, they could afford to pay us, it's just against their principle. Every month we have been underpaid and we always have to go and hassle someone about it. I genuinely think they do it on purpose in the hope that the employee won't have the balls to say anything about it. Thankfully, I don't care about kicking up a fuss if I am being treated unfairly.
I think Hagwon managers totally neglect to realise that many English teachers make a life-changing decision to come here and it takes a huge amount of organisation too. When we arrived at the airport last April, our boss was 45 minutes late and when he eventually turned up he made no apology, complained that we looked tired and didn't talk much (we had travelled for over 20 hours and hadn't slept for about twice that amount) and he bought a woman with him that was obviously a prostitute. I guess that explains why he was late. And then we got put in a house that was an hours drive away from the city that we worked in, with no bed, no public transport and no supermarket or restaurants within miles- and they actually expected us to live there for the first 3 months of our contract. Anybody with any consideration for other people wouldn't have acted in this way. One of the first things he said to us was that our contract was meaningless and that we shouldn't worry about 'changes.' Ha! I think he must've thought we were really naive, a contract is a contract- if it's signed, it's a legally binding document, doesn't matter which country you are in! (I let him know that I was aware of this.) I am so glad that I put my foot down right at the beginning and told our boss to sort his act out, because I am sure he would have walked all over us by now if I hadn't.
My students have grated on me this week too. I have a new class of 19 year old girls and I find their blinkered outlook on life really draining. Most Koreans I have talked to strongly believe that their country is the best in the world even if they've never been anywhere else. It's great to be proud of the country you are from but it's not great to look someone from another country in the eye (that would be me) and state that 'Korea is better than any other country in the world, so why would I want to travel?' And these views are embedded in students from the age of five upwards. I have always thought exploring the world would be a positive thing where I would learn good, bad and sometimes just totally different things about other people's cultures. Travel is an enriching and hugely beneficial aspect of my life- I have learnt things by travelling that I could never study in a classroom. And cliched as it might sound, I have also learnt about myself. One of my high school students actually said to me that she hated all culture apart from Korean culture. Not only is this hugely insulting to me, someone of a different culture to her, but massively myopic and bigoted of her. And I guarantee that she's never studied other cultures, she's just decided that's how she feels. All I can say is that a) I wont be returning to Korea after I leave and b) This girl and her fellow peers with similar outlooks will be running this country in ten years time. Now that is scary.
