I called ex-students of Joe and Rana right from the Airport, and afterwards I tried to find out which way was north so I could orientate myself with the map I had, but literally no one there knew, so I had to just ask which way Seoul was. It took me a couple hours to get to the Coffee shop that Joe and Rana told me about, and sure enough I saw some whities there who told me where I could find a place to stay. I stayed for a couple days in a place that was full of foreigners. The living situation there was different from what I had seen before. There was a central area that was basically outside other than the fact that there were sheets of steel placed above to keep it dry when it rained. It was a cozy environment though.

Joe and Rana told me that Korea was a very safe place and I got that feeling also from the obvious homogenous and routine ways of the people. So I didn't bother to even unlock my bike from a post across the street even though it was smack dab in the middle of the city. But sure enough when I went to unlock it it was still there. After a couple of days in the residential I heard of another one that that was smaller that I liked more so I moved. My room was tiny and the only furnishing it had was a mattress, but it was good enough for me, and worth the rent of $130 because it was in the center of the city. I had four western roommates in that small place, and I don't even remember any Koreans living there besides the owners of the place who were a man, woman and their son who we never talked to. There was a rock climber from LA who was just traveling, and three other English teachers: An American guy Brian, an American girl Amy, and an English girl whose name I don't remember, and an English guy whose name I don't remember. They had all been in Korea a couple years and made their money giving private classes, which paid like twenty bucks an hour.

When I first got there I got a part time job teaching in an Institute not far from where I lived, but that didn't last long because I just took over for the last few hours of the course. The English teaching there was fun and easy. I just went into the classroom with half a dozen students and we would just talk and sing songs together. I tried to bring lessons but the students were really laid back and just wanted to have fun. There were a lot of cute girls there who wanted to know if I had a girlfriend, and I went on a date with one of my students who called herself Moonbeam. Most Koreans who study and relate with Westerners have Western names because they don't think we can pronounce their Korean names. I didn't call her anymore though because I got involved with this Christian group that took most of my spare time.

When I arrived there I didn't have any money and even went to a homeless shelter for free food where they gave me some cookies but told me to not come back because it was for Koreans. After a couple of days there some fundamentalist Christian girls who taught English and were soldiers in the base approached me to talk about God, and one of them told me the school she worked for, called a ''Hogwon,'' was hiring. So I called the principal of the school and was hired at $1.8 million Won a month. I liked the idea of teaching little six year olds so I took the job, but after my first day of work the woman Mrs. Cho called me in her office and told me my salary was actually 1.4 million and I just accepted that. But the next day when I went in she told me it was actually $1.1 million. That night I told my roommates and they said that that kind of behavior was typical in Korea and that if you give them an inch they will take a mile and to be very careful because most English teachers there get ripped off. So the next day I went into work and told her I wanted 1.5 million won and she said it wasn't up to her to decide and that I had to call the central office and ask an American guy who was supposedly in charge of that. I didn't bother and told her that I was going to get work elsewhere and she suddenly told me that 1.5 million was fine. There was another institute that was begging me over the phone when I was in her office talking to her, but I decided to work for the Hogwon because I was more interested in teaching little kids than adults.

At that school, which was called PSA (pre school academy) there was a system where each class is shared by a Korean woman and the foreign teacher. I took over the foreign teachers job from an American guy named Vaughn. My partner teacher was a Korean girl who grew up in Africa for a while and then Vancouver and had lived in Vancouver for the last eight years. This girl could speak English fine but she had zero personality, so we just ignored each other and did our own part. I was in charge of taking the kids in the other room and doing the workbooks with them. After school I also did a reading class with a smaller group of kids. During lunchtime they had playtime in the basement which was fun.

I also had three hours a day in the afternoon at another school for kids from 13-15 at a private English academy. That job was alright with the younger kids, but the fifteen year olds were down right depressed and didn't have any interest in learning English, and I didn't really blame them either because the book I had to use with them was really boring. It was just a story I we had to read together about some cowboy or something. At that school I had I think three classes a day separated by ten minute breaks when I would hang out with the other English teachers. The other teachers there were Vaughn, and a Canadian girl, a young American guy, another older American guy who was openly gay , and an ex-army American dude. They all got their jobs from the states so they were on year long contracts and were living in normal Apartment buildings as roommates near the school. They had a totally different living situation than the people I lived with and hung out with in the Internet cafe I went to.

