Blog Backlog

These few paragraphs are from a couple of months ago. I decided to post them separately from the newer stuff I'm working on because they aren't terribly deep topics, and having this backlog of notes in my journal keeps me from digging into meatier stuff.

Anyway, these are random ideas and observations that I jotted down. I couldn't make them cohesive. Story transitions are hard..

"Family Nice"

On the first night I moved into my apartment, it was my hagwon (private school) director herself who showed me the place.  She took one look inside the room, saw the leftover bed sheets, empty pantry shelves, lack of toilet paper, turned and said, “We’re going to E-mart. You need food and new blankets.”  It was already eight o'clock at this point.  I tried to tell her, “No, no, it’s fine. Really.  I have an Asiana Airline blanket from the flight, and the teacher who left gave me some ramen.  I’ll be okay.” But she wasn’t having any of that. 

We hopped in her car and drove to the E-Mart, which is basically like a Wal-Mart, except four stories high and less obese.  We went to the food court, where she refused to let me pay for my food.  Then (and keep in mind that it’s around 9 o’clock at this point), she took me grocery shopping and picked up some blankets and pillow covers.  She also threw a 20-pack of toilet paper in the cart for me.  Apparently, this is a tradition for the new people moving in.  You get them tissues.  

Because nothing says "I care" like giving someone a freshly wiped bum.

By my math, the twenty rolls should last me into early 2014.

I thanked her again and again for going out of her way to get me settled.  The new school year was starting, and I knew she had been working well into the night for the past few weeks in preparation.  She dismissed that she had done anything noteworthy, explaining, “In Korea, you will find that we are ‘family nice’."

“Family Nice.”  The literal translation gives a nice little shine to it, don't you think?

One-Note Notes to Myself That Don't Need Further Embellishment

The Art of Eating

Learning to use chopsticks reminds me of when I first started playing guitar in middle school; it’s all about muscle memory. It’s the same idea, except now I get to do all my practicing in public, and strangers don’t come up and replace your guitar with a fork if you suck at it.

Old folks at Korean restaurants: "Here, let me get you some silverware since you have all the finesse of a tree stump.

Grocery Shopping

Can never tell what's going to be expensive or cheap.  Pomegranate juice?  $20.  A brand new colander? $.03. Also, I keep hitting my head on the overhang in the checkout aisle. Today was the fifth time in two weeks.

Atrophying English

I noticed the decline in (or should that be "of"? [Prepositions are the first casualty.]) my English when I first got here, but now I can't tell if the decay has leveled off or if I don't have the cognitive capacity left to realize that I sound like a freaking caveman.

I was talking with my friends one night about how Korea still holds a grudge against Japan from being occupied for so long. I said, “Yeah, It's weird. I’m pretty sure that Japan forgived the US relatively quickly after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Wait a minute… I thought. Something sounds strange about that sentence, but I can’t my finger on it…

Another time, I wanted to compliment a student, so I said, “Gordon, did you draw that picture? Wow, you’re such a great...draw-er."

Yes, I know what this is. No, I'm not stupid.

And this is an excerpt from a conversation I had with my coworker about how uncoordinated our students can be:

   Me:  “These kids have no motor skills.  They just clop around like baby cows.” 

   Coworker: “You mean ‘calves’?”     
   My mind: Why, yes. Yes, I do mean that.

Awkward Teaching Moment

Kids were fighting because one of them called the other a poo-poo head or something. I don't know. It's hard to care sometimes. 

   Me: “We don’t say bad words to friends. Have you ever had a friend say bad words to you?"

   Kid: “No, but my dad says it to me all the time.”

   Me: Uh...Ok. Nice talk.  And I can't report anything like that to anyone?   I'll let you go play now.

July 11th Late Night Note to Myself

I think my bones have calcified after sleeping on these rock mattresses for five months.

Gran Torino

Gran Torino is one of my favorite movies, but it always bugged me how bad the acting from the Asian actors is in it. It really takes you out of the story. Turns out that native English-speaking inflection is hard to master, and that that's actually how most of the second-language English people from Asia (that I've met) sound when they talk. Now I can enjoy the movie again.

I'm Not Sure You Know What That Means...

Our class went to a Korean children’s play on a field trip, and the overture was “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers.  I'd say that's a pretty adult-oriented start to a story about a spider who recruits a bumblebee to help win the heart of a lovely butterfly.

But Korea loves its western music, regardless of appropriate content or context.  They play it everywhere. In the stores and on the streets.  Home Plus Express is a grocery chain that you can find in just about every collection of multi-storied buildings in any decently sized town.  Every time I've been in there, they play this cheesy jingle that goes, "Home-uh Stoe Pruh-suh sam na di mi go/Home-uh Stoe Pruh-suh!"  

Translated, that's "Home Store Plus (gibberish)/Home Store Plus!" It's actually pretty catchy.

