Another busy weekend

The second avalanche of cutness wasn't here for one afternoon! In the evening we had a "kempu pire" and we baked potatoes... well, we carbonized them, but who cares, they were delicious the same. When the kids went to sleep I was drinking beer on the porch of my bungalow, smiling to myself, feeling almost happy, at least as happy as I wasn't for a long long time. You know, at ease, satisfied, all worries forgotten and so on. And then I heard the children crying, their place is quite close to mine, it was sleeping time and I imagined the hard time the teachers are having. But it went on and on, too long, far too long. What the hell is going on? I waited a few minutes more, but no, it didn't seem to stop. Ah, my temper! Don't get me wrong - I believe that spoiled kids sometimes need a good slapping (if you find me cruel, ask His Holliness the Dalai Lama about this), but here we are talking about children from six to eight that go to sleep in a completely foreign environment, without parents and you have to do something to confort them! I headed for the guesthouse, blind with fury, having in mind some slapping for the teachers (I swear I would have done it!), when half the way I stopped like a complete idiot. Moron. Asshole. Jerk. Luckily I was only blind with fury, not deaf. They were laughing. They were having fun. They enjoyed it. Of course I had to be sure of it so I reached the guesthouse softly and slowly, peeked through the window and hoped I will dream of them.
In the morning they woke me up at 5.30 - their teachers were still sleeping so they found that playing (and shouting) in front of my door is safer. They were right. It's just that since they left I have no more choko pies in the fridge.



And we spent all the morning together and I was their archery instructor and we had so much fun that when they left I really shed a tear. No, I'm not getting soft, it was all because of the pain, the kiddies just wanted to pull my beard for goodbye! How could I say no?
The really most amazing and sweetest thing I saw was the lunch. The boys serving the girls. Without orders, without complains, without stupid jokes. They just did it. Maybe the "true" emancipated women (wymen?) find this disgusting. I dont care, I find it sweet.




Yes, lunch. If I'm given meat, I just eat it. So I wasn't complainig or being picky when with lunch came also a sandwich with fried eggs and ham. But what the hell was strawberry jam doing in it?
Even before the wee cuties left, another bus came, with high school students. With them we had some more conversation, mostly about archery. Yeah, I became (un)officially an archery instructor (and my brother and my nephew are ROFLing at this). And I'm a good one. You know the Italian saying "Chi sa, fa - chi non sa, insegna"? Translation: He who knows, does -the one who doesn't know, teaches.








In the evening I applied for a teaching job in Seoul. Whish me luck, don't pray!

