korean life

This is a good week for me. Middle school students are currently preparing for some important tests. In Korea, students don't have tests scattered throughout the school year, rather every 2 months they have tests in each subject over what they've been taught for the past 2 months. As such, most kids don't show up to my school because they are busy studying, and the ones who do show up have class exclusively with the Korean teachers, so my classes are cancelled.

Today I had two classes, both with elementary school kids. After that I pretty much just sat at a computer and played this game for 90 minutes. The best I got up to was 87, then I mistakenly clicked 98 instead of 88. I had 32 seconds left on the clock, so I'm going to go ahead and give myself full credit for that one.

I lost a 15,000 won bet with a class last week. I didn't actually pay students money, rather it was 15,000 won in ice cream that I had to buy them. I lost because I didn't believe what they said about high school life in Korea. They told me that a high school student goes to school at 8am and doesn't leave until 9pm. I didn't believe them because that seems like it should be illegal. Can you imagine? That's twice what I had to do. The kids told me to verify it by asking my girlfriend. I did, and she confirmed that that was her typical day as a high school student.

Speaking of my girlfriend, she still puts in absurd hours, except now it's for work instead of school. For the past two days she's had to go into work at 8:30am, and has had to stay until 10:30pm. That's not her standard day, usually it's until 6, but she has some big kind of project or something. She's some kind of engineer/architect. I'm not sure what her job title would be exactly. She draws the plans for heating ducts in new or renovated buildings. I told her it should be illegal for her to work so much. She agreed. She hates her job. Most people here do.

beach

It's been getting pretty hot here in Daejeon, topping out at about 90 degrees a couple days this week. The girlfriend and I thought it best to head to the beach today, so we did.

a video and a picture

Sometimes when I'm in class teaching I feel like I'm the dumbest person in the room. Maybe a more self-confident way to phrase that would be to say that I'm the least smart person in the room. For instance, if a book that I am teaching from has both English and Korean in it, I'm well aware that I'm the only one in the room who doesn't understand all of it. Or, like today, I have a kid show up and do this:

fellowship

When I was a youngster my family went to church in Philadelphia. After each service, a lot of people would go to a big room called "fellowship hall" to enjoy refreshments, like bagels and coffee. There would be a lot of people in the room, and I used to enjoy walking in a big circle throughout the room. I'd constantly be walking around, dodging around people and dipping through conversations, for no reason other than that I enjoyed dodging around people and dipping through conversations. I must've been annoying as hell.

But looking back now I can see that maybe there was a point to it. It was a sort of training for me, training to live in Korea.

Korea is a pretty congested place. If you're walking someplace you're bound to be walking amongst a lot of other people. I'm not exactly sure what it is about them, but Koreans have a real knack for getting in the way. When walking down a sidewalk, they have a tendency to take up as much of that sidewalk as possible, making it quite difficult to pass them. And then when you do try to pass them they seem to always unwittingly drift toward the side that you are passing on, and cut you off. Similarly, in a grocery store they also position themselves in the most frustrating places as they look at things they might want to buy, or they put their shopping cart in an place that impedes a potential passerby. I don't know if I'd say it's impressive, but it's pretty remarkable how good they can be at getting in your way.

I'm not really sure why I'm bringing this up; it just happened a lot to me today and I was reminded of walking around fellowship hall and it's been like 2 weeks since my last post so I figure what the hell.

I had dak galbi tonight. On Wednesdays I finish work a little earlier, at 8:40, and my wonderful girlfriend came and met me for dinner. Dak galbi consists of chicken, cabbage, sweet potatoes, rice cakes, onions, and the red sauce that is ubiquitous in Korean cuisine called gochujang. Most restaurants here that serve it specialize in it, so I've never seen in at the few Korean restaurants I've been to back home. But, if you're ever at a Korean restaurant and you see dak galbi on the menu, get it. If for some reason I had to choose one dish to eat for every meal for the rest of my life, I'd choose dak galbi.