When HPE isn't playing that, they'll pump electronic dance music so you can hear it crystal clear in the dairy aisle.  It'd be like going to an eye doctor's where the muzak's all Metallica and Slipknot. I think the best way to show you how alien it can feel to be here sometimes would be to give you the chorus to one of the songs they played while I was grocery shopping one afternoon:

"All day and all night, I just wanna f***."

(Crazy dance beat breakdown)

"And I just wanted some ramen and mayonnaise, but this is cool, too, I guess."

At first I thought, "Should...should I tell them what those songs are saying?" But since then, I've decided that it's way more entertaining to watch oblivious moms and kids walk around town while LMFAO tells them all that "We're in Miami, biiiitch." Thanks for sharing, guys.

"Ajummas, Come Out to Play-ee-ay!"

I guess you'd need a little background on the stereotypical old ladies in Korea. They're called "ajummas." It means "old women" or "elderly mothers," but it can also be used in a derogatory way. They're notorious among foreigners for pushing and shoving you aside when you get on the subway, staring you down with their loathing, piercing eyes, and yelling at you in rapid-fire Korean for accidentally violating yet another one of Korea's inscrutable social norms. 

One Sunday as I walked hungover to the convenience store down my street, tired and still just a little bit under the influence, I was met by a surreal scene, made even more so due to my clouded head. 

An all-out turf war was unfolding between two gangs of ajummas decked out in matching garbage collecting gear: trash picker-uppers, yellow volunteer vests, garbage bags, dyed black hair complete with perms, and giant bonnets to top it all off.

I swear I wrote that description before going to Google to find this picture.  I searched for "Ajumma," and this was the fourth image result. 

They stood on opposite sides of the street that I was walking down, just screaming at each other. You'd think it would be about something important, but as far as I could tell, they were fighting over who would get the honors to pick up the trash that was in the roadside gutter. I couldn't tell you what they were saying to each other, but I knew it was none of my business. 

I passed between them, that vicious gauntlet of vitriol, got my Gatorade, and spent the rest of the day reeling from the fact that recovering from a night out takes about five hours longer for every year older you get.

^^ (That's a Korean cutesy face. They use it in texts, emails, everything.)

Went to the Family Mart at 10pm on a Sunday night. I'm guessing they usually aren't terribly busy then. I walked in and saw the high school girl working behind the counter getting macked on by her boyfriend. Cuddling, hugging, holding hands. (No kissing. That would be indecent.)

They both froze, with the same amount of terror in their eyes they'd have shown if I were one of their parents coming home unexpectedly early from a night out. Red-cheeked, the boy quickly threw up the counter divider and walked out the door like he had somewhere else to be. I felt guilty, you know, like I had somehow been rude for barging in on them, and I didn't want to hold up their night, so I hurried up and paid.

As I was walking home, I looked down an alley next to the Family Mart to see the boyfriend hanging out in the dark, just biding his time. I walked a few more steps, then turned back to see him rushing back to the store to continue their mack session. Good for them, I thought. They aren't going to let something silly like work ethic stand in the way of their love. ^^

"Foreigners! Foreigners Are Here!"

One day in my first month here, I walked home with Brandon, the 21-year-old son of one of my coworkers. We were coming up on our road when a pudgy, 10-year-old Korean kid with glasses saw us and stopped in his tracks. 

"My God," he must've thought to himself, "a white person...and a black person?! Walking together?!?! This is simply too much. Cancel all my appointments. I must investigate further." 

As soon as he started following us, he started shouting something in Korean. Over and over. Loudly. Annoyingly. I wanted to know what it was. Luckily, Brandon’s been living overseas for the past eight years, so he told me with a laugh, “He’s saying: ‘Foreigners! Foreigners are here!’” No one else was around to hear it besides me and Brandon, so I guess the kid just wanted us to know that, you know, we're not from around here.

We reached my apartment building first, so I said bye to Brandon and walked to my front door. Please don't be there. Please don't be there, I thought. Sure enough, he was still waddling right behind me. I turned around, put my two hands up towards his face, and said, “Stop. Do not follow me.” He cocked his head to the side and stared with empty cow eyes like he had no idea what that meant.

Somehow reminded me of this scene in Jurassic Park.

Needless to say, he didn't stop and instead followed me into my building.  My flat is on the second floor, directly at the top of the staircase—a straight shot from the front door.  I didn’t want the kid to know where I lived, so I kept walking until I was in front of my other coworker’s place, who also lives there. Better this kid murders Vincent than me, I figured..  He took a few steps up the stairs and got bored or maybe tired.  Did I mention he was pudgy?  

To make things stranger, he turned around and started opening and closing the front door to the building.  Because of the way the place is set up, this made giant “WHOOSH…BANG. WHOOSH…BANG” noises as the change in air pressure slammed every apartment door in the building against its frame.  It was a strange encounter to say the least.

That night, I had a nightmare that the kid was standing in my room, watching me sleep.  Woke up half-conscious around 3am, convinced that the jacket hanging from my wardrobe handle was him.  I didn’t fall back asleep until six in the morning. 

There is no purpose to this story. Thanks for reading.