Let's waste some time together

This is the best description of Asian way of working. I'm not talking about Chinese - Philippino - You Name A Poor Country - slavery work, I've done it and it's same as anywhere around the world. I'm talking about normal daily farm work as I experienced it in Japan and here. To an outsider it may look as highly organized and extremely efficient. Dream on.
I will not repeat myself with stories from Japan, the last few days here are enough. Not that I complain, I'm still at a loss with this way of doing things where the time needed to do something is much more appreciated than the result. Few days ago I had to move from my lovely traditional house in the orchard to another bungalow and before leaving I had to clean it. Easy, it's not a really big house and I'm not your ordinary dirty male; clean the dust, sweep and wash the floor, done in maybe 15 minutes. Wrong! When I reported that the mission is completed I got only amazed looks. No, no, you have to clean it well, guests are coming in the afternoon! Yes, yes, I cleaned it well, guests are coming in the afternoon! A whole committee went to check the house and to recheck and willing or not they had to admit that the house is clean. But their faces were telling another story. They were not happy at all. I did it too fast thus it's not really clean, maybe it just looks clean and even if it is really clean I did it so fast thus... I was just waiting to see the CRC message appear in their eyes. And even more important than that was the fact that I completely messed the daily schedule. They had to find (make up) any job for me for the next few hours (which I was supposed to spend cleaning the house). Yes, I know, I should have gone to sleep and make it look like a work of hours, but it's not really my style. And it's not even Asian style. They really seem to do something all the time.
Today this stuff reached such epic proportions that at the end of the day I literally ROFLed. It was to laugh my lungs out or to cry in despair.
It's time for persimmon census. Yes, we count the fruits. For the insurance. Clearly we don't count all the fruits, but for an average figure we do 16 trees in bigger orchards and 12 in the smaller ones. Here they have a whole philosophy and a very complicated way to choose which trees are suitable for the census that takes a very long time to be explained in every single orchard. At the end everybody just picks random trees and does the counting. We have to do something like 50 orchards because the farmers have a collective insurance and it seems that here Kang is the Master of Persimmons. The average number of fruits is around 250 (I bumped into a tree with more than 500 fruits). You would never believe how fast we do it. We swarm the orchard, six of us, so we do two or three trees each and in less than five minutes we are done. We start after breakfast, 8.30 AM and before lunch we do something like five orchards. No, we don't have lunch at 9 AM but at 1 PM so there must be something really really wrong, don't you agree? OK, the orchards are quite far from each other, true - but some are very close. You think we do them one after other? How naive you are! That would be a very bad way of doing things! You see, we got a list, compiled by the insurance company and I guess it's by alphabetical order (because since now we were doing only orchards that belongs to different Kims) and we go by the list. Yesterday we were two times in three places just to do the orchard near the one already done. But today we were three times in a place where we were two times yesterday! It would actually be possible to do all the work in two days - in this way it will take us a week. When I saw where we were parking I felt rising a tide of despair but decided that actually there is a funny side in all this and lied down in the shade of a tree (persimmon, what else) and started laughing. Folks were amazed why this crazy foreigner is so happy so I tried to explain that I always find madness funny. We were here two times yesterday and two times today - why we didn't do the counting in all the five orchards the first time? They showed me the list and explained to the uneducated barbarian that we work by the mighty document with many seals and signatures. I stopped laughing and wanted to cry again.
My ninja coworker



Another day, another way
Even if I don't post every day on this blog I write almost every day, when something is to be mentioned. What I wrote yesterday would be softened today, so now the contrast will be more clear. Because in the morning I had a really hard time to control myself when we were sorting the lovely pink ribbons we use for marking the persimmon trees. Everything is on them, the name of the owner, number of the tree, date, name of the censor and the number of fruits. Guess what? We were sorting them by locations, not by names. I bit my tongue not to say something nasty. And we did something even better, we worked in two smaller crews in different areas so tomorrow we'll finish the work. Now I'm only afraid that everyone will hate me because they'll have to redo the weekly schedule.
I was planning to leave in a few days to go back to slavery work, cabbage season is due to start in Gangwon do, but during breakfast Kang told me that in the beginning of August we'll have another school here, for two days. You noticed that "we"? But as soon as the kids will leave I'll jump to Japan for the visa extension and then picking cabbage.

This morning I woke up at six and looked through the window. For a moment I was sure I had taken some illegal substances without knowing it. The rice fields around me were glittering like a sea of emeralds. When my sight wasn't so blurred anymore I noticed it was not a sea of emeralds, but that there are milions of diamonds on the rice plants. I grabbed my camera and ran out before the sun changes the angle that makes the dew drops so shiny. It really was an amazing sight and also a beautiful way to start a new day.



We had two rainy days so we were doing small works near the office building with the roof always at hand. And today in the morning we finally finished the counting of persimmons. Three days and half and in the last day and half we did more than two thirds of the work. We left the hardest two orchards for last.


It took us almost half an hour to climb the top of the hill, covered with persimmon trees, and we slowly descended, marking the trees.
Finished!

Before lunch we had to do the most boring part, paperwork. Copy all the figures , recheck the numbers and so on.


And after lunch - an unexpected (for me) joy.








I noticed that Koreans are very paranoid about their persimmon orchards. Gates everywhere!


But no gates around lotus fields. It's blossoming time. They do have something mystic, but not on my pictures...


And another mystic one, a light in the middle of the rice fields, have no idea why is there but I see it every time I go back from the store with beers...

