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Friday, January 27, 2012

I’ve been back in the States for about two weeks now, with just another week remaining before I return to Daehan Minguk (Korea’s actual name for itself. I always find it surprising when I learn the real names of countries, and they sound nothing like the English name for them). People keep asking me if I’m dealing with any culture shock right now. The short answer is no – I mean, I haven’t been away that long, and it’s not like life in Korea is dramatically different from life in America, or any other highly developed country for that matter. It’s been good to be back.

The first thing I noticed upon arriving was how much friendlier Americans tend to be towards complete strangers: saying “hi!” just because you happen to be passing in the hallways, smiling for no particular reason, engaging in random chitchat. It’s nice but it’s a little bewildering if you’re not used to having random people wedge themselves into your lives. I was grocery shopping back in Lawrence, looking at potatoes, when a little old lady sidled up next to me. She told me all about her potato diet, how she’d lost a ton of weight, and how she went to this seminar about the potato diet but didn’t shell out $65 for the book, she’d just stuffed all that information from Dr. So and So into that little potato in her head…and so forth. I kept nodding and smiling and thinking that if I were back in Korea, this little old lady would be shoving me out of the way with her cart to get to the discount potato bag. Koreans tend to be a lot more clannish and unwilling to engage strangers. It’s not that Koreans aren’t nice people – I’ve certainly been the recipient of unprovoked kindness, and definitely some over-sharing also. They’re just not quite as open, on average, as Americans.

Other than that, minor differences abound: yeah, in the States, you don’t have to bow to people older than you, or do that thing where you touch your hand to your arm when you’re giving something to someone (which makes it kind of awkward when you’re trying to juggle holding your groceries and paying for them at the same time). Particularly in Kansas, the environs is different: the skyline is vast and unobstructed by buildings. There are plenty of churches, but none with red neon steeples. Oh, and there are actually trash cans readily available, so people don’t generally toss their garbage on the street…

Exciting stuff, eh? That’s the problem I have been running into when trying to describe my life in Korea. My experience thus far has been interesting to me, but I can’t seem to boil it down into compelling sound bite format. Here’s how my reunion exchanges have transpired:

“So, how’s Korea?”

“It’s all right.”

I think the frustrating thing for teachers coming back home is that they want to talk about their Korea experience, sometimes desperately, but it’s hard to know where to start. It’s also difficult to find an audience that will really care to listen, because “I had to use toilet paper as napkins, and take my shoes off when going indoors” is just not as sexy of an anecdote as “I had to rebuild the roof of my mud hut every week during rainy season.” That is not to say that I think my experience, or that of any other expat in a fancy developed country, is somehow less valid than that of someone slumming it in some hovel in the third world. I just think it’s somehow harder to convey the sum effect of the differences between societies, when the similarities are so similar.

To wit: living in Korea is just like living America, except totally different in every way.

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Little Gifts

Thursday, January 12, 2012

In a Korean workplace, it’s customary for co-workers to just randomly give each other gifts. Cookies, tangerines, rice cakes, etc. My favorite gifts are the tangerines – like the strawberries here, they are supernaturally sweet. My least favorite gifts are these giant blocks of rice cake, which look like this:

Oh joy a rice cake thanks.

Usually I’ve learned to accept gifts with grace by saying thank you: “Kamsa hamnida“, and immediately stashing the gift in my drawer, either to be consumed later if it’s a tangerine, or offered to students (or the food trash receptacle) if it’s a rice cake.

I was offered the strangest gift of all today: a dog. A Yorkshire terrier, to be exact.

Let me back up – a few months ago, I had written an essay for the school yearbook. My co-teacher wanted me to write something summarizing my first year in Korea, so I wrote briefly about my experiences, bonding with the students, yadda yadda. I think I had written something about feeling lonely and isolated when I first arrived, as almost every foreigner feels. Anyway, apparently that line really stuck with one of the other teachers, who came up to me and mentioned that she “felt concern for [my] lonely,” and though I insist that I am doing okay now, she still mentions it every other time we chat. She’s a really sweet lady.

Anyway, we were chatting briefly after lunch today, and she talked about her dogs. She has seven of them, and one recently had puppies. “Wow,” I said, “what are you going to do with all those puppies?” She said she’s going to keep them (no, not for stew, har dee har har), because she has a big property in a pretty rural area. Anyway, I wonder if she maybe mistook my interest in what she was going to do with those puppies, for an interest in said puppies, for then she suddenly offered me a dog. “I feel that you are lonely, so I want to help you!”

“Oh, thaaaanks,” said I, a little flabbergasted. Uh…I like dogs and all, but I kind of don’t really want a dog. Not just yet, anyway. (Think how the hedgehog would feel). I was moved by her gesture, but the responsible animal owner aspect of me is just always shocked whenever someone offers another person a pet as a gift – what if the recipient can’t properly take care of the pet? What if the recipient doesn’t want the pet (as in my case)? Though she meant it very sincerely, and it was really quite sweet. She’d take the dog back when I go back to the States, so there wouldn’t be the issue of me dumping it off at the pound (or bosintang restaurant) I’m actually friends with another foreign teacher who would LOVE to have a substitute dog while she’s here, but I’m not sure if the woman will be offended if I pass off her very heartfelt gift to a stranger.