제 이름은 차드위키 우드스 입니다

(My name is Cha-duh-wee-kee Woo-duh-suh)

Fun with Oxford Class

Instead of chronicling the day-to-day stuff, I put together a collection of little classroom moments I want to make sure I remember.  To fill in some of the gaps, the name of my classroom is Oxford.  The other seven-year-old classrooms are Stanford, Yale, and Harvard.  It's a theme, you see.

I teach fourteen kids. I was supposed to have seven, and the other seven would go into the now-unused Harvard class with an additional teacher.  Due to budget cuts, I have the entire upper-level seven-year-olds to myself.

(I should mention: Seven years old in Korean is actually closer to 5 or 6.  In Korea, babies are one year old the day are born.  Then, on January first, you tack on another year.  So, from my understanding, you could have a kid born on December 31st who would be considered two years old a day later.)

Anyway, it's still a blast most of the time.  And these are some of the aspects of teaching that I want to remember years from now.

Like during the field trip to the park, for example.

The Thumb Princess

Sometimes the pseudo-English that you hear and read turns out to be inscrutably fascinating.  One phrase sticks out in particular.  

I was reading through the kids’ diaries.  (It’s not a breach of privacy; it’s my job.)  In it, they’re supposed to talk about what they did over the weekend.  Barbara (who, incidentally, is about 4’6” tall and whose father is around 7’, no foolin') wrote about a musical she saw.  The magical, mysterious line that she wrote, the one I can’t understand and which pops into my head from time to time, is:

“A thumb princess pretty.  A thumb princess breakdown.”

I don’t know what a thumb princess is.  I can’t imagine a princess who is also a thumb being pretty.  I don’t know why she broke down.  I don’t know what Korean word Mommy and Daddy mistranslated so that it became “breakdown.”  I don’t know why, even after days of going over the importance of including verbs in all of our sentences, Barbara refuses to use them in her diary. 

I don’t know any of these things, and I never will.  I could easily Google it and answer all of my questions in a few seconds, but I'd rather live with the mystery.

Hypocritical Intelligences

The rule of thumb(princess) that I’ve learned so far is that kids are incredibly clever and equally surprisingly stupid.  (I mean that in an endearing way.) Sunny, the same bilingual kindergartner that tells me about how the CO2 cycle works, can name most of the countries on the globe, and asked about what root languages English stems from, is the same kid who can’t wipe his own ass.  

With that nonchalant lean,
 he looks like someone who could sell you life insurance--
not somebody who needs instructions to use the toilet.

A typical exchange between me and Sunny:

“Chad Teacher, may I go to the bath-uh-room?”

(The extra syllable is a holdover from Korean pronunciation.)

“Yes, Sunny.”

He waits and looks at me…

“What is it, Sunny?”

He whispers in my ear, “Chad Teacher: Poo-poo.”

Then, I call the head Korean teacher (Janice Teacher) to check on him in the bathroom, since I’m pretty sure any help I could give would be disgusting at best.  (Is it sexist if I sometimes relish the fact that men aren't expected to take care of this sort of thing in Korea [and most places]? The answer is "Yes.")


Thankfully, last week, he stopped informing me of which type of excretion he will be performing, so he either: 1) learned to wipe over the course of a weekend; 2) is back in diapers; or 3) has some very upset parents when they see his underwear in the laundry.  

Example #2 of Baffling Buffoonery

As long as we’re talking about silliness, I should mention Justin.  Justin is a very unique boy who is excited about everything and quick to pick up on the lessons while simultaneously being as dumb as a rock of boxes.

Here's Justin, lost in thought.

The way lunches work at Hope School, the teacher dishes out all of the food to each student, and then we all eat together in our classroom.  In the past week, Justin has thrown up his food every other day at lunch, which brings his barfing average up to .500.  And what’s more is that he doesn’t even make a fuss about it.  One minute everyone is eating quietly, and the next, Justin has regurgitated squid and seaweed on top of his rice.   He comes up to me, unfazed, and says, “Chad Teacher, I got sick…Can I have more rice?”

I kept a watchful eye on him the next lunch to see why it was happening, considering he wasn’t sick in any other way.  I have a hypothesis that I'm working under until I find evidence to the contrary:

As far as I can tell, Justin doesn't realize that human beings have a gag reflex.  Seriously. He will take his chopsticks when he isn't eating and push them absent-mindedly too far into his mouth.  After doing this, he'll have a quick little convulsion.  Almost like it was a GAG REFLEX or something. 

Pictured: Justin at age 37.

I didn’t say anything to him because, at this point, it seemed like a silly hypothesis. But sure, enough, yesterday, on Thursday, May 10^th, 2012, Justin threw up again.  All over his rice.  Again.  This time, I had him clean up the mess. (We're supposed to push them to be independent.  And although I try to make it sound gross for the sake of the story, the rice was relatively throw-up free.)

