Goodbye, Part 1

One of the hardest parts about teaching in Korea is how transient the expat community is. Contracts are only for a year and once their year is up, a lot of teachers go home. I was lucky my first year and none of my close friends left, but this year Omega left in May, Tony and Christine left in November and Riah left a few weeks ago.

On what was suppose to be Riah's last evening in Korea, we (Audrey, Caroline, Riah, Siobhain and I - the ladies I spent Christmas with) were sitting in Cold Stone in Gangnam, feeling morose, when Caroline suggested we make a scrapbook as a going away present. She had a Polaroid camera. I had many different colors of pens. We had a notebook and stickers. And scissors. And tape. Look, I'm friends with a very crafty group of people, okay!


I love that I'm friends with a group of people who, when someone suggests making an impromptu goodbye scrapbook, ACTUALLY have all the necessary supplies on hand.


Caroline and Siobhain examining a Polaroid.
And so we made a scrapbook. It was a rush job; Cold Stone kicked us out at 11:00, the Coffee Bean we relocated to kicked us out half an hour later and Audrey and I needed to catch the last train home at midnight. The first half of the scrapbook was detailed (or at least had interesting asides) and had introductions and dinosaurs and fun lessons learned in Korea (even in Korea, don't assume people don't understand English is an important one) while the second half consisted of unannotated Polaroid pictures hastily taped onto blank pages while the Coffee Bean employees gave us the side eye for still being in their shop ten minutes after closing.


Riah's introduction page. When pronounced with a Korean accent, Riah sounds an awful lot like the word liar, so Riah specified that her pants were not on fire. And, underneath No Pants On Fire, I added 불 바지 없어요, which says, in what I'm sure is truly atrocious Korean, No Fire Pants. It was hilarious at the time.
We adjourned to the street outside to say our final goodbyes, which were awful. Saying goodbye is never fun, but it's especially hard in such a ephemeral community because Korea, our common ground, isn't a permanent location for any of us. My group of friends from university still meets up in Chapel Hill periodically, but the odds of seeing this group of girls again in the US are slim. Also, for me, saying goodbye to Riah was the first on a long list of goodbyes I have to say this month.


Riah gave us matching bracelets from Cambodia as a going away present.
So, we were standing on the street of Gangnam crying and promising to write and it's awful and cold and then Audrey and I realized that if we want to get home, we have to leave RIGHT NOW, only we didn't realize the time quite soon enough and just missed our last transfer. I've just barely caught a lot of last trains home, but in two years of living here, this was the first time I actually missed it.

Luckily, we were both able to find taxis willing to drive out to where we live with minimal fuss.

I woke up the next day, Wednesday morning, to an email from Riah. The snowstorm that ate Chicago (are we calling this one Snowpocalypse?) meant that O'Hare was closed and Riah was stuck in Korea until Friday night. Suck it, Chicago. On Thursday, Riah, Audrey and I went to COEX, and during our shopping breaks, we finished the scrapbook. We captioned the photos and wrote lists based on our experience here: crazy English names Korean children give themselves, Things We <3 About Korea, Places we <3 in Korea, How to Anger a Korean, Important Konglish Words, Important Korean Words.

Our list of Important Korean Words is possible the most worthless list of Korean ever and contains such gems as kimchi dumplings, old woman, fleece lined pants and fish (the animal, not the kind you eat). Others - Samsung, Hyundai, soju (Korean rice liquour, like drinking rocket fuel) and bulgogi (Korean barbecued beef) - don't even have an English translation. We had more, actually useful, words, but it turns out we don't know how to spell the Korean we use the most. We spent five minutes trying to figure out how to write thank you, a word I say ALL THE TIME.

After several failed attempts, I said, "You know, we are surrounded by people who know how to write 감사합니다."

We looked around at the cafe, full of Koreans. "Yeah," Riah and Audrey said.

"We could, you know, ask any one of them."

"Yeah," they said again. We stayed seated and left thank you off our list.

