I understand that there are cultural differences between Americans and Koreans. I understand that these differences may at times be hard to understand. However, I do believe that there are universal cultural norms that are true all over the world. For a long time, I thought that these cultural norms included many hygienic standards, such as, say, not hawking up loogies at every possible juncture. It appears I was incorrect. At all hours of the night you can hear Koreans (and even a French kid or two) treating the sinks as if they were modern day spittoons rather than what I incorrectly assumed were washbasins designed for tooth brushing and hand washing. They spend so much time hacking up phlegm that you would assume that they were auditioning to be an extra in the bar scene of an upcoming Western flick. Beyond this, though, the difference in what I assumed to be universal norms spreads to other areas of everyday dorm life.
I know that I have touched on strange Korean behavior in the gym before, but I have seen enough disturbing new things that I felt I needed to outline them here. Together, they seem to demonstrate a clear lack of understanding about the purpose of a gym by students at this school. As not everyone is apparently clear on the concept, I feel that it may bear repeating that gyms are for working out. Despite what you may gather from people here, they are not bedrooms, beauty parlors, cinemas, or anything else. The first clue that a person is not doing the right thing is readily apparent. If somebody is wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants and does not have a drop of sweat on their face after 5 minutes, much less 30, they are not doing what they are supposed to be doing in a gym. Unless you are somehow genetically crossed with a golden retriever, and are therefore physically unable, sweating is part of the process of working out. It is fairly infuriating to have to use the broken exercise bike while the kid on the good bike right next to you spends 20 minutes watching anime on his portable media player and breaking as much of a sweat as he might if he were standing outside the Saint Basil’s Cathedral during a snowstorm. Another clear sign that you’re doing it wrong is using the machines without putting any weight on them. Doing 10 pound leg curls is neither impressive nor productive. I’ve seen mimes lift more weight during their routines. There are paraplegics who could do more impressive leg presses than some of these kids.
One of the more shocking things I’ve seen was kids playing ping-pong on the floor of the gym. At first, I assumed it was just a quick joke while they were grabbing a drink. After about a minute of hearing that ball clicking against the floor, then a paddle, then back, it started to get annoying. When they started really whacking it back and forth across the room it began to be too much. The final straw was when they started using a barbell as the net for their impromptu game. At that point, I had to inform them that there was a fully functional ping-pong table in the adjacent room, which I was sure, would be adequate for all of their “sporting” needs. Perhaps the most distracting thing I have seen is the unbelievable uses of the gym mats. It would seem to go without saying that the gym mats are for exercising, but once again, that would be assuming too much. I have seen people walk into the gym and plop down on the mats without moving for the next 15 minutes. One kid has a routine of lying face first on the mat with his knees tucked up by his side and feet against the wall, looking like a frog ready to jump, while he remains lying there looking asleep until some multitude of minutes later he decides to actually start doing something. However, I don’t begrudge him, as it appears he may be actually stretching, or at least pretending to stretch. This is far better than the kids who just flop onto the mats after a 5 minute stint on the treadmill and then seem to “catch their breath” for the next 10 minutes. By far the worst I have seen, though, was outright cuddling.
This inappropriate “personal displays of affection” as it would have been known in high school was truly an assault on decent gym behavior. It began when two guys came into the gym and after a bit of jump roping flopped onto the gym mats right next to each other. Considering that the number of mats in the gym exceeds one it seemed an odd choice at the time. Just as any man should not use a urinal adjacent to somebody else if there is another option available, sharing gym mats is something that should be done only as a last resort, and not as a first choice. I imagine it’s akin to sharing needles, in that you would do so in a pinch, but even heroin addicts wouldn’t prefer it. Of course, as weird as it is for the two of them to be that close, if it had stopped there it wouldn’t have really been anything worth noting. It started to escalate when one of the kids put his arm around the other. By the time I was finished he had his legs over the other guy. It looked like they were playing some bizarro form of two person twister in which the arrow was being spun by an invisible man with a twitch. I don’t have a problem with two people being so intimate with one another, but I do have a problem with the choice of venue. I shouldn’t have to watch anybody’s pre or post-coital snuggling, or whatever that display was. That’s why God invented rooms.
While I’ve established that Koreans tend to not be the fittest, it certainly doesn’t stop them from thinking they are. Perhaps the best example of this occurs when watching or discussing baseball. Koreans have developed a national delusion that they are masters of the sport. The first thing they will tell you is how well they have done in the World Baseball Classic (a tournament that all but the most involved baseball fans will be surprised to know exists at all). When you state that any tournament that shows Japan as the premier baseball nation in the world over, say, the Dominican Republic is clearly not the best show of skill they remain undeterred. They will continue to tell you about their amazing baseball league. Then they will conclude that it is massively popular in the country. This last point I certainly cannot deny. You see people practicing pitching nearly nonstop. Unfortunately, it becomes readily apparent that they have never actually learned to throw a ball properly, as most of the “pitches” come sailing out like a toss from a middle-aged man in a slow pitch softball league. However, the lack of quality pitchers does not deter them, as there are batting cages nearly everywhere. I must say, this is a excellent idea for late night after bar outings, assuming one can remember to head in the proper direction rather than stumbling into a cab after downing too much soju. Despite the national lack of ability I have learned to generally agree with anybody when it comes to baseball. It’s just much easier. One evening I had a viciously drunk man tell me that the Lotte Giants (the team from Korea’s second largest city) were the best in Korea. Having recently seen a game, along with the league standings, I attempted to explain to him that the Lotte Giants were actually terrible. After he once again hopefully yelled at me that that Lotte Giants were the best I simply agreed and went on with my drinking. If I’ve learned one thing in Korea, it’s that it’s sometimes best to cut your losses. I definitely didn’t learn to be politically correct. I call it a wash.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Korean Letters, Grammar, and My Wild Accusations
I am sick of Korean. Not the country of Korea, mind you, but the Korean language (known here as Hangul). I have always had problems with foreign languages, but at this point I am entirely fed up. I guess it’s worth beginning with the good points before really digging in, though. First off, it’s not a tonal language. This is a very good thing as it means that I’m less likely to inadvertently insult somebody’s dead cat when trying to ask for a beer. Another good thing is that there is a real alphabet, and it wasn’t a total afterthought. I’ve heard that to read a Chinese newspaper you need to know 30,000 characters. Koreans will tell you that you only need to know the 24 Korean letters in the Hangul alphabet. This is a boldfaced lie. It’s hard to decide where to start with this ridiculous statement (their ridiculous statement, not mine). First off, Koreans are inordinately proud of their language. It was allegedly invented by their most intelligent and benevolent King Sejong in the 15th century. This mirrors what Russians will tell you about how Peter the Great invented surgical tools and giant pianos, and no doubt how some old Germans will tell you about the great Kaisers and their fantastic invention known as the deli roll. Most cultures make incredibly outlandish proclamations about their ancient leaders, but some of the Koreans seem to have taken it a bit further. I have to admit that it is a fairly brilliant alphabet, made entirely of circles and straight lines; very easy to look at and read. Despite these facts, I will not accept the whimsical concept that the letters were meant to mimic the shape your mouth makes while making the intended sound. This is utter baloney. But it is only the first in a long line of lies you will be told about the Korean language. Another lie is that while they claim to only have 14 consonants, they are not counting the double letters. “Double letters?” you might ask, but calm the fuck down and I’ll explain.
It turns out that many consonants can be doubled up. These double letters are very important as, for example, most swear words start with a “double S” sound. Koreans will explain to you that to make this sound you should say the letters with a deeper breath, allegedly making a different and distinguishable noise. I call shenanigans. The only distinguishable bit is that they just say it much louder, and you are more apt to get spit on. I attempt to explain that the only difference is that between saying “sah” and shouting “SAH” but they just don’t seem to get it. “No, no, can’t you hear the difference?” they ask, while thrusting their face towards mine and yelling “S” sounds at me from within what Kindergarten teachers would call my “private bubble” and spraying spittle this way and that.
In addition, they also double or even triple up vowels. Unfortunately, these are even more difficult than the consonants. It turns out that you can combine nearly any vowels to make new sounds. One of the issues is that people will teach a fairly insane way of figuring out what these new vowels should sound like. First off are the simple combinations of vowels. These would theoretically be easy, except for the fact that they make no sense. For some reason, the combination of an “O” vowel and “Ah” vowel makes a “Wah” sound. My teacher acts as if this is the most reasonable thing in the world. The theory is that by saying “O-Ah, O-Ah, O-Ah” very quickly it starts to sound like “Wah.” This would be far more reasonable if you had 5 seconds per vowel to figure out what they should sound like. It turns out it is far easier just to memorize that a vowel with that line configuration makes a “Wah,” and similar looking ones make “Wuh” and “We” sounds. In a similar manner, doubling up an “Oo” sound makes a “Yoo.” Why this is the case is I may never know. I just try to remember what they look like as best as I can, and think curse words at the letters as loudly as mentally possible.