When the kids have extra food they can’t finish, I have them take their trays to the serving table at the back of the room and dump it into the rice pot.  Justin missed the pot, and all of his rice ended up on the floor.  Naturally. He said, “Chad Teacher, I spilled!”  “Get a tissue and clean it up, Justin.”  He grabbed a wet-wipe, picked up a big hunk of the stuff, and put it in one of the empty pots.  I watched to make sure he could do it on his own.  Then, after I hadn’t looked over for maybe a moment or two, I checked back in on him.

He was squatting down and eating the vomit-rice off the ground.  Grain by grain.  Like a monkey delousing his friend.

I sort of froze for a second, and I’m ashamed to say that in my shock, Justin was able to put scarf down another two grains of rice. 

“JUSTIN! What are you doing?” I said, not in an accusatory tone, but in a way someone would yell a sincere question while still in disbelief.

“Sorry, Teacher,” he said, and went about cleaning the rest of it up with a tissue.

The thing is, we had extra rice, so if he was starving, he knew he could have had that.

I don’t understand these kids sometimes.

That Wacky Little Dangle

I’ve learned to ALWAYS check the videos before you play them for the kids.  Even the most innocuous looking ones can surprise you.  I opened up a video called “Friendship,” that inadvertently exposed my kids to a waterfall of “f**ks” before I could cut it off. (Thank God they don’t know what it means, or it would’ve started a Hope School-wide epidemic.)

One day, they said they wanted to watch the “Crazy Frog” video.  I only knew enough about Crazy Frog to know that it’s an obnoxiously catchy song for kids.  Normally, I don't take requests, but it was before class was supposed to start, so I let them pick.  Turns out, it’s a French-language music video that stars a computer-animated frog riding rockets and dodging the bad guy while singing a remake of the Beverly Hills Cop theme “Axel F.” While you might not know it by name, I’m sure you know it by heart.

The Crazy Frog version that ostensibly seems like a kid-oriented music video, decided to add a realistically rendered, dangling, floppy, HUMAN penis to the main character for some reason.  Seriously.

WHY?!

I can’t understand it from any context.  And to think that it was an intentional design choice!  I just picture some guy on the computer animation team sitting and animating it for hours on end:

“Well, Crazy Frog’s invisible motorcycle banked left here, so I’ll have to account for that in our calculations.  Also, when he falls off the building, should I build an independent physics model to account for the flap due to penile wind resistance?”

Luckily, the kids didn’t start yelling out “Chad Teacher! Pee-pee!”  Actually, they didn’t notice at all, or they didn’t care.  Apparently, Korean culture is way more open to non-sexual nudity than we are. Just this week, the six-year-olds down my hall actually had a sex-ed lesson minus the actual sex part, so I guess “anatomy class” would be a better choice of words.

Still, I can’t get over the fact that they put a mammalian penis on an amphibian.  We all remember from our Bio 101 courses (which make us experts in everything “biology”) that frogs reproduce by ejecting their eggs and sperm into the water from their cloaca, and therefore have no need for external genitalia.

I'm ranting now.  It just really surprised me.  The fact that something like this can just pop up on the internet is disconcerting.

And I’ve now written more about Crazy Frog’s wang than any other Korean topic so far.

Prosody: The Terrible Melody of Korean English

The Korean word for “no” is “ah-nee-yo.”  So when the kids say “No,” which is about every five seconds, they drag it out: “NOoooOOOewww!”  I’ve mapped out the melodic intervals that occur using my extensive, mostly impractical knowledge of musical theory. I identified an emphasis on the diminished fifth, which is labeled, academically, as the "tritone" and, colloquially, as the Diabolus in Musica or "The Devil in Musical Form." Think of the opening notes from Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze."

Of course, I'm just hyperbolizin'.  It actually sounds like this:

"Funky" Chickens

I nicknamed one of my students Funky Chicken on the first day in class because his mom always styles his hair up into a feathered mohawk.  Plus, it was clear from day one that he needed to be taken down a peg.  His name is Gordon.  He’s a little punk sometimes and also a little awesome. 

See?

One of the girls, Ruri, loves to tease everybody, so whenever Gordon does something silly, she likes to say, “Funky Chicken Gordon!”

Or, at least, that’s what she tries to say because it sounds EXACTLY like, “F*cky chicken, Gordon!” 

It’s a subtle difference, but one that I feel changes the meaning ever-so-slightly.

Without ever discussing with each other it before, Tim (a 25-year-old who teaches there, too) said he found out about it and wasted about five minutes of class one day asking her to say "Funky Chicken" over and over again.  This kind of thing makes me worry about who we are letting teach our children.

Here's a young go-getter after a long night of "teaching."

And while we're on the subject of swearing, in my first week of teaching, one of my students kept saying, "Beesh!"  I didn't know what it meant, but he kept using it and then giggling.  As in "Lynn is a beesh! Heeheehee." Finally, when he said, "Chad Teacher is a beesh!" it suddenly clicked that he meant "bitch." It was obvious he didn't know just how bad the word was, but, boy howdy, did I ever lay the smack down on him.

To Pay the Teacher's Toll: 

A Short Horror Story

I’ve been having audio hallucinations for the past two months.  I feel like my apartment is haunted.  A better explanation is that I’m going crazy.  

