Culture As Given

This post consists of some aspects of Korean culture that are a part of my daily life. I haven't put even close to everything here, but it's a good sample. If you like what you read, research some more :)

Music (Kpop)

• I’m being seduced by KPop...I love it! The music itself is a lot like the BSB/*NSYNC/Spice Girls that I’ve rediscovered that I like. But the boys are dressed so nicely! And the dancing in the music videos is fantastic. Sometimes the outfits don’t make sense, but the videos are just filled with them dancing and singing...no crazy Lady Gaga stuff that has nothing to do with music. Plus, one of my students gave me a bunch of music as a birthday gift today, so I will get to listen to it a lot more. So far, I really like SS501, Super Junior and 2NE1.

Fashion

• I’m amazed by what Koreans can pull off. First, there’s the shorts-over-tights thing that I see tons of girls wearing. I might have to try it before I leave. Then, there is the tights-with-socks-and-athletic-shoes/Converse thing, coupled with a skirt, dress or shorts. How that looks good, I don’t know but it’s totally acceptable to everyone (even me) and everyone does it. Next, the patterns: the other day, I saw a guy wearing 2 kinds of plaid and 1 kind of stripes...and he was totes hip. Finally, there are the boys. A majority of men here dress exquisitely and I love it. Several pieces to every outfit (which is attractive to me for some reason) and the pieces are just a little different from things you'd find at home. This blazer, for example: 

Television (K-Drama)

• I think the fact that I purchased Lee Min Ho socks while in Seoul this weekend adequately portrays how much I love this part of Korean culture.

Food

• I’ve adjusted a lot better and a lot more quickly to Korean food than I expected I would. Before leaving the US, I assumed I would get bored of having rice every meal. But there are several kinds available here (it’s not just white or fried) and it’s often used as a buffer between my taste buds and the spicy flavoring – which my mouth appreciates. (However, despite the spiciness of most of the food here, it doesn’t have a lingering taste. A lot of times, about a half hour after lunch, I don’t even remember that I had something spicy to eat. It’s nice – you know, in case I meet my soulmate here and he needs to kiss me right after I eat.) I also find myself really enjoying and even craving food that I thought was weird when Dr. Koh was feeding it to us – in particular, the dried seaweed sheets. They are so salty and yummy! I like to eat them as a snack, like crackers or chips (even though that’s not  the texture that they have or what they taste like). I also find myself craving Korean food in general; like being really excited for lunch at school (which is always delicious) or preferring traditional Korean food over pizza or fried chicken for dinner. The Office Guy at my school told me today that I "eat Korean food well", that I try everything...I take that as a compliment. However, the downfall to all of this: not only is Korean food (and alcohol) exceedingly cheap here but it’s really expensive back in the States! :( It’s easy to find a full meal here for about $5 or $6 – and side dishes are always free and refillable (and tipping is not a thing that happens here). And soju is about $1 for a 360 mL bottle...it doesn’t sound like a lot but you only need about 1.5 bottles to reach a fun level of inebriation. I’ve heard it’s upwards of $10 for the same amount in the US :/ THAT will not be fun to get used to when I return.

History

• I've really enjoyed learning about the history of Korea, especially the history of the language and the recent history of the culture (post-Korean war to the present). The language is fascinating because King Sejong, who invented it, wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to learn. As such, there are only 24 characters (unlike the thousands of Chinese) and they are very phonetic (they almost always make the same sound). The formation of words with these characters is also very consistent. Words are formed with clusters of characters and each cluster has 2 or 3 (in rare cases, 4). In addition, the symbols of the consonants were assigned based on the shapes one's mouth makes when saying them. The vowel symbols are formed according to the 3 fundamental symbols of Eastern philosophy (Heaven, Earth and Man) and each vowel uses 1-2 of these symbols to make the character. Finally (this is one of the coolest things), all of the vowels conform to the harmony of yin and yang. All of the vowel sounds in a word will be either yin, meaning the dots (Heaven) will be down or to the left of the line (Earth or Man), or yang, meaning the dots with be up or to the right of the line. So awesome! I'm still struggling with the way that these characters make words and sentences but I LOVE the origin of the language.
• The recent rise of Korea, out of the ashes of the Korean war, has become a topic that fascinates and amazes me. It's hard to describe, but take the time to watch following videos. I think you will start to understand why this country is so amazing and why I love it here. 