I went to an internet cafe that was frequented basically only by westerners. There were a lot, all of whose names I can't remember any more. Most of them were Canadians. There was Cam who had lived there a couple of years and was renting his own house. He had a party once that was fun. I got really drunk and hungry and bought a can of soaked cock roaches at the local convenience store-hole in the wall. I don't even know why they sold soaked cockroaches, but at the time I assumed they were for human consumption so I took them back to the party and began eating them. I remember they were quite filling, but they were very bitter and after about half the can my mouth was burning with excruciating pain so I had to stop. I tried to share them with the others but nobody was interested. There was a world cup game on that morning that I watched before crashing out there. The next morning I went to work.

Another guy who was always there was from Boulder, he made his money selling Dungeons and Dragons type playing cards to the soldiers. He only worked on Sundays and had the rest of the week off. Amy my house mate was a regular there, and there was a Canadian couple who had been there a year. I think the guys name was Jerry, and he coincidently knew Cam from Canada. For some reason most of the English teachers in Korea were Canadian. There was another American couple from Seattle, and an American high school girl who was an exchange student. I think there were some more but I can't remember them.

That internet cafe acted as a home away from home for everybody. I didn't hang out there as much as the rest of the people though, it seemed like most of them were there all the time. An ex-pat living in Korea definitely needs to have a support base of other foreigners because Koreans are very strange and don't mix well with foreigners. We had to get together and talk trash about the Koreans in order to keep a healthy state of mind.

Korea is a very strange country, mainly because it has historically been very isolated from the rest or the world. This has fermented strong ethnocentrism and fear of other countries changing them. For example, Koreans are always trying to push their customs on people who come there, not because they make sense, but because ''that is how its done here''. For example you can't ever take your shirt off even if you are in the middle of the woods. Another example is one day we had a parent teacher conference in the preschool I worked at, and in an attempt at conversation I asked one of the fathers what he did and he said, "Businessman''. The girl I worked with overheard that and told me that in Korea it is rude to ask someone what they do.

I found out throughout the years that in poor countries it is kind of awkward asking what people do; they don't seem to want to go there. I think it is because it exposes how boring or screwed up their lives are and just becomes embarrassing for both of us. So if you want to strike up a kind of relationship with them you have to get good at small talk. Another reason is that in a lot of undeveloped countries the people are used to compartmentalizing responsibilities and knowledge so that the people in power can keep their power and continue to lie. Its difficult to explain, but this issue comes up a lot in places where I got to know a little bit. It obviously isn't like that with everyone, but its worth mentioning.

I had some private students while I was there. A doctor and his wife in their apartment building. They were fun to teach because I just talked to them for an hour with the help of a conversation topics book. I had another woman who I talked to and proofread her masters paper on sea biology. I also taught her teenage sons a couple times. I also taught a little girl a couple times, but my time was limited with her so that didn't last long. Another guy I had for the whole time I was there was a college English professor who taught English by recording news in English and then writing the transcripts. He would pay me for an hour a week to listen to the news with him and complete the words that he didn't understand.

From teaching them and waling around the neighborhood I got to see how the city layout is. Seoul is a very new city. It sprung up out of the ashes of the Korean war fifty years ago, and is now the the tenth largest city in the world. One website even said it is the third largest city in the world. It has about 20 million people it it. It is pretty big in size, but the people are packed in there good because I didn't see any houses. In the historical and business center where I lived there were residences packed in between the large buildings. But in most of the rest of the city everybody lived in big twenty story apartment buildings that were packed together for as far as the eye can see.

There is one unhealthy thing about their lifestyle though, and that is their national alcoholic drink called Soju. Soju is the absolute cheapest way one can derive alcohol from rice. A liter of the stuff costed less than a dollar and if you try to drink the whole liter than its bye bye; you will literally black out. I remember one time I went drinking with some of my house mates and I accidentally drank too much Soju which needless to say is easy to do because it is so strong you could probably run your car off of it. The last thing I remember was we were outside in a little park area and I went to a bush to take a whiz, and the next thing I remember is suddenly waking up at three in the afternoon the next day in my bed with puke all over me. I got up and walked downstairs my house mates were there sitting on the steps of their rooms in the central circle. They all laughed when they saw me with the puke all over my shirt, and I had to ask them what happened. They said I went to the bush to pee and suddenly fell over it and passed out. They said when they woke me up I took my pants off and tried to start a fight with some sober koreans walking down the road. From then on I treated Soju with a fear based respect, but kept buying it on occasion, but letting a litter last a few days. I wasn't the only fool to fall victim to soju though. I little bit before I arrived there, there was a story in the newspaper of three executives of a big company who were found dead with a couple of empty bottles of Soju next to them. I was selling cigars on the street while I was there, and it was very interesting so see all the drunk people. Koreans got drunker than anybody I have ever seen, including the drunken Indians I ran across in the states. In fact, can't imagine any group of people drunker than the Koreans. Up until then my idea of a drunk was someone who was stumbling down the road blabbering incoherently, but the Koreans take it to a whole new level. Every night I went out I saw a bunch of Koreans, male and female, slung over their friends shoulders because they were completely passed out. I even saw a bunch of professionals with their business suits on passed out on the sidewalk; and that is all because of the Soju.

