Filed under: anatopism, expats, how we roll, Jeju crew, life on Jeju, miscommunication, okay seriously Korea, things I like, yoga
…that I am hungry now, and I probably wasn’t a very good sport earlier, and my room needs to be tidied firstthingtomorrow, and my blog is the first thing to come up in a Google search of the word “hotchken.” And I’m coming to peace with all of that. Today I woke up late and I ate some soup, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same soup we’ve been eating since Monday, and while I haven’t gotten sick yet, I still have to get over the mental block I have that says that cooked beef is only good for three or four days at the most. (Or do I?) Then I ate a pretzel at the new, revamped Tom and Tom’s in Sicheong (City Hall), which now features an extensive variety of soft pretzels – I can think of ten off the top of my head – and is so pleased about these pretzels, in fact, that a detailed explanation of what pretzels are (it starts by describing them as “a salted biscuit”) is permanently written on the front of the shop. Then I ate at Bagdad with Aewol (my friend who teaches in Aewol) and Transy, a Program kid out in Seogwipo who went to the university of the same name. (Incidentally, I made him my de facto brother in the second week of the Program’s training, but “Transy” is shorter.) So that’s one meal today, pretty much. Now it’s midnight and I just spent five minutes deliberating over whether or not I should make myself a piece of toast. The whole situation seems to parallel every problem I have in some deep way, but I’m not entirely sure how.
Scooter and I went to Expat Ultimate Frisbee today, which was fun, except that – if you know me personally – you know that I have absolutely zero hand-eye coordination, and also no experience with Ultimate. I was not a top pick, shall we say. The problem with me playing sports has always been that I have trouble focusing enough to be coordinated – I can do solo things better, because then it’s just me, but when I’m with other people I get self-conscious about the fact that this sort of thing just doesn’t come naturally to me, and then I’m really in a bind. Point being that at one point I forgot the rules and completely flubbed the one chance I had to do something worthwhile, and what I really wanted to do was stay on the sideline and watch some more so I could get a feel for it, but they convinced me to stay in and practice, which is difficult to do when you’re not sure what’s going on, and then they definitely felt sorry for me as The Girl Who Couldn’t Play Frisbee. (Who Can’t Play Frisbee?) And if there is one thing I cannot abhor, it is people feeling sorry for me. So I played until I could get a sub and then got out – I’m afraid that getting out, and the fact that I was visibly a little frustrated with myself (even though it’s just a game!), probably meant that I came off as a bad sport, so I’ll have to go back and redeem myself. I mean, I got back in, but I still wasn’t any good, and although it’s immature, part of me will always want to be good or go home. I need to grow out of it, but I’m thinking it might just be a part of who I am.
At any rate the Expats were v.nice – I recognized many of them, after all, from rhymeswithjeju, the mailing list for English speakers on the island – and it’s not their fault that they were concerned about a person with such appalling athletic skills.* To be honest, I think the language barrier has been getting to me a bit lately – I find myself increasingly frustrated with people who are only trying to help me, like, you know, my pottery teacher. Or my yoga teacher, for that matter. They know I speak very little Korean, and I know their English is equally limited, but sometimes they’ll just start speaking Korean and be surprised when I keep messing up, because I don’t know that my foot is supposed to be flexed or that I’m pulling the clay too hard. Maybe it’s the relatively stressful week I’ve had, although I might just need to come home for a bit.
It was a good day for Frisbee though; the sun was up, the sky was blue, it was beautiful (and so were you). Scooter coached me on some basic Frisbee catching technique after learning that I didn’t learn to catch anything until I was six, and to his credit, didn’t laugh at me too much when it bounced out of my hands. I also crashed a pickup soccer game between these two boys who were probably in fourth or fifth grade; I meant to just play, but they ended up giving me some technique tips for my kicks. Overall, it was an educational afternoon. Afterwards we went to Tom and Toms and met some Jeju National University students, one of whom is going to be my language partner. She has a puppy and the same name as Teddy Bear Barrette. Interestingly enough. Soccer’s been sick all day, so I visited her later with some Gatorade and some leftover naan, and we watched Muhan Dojeon and made one of those sewing kits that they sell at the stationery stores here – this was a stuffed cell phone charm in the shape of a bunny’s head. Mine is blue.