(watch all of the parts...it's about an hour but very worth it)

Try This At Home

• After I got home from school yesterday, I waited for PP and Anna to get home from Jukdo Market and then we went to Mundeok to meet Liz for dinner. It turned out that we met Liz and a few of the teachers from her school (the youngest ones). It was really fun! We had a spicy-ish dinner and got to know each other a little. Her mentor teacher speaks English really well - he lived in California for 3 years. The boys (her teachers) talked in Korean and the girls (Liz, me, PP and Anna) talked in English with a little bit of cross-conversation, with the help of Liz and her MT. It was really great because Liz was able to explain some Korean culture things to PP and Anna that I hadn’t, or that I just didn’t know. For example, we take shoes off at school because, for children, teachers are considered the next best thing to parents – so going to school is like being at home, where we always leave our shoes at the door. Cool!

Visitor's Day

• PP and Anna are here! It’s going to be weird without them after they leave…it just seems normal that they are here when I get home, and it will be a little lonely when there aren’t people in my apartment when I get home from school Now that they are here, it’s hard to imagine that it’ll be 4 more months until I see anyone from home. I’m so glad I have such good people here to lean on. Until they leave, though, we are going to have a great time!

Rain Delay

• I know it's been more than 2 weeks since I last updated this blog. Poor Korea blog! Everything I've been up to is on my Adventures blog, but in an effort to avoid copy-and-paste posts, I haven't posted anything here in awhile. Stay tuned there until more Korea-related material appears here :)

Language Lesson (Feb 25)

• A random fancy thing about Korea: Elevators actually close when you push the “close door” button. Who woulda thought?
• One of our “lectures” today was 3 hours (!) of learning games. At first, I was annoyed that it was so long, but it was definitely better than being in the lecture room for that time and ended up being pretty fun. I think my favorite game was “Worm” – we were in groups of 8 groups of 6-7, held on to each other’s hands and had to try to catch other groups and add them to our line. It was dangerous (kind of along the lines of Red Rover) but fun for sure.
• Our Head Coordinator’s family came today and we got to play with her kids! They are so adorable and really smart. We taught them the Baby Shark song; they caught on to all of the motions and then remembered it later in the night! So cute. Darryl taught the daughter (age 4) some adorable faces too. It was so fun and such a relief from lectures (and a little taste of what teaching will be like).
• Tonight we learned more Korean! It was stressful (our teacher went fast) but I’m adding to the things I can say. I still don’t know any sentence structure, but I can recognize most of the letters of the Hangul alphabet and I use these phrases:

Kam sa ham ni da - 감사합니다 - thank you

An nyeung ha se yo - 안녕하세요 - hello/how are you

Ne - 네 - yes

Anniyo - 아니오 - no

Ha ji ma - 하지마 - don't do that

Pong chi ji ma - don't lie to me! (slang)

San saeng nim - 선생님 - teacher

Omma - 엄마 - mom

Oppa - 오빠 - literally means "older brother" but is used as a term of endearment from a girl to a boy (who is slightly older than her)

Mambo No. 5

Love from Group 5 :)

I Am The Best

• K-POP DANCING! This week, our post-lecture classes are K-Pop dancing and kite-making. I was so excited to do K-Pop so, even though there were a ton of people signed up, I was going to be there :) We learned 0:22-1:38 of the choreography from 2NE1's "I Am The Best" and it was so much fun! (Plus, it was cool because that's the song we used in our Group 5 video!) I needed the movement after all the sitting we've had to do the last few weeks, and I wanted to dance. It was hard and we/I definitely didn't look like the girls in 2NE1. But one of the guys did say to me, "Someone has a dance background"...I love that :)