A teacher forever

New miracles happening here. When more than two years ago I tried for the first time sesame (or perilla, I still don't know the difference) leaves I almost puked. Seasoned, pickled, cooked or raw - it was all the same shit. I tried to describe the taste as something between soap, shampoo and toothpaste. Incredibly the taste is just the same after two years - and I love it. Sometimes I eat more sesame leaves than kimchi during a meal and that says a lot.
Another thing that never changes are the kids. Kang asked me if I am willing to help when children will come for a one day farm experience. Of course I will help, but how? Teaching English. And so it was. And so great it was! My God, in all these years I haven't realized how much I miss teaching. How much I miss kids. Once a teacher, forever a teacher. It really is as I was saying all the time, teaching is not a job, it's a vocation. I have to reconsider my decision that I won't teach again. On the other hand I know how incopatible I was even in the Slovene educational system, let alone how I would look in an Asian one. Surely fired after one week because the kids have too much fun - which is synonim for they are not learning anything. Yeah, Asia has the dumbest education you can imagine. And the sweetest kids you can imagine.
They arrived in the morning with the bus, a few tons of cuteness in all sizes and shapes. They stared at me with open mouths and when they heard that I will be their English teacher for a day they started trembling in terror. When they left it was hard to say who was more sad, them or me. I know for me that I almost cried when they all waved and shouted goodbyes from the bus.
It was not a real English class at all; when they were picking tomatoes I just explained that they are actually picking cherry tomatoes. And some more vegetables and fruits and animals. It was fun for everyone. We were making puffed rice (with persimmon sugar!) together, we had lunch together, we played with Tokki together.
I told you that the farm is huge - an electric mini bus is needed to visit it.

Everyone was posing for the teacher taking a picture - but one sweet smile was only for me.

As hours passed more and more of them were coming spontaneously to me, asking "What name is this?" for different things. I bet another teacher would be correcting them, but the idea was far from me. As many linguists say, the point of communication is the correct interpretation of the message. My point was the pronunciation - Koreans have an awful one. Korean language lacks certain sounds, like "v" or "f" or to end a word with a consonant and a mission impossible is to make them say "si" - it will always sound like "shi". My usual joke with kids is to ask them, while they are sitting, what are they doing. Nine times out of ten their answer is "I'm shitting."
This time I didn't make this stupid joke, mostly because they were never sitting (shitting?) for more than ten seconds.
Playing Korean traditional games.

I was green with envy when a girl fell and bruised her knee because she ran crying to Min Ho (the student) for comfort (not to her teacher!) and then he was carrying her around. Yes, I know I would have been of no use to her - I have to learn Korean and do it fast!
The greatest fun for the kids came in the afternoon when they played at catch the eel. It's not metaphorically speaking. They were actually catching eels with their hands in a muddy pond. For them it was what a mud festival is for rockers. The joy, the fun, the laughter!



To me the cutest was the girl in the pink... err... in the brown dress.

Later they had a shower that didn't change much the colours.

They changed in the classroom and this came out. Sweet as chocolate, don't tell me you wouldn't eat her!

Goodbye kids, I love you and who knows, maybe we will meet again, if not in this life in one of the next.

Sometimes I may write to much about pretty Asian women, risking to be considered a tipical male pig. Be it. But for this time I'll do the opposite, I'll entartain the female readers. If I remeber well which picture from Iwanuma was one of the most "clicked" something simalar awaits this one. Here's your average Korean farmboy.

More about the farm. This is the education center.


One of the rest areas.

The mini store. You can buy persimmon wine, persimmon ice wine, persimmon juice, persimmon leaves tea and noodles. I haven't figured out the last yet.


The wine tastes good. It really tastes like wine and it has 12% of alcohol.
I'm afraid I'm falling in love... what a fool I am.

