The new teacher

After Gary left, a new teacher came to replace him. Because he's still in Korea and has a pretty uncommon name, I'll refer to him as Bob, which isn't his name. Bob was a very unusual individual. He was always filled with energy and enthusiasm for everything. He seemed like a Christian fundamentalist in his zeal, but he wasn't religious.

On Bob's first weekend in Korea, my coworkers and I took him out to Sinchon. Bob was a very strange individual after a few drinks. It didn't take much to get him plastered, and he was a little too lively to begin with. When we were searching for a bar, he thought it would be a good idea to pick a cigarette butt off of the ground, use it as a divining rod and throw himself into a pile of garbage.

After a few places, we wanted to find a more lively bar. We decided to split up and look for a bar and return to the corner we were at in ten minutes. Each of us would go a different direction, pop into a few bars to check them out and return with our findings. The plan worked out pretty well except for the fact that Bob never returned. So, we all split up for twenty minutes in an attempt to find him. We never found him.

This was quite worrying because he had no cell phone, spoke no Korean, had no id to show a cab driver where he lived and probably didn't know how to get home. We searched for a bit more, but we finally gave up and enjoyed the rest of our evening.

The next day, I called his home phone, and thankfully he was there. He remembered the subway station near his house and had a taxi driver take him there. Apparently, he forgot where we were supposed to meet and had no watch to keep track of the time. He met some other foreigners and hung out with them for the rest of the night.