Have you ever been to the beach all day, and when you go home at night to lay down, you can feel the steady waves rocking you softly back and forth?  Can you hear them, too?

Have you ever had a song stuck in your head?  Only, it’s not in your head.   You swear that it’s coming from somewhere else.  Maybe your neighbor’s playing it.  Or maybe it’s blasting from the windows of a car driving by.  It can’t be in your head.  Because it sounds so real.

I know the feeling. 

When I’m alone, I hear an ethereal call.  It beckons from the depths of my mind.

“Teacher! …Teacher! …Teacher!” 

The hauntings began one week after starting work in Korea.  I’m afraid that my dreams and reality have merged. I can’t remember what it was like before it began.  Did I ever really live without this curse?  I cannot answer. And now it never stops…

“…Teacher.”

I’ll be there in a minute, Justin.

“…Teacher!”

Hold on, Barbara.  I’m helping Justin.

“…Teacher!”

Sunny, you know I’m busy right now helping Justin, then Barbara, then Lucy. And then Tommy. Ruri, Gordon, Chris, Amy, Annie, Ian, James, Jean, and Laura.

…

“TEACHER!!!”

OXFORD! How many Chad Teachers are there?

The voices recede for a moment.  I relish it.  Then the specters mumble in unison:

“…one.”

And how many students?

They mumble doubly:

“…fourteen.”

Can I help all of you at once?

They pause as if to think.

“…No…”

That’s right.

Silence washes over the room as I find an uneasy peace.

Calming thoughts come to the fore, taking advantage of the voices' ephemeral recession.  I almost drift 

off to sleep.  I can feel it coming because I cease to feel anything.

And then—

“TEEEEEAAAAACCCCCCHHHHHHEEEEEERRRRR!!!!!!!!!”

I gasp.

I am not Chad.

I am not myself.

I have no name. 

           

I am only...

Teacher.

And One Last Thought about Teaching... 

...there are boogers.  Boogers everywhere.

Not really a surprise.

First Day in Korea and Ramblings

          I learned that the man and woman at the airport who were holding the name card with “Chadwick” on it were named Doug and Ray.  Doug is the maintenance man/computer network administrator at Paju Hope School, and Ray is the director.  They both speak English very well.  I was surprised that they were both there to pick me up.  I’d heard that some teachers get Google Map directions (in Korean hangul) from their schools and are left to fend for themselves with taxis and buses. As we greeted each other, I was anxious that I would make some sort of cultural faux pas and that the dozen uniformed Korean soldiers with assault rifles marching around in the airport would open fire.  This worry turned out to be unfounded. 

Ray and Doug walked me to the parking lot.  I was in a daze.  It was 6PM local time, I hadn’t slept for about 36 hours, and I WAS IN KOREA!

Everything was alien, and everything was familiar.  Yeah, I recognize that Hyundai car from back home, but why are there fifty identical models in this one parking lot?  And why is every single car black, grey, or white?  (I learned later that only “country bumpkins” drive colorful cars.)  We loaded up my two 60 pound bags and hopped on the expressway.  Alien and familiar: Highway signs in English and Korean.  The cars swerved without signaling, missing each other by inches (or centimeters, I suppose). The drivers honked for reasons I couldn’t decipher.  Doug and Ray bickered like an old married couple over the directions, though they aren't married (and, in hindsight, I don’t think it was bickering; Korean just sounds like that.)

The Reality of Korea

The landscape was unlike anything I’d seen in the States, and I’ve driven from North Carolina to Utah, from northern Michigan to Florida.  The highway followed the Han River system, which was on the left.  To the right, there were pockets of shiny skyscrapers next to grimy one story buildings.  The rest was rolling hills and the occasional mountain.  The Han River was lined with lit lampposts along the bank on the other side.  I wondered why they would need lighting over there, considering that there weren’t any buildings or towns that I could see, when Ray mentioned nonchalantly, “That’s the DMZ. And that island in the river is where the South Korean and United States armies do their live fire exercises.”   You know: the same live fire exercises that the North had just issued a threat against about a week before, saying that if the South went through with it, there would be retaliation.  My stomach dropped. 

That's North Korea in the distance.

All the things I had read about were slowly becoming real.  I could have studied a thousand books, and it wouldn’t have been the same feeling as simply being there.  “There’s the DMZ,” I thought.  “At least I get to see where the invasion will come from before it happens.”

That would be the last time that I'd be that nervous about living so close to North Korea.  I liken being near the Korean border to working the job I had installing warehouse storage racking.  With racking, you’re free climbing 30’ above a concrete floor, and jump-stepping over gaps.  Each passing jump that doesn’t end with you falling to your death makes you more confident that you’ll live through the next one.  (Statistically, that makes no sense at all, since with each step, your odds reset. But us human folk are great at making illogical rationalizations.)  That’s how it feels to live in Paju-si, South Korea; each day in which I don’t wake up to mortar fire or tanks in the streets makes me more confident that it won’t happen tomorrow.  Now, take my line of thinking from the two months I’ve been here and apply that to the fifty years or so that people in South Korea have dealt with the North-South tension, and it makes sense that no one here bothers worrying about it.

