The Ultimate Job Hunt

I like Elections.  Where else can you get to see hundreds of guys working around the clock to try and get one guy a job?  I think if he needs all that help for a position that isn’t even permanent, just a three or four-year contract that might not even get extended, then there's got to be something wrong with him.  

Still, when most people look for a new job say in an office, they call up Uncle Tony, look through some classifieds, and start reading Self-Help books.  Not the guys trying to get into office.  They start by WRITING a Self-Help book.  Then they round up some people, including Uncle Tony, and get them to quit the jobs they already have to come work for him in looking for work for him.

What is also nice about elections are the debates: where they lock the two guys up in a room and get them to argue.  Its about the only opportunity you will get to see job hunting get turned into a spectator event.  (Usually firms do this sort of thing too.  They put candidates in a room to argue, and they give them psychological tests and questions to mess with their minds.  Unfortunately they prefer to keep all this tomfoolery to themselves.)

What we also love about the presidential or prime ministerial race, is that the loser can't save face.  He can't just see the bad numbers as they're being tallied on election night, call the party boss and say, "Well, sorry man, did the best I could, I'm gonna head home now and have me a whisky."  No.  That will not do.  "Fraid not, pal.  You've got to go out there one last time and say that you lost."  And no matter how much running around the tricky question he has done over the course of the campaign, there's no spin he can put on his finale.  He wants to come out and say,  “Yeah, the thing is, I doubt that I could have accepted the position even if it was offered to me…it just wouldn't have fit my commitments and schedule at this time, but thank you everybody.”  Except that all those people who had quit their jobs to find him his one would feel him ungrateful and picky.  Especially Uncle Tony.  

The Sharks of Yeosu

We headed past the World expo site on our way to the Aquarium, and to say that it had become a wretched wasteland would be too kind a complement.  There was ripped up concrete all over the place.  I hopscotched over the gaping holes and pieces of wreckage and soon came upon the Aquarium.  During the expo it was just another pavilion but was now it was a great symbol in the promised land, like an obelisk in the desert.  It was clearly a wondrous local novelty, attracting townsfolk who stood mesmerised by its grandeur, as though a strange UFO had appeared in their midst.  

You had to take a ticket to buy a ticket to get inside.  I got number 262 and they were only up to number 150 as gaggles of people burrowed about the lobby and fathers half heartedly tried to keep a track of their kids.  We bought a coffee in the coffee shop and grabbed a table on the landing where you could contemplate the lovely bay.  Contemplation was not easy because just to your left was the wasteland and you wanted to keep that out of your mind.  A middle aged man who acted like an old man wandered over and hovered above our table to gaze at the horizon.  He stood with his feet spread wide and his hands cupped behind his back, which made his belly protrude further out and even closer to my face than he already was and I tried real hard to enjoy my morning espresso.  As it turned out, I could have waited until I was within the aquarium itself to buy a coffee.  There was a coffee shop right in among the tanks and so instead of having a man hovering above, it could very well have been a tiger shark or grandaddy turtle, or giant eel.  

The Zoo or Aquarium experience is a lesson in how simple man is.  You essentially go to these places to watch animals eat.  You have already accepted that, because you’re no ruler of an exotic land, that you won't get to see the animals fight, or even pursue each other around.  No.  There would be none left for tomorrow.  And somehow watching them mate is not quite so pleasing as it should be.  You would much rather observe your own kind do that.  And so you’re left with getting the most fulfilment from watching them eat.

The good news was that the Yeosu Aquarium understood this part of the human equation and got that craving out of the way right away.  No sooner had you gotten through the doors did you come upon a half dozen starving sea otters in a glass compound.  And you felt no sympathy for their empty stomachs.  Indeed you were delighted in this, and in witnessing them feed so frantically and with such ill manners.  A staff member was next to the otters selling a jar of four worms for 2,000 won, which sounds a lot, until you caught sight of the worms.  You pour them into a hole where the otters gleefully receive them, but often fumble them and have to go back for them later in the running water.  I would have happily bought a jar, except I wasn’t sure by the time I got to feed them that they would still be hungry.  I didn't want to pay to feed them unless they were truly desperate.  