Another fairly annoying point is the difference between L’s and R’s. There is a myth in America that Asians, be they Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or other, do not distinguish between the two. This is only partially correct. Koreans do not, in fact, have a different letter for the two, rather, they have a sort of backwards block 5 shape that takes the place for both. The annoying point is that at different places in different words it makes either one sound or the other. In certain words it is a very distinct “L” sound, while in others it is a distinct “R” sound (honestly, they have a burger joint called “Lotteria”). It gets frustrating in that when you ask the person responding is inevitably unable to tell you which one it is. It’s the opposite of the Spanish letters V and B, which are written differently but sound exactly the same. At least in that situation you can ask the inane question “v de vacca, o b de burro?” which roughly translates to “I speak Spanish very poorly. Please speak more slowly.” In Korean, there is no equivalent way of figuring out what the sound you are supposed to be making. You just sort of guess and hope that eventually people will stop brining you soup when you ask where the nearest hospital is.
Another extremely frustrating issue is that the Koreans have somewhere between 4 and a million different kind of O-ish sounds. Normally, this would not be much of an issue, except that they tend to sound very similar, and screwing them up can cause fairly serious communication errors. While attempting to get to rugby practice one day, one of my teammates told the cabbie that we wanted to go to “Chong-day Chong-moon.” The cabbie then began happily driving across town in a very unfamiliar direction, and eventually stopped the cab in front of a convenience store across the street from a forested area. At this point we realized that we must have made some kind of mistake and called the captain for help. After hearing my teammate yell into the phone “I TOLD him Chong-day Chong-moon” for about the fifth time he handed over the phone to the cabbie, who after a brief back-and-forth began laughing, hung up the phone, and started driving. At this point he turns around and says “AHHHH, ChUUUUUUNg-day ChUUUUUUNg-moon. Bleep bloop bleep bloorp Chong-day Chong-moon. ChUUUng-day ChUUUng-moon.” I took this to mean that whichever sadist designed the city had intentionally made different districts with nearly identical names just to swindle foreigners out of cab fare, but I was unable to confirm my suspicions. I honestly can’t believe that if you told a cab driver in New York to take you to the “Umpire-State Building” he would drive you to Yankees Stadium and then be utterly bewildered with his mistake. Well, maybe if he was a native New Yorker he would, but certainly not a cabdriver from out of state.
Finally, I hate Korean Grammar. You need to mark everything in some way with a suffix to explain what kind of word it is. Are you using a word indicating time? BOOM, suffix. How about a place? Suffix. Maybe you were going to use somebody’s name. Suffix. Maybe you’re just going to use a boring, run-of-the-mill noun. SUFFIX. You end up spending half of your time determining whether or not you need to add a suffix, and the other half of your time figuring out which suffix to add, depending on if the word ended in a consonant or vowel. You may think that with all of these rules the language would at least be unambiguous, but you would be entirely incorrect, because they leave out the pronouns in a sentence. Who is going to buy a book tomorrow? Tough shit if you thought it was Mina, because it was clearly Sora. Moron. And it’s not only the language that is ambiguous. Try learning Korean names. They all have the same number of syllables, and because of how they are constructed, they are all made up of around 60 different pieces thrown together. In fact, Korean names are so similar to each other, and last names are so common place, that their baseball jerseys have 2 initials before the last name. Imagine the embarrassment if you were to mix up H.K. Park and H.J. Park. Some Korean last names are so common that it is like how it must have been in Southie in the 50s, where you couldn’t swing a whiskey bottle without hitting an O’Brian, a Murphy, or an O’Sullivan.
You may at this point think to yourself that I have gone a little bit over the top with some of this. Well, I will respond the way my father would. Perhaps YOU’VE gone a little bit over the top. Think about that for a while. You could fairly point out that I’m probably just bitter because I’m terrible at learning foreign languages. You could say I’m just lucky that I was born to English speaking parents, because I’m far too lazy and inept to learn it otherwise. And I’d say you’re right. And God bless America.
It turns out that many consonants can be doubled up. These double letters are very important as, for example, most swear words start with a “double S” sound. Koreans will explain to you that to make this sound you should say the letters with a deeper breath, allegedly making a different and distinguishable noise. I call shenanigans. The only distinguishable bit is that they just say it much louder, and you are more apt to get spit on. I attempt to explain that the only difference is that between saying “sah” and shouting “SAH” but they just don’t seem to get it. “No, no, can’t you hear the difference?” they ask, while thrusting their face towards mine and yelling “S” sounds at me from within what Kindergarten teachers would call my “private bubble” and spraying spittle this way and that.
In addition, they also double or even triple up vowels. Unfortunately, these are even more difficult than the consonants. It turns out that you can combine nearly any vowels to make new sounds. One of the issues is that people will teach a fairly insane way of figuring out what these new vowels should sound like. First off are the simple combinations of vowels. These would theoretically be easy, except for the fact that they make no sense. For some reason, the combination of an “O” vowel and “Ah” vowel makes a “Wah” sound. My teacher acts as if this is the most reasonable thing in the world. The theory is that by saying “O-Ah, O-Ah, O-Ah” very quickly it starts to sound like “Wah.” This would be far more reasonable if you had 5 seconds per vowel to figure out what they should sound like. It turns out it is far easier just to memorize that a vowel with that line configuration makes a “Wah,” and similar looking ones make “Wuh” and “We” sounds. In a similar manner, doubling up an “Oo” sound makes a “Yoo.” Why this is the case is I may never know. I just try to remember what they look like as best as I can, and think curse words at the letters as loudly as mentally possible.
Another fairly annoying point is the difference between L’s and R’s. There is a myth in America that Asians, be they Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or other, do not distinguish between the two. This is only partially correct. Koreans do not, in fact, have a different letter for the two, rather, they have a sort of backwards block 5 shape that takes the place for both. The annoying point is that at different places in different words it makes either one sound or the other. In certain words it is a very distinct “L” sound, while in others it is a distinct “R” sound (honestly, they have a burger joint called “Lotteria”). It gets frustrating in that when you ask the person responding is inevitably unable to tell you which one it is. It’s the opposite of the Spanish letters V and B, which are written differently but sound exactly the same. At least in that situation you can ask the inane question “v de vacca, o b de burro?” which roughly translates to “I speak Spanish very poorly. Please speak more slowly.” In Korean, there is no equivalent way of figuring out what the sound you are supposed to be making. You just sort of guess and hope that eventually people will stop brining you soup when you ask where the nearest hospital is.
Another extremely frustrating issue is that the Koreans have somewhere between 4 and a million different kind of O-ish sounds. Normally, this would not be much of an issue, except that they tend to sound very similar, and screwing them up can cause fairly serious communication errors. While attempting to get to rugby practice one day, one of my teammates told the cabbie that we wanted to go to “Chong-day Chong-moon.” The cabbie then began happily driving across town in a very unfamiliar direction, and eventually stopped the cab in front of a convenience store across the street from a forested area. At this point we realized that we must have made some kind of mistake and called the captain for help. After hearing my teammate yell into the phone “I TOLD him Chong-day Chong-moon” for about the fifth time he handed over the phone to the cabbie, who after a brief back-and-forth began laughing, hung up the phone, and started driving. At this point he turns around and says “AHHHH, ChUUUUUUNg-day ChUUUUUUNg-moon. Bleep bloop bleep bloorp Chong-day Chong-moon. ChUUUng-day ChUUUng-moon.” I took this to mean that whichever sadist designed the city had intentionally made different districts with nearly identical names just to swindle foreigners out of cab fare, but I was unable to confirm my suspicions. I honestly can’t believe that if you told a cab driver in New York to take you to the “Umpire-State Building” he would drive you to Yankees Stadium and then be utterly bewildered with his mistake. Well, maybe if he was a native New Yorker he would, but certainly not a cabdriver from out of state.
Finally, I hate Korean Grammar. You need to mark everything in some way with a suffix to explain what kind of word it is. Are you using a word indicating time? BOOM, suffix. How about a place? Suffix. Maybe you were going to use somebody’s name. Suffix. Maybe you’re just going to use a boring, run-of-the-mill noun. SUFFIX. You end up spending half of your time determining whether or not you need to add a suffix, and the other half of your time figuring out which suffix to add, depending on if the word ended in a consonant or vowel. You may think that with all of these rules the language would at least be unambiguous, but you would be entirely incorrect, because they leave out the pronouns in a sentence. Who is going to buy a book tomorrow? Tough shit if you thought it was Mina, because it was clearly Sora. Moron. And it’s not only the language that is ambiguous. Try learning Korean names. They all have the same number of syllables, and because of how they are constructed, they are all made up of around 60 different pieces thrown together. In fact, Korean names are so similar to each other, and last names are so common place, that their baseball jerseys have 2 initials before the last name. Imagine the embarrassment if you were to mix up H.K. Park and H.J. Park. Some Korean last names are so common that it is like how it must have been in Southie in the 50s, where you couldn’t swing a whiskey bottle without hitting an O’Brian, a Murphy, or an O’Sullivan.