Here is my cool thing for the day: the New York Times wedding section. No, I don’t know why I read it, but yes, I always do.
*How unathletic am I? Here’s a story: The summer before my freshman year of high school, I swam competitively for the first and last time, on my neighborhood team. I had no natural talent and no experience. All the girls in my age group had been swimming for years. Ergo, I could not keep up with them; ergo, I had to practice with the elementary schoolers. No joke. But, in the crowning moment of my summer, there was one race in which I did not come in last, which meant that I was not the slowest, and let me tell you, fifth place has never been so sweet.
Filed under: ESL, how we roll, life on Jeju, miscommunication, okay seriously Korea, skool, students, teaching
Bright Eyes – Bowl of Oranges (mp3)
Look, I know I just put a song up, but a) the link didn’t work – I’m still trying to figure it out – and b) today I really like/need this. In a way I feel like “Bowl of Oranges” has become one of those code words used by students of a certain age, i.e. one of those things that people use to identify themselves as A Certain Kind of Person who Listens to Music and Likes Certain Other Things – which might be Dave Eggers, or Wes Anderson movies, or, you know. There’s a person I don’t know anymore, but I knew him once, and he told me that when most people talk about music they aren’t really talking about music at all. (Although – for the record – I like both Dave Eggers and Wes Anderson.)
I wish my low-level weeks didn’t keep me feeling like I’m running on empty. Today 1L – probably my smartest first graders, and definitely second in my list of favorite classes, although honestly after Wednesday they’re in more like first and a half place – did a really good job speculating what they’d bring on the Mayflower, and the low-level second-graders I had were incredibly loud, but then most of them did the worksheet, which was a plus. It kind of makes up for the fact that I’m pretty sure one of my students had a seizure in class yesterday, which everyone but me seemed to know was due to epilepsy. Would it kill them to tell me these things?
Filed under: actual transcripts, anatopism, dumb miguks, host brother, host dad, host fam, host mom, host sister, how we roll, Korean classifications, life on Jeju, miscommunication, okay seriously Korea, questionable fashion decisions
A series of stories.
A
Halloween
I didn’t intend to see a horror movie simply because it was close to Halloween. Things just worked out that way. It was my sweet, gentle Oma who chose the movie (more on Oma’s likes and dislikes in a minute). It was entirely in Korean, of course, but you know the old adage: sadistic torture knows no language. There was something about an ugly necklace, some sort of supernatural hand that appeared periodically, and some women in court clothes who kept pulling all sorts of medieval/Guantanamo-style treatments on each other (or maybe just on one woman. I don’t really know). I fell asleep for part of it. Oma kept her hands over her face the entire time. Fun night!
Saturday Albuquerque had organized this festival for some little kids at a program at this church that one of her students attended, and most of us had signed on to help, so I found myself hauling thirty small prizes* and a 24-pack of toilet paper across the island. Oma and Apa were headed to Seogwipo anyway to help with a wedding the next day, so I caught a ride and ate lunch with them and the wedding party, where I received a gift bag containing detergent and brown sugar. I met up with my friends and headed over to the festival site, where we were confronted with an immediate problem: Scooter, in a rare burst of enthusiasm, had invited some of his students, all of whom were at least five years older than our target audience. So we had to make some activities up, most of which consisted of us encouraging them to tell the goriest ghost stories possible (in English, natch). For the little kids, there were mask making, face painting (with poster paint and WATERCOLORS – thanks for not having party supplies, Korea), and various relay race activities. Then we all ate fried chicken and were very happy. Except that, during the haunted house, some of the students spat in Scooter’s face. Oops.
