Back from civilization

Hey everybody. I've been back in Korea for a while now trying to get used to the new house, heat and humidity. Not gonna happen. But Chuseok, (Korean Thanksgiving), is almost here and that's generally the time when the weather changes. So I'll have to put up with sleepless nights, (like last night), covered with this slime that is probably half sweat and half humidity, chasing mosquitoes around the house for a little bit longer to save myself the expense of buying an air conditioner.

I'm probably doing the wrong thing since this house has ondol heating, (that's Korean floor/water heating, Korean national treasure number 112), and I've had nothing but bad experiences with that. It's just a big water heater that heats water and sends it through pipes in the floor. The pipes get clogged over the years, (and this is an OLD house), so you have to have the thing going full blast to get some areas heated. That way your house either gets super hot, (and costs you a ton of money), or the pipes all freeze, and cost you a ton of money to thaw out. You can never turn it off or the pipes freeze and cost you a ton of money to thaw out. Most, (like mine), have the boiler either outside the house or in a room that isn't heated and when THAT part of the water pipe system freezes, you have to thaw it out and it costs... And the day after I moved in here the landlady, (who is a cute, old ajjumma who has already told me she's surprised that I can cook and that I'm not married), called the boiler repair guy to get the water heater fixed. So that's probably not good either.

I just have a little electric heater and it was all I used last winter. This place is a bit larger than my dorm room so I would probably be fine with the little heater plus the air con/heater. As it is now my house is inexplicably 5-10 degrees warmer than it is outside at all times even though I'm constantly blowing outside air in with fans and leaving the windows and door open. Maybe it'll still be hotter than outside when winter comes and I won't need to use the ondol at all. Or, and this is more likely if you know anything about my adventures in Korea, maybe in winter my house will be 5-10 degrees COLDER than outside. But who knows? Maybe this is the one ondol heater in the country that's any good. Ha ha ha. It's dangerous for me to think positively like that, but I still do, as you will see as you keep reading.

So here's what happened while I was away: I got to the airport in Incheon with my round trip ticket to Vancouver and back to Incheon but I wasn't sure if my multiple re-entry permit had expired or not. Turned out it had so I asked the immigration officer for a new one. This costs about 50 bucks. She says to me, "Your work visa expires soon after you will be coming back. Why don't you just give me your alien card now and return as a visitor. You automatically get a 6-month visitor visa." I was confused. An immigration officer using discretion to save me 50 bucks. I just KNEW I should have been skeptical. I asked if that would be possible being a tourist while I still had a valid work visa. I asked about my bank account. I said that a person can't start a bank account without the alien card, will I be able to do my banking? And I mentioned that there are all kinds of other things that a non-Korean person can't do without an alien card but she assured me that there would be no problems.

I have raved on and on here about immigration officers in this country and their complete incompetence. I may be wrong. They may actually be very knowledgeable about the "rules" that are flying around this country willy nilly changing like Oprah's weight. They might just be enjoying themselves causing us foreign devils trouble. And maybe while they are faking apologetic behaviour as we rave at them for being such blockheads, just maybe after we leave the immigration offices around the country where they all regularly "screw up", they go to the break rooms and say, "Did you see that big one with the beard? I thought his face was gonna explode! Ha ha ha ha ha..." or some things like that. I'm really starting to wonder.

So anyway, I had a VERY enjoyable time in Canada. If you like you can see some pics and a little history of my trip on facebook. The photo album is called "summer 2010". But since this is a blog mostly concerned with Korea, we'll skip to the end when it was time for me to go back to Korea. I was told in the Vancouver Airport that my return ticket to Korea was no good. I instantly thought that maybe the travel agent who sold me the ticket had cashed it in while I was on vacation. It has happened before. Just recently the guy I used to deal with sold a pile of tickets to foreigners at vacation time, cashed them in while they were on vacation, closed up shop and disappeared leaving a lot of people stranded. A very "cunning" Korean business move. But that wasn't the problem. This time. The lady at check-in told me I needed some proof of my intentions in Korea. I said to her that I was going back as a tourist, what proof could I show, a camera and a flowery shirt? No she said I needed a return ticket. I wasn't about to purchase aNOTHER ticket back to Canada, which I wouldn't use, and because of some other lies I had been told by various Koreans, I didn't even have enough money to buy one!

