Sunday, June 27, 2010

Fear the Reds

Words for the week: snorkel, partly cloudy

So a few times a week the 5th grade teachers, (whom I'm apparently a part of) get together and eats Korean snacks. Its usually some pretty different stuff, but I eat it anyway. One afternoon the teachers came back with this ice cream-type stuff with rice cakes and kidney beans in it. It was ice on top of a smoothie and then the beans and rice cakes at the bottom of it. I don't know what it was called, and I don't know how its sold regularly. It wasn't great, not terrible but not great, and it reminded me why you don't mix beans with ice cream.

Oh and I was recently introduced to how Korean children signify their admiration of someone. One day I was wrasslin around with the kids before class, like I always do, and this one kid came up to me and put his hands together in the shape of a handgun, ran behind me, and stuck it into my butt....Uh...What?!?! I had no idea how to react..I mean what the hell just happened? It was sooo weird. I told the kid "no, no you can't do that", but all he did was smile at me and run away. I've since blocked repeated attempts at my rear end, and am obviously much more vigilant of the kids at all times. I brought this up to some friends and found out that this type of thing happens often, but only to guys. It means they like you, so I guess I got dat goin' for me. What a weird cultural concept.





I finally had an orientation Monday through Wednesday of the past week. We went to this convention center where over 200 foreign teachers in my province (Gyeonggi) alone are currently teaching. It was pretty cool...I learnt a lot about teaching and made a lot of friends who live near me. What was particularly cool was meeting people from English-speaking countries all around the globe--New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, the UK, Ireland, Canada, and all over the United States. So that was cool. And we were able to have some beers at night which made it all that much more fun.

Last weekend I went to a place called Muuido, which is an island off of Incheon (which supports Korea's largest international airport). To get to the island you need to take a ferry, and round trip was like 3,000 won, or less than $3. Real cheap. We then went to this area called Hanagae which is nothing more than a little strip of beach with all sorts of gondolas along the beach, each at 10,000 won a night. Again, very cheap. It was pretty much spring break, just hanging out on the beach all weekend long and eating shellfish and other local marine wildlife. The tides there are pretty outstanding, and I even went out as far as maybe 500 yards one time where the water had been just a few hours ago. It was pretty cool, and again there were lots of English speakers all over the place.

One of the things that I have really noticed since being here is how well Koreans can save space. There are around 50 million people here, all crammed into an area roughly the size of Indiana. So there's not much real estate to work with, and so Koreans have become experts at saving space. For example, many bathrooms' showers consist of nothing more than a shower head poking out of the wall in a bathroom, with everything in the bathroom being waterproof. It's also rare, as I've noted before, for Koreans to have dryers. And there are lots and lots and lots of buses (I still think that word should be spelled busses), and they are usually pretty full. A lot of people ride them, and therefore either don't have a car or have only one in their family. Another space-saving example is in my school. With over 1700 kids, one would think that the cafeteria might be a central room in the building. But actually, there is no cafeteria. The lunch ladies bring food up in these huge carts on elevators and each class eats in their homeroom, and then spends time cleaning up afterwords. Its kinda interesting to see these ways that people have learned to deal with too many people in not enough space.



Prior to my leaving for Korea I was told that people might stop me and ask for my autograph. This hadn't really happened to me, and I figured I wasn't tall enough to be thought of as something like a basketball player, and so it wouldn't happen to me. Well on Fridays, just before lunch, I have my favorite class, 3-5 (a third grade class). I like it because there are two really good English speaking boys who lived in the US for a time, and I can use them to help some translation issues. I also like it because there are some of the most adorable little girls, like the one with a mustache (incidentally the only facial hair I've seen in Korea), or the one who is a little heavier and stares at me with her little smirk for 5 straight minutes before every class, pointing her finger at me and rubbing the hair on my arm. (I guess body hair isn't too common around here.) So Friday they all were really rowdy for some reason and all started asking me for my autograph. Let me tell you what, it was absolutely bonkers. There were shoving these pieces of paper in my face like I was a Korean pop star or something. I mean at first it was funny, then it got to be really annoying. Eventually I just started signing alternate names like "Barack Obama", "Jack the Ripper", and "Marty Dertz". Can't wait til these kids realize what was really going on. I got a good laugh out of it.

Soccer games in Korea are a big deal, and so being here for the World Cup has been really cool, especially since Korea has had success. On game days/nights, local towns organize these huge gatherings of people and have a big screen available for viewing. Saturday night I went to "city hall" in Seoul with a bunch of people and watched the game. It was nuts. I couldn't even guess how many hundreds of thousands of people were there. It was a total mess because right before the game it started raining and didn't stop the whole time. But this was just an absolute party... prior to the opening kickoff there was a concert with all of Korea's most popular bands. The best part about it was that it was all free. It was such a cool experience, seeing people support their country and everything. I don't really have anything to compare it to in the US because while instances like the 2010 Olympics were great and did a lot for national pride, there were still people in the US who didn't really care about it. EVERYONE here is a die-hard soccer and Korea fan. All game long people sing and cheer and dance..even in the rain.


After Korea lost we went to Itaewon (a section of Seoul basically designed for foreigners) to watch the USA-Ghana game. Now keep in mind that the Korea game started at 11:00 PM. The US game started at 3:30 AM. These bars were all open and tons of people were hanging out, it was really cool. Because of the times I ended up getting home around 10:00 AM. I hadn't pulled a legitimate all-nighter since Tony Hawk 2 came out and Slick Willy was in office. But it felt good, made me feel like I'm still in college.

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