What’s interesting is that she didn’t offer me one of the puppies; she offered me her Yorkshire terrier, who’s about 7 years old, and from the way she talks, he might be her favorite dog. She also mentioned that I might have to re-potty-train this dog, since he’s become accustomed to running around this huge property and might have forgotten how not to poo on the floor and stuff. I, never having owned a dog – only felines, who generally know where to put their business – haven’t the foggiest idea of how to train one. Sometimes even taking care of the hedgehog is overwhelming to my exhausted self; the thought of cleaning the poop off her exercise wheel is a little less exciting than studying Korean grammar or a DIY root canal, you know?

I told her that I’d never owned a dog, and that I was really more of a cat person, but I’m not sure she really understood, because she said “expect a dog when you return from your vacation!” and left the room. Hoo boy. This isn’t exactly the sort of gift I can just stash in the drawer and toss in the bin later. Again, this setup would be perfect for the friend I know who wants a dog while she’s in Korea, but I’m not sure how to propose this without offending.

There are two types of dogs in this country: those wearing clothes, and those in stew. This would be a very patriotic example of the former.

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Camptown Students Sing this Song…

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

I’m midway through my second week of teaching winter camp. Overall, this will be the sixth camp I’ve taught. When I first started out last winter, I was kind of baffled by the whole concept of “camp” here in Korea. It’s not an overnight trip to some woodsy location with a cabin and some bonfires like it is back home; it’s…extra classes, in the same old school building. If my mom had suggested to me that I go back to school, over summer vacation, for extra schoolin’? During my rebellious (and, admittedly, slightly pathetic) wanna-be grunge Wicca Hot Topic phase? Unless that camp had been hosted at the local mall witch store, there’s no way I would have gone willingly.

Oh, man. I think I'm gonna have to offer a "Craft" themed camp next go around!


Thanks to the intrepid souls over at waygook.org, and to channeling my own depths of dorkery, I was able to get through last winter okay. I did finish exhausted, however, and thrilled not to see that batch of students again for another month.

Thankfully, I’m feeling like I’m slowly but surely getting better at this job – just in time for budget cuts, natch – and last week was probably my professional peak, in terms of being a super-awesome-cool English teacher. I did a detective / murder mystery themed camp, of which there is a gigantic thread over at waygook.org, and of that megathread of posted materials, I used maybe…1%. I have unfortunately developed this sick aversion to using other people’s materials these days, even though it would save me so much time and sleep (what an idiot I am).

The one time I did end up using someone else’s stuff, though, it ended up being way too difficult and the students, who had loved every second of camp up to that point, started complaining bitterly. It was shocking, the change in attitude, and I sincerely felt bad about totally harshing the kids’ mellow* by introducing this extremely difficult, not-fun activity that was vastly different in tone to everything else we had done. It was my fault: I had been utterly wiped after prepping a week’s worth of materials, that involved: 1) creating a semi-realistic looking crime scene, complete with tape, hair extensions and blood; 2) requesting voice recordings from my friends back home as actors for a murder mystery “investigation”; and 3) taping envelopes with secret codes all over the damn school, pissing off the lurking security adjosshi who patrols the building after hours. So on Friday, I just went with a cryptogram activity posted by another teacher. I had incorrectly guessed that the students would be game for some crazy Da Vinci Code cracking nonsense; well, maybe they would have been, if it hadn’t been super hard and badly formatted. I actually sincerely regret that because it was the one sour note of a completely and utterly awesome camp. The kids were way into it, I was into it, and we were all a little sad when it ended. With my co-teacher’s help, I went through the feedback left by the students (in Korean, so they could give more detail), and a frequent comment was that “this camp was not a waste of time.” Though perhaps a bit clinical and cold-sounding in translation, this is probably the nicest and most validating complement I can get from burned out Korean middle schoolers. These kids guard their free time with the tenacity of dragons.

This week, I’m midway through a Superhero themed camp with my 8th graders. I chose the theme last summer, during the conclusion of my Greek mythology camp. One of my loyal camp attendees shouted out, “Marvel and DC!” and so the theme was decided. It’s going a little less swimmingly, as the students have been out of school longer and so the 8th graders seem to have forgotten a lot of English in the interim. Plus, I’m just not that jazzed about superheroes. Murder is definitely more up my alley (I guess that’s why my students love me, ha). I’ve been doing my best to bring up my own enthusiasm level, by showing up the first day in my Halloween wig and some Wonder Woman style bracelets fashioned out of foil tape. Still, I have to admit that I’m not feeling it as much this week. Hopefully the students don’t pick up on this.

Once this week is finished, then…I pack my bags and hop on an airplane, bound for…home. Home. Where is that again? Even though I talk regularly to my friends and family through the magical ether (net), it still seems like a distant memory. That was another life, a life in which I wasn’t staying up at odd hours pasting hair extensions to a papier mache ball dripping with fake blood, for the sole purpose of provoking a reaction from 13 year olds. Who was that person, who lived in Lawrence and used to go out to bars, and do things, and have actual conversations with other adults? What was she like? I guess I’ll find out in four days.

*for the record: these kids were not that kind of mellow. In case any education officials are reading this blog. Everything’s legit up in my English Zone!

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Ticket to Ride

Monday, January 2, 2012

A day into the new year, and I’ve fulfilled my first resolution! After tearing apart both my apartment and classroom, alerting the upper echelons of school and alarming all my friends and family back home who are waiting eagerly to see me in less than two weeks – I finally found it, wedged in some random pocket of a purse I never wear. Contrary to that dumb adage “it’s always in the last place you look” (well durr – once you find it, generally you stop looking), I swear I’d checked that purse before, but obviously hadn’t given it a thorough pat down. This little blue thing is inked with bureaucratic verbiage from eight different countries. I just need to fill up a few more pages, and then I hope I get a free drink.

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