나오미 in korea

To my loving friends and family,

My inbox is overflowing with emails from all of you. It seems you all had a great year. You achieved work goals, ran marathons, did some epic missions, finally went to India to spend six months on an ashram and discovered your spiritual centre. I applaud you, and would like to reassure you that you achieved a lot more than I did in 2006.

I didn’t meet that many great people and didn’t have that many great times. I didn’t achieve many goals or face any challenging challenges that I hadn’t faced before. I really didn’t have many epic journeys in South America, cultural enlightenments in Prague or formed memorable bonds with Thai hill tribes. In fact, the most memorable experiences I’ve had have been painful, embarrassing, or stupid.

And the awards go to…

Best Compliment: Attending a Christmas play only to get kicked out by the director who thought I was sent by my boss to spy. Apparently, the idea of a Christmas play for six year olds is an event requiring the most stringent security measures and teachers from competing schools must have their pockets searched for recording devices and be escorted from the building.

Best Warm Fuzzy Moment: Now that my boss’s baby is walking, she can run away from the strange Westerner and cling onto the TV, sobbing in terror. Makes you feel really great.

Best Foot in Mouth: Cooing over the baby and asking how old he was. My boss replied coolly that, actually, she was a girl, and had just reached six months.

Easiest Run-in With the Law: A couple glasses of wine and a drive home. Police checkpoint ahead… oh dear. No international license, no registration, no insurance, van surely poised to explode beneath me. Reluctantly I roll down my window and prepare to face the music. The stern Korean brandishing the breathalyser gets a huge fright, says “sorry, sorry” and waves me on. Foreigner. Best defence I can think of.

Best Public Relations Incident: Falling into a 3am screaming match in half Korean/half English with the owner of the karaoke bar under my apartment, whose five singing rooms made my apartment rattle and hum from 8pm to 4am every night, and made my life a zombie hell for three months. All I could do was scream at him: “Me very angry. I have no sleep. Every day sleep two hours. Hate.” It took five minutes for the disgusting heavy-lidded sod to eventually get through to me that because he’d been there since 2004 and I since Feb 2006 I didn’t have a leg to stand on and could just bugger off and die.

Best Use of Korean by a Foreigner: Having a kid in my class for six months thinking his name was Pyon-tae, because that’s what the other kids called him. No attendance card; this is a Korean hagwon! In November I was sitting around the dinner table eating my rice when my boss says to me:

“Min-tae has car accident and has left the school.”
“Who?”
“Min-tae. In your six o’clock class. With red glasses and teeth like the rabbit.”
“You mean Pyon-tae?”
Silence. Sally taps her spoon on her bowl reflectively. The other teachers start to smirk and nudge each other. Sally grimaces.
“His name is not Pyon-tae. Pyon-tae means pervert.”

Super!!

Best Use of English by a Korean: Asking Micky, my drop-dead gorgeous Korean workmate, why the baby was looking feverish and being told “Her cunt is sick.” Thrush.

Happy New Year!

Love,

Naomi