Audrey and I said goodbye to Riah again Friday afternoon, after spending the morning at the jimjabang. It still sucked, and I still cried, but it was easier the second time. It was easier when we weren't rushed. It was also easier because, during her extra days, Riah and I made plans to take a road trip once we're both back in the States. Wisconsin and North Carolina aren't that far apart.


Me and Riah

죽을래, Blog?

Long time, no blog. Since I last wrote I have:

• Turned 26, which was anticlimactic since I had already turned 27 Korean age a few weeks before.*


• Pru came for a week and we went to many palaces and markets and ate lots of food. Some of it was in a tent and some of it was deep fried and on a stick.


• Pru also got me started on K-dramas. We mainlined Secret Garden in four days and now I'm watching a bunch of K-dramas, three of which are about cross dressers (I swear that was an accident) and something called Joseon X-files (oh yeah, aliens in 16th century Korea). *faceplam*


• Said good-bye to Riah, who left for the US. On Tuesday, we made an impromptu scrapbook in Cold Stone and cried on the streets of Gangnam and Audrey and I missed our train home. On Wednesday, I woke up to an email from Riah telling me that the snowstorm that ate America meant that O'Hare was closed until Friday and I got two and a half more days with Riah! Suck it, Midwest! [More here]


• Celebrated 설날 (Seolnal, lunar New Year) by making a spectacle of myself with Riah and Audrey at the aquarium, one of the few places that was open. Welcome to the Year of the Rabbit!


• Adhearing to the rule that you should be as clean as possible before getting on a trans-Pacific flight, the morning before Riah's flight, Audrey, Riah and I went to the bathhouse for a few hours. It was my first time at Dragon Hill Spa, which I liked, especially the outdoor tubs, but my favorite is still the green tea themed spa I went to in Boseong.


• Break is over and students are back for eight whole days before the end of the school year. Yesterday, the 3-1 boys filed in a few minutes ahead of the girls. "Where are the girls?" I asked.
  
  I was solemnly told, "In Seolnal, they is DIE!"
  
  죽을래, which means do you want to die?, is a common expression in Korea and I've heard countless variations of it in English in the past two years, but it still kills** me every time.

All of these bullet points deserve their own entry, but it's unlike I will actually get around to them.

* Sokay, in Korea ages are counted differently than in the West. You're one when you're born (none of this X month business for the first year) AND you age on New Years instead of your actual birthday, which means your Korean age can be up to two years older than your Western age. On December 31st, I was 25 US age, 26 Korean age. The next day was New Years, which meant I turned 27 Korean age while I was still 25 US age. Since my birthday is in January, my Korean age is normally only one year ahead of my western age, but my little sister, who just turned sixteen in December is already eighteen in Korea. Somewhere my mother just blanched at the thought.
**Zing!

SOSing

Monday's Frustrations:
The 5th graders started Lesson 14: Is Peter There? this week. It's all about phone numbers and phone conversations so, of course, I played "867-5309/Jenny" and told the kids to listen for the phone number and write it down. While the students enjoyed the song, the activity was a complete failure. I showed a live performance of the song from YouTube, and the sound quality was less than steller. Even I was having trouble making out the lyrics, and I already knew what they were. After the first two classes, I scrapped the idea and spent the last five minutes of class reviewing Step & Jump.

Monday's Konglish:
Cheating (or as it's called in Konglish, cunning) is rampant in Korean classrooms, far more than I remember from when I was in school, and it's not uncommon to see half the class blatantly cheating during textbook activities. During the "Let's Write" textbook activity today, I saw a boy leaning over for a look at his friend's textbook.

"No cunning," I told them.

"'Teacher," the first boy protested. "I'm no cunning. I'm ... SOSing."

It's a touch depressing that he couldn't think of help, which is basic vocabulary, but I am amused that he substitued it for the Morse code signal for help.

바보, Cait

Michelle and I gave the 5th graders a test today, mostly as punishment for making me want to defenestrate them last week. There were several sections, including three sentences written in Korean for the students to translated into English. I was looking over the test while the kids worked and Michelle asked if I could translate the Korean sentences. I started sounding out the words* and translating under my breath.