The Korean people have a love-hate relationship with Westerners. On one hand I was always coming across Koreans who wanted to talk to me and invited me to hang out with them, and even thanked me for freeing them from the Communists and kick starting their country as if I was an an ambassador for the west. But on the other hand I came across a lot of Koreans who were down right rude to me. I was given the finger on the street once, and it wasn't uncommon for them to give me a dirty look. Also the women I worked with didn't want to have anything to do with me, but that could have just been the school I worked at. There was just as much of a chance that if I had of been at another place they would have wanted to hang out with me.

Koreans were basically going through a bit of an identity crises. For hundreds of years they were known as the ''Hermit Kingdom'' because of their unwillingness to trade with other countries. For more than a thousand years they have had their own language and they tell me they even look a little different than the Japanese and Chinese. So after the Korean war when America came in and kick started their economy with American businesses and our political system, they had to suddenly open up to the rest of the world. They were still a third world country until the Olympics in 88 when they started to get a strong electronics industry going. Until just a couple months before I went there Korea and the rest of Asia was in such a big boom exporting goods to the States and Europe that their currency deflated by like %100 or something and pretty soon a lot of people were out of work. When I was there Koreans were always trying to tell me that their country was going through a tough time but I didn't see any crises. I think the Koreans over reacted a bit to that crises because the IMF bailed them out anyway. But because of the crises a lot of people stopped taking English classes, but even more English teachers left because the currency devalued, so there were still Koreans falling over each other trying to hire English teachers.

The Koreans were kind of having an identity crises between the sexes also. Traditionally the women stayed at home and the men work, but I could see that would have to start changing pretty soon because of the increasing influence of the Western world. Because women were kind of oppressed there and were super hot because of the healthy diet, a lot of the male Westerners had Korean girlfriend. I say male westerners because in was obvious that all the guys had Korean girlfriends but non of the female English teachers had boyfriends. The main reason is that the Korean girls are so hot and slave over their men, but the men are generally kind of nerdy and not very respectful of women. One example is I was having lunch in a restaurant with a Korean girl who hung out with us in the cafe. She was spoke perfect English an was married to an American guy. While we were talking she accidentally let out a little belch, and these two suited middle aged men sitting next to us yelled at her in Korean and told her she wasn't being lady like. So she yelled something at in Korean to shut up and that she can belch if she wants to. I could tell how some of the Korean women I worked with didn't seem to like men. One reason they didn't really want to talk to me could have been because I am a man. I remember one time at the institute I worked at we were going out to have something to eat and drink with the guys who worked there, and one of the guys invited the lady who managed the place and she said, ''No I don't want to hang out with a bunch of guys''.

After three months in Korea I had to leave the country to renew my visa, so I went to Tokyo for three days. Overall I was in Korea for only five and a half months but I had a lot of different things going on. I had four distinct groups of Westerners that I hung out with. 1) My housemates, 2) The people in the internet cafe, who strangely enough, other than Amy weren't the same as my housemates even though I lived like two blocks from the cafe. My housemates went to two different cafes. 3) The contracted teachers in the institute for teenagers that I worked at. 4) The Fundamentalist Christians. I also read the majority of the two thousand page book called A Course in Miracles when I was there, and went to the gym regularly. I think I got the biggest muscularly than I have ever gotten when I was there. I remember at one point I weighed in at 74 kilos.

For the first couple months I was there I was heavily involved in a Canadian and American group of fundamentalist Christians. I met them from a few girls who stopped me in the subway station and wanted to talk about God. I had never been involved with Jesus freaks so I decided I would go to their church and see what made them tick. I went to their church group and the men were very eager to meet me and give me a series of lessons. After I hung out with them a couple of times one American guy whose name I don't remember became the leader in their quest to convert me. For a couple months, other than their Sunday sermons, I hung out with them like three or four times a week where they would give me different lessons in a very specific order.