Pictured: The real reason Kim Jong-un wants to invade. 

But I digress.  Now we’re back in the car driving towards what will be my home for at least the next year.  I was taking everything in that I could.  I suppose now would be a good time to mention that one of my initial reactions to being in Korea is something that makes me feel a bit ashamed of myself.

I realized that the people here are real people.

I mean, I didn’t intentionally reduce my archetype for a “Korean” down to the dimensionality of a cartoon character.  But, when I was back home in the States, there was simply no way to fathom that these 22 million people across the world can each have individual personalities and appearances.  Our minds (or, my mind, at least) cannot make room for that many people, so we generalize until it becomes necessary to remember the specifics.  Before, Korea was just little a peninsula nation with a bunch of people living on it.  Quiet, Asian, short, highly traditional people.   Being here made me realize that the world isn’t just a map.  It’s filled with people who have their own thoughts, desires, and attitudes.  It’s filled with people who, in the grand scheme of things, are just as important to the world as I think I am.  And here’s another digression…

Koreans aren’t just taciturn, respectful people, and whether I meant to or not, that’s how I had thought of them before coming.  I was wrong.  There are stone-faced soldiers, publicly affectionate teenage couples, stumbling drunks, bored toll booth workers, racist taxi drivers, Christians, Buddhists, atheists, friendly convenience store clerks, pushy old women, a LOT of drunk middle-aged businessmen on the subways after work, mothers, children, single women in their 30s terrified they’ll never get married, excitable kindergartners, university-aged women in short skirts and high heels, and university-aged men in classy suits.  There are groups of elderly folks who can keep up with me while hiking up the mountain near my apartment.  Not only that, but when I reach the top and I'm puffing and hydrating with the Gatorade I brought along, they're sitting at the picnic tables getting drunk on makkeoli and soju  (rice beer and rice liquor). You’ll find every combination of adjective, gender (transgendered included), and age here, just like you would anywhere else.  They’re as different from each other as I am from them.  We’re all the heroes in our own stories, and I guess I’m just more aware that OTHER people in every country across the world think the same way.  It’s a simple thought, right? One that I should have already had long ago.  Hence the shame in only grasping it once I came here. 

Oh, and they aren’t nearly short as I thought.

Except these guys. They're pretty short.

            First impressions of Paju

            Anyway, we were getting close to Paju Hope School, and I was eager to see where I’d be living.  We pulled off the interstate and Ray said, “Here it is!”  I looked out excitedly, and it was--with an optimistic mindset--incredibly discouraging.

This kind of stuff.

              We drove by shacks with broken pallets leaning up against the walls, abandoned shopping malls, winding roads with dirt sidewalks.  I tried to stay upbeat.  Surely Hope School hadn’t lied when they sent me those pictures of a modern, clean downtown shopping center along with the recruiting material.  I decided to convince myself that I didn’t get a good look at the area because it was dark out.  The next morning I would be better able to see, and then it wouldn’t be so bad…right?  Yeah, turns out that was the right thing to do.

That's more like it.

           While much of the town is old farm shacks, shoddy rice fields, and empty storefronts, it also has a bustling downtown area, a view of a mountain in the background, plenty of places to eat, and Family Marts on every corner. (Family Marts are like 7-11s but even more prevalent.  I’m not exaggerating when I say they're on every corner. And you can buy liquor there. Comes in handy when you can walk out of a bar, grab a beer from the Family Mart for 1400won [about $1.30] and then head back inside. Or sneak soju into a noraebang [karaoke room]. So many digressions in this post, huh?) 

            The first night I got in, we went out to dinner with some of the teachers, even though all I wanted was to go to bed.  We went to a little café that’s actually only a few steps away from where I live now (though I didn’t know it at the time).  Going to sit down, I banged my knees on the table.  That’s something I hadn’t anticipated: it’s very hard to find a table that you can fit your knees under.  Whoda thunk it?

            I ate the weirdest thing I could find on the menu, which actually wasn’t that strange: squid, rice, egg, and kimchi.  Cost 6000won, which is about $5.25.  I’ve learned that it’s much cheaper to eat out than to cook for yourself.  It’s counter-intuitive and goes against every survival instinct I learned in college, but that’s how it works over here.

Fish heads and ramen = more expensive than a three course meal at a Korean diner.

            After dinner, Ray took me to my hotel, since the teacher I would be replacing hadn’t moved out yet.  On the entire drive from the airport, Ray had been apologizing for the hotel I was being put up in.  She said, “Outside, it does not look nice, but the inside is... (slight pause) nice.  And it’s only for a few days until we can get your apartment ready.”  I told her I was sure it would be fine.  I later learned why she had been so anxious for me to stay there.  In Korea, newlywed couples often live with their parents until they get their own place, so they need a private place to go to.  They call these places “Love Motels.”  I was staying in one.  Red lights in the hallways, colored lighting above the bed, two-person Jacuzzi, and not much else.  Apparently, last year, Ray had picked up a teacher and put him up in the same hotel.  He looked at the room and the town around it, hailed a taxi, bought a plane ticket, and flew home that night.   There may have been more to the story, but that guy must have thought of himself as royalty.