그녀는 무엇을 하고 있니? Well, it's a question, 무엇을 means what, 그녀는 means she and 있니 means is, which give me What is she something. The title of Chapter 11 (one of the chapters being tested) is What Is She Doing? and anyways, I'm pretty sure 하고 means do, so 그녀는 무엇을 하고 있니? must mean What is she doing?

그는 노래하고 있어. 그는 and 있어 are he and is and 노래 is the first part of the Korean word for karaoke room and hey, I think 노래하고 would literally translate to do song, which means singing. 그는 노래하고 있어 means He is singing.

나는 달리고 있어. Well, as per the last two sentences, 있어 still means is and 나는 means I. I am something. 달리고, where do I know that from? Oh right, that's what my co-teachers are always telling the students when them come tearing into the classroom at top speed. 나는 달리고 있어 means I am running.

I looked up from the paper, pleased with awesome Korean skillz, only to find the fifth graders in the front row hanging onto my every word and frantically scribbling down the answers I had just inadvertently given them.

One of the boys gave me a thumbs up and said, "Thanks, Teacher."

Michelle looked at me and said, "You can't say the sentences out loud."

"I didn't think I'd be able to translate them," I wailed softly.

바보, Cait.**

*While I've been able to read Korean for almost two years now, I still don't recognize many words that aren't place names, so I have to sound things out when I read and sometimes, they turn out to be words I know.

**바보 - dumb, stupid, foolish

Monkeys, Lions and Penguins, Oh My!

-- Am still sick. Oh boy, am I still sick. I felt much better on Thursday and was all, "Ha, this is why I don't take unidentified medicine!" and then I woke up hella sick on Friday and got progressively worse throughout the day. Because irony hates me. At lunch, a co-worker bluntly told me, "You look very bad today." By the end of the day, my students were worriedly asking why I was crying (my eyes were bloodshot - bloodshot with disease) and my co-teacher suggested that I not worry about the after school classes and just take a nap in my office. I asked her if I looked that bad. She gave me a long look and said, "Yes Cait, you look that bad." I finally made it home to a mirror and, yeah, I had sick eyes.  No one wants to hear about me complain about how I'm siiiiiiiiick, but suffice to say I went back to the doctor Saturday morning and my cold has morphed into a fever and some quasi-serious lung issues. The good news is I'm on meds, and while I might be all hippie and organic about medicine, I am fully aware that antibiotics are my friend. The bad news is just now I went to make food happen and I got so dizzy, I had to sit down in my kitchen, which does not bode well for when I have to put on pants and teach children tomorrow.

-- Both Korea and the US were eliminated last night. I'm sad the World Cup is over for me, at least in terms of fan participation. I'm sad being sick robbed me of my last chance to wear devil horns and jump up and down a sing patriotic Kpop songs in a crowd of thousands of Koreans. I'm bummed my students will stop showing up to class temporary tattoos on their cheeks, gleeful and excited about the next game. I'm disappointed I never managed to catch a US game. I'm sad for the players, because they looked so damn happy after Thursday's game and now it's over. And I'm a bit annoyed that I'm going to have to pick a team to root for based on something over than pure nationalism.

-- While waiting for the after school class to start on Thursday (the one day this week where I felt like an actual human being instead of some walking plague factory), my third graders and I played a charade-like game. I would say the name of an animal - sometimes in English, sometimes in Korean - and they would pretend to be the animal. After a good ten minutes of playing, I realized that while I might bemoan the state of my Korean, it's not so much that I don't know any and more that everything I know is useless. God forbid I have to give a taxi driver anything beyond the most basic directions, but I can name every animal in the zoo, which is no help, unless I'm having the taxi drive me around a zoo. Turn left at the monkey isn't nearly as useful of a phrase as I live next to the Daiso.



Monkeys, lions and penguins, oh my!

Sit Down?

SCENE: The English classroom, during class change between second and third period. Most of my 6-5 class is already in the classroom, huddled in groups playing 공기, running in and out of the classroom and shouting at their friends - generally acting like children who just took a two hour test and are ready to have some fun, however briefly. Class hasn't started yet, so as long as they're not hitting each other or destroying my classroom, I don't care what they do.

