Abroad

I keep singing "Mamamia" in my head because 1) there are posters for the show all along my trek to work, and 2) it reminds me of the episode of Community where everybody turns into zombies at the Halloween party and Troy says "I love you" to Abed seconds before Abed is swarmed by the mass of infected people..............

Anyway, I've got some Soviet Russian music playing now so maybe that'll clear my mind from outdated pop music as I drink my Friday night celebratory soju and think about what I need to do around here before we go to the FC Seoul game tomorrow for "Foreigner's Day". I resent calling it that so I usually refer to it as "International's Day", but it should be a good time. Most of WILS is going.

Ok, this drink I made seriously tastes like rubbing alcohol.

On a side note, I cannot believe how much I am loving the food over here. It's like the Koreans have found a way to make the most repulsive sounding things taste delicious. Want some cabbage that's fermented with bits of rejected fish and oysters and other nasties that nobody wanted to eat? Have some kimchi! (which has very much grown on me. I actually made a 김치 찌개 the other night that was amazing). Want some raw beef and a raw egg seasoned with some of the spiciest spices your mouth has ever experienced? Have some yukhoe (육회)! Reisha (and by the freaking way, I found out that I knew Reisha's brother at UVA because he's totally Anna Kushner's boyfriend), Wally and I went out to a place today where I cannot remember for the life of me what the food was called, but it was absolutely amazing. It was thin (and I mean THIN) slices of beef that we grilled. It wasn't bulgogi. And if I didn't know better I would have called it beef samgyeopsal. We sat around and talked while our waitress grilled our meat for us. We wanted to tell her that we could do it, but, well, we didn't know how to. She was super nice to us and even brought out a bottle of 'digestive tea' for us to have at the end of the meal, on the house.

People here are so nice and welcoming to us. I know that sometimes it feels like they're all looking at me and judging me, and they probably are, but when it comes down to us actually interacting with them, they have been so courteous and kind that it would put Southern Hospitality to shame. I was in the Family Mart at the base of the Tower tonight buying my soju and there was an older man in there and as I walked up to the register he gave me a big smile and patted me on the shoulder and let me go in front of him in line. By the time I had put my bottles in my bag he was done paying and was at the door the same time I was. He looked at me and bowed and let me go first before he said 'thank you'. I said 'thank you' back out of English habit even though I should have said something like '감사합니다' to him. I walked over to the elevator smiling thinking how lucky I am to be living in a place where people are accepting of foreigners and don't treat them like shit because they can't speak the language and don't know the customs. I make an ass of myself every time I go to a grocery store or cross the street or hold the door for a stranger, but the Korean people just look back at me and, I'm assuming, think something along the lines of "It's ok, he's at least here and he's trying to learn some things." I was complimented the other night when I received my change with both hands and bowing to the clerk at a convenience store as I had taken my change "very Korean-like".

Maybe it's because I love other cultures. Maybe it's because I grew up in an area that rejected any notion that was not purely American by nature. Maybe it's some completely random reason that I have no control over, but I love it here. I love this whole experience. I love being oblivious to many of the things going on around me, but at the same time being more into some things because I have to use senses other than language to operate. I pick up more on body language than I ever have before in my life. I'll pass a group of people on the sidewalk and pick out two words of what they're saying, but it's enough for me to contemplate what they were talking about until I pass the next group..all pushing past each other on the crosswalk trying to make it across the wide streets of Seoul before the little green man stops blinking.

Imagination is a big part of surviving while abroad. If you cannot wonder about things then you're doomed from the start. The language barrier creates a wall of solitude when alone that mandates some kind of inner thought process of what is going on around you. If you think you know everything; if you think your culture is always right or is the best, or even close to being the best, then you're setting yourself up for failure. You have to be more accepting than you've ever been in your life. You're not just visiting another culture, you're living here. And I have to remind myself of that every single day. When I wake up and look out of my 12th-story window I have to tell myself that I am but a simple visitor to this land and I will learn the most that I can. While I cannot learn everything, I will try my hardest to be able to hail a cab and tell him directions in Korean or go to a restaurant by myself and speak no English the whole time I'm there by the time I leave this city.

Whenever that may be.

It all comes down to Grapes

Because I said that I'm going to do posts on here after I do posts on my Seoul blog I figured I'd come on here tonight and type up some things that I can't really say on my other one since there are people I don't necessarily want reading all of my feelings who read that one.

I'm not going to say anything too bad about Seoul. I still love it here. There are, however, a few things that bother the shit out of me:

1) The way people walk over here. Back home people usually walk in straight, or at least semi-straight lines. Here, there is little of that. You could be walking down the sidewalk and the person coming in the other direction decides that they now want to meander through the sidewalk and get into your path. Either you run into them or you get out of their way because once they decide to do what I call the "Korean Swerve" there's no turning back for them. A lot of the sidewalks here are brick-lined so I can look at the lines people are walking and oh my god, people seriously don't walk in fucking straight lines. Especially at night. Oh my god. And it's not that they do it to just foreigners, it's everybody. And for god's sake stay clear of bikers. Just like in Charlottesville, they think they rule both the roads AND the sidewalks.