             Learning Culture from a Hotel Room

            The hotel wasn’t too bad.  Plus, I was excited to see all the little differences in amenities between Korea and home.  First off, even in a hotel room, you have to take your shoes off, even if you’re only going to take three steps into it, like the hotel worker who showed me the room.  Once everyone left, and I was finally able to rest, I tried to stay awake to look around a bit.  First, I turned on the massive TV that was on the wall about two feet away from the foot of the bed.  I couldn’t tell when the TV shows ended and the commercials began; they sort of run together into this epileptic mess of bright flashing lights and dancing, smiling hosts.  Apparently what I was watching was a news show, because in between the "super happy fun time colors to make for better viewing pleasure," one of the people on the program was being carried away in a body bag.  Interesting juxtaposition.  Even though there wasn’t any blood from what I could tell, they censored the image of the bag.  That’s quite a difference from American television where anything goes as long as its violence and not naughty words or nudity. 

            I went into the bathroom to do some ‘splorin’.  Korean bathrooms, at least in apartments and hotels, don’t have shower stalls.  The entire bathroom is the stall.  The showerhead hangs on the wall and can detach.  There’s a drain in the floor and a metal flap that covers the toilet paper to keep it from getting soggy.  In the hotel, there was a toilet from the future.  It was western style, so it wasn’t just a hole in the ground. On the left-hand side, there was a remote control with ten different buttons—none of which were marked in English.  I did my business and was weighing my options.  I looked and looked for a label that might be the flush button.  Eventually, I found it; it was just a metal push button on the side of the toilet.  The remote control was for the bidet.  I didn’t have the courage to try it.  It had options for temperature settings, massage cycles, and brushing. I didn't even know there were that many ways you could spray water up your ass.

Not worth it.

            After forty hours of traveling, I was finally able to go to sleep.  I turned on the AC, which stayed on all night.  Apparently the AC doesn’t count as a real fan, because I was alive the next morning (Close Call).  I lay down on the bed that was so hard my back cracked four times.  I’ve since gotten used to the hard mattresses they have here, but that’s mostly because I forget what an American one feels like.  The next time I go back home to Indiana, I might not be able to leave the bed. 

I slept like a baby brick from 9 at night until 4am, when the jet lag told me it was time to get up and at 'em.  I checked out the Korean computer in the hotel room and accidentally, serendipitously discovered that pressing Shift and one of the random Korean keys will switch from Korean hangul to good ol' English. I wrote my family to tell them I had made it and got ready for Hope School orientation...

PS: Thanks for reading through this, if you got this far.  I apologize for the meandering nature of the post, but there was just so much to take in on the first few days.  If the blog reads like a big hodgepodge of half-formed ideas, that’s because that was how my mind felt when I first got here.

The Flight

Sitting in the Indianapolis airport waiting for my connecting flight to Chicago, I watched the sun rise around 7am.  I realized then that I would be going more than 24 hours without seeing the sun set as we chased it westward, and that jet lag would be an unavoidable, uncomfortable reality for me very soon.  I texted my friend Ryne and told him I felt there was something literary to be said about the whole thing.  Maybe something to do with Icarus flying too close to the sun or how technology has progressed faster than our ability to cope with the changes it brings, but I was too tired and too far from those free-wheeling college English courses to be able to put it all together.

I guess you could say that the slowly approaching reality of it all introduced me to a new perspective, one that would help me shape the way I viewed the whole experience.  The jet lag was about to make my own body become something simultaneously familiar and alien.  I think it’s a good thing. I mean, what better way is there for you to start your life in a new country than to be in a state of physiological and mental ruin?  All the better to build yourself back up from the rubble.

It wasn’t two minutes from the time that I got on the plane to Incheon that I met two other nervous, excited English teachers.  Not that we even had to say what we were going over there for.  Being white, native English speakers in our early-to-mid-20s was a big tipoff.  We marveled at how many other white, native English speakers in their early-to-mid-20s were on the plane.  About a third of the passengers were obviously teachers, and the rest were all very sleepy Asians. (I’m not sure why, but just about every Asian on board was passed out, head back with mouth agape before the plane took off.  I envied them.) 

For the pre-flight demonstration, Asiana Air played wacky Eastern-style computer animation.  You might know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever seen the Tiger Woods scandal re-enactment they played on the news back in 2009 (Tiger Woods Animation).  Again: familiar and alien.  I had seen these instruction videos before with live-action, but why animated? Was that really more practical than using real actors?