You may at this point think to yourself that I have gone a little bit over the top with some of this. Well, I will respond the way my father would. Perhaps YOU’VE gone a little bit over the top. Think about that for a while. You could fairly point out that I’m probably just bitter because I’m terrible at learning foreign languages. You could say I’m just lucky that I was born to English speaking parents, because I’m far too lazy and inept to learn it otherwise. And I’d say you’re right. And God bless America.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Being Overweight, Exercise, and "Diet" Food
I’m overweight. This is not a feeling due to cultural or media pressures. This is not a self confidence issue. This is not even something one of the mean girls at school wrote about me on a bathroom stall wall. This is simply a medical fact that I was alerted to after my check up. I recently got my results back, and in the back of the very long list of numbers and acceptable ranges were the problems that they found with me. Apparently I am in need of diet and exercise. I do not feel bad about this. In fact, I was not overweight before I stepped off the plane and onto Korean soil. I’m 6’3”, and when I first got here I weighed about 190 pounds. While this is the heaviest I’ve ever been it’s a far cry from overweight in America. But South Korea is not America. There are no fat people here. This is not really hyperbole, more like an engineering approximation. You can go for days walking through Seoul and never see an Asian person over 200 pounds. And there are some good reasons for this. One of them is not exercise.
When I first got to Korea, I realized my workload mirrored what people expect from a semester abroad. Because of this, I found that I needed to find other activities besides homework to fill my time. While sleeping, watching movies, reading, and drinking certainly do succeed in this endeavor, they’re not appropriate all the time. Occasionally getting out of bed for something besides class, food, or whiskey-cokes is generally accepted by many self-help authors as one of the most important habits of highly effective people. With this in mind, I found the gym in the basement of my dormitory. Back home I can use the gym at the school next door, where a noticeable portion of the students seem to spend more time working out, gelling their hair, and popping their collars than they do on homework. This means that I am blessed with using a gorgeous gym donated by a gracious family of benefactors that also believes, in line with the beliefs of many of the students, that well shaped pecs are an integral part of a good college education. The gym in Korea is noticeably lacking in comparison. Much of the equipment is rusty, the floors are so dusty and slippery as to make wearing sneakers on them the equivalent of wearing socks on a linoleum floor, and is unheated, in what can only be an attempt to scare off many of the students into the adjacent ping pong room. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for the ping pong magnates of our day) this seems to be a successful venture. Much of the time spent in the gym is spent pleasantly alone, or, at worst, in fairly sparse company. It is this company, however, that gives me a great deal of joy.
Watching some of my classmates work out is an exercise in keeping a straight face. The first thing one will notice in my gym is a complete lack of proper attire. The first time I noticed it was when one student was wearing a black, puffy, Northface vest while running on the treadmill. This, by itself would almost certainly win the award for most unlikely gym clothes. On that day, however, it wouldn’t even warrant much notice, as walking next to him was a kid dressed in a wind breaker, Dockers khakis, and most astonishing of all, flip flops. I understand that there is something to be said against the exclusive nature of many exercise groups. Bicyclists wear prohibitively expensive and prohibitively ugly cycling gear, and then shoot nasty looks at people in regular shorts riding by. But I think that sometimes these emotions come from an important place. Flip flops are not acceptable on a treadmill. This is not due to snotty elitism or some overblown sense of exclusivity. This is due to the fact that anybody who goes to an elite engineering school, or for that matter an elite preschool, should be aware that you are not intended to run in them. However, even this is not the most entertaining thing I’ve seen. The winner by far would have to be the person I saw one day wearing jeans with a belt, flip flops, and a button down shirt. Ordinarily this would be an amusing thing to see, but he managed to take it to a whole different level. Most of his workout consisted of standing in front of the mirror while making sure to keep what my friend refers to as his “Playmobile haircut” perfectly in place. He would then occasionally do a few sit-ups, and then return to petting down a few strands of hair on the side of his head. Finally, he swung a stick around like a golf club for a bit before retiring back to his room after 30 minutes. I don’t mean to sound like a jackass, but it was one of the funnier things I have seen in this country. I am a simple man and I believe in some simple things: the right to earn a living wage, to a decent education, to privacy, and that wearing a belt, a button down shirt, or flip-flops in a gym should be punished by a mild flogging.
As exercise is clearly not the reason for the amazing lack of obesity in this country, the clear frontrunner for the reason that people here are so skinny has to be the food. It is all things diet food should be, while at the same time tasting immensely better than anything in America labeled “Light.” That is not to say that it tastes particularly good, just that I would pick Korean food over a microwavable diet TV dinner any day of the week. There are very good reasons that this food is good for losing weight. The first is that it contains very little actual food. I don’t care what you say, but seaweed soup is not a breakfast food. It is hot water with fish food thrown in. Judging from this, I would say that the concept of calories escapes Koreans. Beyond this, Korean food is physically difficult to eat. American food is designed for easy consumption. Most cheeseburgers are greasy enough that with minimal chewing you can slide whole chunks of meat and cheese down your gullet. Korean food is the exact opposite. It is always hot and spicy to an unbelievable degree. Eating it wears you out. You end up finishing your meal not because you are full, but because you are tired of trying to force sustenance into yourself. On top of this, they have devised perhaps the most ingenious dieting device of all time. This device is known in the Western World as chopsticks. If you ever decide to crash diet I would suggest eating noodle soup with chopsticks for a week. Trying to eat noodle soup with chopsticks is akin in difficulty to a Korean making it in the NBA as a center. In fact, feeding prisoners of war noodle soup with chopsticks is banned under the Geneva conventions. As nearly all of the food in this country is difficult to ingest for one reason or another, you are almost guaranteed to lose weight as soon as you get here. In the first month I lost about 10 pounds without even trying. I believe it is this semi-masochistic diet that does the trick for the Koreans. Nearly everybody in this country has the body of the geeky kid with huge glasses who, in high school, spent too much time on the computer reading about the latest graphics cards (and I would like to point out that I only did that before high school). They are skinny, but certainly not in shape. But what do I know? I’m overweight.
When I first got to Korea, I realized my workload mirrored what people expect from a semester abroad. Because of this, I found that I needed to find other activities besides homework to fill my time. While sleeping, watching movies, reading, and drinking certainly do succeed in this endeavor, they’re not appropriate all the time. Occasionally getting out of bed for something besides class, food, or whiskey-cokes is generally accepted by many self-help authors as one of the most important habits of highly effective people. With this in mind, I found the gym in the basement of my dormitory. Back home I can use the gym at the school next door, where a noticeable portion of the students seem to spend more time working out, gelling their hair, and popping their collars than they do on homework. This means that I am blessed with using a gorgeous gym donated by a gracious family of benefactors that also believes, in line with the beliefs of many of the students, that well shaped pecs are an integral part of a good college education. The gym in Korea is noticeably lacking in comparison. Much of the equipment is rusty, the floors are so dusty and slippery as to make wearing sneakers on them the equivalent of wearing socks on a linoleum floor, and is unheated, in what can only be an attempt to scare off many of the students into the adjacent ping pong room. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for the ping pong magnates of our day) this seems to be a successful venture. Much of the time spent in the gym is spent pleasantly alone, or, at worst, in fairly sparse company. It is this company, however, that gives me a great deal of joy.
Watching some of my classmates work out is an exercise in keeping a straight face. The first thing one will notice in my gym is a complete lack of proper attire. The first time I noticed it was when one student was wearing a black, puffy, Northface vest while running on the treadmill. This, by itself would almost certainly win the award for most unlikely gym clothes. On that day, however, it wouldn’t even warrant much notice, as walking next to him was a kid dressed in a wind breaker, Dockers khakis, and most astonishing of all, flip flops. I understand that there is something to be said against the exclusive nature of many exercise groups. Bicyclists wear prohibitively expensive and prohibitively ugly cycling gear, and then shoot nasty looks at people in regular shorts riding by. But I think that sometimes these emotions come from an important place. Flip flops are not acceptable on a treadmill. This is not due to snotty elitism or some overblown sense of exclusivity. This is due to the fact that anybody who goes to an elite engineering school, or for that matter an elite preschool, should be aware that you are not intended to run in them. However, even this is not the most entertaining thing I’ve seen. The winner by far would have to be the person I saw one day wearing jeans with a belt, flip flops, and a button down shirt. Ordinarily this would be an amusing thing to see, but he managed to take it to a whole different level. Most of his workout consisted of standing in front of the mirror while making sure to keep what my friend refers to as his “Playmobile haircut” perfectly in place. He would then occasionally do a few sit-ups, and then return to petting down a few strands of hair on the side of his head. Finally, he swung a stick around like a golf club for a bit before retiring back to his room after 30 minutes. I don’t mean to sound like a jackass, but it was one of the funnier things I have seen in this country. I am a simple man and I believe in some simple things: the right to earn a living wage, to a decent education, to privacy, and that wearing a belt, a button down shirt, or flip-flops in a gym should be punished by a mild flogging.