RELEVANT LINGUISTIC INFORMATION: In Korean, if a ㅅ (/s/ - equivalent of an English 's') is followed by a 이 (/i/ or /i:/ - romanized as an 'i' and the equivalent of the 'ee' in meek), the 's' sound becomes a 'sh' (/ɕ/). For example, the Silla dynasty is pronounced Shilla. Some of you have probably already guessed where this story is going.

So, one of my sixth grade boys who isn't the brightest kid, but is hilarious and outgoing and good at expressing himself regardless of linguistic barriers and, just to complete the mental picture, super tiny and wearing a bright pink hoodie, walks into class, sees his classmates going crazy around me and decides to restore order.

"SIT DOWN!" he yells, a command my students have heard me say plenty of times, only what he actually says is, "SHIT DOWN!"

"SHIT DOWN, SHIT DOWN, SHIT DOWN!" he shouts at each group of students milling about, while I stand at the front of the class and bite my lip so hard I can still feel the teeth marks hours later in an attempt not to laugh.

Some days, I really love being a teacher!

One of these things is not like the other....

Actualfax conversation I had with Marie today. (Relevant info: Today was Open House at my school and I had to go downstairs to bow to the parents. That's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. I stood in front of an assembly of my students' parents and bowed while they clapped politely. I got to do the same thing to the student body on my first day of school. It's Korea: you bow. Fact of life.)

Cait: awesome! was just introduced to the parents as Native Teacher Gate
Marie: HAHAHA! so they don't realize it's pronounced with the ㅋ sound not the ㄱ sound. (ㅋ is romanized as 'k' and is a hard 'k' sound, such as in my name. ㄱ is more of a 'g' sound and at the start of a syllable is romanized as a 'g', but at the end of a syllable it's romanized as 'k'. This leads of all sorts of fun confusion.)
Cait: my principal doesn't. My co-teachers have told him, but he just keeps on calling me Gate.
Marie: LOL I will start calling you Gate. I'm contemplating changing your name in my phone
Cait: ahahaha I'm still being called Cake by some of the students.
Marie: hmm, that's really a hard decision. Gate, or Cake in the phone. You need to make a powerpoint.
C-A-K-E Cake (picture of Cake)
C-A-I-T Cait (picture of Cait)
Cait: there are just so many fun ways to mangle my name.
Marie: maybe your students were hungry?
Cait: I did meet the 6th graders right before lunch....


One of these things is a delicious treat. The other is no longer amused.

Eureka!

So, I've been studying Korean in earnest (albeit on and off) for a couple of months now and, well, it's slow going. Korean is so different from English or any other language I've studied that I barely even know where to begin. I have a textbook that I haul around with me and pull out when I have a spare moment, and I've spent hours writing the same words and sentences and grammatical concepts over and over again:

가다 - to go, 가다 - to go, 가다 - to go, 가다 - to go
나는 서울에 가요. - I go to Seoul. 나는 학교에 가요. - I go to school.
는/은 - object markers, 는 - if the previous syllable ends with vowel, 은 - if the previous syllable ends with a consonant
너 - you, 너 - you, 너 - you, 그 - he, 그 - he, 그 - he, 그녀 - she, 그녀 - she,그녀 - she

And really, I'm no closer to being able to understand what people are saying around me than I was a few months ago. I understand the idea behind immersion learning, but without a basic understanding of how the language works, you don't get far. Once I learned how to count, I was able to figure out the basics of number classifiers just by listening to how other people ordered things, but only once I knew the numbers. And other examples are few and far between. I get by okay by speaking phrases and nodding a lot while not really understanding the answer, but sometimes I despair about actually being able to use Korean on any sort of a functional level.

My fifth graders are working on possessives and on Monday my co-teacher gave them a worksheet that included, among other things, six Korean sentences to translate into English. I was walking around, helping the kids with the other sections when I realized I didn't know the translations for those sentences. Crap, I thought to myself, as I turned to find my co-teacher and ask for a translation. Then I paused and really looked at the sentences:
이것은 너의 연필이다. // 이것은 너의 것이다.
이것은 그의 컴퓨터이다. // 이것은 그의 것이다.
이것은 그녀의 가방이다. // 이것은 그녀의 것이다.