Let's expand on that shall we? A long time ago when I started the bank account I have now, in 2004, it was still okay for a visitor to Korea to get an international bank card. You know, one where the Cirrus or Maestro or whatever logos that are on the card, are actually functional. All cards and all machines in Korea have those symbols but they aren't all international. They are now mostly just for show. So people think Korea is getting more international instead of actually getting LESS international, which is the case. Anyhoo, soon after I got my card, which really WAS international, (I used it in Canada, Thailand, the Philippines and probably Japan), there was one of these new laws instituted for the purposes of making things tougher for foreigners that stupidly disallowed these foreign bank cards. I say "stupidly" because the usurious exchange rates and service charges banks tack on for actually using the cards overseas must more than offset any fraud that Korean bankers don't trust us foreigners not to commit. Which was the stated reasoning behind this new rule. I'm pretty sure I was charged over 40 bucks for every transaction I made from Thailand last time I was there. And you don't even want to know the exchange rate! The banks are losing money on this no doubt in my mind.

I tried to protect that card for as long as I could. I even tried to get a new non-international card to use in Korea while I still had the real international card. You should have seen the teller when I tried to do that. She actually tried to snatch my international card out of my hand at one point. They did everything they could to convince me to surrender it. Including lying to me saying they could issue me a new international card. I called my Korean friend April, who works at a bank and she told me they were lying and to keep the card because they can't retroactively disallow my international priveleges. Well unfortunately because of wear and tear, the card broke and became unusable. I went to my bank and with a Korean "friend" there with me, (a guy who works for Seokang College and has known me since 2004), my bank issued me a replecement card and my "friend" and the teller swore up and down that it would work in other countries. I tried it in Canada and Japan and, big surprise, they lied.

But I had expected that. My secondary source of income while in Canada was going to be my pension. I went to the pension office in Gwangju before going home and was assured that my pension would be transfered to my Canadian account within a couple days of their receipt of my bank account information. They even showed me how much pension money I had built up. I tried to send them my information from Vancouver the day I got to Canada and started my new account. The fax number I had been given was not working. I also tried to scan it and send it to an email address the guy at the office gave me but that didn't work either because they are STILL waiting for Seokang College to submit my pension money. Before I left I went to the labour office and they actually CALLED Seokang and talked to my supervisor who said, (need I say he was lying), that Seokang was going to pay my severance pay at the end of my contract. The end of my contract was the 17th of August. Still no severance pay. They also assured me before I left that my pension was going to be available about a month after the end of my WORKING period with them. That was mid June. Another lie. I STILL have not received my pension or my severance. In fact when I got back to Korea I talked very briefly with my supervisor Penis, I mean Peter, while giving him back the keys to my office and room. He said that my pension wouldn't be available till the end of September. I said, "Don't forget the severance either," and he gave me his best Fat Tony impression, "What is severance?"

You know Fat Tony from the Simpsons? "I guess you don't know anything about those truckloads of cigarettes that were hijacked, do you Fat Tony?" "What are cigarettes? What are trucks?" I think he's supposed to sound like Joe Montegna's character in Godfather III, Joey Zaza.

So I'll probably have to go back to Gwangju to the labour office and have them call Seokang College AGAIN and inform them that it is the law to pay a month's severance upon the completion of a one-year contract. They didn't pay it to me last year or in 2005; they didn't pay it to Kasia the 6 years she taught there; and they still don't want to pay it to me. I think Cock, I mean Penis, I mean Peter just keeps my severance money every year. Him and Jung and probably director Park go out for food karaoke and singing hoes once a year on the foreign teachers. Unbeknownst to us.