As exercise is clearly not the reason for the amazing lack of obesity in this country, the clear frontrunner for the reason that people here are so skinny has to be the food. It is all things diet food should be, while at the same time tasting immensely better than anything in America labeled “Light.” That is not to say that it tastes particularly good, just that I would pick Korean food over a microwavable diet TV dinner any day of the week. There are very good reasons that this food is good for losing weight. The first is that it contains very little actual food. I don’t care what you say, but seaweed soup is not a breakfast food. It is hot water with fish food thrown in. Judging from this, I would say that the concept of calories escapes Koreans. Beyond this, Korean food is physically difficult to eat. American food is designed for easy consumption. Most cheeseburgers are greasy enough that with minimal chewing you can slide whole chunks of meat and cheese down your gullet. Korean food is the exact opposite. It is always hot and spicy to an unbelievable degree. Eating it wears you out. You end up finishing your meal not because you are full, but because you are tired of trying to force sustenance into yourself. On top of this, they have devised perhaps the most ingenious dieting device of all time. This device is known in the Western World as chopsticks. If you ever decide to crash diet I would suggest eating noodle soup with chopsticks for a week. Trying to eat noodle soup with chopsticks is akin in difficulty to a Korean making it in the NBA as a center. In fact, feeding prisoners of war noodle soup with chopsticks is banned under the Geneva conventions. As nearly all of the food in this country is difficult to ingest for one reason or another, you are almost guaranteed to lose weight as soon as you get here. In the first month I lost about 10 pounds without even trying. I believe it is this semi-masochistic diet that does the trick for the Koreans. Nearly everybody in this country has the body of the geeky kid with huge glasses who, in high school, spent too much time on the computer reading about the latest graphics cards (and I would like to point out that I only did that before high school). They are skinny, but certainly not in shape. But what do I know? I’m overweight.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Rugby, Doctors, and Torture Racks
I recently started playing for an expat rugby team here in Korea. Rugby is not a popular sport in this country, so I was very lucky to find a club within a “reasonable” distance. I put that in quotes because some of my teammates make rather epic journeys to get to practice. I have a relatively simple commute consisting of a 20 minute cab ride followed by a 40 minute bus ride followed by another 10 minute cab ride. I have talked to people who have bus rides over 3 hours long. Practice is on Saturday afternoons, and to make sure I get there on time I have to leave my school by noon. Keep in mind that rugby players are fairly well known for their drinking (in the same way that male figure skaters are fairly well known for their fabulousness) so getting up any time before sundown on Saturday can often be an act of extreme physical exertion. I love rugby, but I simply would not even entertain the idea of making a nearly 4 hour commute so I could then get my head bashed around, no matter how fun that sounds.
Playing rugby anywhere in the world has its benefits, chief among them the sense of camaraderie and similarity to rugby everywhere else in the world. Some things about rugby teams are the same everywhere: teammates are very fond of tall players; cleats are called boots and your uniform is called your kit; everybody has a worst injury story; lunchtime conversations would cause nuns to go into spontaneous cardiac arrest from shock; oh, and drinking culture. Everybody knows that rugby players drink. For some people, that’s why they started playing rugby. It’s my opinion that risking great bodily harm just for some beer is probably the most inefficient way to go about getting drunk, but I’m not one to turn down somebody interested in the team. But even though the act of alcohol consumption is widely known the methods are not. The most important thing about rugby drinking is when both teams join up after a game for an event known universally as a “drinkup.” I’d put money down that even in France they call it “le drinkup.” This is where most rugby traditions take place. When a person scores for the first time they are made to “shoot the boot,” meaning that they have to drink beer out of the cleat of the largest, smelliest, dirtiest player on the team. While many people would find behavior such as this an indication of severe mental disorder, in the rugby world it is a great honor. While shooting the boot is a major piece of rugby culture, nothing compares to the drinking songs. The songs are without a doubt some of the most offensive things ever put to music. I believe that if The Vatican ever caught wind of the song “Jesus Can’t Play Rugby” half of Ireland would be instantly excommunicated. The songs are so offensive that they even make me uncomfortable. This is no small feat, as I’m fairly sure that my dinner conversations have deeply offended no less than half of my school, and most of the rest just have a different eating schedule. Despite how awful most of this sounds, the fact that all of it is a universal constant is incredibly comforting. It is nice to know that no matter where in the world you go, if you find a rugby team you can be offending people of all races and religions within an hour of the end of your first game.
One of the other nice things about playing with a sports team abroad is that it brings in people who are truly committed to playing the sport. This is not like a college intramural softball team. Many of my teammates are people from countries where little children who are barely able to stumble about are carted off to mercilessly wail on one another in a contest that even the most frilly of girls would never be able to call cute. Several of the people on my team have been playing rugby for over twice the time I have. There is at least one guy who has been playing longer than I have been alive. This brings me to one of the major downsides of playing with people who are this good. I fear for my life. A good portion of rugby is about knowing the game. It’s a sport in which intelligence, although severely underrepresented, is of major import. Being smart allows you to place yourself in positions which prevent you from getting demolished, and allow you to fairly easily pick off the morons who stand around with blank looks on their face. The problem with people from countries such as Australia and South Africa is that they don’t do stupid things. They are the ones who make you look stupid. All of a sudden, you’re the dumbest player on the field. And that’s not a good place to be.
Another downside to playing rugby here, or really anywhere, is that it begins to take its toll after a while. After 8 years of playing this game I have become an old man. I already had many of the qualities, including bad posture, grumpy temperament, and a tendency to make loud and inappropriate exclamations in the dining hall (in my case the difference being that this occurs at college rather than a nursing home). I’m one step away from sitting on my porch with a shotgun and yelling at kids to get off my lawn. Now with rugby, I also have the gift of a body that is prematurely falling apart. My knee clicks like the stopwatch at the beginning of 60 minutes (see, even my metaphors are for old people) and my back is in near constant pain. Just running for an hour or two puts me in pain for the next week. This is a particular problem when you have weekly practice. Recently though, I decided to try to get my back fixed. I had heard about a famous doctor that works on campus from my Korean friends, so I decided to go check him out.
One day after class I decided to go see Dr. Lyu. Dr. Lyu is easily the most famous and successful doctor in all of Korea. He is a very nice looking old man, who always wears old tweed jackets with a ruby rose-shaped pin on the lapel. The walls of the office are adorned with pictures of astronauts he helped prepare for space missions as well as old texts and models dealing with acupuncture. There is an area for the distribution of traditional herbs that strangely has a couple stuffed turtles lying on the floor. In addition, there are about a half dozen beds that people lie down on while they are being worked on. Upon first look these are clearly not normal beds, but some kind of special design. I noticed at first that there were two big electrical motors strapped to the bottom of each one, and that instead of the standard flat cushioned top each platform was made up of a series of cushioned rollers. The entire structure of the beds is made of steel tubes painted a seafoam green that is the color I imagine they paint bed frames in mental hospitals. Finally, the examination tables are trimmed with what looks like red floral pattern wallpaper and gold painted wood accents. At the end there are what appears to be some adjustment handles that are topped with what are obviously golf balls, once again painted that slightly uneasy green color. I took all this in as I was asked to lie down and point to where my back pain was located. With this, the doctor began inserting very fine needles into my back, the backs of my knees, and the backs of my ankles. In the coming weeks I would also get poked in the side of my elbow, the back of my hand between my thumb and pointer finger, the side of my hand near my pinky, and even on the ridge of my ear, not to mention some extra ones in my back. While all of the acupuncture would seem to many to be the weird aspect of my treatment, it wasn’t even close.
After my acupuncture, I was instructed to turn around and lie down on my back. With this, Dr. Lyu’s assistant strapped my feet into some foot holding devices that are much like leather shoes with the toes cut off. These shoes were then tied to the end of the machine while I was left in a state of utter bewilderment. Next, some straps were pulled over the other side of the machine and I was told to grab hold. At this point, the assistant flipped some switches and the machine began to tilt back, moving my head closer to the ground and my feet towards the ceiling. For a while I just looked at the patterns in drop ceiling tiles that are only interesting to somebody with ADD. When the tilting stopped I was told “It will start moving now” which was certainly a phrase I was not expecting. With that my feet were pulled up and the straps in my hands pulled down. The tension was quickly released but the next second the pulling began again. I quickly realized a few things. First was that the golf ball handle things were not levers but switches. Second was that only somebody pursuing an engineering degree would give a shit about the golf balls while they are being jerked around on some bizarre contraption without so much as an explanation of what was going on. Third, I thought that given the opportunity, the leaders of The Inquisition would have given an arm and a leg for a device like this (likely from one of their victims, but I imagine somebody who deals in extremities is not liable to be a particularly picky customer). This machine was clearly some sort of motorized torture rack device that had been slightly adjusted to alleviate back pain rather than elicit confessions of heresy and witchcraft. As the machine was tugging me back and forth Dr. Lyu came over and explained that this was a device of his own invention, with only 10 in the entire world. At that moment I was wondering why there was 1 of these things, much less 10 in existence. Soon, however, the thrashing stopped and the machine tilted back to horizontal. I got off and to my astonishment felt amazingly better. Clearly, the doctor knew what he was doing. Now, getting on the seafoam green and floral red patterned torture rack is part of my weekly routine. What a bizarre invention. Only in Korea.