Tower Tall (Feb 19)

• Nam San Tower was the order of the day. We all got a nice nap on the bus ride into Seoul - and then basically got dropped off at the bottom of the hill that the tower is on and were told "Go and be back at 2 pm!" We had no idea where we were headed! And there was literally ONE person in our group of 50 who knew which direction to go. Luckily, it was a pretty straightforward walk. And by "straightforward", I mean metaphorically - it was a REALLY steep walk. But we made it.

• Honestly, one of my main reasons for going to the Tower today was to find the place where Jun Pyo waits for Jan Di...#notaddicted. I didn't come across it (I don't even know if they actually filmed it there), but I had fun imagining that GJP waited on the stairs for her thinking about how far Jan Di had to walk to get up there.
• I ate a cheeseburger! I've been wanting one for a few days. It was small, but pretty yummy - and is apparently the Best Burger in Seoul.

Also, there was a Coldstone! And most of us got ice cream, despite the freezing temperatures. Our Kiwi friends had never heard of Coldstone, let alone eaten it before, and they were totally amazed by it. How they made it, how it tasted. Also, Chris tried to test his Korean and ended up ordering 2...oops.

• We had a little extra time, so we ended up playing some games with Sehee and Rachel (some of the Korean Group Coordinators - KGCs) and some other scholars. It was really fun just spending time with people :)

• We got to be a part of a guy's proposal to his girlfriend! Not completely - he was going around the tower getting people to write messages to his gf on a dry erase board. Then he would take pictures of the people and their messages and I assume he's going to put it into a collage. So cute!

• The Love Locks were amazing! Millions of people take their significant others to the Tower and "lock in" their love by attaching a lock to the fences or the designated trees (some people sneak a few elsewhere). It's cheesy and kind of makes a single girl want to vomit (esp. when she's with friends that happen to be an adorable couple) but it's also really cool.

Welcome to the Farm (Feb 18)

•  We had a field trip to a very small farming community today. I'm not sure if it was an actual village or not, but their community leader was really excited that we were there and wanted us to make sure we shared our experience there with everyone we know.

We were supposed to rotate through 4 activities, getting an hour at each one, but for some reason we got really rushed through all of them and even ended up leaving early. A little disappointing, because the people seemed like they spent a lot of time preparing for our visit :/ But nonetheless, it was a great day and the activities were pretty cool:

• Yunnori (traditional Korean game) - We learned to play this game at our first station. The man explaining it said it was like Monopoly, but I think it was actually more like Sorry. It was fun and we easily played it in large groups (about 15 people), which was good. There was also another game (kind of like hacky sack) but we could only choose one to learn.

• Straw craft - A few of the older men from the community made us a straw craft (I think we were originally supposed to learn to make them, but they just made it for us). I'm not sure if it's something they would actually use, but the way that they were twisting and tying the straw was how they make baskets, bowls and even shoes.

• Rice cakes - Again, we were told we'd be making rice cakes, but we only got to slice and eat them. It was a very interesting taste. The powder on the outside was very dry (think baby powder) and overwhelmingly rice-tasting, such that it almost made me gag! But the gooey "cake" underneath was pretty good. Desserts in Korea (at least the traditional ones) aren't like those in the US - I think they are mostly bean- or rice-based and they are sweet, but not in a sugary way. Considering these things, this rice cake was yummy...not brownie-yummy, but not bad.

• Making tofu - We got to do a little more with this station. We used the grindstone to turn the mixture of soybeans and water into a paste (it looked very strange). After that, I believe the paste is put into a mold (they might add a few more things to it, but not much) and then cooked. We didn't get to do those steps but we were able to try some freshly cooked tofu. The taste wasn't bad, after being dipped in a soy/sesame sauce but I really don't like the texture  of tofu (and that was confirmed today).