And I realized - dude! - I got this. I know what those sentences mean. I'm not just inferring based on being able to read a word or two, but I *know* what those *sentences* *mean* and I understand the underlying grammatical components. In a perfect combination of acquired knowledge and sheer exposure to Korean, something clicked.

이것은 너의 연필이다. 이것 = This. I know that from the phrase how much is this. 은 = means the word this is the object of the sentence. I learned that out of a textbook. 너 = you. I ought to know that one; it's one of the hundreds of words I've written over and over again while studying. 의 = possessive marker. I knew the lesson was about possessives, which means that something has to turn the you into your and 의 was the only unknown in the sentence. 연필 = pencil. My students like to teach my Korean, usually by pointing to an object on my desk and telling me the Korean and English word. I've have dozens of different students teach me the word for pencil. 이다 = is. My students shout BINGO이다! whenever they see the Bingo boards on my desk. "Hurray," they're saying, "it's BINGO!"

이것은 너의 연필이다 = This is your pencil.

I'm no closer to being able to understand Korean than I was last week, but I feel like at least I'm making some progress.

Fourth Graders Are Adorable

There are truths universally acknowledged: a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife and fourth graders are adorable. I teach third through sixth grade, but fourth and sixth grade are my favorite. I have a rotating group of fourth grade girls assigned to clean my classroom (no janitors in Korea, they use the children instead). Half of them hate it because my classroom is always a mess (although hopefully my new policy of if-I-see-you-throwing-things-in-my-class-you're-staying-late-to-clean will help with that), but the other half love it because it means fun times with the English teacher. Also, sometimes I give them candy.


This is 예림 and 유지. 예림 (Ye Lim, English name: Tiffany) is on the left. 유지 (Yu Ji, English name: Alice) is on the right. They don't actually like cleaning the English room, but they love to come by my office after school. We talk, usually about makeup (which they are obsessed with and I am woefully uninformed about) and I let them play games (usually about makeup) on my computer. I justify it by making them explain the rules to me in English and they make it worth my while by showing me a Fair Isle knitting game on Naver (Korean Google).


This is 윤주 (Yun Ju, English name: Judith). She is easily one of my best students of any grade. I am constantly taken aback by how *advanced* her English is. She's all quiet and demure in class and then - bam! - she breaks out a fully formed, grammatically complex sentence. With the rest of my fourth graders, I'm just happy if their sentences have a noun AND a verb. She used 'widow' in conversation one day and when I asked how she knew the word, she told me it was because she's reading the Bible in English.


Only girls are assigned to clean the classrooms, which, of course. Korea? A patriarchal society? What makes you say that? (The boys do have chores, but they're assigned things like crossing guard duty in the morning, not cleaning.) 강석 is the one and only boy in the cleaning rota and it's only because he was shanghaied. The poor kid was just walking down the hallway one day, minding his own business, when a group of girls rushed out, grabbed him, drug him into the English classroom and put him to work. He was a good sport about it.


재희 loves to teach me Korean. She usually stick with nouns, things in the classroom she can point to. I have learned to words for pencil (연필), pencil sharpener (연필 깎개), scissors (가위), eraser (지우개) and window (창문) a hundred times. She's always super excited when I write anything in Hangul (Oh Teacher, very good job!) and together we cover the whiteboard with writing. On the board, you can see the day's vocabulary: sun (해), name (이름), desk (책상), the name of my school, table (서탁), dog (개), girl (소녀), phone (전화) and radio (라디오).