Playing rugby anywhere in the world has its benefits, chief among them the sense of camaraderie and similarity to rugby everywhere else in the world. Some things about rugby teams are the same everywhere: teammates are very fond of tall players; cleats are called boots and your uniform is called your kit; everybody has a worst injury story; lunchtime conversations would cause nuns to go into spontaneous cardiac arrest from shock; oh, and drinking culture. Everybody knows that rugby players drink. For some people, that’s why they started playing rugby. It’s my opinion that risking great bodily harm just for some beer is probably the most inefficient way to go about getting drunk, but I’m not one to turn down somebody interested in the team. But even though the act of alcohol consumption is widely known the methods are not. The most important thing about rugby drinking is when both teams join up after a game for an event known universally as a “drinkup.” I’d put money down that even in France they call it “le drinkup.” This is where most rugby traditions take place. When a person scores for the first time they are made to “shoot the boot,” meaning that they have to drink beer out of the cleat of the largest, smelliest, dirtiest player on the team. While many people would find behavior such as this an indication of severe mental disorder, in the rugby world it is a great honor. While shooting the boot is a major piece of rugby culture, nothing compares to the drinking songs. The songs are without a doubt some of the most offensive things ever put to music. I believe that if The Vatican ever caught wind of the song “Jesus Can’t Play Rugby” half of Ireland would be instantly excommunicated. The songs are so offensive that they even make me uncomfortable. This is no small feat, as I’m fairly sure that my dinner conversations have deeply offended no less than half of my school, and most of the rest just have a different eating schedule. Despite how awful most of this sounds, the fact that all of it is a universal constant is incredibly comforting. It is nice to know that no matter where in the world you go, if you find a rugby team you can be offending people of all races and religions within an hour of the end of your first game.
One of the other nice things about playing with a sports team abroad is that it brings in people who are truly committed to playing the sport. This is not like a college intramural softball team. Many of my teammates are people from countries where little children who are barely able to stumble about are carted off to mercilessly wail on one another in a contest that even the most frilly of girls would never be able to call cute. Several of the people on my team have been playing rugby for over twice the time I have. There is at least one guy who has been playing longer than I have been alive. This brings me to one of the major downsides of playing with people who are this good. I fear for my life. A good portion of rugby is about knowing the game. It’s a sport in which intelligence, although severely underrepresented, is of major import. Being smart allows you to place yourself in positions which prevent you from getting demolished, and allow you to fairly easily pick off the morons who stand around with blank looks on their face. The problem with people from countries such as Australia and South Africa is that they don’t do stupid things. They are the ones who make you look stupid. All of a sudden, you’re the dumbest player on the field. And that’s not a good place to be.
Another downside to playing rugby here, or really anywhere, is that it begins to take its toll after a while. After 8 years of playing this game I have become an old man. I already had many of the qualities, including bad posture, grumpy temperament, and a tendency to make loud and inappropriate exclamations in the dining hall (in my case the difference being that this occurs at college rather than a nursing home). I’m one step away from sitting on my porch with a shotgun and yelling at kids to get off my lawn. Now with rugby, I also have the gift of a body that is prematurely falling apart. My knee clicks like the stopwatch at the beginning of 60 minutes (see, even my metaphors are for old people) and my back is in near constant pain. Just running for an hour or two puts me in pain for the next week. This is a particular problem when you have weekly practice. Recently though, I decided to try to get my back fixed. I had heard about a famous doctor that works on campus from my Korean friends, so I decided to go check him out.
One day after class I decided to go see Dr. Lyu. Dr. Lyu is easily the most famous and successful doctor in all of Korea. He is a very nice looking old man, who always wears old tweed jackets with a ruby rose-shaped pin on the lapel. The walls of the office are adorned with pictures of astronauts he helped prepare for space missions as well as old texts and models dealing with acupuncture. There is an area for the distribution of traditional herbs that strangely has a couple stuffed turtles lying on the floor. In addition, there are about a half dozen beds that people lie down on while they are being worked on. Upon first look these are clearly not normal beds, but some kind of special design. I noticed at first that there were two big electrical motors strapped to the bottom of each one, and that instead of the standard flat cushioned top each platform was made up of a series of cushioned rollers. The entire structure of the beds is made of steel tubes painted a seafoam green that is the color I imagine they paint bed frames in mental hospitals. Finally, the examination tables are trimmed with what looks like red floral pattern wallpaper and gold painted wood accents. At the end there are what appears to be some adjustment handles that are topped with what are obviously golf balls, once again painted that slightly uneasy green color. I took all this in as I was asked to lie down and point to where my back pain was located. With this, the doctor began inserting very fine needles into my back, the backs of my knees, and the backs of my ankles. In the coming weeks I would also get poked in the side of my elbow, the back of my hand between my thumb and pointer finger, the side of my hand near my pinky, and even on the ridge of my ear, not to mention some extra ones in my back. While all of the acupuncture would seem to many to be the weird aspect of my treatment, it wasn’t even close.
After my acupuncture, I was instructed to turn around and lie down on my back. With this, Dr. Lyu’s assistant strapped my feet into some foot holding devices that are much like leather shoes with the toes cut off. These shoes were then tied to the end of the machine while I was left in a state of utter bewilderment. Next, some straps were pulled over the other side of the machine and I was told to grab hold. At this point, the assistant flipped some switches and the machine began to tilt back, moving my head closer to the ground and my feet towards the ceiling. For a while I just looked at the patterns in drop ceiling tiles that are only interesting to somebody with ADD. When the tilting stopped I was told “It will start moving now” which was certainly a phrase I was not expecting. With that my feet were pulled up and the straps in my hands pulled down. The tension was quickly released but the next second the pulling began again. I quickly realized a few things. First was that the golf ball handle things were not levers but switches. Second was that only somebody pursuing an engineering degree would give a shit about the golf balls while they are being jerked around on some bizarre contraption without so much as an explanation of what was going on. Third, I thought that given the opportunity, the leaders of The Inquisition would have given an arm and a leg for a device like this (likely from one of their victims, but I imagine somebody who deals in extremities is not liable to be a particularly picky customer). This machine was clearly some sort of motorized torture rack device that had been slightly adjusted to alleviate back pain rather than elicit confessions of heresy and witchcraft. As the machine was tugging me back and forth Dr. Lyu came over and explained that this was a device of his own invention, with only 10 in the entire world. At that moment I was wondering why there was 1 of these things, much less 10 in existence. Soon, however, the thrashing stopped and the machine tilted back to horizontal. I got off and to my astonishment felt amazingly better. Clearly, the doctor knew what he was doing. Now, getting on the seafoam green and floral red patterned torture rack is part of my weekly routine. What a bizarre invention. Only in Korea.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Sports, Sports, and More Sports
The Winter Olympics just ended, and I got a chance to watch a bit of it. Watching the Olympics in Korea is a whole different ballgame than in America, you know, assuming they played ball-sports in the winter. To begin with, I am pretty sure that every single Korean athlete got a television appearance. One day I was lucky enough to catch the women’s slalom on the TV in the dining hall. Nobody seemed to be very interested in the action, seeing as it was not a sport that South Korea does particularly well in. As if to emphasize the point, they showed the entire run of a Korean skier who crossed the finish line in 51st place. I was as surprised by a few things about this. Firstly was that at least 51 people competed in the women’s slalom competition. Secondly was that they bothered to show her entire boring run. It was like watching it in slow motion. Easily the most surprising thing of all however, was that as soon as her time was in the TV crew cut away from the event, and in fact their Olympics coverage entirely. It was as if nobody else mattered at all. Imagine watching track and field, seeing some American fall down halfway into the 5k, and NBC cutting away with Bob Costas saying “well, a valiant effort from the American, but unfortunately luck wasn’t on his side today. Now, onto Days of Our Lives!” Well, needless to say I was some mixture of confused and pissed off. We give many of our athletes no respect. We treat winning a silver medal like some sort of disfiguring scar. It’s something that at best we ignore, and at worst we are disdainful of. I can imagine people meeting Olympic athletes on the street and saying “Oh, I’m so sorry about how things turned out. I mean, it must be really rough. Well hang in there. Chin up. You probably won’t suck so bad next time.” Seriously, a silver medal means that there is only 1 person in the entire world better than them at something. If I was that good at anything I would be ridiculously proud of myself. I’d walk around with a sash and have billboards put up with my face, and below them in enormous bold letters it would say something like “SECOND BEST PAPER COLATER IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD!!!” And these people do something that actually requires skill and that they be in peak physical condition. Well, except for curling. Here however, I’m pretty sure they would welcome back an 11th place curling team with some sort of parade. They are inordinately proud of their athletes.
