Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Ya-ta Boy]

No school today. The boys went to some amusement park in Daegu. I begged off so I could go to a meeting at School #3 and sign the contract. The real reason was that I didn��t want to have to play dodge-the-boy-with-the-crush all day. But I did get a lot of personal business done, like banking stuff that is time consuming.

I got to the front gate of the school at 6 to meet Jin-Wook and Young-Duck, who also dodged sponsoring the field trip for whatever reasons. However, Young-Duck was a no-show. ��Young-Duck is died,�� Jin-Wook said. Well, maybe. If he has, it wouldn��t necessarily be a bad thing after seeing him kick a kid square in the crotch on Friday and slam 5 or 6 more up side the head with his fist—for wearing their slippers outside. Anyway, he broke our ��promise��, leaving Jin-Wook and I to have dinner together.

Jin-Wook said, ��I heard you like duck.�� (He heard it from me, so the accuracy of the rumor was 100%.) So we went up to Ok-Chon. Ok-Chon is the valley at the south end of School #2, about 3 miles up the road. Take a right at the bridge as you come into town from the south and you are in Ok-Chon, one of the prettiest valleys I��ve seen in Korea. On the south is Soul of the Eagle Mountain and on the north is Hwa-wang-san. Drive a couple of miles up the valley and you come to a lake (artificial), but a lake nonetheless. At the far end of the lake is a terrific duck restaurant. Several little tiny huts outside, with traditional ondol floors. Four or five pavilion-type thingies along the water (roof, no sides) that will be fine a little later in the year. Our little hut could not have been more than 6�� by 6��. Several dozen white birds were standing in the water—Herons? Egrets? Cranes? Anyway, quite pretty to see the flock in the trees across the lake and then watch them swoop down to the lake side.

Jin-Wook and I sit down in our little hut, windows open, floor and buns warm, and the ajumma brings out the food and the soju starts flowing. Jin-Wook tells me he found this restaurant two weeks ago (he moved to the valley 3 weeks ago) when his friend brought him there. The friend is a friend of the ajumma��s husband. Jin-Wook started to tell me about the husband, but before he got very far into the story, the husband showed up at our hut door. We invited him in and I started quizzing him. (He speaks better English than Jin-Wook.) Mr. �� majored in public administration in college, but started teaching in ��88. He was anti-government in those days. He demonstrated and was a member of the teachers�� union. President Noh Tae-Woo had him arrested, dragged off to jail in Masan for a week and then banned from teaching for 10 years.

From the very beginning, he knew I am mi-gook saram. It didn��t matter. (Why does it seem to matter more to taxi drivers who talk to other nationalities, but never to anyone who talks to me? I don't understand that.) At the end of the evening he invited me back on Friday to visit his home. I had to turn him down because I have other plans, but I��m reconsidering. It seems to me this could be a ��relationship�� worth following up on. I would love to hear the real anti-government point of view from those days. I��ve met a couple of them before, but their English wasn��t good enough to explain the point of view. This guy may be able to do it. Another of the things I want to learn from him—how does he manage to drive to work at Hapchon in 35 minutes when it took Jong-Hoon and I 3 �� hours to get there last October? A major mystery. And once again, I��m confronted with the mystery of why so many ESLers say ajosshis are not worth talking to.

The rest of the evening was kind of a bust. Jin-Wook and I came back to town and went to Cello. His ��girlfriend�� –she��s just a friend!—works there. I still have not understood why so many of my ajosshi friends drag me to a bar to sit and watch them flirt with a woman who doesn��t speak a lick of English. It��s a whole lot less than interesting to me. I did find out though that she did go to Milyang with Jin-Wook last Saturday to visit his apple orchard. I think more is going on than Jin-Wook admits to. But then I also think his real girlfriend (not his wife) lives in Jinhae. But this is a different girlfriend than the real estate agent who sold him his new home and who he spent the night with last month. Yes, in case you were wondering: Korea is a very conservative society.

[lonestar]

If you go all the way into that Ok-Chon valley, to the point where the paved road ends and the footpath up to that local mountain begins, there is a small Buddhist temple/complex arrangement there. Climb up that mountain and find the statue of the seated Buddha-- on a clear day, from that height and that vantage point, you can see forever. A wonderful view of the valley below you, and of the other surrounding valleys and hills off in the distance. Sorry I can't remember the name of that mountain, or the name of the temple, or even the name of that seated Buddha statue, but if you ask some local friends, they should know what and where it is, and be able to take you there. Go there on a clear day for the best visibility. You won't regret it.

[Ya-ta Boy]

Thanks for the tip. This must be the same temple my friend mentioned last night as we were leaving the duck restaurant. I'll make it a point to check it out.