As far as I can remember the order of the lessons where something like this: 1) Every part of the Bible is the word of God, so you can't question any of it. 2) No other book in the world is the word of God, and any other book that claims to be of any moral or philosophical authority is of the Devil and therefore ''dangerous''. 3) The final and most important lesson was the ''light and dark'' study. Its basic thesis is that you are either with God or with the Devil. If you are with God you will go to heaven for eternity when you die, and if you are with the Devil you will go to hell for eternity. Although none of them accepted my challenge to look me in the eye and tell me I was going to Hell for eternity when I die; which shows that they weren't one hundred percent sure of that part of their lesson.

The way their conversations with me would go is one of them would explain the principles of their beliefs to me as long windedly as possible and then the next guy would basically repeat word for word what his friend before him said. And as soon as they were finished with their speeches they had to take off before giving me the change to say anything.

Most of the meetings where just me and the kid who took it upon himself to be my main ''guide'' into their faith. But the final lesson, the ''light and dark'' study, was attended by two other guys. They were very serious about this meeting because it was their final class with me before they wanted to convert me. While they were giving me the lesson they told me that they planned to Baptize me the following Sunday, and talked so seriously that I was sweating the whole time like I had just come out of a shower and it wasn't even hot in the room we where in, which was very strange. This lesson was mainly about the dangers of the Devil, so the meeting was full of fear and dread. All of them liked to point out how joining the Church saved their lives. One guy told me that he was sure he would be gay if he hadn't joined the Church, and another guy freaked out and told at me yelling with tears in his eyes that he was seduced by the Devil and screwed a prostitute once because he wasn't part of the Church at the time. I tried to get a word in but as usual they became tired because we had been talking until four in the morning

So in the end after the thirty or so times I had met with them I had never actually said anything to them. The whole time was them preaching to me and then suddenly having to go. The reason they didn't kept the hope alive that they could actually convert me was that I did listen to them for so long, and they must have never met anyone who had listed to them so much and not joined them. I just wanted to see if they were capable in listening and philosophizing. I didn't go to their church for about three weeks after that meeting because I was busy and problems with the metro, but when I did manage to go back and see the guy who was in charge of my conversion, he kind of exasperatedly said, ''What do you want Kyle?'' as if he had given up on me. I just said I wanted to philosophize to him and mainly wrap up what we had been talking about for like two months, so we went to the local coffee shop in the building. I tried to answer the different points they made but they didn't want to talk about that, so I said I just wanted to philosophize and he said he didn't philosophize, which is mainly all I wanted him to say, admit that he didn't philosophize. And they also admitted proudly that they were ''blind followers'' which they said in their own words. One of the main things they prided in themselves were their ''conviction'' which meant their ability to be blind followers of the very specific rules that they went by. The two guys I meet with only wanted to talk for a couple minutes and had to go because they seemed to see me as a lost cause. But before I let them go I asked them to look me in the eye and tell me that I was going to hell when I die because I'm not part of their church as they had told me with conviction that they believed that at least 90% of the people in the world were destined for an eternity in hell, even other people who called themselves Christians but weren't real Christians for this reason or that. They couldn't look me in the eye and tell me that though, and then I told them that I wasn't destined for Hell and that in fact we would see each other one day in another life time even if it was millions of years in the future in another planet, but all they could say was that they hoped to see me again in this lifetime.

So that was wrapped up and I learned a lot about how to deal with fundamentalists. The main lesson was to make it clear to anyone that I would speak to in the future that I am already familiar with their beliefs and don't need to hear them over and over again, and make it clear that I want them to listen to what I have to say and if they don't, not to waste their time and expect me to follow them. When talking to fundamentalists it is important to very quickly get to the main points which are: 1) Explain why they shouldn't be so preoccupied with the Devil and evil, 2) Why they should have a more open mind to similarities to their religion in other philosophies, 3) Why they should believe in reincarnation. If I ever talk to a fundamentalist who is able to listen to those three points then I am sure they won't be a fundamentalist for long, as the very definition of a fundamentalist is - someone who is unable to even listen to any idea that is outside of the rules of their narrow minded framework.

