Today’s haiku:
VROOM VROOM VROOM BEEP BEEP
NO RULES ON THE ROTARY
AT LEAST I’M INSURED!
There are two Indian restaurants on the north side of the island, Baghdad and Raj Mahal.
Baghdad’s is named after a Bollywood film. It’s the lesser of the two places. The menu is pretty limited and the samosas are soggy.
Their best items are the tandoori stuff, other than that, the menu is basically one flavor of curry/stew and some salad stuff. The naan is okay, I guess.
Baghdad’s big selling point is its location right near City Hall, which is where a lot of the foreigners go to party on the weekends and hang out in general. City hall is where the foreign newspaper hq and the immigration building is located as well, so I’ve spent a lot of time in that area.
Also, the restaurant has a nice atmosphere during the daytime, and the hookah pipe is fun to play with. Here’s a picture of me using it:
The other fun thing about Baghdad’s is that the owner ends every sentence with “brother.”
An example: “Welcome back, brother. What are we going to eat tonight, brother? Can I get you anything to drink brother? Would you like to smoke the hookah brother?”
Raj Mahal is in “shin-jeju”, the newer suburb, and that owner is even more entertaining, since he sounds like that guy from The Simpsons (I don’t watch the simpsons, I’m only writing that because people here say the owner sounds like the guy from the Simpsons). He’s from Nepal and he met his wife in Japan (maybe), but somehow they both ended up on Jeju Island, and the place is better for it.
Raj Mahal offers a bunch of different types of curries and other fun stuff like aloo gobi and vindaloo and basmati rice etc blah blah blah.
There’s also a little electric piano.
The food is tastier there and the samosas are crispier on the outside, although they are smaller and more expensive.
Both places are legitimately decent in the sense that if you place them in a competitive culinary environment, such as Albany NY, they would probably still survive. IE, they are not just “good for Jeju because they’re not korean food.”
However, I have fond memories of cheap Indian lunch buffets back home, places where you could pay seven bucks and then eat twenty pieces of naan and that sort of thing. Indian food isn’t just supposed to be good, its supposed to be cheap. The expensive Indian restaurants in America are like TOTALLY FUCKING AMAZING, and they had better be.
The places on Jeju are a la carte and it adds up pretty fast. I spent 37,000 won (on two meals, admittedly) last weekend. For a similar price, the places back home are much better. But that’s what you get on this island: if you want food that isn’t Korean and isn’t horrible, you have to settle for something. At the very least, the Indian restaurants offer actual Indian food, as opposed to the “mexican” restaurant which is really just a noble attempt by Koreans to produce tex-mex food.
It’s a new school year here on Jeju, as of early March. That meant massive shuffling of classes as every student advanced a grade, some new first graders arrived, and some old students who were hogwon ‘shopping’ discovered that Yale Academy is the only hogwon in Seogwipo that can deliver an Ivy-league education, or at least an education with Ivy league posters in the lobby.
I’m still pretty confused about how and when the placement process occurs, so I was merely happy that I got to keep a few of my more beloved classes/students, and merely horrified to discover that I was keeping my evil seventh graders, who now are evil eighth graders. The K-pop band beast is no less popular with the change in grade. They also took a rather low blow at my ability to teach them, more on that later.
Some of the parents on the island are insane, and a little pathological in their insistence that their kids study 10-15 hours a day. But that discussion is for another time, perhaps after I leave Korea. However, one parent lashed out at her kid because of a “horrible” report card comment I had written. My Korean co-teacher came in one day to tell me that the girl was crying and it was very messy.
The only problem was that I hadn’t written a bad rc comment. In fact, from my memory, I had written a glowing report of the student, whose hogwon name is “Isabella.”
My comment read something like this:
“Isabella is a really nice girl and she’s very smart. She studies and does well, even though sometimes she gets a little distracted. I enjoy having her in my class.”
The d-word was the instigator here. Apparently distracted is too strong a word to use because its going to cause a parent to flip out and bring their child to tears. Oh well, lesson learned I guess. Nice to know that there are people who understand how to accentuate the negative and ignore everything else.
I do that all the time myself. Unfortunately, there is nobody whose life I can (legally) make miserable except my turtle, and I love my turtle, so I would never do anything to hurt my turtle, except to forget to feed him for two weeks. (not that this would actually hurt my turtle. nothing can hurt my turtle. my turtle is invincible. he has a new tank, new ‘gourmet’ turtle pellets that he doesn’t eat, and yet he’s as lively as ever)
I had the rare opportunity to teach two students one-on-one in two different one-man classes. One of them was learning “base camp 1”, which is the first in a series of silly books that teach the kids essentials like the timless song “WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE TOY? ROBOTS. ROBOTS. I LIKE ROBOTS. HOW ABOUT YOU? I LIKE ROBOTS TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”
The other kid had never studied English before and was learning phonics and the alphabet. This was a lot of fun because I had never taught this before, and I was really excited to see him making progress every day. I went to Home Plus, the korean equivalent of Wal-Mart, and bought a bunch of magnetic English letters to place around the room and we did lots of games with those.
Then Peter and Jack (those were their names, respectively) both got moved to a different class, because Yale generally likes to consolidate classes when it can. The only problem is that NOW I’m teaching a four-student class, with the kids at three different stages of learning the material. Poor Peter is learning “words” that he can’t even spell. I imagine his understanding of the material to be something like that this.
Me: “What’s this?”
Peter: “That’s a teacher.”
Me: “Why is that a teacher?”
Peter: “Because yesterday in the computer lab the computer said that this picture was a teacher.”
Me: “What letter does teacher start with?”
Peter: “Let’s see here…w!”
Stay tuned.
Apparently it’s springtime, because by the end of the day I have a manly man’s odor, at least according to my 8L class. It took three weeks, one boss, and two co-workers to deliver this message to me. It’s nice to know that even in the Internet age a passive-aggressive culture will find ways to delay and obscure such material.
Also, it was nobody’s fault but my own, but HOLY SHIT WHY IS THERE EGG IN MY HAIR???????????????????????????????AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
If anyone ever asks to test an egg to see if its hard boiled or not, do not volunteer your own. All I’m getting out of it is a free beer tomorrow, and I discovered soon thereafter that it is not worth it. Not even worth six beers, IMO. Someone said it was good because it made my hair look “shiny.”
I don’t need my hair to look shinier! My hair is one of the few things people praise generally about my appearance! Lots of things would make your hair look shinier, that doesn’t mean they belong there. Would you put shoe polish in your hair? Mercury? Have you seen “There’s Something About Mary”?
At least it gave me a good reason to have a shower. And if my hair smells like rotten egg tomorrow, I guess I’ll hear about it three weeks later.
Culture Time 