There are a few anecdotes about Korea that I want to preserve. As I remember them, they'll show up here.
Let's Dance
Koreans don't dance. It's not part of their culture. One of my students returned from doing a year in America. She had attended a normal American school for grade 9. I asked her what she found hardest about America, and she had an emphatic answer: "School dances!" (May 4, 2008)
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What's in a name?
Some of our students refused to take English names. I had no problem with this as long as they had no problem with however I ended up saying their names.
Two anecdotes about names:
The syllable "dong" can have many meanings, including neighbourhood and excrement. It's also a common syllable in boys' names. I had one student who refused to take an English name, and the last syllable of his name was "dong." I know every time I pronounced it wrong, because the other students would break out laughing.
I had another student, a girl of about 12, who was going to America for a summer program. She also refused to take an English name. I really pushed her to take one, because I suspected that her Korean name, Kim Sukyoung, would lead to a lot of teasing in America. In English, it sounds like a sentence, with subject, verb and object. I didn't tell her why I wanted her to take an English name, I just tried to persuade her, unsuccessfully.
When she returned to our school, I greeted her, "Hi Sukyoung!" Her face went red and she said, "Susan." (May 4, 2008)
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ATMs and Money
In South Korea, you don't tell a bank machine how much money you want, you tell it how many bills you want. The bank machines only stock one denomination, the W10,000 bill (approx. US$10). So if you want W100,000, you ask it for 10 bills. It took a while to get my mind around that. I was just recently reminded of it. (July 12, 2008)
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Hair Cuts
One of the great joys/terrors of living in a foreign country is getting your hair cut. In many places, they simply don't do it like we do. In Korea, it was hard to get a hair cut and not either end up looking like they had put a bowl on your head or having your head simply shaved.
However, in Korea, a haircut also almost always included a scalp massage. Done well, this could be very relaxing. Done poorly (more often) and it was painful, especially when they would jam their fingers into your ears. (July 15, 2008)
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Bad Words
In Korean, "shut up" is considered a profane curse. I didn't know this when I first started teaching. I had one chatty boy in class who just wouldn't stop talking, even when I was giving instructions. After telling him ti be quiet, stop talking and any other way I could think, i said "shut up!" The girls in the class gasped. The boy started crying. In my haste to explain that "shut up" was not swearing, I added, "now shut the f$#% up, that's swearing." Then realized what I had said.
In Korean, there is a very bad expression about female anatomy that is said "Jil" Well, we had a new teacher arrive from America, and her name is Jillian, but she prefers Jill. We're out drinking after work Friday, a mixed group of foreigners and Koreans, and she arrives late. She sees a bunch of people she doesn't recognize, so she just says, "Hi, I'm Jill" shocking the Koreans, one of whom promptly shot beer out his nose. (July 20, 2008)
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Miss you
I've been asked a few times lately what I miss most about Korea. Beyond the obvious answer that I miss my friends and some of the more memorable learners, I guess I have two distinct answers.
First, I miss noraebang. One of the lasting gifts that I've taken away from Korea is a loss of shyness regarding my singing. No, I'm not good, but I enjoy it, and I'm a lot less self-conscious about it now. I owe that to the noraebang rooms (private karaoke rooms) and to the friends who dragged me out until I got comfortable singing along with them and to them.
I need to explain the second one. One of my greatest hardships while living in Korea was the diet. The food is either too hot for me, or it's seafood, which I detest. Even things that I should have been able to get by with - like bulgolgi or pork seemed to always give my friends food poisoning - making me very cautious. So it probably would amaze those who knew me there that there is Korean food that I miss: specifically mul-mandu and ja-jang-myun. (July 20, 2008)
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Miss you, too, Kyobo
It hit me a while ago that I'll never walk through the doors of the Kyobo bookstore in Gangnam, Seoul, ever again. I'll miss that place even though it wasn't a particularly good bookstore for English language books. Kyobo was always bustling. Even the much smaller one in Busan was always full of people. One thing that I had forgotten about South Korean book stores is that they, like us, list their books in alphabetical order by surname. But for Koreans, the surname comes first. So English books are ordered by first name, not last name. Stephen King comes before Tom Clancy and J K Rowling comes before both of them.
Getting nostalgic for Kyobo also makes me think of the Quiznos on the ground floor. It was one of the very few places that you could get turkey meat. It wasn't great, but it was what we could get. Now I'm craving a turkey melt. Damn. (Sept. 2, 2008)
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Elevators
Ah, the things you forget, or choose to forget. Elevators in South Korea are annoying. There will be two or four of them side by side, just like at home, but each one has it's own call buttons (up and down). You never know which elevator will come fastest, and the elevators don't talk to each other - so if one answers a call, the others will still come anyway. This means that for every person riding, four elevators have stopped to let him on. If you have a long distance to go, you could have a long wait for an elevator, or a painfully long stop-and-start journey (or both). My last apartment was on the top, 24th, floor. I always had to budget a lot of time to get to work, even though that was just across the street, because I never knew how long it would take to get to street level. (September 26, 2008)
More later
— SGP
