A Term in Review

Well, it’s Sunday night, and tomorrow morning starts the first day of the Winter term at my Hagwon, i.e. a whole new schedule of classes and a whole new slew of young minds to prod/torture/mold. This seems like as good a time as any to take a moment and reflect on my first three and half months in Korea.

First of all, it seems a little strange to be writing those words- three and a half months. In some ways, my time here has seemed a lot shorter than that. I’ve gotten into a pretty regular schedule, and feel comfortable in my neighborhood and environment. People recognize me at the local bars and restaurants I frequent, even knowing what I’m going to order (perhaps that means I’m a bit too predictable). Even the angry old man who works as the janitor at my local pool has been smiling at me lately. Life is pretty normal.

At the same time, I still experience those “Wow, I’m in Korea, aren’t I?” moments on a fairly regular basis, whether it be while I struggle to explain to my building’s plumber that my toilet is broken, or have to repeat the name of a place four times to a cab driver before he knows where I want him to take me. I’ve enjoyed my time her so far, but that doesn’t mean I’m not missing the comforts and regularities of life in the States—a skype conversation with my family while they enjoyed thanksgiving dinner this week and tried to virtually feed me a forkful of pumpkin pie especially confirmed that feeling.

At school, I still feel like I haven’t quite gotten the hang of this whole teaching thing yet, but every day provides me with a little more experience. I’ll be teaching some upper-level TOEFL classes as well as some regular English classes this coming term, so I am optimistic that my schedule will treat me a little better emotionally and psychologically these next couple of months. The biggest lesson that I’m starting to realize from teaching for 13 weeks is something that my mom likes to tell me on a regular basis: don’t get stressed out about the things in life you can’t control, i.e. most of them. There are a lot of things about what I’m teaching and how my school is organized that has frustrated me at times, but in the end the only thing I can do is try and work around those irritations and do the best with the hand I’m dealt.

Overall, I think there are some pretty nice things that I can hang my proverbial hat on from the last few months. I ran a 10k and am confident that when my bum knee is back to 100% strength, I am capable of training for a marathon (something I never would have dreamed of doing 6 months ago). I’ve lost over 25 pounds since July and feel like I’m in the best physical shape of my young adult life, despite living amongst a crowd of foreigners where eating and drinking healthily is not a particularly high priority. I’ve learned to read and speak (a very little bit) a new language. And I’ve successfully survived as a financially independent person in a country almost 7,000 miles from home. Not too shabby, if I may say so myself.

Putting On My Dancing Shoes (while taking off my regular ones)

I decided to use my Sunday off a little more judiciously than I have my last couple of days off, which have been spent mostly hanging around my apartment. I took the subway into Seoul in the early afternoon to meet Bryan and Carla for brunch at the COEX Mall. I’d spent the last three months or so (basically from the first week I was in Seoul for training) emailing back and forth with Bryan and Carla—a brother and sister from Ecuador who are very good family friends of my cousins—trying to figure out a time and place to meet up, and this was the final outcome of that correspondence. We ate at this American-style place that was pretty expensive but very good- I got a brunch plate that constituted the first solid breakfast food (aside from cereal) that I've had since I've been in Korea. It was great to talk and get to know them a bit; both of them have been in Korea about a year teaching English as well, so we shared stories and exchanged our experiences about life in a foreign land, the spiciness that is Korean food, and the ridiculousness that is the Korean education system.

After brunch, I headed over to my friends’ apartment—only about a 15 minute walk from COEX—and hung out with Kevin and Jae for the afternoon. It’d been a while since I’d seen these guys, who I became really close with during training, so that was time well spent.

Around 6 o’clock, we met up with some other friends and took a subway to Insadong. There, we went to this traditional Buddhist restaurant, leaving our shoes at the door to eat dinner and watch a performance. Kevin had already been four times, so his recommendation seemed pretty solid. The meal was expensive (40,000 won) and completely vegetarian, but was actually really good, in my opinion. There were about 25 dishes overall, including a wide variety of kelp salads, a couple of soups, a number of tofu recipes, and even some kimchi for good measure. It was definitely unlike any meal I’ve ever had before, and the color, variety, and novelty of it made the dinner well worth it.

