Reflections on a homestay...

One thing I forgot to mention in my last entry... I think I've mentioned before in here that Korean people don't believe, like Americans, that they become a year older on their birthdays. Everyone turns a year older on Chinese New Year. This is, I guess, why Korean age is different from American age. I think Koreans are 1 year old when they're born, and then a child born in January theoretically turns 2 in February on Chinese New Year, even though they're only about a month old. And they say that you have to eat rice cake soup to get that year older. Anyway, I ate mine, so my Korean age increased... to 24, I think?

Tonight I want to talk about my homestay. Since Meghan and Tim left, I've been spending a lot more time at home in the past week. I've eaten dinner at home every night, which recently has meant sitting on the floor in grandma's room. She came into my room three or four days ago around 7:30pm and found me trying to sleep, and started pitching a fit. She was like "Dinner?" And I said, "I ate." And then she said some stuff about my friends leaving, and I made the mistake of conceding "Lonely," in an ironic tone, but she took pity on me and dragged me into her room to eat (again) and watch Korean TV with her and her grown-up daughter (she's my host Dad's mother, and his sister was visiting). At first, I was cursing fate, and just really irritated that I was in this stupid awkward situation having to watch TV I didn't understand and sit with these people who were ignoring me and eat food I didn't like. I'm not going to say I suddenly attained some sort of Zen acceptance of the situation, but I tried to look at it from a different perspective. That grandma is a nice lady who apparently likes me who wanted to spend some quality time and share some culture with me the only way she knew how. And then I enjoyed the time more. We've repeated dinner in grandma's room with the kids the last couple of nights, and I've tried to appreciate it. I find it frustrating to watch TV shows (like the drama we watched one night) that I think are really interesting, and that I can barely follow a bit and guess what's going on, but that I can't understand. It's perplexing. 

I was only eating dinner maybe two or three nights a week at home in the few months leading up to coming back to America, which I chided myself for even as I was doing it. I know that integrating ourself into our homestays, and being cultural ambassadors, is a part of the grant, and that I can't do that unless I'm physically there, but it was just wasn't happening. I know in a lot of ways I'm really lucky in my homestay. My friend Amy has real horror stories, and Meghan's host sisters are in some ways way more annoying than my siblings. I really really genuinely like my host mom a lot. She's a really sweet lady who does everything for me and tries to talk to me. I only wish she was at home more. If so, I'd be more inclined to eat dinner at home. But most of the time it's just grandma, who doesn't speak any English, and who often just slaps together some gross side dishes and leaves it for the kids and me to eat. I don't usually have a lot of family bonding time (at least with Mom), and the kids are inclined to ignore me most of the time. So it doesn't seem like I'm thwarting anyone really by not coming home, because the kids don't miss me. (The boy certainly doesn't, anyway.) But I guess in using that rational I miss the one or two times a week that my  host mom is actually home, and I constantly blow off grandma, which isn't nice. 

So anyway, one of my New Year's resolutions was to spend more time at home, which I've been forced to do this week anyway because I don't have friends to go meet. And so far, it's... okay. I'm going a little stir crazy, but I'm sure it will be better next week when I'm going to school. I can't quite pass a whole day working out and reading, but it is kinda nice to be part of the action in the evenings. Sometimes. Sometimes it's annoying. 

One thing I accomplished today in my reading marathon was finishing the book Dad gave me for Christmas, The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. It was actually... really really good. It's a long one, a little over 400 pages, and it proved to be a slow start, but the last half really redeemed it. Pollan's prose is very readable, even for someone like me who really prefers fiction to non-fiction, and even when the topic is something so inherently boring as corn and cooking. I'll attempt to sum up his premise. (Tim, if you're reading this, I hope it doesn't sound like Adam Hartzell.)

For his book, Michael Pollan traces the life cycle of three meals, from the farm to the dinner table. The first, a McDonalds meal he enjoys with his family, in the car no less, he uses to illustrate the unnatural pervasion of corn in our modern diet and the perversion of the farm ideal by what his embattled, embittered farm contacts call the "military-industrial complex." The relatively recent rise to dominance of corn has created a monoculture that is bad for the land, the farmers, and the consumer. He is particularly enlightening on the subject of biofuels, one that The New York Times addressed just this week: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/science/earth/08wbiofuels.html?scp=1&sq=biofuels&st=nyt. Basically, biofuels require such a large amount of fossil fuel to make them (in harvesting and transporting) that they aren't so economical at all (except sugar cane). The second meal is one he creates from entirely organic food grown on the farm of a somewhat unhinged but really interesting character. This isn't "Whole Foods"-style organic, either. Apparently, the entire organic industry has actually been taken over by the, well, industrial industry, leading to food that is, at times, even less healthy than non-organic. Thus, this food is more properly called "local." This portion of the book is the one I found most interesting, especially a chapter debating the merits of vegetarianism. Anyway, it made me want to eat local too. We'll see what happens when I get back. In the third part of the book, the hunter-gatherer portion, he creates a meal made entirely of things he hunted or gathered himself, with some enlightening passages describing the ultra-liberal-cum-hunter. Overall, it was a refreshing and enlightening (and even interesting) book on what I thought was the most boring of subjects. 

Anyway, I actually started writing this post (which should have been posted on Sunday) on Saturday, because I knew I'd be gone on Sunday on the family ski trip, but I'm just now finishing it up on Tuesday. I want to write about said ski trip, but at the moment I'm tired and afraid I won't do it justice, so I think I'll save that for another post this week. Needless to say, it was every bit as interesting as I knew it would be.