Quite a few worms who, like people, are slippery creatures to begin with, went through the hole and slithered beyond the otters to temporary freedom, signalling that the chase was afoot.  One otter had a worm trapped underneath its belly and was looking around for it, quite oblivious to how close it really was.  You could see it through the glass and you wanted to call out, "hey get up youre sitting on your snack you idiot," or if you were going for the worm, "hey get off him you bully."  You wanted to see both the feeding and the escape and so you were torn and ended up refraining from taking sides.  It was jolly good sport.  

And then a father put his finger through the hole that was the border between man and otter, and he wiggled it around in temptation.  "Come here, dear otter, come and bite my finger."  This was a brave man and I appreciated his arrival to the theatre.  To his credit, the otter wasn’t biting.  He knew that worms came in jars, that they were thinner than this man’s finger and they didn't just linger out in the open like that as if to say, "hey wanna meal?"  So that made a few of us disappointed: dad and the kids, who didn’t get to see any super close-up of the otter, and me, who wanted to see what an otter biting an index finger looked like.

The starving otters were to the Aquarium what the Rookie's are to the Marathon.  They charge out and give you a thrilling beginning after which things settle down into predictable monotony.  And so it was at the Yeosu Aquarium.  From that point forward, it was good old fashioned fish swimming happily in the tanks.  No big fish eating smaller fish and no fish fingers.  And yet a lot of big sea creatures, a menacing tank full of piranhas and even some small whales and sharks.

It was not a bad way to spend 16,000 won and two hours. 

Tunnelling through Yeosu

Yeosu is a sleepy town at the bottom coast of Korea, with mountains in the midst of town that give you a million and one perspectives of the ocean, and yet separate one part from another, the old Yeosu from the new, the downtown from the beach, yesterday from tomorrow.  It is a place not without its charms, and has been oddly overlooked as a travel destination, like that kid who gets picked last on the sports team.  

You get teleported there via KTX and immediately notice that there is no immediacy.  You see people actually sitting around doing absolutely nothing (a pastime I thought extinct in Korea), or wandering about with no fixed objective.  I had the weird notion that I had somehow travelled beyond the border and found some new and wondrous civilisation.  

We spent much of the time in the so called old town, the area that was originally thought to have been the downtown before that got moved to the other side of a mountain and through a tunnel - they are always tunnelling in Yeosu.  You go through a million tunnels just to get there from Seoul, and when you arrive, you go through a million more.  To go get some milk, to go to the beach, to go see an old friend, you have to go over a mountain or through a tunnel.  I wonder how painstaking life was before tunnel technology came to the place.  I bet they weren’t sitting around doing nothing though.

We went to a coffee shop overlooking the sea, called Blank.  I ordered 2 espressos, held up 2 fingers before the waiter's eyes in case my Korean accent wasn't working and waited.  The waiter took a deep breath, praying, I suppose, to the God of English that he might be allowed to survive this ordeal.  “What do you like?” he asked.  I repeated my order, with the 2 fingers again, paid and as he was giving me the change and the buzzer, I could see him bracing himself again.  It was the long pause you do when you are about to give a ridiculous offer for a second hand car and you are not sure how badly the other party is going to take it.   “Let me bring out to you,” he said, putting the buzzer quietly down on his side of the counter and looking relieved when I nodded.

With some wifi I looked on the usual english websites to see what there was to do in the place, but all I found was that familiar litany of visits you get pointed towards in any Korean destination:  A temple here, another there, a market, a museum and another temple.  This was my top ten of misery:  Temples where monks sit around listlessly or not at all and where tourists snap off zillions of photos holding up 2 fingers in the air and museums full of old plates and bowls that don't have any food on them.  I would like to see the monks doing some hot yoga or martial arts training on the lawn, karate chopping or slide kicking one another.  But no, not this time.  

