I woke up feeling fatigued and ill but strangely I feel alright again. I told everyone that I was suffering from the Swine Flu which elicited a few laughs. Last night we (some of the foreign teachers that live in my apartment complex- there are six or seven 13-15 story buildings around me called Kyung Hee Hak Sung (I think Hak Sung means apartment?) ventured into what we call downtown Asan also called Onyang for some drinks. There are about 50-60 foreign teachers scattered throughout the apartment complex but I only usually see and know about 20 of them. We live in, Sinchang- a small town of about...maybe 15,000-20,000 which lives and dies when the university is in session. Sun Chun Hyang university is the definition of a commuter school. During the week, students are out and about the streets, usually stumbling around drunk at night. The weekends turn the town into a veritable ghost town- when I arrived here, I came on a Friday and thought my life was going to end because a) I didn't know there were that many foreigners living next to me and b) I wasn't told about that the student's flock in masse to their homes on weekends. My experience is that Koreans tend to drink a lot and students are no exception. Alcoholism is a wholly concept/disease? /issue/problem in the West or U.S.- Koreans work very had and play equally hard. It's actually quite hilarious even now, seeing students and old men sozzled after they get done eating. When you go out to dinner, soju (the Korean hard alcohol similar to Japanese sake which gives you incredibly bad hangovers; it's half the alcohol percentage of vodka; has a smell reminiscent of paint thinner or nail polish remover and costs next to nothing, about 1300 Won for a bottle which is about a dollar U.S.) is just as much as part of the meal as rice. Unless you're going to Itaewon (an enclave in Seoul exclusively for two types of people: 1) moronic G.I.s who tarnish America's already soiled reputation one bar fight at a time, and 2) foreigners who wish they never set foot in Korea and desperately want to cling to all the amenities of home), western style bars are not uncommon but perhaps hard to come by. Koreans usually go to restaurants to drink with a group of friends where they spend hours eating, drinking, and probably denigrating foreigners (English teachers are just as much cultural ambassadors as teachers of English; Korea after all, didn't earn the name, 'The Hermit Kingdom' for nothing; Korea only started opening up to the West very recently and this still is a completely homogeneous, insular, and, isolated society vis-a-vis the U.S. or most western countries).
Today (Wednesday, April 29) we have off from school because of school board elections in which they elect the head school superintendent. I for one and probably many other teachers as well have absolutely no clue why we need a day off for this but like with many things in Korea, the answer to why things are done differently here are not important. I've found that you have to accept things for what they are; the more you try to look for answers about for example, why you don't shake hands (generally you don't but sometimes close friends do and it's not totally absent incidentally) but instead you share food when you eat at traditional and even many contemporary restaurants is beyond me? Or why the intercom in my apartment- there's a guy who starts speaking in the morning sometimes? I could go on but for some reason I'm blanking on the myriad occurrences of confusing seemingly inane things that go daily here.
Let me explain how going to a restaurant works for those of you who don't know. Let's say you go to a traditional restaurant. Here you have at least a couple of side dishes (love the side dishes!) of different types of kimchi, and maybe eggs, seaweed, squid, and other stuff that I can't think of right now. A big misnomer to the uninformed is that there is only one vegetable type of kimchi. You'll soon find out there are many many different types of kimchi e.g. my favorite, the spinach kimchi (which I have in my fridge at the moment), the most common I think, lettuce kimchi, radish kimchi, and probably dozens of other types that I don't know of. Everyone then, helps them self with whatever side dish seems appealing at the moment. Bone appetite!
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