working for the weekend... (Bungee Jumping of their Own)

It’s technically 8:04am on the 26th, but I’m writing about yesterday, so whatever. I’m deliriously happy this morning for some reason… but I certainly don’t mind!

First, a quick to-do list, because today is going to be a busy, productive day of density destiny! I can think of roughly two or three people who will think that’s funny (besides Michael J. Fox), so I hope they’re reading. Someone commented to me recently (I’m paraphrasing) that I was helping to inspire them to their goal of living and working abroad. That’s really cool! And if you know any small amount of the language (or more) when you arrive, you will be light years (eons!) ahead of me, and have a much easier time of it! I’m not sure I would be gutsy enough to just pick up and move somewhere (especially some place crazy like Korea), but with all the support offered by Fulbright, I’m doing okay.

Had a quick break for breakfast. I’ve finally started to appreciate one of the kinds of soup, so now Mom has given me that every morning for the last four or five days. It’s called kimchi soup, and it’s made of… you guessed it! Kimchi. But there’s also some non-fish meat and, most excitingly: no tofu or seaweed in it! And we also had some strands of potato, which makes the rice almost appetizing. I think the diet is agreeing with me pretty well so far. The rice is very filling, but thankfully at home we eat a different kind of rice that’s a little less carby than white rice. (It’s still white, but there’s… other stuff in it.) And now that I like kimchi soup, I get quite a bit of vegetable as well. I feel like I might have lost a small amount of weight already, and I’m enthusiastic to start exercising. Excitingly, I just noticed that my hair is mostly long enough to put in a ponytail without clips now. Almost.

Oh yeah, my to-do list:
1. Go to gym with mom?
2. Finish making student facesheets
3. Learn third grade names
4. Blog
5. Figure out rewards system, go shopping
6. Read 25 pages of The Ambassadors (side note: Surprisingly, I’m really enjoying this book… sort of. I guess I read The Turn of the Screw in high school, but I don’t remember liking it a whole lot. But this story is really engaging. It’s just… Henry James’s writing is impenetrable. Every once in a while there will be a passage or phrase that makes all of that decoding and verbosity worthwhile, that makes me stop and go… wow. But the rest of the time, I wish he would just shut up and get to the point. I want to know what happens next, not every thought that this character has ever had. God! :)
7. Lesson planning
8. Write
9. Get outfit ready and pack for tomorrow

Anyway, yesterday was basically amazing. I met Meghan (another Fulbrighter, the one who went to Seoul with me, went to New College (in Sarasota), and was in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh) at Paris Baguette at 9:30am. We both live in Naju City, but we didn’t know where we lived, or if we were within walking distance of each other (most important). But on Friday I said, hey, do you know where Paris Baguette is? (Yes.) Is it within walking distance of your house? (Yes.) Let’s meet there, and hope it’s the same one. Because, unfortunately, we didn’t know if there were two Paris Baguette bakeries. But, joy of joys, we discovered yesterday morning that there aren’t, and that we live relatively close! It took me five minutes to walk there, and her ten, so yay! We also convinced Tim to come from Gwangju to meet us, so then we walked to the bus terminal (very near my house) and picked him up. We did a little exploring of Naju, walking along the two or three main streets of “downtown,” but then we realized it was 9,000 degrees. The most disappointing thing about Naju, I’ve discovered, is that there’s no Dunkin Donuts. There is, in fact, nowhere we found that we can just buy something and sit forever, except…

Lotteria. So after much exploring and sweating, we went to Lotteria, a fast food restaurant that’s strikingly similar to McDonalds in its offerings, except… Koreany. They have Korean variations of most fast food standbys… like Bulgogi burgers, and green tea ice cream things. They also have normal stuff. Whew! So we bought ice cream and drinks and sat there for an hour or two catching up (and speaking English quickly!) I feel bad for Meghan… she lives on the 15th floor of her apartment complex, and her elevator and A/C are broken. (I would fly home. Literally.) Apparently her family recently told her about another elevator, which you have to walk up four flights to the roof to get to. But it’s better than nothing, she assures us. She also has very young host siblings who are annoying to her, because they watch her ALL the time and are at her side constantly. Amy also complained about this in her blog. Interesting. My kids mostly ignore me, although recently they must be feeling more comfortable with me, because they bring their physical disputes into my room. I mostly just yell “하지마!” (“Stop!”) and “가 세요!” (“Go!”) when Allen is beating up his sister in my presence, or when they make fun of my Korean. I really like Stacey a lot, and I feel bad for her, because so far as I can tell, her little brother beats up on her and then she gets blamed for it. I suspect there may be a large amount of instigation on her part not in my presence, but she’s still nice to me. Yesterday while I was cutting out pictures of my students and sticking them to paper, she came in with her scissors and started helping me. Allen is cute, but a little brat.

