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Here are some things that have happened to me recently:
While walking into Seogwipo, I passed by a gaggle of middle school-to-early high school girls. I had my head down and was thinking, as you do, so at first, I didn't really notice how tightly they clung to each other.
Then, one of them-- the one in the middle with the sky blue Flu Paranoia mask said, "Hi!" Such bravado! Such boldness! She dares to speak to the bearded white guy, the breather of fire and the consumer of souls!
Her friends screamed, and clung harder. The one closest to me started slapping her shoulder, and screaming something-- "Why would you do that? I can't believe you did that! You're crazy, Soo Eun! You're crazy!" etc. etc, I imagine.
So, I said, "Hi there!" and their screams got louder.
As soon as we passed each other, her friends started pushing Fearless sky blue Flu Paranoia masked girl down the street (her, being fearless, leaned back, willing to remain in my presence a little longer).
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About half (no hyperbole there. HALF) the people living in rural Seogwipo own tangerine groves. At school the other day, a couple of the teachers said, "Orangee?"
"Oh, no. Someone already gave me 3 of them," I say, and then I round the corner.
There are two massive crates of tangerines, stacked on top of each other.
I don't think you understand when I say massive crates. I mean MASSIVE. 4 feet x 2 feet x 1.5 feet massive. Two of them. Completely full.
My shoulder ached when I got home, from where the strap cut in.
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I ate 23 tangerines the next day. The day after that, I had horrible acid in the back of my throat, all day long.
But it was so good while it lasted!
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I want to do bobbing for apples with my students.
I bought 2 decently sized basins (as I am not sure the school has any clean enough to eat out of, of that size), and a whole bunch of apples.
This is just to say-- APPLES ARE DAMNED EXPENSIVE HERE.
Not that I won't be reimbursed by my school, but STILL.
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There's an old farmer-man who drives a tractor at a crawl through the streets of my town. This evening, as I was going out to get plastic bags (for the clothes-protecting during the apple-dunking), and I saw him drive by.
In the back of the tractor-- in the trailer portion-- there were about 7 other old people, all scowling and looking generally fed up with the world.
Ahh yes! The Jungmun Disapproving Old People harvest! It comes but once a year!
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The man who runs (and perhaps owns?) Espresso and Yogurt (the best Jungmun coffee shop) is very nice. His lattes are pretty damn good, and the chairs are comfortable.
Alas, I've gotten into this funk where I can't write in my apartment-- only when I'm elsewhere. Needless to say, I've been drinking a lot of lattes in comfortable chairs, around nice men.
There are worse restrictions on when/where I can write...
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I'm trying to figure out a way to play a Zombie-tag variant with my students (FOR HALLOWEEN... WHAT!! It's THEMATIC and thus, APPROPRIATE).
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Throat aches in that "You're gonna be sick in a weekish" way. Voice may be going away. I may be Very Sick for the language festival (where I am meant to be serving chili).
Which will be bad...
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I was trying to find the post office in Jungmun, and had NO IDEA where it was. So I stopped into a bank.
The teller I talked to spoke no English (doh). I tried to mimic mailing a letter. I had a sheet of paper, which I folded in 3. I stuffed an imaginary envelope. I licked said imaginary envelope, and put it in an imaginary mailbox. The woman looked at me like I was a moron.
Gah...
That's okay-- the bank teller next to her, looked at her as if she were a moron for not understanding, and after a minute of moron-glances, Bank Teller 2 said, "Post office?" and pointed the way out to me.
So, I went to the post office, and was in the process of mailing my things, when Bank Teller 2 walks in, carrying my phone.
I had left it there, and he had chased me down the street to give it back.
This is in no way an isolated incident-- Koreans are very staggeringly nice people when they're not cowering in fear from my awesome bearded Caucasian might.
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Another story of Korea's awesomely helpful people/policies.
So I went in to the local pharmacist (strike that, one of the 10 local pharmacists). The guy there is very kind, and speaks English fairly well to boot.
There's a basket of the tangerines out, free to take, which is nice.
As I pay for my medication, the guy says, "Drink?"
