Korean workshops: lake cruises, caving, booze and singing rooms...hmm...fine, since I'm being paid, I'll go!

First off...I apologize for the super late update...I got sick last week and, on the doc's orders, I took 3 days off (ie: no internet for 3 days). As usual, they pumped me full of drugs (IV drip, 5 kinds of pills and a liquid medication) in the hopes of walking that fine line where they kill everything inside me, but manage to keep me alive by the faintest of chances.

Taking the sick days was an experience in itself. Back home, if you're sick, you don't come to work. Here, I had to tell my principal that I intend to be sick, then go to the doc, get a note from him suggesting I take 3 days off then have the vice principal sign off on it, approving my sick leave. Because, as we all know, middle school vice principals are the leading medical authorities in Korea.

Fast forward to Monday (good weekend, thanks, just relaxed and hung out with my homiez). Monday morning they were doing final preparations for the school-wide workshop (50+ teachers, vice principal and principal) and I tried my best to get out of the whole thing. I thought it would be a boring series of lectures in Korean and I would be ignored and bored throughout the two-day ordeal. They asked me to pack my own food for two days, so that was a bad sign.

Getting out of the thing was a no-go and I was getting the distinct feeling that the powers that be weren't too happy at my attempts to stay at school and do lesson plans instead of joining the workshop...so, I reluctantly packed and showed up on Tuesday expecting the worst.

Well, let me tell ya...going on that "workshop" was the best decision I've made in a long time. For one thing, calling what we did a "workshop" is about as accurate as calling the annual beer pong tournament in some dorm room an "International Summit on Nuclear Disarmament".

We got on our big comfy tour bus after the kids left for the last time this semester and all the professional teachers and serious bigwigs turned into top-notch party animals. It was like that episode of Simpsons where the parents send the kids off to camp and as soon as the bus is out of sight, they start dancing and popping the champagne open.

In true Korean fashion, social bonding revolved around the generous flow of both tasty treats (everything from cherry tomatoes to chocolates and pumpkin-tofu chips) and copious amounts of alcohol.

Our first stop was Sobaeksan National Park where we went for a gorgeous mountain hike and I found a few of my favourites....waterfalls:

The first thing I noticed during the hike (and the lunch we had en route) was that far from being ignored, I was like the most popular girl in high school...everyone wanted to talk to me. Teachers I've never met were coming out of the woodwork to say hi and tell me a few nice things either in broken English or by having the other English teachers translate.

Likewise, lunch was a huge surprise...there was a veritable cornucopia of vegetarian options! I stuffed myself on all sorts of cool stuff (like random fresh vegetables and whatnot from the surrounding mountains).

Then we headed into Chungju, a little resort town in the mountains. It was perfect...it's like a Korean Jasper...okay, so maybe it's not quite as nice as Jasper, but it has the same feeling of a happy little town tucked away in the mountains...I loved it.

When we got there, what was the first thing I saw? A 1991 Chevy S10 pickup truck. Now, to most of you this means absolutely nothing. But, I owned one for 9 years and I loved that little thing...I haven't seen an S10 in nearly half a year (getting bored of Hyundais and Kias, quite frankly), so I was ecstatic to have its dumb, square eyes staring at me from across the parking lot. Talked to the owner (of course, I did)...he gets parts from the US every time something breaks on it...that takes dedication haha

Dinner was at a local joint that, like every other restaurant in that town, served pheasant...my coworkers had pheasant for dinner AND breakfast the next day...bit of a departure from orange juice and cereal, but hey...who am I to judge? I asked for veggie options, they gave me a 100% absolutely definitely meat-free plate of dumplings that, when I opened them up presented half a zoo. So much for that.

After the dinner came another proud Korean tradition: get absolutely loaded and head to the Noreabang or singing room. I have successfully avoided heading to a "shinging room" (most Koreans have trouble with "si" sounds since it doesn't exist in Korean...pretty funny when my students say they have to sit...confused me at first why they are so vulgar and why they talk about having to go to the bathroom...). Anyhoo, this way there was no getting away from the singing room...which is basically an entire floor filled with rooms the size of motel rooms. In each room, there is a biiiiig couch, a table filled with snacks and copious amounts of beer, a big screen TV and a microphone...oh and a big, booming sound system.

Even though I told my coworkers that hearing me sing would be absolute torture for them, they insisted I give it a whirl. All Koreans seem to listen to and sing are REALLY crappy K-pop "dance" songs from about the '70s to now. They all sound more or less the same and they're all horribly lame. Since I listen to gangster rap and rock, I was a little out of my element when they insisted I tackle something cheesy and pop-y. I finally settled on Yellow Submarine by the Beatles, thinking everyone knows the Beatles. I was wrong. I mean seriously...how the hell does anyone in the civilized world live in ignorance of the awesomeness that is the Beatles???

So, I was completely on my own, while I screamed my head off, in a horrible, off-key rendition of the British classic.

The rest of the night was spent smashing my fist against tambourines and clapping with over-exaggerated enthusiasm while my respected elders made fools out of themselves singing incredibly cheesy pop songs written by people who have the musical talents of squirrels.

Thankfully I have a few other coworkers who decided that drinking themselves into oblivion can wait for another day and we sneaked out just before midnight and headed to bed.

Back at the hotel, we had ONE bed for 5 men. My coworkers suggested I take the bed and share it with someone else...ummm....no thanks. I shottied half of the L-shaped couch and crashed while the rest made themselves semi-comfortable on the floor. Now, what's amazing about this is that sleeping on the floor seemed perfectly normal to them and we were actually staying in a FANCY hotel. Boggles the mind.