I went into the bathroom and to my surprise found that there was no back wall at all.  Instead I was faced with what I was always faced with in Yeosu, a mountain.  They had not cut it out or filed it down like in the middle of town, but meshed it with the structure and saved themselves the trouble of building a wall...a bit draughty, but nice.

Daegu visited

Daegu has been on my radar screen for ages, but I keep mixing it up with Daejon so I never get there.  I had just heard that one of these Dae's wasn't very good.  And what I found out was, Dae-Jon like John Doe, the guy you have nothing on, and Dae gu, which is halfway to goood.

The feeling seemed always to be sleepy.  Even in the Love motel where we got plonked on the Saturday night, the noise was moderate and mellow and there wasnt a lot of randiness.  Local characters, while not perfectly welcoming were at least in no great hurry to push past you and get nowhere like the Seoulites.  It is a city that seems to be at that pleasant point of globalisation where the foreigner, while no longer anything new, is infrequent enough to not yet be an annoyance. 

We went along to an Amusement Park in Duryu Park called E-World.  Have you ever been to an Amusement park in Korea and afterwards said, "A theme park should not have this many people, you should be able to get on rides with a small wait, and not have annoying people in your face all day?  And it should be cheap."  Well, E-World in Daegu is that place.  A ticket was 28,000.  You could get it for 14,000 with some resourcefulness, some negotiation at the ticket booth, the right mix of credit cards, and some luck.   

We tried the Viking, which resembled a public spa; there were people lining both ends and nobody in the middle.  A rollercoaster called the Boomerang did its course, hesitated, and went backwards to the start.  For the record, its not twice as much fun if you do a roller coaster backwards, especially one with a couple of loops.  We tried a roller coaster called The Camel.  And one called The Hurricane.  It must have been called that, not because it span you fast, but because it was all over in a matter of seconds, and like any hurricane, it left a mess.  In your stomach.  Since it was so brief a ride, there hadn't been enough time for a queue to build up so the guy said at the end, when you pulled back in to the safety of the station, "who doesnt want to go around once more?"  I didnt, but even more, I didn't want to be the weak white guy who wanted to get off and so my hand stayed down and my stomach got shook up again.

E-World also had a ghost house that must have been modelled on the marathon, it was that long.  You needed rest stops and water breaks to get through it.  You turned left and right more than a tennis fan's neck in a big five setter and still you were in darkness, as shifty chuckles and screams resonated in the background.  Take your claustrophobic or Achluophobic friend in there and they will either be cured of their fears due to prolonged exposure, or they will need to be taken straight to their shrink, and will likely never be the same again.

Now what I know is, there's Dae I dont know much on, and there's Daegood.

The Expo Hunter

Brisbane '88 was my first World Expo.  We drove 3,000 Kms to get there from Melbourne and I remember only standing on a square plate, putting twenty cents in a slot and then trying to stay on while the plate vibrated fiercely.  I thought that a technology like that would surely take off, as it had almost made me take off, but I've hardly seen it since, except in Korean gyms.

The Shanghai 2010 expo was fantastic for people watching, especially if it is the back's of their heads that is your thing.  All I can remember about that were the queues:  To buy a ticket, to give that ticket to somebody and get inside, to buy some horrible food, took queuing.  You were in a constant state of waiting for something to happen.  And it never did.

I should have learnt my lesson but as they say, all good things come in threes and I went to the Yeosu 2012 Expo.  There were heaps of people, most of whom were occupied in taking photos and that helped keep the queue pool down a bit.  There was a neat water and light show at night,  which concluded with a question that seemed too profound for the situation, "Which future do you want to choose?" About a quarter of the people were recording the show on their smartphones.  Im not sure why.  If you posted it on youtube you would be happy with a dozen hits.  I suppose they were sports fans, used to watching delayed telecasts of their favorite events, and just wanted to watch an event live on TV.  Just once.