Surrounded by persimmon trees

Wwoofing is saving my ass again. Sure, I make no money, but at least I don't spend any. And there's a chance to come back here in few months to make some money harvesting persimmon. We'll see when the time comes.
I'm situated in the Sweet Persimmon Village in the south of Korea, halfway between Daegu in Busan. It's a place with the lowest precipitation in all Korea, which is a refreshing change (read that "refreshing" as strongly ironic, the temperatures are going crazy and with high humidity is a challenge even to breath). Working can be a madness, but you'll never believe that every day I can't wait to go to work. The alternative is to lie on the floor in the room and try not to move a single muscle (with all available fans on). But the work... OK, the first 30 seconds are painful because I have to walk under the killing sun from my room to the orchard, where's always shadow and a soft breeze. I tried to sleep there one afternoon, but no way - you must be standing to feel the breeze. We work slowly and never in the hottest hours of the day. I think this is the first place in Korea that I find to be really organic (for the most part, a few orchards aren't) and not just a wannabe eco farm. All the weeding is done by hand, no herbicides used and for pesticides they use mostly hot pepper based homemade liquid. Nice, but the sceptic in me is always alert so I do have a problem with an organic fruit farm, that is surrounded by acres of rice fields. When the rice is sprayed with all possible chemicals it really doesn't affect your trees? Crap, you may well fuck me, but the rice is grown organically, too. I just can't believe I've found such a place in this country. The farm is huge, it actually deserves the name "village". It has it's own packing facility, a persimmon wine production center, restaurant, office building, education center, few warehouses, lodging facilities (one traditional and two less traditional houses), archery field and you name it. The owner (or owners, I have no idea) lives with an extended family, usually they are ten at mealtime, add one employed worker, a student of agriculture who is doing here his internship and me and you have a picture of a communal meal. Oh yes, for lunch we are joined by two hired ajuma that also do farmwork (but luckily at lunchtime the daughters, sons, nieces or nephews are not home).

Here's one of the smaller orchards in which is situated the traditional Korean house or hwantobang.

A zoomed look at the house, which is my temporary home, complete with ondol - I surely don't need in these days.

Pavlov's rabbit

The chap is my next door neighbour. Since he has no name I called him simply Tokki (which means rabbit in Korean). Tokki and I are now friends. He's a very clever rabbit because he knows the Slovene language. Cleraly he cant speak, he's not a fairy tale rabbit, but he understands me. He really does what I tell him to do.
Well, this is the story I sold to the guys here. Of course they were laughing when I told it, but when I proved it to be true... it was my turn to laugh. The fact is that if I call Tokki he comes to me. The others can't catch him even if they try in group, Tokki is fast as a flash (and clever also, as I already said). A fistfull of fresh grass every time I pass by does the trick since I pass there twenty or thirty times a day. So when he sees me approaching his nose is alreday stuck in the fence, waiting. If I go in I have to be very careful not to step on him so today I really had to kick him a few times so I could finish my work - I dug a new house for him, since the one he did for himself was all the time flooded.

Archery
It was my day off when I dug Tokki's house, I finished it very fast and then I went with Kang (the boss) to learn something about Korean traditional archery. I suppose that me with a Korean bow was the funniest thing the folks here have ever seen. So far I have never tried any archery, let alone some Korean traditional (kids playing as Indians really doesn't count), so the arrows were flying in all directions and everybody was running in panic for shelter. I'm really surprised that I didn't manage to shoot myself in the back. With my skills it would be perfectly possible. The worst part was finding the arrows. Some were in the nearby sweet potato filed. One was in the rice field. Lots of them were at my feet. When Kang patiently repeated and showed me the technique for the third time I managed to hit the target with one arrow out of thirty (here I use the term target very widely since I hit only the frame). When Kang realized that I actually can send the arrows approximately in the target's direction, continued with explanations. That here is no point in aiming in a straight line, since Korean bows are used to give to the arrow a ballistic curve so you aim at a certain degree over the target. Ah, that's the trick! Not really, since I had to collect my arrows on the other side of the house. They didn't believe me that I was aiming at enemy helicopters landing on the roof. At that point I had it enough and the fingers started aching but Kang decided that it was time for an archery contest, internetional of course, Korea vs Slovenia. I wished my brother or my nephew were here to be in my place, but maybe they would find the Korean traditional bow a sort of a toy, simply a piece of wood (so finely polished that at first I tought it's plastic), a synthetic string and fiberglass arrows with steel tip.
To make me feel at ease he told me that Koreans are known as best archers and that the Korean women are invincible since they practice fourteen hours a day. Of course Korea won in this contest, too, but not so smoothly as Kang was expecting. I remembered a book, Zen and Archery, that I didn't read, but the title gave me an idea. Why should I care so much about what I'm doing? The arrow is supposed to know where to go, I'm just helping it! Now don't think that I suddenly became some archery master by a zen miracle, not at all, but the improvement really looked as a sort of miracle. In the first round I managed to hit the target with thirteen out of fourteen arrows making one single point (against Kangs' 32). We did the second round with thirteen arrows because I couldn't find the one that missed the target. This time I made two points, all arrows in the target (or the frame). In the third round Kang almost had a heart attack when with the first arrow I hit directly the center (5 points) and ended with 10 points in all. When he managed to make "only" 27 points, he declared that my 10 are worth much more and proclaimed me winner (of one round).

