This week was particularly interesting because one gentleman wanted to meet for his class, even though his office was closed for a company holiday. For a location, he chose the Grand Intercontinental Hotel lobby. It was a nice place to say the least.
And because it's considered polite to order something if you're going to sit down someplace (you know, to sort of "pay the rent"), he got me a drink.
I got the cheapest thing on the menu -- an $8.50 Coca-Cola.
Yeah, "Whew!" is what I said. But I guess he's got money to blow -- he had just gotten back from a visit to his son's boarding school in Maine.
That wasn't the only class that went atypically. On Tuesdays I meet with a faith-based non-profit (I don't want to get too specific) in sort of a group class. We mostly go over the English Café pages in the Korea Herald, and talk a lot. This week, however, no one showed up for class.
In fact, no one was even in the office when I showed up. I wondered if my clock was wrong or if I came on the wrong day, but no - everything was normal.
It just turned out that everyone had gone out drinking the night before in a "dinner meeting" (회식, 會食), and everyone was still hung over. One of the two people who came in later -- a mid-level manager in the organization -- expressed some dismay that so few people were there and apologized to me.
In Korea, the problem isn't in drinking too much that it affects you on the job. It's that absenteeism for being hammered makes you a sissy in the eyes of your coworkers. Last year, I posted the figures from an article in the Korea Herald, but I thought that was just regular companies. Several times I've had my morning students fail to show up because they overslept after drinking with clients the night before.
But apparently, overdrinking is common even in religious non-profits.
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