Most of all I wanted to understand what the Expos are all about.  Why were people even there?  People like the man who came up to say hello, proudly stating that he had come all the way from Queensland just to see it.  Oh but you must be doing other things besides, right?  No, just flying in for the expo.  If he wasn't from Queensland I would not have believed that.

The theme of the expo was "living ocean and coast," so all the nations and corporations had set up their pavilions based on that idea.  A lot of them brought the environment into it, and incidentally their own proud record in looking after it.  They used catch phrases like, future generations, sustainability and the like.

Others put very little effort into it.  The Australian pavilion took about ten seconds to walk through, and that included stopping to look at the interesting stuff.  At the end you got corralled into their shop, which was selling the Australian version of snake oil, Lamb placenta cream.  The French had an artistic installation like you would see at a chic gallery while the Italians showed you how the Panama Canal worked.  Others still showed you nothing.  You got to their stall, and it said, "Cultural shop."

All of them were geared toward selling you something in one way or another.  It might have been the only way to entice people of different Nationalities down there for three months:  "Tell you what, you man your nation's stall for three months, and you can sell whatever you like there.  We'll supply the crowd."  

Street performances were neat.  A harpist and a belly dancer alternated, to give each other a break.  A magician kept you guessing.  Some strongmen gave a strong performance.

And I never did work out why people came in droves.  Or why I did either.  

Tent City

We arrived at the beach on the east coast of Korea at eleven at night, and it looked like we had entered a refugee camp without the foreign aid workers.  As far as you could see, there were tents.

We found a place without any immediate neighbours and pitched our ten-man tent, which was one of the bigger ones on the sand.  You would not think that a tent lends itself to any claim of status but on this beach, it did.  The last time we came we pitched a two-man tent that was about as good as Bear Grylls could put together with branches, in the woods.  On that occasion people with easy chairs, lamps hung up over their heads and mattresses filled with air, had looked on disparagingly.

This time we had come prepared.  Our tent was the big daddy of tents and I looked about with a pride that did not last long, for true respect required more than a tent.  What you needed was something to go with it, like say, a table and a few chairs and a canopy.  In essence, creature comforts.  What we had was a big empty pavilion, the Lawrence of Arabia special that would have been ready if everyone came over for an illegal card game.  What they had were cosy chalets.  

Everyone is nosy when they get to tent city, as they are in any neighbourhood.  Its just more pronounced.  Imagine that your neighbour has knocked down his house and a new person has moved in and is putting up a new one, which is only a few feet away from your window.  This will occupy your consciousness.  "Who are these people?" You will ask yourself, "What kind of people would use this kind of orange brick?"  

As we set our own tent up, some older people ambled by, stopping to admire us try.  At 2 am some neighbors moved in next to us and we became the nosy.  I watched them, content that they had an average-looking tent.  But they continued working, and by the time they had finished, some new wings had been added and they had something much more majestic.  I was about to go over and say, "Ok, ok, you've made your point.  That's enough," but fortunately, they had stopped.

On the other side, somebody had a cage inside their tent, inside which was a dog.  It didn't bark all night.  I wondered about the protocol if the dog needed to relieve itself.  On the street you had better pick it up or you might get shamed by a kid with a phone camera.  But out here, the dog could cover things up with sand and if he failed to do so, you could.

The tent people got up early.  At six in the morning the place was buzzing with activity.  Food was being prepared, throats were in the early stages of being cleared, and stiff muscles were getting massaged by fists.  I thought it was about nine so I go up.  A while later, too late to try and catch some more zzzs, I noticed that it was only six.  

Korean Musical

I went to a Korean Musical called Bibap next to City Hall the other evening, in a theatre not unlike a church hall.   The name Bibap sounded like a Korean food missing a syllable and I wondered why that was.  As it turned out it was an attempted, possibly misguided pun, half relating to the food and half about something else ~ hip-hop or bee boy rap, I don’t know which.  In the end the performance was very much like a Bibimbap ~ everything thrown in haphazardly, mixed around real quick, and yet quite tasty and more favourable than a lot of other things on the menu.