This pride in their athletes was shown in many other examples. For instance, I got to see Shani Davis win gold in the 1000 meters about 10 times. This is not because the Koreans have some strange cultural fetish for large, Black, American speed skaters. It is because a Korean won silver. As I said before, winning silver might get somebody a mention in their hometown newspaper in America. Here it is deserving of multiple replays from all possible angles with lots of very exciting yelling. From all the commotion you’d think the Mexican national soccer team had just scored a goal. Another time, one of my professors broke the entire flow of a lecture to announce the “Wonderful, wonderful… marvelous” news that some girl won the gold in the speed skating 500 meters. As an aside, it is also probably worth noting that speed skating is one of the most bizarre sports that any country could possibly dominate in. It’s like dominating ice dancing; it just doesn’t really make much sense why any country would invest that much interest in it. At any rate, the Koreans do really care for some unknown reason. The most vivid example of the Korean investment in its athletes, though, is clearly Kim Yu-Na.
I don’t know if people in America care, or are even aware that Kim Yu-Na dominated figure skating. In America it isn’t considered manly to even be aware that figure skating is a recognized sport. In South Korea I am pretty sure that every single person watched the competition. Kim Yu-Na was already quite popular here before the Olympics, but they brought it to a whole new level. The free skating portion of the competition, which is also the final portion, was on a Friday at 1 PM. This also happened to be graduation for many of the seniors (I don’t understand why they graduate halfway through the second semester, but they do). Because of this, there were a number of parents and grandparents carrying bouquets of flowers. I once again watched in the dining hall. Normally around 1 o’clock the place is pretty empty, as people run off to class, but that day it was absolutely packed. Everybody sat transfixed as the people before her went out on the ice. As soon as it was her turn to skate every person in the building became totally silent. The food preparation stopped, and even the dishwashers came out to watch. Every jump Kim Yu-Na landed was greeted with great applause and cheers. You could feel how tense people were. I think if she had fallen many of the grandparents wouldn’t have survived to watch their grandchildren graduate an hour later. Heart attacks and aneurisms would have swept through the crowd like a grotesque wave. Luckily, this never came to pass. With one final enormous cheer she finished her routine and left the ice to get her score. As soon as it was posted the crowd broke into applause even louder than before. I thought for sure people were about to start throwing flowers at the screen. Even though Kim Yu-Na had just pretty much locked up a gold medal with the world record score she received people stuck around to watch the next skater, a Japanese woman, take her turn on the ice. I was pretty sure that they were all sticking around in the hope that she would fall and they could all take a bit of symbolic revenge on the Japanese for all the invasions and systematic destruction of Korean culture, but instead they let out a long, heartfelt “oooohhh” when she messed up on a jump. I think they would have been much less pleasant and much more riotous had she won, but now they could be nice as it was sure that their skater had won. As soon as the Japanese woman finished everybody immediately poured out of the cafeteria, almost as if they had some place nearly as important to be.
Clearly, being in Korea made following many of the American athletes and teams a very difficult task. Apparently everybody back home was very invested in the American hockey team’s quest for the gold. I hear that the final between the USA and Canada was a fantastic game. I didn’t get to watch of course, because of the time difference and the never-ending hatred NBC has for streaming video outside of the country. I must say, though, that I was much less invested than other people in the outcome of the game. I really only wanted the US to win so I could make fun of the Canadians on my rugby team and down at the pub. I mean more than I normally do. I would honestly have felt a little bad if we had won. What do they have beside hockey, trapping, and occasional sex with moose? It would have been unfair to take away by far the second best of those three things. Plus, it’s not like we’re going to stop making fun of them. They still have French-Canadians, and they aren’t going anywhere.
While watching the Olympics in Korea was strange, so was watching the Super Bowl. While the Super Bowl was a while ago at this point, it was a very strange introduction to Korea. I was around my second week in the country, but like any good American anywhere in the world I had to find a place to watch what is essentially a second Christmas for most people. My local ex-pat pub, Santa Claus Bar, was open for the early morning start of the game. I don’t have any classes that start before 1 PM here, so waking up for the 8:30 start time was a bit of a pain. After a cursory shave and shower I stumbled my way over to the pub. That morning they were luckily serving a nice American breakfast. I decided to have mine with an orange juice to help wake me up. Many other people there had theirs with a pint of beer. Or a rum and coke. Or a couple of rum and cokes. Well, what’s a little drinking on a Monday morning? Honestly, probably alcoholism, but who am I to judge? There were a few fairly bizarre things about the whole situation, along with the all too common aspects. The first and most obvious different thing was the Korean family in Colts jerseys who had camped themselves directly in front of the TV screen. Luckily, with their being Korean, I was able to see over them fairly easily, but it was annoying nonetheless. The next strange thing was the breakfast. I mean, it’s just not Super Bowl food. I wish I could have dug into a huge pizza and a plateful of chicken wings. Unfortunately, these are not foods that Koreans make well, or even palatable. The Korean pizza I have had the displeasure of tasting is one of the more awful things I have been tricked into believing is food in this country. It should be noted for all eternity in some large stone monument that ketchup does not equal tomato sauce, and that large sweet potato wedges are not an acceptable topping on any pizza. While these things were different, some things weren’t. There were still the people who were more interested in the commercials than the game. Hell, next to me I had people discussing the merits of J.D. Salinger’s literary works. I was kind enough to tell them that upon his death some new manuscripts had been found, that I suspected would be published in the not too distant future, and even more kindly refrained from informing them that “The Catcher in the Rye” is a horrible book about some boring over-privileged pain-in-the-ass who needed a handful of Prozac and not a narrator telling the reader what he wasn’t interested in doing. If books were judged on what their protagonist wasn’t interested in doing I should just write my autobiography now and accept all of the literary prizes and royalty checks that come flooding through my door. Back in the world of football, things went quite well, as I like the rest of the US, outside of the unfortunate state of Indiana, was cheering for the winning team. How could anybody possibly cheer for Payton “I’ll shill any product you bring me” Manning over the city of New Orleans? It’s the least we could do after Katrina, other than helping save people or rebuild their city or something. So with that great schadenfreude feeling of watching a team you hate lose the biggest game of the season I walked into the strange afternoon sun and back to school to go study my Korean.
This pride in their athletes was shown in many other examples. For instance, I got to see Shani Davis win gold in the 1000 meters about 10 times. This is not because the Koreans have some strange cultural fetish for large, Black, American speed skaters. It is because a Korean won silver. As I said before, winning silver might get somebody a mention in their hometown newspaper in America. Here it is deserving of multiple replays from all possible angles with lots of very exciting yelling. From all the commotion you’d think the Mexican national soccer team had just scored a goal. Another time, one of my professors broke the entire flow of a lecture to announce the “Wonderful, wonderful… marvelous” news that some girl won the gold in the speed skating 500 meters. As an aside, it is also probably worth noting that speed skating is one of the most bizarre sports that any country could possibly dominate in. It’s like dominating ice dancing; it just doesn’t really make much sense why any country would invest that much interest in it. At any rate, the Koreans do really care for some unknown reason. The most vivid example of the Korean investment in its athletes, though, is clearly Kim Yu-Na.
I don’t know if people in America care, or are even aware that Kim Yu-Na dominated figure skating. In America it isn’t considered manly to even be aware that figure skating is a recognized sport. In South Korea I am pretty sure that every single person watched the competition. Kim Yu-Na was already quite popular here before the Olympics, but they brought it to a whole new level. The free skating portion of the competition, which is also the final portion, was on a Friday at 1 PM. This also happened to be graduation for many of the seniors (I don’t understand why they graduate halfway through the second semester, but they do). Because of this, there were a number of parents and grandparents carrying bouquets of flowers. I once again watched in the dining hall. Normally around 1 o’clock the place is pretty empty, as people run off to class, but that day it was absolutely packed. Everybody sat transfixed as the people before her went out on the ice. As soon as it was her turn to skate every person in the building became totally silent. The food preparation stopped, and even the dishwashers came out to watch. Every jump Kim Yu-Na landed was greeted with great applause and cheers. You could feel how tense people were. I think if she had fallen many of the grandparents wouldn’t have survived to watch their grandchildren graduate an hour later. Heart attacks and aneurisms would have swept through the crowd like a grotesque wave. Luckily, this never came to pass. With one final enormous cheer she finished her routine and left the ice to get her score. As soon as it was posted the crowd broke into applause even louder than before. I thought for sure people were about to start throwing flowers at the screen. Even though Kim Yu-Na had just pretty much locked up a gold medal with the world record score she received people stuck around to watch the next skater, a Japanese woman, take her turn on the ice. I was pretty sure that they were all sticking around in the hope that she would fall and they could all take a bit of symbolic revenge on the Japanese for all the invasions and systematic destruction of Korean culture, but instead they let out a long, heartfelt “oooohhh” when she messed up on a jump. I think they would have been much less pleasant and much more riotous had she won, but now they could be nice as it was sure that their skater had won. As soon as the Japanese woman finished everybody immediately poured out of the cafeteria, almost as if they had some place nearly as important to be.