On Friday, my cleaning crew discovered that there are some English board games in the back of the classroom. We never use them because the classes are too big (a 4-6 player game in a class of 38 doesn't work well), but they're great for a couple of 4th graders. The girls chose Boggle Jr. which was perfect for them. The fourth graders are just starting to learn to read and write, and since the curriculum completely ignores phonics, I jumped at any chance to teach it. (I have a big long rant about phonics and how they don't exist in the public school curriculum. I think I understand where they're coming from. The Korean English teachers are often woefully unqualified to teach English and phonics are confusing, especially if your native writing system is a one-letter-one-sound-no-exceptions system like Hangul, but if the children don't learn to sound out words, their only alternative is to what? Memorize the dictionary? Good luck with that one. A few months ago one of the vocabulary words for 5th grade was elevator. I gave the kids a worksheet with their vocabulary words written in English and told them to translate it. Only a handful where able to translate elevator, which is funny, since it's the same damn word in Korean. They had just never seen it written before and they couldn't figure out how to sound it out.)


With that being said, English phonics are incredible confusing. Take for example wood (above) and tool. Both have "oo" as the vowel sound, but the vowel sounds aren't the same. My poor babies were so confused. "But Teacher," they told me. "Wood. Tool. Not same same. Why?!" Kiddos, the answer is that English is the language that lurks in dark alleys, beats up other languages and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary. Also, we like to screw with your minds.

My Hobby

Telling my students, "한국말 몰라요!" (translation=I don't know Korean) and watching their brains slowly implode. "But Teacher," they wail as they try to process me telling them I can't speak Korean IN Korean, which means that I can - in fact - speak Korean, at least a little. "You Korean speaking now!" I just smile, repeat myself and watch steam slowly pour from my kids' ears. They like the sneak up behind me and shout, "Teacher! Hello Korean speaking!" in an attempt to trick me into using Korean, therefore admitting that I DO speak Korean and allowing us to drop this ridiculous English speaking façade. This, plus my habit of answering question asked in Korean*, has my students CONVINCED that I actually can speak Korean and won't, just to be mean.

*This actually isn't that hard. There's a very finite number of questions I am regularly asked in class and it's not that hard to learn the necessary vocabulary to be able to understand them. Blah blah blah something in Korean 아니오 책 means, "Teacher, I have forgotten my textbook." I don't have to be able to understand what is undoubtedly a sob story about how the dog ate the textbook to be able to understand that sentence. No (아니오) and book (책) are sufficient. Plus, it's really not that difficult to guess a lot of what they're saying. While speaking the same language is nice, it's not actually that necessary for basic communication, and little kids are ridiculously expressive. Blah blah blah something in Korean 아니오 책, plus pointing down the hallways means, "Teacher, I have left my textbook in my classroom. Many apologize and, with your permission, I shall go fetch it. Be back, prepared for class, in a jiff." I nod, wave towards their classroom and tell them, "Okay, but next time, remember your book before you get to class." The student runs off, the entire exchange was conducted without either of us having the slightest clue what the other person was saying, the other students stare at me and exclaim, "Teacher! He Korean speaking! You understand! WHAT?!" All I'm saying is, kid, if you're doing a little jig and pointing down the hallway, I don't need to know the word 화장실 to know you need to take a leak.

Stitching and Bitching (and Some Studying)

Fishy says,"Om nom nom nom. Dead skin is delicious!"
I went to Gangnam on Thursday night for SnB. The Thursday night meetings are currently being held at Namu Keuneul, a coffee shop that has a Dr. Fish spa for 2,000 won ($1.60). The doctor fish (also called reddish log sucker and doctorfishen) is a type of tropical fish that eats dead skin. They were originally used to treat skin diseases, but in Korea and Japan, they're used in spas. Full body spas exist (and seriously creep me out), but the Dr. Fish at Namu Keuneul was just a foot spa.




First you wash your feet to prevent contaminating the pool. Then you soak your feet in the tubs for twenty minutes while the fish nibble on your toes. The dark clouds surround our feet are actually fish, which flocked to us as soon as we stuck our feet in.   It doesn't hurt at all, but it does tickle. A lot! Turns out, my feet are really ticklish. I believe the phrase "Pillsbury Doughboy" was used to describe my reaction. (Sarah, on my reaction: was not even remotely surprised.) I couldn't stop laughing! Marie, Siobhain and I took our knitting with us and knit while the fish nibbled.