A lot of foreigners in Korea make their living selling goods on the street that they buy in warehouses there. Joe and Rana made three thousand dollars in three days selling jewelry on a vacation island in Korea, so they flew home for a week but when they went back there were cops there who didn't let them. One of the activities that I had while I was in Korea was Cigar selling. I got into it because some of my friends were selling jewelry on the street, and my roommate was selling cigars that he bought from an Irish guy and a South African guy who bought them in the Philippines. Those two guys had me, Neil, a couple from the states, and another American guy selling for them. They told me they were seeded in Cuba and put stickers on them that said they were Cuban cigars, and that is what I sold them as, but they weren't very good. On the weekend nights I went to the pedestrian mall near where I lived and sold them for a few hours. I just stood there and watched people walk by, and every once in a while someone would buy one from me. At the beginning I would yell that I had cigars for sale, but I don't think that helped much and I stopped doing that pretty quick.

It was from was selling cigars on the street that I noticed how drunk Koreans get and how they all dress in conservatively in black. Mostly they were friendly enough to me, but one young guy gave me the finger, and another time some guy tried to take my cigar and walk off without paying for it, but his friend stopped him; and one time a guy spit it out. I made about a hundred dollars a day for three or four days for their national holiday where they are supposed to buy presents for each other, but the cops kicked me out of the mall I went to on the last day. I sold in three different places. I went to one place to sell with my roommate Neil once. We would play video games, and sell, and play some more video games. I got really good at one car racing game that I played every day because video games are cheap there and the arcades are all over the place. One time while I was selling during the holiday a really drunk guy walked up to me and kept trying to talk to me for about a half hour. He was trying desperately to communicate with me, but he wasn't even speaking Korean, it sounded like he was trying to pronounce something in English but was nowhere near pronouncing anything. He spoke exactly like a severely retarded person. It was weird because he was in good shape and dressed normally. After I realized that he wasn't going to go away I went back home, but he followed me all the way to the subway. When I paid to go past the gate he just jumped over it and followed me in the subway. In the subway he became more desperate and started to yell and cry at me, but all I could do is stand there and look at him because he wasn't making any sense. When I got out of the subway and was a block from my house, I ran away from him the long way around to block to shake him, and he chased me for a little bit, but luckily I was able to out run him by the time I got to my house. One time while I was selling in another mall an American fundamentalist came up to me and told me he felt sad for me when he saw me selling there on the street and wanted to convert me to God, so I told him of my experience with the fundamentalists there and then told him about aliens and the Urantia book for about an hour; and I actually had a really good night selling that night while I was talking to him.

On the street I noticed that there were a lot of really drunk American soldiers out there on the weekends, but they mainly hung out where the prostitutes are. Once I went there with my friends from the institute. It was an an inclining strip on a small street where there were no cars at night a couple blocks from the Mosque. The place was lined with a bunch of whore houses with nasty looking prostitutes and had tons of drunk hill billy soldiers who were eager to talk to me. There were a lot of corn cobbed hip hop looking black soldiers who looked like they were right out of a Snoop Doggy Dog video, and there were a couple of huge Military Police standing guard. The American soldiers had a bad reputation for raping Korean women there. I saw a couple demonstrations on the street against the violence of the soldiers.

I talked to one girl for a while who had nothing but bad things to say about being in the military, and that she can't wait to get out. When I told one guy that I was from Colorado he said, ''Oh that's where all the tree huggers are from!''. I was standing next to the gay guy I work with and one soldier just out of the blue started yelling at him and telling him he was going to kick his ass, so my friend just stood there, but the guy kept going on. Pretty soon after that we went to a Korean restaurant.

There were about 40,000 soldiers on the base in Seoul and on the surrounded bases and the five or so kilometer wide demilitarized zone on the border with North Korea. I walked past their town within Seoul once and it looked just like a middle class American neighborhood with the houses, schools, and streets exactly like it is in America; which was weird because Seoul has nothing but big apartment buildings. A lot of the people in my Christian group were soldiers.

I had a TV in my room and every night I would watch the tonight show on the army bases channel. It was a government sponsored channel so there weren't any commercials, so they played really weird progaganda-type commercials. The strangest one was a of a toddler riding his tricycle along the median of a highway with semis driving by, and the narrator says, "This child has less of a chance of getting hit by a car than you do of getting skin cancer, put sun screen on!''. There were a lot of anti suicide commercials also. They would usually show a depressed looking kid in his room and the narrator would say, ''If you are sad, seek help!'' and then it would show his friends coming in and taking him out to do something fun and he would cheer up.

My time in Korea was fast and fun, and when I left I had $6,700 in the bank.