I’d hoped for slightly older host siblings, with whom I could really bond, but I’m happy with my family situation. I’m not sure if I mentioned this, so I’ll mention it again. Mrs. Shim, the director of Korea Fulbright (KAEC), gave us this most important piece of advice during our first week of Orientation: Don’t compare anything about your experience with anyone else’s, because then you’ll be disappointed. At the time, it seemed curious. We’re obviously going to talk with our friends about our experiences, but she was encouraging us NOT to brag when the school or family did something really nice for us. But now, I understand better. For example, yesterday when I was bored, I was perusing the blogs of other ETAs, and I found myself getting a little jealous. One girl has three teenage host siblings, one of whom is a student at her school. She’ll be able to hang out with her host kids, who think she’s cool and want to spend time with her but don’t climb all over her like young host siblings apparently do. So for a moment I thought… man, I wish I had that host family. The same with schools… when I read about someone teaching high school, or someone who gets to plan all of their lessons without a book… then I start to feel a little jealous. It’s the “grass is greener” principle, inevitably. But I am really happy with my 한국 생활 (Korean lifestyle). My host kids are cute, and my host mom is really nice and helpful, and she’s trying very hard to learn English. My house, aside from the A/C situation, is really nice. My room is huge, my bed is comfortable, and I have my own bathroom, including a (cold) shower. And I thought I wanted to teach high school, and I’m sure I’d like it a lot, but the middle school kids are cute and really sweet (as evidenced by the card), and the teachers at DMS (especially my co-teacher!) are really nice. I read about ETAs who have co-teachers who hardly speak English at all, and I realize how lucky I am. 김수현 (Kim Su-Hyeon) can help me plan lessons, and be an asset in so many situations, so possibly for that reason alone I should be super-happy. I am very happy to be teaching in two schools, because that way I can compare two different experiences, rather than just thinking that my one school is what all Korean middle schools are like.

Hmm… I got distracted from my account of yesterday. Sorry! Tim’s host mom bought him some (ugly) teaching clothes. :) And some not ugly ones. Think… pastel and rhinestones. Bedazzler! So after Lotteria we went to a stationery store. I may literally stay in Korea forever because of the ubiquitousness (ubiquity!) of stationery stores. They’re relatively inexpensive, and so fun. And they don’t just sell stationery. I’ll have to take a picture today when I go, so you can appreciate it. It’s kind of like Claire’s, but with less jewelry and papery stuff too. Amazing. Then we went in search of a DVD bang. There were no places that explicitly said “DVD bang,” but we had two possibilities. One is right around the corner from my house, and we went there first. It’s actually a DVD/TV/MP3/Noraebang, which means it has a bunch of really skeazy rooms with TVs and karaoke equipment. They don’t, however, have English subtitles for their movies, because they’re not actually played from DVDs, so that didn’t work.

So we headed to the other possibility, which was labeled a DVD 국장 (theater), and is about a ten minute walk from my house (and equidistant from Meghan). And the man there was really nice! We watched Bungee Jumping of Their Own, which me and the critics agree is the single stupidest English language translation ever in the history of time, but it was actually really good! The Korean title is just something like Bungee Jumping 하다, which just means, “to bungee jump,” I think.

My rating: BBBBB (5 out of 5 Bs)
So, quick plug for the movie. I’m going to go ahead and tell you the plot, because you probably won’t see it anyway, and you certainly won’t see it, I’m sure, unless I tell you how awesome it is, which includes giving away the twist. In the movie, a man and woman meet and fall in love while in college. They’re very serious, and very in love, but then he has to go away to do his year (two years?) of military service. She’s on her way to meet him at the train station to say goodbye. [If you think you might actually watch this movie, which, remember, I gave 5 Bs, but don’t want to know the plot twist, then stop reading now.]


Flash forward to something like sixteen years later. The man is now a high school teacher in Seoul, married to a different woman with a child. The movie plays with time in a confusing way, and convinces us that the teacher is actually falling in love with one of his (male) students. But slowly, we come to find out that his girlfriend of fifteen years ago got hit by a car and died on her way to meet him at the train station, and he has since become convinced that she was reborn as his male 15 year old student. He seems to just be losing his mind, as the student doesn’t seem to return his affections or have any inkling that he’s the dead girlfriend. And it’s super-awkward, because the teacher begins to act really awkwardly toward the student, and rumors start to go around school that he’s gay. This is interesting—most Korean movies don’t address homosexuality, but this one does. But it does so only by having it be a woman in a man’s body. Interesting. But anyway, the teacher eventually gets fired, after much inappropriate behavior, and his wife leaves him.

Everyone thinks he’s insane, and a gay pedophile, but he just lays in bed convinced that his first and only love is actually reborn in the body of a 15 year old boy, but doesn’t remember him. It’s pretty torturous. Apparently they had some morbid conversations before he went to military service about… (oh my God! I really have forgotten English. What’s the word for coming back in another life as someone or thing else?) reincarnation, and they both believe in it. (I’ll have you know that it took me a full three minutes of hard thinking to come up with that. Shit.) So… you’ll be pleased to know that the boy does eventually realize he’s the woman, and the ending is semi-happy.