Somehow Hallim (or G) and I ended up back in Jeju-si, running through e-Mart at 9:00 on a frantic search for tofu and bananas and other barbecue supplies, in large part because I am pathologically unable to let anyone do anything for me. After some help from a kindly Anglophone meat clerk (who nonetheless alerted the entire first floor that there were two eccentric foreigners floundering through the groceries), we made it back to my apartment, where we dressed to represent the fair state of Kentucky (I was a cigarette, she was barefoot and pregnant). In retrospect, I should have donned a fat suit and a Philip Morris nametag so I could have been Big Tobacco, but there’s always next year.
We made it out to the pension in Hamdok Beach around 10:00. Here’s where things get – and will stay, for your purposes – a bit blurry. There was fun, and there were adventures; we ate grilled chocolate-stuffed bananas, made friends with a Korean family, watched Africa cook chicken adobo (as Scooter said, “After eating this, I’m gonna wife her”). Oregon had brought a college friend whose name was – and I am not making this up – Ricky Martin. And then there was a campfire, and grass seeds that stuck to our clothes, and an accidental but somehow inevitable discussion with a certain person in my life, one fueled by throwaway comments and cheap Hite beer and weeks and weeks of the unspoken. It happens. We’ll be stronger after this, but it’s going to take a while. To imagine that here I would learn how to depend on others, and at the same time so well how to be alone…well. I didn’t. But now I can, and I count my happiness and my sadness on each hand, and I keep the transcripts to myself.
The next day I woke up on the floor next to Hallim, still wearing a cigarette costume (having forgotten to bring pajamas), still with pampas grass in my hair, and we headed home.
B
feats of strength
If you have never been to a Korean wedding, let me just say this: Imagine the part in the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” where the synthesizer kicks in. Now, instead of recollecting that as music, try to picture that as flashing plastic chandeliers. Add a fog machine. Welcome to the wedding hall.
After we arrived, HS and HB in tow (they had to wake us up, as we’d fallen asleep on the bus), we were immediately escorted to the nook where the bride waited, where we – not my family, just Hallim and me – had our picture taken with her. On the bride’s camera, not ours. Then we were escorted back to our seats, where I was immediately summoned by some of Apa’s many ajushi cousins to sit with them; despite the fact that none of them spoke English, they all managed to ask me to call them “opa” (older brother; yeah okay). They called me by my host fam’s last name, which was cute, and they kept speaking to me in rapid Korean, which was not. Then we saw the wedding, which involved, in addition to the aforementioned elements, bubbles that shot out at random intervals, a troupe of toddlers dressed like Cupid who performed an interpretive dance, and a push-up demonstration by the groom, who was cheered on by an announcer and his bride. I should mention at this point that none of this appeared to have been rehearsed. At all. Then it was picture time; first the bride and the groom were photographed, and then the bride and the groom and their families, and then the bride and the groom and their mothers, and then the bride and the groom and their friends, and then the bride and the groom and everyone on one half of the room. Hallim and I fell into the last category. We were shoved to the front of the wedding pictures. I felt a little like a trophy wife. Trophy foreigner?
That’s all for today. More tomorrow. There is more, of course. In the meantime, I’m going to take a bath, revel in my newly purchased Time magazines, and try to forget the fact that I have mosquito bites on my hands.
Filed under: Jeju crew, life on Jeju, miscommunication, music, PCT, Pop-Song, skool
The day is not mine, Trebek.
I hate to be off to such a bad start so early in the morning, but here’s the thing: I lost my classroom keys. Except they weren’t my classroom keys, they were PCT’s classroom keys that she had lent me so that I could in fact get into my classroom, which puts me in PCT’s bad graces, not that I wasn’t already there. I can’t find them anywhere, which means that a) I cannot lock my classroom, b) I look (am) extremely irresponsible, and c) PCT hates me. But I don’t blame her, because I kind of hate myself, too.