• Lunch - Some of the women of the community made us a fantastic lunch. Such a great break from the caf food, even though they had to make a TON of it.

American English

• One of the lecturers we had today was totally boss. First of all, he was dressed fantastically - he looked very attractive and way younger than 39 (totally shocked when he said that was how old he was). Secondly, he talked about a really fascinating subject: basically, the conventions that we take for granted as English-as-a-first-language speakers can be huge roadblocks for ESL or EFL speakers. Thirdly, he had the best stories:
• He met his first friend and Charles spoke Korean and his friend spoke English, but they just laughed and played together anyways.
• After his family moved from Korea to Hawaii, his teacher read him Where the Wild Things Are. He said that as a 6-yr-old who didn't know English, it was the most amazing sensation...and then clarified: "Up until then...not since. But I won't go into details." Hahaha :)
• On learning semantics over pronunciation: He learned "So?" after an older student came to his group of friends bragging about his new Gameboy. When Charles' bigger friend said "So?" to him, he realized that that was a tough phrase, a good one to know. "From then on, I became a very cocky boy." He also learned "What about it?" when the same older student came back a second time. Charles said "So?" to him, so his friends were patting him on the back and saying to the boy, "Yeah! What about it?" He used it as "Whataboutit?" but used it nonetheless and "became an even cockier boy."
• (At the end of the lecture) Now you might be thinking "'Ah, I have the goodies for the rest of the year!' And yes, you do."

Famous Friends

You know, just hangin with 
Daniel Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis ;)

Dance Girl Dance

• I learned to break dance tonight! It was awesome - so much fun - and I can actually do it! And I kind of want to keep doing it...Korean break dance class maybe? I've got all of my winterguard bruises popping up (knees, shoulders, tops of feet, etc.) but it's okay...I hurt way less than any wg practice I've been to (though I was only doing it for a couple hours). Andy (the guy who was teaching me) told me I could be a BGirl because I was learning so quickly :D
• Maishon told me that I remind him of Cate Blanchett, when she was in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, especially when I was doing some ballet. I'll accept her as my doppleganger :)
• Today at lunch, we ate fish that had to be de-boned first. It was kind of gross :P The bones were really pointy and, with every bite, I was afraid that I was going to eat one.

People Like New

• It's interesting meeting new people again. I feel like I haven't really done it in a long time. Especially in classes at EMU, I generally got a bad impression of people or they already had friends in the class, so I only interacted with them when necessary (for assignments). After all, I had my fantastic roommates, TBS Sisters and band people...who needs more than that? But here, I need to befriend at least some of these people in order to maximize my experience. And, let's face it, there are some very cool people her to get to know. 

First, I love that I've met several people who are as blunt as I am - or at least who are as forward as my other friends. It kind of helps me understand what other people see me as. For example, one day last week, in the span of a couple hours, at least 3 people asked me if I was okay and that I looked tired or sad - I wasn't, so I think that I'm just not as peppy as I come off at first...which may or may not be bad. Another example: In cooking class last week, I partnered with Shelby and Glenn. Shelby and I have been getting to know each other over the last couple months but I had just met Glenn...and he pegged me as a Type A person (like his sister) who aimed for perfection. It wasn't bad, just funny that he got it pretty much right. (He also thought it was interesting that, considering my perfectionist tendancies, I was okay with our bibimap turning out "good enough".) Finally, Shelby has told me more than once (again, not in a bad way) that I'm a bit of a perfectionist. She also said that it was funny how I complain about walking far (like around town) but always want to take the stairs. It's kind of cool to hear new things about myself...or at least things from new people :)