2) The smells on my way to work. At first I couldn't smell what I've deemed to be the "smells of cities" here. But lately I've been smelling some kind of sewer smell on a good part of my 20 minute walk to work. It's pretty bad. I mean, not like how KWHS used to get when the sewer system used to back up into the bathrooms, but it's bad enough that I'm like...ew...it smells here. Maybe it's the little fruit sack things that are dropping off the trees near the sidewalks and being perpetually crushed by pedestrians. Somehow people have a thing for planting smelly trees and shrubbery where people have to walk and I really don't know why.

3) My Yellow Class. They're fucking terrors except for one quiet girl who is trying her hardest to operate in that environment with them.

4) How the Korean people stare at foreigners. It's long, it's hard, and it's bad.

I can't really think of others right now, but I'm sure it'd be something about how something it supposed to taste like something, but it doesn't.

Oh, 5) The grapes here suck. You know that realllllllllllly fake grape flavor in things? Well that's what grapes are like here, except the skins are tough to the point that Koreans actually spit it out rather than trying to eat it; there's probably 4 big seeds in each one that you can't eat, and thus, as the Koreans do, spit them out; and the texture and overall experience of the grapes remind me of the grapes my grandparents used to grow at their house and I can remember people telling us not to eat those grapes.

And 6) Fruit is fucking expensive as shit here. 15,000 won for a bunch of your shitty grapes, sir? I think not. I'll just go buy some fruit-flavored candy from the convenience store down the street. At least I don't have to spit any of that out when I eat it.

The rest of the food has been great here, though. I just know not to bother with grapes while I'm here.

Brief Rant

I still hate my Yellow class, but they're getting better. I, haha, I wanted to say 'drugged'...I BRIBED them with drawing yesterday and they were better behaved in order to get the reward and then as they were drawing they were dead silent. It was great. Having them as my first class actually wears me down some days. Kinda like how 2nd block at AHS used to do. Luckily I didn't have 4th block in their place though. God, I wouldn't have made it. The only thing that got me through 4th block some days was knowing that I could go home soon.

I need to figure out which words my EFL7 class actually understands, though...Sometimes I'll say something to them and just get blanks stares..

Later, in my Indigo class, we were reading about King Tut and his mysterious death and whatnot and we got to a part that said in 2000 the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, or whatever it's called, started using advanced x-ray technology on the mummy. One of my kids pointed out that 2000 was the year he was born. I guess it kind of caught me off guard to think that, soon, people who were born in 2000 will be in high school. These people have no memories of September 11th happening, which means that it most likely had less of an effect on their lives and maybe we can stop using it to justify things with the younger generations of people. I was never really affected by the Cold War (being born the year the Berlin Wall came down and just a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union) and I don't understand how people can justify war and hatred over different ideology like that. Maybe these kids can be a new voice of reason against the kinds of things we're doing around the world in order to tout our failing power and crumbling influence. We just have to remove the old people and the closed-minded asses from power first.

And also get the young people to care....Which is always a difficult task..

Ok, getting serious Now.

So, hey, guess what. I'm still living in Korea. Yeah, it's going to be like that for about a year. Hopefully the fact that I started another blog will help me get back on here. I know I've promised this to my sparse number of readers many times, but this time I can just try to get in the habit of posting there and posting here in the same night. It may not be every day, but I'm sure it'll be more often than what I've been doing recently.

I love it here. I made sushi for the first time last night because I can easily, and cheaply, find the materials to make it. I'm still getting used to the whole I'm-in-a-huge-city-in-Asia-and-I'm-a-rural-kid-from-eastern-Virginia thing. Culture shock hasn't been that bad though. I'm learning enough Korean to get by and as time progresses I'm hoping to learn more. Funny how one of my target languages from a few years ago is now the official language of the country I live in.

I've thought about moving to Spain or Poland after this. I don't know. I have a good amount of time to think about that later.

Once I figure out my address I'll be sure to post it up here. And on my other blog: thirteenhoursearlier.blogspot.com

As for now, I have some grading to do, not much at all though. And nothing like grading was back at AHS. There's like...3 sentences for 10 kids that I have to read. It's much more simple than reading historical identifications and having to pick out what parts were important and what others were meaningless drivel meant to expand the writing to a point the students thought was an acceptable length. I would have accepted 5 sentences if you could tell me Who, What, When, Where, Why is this Important....but no, there were different ideas for what was supposed to be written. My favorites were from the beginning of the year when the ID was on Columbus and the kids had no freaking idea who he was.

Did you know that Columbus discovered America in the late 1980s? Me either. Because he didn't. It made grading suck something fierce.

But now, I'm circling words and checking to see if the kids put "The" at the beginning of a sentence or include "is" in the middle of their 5 word sentence. Tedious? Maybe. Super easy? Yes.

I also have to make up a vocabulary quiz for my National Geographic class. I think the last quiz I made was a bit too easy because from the look of it, most, if not all of the kids didn't miss any of the fill-in-the-blanks or multiple choice questions. I still have to read their sentences though.

But that's enough rambling about work. It's strange to think that I actually have a job here. Any other time I've visited a country it's been for my own enjoyment. And this is too to most extents, but I do have to do work.

My job starts at 2 in the afternoon. It's great.

Uhh..

Holy fuck. I live in Seoul now.