I think the PCT problem started when she told me that I had to cut the numbers for PopSong and that she would help me, and then told me the next day that she couldn’t help me because I didn’t understand how busy she was, without giving me any guidance as far as how to make the group smaller without a working knowledge of the Korean words for “If you’re slacking, you can’t stay here.” I was frustrated. It probably showed. But I felt like I was being given an impossible task, and I wanted them to know that it wasn’t going to be done well, because I didn’t know what to do. Now I have tried to make it up to her – even though I don’t feel like I should have to – by going out of my way to talk to her, to ask about her, to bring her pastries from Paris Baguette, but this is not the woman who grabbed me in the airport and told me that we were now sisters. Somehow, somewhere, I botched it. At least ACT still loves me – and that is a relationship I work hard to cultivate.
Speaking of PopSong: vacations have meant that we haven’t been able to meet regularly, and numbers have dropped for serious. I need to make a schoolwide announcement. I also need to get “All You Need is Love” into a key my kids can actually sing. I also need to stop feeling like all of this is futile.
This is, at heart, my fault, and I know it. I’ve been in a funk ever since the weekend, and I know what I’m afraid of: that what has been good can’t stay. We’ve got a rhythm here on the island, we’ve all gotten comfortable with one another, and I guess the return of the other Program kids reminded me how easily it can be disrupted, that maybe our little group is good enough for me but not good enough for everybody. And bending over backwards to keep it all together isn’t intuitive for me. I don’t know if I’m cut out for this friend captain thing, after all.
The fall uniforms are out in full force though. I kind of want one. And by kind of I mean a lot, specifically the jacket.
Filed under: actual transcripts, Apple, life on Jeju, miscommunication, okay seriously Korea, skool, students, teaching
Today: more travel poster making. Some of the taglines:
“About India”
“Strange Egypt”
“Surprise Egypt”
“[Egypt] is very mistery. How nice!!”
What can I say. Nothing that would make it any funnier, for sure.
I have a few hours’ break in between classes, so I’m at home now to change into warmer clothes/lesson plan/(nap). Fortunately, I set up Aurora on my computer, so now I have an iTunes alarm clock. My computer is so damn cool. I did need a break though. Even when my students are better, as they were today (and by “better,” I mean “not beasts”), teaching the low-level classes always sets me on edge, because I know I’ll have to deal with the other teachers as well – teachers who are mostly kind, but many of whom seem to have given in to – don’t hate – this culture of low expectations. Yes, I know tossing around conservative buzzwords like that isn’t going to earn me any brownie points on the island (especially considering that I – I! – am probably the second-most conservative person here, after the immortal Quagmire). And it sounds strange to say that about a country like Korea, where rank is emphasized above all. But most of my low-level second (eighth) graders seem to have actually regressed. And sometimes I feel like the teachers have given up on them – “oh,” they say, “maybe he does not speak the English well, so maybe we give something easier.” So? That’s why I’m here. So help me by at least translating my instructions, making him – or her – do what they’re supposed to. It doesn’t matter if it takes longer. I’ve got time to teach them. That is, after all, what I’m here to do. Teaching doesn’t get easier with the fact that due to scheduling changes, half the time I don’t see classes for weeks and weeks. I had a class of eighth grade boys today and I think I have seen them once before. Maybe twice. How am I supposed to teach them anything?
Filed under: actual transcripts, dumb miguks, food, host brother, host dad, host fam, host mom, Jeju crew, life on Jeju, miscommunication, okay seriously Korea, pipe dreams, U S of A
I have no winter job, I might not have a job next year either, I have a helmet haircut, I live with a fucking card sharp, and I’m through with men for at least a year. How are you?
Things are not quite that bad – I did, after all, get to attend HB’s Sports Day today, where I ate chicken on a stick and that candy we bought at Dollywood years ago, fool’s gold, except this candy was made on a skillet out of the back of a truck in the rain. I also got the chance to watch: mass hula-hooping, mass choreographed techno dancing, and this event where these people wearing masks that looked like the Clintons had balloons in their pants and the kids had to compete to see who could pop them first. HB did samulnori, and he ran what they called the Marathon, which was actually just a race. Not 26.2 miles, no siree. HB and his best friend were in the same heat. HB kept on trucking. He’s pretty fast. HBBF is not, but his effort was valiant.