Second, even after the first week, I still feel pretty comfortable eating lunch with new people or sitting by people I don't really know in class/on the bus - today, I kind of figured out why. Usually in new situations (like college orientation), I feel like you can mingle with new people at the beginning, maybe for a couple of days, but then it's kind of a social demand that you settle into an existing or self-made group. But because we're only going to be together as a large group for a short time, it seems that those demands don't really apply (or I'm not letting them). There are definitely many people who have formed groups and I certainly have my "go-to" hang out people. But I will also get to know people who are geographically closer to me more deeply later...so right now is a great time to just mingle with everyone. And the fact that I haven't established myself as part of any one group has really helped me do this, and feel comfortable doing it. It's both a really unique opportunity and a great challenge to put before myself. And, as Ashley put it, we get to "talk to people from around the world on a regular basis and that is pretty awesome" :)

American Standard

• Lectures today were a little overwhelming. There was a lot of information and one of them covered a topic that pertained to teaching that I hadn't even heard mentioned before, which was a little unnerving Basically, I figured our lectures would be information that I knew but could use extra tips on (like curriculum/classroom management/etc.) or information I had heard about vaguely and would be getting more details on. So this particular one was a surprise. But we got a lot of good traveling info and tips from one and I impressed a professor by knowing that the US does not have a nationally standardized curriculum in another.
• During dinner, we were discussing the lectures and, as I was talking about the Korean Education lecture, Jennifer asked me whether I liked the idea of nationally standardized curriculum. I talked about that, standardized testing, GLCEs, certification, teacher evaluation and the MEAP - after which she and Shelby both said they were really impressed with how much I knew. Yay for forming opinions and putting what I learned in college to use!
• In my optional class tonight, I learned to cook bibimbop, with Shelby and Glenn. It was fun but the best part was that I separated an egg (thanks Dad :)) and flipped each part in the pan (without a spatula)! It was so cool.
• After that, we went to norebang with a bunch of people from Group 3. Norebang is Korean karaoke, but you get to be in a room with everyone you go with, instead of singing to a bar/restaurant full of people you don't know. I sang I Want It That Way, My Heart Will Go On, A Whole New World, and Womanizer with various people. It was really fun hanging out with people from a different group (I'm in Group 5), because the people in my group only casually talk to me and I feel like I'm not making close friends with many of them (like a bunch of the lecturers say we should be doing). I also tried various Korean beverages, including black raspberry wine, lemon beer, and soju. Also also, I learned that  Korean boys in clubs = American boys in clubs...fun.

Seoul Music (Feb 7)

• Today, we visited Seoul. It was a really cool city and I'm excited to go back again, but when it's not soooo cold.
• When we got there, we attended the TaLK Opening Ceremony on the main campus of Korea University. Best thing first, we got to see Dr. Koh! It was fun to see someone from the home and to get hugs :) After that, there were some cool videos made by the NIIED (explaining the use of and need for English in Korea) and a few people gave nice introductory speeches. But the entertainment was the best part. First, there we heard a group called the "Rainbow Choir", that is made up of children from several different countries.

They were really adorable :)

Plus, there were 2 girls who did Korean Sign Language! (I mean, I know that people who are deaf are just as diverse as everyone else, but it's crazy to think that those who are non-American also need a separate language!)

(Sorry it's sideways.)

Then, there was a performance from a group who played and performed a traditional harvest dance.

Lastly, we watched a group called the "K Tigers", which is made up of about 30 kids, and is a mix of Taekwondo and hip hop dance. It was amazing! See the video to fully understand :)

 

• After the ceremony, we were driven to Gyeongbuk Palace in Seoul, to begin our scavenger hunt around the city. The hunt was a good idea in general, but would have been way better if A) there were more explicit directions on which way to turn out of the palace in order to be on the right track (we turned the wrong way and spent about 45 minutes trolling up and down the same stretch of road - if we hadn't had Adam, who speaks fluent Korean, it would have been even worse) and B) it wasn't freezing. Nonetheless, we did get some great street vendor food along the way (I had an egg baked into cornbread and a chicken kabob) and were able to see a little of Seoul. I really can't wait to go back.