I, thinking he means, 'You should take these pills with something to drink, to make swallowing their giant form possible' say, "Yes."
He turns round to the little gas station fridge behind him, and flips back with a two-shot bottle of Concentrated Vitamin Beverage, and hands it to me free of charge.
Which is very cool-- the pharmacies here don't just get you what you pay for, and send you on your way. They see their jobs as keeping people healthy. So they try to.
I dig it.
Showing posts with label south korea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label south korea. Show all posts
Time passes, dreamlike and sprinkled with flashes of nightmare-- the eyes-rolled-back snarl of a teacher; kimchi that tastes of fire and blood; the anglerfish horrors of the Suwon fish market.
But things are good, you laugh over minor cultural misunderstandings with new friends, and spin classic Korean references into Americanized threats-- "Don't make me call my friend in Jeju-do. He come up here and crack skulls till I get a drink, biatch." The sun and the humidity conspire to steam you on the way to your Crowd Control 101 class, but it's only a halfhearted effort. On the bus, you dodge scowls from toothless Korean geezers with a bow and grin.
Waiting for an elevator one day, you joke with one of the orientation coordinators.
"All this heat," he tells you, "you're probably going to lose some weight."
"I hope so," you tell him, crossing your fingers, and deciding not to take the remark personally.
"Really? I thought that in America, having more weight showed that you could afford to feed yourself very well," he tells you. You smile, like it's a weird joke you're missing the social cues to pick up on. When all you get back is an earnest stare, you explain that that line of thinking was true for France in the 15-hundreds, but nowadays Americans are just fat because of eating poorly and little to no exercise. You start to explain that the leading research shows that high-fructose corn syrup actually eliminates the body's ability to tell the brain that it's full, but the elevator doors slide open and you can see that he's already lost interest.
There's a terrifying coordination in some of the Sports Day groups. A sort of militant efficiency that comes from synchronized chanting and the muscle-pop of testosterone. There's grit in their voices and veins that bulge from throats. The chain of command is easy to spot, top down, orders that get barked over dodgeballs and across bugbitten links in the human rope. There's a violence inside their organization, and it all seems rather silly for 10,000 won worth of KFC gift certificates.
One night, you go to Noraebang and warble through the echo of the mic. You learn that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is not, under any circumstances, a good warm-up song. You drink $3 ciders and bounce on the couches, waiting for the booklet of songs. You struggle to keep up with Eminem's lung capacity, and Matthew Bellamy's stratosphere pitch, and have a fantastic time. There's talk of purchasing a third hour, but you eventually decide against it.
You Skype obsessively. Your girlfriend's still in Iowa, a 14-hour time difference, and you phone her at 11pm, so when she answers, you get to poke fun at her bed-crazy hair. She complains: "I haven't even brushed my teeth yet." You tell her that she probably tastes like day-old tuna and half eaten broccoli. You make faces and gagging sounds, but you wonder if you're right. You skype other folks too-- your mom, who still hasn't figured out her webcam; your friend who works the graveyard shift at a college parking ramp; your old roommate who wants to talk writing and art and philsophy with you. For all these things, if you could make love to the internet, you would (but only if the internet was into it, and only if it weren't a dude, and not if it were into anything freaky... which, knowing the internet, it probably would be).
In Seoul, you see a legless man drag himself down the street, face down on a skateboard. He's filthy with dirt the pedestrians kick up from the street. Grime collects in the wrinkles in his face, deep grooves that cut through his forehead from hours and days of straining to look up. He's tied tire rubber onto his stubs to cope with the constant friction with the street. He's got a radio that he shoves along in front of him, screeching the peppy K-pop noodle-eating song they played in your dance class. The song's happiness sours, from his radio. You wonder how the world looks from his perspective; just shoes and pantcuffs and cigarette butts, and the occasional glint of money: yes! 50 won! You think this in the disgustingly blase way that rich, white, employed college kids think about these things-- a flickering curiosity that's gone by the next knicknack shop. You cannot fathom the inherent nihilism, the raw hopelessness, of his situation because hopelessness is a word you simply do not understand. You see three more men, legless or paralyzed, their thighs withered and atrophied. You do not give them money.
