Martial Arts Demo

We asked some Korean friends if this performance seemed funny and awkward (because, honestly, it is hilarious), or reasonably normal.  Apparently this falls on the normal side here.  Most guys have this sort of training when they do army service, and showing it off isn’t that unusual.

I suspect that they wouldn’t find Star Wars Kid very funny, either.

Korean Rap

Last night I saw my buddy Lee perform at an outdoor festival at Ulsan University.  He’s the one in the fedora and sun glasses.

Something I never thought I’d eat with chop sticks:

Pancakes.

This has nothing to do with Korea, but…

On Wednesday afternoon a student at Wesleyan University was shot and killed in the campus bookstore’s cafe, where she worked.  The police are now saying that it was an anti-Semitic hate crime, and plans were discovered for a campus-wide shooting spree.   The school’s administration has relocated all of the residents of the Bayit, Wesleyan’s Jewish program house.  The campus is slowly moving out of a lock down state, but the gunman has still not been caught.

I know that people die due to religiously-motivated violence all the time, but this one hits particularly close – Wesleyan was my home for four years, and the small community there is very closely knit.  I don’t have anything profound to say about this tragedy or what it means from a more global perspective.  I’m just sad, and asking, if you pray, that you throw one out there for Johana Justin-Jinich, her family, and the Wesleyan community.

Hartford Courant

New York Times

stereotypes based in reality

Today when asked to name an animal that starts with the letter ‘r’, many students answered with “robster.”  A food that begins in ‘r’?  Rollipop.

My Classroom

Unlike most public school teachers, I have my own classroom.  It is an English lab of sorts, with a bank of computers in the back and a small collection of English books and dvds and an encyclopedia set.  I’m still trying to figure out how to make full use of all of the resources that I have available to me.  This is definitely nicer and more high-tech than any public school classroom than I have ever seen in the US.

I absolutely do not understand the thinking that went behind the images and text on the blinds in this classroom.  One says “Organic Fruit” while another says McDonald’s Drive-Thru”.  On the other side of the room we have “Irish farmer with his donkey and dog”.

Most of my students are really camera-shy.  The best I can usually manage are candid shots.

The view from my classroom window.  The white building in the middle is my apartment building.

Korean Age

When I first arrived in Korea, I started hearing people mention in passing the difference between their American age and their Korean age.  I got the vague impression that I was older in Korean years, but exactly how much older continued to baffle me – I heard both 1 and 2 years added to my age.  A few days ago a team of 3 native Koreans were finally able to straighten me out.

I was born in November of 1983.  In the United States, this makes me 25 years old.  In Korea, I am 27.  Here’s why:

Fact 1:  Here, when you are born you are already one year old.  From what I was told this is their way of counting the period from conception to birth – they round up the 9 months to a full year.

Fact 2:  No matter when in the year you are born, your age goes up a year on January 1 of the following year.  So when I was born in late 1983, I turned two about 40 days later on January 1 of 1984.  This means that in Korea, I am exactly the same age as everyone who was born in 1983, and right now that age is 27.

Confusing?  It certainly was for me – the three Koreans who explained it to me were the third group of people to try, and the only ones to succeed.   Now I just have to get used to the idea of being 27 two years early.

Music in the Park

These were taken while I was on a walk around a pond near my house earlier this week.  There are speakers spaced every 20 feet or so, meaning that you can always hear the music.  This afternoon’s highlights include N’Sync and Queen.

There is something really surreal about walking in pseudo-nature with power-walkers wearing surgical masks while Bohemian Rhapsody is cranking over loudspeakers.

My students are awesome

Some of my 3rd period 7th graders started spontaneously dancing and chanting my name when they walked into class today.

I think he is saying “Sarah!  Sarah! Sarah!  Woah!  It’s Sarah!  Yeah!”

The Expat Thing

Ulsan is a city of about 1.1 million people.  In Korea, this makes it one of the smaller cities.  I’ve been asking all of the expats here that I’ve met how many foreigners they think live in Ulsan – the answer is always somewhere in the hundreds.  In a city of 1.1 million, this seems incredibly low to me.  I think that a good number of them must live in my neighborhood, however, because whenever I go out walking I run into an average of one foreigner/group of foreigners per hour.  Most of the time when we cross each other on the street we nod and smile, maybe saying “hey” as a brief acknowledgement that we speak the same language.  I kind of like this ritual, this fleeting recognition of the fact that as foreigners in an extremely  homogeneous country we automatically have a long list of shared experiences.

Yesterday I was walking down the street and I saw a group of 3 white guys, sitting at a table outside a bar.  They saw me coming and called out “hello, how are you!”  Now, the street was just busy enough, and they were sitting just far enough away from me that this greeting was  shouted through a crowd of a dozen or so Koreans.  It didn’t have the subtlety of the passing “hey” that I’d gotten used to exchanging with foreigners, and I found that this really annoyed me.  I could tell that they wanted me to come over and chat.  In a split second, I decided not to engage.  I yelled out a “hello” in return, and kept on walking.  As I got further and further away, I tried to figure out why I’d brushed them off.  I normally love talking to strangers.  Back in Chicago I made more friends while riding the train than anyone I know.  So what made this situation different?

I think that a part of the answer lies in my general dislike of feeling like a tourist or outsider when I travel.  I don’t enjoy sight-seeing, and if I ever need to look at a map I find a private place, memorize what I can, and hide it away before continuing on my way.  In Korea, I am a perpetual outsider.  My light hair and green eyes immediately peg me as a foreigner, and strangers (especially children) say “hello” to me on the street all the time.  This is unavoidable, and I kind of appreciate it as a welcoming gesture.  But when other foreigners try to talk to me (beyond the passing greeting), the only obvious reason being that they are also foreign, it seems as if they think that we belong to some exclusive club of non-Koreans.  And this grosses me out a little.

But then I realize – if I was walking down the street in Chicago or Minneapolis, and a group of guys sitting outside a bar yelled out to me, there is actually no way that I’d go talk to them.  I would immediately categorize them in my mind as people who will probably make me uncomfortable, pretend I didn’t hear them, avert my eyes, and keep walking.

Yes, it’s different here.  We all belong to a tiny expat community in a small city.  And knowing how my life works, I will probably meet these people again soon, in a more legitimate setting.  And ignoring the grossness of being singled out on the street due solely to the fact that I am non-Korean, the fact remains – moving to Korea is not going to change me into someone who talks to groups of older men who yell at her on the street from bars.