Thursday 7 March 2013

(Day 230) Seoul Nambu Correctional Facility-day 135 D-21

sit-upspush-upschair-lifts
1005040

Breakfast coffee!!
Lunch radish kimchi
grass kimchi
Korean style pancake
spicy vegetable & chicken soup

Same soup as last night’s dinner, but with chicken and a kimchi I can’t describe as anything but grass... fail, but I’ll eat it all anyway just because there’s nothing else. The soup smelled a little like dog food...
Dinner kimchi
rice cake and beef soup
zucchini & mushrooms
shredded radish kimchi

There soup is the one decent thing. Two kinds of kimchi is redundant and a couple of slices of zucchini and some mushrooms is more like a garnish than a dish. Oh well, I only have to eat this 2 more times this month.

Less than 3 weeks! How exciting! The idea of leaving-- of escaping Korea-- of being free--anywhere but here, pretty much consumes every waking moment. Right now, it’s all I think about. I can't help it. If I knew exactly what time I would be leaving, I be counting down the hours and minutes (~480 hours).

My playing cards were almost confiscated as contraband in less than 24 hours while i was showing them to Mr. Kim during the exercise period. Apparently, you're not allowed to have playing cards, but somehow Mr Kim said something to the guard and he handed them back to me. We quickly walked away as to not push our luck. You can buy Korean cards (go/stop) and baduk, a game played with black and white tokens, like checkers, but a deck of western style playing cards is contraband. Go figure.

Speaking of contraband, there is a inmate here that spends all of the exercise period actually exercising by jogging around the yard. He's a big dude. He looks as if he spends the rest of the day doing push-ups. Anyway, when he runs, he wears a blue toque with white stars on it. Yesterday, some guards came into the yard and took his hat away from him for no reason at all. What's the harm in a fucking hat? Obviously at some point, someone with authority gave it to him. That's the only way he could have gotten it in here in the first place. I made my contraband. It’s highly doubtful this guy knit his own hat.

If people bring inmates stuff, it has to be approved by the guard before it is given to the inmate. Nothing gets into the cells without going through a guard first. I even had my asshole x-rayed when I was processed and visitors have to turn in their hand phones before they can meet with inmates for 15 minutes with Plexiglas and an intercom between them. My mail has always arrive already opened and any books I've received, take at least a day before they reach my cell, so how did this dude get his hat into the jail in the first place? I have all my clothes here in storage, but I had to buy prison approved socks and underwear and shirts. And once he had it why did they come and suddenly take it away? It’s just a hat...

Prison has not taught me to have any respect for authority. If anything, I have even more disdain and contempt for power tripping authority figures. Down with authority! Freedom to the people!

I finally got a menu today. From my limited Korean skills, what is written is not what we were served last week. I don't remember having bibimbap for lunch yesterday... In fact none of the meals I recorded in the last week match anything on the menu...

Mystery solved. I've been given the wrong menu. The worst part is that the wrong menu had much better food on it. I've been served shitty food all along. This whole time has been a scam right from the beginning. I knew it. They wouldn't let me keep the menu as evidence and now I don't have a menu again. I have 3 more weeks of shitty food to look forward to. It’s actually less than 3 weeks though, so I think I can deal with it.

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