So please watch it! It’s a really amazing movie. The plot is somewhat similar to that of the little-known Nicole Kidman movie Birth, which was not nearly as good or interesting, but which had a similar taboo involved.

Anyway, I’m definitely going to be going back to the DVD bang at least three times a week! In the interest of saving money, I will also try to figure out if I can set up a rental account, because there’s a movie rental place nearby as well. So after DVD bang we parted ways, and Tim went back to Gwangju, but it was a wonderful time, and just what I needed.

When I got home, I started working on my student face sheets. I have big legal-sized sheets with my students names and pictures for each class at DMS, but it also has a lot of other useless information (phone #s, addresses) and a lot of Korean. So I’m cutting the pictures out and taping them to one sheet for each class. I need to finish that today, but yesterday I finished first grade. The names, I think, will be amazingly difficult to learn, for a few reasons. First, there is a common misconception that “All Asian people look alike,” which is definitely unfair, but it’s true that two or three pairs of my students look immensely alike. Also, the names are completely unfamiliar to me, so to me it’s just like summoning a vocabulary word that’s totally new. Essentially, I’m adding 180 words to my vocab list. The third thing that makes things difficult is the set up of Korean names. The name that’s written first is actually the family name, and something like 60% of Koreans have one of four really common family names (박 (Park), 이 (Lee), 김 (Kim), and one other that I can’t remember.) The 2nd and 3rd parts of the name are the given name. But unless you’re really good friends, you never call someone by their given names (it might be okay for me to do it with my students, but I’ll have to ask). So anyway, most of my students’ names start with Park or Kim, which means having to remember 180 words that all start the same way. See how this will be difficult? But I’m really going to commit myself to spending a lot of time trying to learn them, because I feel like that will really help me connect with the students much better. Wish me luck!

Around 6pm my mom came home and announced that we were leaving for a music festival in Gwangju. We went to Lotteria first (twice in one day!), then got on the bus. I didn’t know what kind of music we would be watching, or even where we were going, but I soon found out! We went to 무등산 (Mudeung Mountain), sat outside, and watched what I think were some religious acts. I’m pretty sure that there’s a Buddhist temple on the mountain, because there were a lot of monks around and involved, and in the Powerpoint memory presentation they showed. But there were also some Christians involved, I think. Anyway, I really got the impression that the music was religious, although I couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was nice enough. The first group were local high school students playing normal guitars and singing. After that was a couple of guitarists and a girl playing a very old traditional Korean instrument called the 해금 (haegum), which my dictionary defines as a two-stringed fiddle. It was a really unique but beautiful sound. Then there was a guy singing and playing the guitar. We left before it was over and took the bus back to Naju, arriving around 10:00. I was wiped out, probably from being outside in the heat for most of the day, but before we went home we ate 김밥 at a restaurant. It’s… I don’t know. Rice, vegetables, and in my case, tuna, wrapped in seaweed. It’s actually not bad. When we got home, I headed almost straight to bed, but not before making a shocking and very perplexing discovery… my fan was gone!

There was an empty, devastating space in my room by my bed where my fan usually is. I didn’t want to ask about it, because, to put things in perspective, it’s obviously not my fan. I think, perhaps, that it’s one of only two fans that the family owns, so obviously they have just as much a right to it as me. But still… this was the first night I’ve had to sleep without the fan, and it was… frightening. Thankfully I was exhausted, so I fell asleep quickly enough, but I woke up around 3am drenched in sweat. There was something spectacularly loud going on outside my door, so I peeked out to see grandma. I’m not sure what she was doing, but then she said the sweetest word I’ve ever heard: 덥다? (Hot?) I nodded emphatically, and tried to appear pathetic, and she disappeared and reappeared a few seconds later with my beloved fan! I’m not sure where it was, but I nearly cried with joy when she turned it on. It’s back at my side now, cooling me even as I write this. Reunited (and it feels so good). I’m getting by, just telling myself that it won’t be much longer. Less than a month, and summer will be over. I hope. The A/C was broken in the classroom the first day, but my co-teacher seemed surprised and confused by my perplexity. “You’re from Florida, aren’t you? It’s hot there!” I tried to explain, without sounding indignant, that yes, it is hot there, but as a civilized nation, we have air conditioning everywhere. :)

So anyway, it’s now 10:00am, so I should really get started on my to-do list. After a little sign language and dictionary consulting, I expressed to my host mother that I’d like to join/find a gym, and when she figured out what I meant (“Oh! Heals club!” – because Koreans have no ‘th’ sound, they often substitute the not-really-similar ‘s’), she pointed one out not very far from the house. She also said she would help me. I’m not sure if that means go there with me, or what, but maybe soon I will be a gym member! Exercising + Air Conditioning = Best Friends.