Clearly, being in Korea made following many of the American athletes and teams a very difficult task. Apparently everybody back home was very invested in the American hockey team’s quest for the gold. I hear that the final between the USA and Canada was a fantastic game. I didn’t get to watch of course, because of the time difference and the never-ending hatred NBC has for streaming video outside of the country. I must say, though, that I was much less invested than other people in the outcome of the game. I really only wanted the US to win so I could make fun of the Canadians on my rugby team and down at the pub. I mean more than I normally do. I would honestly have felt a little bad if we had won. What do they have beside hockey, trapping, and occasional sex with moose? It would have been unfair to take away by far the second best of those three things. Plus, it’s not like we’re going to stop making fun of them. They still have French-Canadians, and they aren’t going anywhere.
While watching the Olympics in Korea was strange, so was watching the Super Bowl. While the Super Bowl was a while ago at this point, it was a very strange introduction to Korea. I was around my second week in the country, but like any good American anywhere in the world I had to find a place to watch what is essentially a second Christmas for most people. My local ex-pat pub, Santa Claus Bar, was open for the early morning start of the game. I don’t have any classes that start before 1 PM here, so waking up for the 8:30 start time was a bit of a pain. After a cursory shave and shower I stumbled my way over to the pub. That morning they were luckily serving a nice American breakfast. I decided to have mine with an orange juice to help wake me up. Many other people there had theirs with a pint of beer. Or a rum and coke. Or a couple of rum and cokes. Well, what’s a little drinking on a Monday morning? Honestly, probably alcoholism, but who am I to judge? There were a few fairly bizarre things about the whole situation, along with the all too common aspects. The first and most obvious different thing was the Korean family in Colts jerseys who had camped themselves directly in front of the TV screen. Luckily, with their being Korean, I was able to see over them fairly easily, but it was annoying nonetheless. The next strange thing was the breakfast. I mean, it’s just not Super Bowl food. I wish I could have dug into a huge pizza and a plateful of chicken wings. Unfortunately, these are not foods that Koreans make well, or even palatable. The Korean pizza I have had the displeasure of tasting is one of the more awful things I have been tricked into believing is food in this country. It should be noted for all eternity in some large stone monument that ketchup does not equal tomato sauce, and that large sweet potato wedges are not an acceptable topping on any pizza. While these things were different, some things weren’t. There were still the people who were more interested in the commercials than the game. Hell, next to me I had people discussing the merits of J.D. Salinger’s literary works. I was kind enough to tell them that upon his death some new manuscripts had been found, that I suspected would be published in the not too distant future, and even more kindly refrained from informing them that “The Catcher in the Rye” is a horrible book about some boring over-privileged pain-in-the-ass who needed a handful of Prozac and not a narrator telling the reader what he wasn’t interested in doing. If books were judged on what their protagonist wasn’t interested in doing I should just write my autobiography now and accept all of the literary prizes and royalty checks that come flooding through my door. Back in the world of football, things went quite well, as I like the rest of the US, outside of the unfortunate state of Indiana, was cheering for the winning team. How could anybody possibly cheer for Payton “I’ll shill any product you bring me” Manning over the city of New Orleans? It’s the least we could do after Katrina, other than helping save people or rebuild their city or something. So with that great schadenfreude feeling of watching a team you hate lose the biggest game of the season I walked into the strange afternoon sun and back to school to go study my Korean.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Classes, Dorm Rooms, and Prison Showers
A little under a week after arriving at school I began my classes. My classes run the gamut from Korean Language to Mechanics of Solids. This gives a wide range of different experiences to engage in. In some ways, classes here are very similar to classes back home: there are lectures, problem sets, reading assignments, even some essays. In other ways, they are totally different, from the way the classes are run to the way that the students act. The first difference I noted was that at the beginning of class the teachers all take attendance. At the first class they even warned that being late X times equaled one absence and that Y absences would cause an automatic failure in the class. I can’t remember any of my professors back home taking attendance. For some classes this makes sense. It would be very easy to skip out on my hundred person design lecture. It would be much harder to skip my twenty person Korean class. In addition, I’ve always been under the impression that failing a lecture based class was pretty inevitable if one skipped over half the classes. More importantly though is that I couldn’t skip a class if my life depended on it. In many of my classes I’m the only guy without a Korean name, and if the professor just looked up he would almost certainly notice the absence of the dark blond mane of hair sitting about 6 inches above the level of the rest of the class. Perhaps it’s not just a Western prejudice that all Asians are hard to tell apart. Who knows? At any rate, the first few minutes of each class are taken up with roll call. The rest of class is often taken up with a lecture that is entirely independent of any student input. I’m always concerned that asking for a clarification on some point is in bad form, largely because I’ve maybe seen two or three Korean students speak to the teacher during class. This isn’t to say, however, that they don’t speak. They talk to each other nearly non-stop. In many ways Korean college is like American high school. I have never seen a collection of such intelligent “young adults” (this may be one of the worst phrases in the English language, just short of “anal fissure” and “last call”) act so much like a collection of pre-adolescent stereotypes. From non-stop texting in class, to complaining about even the smallest assignments, nothing escapes them. I’ve honestly heard entire classes moan over a one page essay with a due date 2 weeks later, as well as a two problem long p-set due a week later. Neither of those assignments took over half-an-hour. Because these aspects of my classes are all so similar, it is the professors that make the difference. And, you know, the entirely different content, I guess.
Within the first few weeks, nearly all of my professors have managed to leave a mark in my mind in one way or another. For one it was a ten-minute lecture on how Eastern cultures put the family name first, whereas Western people put their given name first, in the same vein as “Black people do this, White people do that” comedy. For another, it was the definitive statement that “Pointillism was a failure” that seems to be a rather overly-objective view on a very subjective field. For yet another it was the discussion of how important clearly labeled buttons on a remote are. He illustrated this point by using the example of watching a “raunchy” late night TV show and having to change the channel quickly when one’s young child walks into the room, rather than accidentally increasing the volume. It turns out that this scenario is much funnier when an old Korean man uses the term “raunchy.” This is not to say that any of these professors are bad. On the contrary, these things give me something amusing to think about while I am in class, which is certainly more than most PowerPoint presentations offer to do.
After leaving the fake-carpet linoleum of the classrooms, I tend to retire to the fake-wood linoleum of my dorm room. My room here is a major step down from the one I left back in Massachusetts. While being slightly smaller it contains one more bed, bringing the total bed size up to that which I sleep on at home. The warped flooring and strange strip of extra, differently patterned, fake-wood running down the middle do little to bring a homely glow to the place. The pink, purple, and yellow blankets that were given to us upon arrival unfortunately don’t match the seafoam green door, nor the off-white drapes. Hell, even the bare fluorescent lighting doesn’t help. The outdated calendar hanging over my roommate’s bed is one of the only touches of décor in the room. This is not surprising though. I have found that most exchange students’ rooms are left pretty bare. Honestly, the effort to take the extra Spice Girls poster over from America is rarely worth the effort. Three is usually enough. The other problem with my room is my degree of disorganization. I have managed to turn my desk into a useful wardrobe, mainly by strewing my pants across it. The books I have read, as well as those I have yet to read, are shoved into crevices whenever I finish one, so they tend to be left all over. Basically, it looks like a shitty college dorm. Even the location sucks. Being both right next to the stairs, bathroom, and front door, means that there is a constant clomping parade of Koreans marching past my door at all hours, making as much noise as humanly possible. This is on top of the concussive blast and booming noise of people slamming their doors, which is not unlike that of a small gas refinery explosion. Also, my next door neighbors talk and listen to terrible music until ungodly hours, which I can clearly hear through the vegan-thin walls. In addition, exiting my room subjects me to a blast of freezing air, as pretty much every door in this country is designed to be propped open, and they almost always are, even in sub-freezing weather. As for the proximity to the bathroom, you can probably guess the downside.