Then on Sunday I went to Sinchon for the new Sunday meeting. It's very new - this is only the second meeting - and I was the only person for the first two hours. It's in a nice coffee shop, though, and I used the opportunity to make myself study Korean. Since I'm going to be staying in Korea for a second year, I figure it's time to get off my butt and start learning the language. 나는 한굴말를 공부해요. In Roman letters, that's Nanun Hangulmallul gongbuhaeyo, which means (I think) I study Korean. I can't form the past tense yet, but that's okay because this is more of an on-going (never ending?) project.

[I ask them to desist and to refrain // and then we call upon the author to explain]

Last night I discovered the my phone has a subway map application on it. I actually noticed this when I first got the phone, but since the map is entirely in Hangul and I didn't know any of the alphabet when I got the phone, I forgot about it. Last night, however, I was lying in bed*, wishing I could fall asleep and fiddling with my phone, and I found the map again. This time, I knew the alphabet** and while I wasn't quick, I could read most of the station names.*** This is all sorts of handy, since I never remember to take a subway map with me and I end up wandering the train, looking for a compartment with a map of the entire system, not just the line I'm on. Also, it has a function that tells you the approximate travel time between stations, and a function that will tell you the quickest route vs. the route with the fewest transfers. I wasted half an hour plotting various trips around the city. (Turns out I can get home from Sinchon like fifteen minutes faster if I transfer at Seoul Station instead of riding the green line all the way to Sadang. This is good to know!)

^* I got sent home sick from school yesterday. I woke up with the milder version of this, but decided to go into school anyways since it seriously wasn't worth the hassle. I made it through my first two classes, but was discovered with my head on my desk during class change and my co-teacher freaked out and took me to the school nurse. The nurse, vice principal and my co-teacher all tried to take me to the hospital (Korean solution to everything), but I managed to convince them to just let me go home and sleep. I woke up this morning feeling fine and with my period, so I think I've discovered the cause. I knew there was no point in going to the hospital. I was impressed, however, by the gossip network at the school. Almost as soon as I got to school people knew I wasn't feeling well. I think it's possible my co-teacher sent out some sort of memo saying I was sick, because all morning teachers and students came by the English zone and told me they hoped I felt better. I was all, WTF HOW DO YOU KNOW, DO I LOOK THAT ROUGH?!?!

^**I got sick of the whole learn a letter/sound/word a day thing, so I decided to go with the tried and true method of making flashcards and reviewing until I knew them. It took me about an hour on Monday afternoon to learn most of the alphabet. I'm still a bit hazy on some of the vowels, especially the w+vowel combos, but I'm pretty much literate again. :D

^***Except for those stations where the name is one thing in Korean and another in English. For example, the station I live at. In Korean, it's 한대앞 (Handae'ap), but the English name is Hanyang University at Ansan, which is in no way a direct translation. This caused all kinds of trouble my first few weeks here, because whenever I got in a taxi, I asked to go to the Hanyang University at Ansan station and all I got was blank looks. Finally, someone explained that the Korean name for the station was completely different.

Hangul

I'm trying to learn Hangul (한글), the Korean alphabet. I think it will be easier to learn Korean (and teach English, for that matter) if I can actually read the alphabet. Plus, I'm getting sick of being illiterate. I've been studying Hangul for a few weeks now, mostly by reading signs on the subway. All the station signs are in Korean, with the Romanization right below, so it's a great way to figure out the more common letters. Then I bought First Steps in Korean at What the Book. I think most of it's going to be pretty useless, but it was cheep and has a good introduction to the alphabet.

Every few days I open it up and start studying, but I get overwhelmed quickly and start to forget what I've learned, especially with the vowels, of which there are twenty one. So I'm changing tactics. Instead of just trying to learn the letters, I'm going to try and learn a new Korean word each day. The idea is that I'll have a better chance remembering what sound goes with what letter if I can associate it with a word. Each word will have at least one new letter in it, so by the end of the month, I should know the alphabet, plus at least thirty new Korean words. Since this will basically double my vocabulary, it's a win-win situation.