I was tired as hell, so I passed out right away, but unfortunately not long after, my drunken co-workers started showing up one after another, stumbling around the dark room, bumping into random objects and trying to figure out the TV from their soju and beer-induced oblivion. Thankfully, anticipating that this would happen and knowing Koreans enough that just because they see someone sleeping 6 inches from them, they will not hesitate to sit down, talk at full volume and turn on the TV and go about their normal business at 2 a.m., I hid the TV remote. Crafty Hungarian: 1. Drunken Koreans: 0.

However, that was just Round One. Round Two began when the intoxicated fool decided that, since he can't watch TV, he'll just go to bed and plopped himself down on the other side of the L-shaped couch, kicked my feet and started snoring. At first I was angry, then I decided that, hey...he's sleeping so damn deeply, he won't know where the bruises on his shins came from in the morning. So, I gave him a swift kick or two.

To my great surprise this was an incredibly effective tool in reclaiming my personal space. Not only did it force him to untangle his sweaty feet from mine, every time I kicked him, he tried to turn on his side, which is rather difficult on a couch. The result was a hilarious (for me) tumble and crash to the floor, hitting the coffee table on his way down. Not one to be easily phased, he tried to get up and either crashed back down to the floor, or made it as far up as getting on all fours and then passed out! Honestly. He looked like a dog that just fell asleep in mid-walk. This repeated itself about three or four times when he finally realized that perhaps sleeping on the floor was the wisest course of action. Crafty Hungarian: 2, Idiotic drunken Korean: 0.

At the crack of dawn (7:22 a.m., to be exact) we were woken up by a phone call urging us to wipe the drool off our faces, get dressed and head out for a pleasant pheasant breakfast (more mountain vegetable-filled bibimbap for me!).

After breakfast came the awesome part of the day...we boarded the bus and headed to Chungju Lake, which is apparently a man-made lake and the second biggest body of water in South Korea. This place is nothing short of gorgeous! What made it even better is that, upon getting to the lake, we boarded a ship and went on a one and a half hour cruise! Seriously...best...workshop...ever!!!

And one more...

After that, another great lunch and I met some Koreans who immigrated to Canada from Korea a few years ago and were back for a visit...they live about 1 kilometre from my family's house!!! Small world! :)

And then came the only part of the weekend that truly rivaled the Chungju Lake cruise...Gosu Cave!!

Sadly we kind of rushed through it, but I'm soooo happy we went there! It had a ton of neat formations and it was pretty dang long too...took us about 40 minutes of walking at a brisk pace...I'm definitely going back there with a tripod and a day to kill!!

Near the entrance:

Some of the many awesome formations...with an enthusiastic math teacher thrown in for scale (this cave was MASSIVE in some places and tiny (had to bend over and just about crawl) in others:

Detail shot of one formation:

And one more...

I have a ton more pictures on my Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/tamasv so check it out!! :)

The rest of the trip took a rather interesting turn. Two days of drinking started bearing fruit when the teachers on the bus fired up the kareoke machine and started belting out more of Korea's finest ridiculously annoying songs from the past 4 decades.

Soon, as the mokkoli (rice wine) and beer flowed, there was dancing in the aisles and much interaction of the sort that I'm sure the husbands and wives of the teachers would not appreciate. It was pretty funny how quickly things go downhill when you add alcohol. Upon our sober start the day before, the head teacher made a neat little announcement about the importance of safety and implored us to fasten our seatbelts lest harm befall us. Fast forward 36 hours, and he was dancing in the aisle alongside the principal, vice principal and roughly 20 teachers as the bus screamed down the expressway at about 110km/h.

Sadly, as is so often the case, alcohol brought out the worst and most disgusting in some people. As is the custom, the principal went around the bus offering people drinks of the rice wine. Okay, offering is perhaps the wrong word. He went around terrorizing people into drinking the vile liquid in his quivering hands. In Korea, when the principal goes around with a bottle of soju (20% alcohol drink) or rice wine, you drink it. Period. Pretty much every principal does this at social gatherings and people, whether they like it or not, have to drink it or face having their career fall from the sky and go up in flames, much like the Hindenburg.

As most of you know, I don't drink and have never had a drop of alcohol in my life. Many have tried to change that, but none has succeeded, but my principal sure gave it his best shot.

After trying to force me to drink the stuff for about 3 or 4 minutes (literally) and having me vehemently object, he threatened to kick me off the bus if I didn't drink. I told him that that's fine, I like walking. He was half-serious. I was completely serious. Then, he did something that, in Canada, would have likely cost him his job and the use of his right arm for 4-6 weeks...he held the cup of rice wine over my head and poured it all over me. I am having a hard time coming up with instances in my life where I felt so degraded and mistreated, but I managed to hold my temper (go me!) and stop at merely envisioning breaking his arm in three places.

Sadly, while others watched, they could offer little more than "we're sorry...he's drunk." Such is life in Korea. He may have doused me in the disgusting crap that was clouding his judgement, but the victory was mine. I stood up to him and my will of not drinking prevailed. He walked away a sore loser, who later realized the stupidity of his actions and spent the rest of the trip sucking up to me and making sure I knew that, despite my stance on alcohol consumption, I was still his best friend.

Despite that blemish at the end of the trip, the retreat was a smashingly great experience. It opened my eyes to a new area of Korea I can't wait to discover even more and it brought me closer to my coworkers and superiors. Perhaps most importantly, it solidified my place as one of the teachers (not just a temporary worker) on the faculty and I found out that, rather than being the merely tolerated outcast I thought I was, I am a respected, appreciated and much wanted colleague...a great way to end my first semester as a middle school teacher!

Have a great weekend, everyone...I know I will! :)

T