西洋오랑캐

Bachelor Chow
Originally uploaded by wdunn.

So what does a man eat on a night when his girlfriend is otherwise occupied, and he is not really in the mood to go through the hastle of cooking real food or heading to a resturant. If that man is Wyatt Dunn he consumes something like this. From left to right we got all the food groups covered. First you got your left over sweet pickled radishes (they might be 단무지, but taste a little different) you got when ordering fried chicken two nights prior, next you got some turkey spam that your mother sent you for Thanksgiving, but since she sent two cans you had one in your cupboard since the end of November, and finally corn (since all of these haphazardly assembled bachelor banquets must include a can of corn). Not to shabby, and a nice change of pace from the nonstop kimchi-fest my life has become.

Lunch (Goyang Edition)
Originally uploaded by wdunn.

Here’s some lunch I consumed some point in the spring of 2004 while working in Goyang. There are some days you just feel like eating a sandwich…in a small town like Goyang-shi this Family Mart pre-made sandwich is the best you’re gonna do. Luckily these desires to eat a sandwich don’t strike too often, and usually I end up getting kimbab instead.

Man I’m pissed. In addition to being sick, I had just typed what was probably the longest, most in depth journal ever written by anyone on one week’s events while living in Korea and not being a Korean, and for some reason this stupid webpage decides to go look at an old journal entry. Since the actual content of this webpage comes up in a pop-up there was no back feature so I was totally fucked. Looks like this is gonna be a hella short entry, since I’d been typing for an hour and don’t have time to do that again. So pretty much this week I became and still am sick, administered some end of semester tests, had way too many craptastic conversations with random Koreans in broken English (a longer entry on this phenomenum will come…probably tomorrow), and had an air raid drill.

To begin with I got a cold or flu or plague or something, which pretty much sucks when you are in a foreign country where medicine tastes like medicine as opposed to candy. Anytime I have to drink some black liquid that smells like ass and tastes like the seat of subway in New York in order to “get better,” I’m gonna take my chances with “walking it off.”

To further annoy me, this week and next week are end of semester tests for my students. These tests are designed to see if the students successfully learned everything that they were supposed to during the semester, or as I like to see it, did I teach them everything I was supposed to during the semester. So, because all of my students are dumb bastards some of my students have some difficultly learning English, this week we’ve been playing the “Let’s take your test over and over again in the hopes that some of you will just memorize the answers and spew them back during you actual test,” game. The kids don’t like it as much as “Memory Game,” or “Hangman,” so I think they’ll be glad when after Monday they are finished with their tests, and so will I.

So Thursday, I’m chillin’ in the office, eating my lunch, when suddenly some sirens go off. These are not police sirens or anything like that. I learn that these are air raid sirens, and that it was an air raid drill. Similar to the “duck and cover” drills of my childhood, we were suppose to get under our desks, until the all clear sounded. Only unlike my duck and cover drills at Forts Ferry Elementary, this drill included the entire town, and people were suppose to get off the streets and hide under desks I suppose. I’m not really sure. After the drill, I learned just how close I work to the “Axis of Evil.” Goyang-dong is located a whopping 15 to 20 minutes by car from the North Korean border. So in the amount of time it took to get from my house to the means streets of Small-bany, I can get from my place of employment to “a threat the the entire free world!”

Dear US Army Personel,

I am writing to you in order to lodge a complaint against two of your soldiers. Last night (aka this morning 3 am), I was walking home from Darrell’s house, minding my own business, you know rockin’ out to some Sleater-Kinney. It was all good, when two of your own tried to talk to me. Of course it being after 3 am, and me having headphones on I kept walking. They got a little pissed off and yelled some shit at me, but other than that it was a non-incident. This is not what I’m complaining about. What I am complaining about is the fact that these fuckers…I mean soldiers were in Shinchon. I mean you guys got your Itaewon, let non army guys have Shinchon. I don’t swim in your toilet (Itaewon), don’t piss in my pool (Shinchon). The second complaint is as follows: It’s bad enough when some foreigner (usually English teacher) feels it necessary to engage me in a conversation simply because I too am white and teach English (I’m not against being polite and acknowledging another foreigner with a head nod or a hello), but this is worse when it’s a soldier with whom I have nothing in common with. I don’t really want to have a conversation with some uneducated hick in big ass hip-hop clothes, with a shaved head and a gold chain. These kind of guys are one of the reasons I left America. Anyway thank you for your consideration. Also it’s not Youngsaen…it’s Yongsan.

Your Friend,
Sincerely,
Wyatt Dunn