Today's Korean word is 귤 (gyul). It means either tangerine or orange. The fruit itself looks more like a tangerine and is seedless like a clementine, but my book gives the definition as orange. It taste sweet, a little tart and absolutely amazing. I've eaten approximately 53890403 귤 (gyul) in the past two months and I've bought none of them. I'm not a huge fan of Korean food and 귤 (gyul) is one of the few foods people at my school know I like, so it's severed at every school event. Every time there's 귤 (gyul) at lunch, I'm always given the left overs and one time during a volleyball tournament at another school, my co-teachers made me stuff my bag with 귤 (gyul) from the reception before I was allowed to leave. It's an especially good word to know since a) I'll actually use it and b) it contains the letter g. In Hangul, the letter 'g' looks like this 'ㄱ'. The letter 'n' looks like this like this 'ㄴ' and I've had the hardest time remembering which one is which.

In addition to 귤, I also learned the word 토끼 (tokki), which means rabbit. One of my students taught me the word before class today. She was wearing a hoodie with a monkey on it and when she came into the classroom, she pointed to her chest and said, "Monkey!" I told her very good and then said monkey in Korean. Her eyes got very big and she said, "Very good, teacher!" Then she pantomimed rabbit (held up two fingers to be the ears and made them hop) and told me "Tokki." I repeated the word a couple of times until I said it to her satisfaction and we grinned at each other. And then there was this explosion of English. She told me her favorite animal (monkey), favorite color (red) and all about her family. I could have hugged her. This was one of the few times I've seen a student go beyond the basic formulaic statements we teach in class, make a cognitive leap about the different words and phrases they've been taught and actually communicate in English. I'm so proud of her!

Bonus picture: I know not everyone's computers display the Korean alphabet, here's a picture of all the Korean in this entry:

Korean Lessons

My kids took it upon themselves to teach me Korean today. A couple of fifth graders were hanging out in the English classroom, as they are wont to do, and they started pointing to the illustrations of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and telling me the Korean word. We went through the animals in the book (some of which I still remember; monkey is 원숭이 - sounds like won-sung-e), and then a few more fifth graders showed up and they went crazy. I had five little girls running around the room, picking up everything they could find, so they could tell me the Korean word. I kept having to ask them to line up so I could listen to all of them at once. It was precious, though. They were so excited to be able to teach me. I wish I had more opportunities to interact with the students in small groups, instead of just seeing them in class.

[call me on the line // call me call me any anytime]

I got my alien registration card on Monday. The alien registration card looks like a driver licenses, only nicer because the picture has been heavily airbrushed (no freckles, frizzy hair or general looking like hot death!) and is needed for all sorts of things such as getting a bank account or a cell phone, two things I didn't have and desperately needed. I was paid on Monday for the first time since July (wheee!) and promptly went and bought a cell phone.


This is 굿 (kut), the exorcism phone! Look, I was bound and determined to somehow work the fact that I know the Korean word for exorcism in to a conversation. Plus, I was using a random Korean word for the name and it was either 굿 or 가위 (scissors), and who ever heard of a phone called scissors.
Word immediately spread around school that I had a phone, even to the students. Today I was mobbed by a group of fifth graders shouting, "Teacher, 선생님 (seon-saeng-nim), phone," only when they say phone, they pronounce it like porn. (True story: when my co-teacher said we would go buy a phone after lunch, I heard "We will go buy you porn after lunch." For a moment I was all, I really don't think we're at that point in our relationship. Luckily I have a good enough mental filter to prevent myself from actually saying that. *facepalm*) I eventually scribbled my phone number on the white bored with my co-teacher's blessing. It was greeted by squeals of excitement and all the students whipped out the cellphones and programed the number in. I really hope none of them call me though. I'm their teacher - I *know* how bad some of their English is. That would be one very short conversation.

(What you really should take away from this blog post is the amount of Korean I managed to work into it, and while it might look impressive, I want you to know that it's like a tenth of my entire Korean vocabulary. That's right, exorcism is 1/30 of my Korean vocabulary.)