I came by free tickets, which is never bad.  Other people seemed to have come by free tickets too, the way they milled about the lobby sipping on complementary instant coffee that was lying about.  Besides those folk were Chinese travel agents herding their groups of tourists like a good sheepdog on a farm. 

The place, the hall, the set, the performers, were all almost amateur yet potentially professional.  The show began noisily as two kids came out with bandanas, caps turned sideways and clutching mics so tight as though they were slippery eels.  The kids appeared to be choking into them, voicing gasping staccato sounds, and made such efforts that I’m certain would make them great boyfriends if they were ever that way inclined.  Their task was to warm the crowd up, get them jiggling along and clapping, shaking or otherwise alert, which I would have thought the decibel levels naturally guaranteed. 

This inclusion of the audience was a fine feature that was consistent through the whole performance.  Somehow, probably because it was a tiny crowd, things were not always ideal.  Sure, there were the occasional over-energetic members of the crowd, but they were mixed with a majority who seemed mostly bemused; the kind who made a clapping motion but not a clapping sound.

Nonetheless the audience was brought into things a lot.  Five people were called on individually to select something, even though they mostly seemed to sit there and look embarrassed as their decision was made for them.  Four people were brought to the stage, including moi, and at one point a long string of dough was threaded through the second row, and those people had to keep it moving like a snake.  At another point, twenty or so balls of pizza dough (which were actually sponges) were thrown at the small audience, who were incited to throw them back at the performers for a minute or two.  It reminded me of when I went to the football with my dad and saw Kevin Bartletts 400^th game.  At the beginning, of the match, his team kicked a lot of plastic balls into the crowd.  I caught one that Kevin kicked somehow.  But contrary to Bibap, I kept it. 

 

Most of these gimmicks served no real purpose for the act or the narrative, but you didn’t mind.  They were fun.

There was in fact a kind of storyline, that two head chefs ran the kitchen at different times and were key rivals:  one seemed to be the nice guy and the other the bad guy.  Other characters were there, so stereotyped there was not even an attempt at concealment in their introductions.  Iron Chef.  Sexy chef…

As expected there was over acting beyond ridiculousness, lots of movement, and lots of noise. 

It was a bazaar of everything.  Some of the Nanta-type tricks.  Some overacting.  Some dance.  Some song.  Some slapstick.  Toward the end the kitchen was dispensed with and the stage transformed into street theatre.  I imagine the producers saying, “Ok fellas, you’ve done the kitchen stuff, good work, now do whatever you want.  You’ve got ten minutes.  Knock yourselves out.”  And they almost did.  One by one the cooks, or were they dancers? came to the centre for their fifteen seconds of fame as the other half dozen waited around them, performing breakdancing moves like backspins, handstands, and even a head spin made possible with the help of a bike helmet that appeared magically.  Like that old friend who you can never get rid of, the mic brothers persisted, making the noise of a sellout crowd and for glimpses, you felt like you were at such an event. 

A few times it was hard to know when the end would come.  Now?, you thought.  Nope, one more skit.  Now? Here again, as the audience put an arm into their winter jackets and started to get up, they had to wait.  One more thing.

And then one of the chefs who had been cloaked in chef wear all evening slipped away only for seconds, but returned with a shirt undone, and some oil rubbed on a well sculpted six pack, in order to say goodbye in style.  Maybe he suspected his performance was forgettable on this night, and thought he had better throw this in. 

Or maybe the whole show was like that.   Insecure about the narrative, which was good, and performers, who were talented enough, they decided to throw in any and every gimmick possible.  Even ones that made no sense.

All in all, the show was upbeat and fun.  It was a quick hour, which did not drag on excessively, and was a pleasant way to pass an evening.