What really topped the night off, though, was the performance that came right as we were finishing our meal. At 8:45, the lights went dark and an older woman dressed in what I imagine was a traditional Buddhist outfit came out on the small square area in the center of the restaurant and began to dance to a beautiful melody of [again, probably traditional] Buddhist music. After she was finished, she was followed by four other performers, two men and two women, each of whom performed his/her own solo dance for the small crowd of people at the restaurant.

As you can probably tell by my remarks in the previous paragraph, I don’t know a whole lot about Buddhism or Buddhist dance, music, or clothing. While watching the performances, part of me struggled with this fact, feeling like I was missing something very important, almost like watching a movie in a foreign language without the subtitles. In general, when I observe cultural practices or performances like the one last night, I feel a little cheated when I have no sense for the context of what I’m watching. After a few minutes, though, I realized that there wasn’t much I could really do for myself at that point, and in the end was contented to sit back and watch a really interesting performance very much different from anything I could see back home.

After the dancers had finished, they all came onstage together and invited a few members of the audience to join them in dance, which I (with the help of some rice wine in my belly and the strong urging of my friends) decided to accept. I was handed a drum and a large stick with which to bang it and given some brief instructions on the beat by one of the woman dancers, and then we were off. Going round and round in a circle in the small performance area, I started to get pretty into the dance. Again, while part of me felt a bit ridiculous for partaking in this dance that I didn’t know and in which I was clearly an outsider, another part of me said: “Hey, just screw it and have a good time!” And that is what I did. I didn’t come to Korea to become a Korean; I came to Korea to experience and learn about a people and place that I knew almost nothing about. And last night was a perfect example of that process in action.

In Her Shoes

So again, I’ve done a not so good job of updating my blog as regularly as I imagined I would. I think the main reason for that is that I have been waiting for something exciting/super interesting/out-of-the-ordinary to happen to write an entry, so as not to bore my readers with the mundane activities of my day-to-day life. Even though I am in Korea, my average day is pretty run-of-the-mill: eating, exercising, teaching, reading, and watching TV online. After speaking to Packer, my Blogger Sensei, I think maybe I will try and write shorter entries more frequently rather than longer ones every week or two.

This past Friday night I went into Seoul to see a show put on by a coworker of mine at a club in Hongdai, a hoppin part of town known for its abundance of university students and excellent nightlife. Andrew and his group Swingset Committee has been performing at various venues around the country for the last six months or so, and is actually about to embark on a tour in Japan. He sings, while his bandmate plays a little electric violin and works the synthesizer. The show was really good—the music they played was sort of a combination of techno, house, and electronica (as you can probably tell, I’m not very good at identifying musical genres).

The more “interesting” (and I use that word very inauspiciously) part of the evening revolved around an exchange I had outside the club right before I ventured inside. While waiting with some friends for the show to start, I struck up a conversation with these two Korean guys (probably in their late 20s or early 30s) who were there as well. They seemed to be pretty normal and outgoing, so I told them about the show and suggested they come in to see it. As we were going in the door, one of the guys offered to pay my entrance fee to the club, so I thought, “sure, why the heck not save the 10,000 won?!”

Of course, as soon as we are down in the club, that same guy starts to get a little friendlier than he had been outside, if you get my drift. I was trying to be nice because I felt like I at least owed him a little conversation after he paid my way in, but after a few lengthy back pats, it became clear that he was probably looking for more than just conversation. I wasn’t intimidated by the guy at all—he was just this little pudgy guy, probably about 5’’2 or 5’’3—but I had some trouble letting him down easy, and had to be assisted by a female friend who ended up dancing with me rather provocatively in an effort to prove to the guy that I wasn’t interested. In the end, I learned a valuable lesson, and think I experienced to some degree what it must feel like to be a woman at a typical nightclub.