In class, you wince at misspellings and grammatical faux pas that your fellow soon-to-be teachers stumble into. But they're nice folks, by and large, and they're in front of the class for the first time, so you decide it's okay to cut them some slack.
But things are good, you laugh over minor cultural misunderstandings with new friends, and spin classic Korean references into Americanized threats-- "Don't make me call my friend in Jeju-do. He come up here and crack skulls till I get a drink, biatch." The sun and the humidity conspire to steam you on the way to your Crowd Control 101 class, but it's only a halfhearted effort. On the bus, you dodge scowls from toothless Korean geezers with a bow and grin.
Waiting for an elevator one day, you joke with one of the orientation coordinators.
"All this heat," he tells you, "you're probably going to lose some weight."
"I hope so," you tell him, crossing your fingers, and deciding not to take the remark personally.
"Really? I thought that in America, having more weight showed that you could afford to feed yourself very well," he tells you. You smile, like it's a weird joke you're missing the social cues to pick up on. When all you get back is an earnest stare, you explain that that line of thinking was true for France in the 15-hundreds, but nowadays Americans are just fat because of eating poorly and little to no exercise. You start to explain that the leading research shows that high-fructose corn syrup actually eliminates the body's ability to tell the brain that it's full, but the elevator doors slide open and you can see that he's already lost interest.
There's a terrifying coordination in some of the Sports Day groups. A sort of militant efficiency that comes from synchronized chanting and the muscle-pop of testosterone. There's grit in their voices and veins that bulge from throats. The chain of command is easy to spot, top down, orders that get barked over dodgeballs and across bugbitten links in the human rope. There's a violence inside their organization, and it all seems rather silly for 10,000 won worth of KFC gift certificates.
One night, you go to Noraebang and warble through the echo of the mic. You learn that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is not, under any circumstances, a good warm-up song. You drink $3 ciders and bounce on the couches, waiting for the booklet of songs. You struggle to keep up with Eminem's lung capacity, and Matthew Bellamy's stratosphere pitch, and have a fantastic time. There's talk of purchasing a third hour, but you eventually decide against it.
You Skype obsessively. Your girlfriend's still in Iowa, a 14-hour time difference, and you phone her at 11pm, so when she answers, you get to poke fun at her bed-crazy hair. She complains: "I haven't even brushed my teeth yet." You tell her that she probably tastes like day-old tuna and half eaten broccoli. You make faces and gagging sounds, but you wonder if you're right. You skype other folks too-- your mom, who still hasn't figured out her webcam; your friend who works the graveyard shift at a college parking ramp; your old roommate who wants to talk writing and art and philsophy with you. For all these things, if you could make love to the internet, you would (but only if the internet was into it, and only if it weren't a dude, and not if it were into anything freaky... which, knowing the internet, it probably would be).
In Seoul, you see a legless man drag himself down the street, face down on a skateboard. He's filthy with dirt the pedestrians kick up from the street. Grime collects in the wrinkles in his face, deep grooves that cut through his forehead from hours and days of straining to look up. He's tied tire rubber onto his stubs to cope with the constant friction with the street. He's got a radio that he shoves along in front of him, screeching the peppy K-pop noodle-eating song they played in your dance class. The song's happiness sours, from his radio. You wonder how the world looks from his perspective; just shoes and pantcuffs and cigarette butts, and the occasional glint of money: yes! 50 won! You think this in the disgustingly blase way that rich, white, employed college kids think about these things-- a flickering curiosity that's gone by the next knicknack shop. You cannot fathom the inherent nihilism, the raw hopelessness, of his situation because hopelessness is a word you simply do not understand. You see three more men, legless or paralyzed, their thighs withered and atrophied. You do not give them money.
In class, you wince at misspellings and grammatical faux pas that your fellow soon-to-be teachers stumble into. But they're nice folks, by and large, and they're in front of the class for the first time, so you decide it's okay to cut them some slack.
