petek, 24. junij 2011

Blood, sweat and tears

I admit it, I'm being sort of "drama queen" giving the post such a title (or posting it on FB) and leaving up to your imagination what could have happened. But isn't such misleading the most interesting way of using FB?
And in the end it was all true, just like I wrote, blood, sweat and tears. We had some fighting here. Ko, a young Chinese, is the first Asian I met that actually fits the stereotype about weak drinkers. All the others I've been drinking with are normal or heavy drinkers that would put to shame many proud western drunkards (like it happened to me). To Ko is enough a pair of glasses of soju and he goes crazy. Not that he becomes drunk - like I wrote, he goes just crazy. I suppose that was the main reason for whatever happened. I can only suppose because at the time I was with Matthieu in our private cyber cafe in the nearby village.

When we came back first I heard a Chinese woman crying, then saw the Korean guy with cuts on his hands. Maybe they had an argument while playing cards, maybe some old issues, maybe just soju but Ko grabbed a knife and started being an asshole. Even if he had a large knife he was drunk and one against many so he had no chance. And his head ended shaped slightly different that it was, he packed his stuff and left. Seemingly with not much hard feelings from both sides since if I understood well they sent him away just for one week, to cool down a little bit and the guy who was assaulted was the one who drove him to the bus station in Yeong Am.
Oh, I forgot about the sweat. Since summer started also here, I was sweating like a pig after walking under the sun from the open air cyber cafe.
Second day of summer and it seems the rainy season knows the calendar. It rained all night long and it still didn't stop, it's almost lunch time. No work with radish. Cabbage yes, because they are packed in nylon nets, but radish goes in cardboard boxes. So we're not making money and we're bored insanely. With the pouring rain I can't even go to my wifi spot. But again something funny happened even if we're staying at home watching TV. Korean dramas or the Chinese channel. It was dramas this morning so at the amazement of all the crew in one moment Matthieu appeared on TV. Few weeks ago he got a chance for a well paid short shooting for a somehow popular drama and that episode was aired more than a week ago, but today was re-aired. In a second everybody was shouting "mechu, mechu" and we tought they all want beer. They just can't pronounce his name so they call like beer is called in Korean. So now Mekchu is a sort of celebrity for them - hell, he was on TV! And he was payed for it! The major puzzle is for them to figure out why he is picking radish now. Maybe the boss will start advertising that in his crew a TV star is picking radish...
This radish business is may harder than the cabagge one. For ten tons we work something like 14 hours with breaks just to eat breakfast and lunch and immediately back to work. And I move something like 25 tons of radish or so. First we do the picking and since I'm slow with it I pull out maybe two or three tons of radish while the others do it double. Almost half of the radish remains on the field for not being the right quality. Then we start packing and there I move again a ton or two in the boxes and here I'm the slow one again. When less than half is packed the loading starts. First I load the pickup on the field and we move to the road where the truck waits. So all the radish goes through my hands twice and a part of it four times.
Next day. No rain but cloudy and windy and too muddy to work. Tried to connect from my usual spot, but no luck. The wind was too strong. I know it doesn't make no sense what I just wrote, but that's what it is. I remember that when I was in Oban, Scotland, I could get a good free wifi connection only on days with wind from the east, otherwise not. Go figure why. Maybe it's the same thing here, sitting on the same bench, computer oriented in the same way, but the signal too weak to make any useful connection. So with Matthieu we just bought a few beers and that was it. And a bottle of soju to drink after dinner like a sleeping pill, we never know if next day we work or not so it's better to fall asleep early and be ready to wake up at four.
More about stereotypes. If you didn't know, Koreans spit everywhere all the time. If you say for a Chinese that he spits everywhere all the time you're limiting him in space and time.

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