Speaking of flight attendants, the actual ones that worked for Asiana Air were, how do I say this…freaking beautiful.  We’re talking Korean actress beautiful.  When I mentioned that I flew with Asiana to the other teachers in Korea, without me bringing it up, they said, “Oh, Asiana.  Yeah, they only hire gorgeous women for their flight attendants.”  Can’t say it was unpleasant having them onboard, but I also can’t say the airline’s hiring practice isn’t a wee bit lookist.  (I know. I’m surprised “lookism” is a real word, too.)

The Boeing 777 took off, and we were free to get comfortable with what would be our floating metal home for the next 15 hours.  I was sitting next to a Vietnamese mother with her little four-year-old daughter.  She was one of the cutest kids I have ever seen.  When she wasn’t napping, she’d wake up and talk to me or play hide-and-seek, which was pretty easy for me because she just hid under her blanket every time.  And she never stopped smiling.  I guess I should mention that she was cross-eyed.  VERY cross-eyed.  I think maybe that’s why I found her so endearing.  Her and I are on opposite sides of the aligned-eyeball spectrum, which goes from crossed to lazy, if you didn’t know. (As a side note, I tend to have interesting encounters with the people I sit next to on international flights:  [LINK])

There were a few things I made a point to remember from that flight.  There was the middle-aged Asian businessman who would walk ten laps every half hour from the cockpit, to where I was sitting in row 39, past the bathrooms in the back and around again.  He had a specific set of arm and hand exercises that he’d do along the way.  He was getting more of a workout during the flight than I had gotten in the past three months. 

Every four hours or so, I’d sleep for exactly 45 minutes with my iPod playing.  If 45 minutes sounds specific, that’s because at 45 minutes into the playlist, there was a song that was approximately 5000x louder than all the others.  I’d wake up thinking we were getting attacked by dubstep robots, only to realize that I was an idiot for once again leaving that song on there and too tired to take it off.

On one of those occasions where I tried to get some sleep, I was about ten minutes in, halfway dreaming about Korea and abstract nonsense, when I got punched in the face with the force of an airbag.  It was a five-year-old boy in the row behind me who went to grab my seat for leverage and accidentally threw the entire weight of his body into my jaw.  It hurt.  He was five.  I will never be a boxer.

The flight path was not what I had expected it to be.  We flew straight north from Chicago over Canada and up into Nunavut before we started heading west.  We were north of Alaska and Russia up in Santa Claus territory before we came straight back south over Siberia.  SIBERIA! Looking out the window, there was no sense of scale, but we could see an unimaginably long crack in the ice below.  Given how high we were flying and how far the visibility was, it would've been about forty miles long. 

After we took a half-hour detour to safely pass around North Korea, we finally reached South Korea.  (A month-long break in blog writing occurred here.)  We landed at Incheon International Airport, which means that a Midwesterner was now on an island off the east coast of northern South Korea.   As we walked towards customs, a strange looking camera was pointed at the hundreds of people coming down the hallway.  Once we got past it, I turned to look at the monitor it was connected to.  It was doing facial recognition scanning and thermal imaging for every single incoming passenger.  That was a good introduction to the camera culture of Korea. Essentially, every time you step outside of your apartment, your image is being filmed, either by the CCTVs at your job or by the government security cameras that line the roads and sit on top of lamp posts in the parks.  It’d feel like being watched by Big Brother, except I don’t think anybody is actually on the other side of the cameras.

I got through customs without a hitch, which was one less thing to be nervous about.  Naturally, as soon as that was over, I began to worry about whether my luggage would arrive.  It did.  What a surprise!  The informal group of foreigners that had been walking through the airport together found its way to the pickup area.  I saw a middle-aged man and woman holding a sign that said, “Chadwick.”  I parted ways with the two teachers I had met on the plane, and took my chances that I was the Chadwick the card was referring to.  This truly began my first few days in Korea.

A Czech Sunrise

I was a 20-year-old male (still am male, just not 20) when this happened. I was on an 8-hour flight to the Czech Republic from the Midwest. When I first got on the plane (around 4pm our time), I sat down in the middle section on the left side aisle. Across the aisle in the 2-seat window side was a Czech mother and her toddler. She was probably about 26 years-old, did not speak English and was very attractive (IMPORTANT).

For the first few hours of the flight, the toddler would get up, grab some stuff out of his mother's seat pocket and throw the SkyMall magazine right on the ground. Then, he'd look up at me and smile. I thought it was really cute, so I would smile back at him, pick it up and give it to his embarrassed mother. That was our only communication at that point.

Eventually, the kid fell asleep next to his mom. The sun went down, and around one hour later, it started coming back up because of the route we were flying. I had never seen a sunrise from a plane window before, so I leaned over and looked past the mother out her window to see the brilliant orange, blues, and grays. She gave me a funny look, and I just smiled at her, nodded, and kept looking in her direction out the window. She jerked her shoulder towards me in an indignant sort of way. I was like, "um...okay..." when I noticed something... 


Turns out she was breastfeeding her kid and assumed I was craning my neck to get a better look. Needless to say, I've never felt creepier than that to this day...

As a side note, I posted this story on Reddit, and another user was kind enough make an Urban Dictionary entry for it:  Urban Dictionary