Aaron Wants Another Cheeseburger

Today my boss, Mintak, took all the foreign teachers out to lunch at the Suassakak Stone Cafe, which is a tiny cafe right on the ocean with literally four menu items: a cheeseburger, a chicken sandwich, a salad, or brunch. There’s also Vietnam handdrip coffee.

Mintak had been talking about the cheeseburgers all week. Using his Korean-inspired English, be basically demanded that I order a cheeseburger.

“Aaron, you get cheeseburger,” he said yesterday. “It is delicious. Not at all like McDonald’s. Real cheese. Amazing. Best food I eat.”

This sounded to me like Mintak being Mintak, and it’s difficult when your boss orders you to eat a cheeseburger and then asks what you think, knowing there’s only one right answer.

But I didn’t have to lie to my boss. Mintak was right: it WAS an amazing cheeseburger. It was all about the toasted bun. But two hours after I ate it, I wanted another one. Who knew Koreans could make amazing cheeseburgers? Mintak did I guess. So did Minho, the owner (and cook) of the cafe. The Koreans certainly do burgers better than the Spanish. I won’t be ordering the $30 gristle sandwich from Restaurant QQ anytime soon, for a few reasons.

Unfortunately, having another cheeseburger might take some (but not a WHOLE lot) effort, if only because it’s either a 5,000 won cab ride or an hour walk, and the burgers are not cheap. But sometimes you do whatever you need to do to satisfy your cravings.

Last night I went to a campfire on Jungmun beach to say goodbye to my spearfishing partner, Weston. It was a very nice evening; I was treated to sausage on a stick (two euphemisms for the price of one!) and we told scary stories (actually, only I did). I was sorry to say goodbye, though.

I’m getting a little dispirited in fact, by the strange cycle of comings and goings which occurs with the foreign teachers here (or anywhere in Korea or Japan, for that matter). Not that it comes as much of a surprise, but almost every non-EPIK (state school) teacher is on a different timetable, and its strange to get to know people for a month or two and then have them leave, most likely forever. I guess that’s why people find romance from within the group of people who arrived at the same time they did. But who has time for love when you have two turtles to feed and a washing machine filled with clothes that need to be hung out to dry?

My students were making me anxious today. In my first class, a boy named Ken (he’s holding the Mike Piazza doll in a picture from about a month ago) high-kicked a girl, then refused to leave the classroom, so I gave him to Mintak to get a good scolding.

Later on, I tried to use tarot cards to give one class a nice break from test studying. I thought it would be a fun way for them to practice their English skills, but the tarot cards were too vague and verbose to make any sense to these poor seventh graders. Which isn’t to say that they weren’t illuminating, or 100% accurate.

For instance, when one kid asked if he would have a girlfriend, the cards KNEW he was in Korea. They said that it wasn’t happening with his dream girl (Emma Watson?), that it was time for “second guessing”, but that he would find what he was looking for if he used his friends and associates to help set him up. Another kid was informed that he would never be rich, and the first kid asked how he did on the exam he took yesterday. The cards informed him that he “needed a mental health day.”

But don’t we all? In addition to the abrupt departures of newfound friends, there’s another sad theme that’s been cropping up recently here, which is the alienation of Americans (and Canadians) from the motherland on the opposite side of the Pacific. I feel like quite a few people have mentioned over the past few days that they have no interest in returning back for at least another 5-10 years, if at all.

And I can’t blame them, or myself. The job market back in the US is abysmal, and there really doesn’t seem to be much of an end in sight to the steady stream of young educated adults who leave school with a liberal arts degree (or even a “real” degree) and discover that there are no jobs, and the process to search for the jobs that don’t exist will leave them depressed, exhausted, and still jobless.

The lack of jobs is the kicker, but it doesn’t help that the vast majority of people here, including myself, observe from a far the US becoming a place antithetical to our values and interests. It really is no fun watching the slow decline which has helped bring many of us eastward in the first place.

I think what separates me from a lot of people here, however, is that I don’t think I’ll be able to parade my CELTA degree around Asia indefinitely. It doesn’t matter how bad things get, America is still my home and I would like to have a sense of pride from being from there. If I can’t manage to return to America within 2-3 and find solid footing, I will be very unhappy.

I originally wrote ‘devestated’, but that doesn’t seem appropriate. I’ll do what I need to do to find some measure of success, but my sense of place is too strongly engrained to feel like I’m anything more than distinguished guest in this country. I could live in many places in America, particularly the northeast megalopolis (Boston-NY-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington), and feel a sense of inner peace, but for right now, and the forseeable future, I think I’m fighing a volcano.