But back to Vancouver. What I ended up doing was talking to a guy who had obviously had stuff like this happen before. He said he hated the Koreans who invented this rule where they fine the airlines for letting people fly into Korea without tickets out. Ahhhh so THAT'S their angle! And sure enough people at immigration in Japan and Korea both made sure I had a ticket out. Air Canada would have been fined otherwise. It's a harmless scam. Nobody gets hurt. Well, except the foreigners. Bonus! So what I had to do was buy a ticket from Korea to Japan. That was the cheapest the guy could find. I asked for one to Fukuoka since if I had landed the job at Nam Seoul I would have had to fly to Japan on a work visa run anyway. Unfortunately, I couldn't use the ticket. And, of course, since the cheapest ticket you can get is GONNA be non-refundable, (which I think should be illegal), I just paid 240 dollars for a lie some bitch told me at the immigration office at the Incheon Airport. Well you can bet that the second I got back to Incheon Airport I - did absolutely nothing. I wouldn't have been able to get a refund for the ticket. They wouldn't have paid me for the worker's "mistake." Nobody would have learned a thing. They are STILL getting people to surrender their alien cards and come back on visitor visas. All that would have happened is I would have been the red-faced irate foreigner who amused the workers at immigration Incheon making them feel a little superior and giving them a little entertainment to break up their boring days. Fuck them. Didn't give them the satisfaction.

So as you can guess by now I left my job at Seokang. I moved to a new house in Pyeongtaek and am all set up for 6 months. Bought some furniture, got the internet paid for the whole deal. I'm here because there's a school nearby called Nam Seoul University. I know three guys who teach there and they all say it's a great school. A great school! After only 10 years of searching this place I've found it! So I figure a little 6-month hiatus won't be too bad. One of the guys who worked there, Chad, said they'd jump at the chance to hire me with my vast experience here and that they were looking to hire somebody. They want people with Masters' but they have people working there without them. So I got back and went to Nam Seoul in person to give them my resume. WITH one of the guys I know who works there named John. They took my papers and told me that they were no longer looking for anyone. But then just about a week ago, a couple days before the September 1st start to the semester, I got a call. The lady on the other end of the phone said she was from Nam Seoul U. and wanted to know if I had a Masters. I said no but told her about my experience. She then asked me for a reference from my previous employer. So I said I could send her one if she texted me her email. She said someone would send me an email and I could just send it to that address. I am STILL waiting for that email. And I tried phoning the number that she called from but the number is no longer in service.

OINK! Do these people doing the hiring call teachers using burners or what? A burner is a disposable cell phone. Called "burners" in Mafia Wars because they're popular with mafia members due to their untraceability. I suppose that's the attraction to hirers here in Korea too. Anyway, yesterday I was out with Sam, another guy I know who works there and he told me that around that time all the workers were expecting their hours to go down because they had been told there would be another person hired but the teachers were suddenly told, "Nope, you're working the hours you're scheduled for." It would have been very nice of them to inform ME of their decision not to hire anybody else too!

I got another tip from Chad for a job at Cheju University. I called them and said Chad sent me. They told me on the phone that they were no longer looking for workers. Yesterday I saw an ad on Dave's ESL Cafe from Cheju University and they are looking for workers. What the hell? Am I scaring people?

Same sort of thing happened with G.I.S.T., a college I taught for last winter. I did a 3-week camp there and loved it. You can see pics from THAT on my facebook page too. So one day in the early summer I was playing tennis with Amber and Andrew, another guy who did the camp and who ended up getting full-time work teaching pronunciation to our camp students. He tells me that they're hiring another person to teach pronunciation. To the students I taught at the camp! Who better than me, right? I applied for the position. I waited until the stated date for interviews had come and gone. I even called the director of the program at G.I.S.T., who I met during the camp, and he said he'd do what he could to help my application. Didn't even get an interview call. But I checked Dave's ESL Cafe yesterday and saw that GIST is going to hire another person to start in October. Had I known that I would have gone back to Canada earlier. Anyways, I called the number on the ad this morning and talked to Hwang Hin Ho, (Triple H will be his nickname if I get a chance to meet him), and he said he remembers me from the camp. He knows the kids liked me and I got great evaluations. Better than Andrew's actually and he works there! I told him I had sent a full application package for the camp and the last ad and asked if he wanted me to send yet another one. He said it wasn't necessary. So I guess that's encouraging, right?

Have you learned nothing from this post? I'd be stupid to even hope for an interview. But, because I AM stupid, I am hopeful. The offer includes a dorm room on campus. I don't want to live in the dorms again so I will keep this place and take the 4-hour train ride home on weekends and holidays I guess. And sleep in the dorms during the week. Or if I don't really like the place, after 6 months I'll find something back in Gwangju. I'll blow up that bridge when I get to it. IF I get to it. I shall let you know, readers...