Oleg, The Lord of the Smell
Oleg is a well known myth among visitors of SF/F conventions. He's a myth because he attends almost every Con in Europe, he's been even on the Slovene Confusion. He travels hitchiking and he never washes. Usually organizers of a Con know one day in advance if Oleg is coming, because his smell comes one day before him (and it also leaves one day after him). His smell is something tangible and it's hard - when it hits your nose you start bleeding. With his perseverance he became a sort of an icon - you can hardly call your Con a success if Oleg wasn't there.
Why this introduction? Because in this village I heard a story of a similar legendary smelly being. A guy who was here for one month, worked every day and didn't take a single shower. According to the folks he smelled as rotten cabbage. He's somewhere from East Europe. You can bet that Oleg was the first person I tought of. And dismissed the idea. Not because of the hitchhiking, if there is a person who could do it, Oleg is your man. Just because here we don't have Cons. Sad, but true.

Enough of radish

July 3rd
Last week we moved again. Same story again, fridge, TV and so on loaded on the pickups, drinking beer and shouting (the boss did the shouting part, we did the drinking one) and cover everything because of the rain.


Till there, nothing special. We locked the door and hit the road but stopped after maybe twenty minutes. In a spot I learned to hate that same day, it's a wet and muddy working story, will not annoy you with it. I started to being really worried because it was almost midnight and there was an empty five toner truck waiting and I started to fear that my joke about a night shift might become true. Luckily it didn't. But to my great amazement we loaded the pickups on the big truck. Crazy stuff.



And we had a hell of a ride way north in the van and now we're settled in a guesthouse in a lost village that goes by the name of Gobuk. Of course the first thing that went in the room was the fridge and the first thing to go in it was the kimchi. Good thing, the fridge is in our room (I share it with two other guys) so we have anju and cold beer all the time for us.

Rainy season really started. It rains almost every day. We mostly don't work and when we do we're in mud to the knees. Following the weather we also changed the work routine, we do not load anymore cardboard boxes (we did it only once and it was an experience I do not want to repeat, half of the time running to cover the boxes, the other half running to load them) but huge plastic bags that can hold around half tone of radish. And also the radish now reached sort of biblical size, pieces of three or four kg are average and impossible to pack in the box. So we had to learn quickly the new way of picking and I was proud like hell when I found a new, better and faster, way of doing it just by myself. Here the point is to pull the radish (two radishes actually, one with each hand) and with a whipping movement of the wrist break all the leaves so the loader picks just the radish root and throws it in the bag. I added to the wrist movement also a quick twist that helps the snapping of the leaves and - lo and behold! - sends the radish root flying into the bag. Or somewhere very close to it, which is the same a good job because it speeds up the work. Or it could speed it, at least. It just doesn't. It's pretty dangerous, too. It hurts when you're hit by a huge radish. After I managed to hit a Chinese guy for the third time he got really angry and started throwing radishes at me. So I stopped inventing nonsense and kept doing it the way I was taught.
When we work I'm going crazy all the time because my boots keep being stuck in the deep mud and on days when we don't work I'm going crazy because it's boring and we don't make any money. At least when it's raining really heavily the boss is so nice that he wakes us at 4:30AM to drink coffee and tell us that we can keep sleeping on because we won't work. And we sleep till breakfast, somewhere around nine or ten, we go back to sleep till early afternoon, we start drinking beer and we sleep some more. We're so bored that we make silly juvenile jokes to the boss, like the one on the following picture...


No free wifi nowhere around. I will wait till we go somewhere with a PCbang to use the internet...

July 12th, Seoul
Call me softy, but I quit with radish. Sixteen hours shifts are just too much for me if they are the rule and not the exception. I hope to find soon another crew with more human working hours.