Today was also Apa’s birthday. After we got back from Sports Day, I made lunch for my family (fettucine with chicken and the pesto my American momma sent over; inexplicably, the pesto was much more popular than last dinner’s homemade roasted tomato sauce), and then Oma offered to take me for a haircut. Having been opsoyo last weekend, I was (am) in need of some family brownie points; besides, I’ve gotten to see the Jeju Crew a lot lately. Also, my host brother and sister have great hair, so I assumed it would be all right. She took me to her hair place, which turned out to be in E-Mart – and not the nice one in Sin Jeju, the ghetto one down by Tapdong. Good Deal. I really loved my haircut last time; this time, however, I look like a member of the Brady Bunch. And not in a good way. My bangs are a) too short and b) sticking up and c) I look like an idiot and I’m kind of mad about it. And, in retrospect, Oma’s hair is nowhere near as cool as that of HB and HS. But what could I say? “I don’t really trust you?” I don’t even have the vocabulary for that.
Sometimes, however, I don’t think that vocabulary is the problem. Oma asked me, yet again, exactly why I was single – and if I had a good answer for that, I imagine a lot of things would be very different. And on the way home, after omija cha and ice cream at a cafe in Chungangro, she asked me my American parents’ hometowns, which is an innocuous enough question (as well as an impressive one for her to ask in English). But hometowns are a more complex issue for us than they should be; I don’t really have one, my mother never really had one, and my father…the workbooks we were given in class didn’t have any sample sentences like “His family escaped because they were wealthy and well-connected” or “My grandfather was an idealist trying to reform a corrupt government from the inside out” or “I still struggle with the fact that all American history curricula suggest that my family’s role within the colonizing French government was essentially that of a collaborator.” I still can’t say, “I took a taxi.” Really, I don’t know how to say what I want to say in English, just like no one here seems to be able to explain why on Earth children are trained to dance King Tut-style to techno, regardless of how fluent they are.
Anyway. Meanwhile, I’m still looking for a winter internship – ideally, I’d love to work with an NGO or a newspaper or UNESCO, but what that requires is me getting in touch with those people, which, you know, I still need to do. I also got an email from TFA, and it looks like unless I can talk my school into letting me out reallllllllly early, I’m only going to be (barely) eligible for New York or California (or, God forbid, Las Vegas), which were not my first choices. And even then, I have to talk wherever I go into letting me either skip Initiation or make it up over…Christmas? Which is coming soon. ADULT WORLD STOP IT I just want to get a job with Sesame Workshop. Really. At this point, I’d even consider applying for grad school for next year, but I still need to take macro and micro to go to school for IR, and I’m still working on a bigger portfolio for J-school.
After we went out for a raw fish dinner with Apa (where I made the same mistake I always do – I ate what they told me to, assuming that no more food was coming out, when in fact there were three more, and better, courses still to come) HB and I played Uno, where he managed to shuffle his cards multiple times while still keeping his loaded hand on top. Twice. Then he made up the following song about me, to the tune of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”:
(IGR) is mischief, mischief, mischief
(IGR) is mischief, oh I’m sorry
And now we are watching Muhan Dojeon.
Filed under: anatopism, how we roll, life on Jeju, miscommunication, skool, teaching
I have to admit that the sign in the back of my room that reads “Grammar Time” was put up mostly for my own amusement.
Today I got to school and they told me that there was a schoolwide fitness test, which meant I would not be teaching at all, which is nice, although I would have liked to have known earlier, so I could have slept instead of getting up and all that. Whatever. I used the time to decorate the classroom with my Words of the Week and a few choice pictures of sleeping students. Now I’m going to go buy a new backpack, because mine broke yesterday, no thanks to you Jansport.