The amenities are also not particularly cushy. So far as I can tell, there is no lounge frequented by students. There is a gym in the basement, but it is missing a lot of necessary equipment and is unheated. As for the bathroom, my main complaint is about the shower. It is of the variety that could pleasantly be called “gym-style” and realistically called “prison-style.” The room has 6 shower stalls, most with the standard American showerhead coming out of the wall, but also a couple with the handheld faucet favored by Europeans and others who clearly have some objection to being thoroughly clean without spraying water all over the damn place. The main issue is that of dividers. The people in charge were smart enough to put some in. This is nice. What is not so nice is the material. One would expect something along the line of brushed stainless steel, perhaps aluminum or some cheap plastic. Instead, they settled on glass. While glass is certainly solid enough to block splashing on other people it does have the fairly obvious drawback of being transparent, a seemingly enormous oversight. Guys are often unhappy or even unwilling to piss next to somebody in a line of urinals, even with chest-high dividers. I feel that the societal mores around showering next to somebody in plain view are a bit stronger, but clearly I’m the outsider on this opinion here. The nice thing is that even though the showers serve around 50 people on my floor, I almost never encounter another person in there. This is because of the rather strange habit people here have of skipping showers entirely and washing their hair in the sink. Two of the sinks have handheld showerheads for that very purpose. And while I couldn’t get away without showering for days on end without hanging dozens of those pine tree car fresheners around my neck it seems to not be a problem for the Koreans. Actually, despite the fact that I grow the amount of facial hair in a day that people in this country grow in a week, shaving supplies are sold everywhere here, but it is nearly impossible to find deodorant. I don’t know if the reason for this is that they truly don’t smell, or if it is due to the fact that I haven’t been snuggling up to anybody, but I am glad I knew about it before I got here. Perhaps the best advice I could give to anybody coming over for an extended period of time would be to bring ample supplies of whatever it is you use to keep from stinking and leave the shaving cream at home. Strangely, while avoiding showers and washing their hair in the dorm sinks is commonplace, brushing teeth seems to be a group event. I have seen both girls and boys brushing their teeth in academic buildings at all hours of the day. Some people even bring their toothbrushes and toothpaste with them in their backpacks. There are clearly some things I may never understand about this place. Despite all of this though, I can’t really complain about my dorm. Not considering the total cost of my room for the semester is about 250 bucks. Suck on that every other college ever.
Within the first few weeks, nearly all of my professors have managed to leave a mark in my mind in one way or another. For one it was a ten-minute lecture on how Eastern cultures put the family name first, whereas Western people put their given name first, in the same vein as “Black people do this, White people do that” comedy. For another, it was the definitive statement that “Pointillism was a failure” that seems to be a rather overly-objective view on a very subjective field. For yet another it was the discussion of how important clearly labeled buttons on a remote are. He illustrated this point by using the example of watching a “raunchy” late night TV show and having to change the channel quickly when one’s young child walks into the room, rather than accidentally increasing the volume. It turns out that this scenario is much funnier when an old Korean man uses the term “raunchy.” This is not to say that any of these professors are bad. On the contrary, these things give me something amusing to think about while I am in class, which is certainly more than most PowerPoint presentations offer to do.
After leaving the fake-carpet linoleum of the classrooms, I tend to retire to the fake-wood linoleum of my dorm room. My room here is a major step down from the one I left back in Massachusetts. While being slightly smaller it contains one more bed, bringing the total bed size up to that which I sleep on at home. The warped flooring and strange strip of extra, differently patterned, fake-wood running down the middle do little to bring a homely glow to the place. The pink, purple, and yellow blankets that were given to us upon arrival unfortunately don’t match the seafoam green door, nor the off-white drapes. Hell, even the bare fluorescent lighting doesn’t help. The outdated calendar hanging over my roommate’s bed is one of the only touches of décor in the room. This is not surprising though. I have found that most exchange students’ rooms are left pretty bare. Honestly, the effort to take the extra Spice Girls poster over from America is rarely worth the effort. Three is usually enough. The other problem with my room is my degree of disorganization. I have managed to turn my desk into a useful wardrobe, mainly by strewing my pants across it. The books I have read, as well as those I have yet to read, are shoved into crevices whenever I finish one, so they tend to be left all over. Basically, it looks like a shitty college dorm. Even the location sucks. Being both right next to the stairs, bathroom, and front door, means that there is a constant clomping parade of Koreans marching past my door at all hours, making as much noise as humanly possible. This is on top of the concussive blast and booming noise of people slamming their doors, which is not unlike that of a small gas refinery explosion. Also, my next door neighbors talk and listen to terrible music until ungodly hours, which I can clearly hear through the vegan-thin walls. In addition, exiting my room subjects me to a blast of freezing air, as pretty much every door in this country is designed to be propped open, and they almost always are, even in sub-freezing weather. As for the proximity to the bathroom, you can probably guess the downside.
The amenities are also not particularly cushy. So far as I can tell, there is no lounge frequented by students. There is a gym in the basement, but it is missing a lot of necessary equipment and is unheated. As for the bathroom, my main complaint is about the shower. It is of the variety that could pleasantly be called “gym-style” and realistically called “prison-style.” The room has 6 shower stalls, most with the standard American showerhead coming out of the wall, but also a couple with the handheld faucet favored by Europeans and others who clearly have some objection to being thoroughly clean without spraying water all over the damn place. The main issue is that of dividers. The people in charge were smart enough to put some in. This is nice. What is not so nice is the material. One would expect something along the line of brushed stainless steel, perhaps aluminum or some cheap plastic. Instead, they settled on glass. While glass is certainly solid enough to block splashing on other people it does have the fairly obvious drawback of being transparent, a seemingly enormous oversight. Guys are often unhappy or even unwilling to piss next to somebody in a line of urinals, even with chest-high dividers. I feel that the societal mores around showering next to somebody in plain view are a bit stronger, but clearly I’m the outsider on this opinion here. The nice thing is that even though the showers serve around 50 people on my floor, I almost never encounter another person in there. This is because of the rather strange habit people here have of skipping showers entirely and washing their hair in the sink. Two of the sinks have handheld showerheads for that very purpose. And while I couldn’t get away without showering for days on end without hanging dozens of those pine tree car fresheners around my neck it seems to not be a problem for the Koreans. Actually, despite the fact that I grow the amount of facial hair in a day that people in this country grow in a week, shaving supplies are sold everywhere here, but it is nearly impossible to find deodorant. I don’t know if the reason for this is that they truly don’t smell, or if it is due to the fact that I haven’t been snuggling up to anybody, but I am glad I knew about it before I got here. Perhaps the best advice I could give to anybody coming over for an extended period of time would be to bring ample supplies of whatever it is you use to keep from stinking and leave the shaving cream at home. Strangely, while avoiding showers and washing their hair in the dorm sinks is commonplace, brushing teeth seems to be a group event. I have seen both girls and boys brushing their teeth in academic buildings at all hours of the day. Some people even bring their toothbrushes and toothpaste with them in their backpacks. There are clearly some things I may never understand about this place. Despite all of this though, I can’t really complain about my dorm. Not considering the total cost of my room for the semester is about 250 bucks. Suck on that every other college ever.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Taxis, Bars, and Basketball Skills
The first thing I asked at my orientation was the name and location of the nearest ex-pat bar and where I could watch the Super Bowl. It turns out the answer to both questions is a place called “Santa Claus Bar,” about a 15 minute walk from the edge of campus. I had looked for directions online, but directions in Korea are not like anywhere else I have ever been. The directions on the internet said to hail a cab and ask to go to the Lotteria (a store that no longer exists) in the Gung-dong district. The reason that the directions were given this way is because with the exception of major thoroughfares and highways, streets are not labeled or even named in Korea. In London, cab drivers have to take a between 2 and 4 years studying the layout of the city and suburbs before taking a test in which they must give directions between two randomly selected places in London from memory, with every turn and street name given. This is very clearly not the case in Daejeon, or for that matter, anywhere else in Korea. To get somewhere that is not famous or randomly well known by the cabbies, like, say, a closed down convenience store, you need to know the place’s distance and directional relationship to a better known landmark. On top of this, many cabbies have difficulty understanding the English pronunciation of areas. In fact, the first taxi driver I gave tried to give directions to simply waved his hand in a manner indicating that he was not going to drive some incoherent foreigners anywhere. The second one took about 3 tries before finally understanding us and saying “Ahhh, Guuung-dong” showing that for some unknowable reason I had been butchering the pronunciation the entire time.
After being dropped off at what turned out to be an eyeglass store I found the sign for the bar that I had seen online. One thing about Korea that instantly popped out to me as being different is that most of the business establishments, be they restaurants, gaming rooms, or bars tend to not be at street level. I had never really thought about it, but it is rare to go to a store that is not at street level in nearly all of the US. In addition, those stores not at street level tend to have some extremely sketchy nature to them, such as being psychics, strange barbershops, or adult bookstores. The Santa Claus bar is actually located in the basement of its building, which continues the Korean trend of putting normal businesses in strange locations. Upon entering Santa Claus Bar I was hit with a wave of air so smoky as to be reminiscent of a combo Wu-Tang Clan/Dispatch concert. Korea is not a place with no-smoking policies. Smoking indoors is acceptable pretty much anywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if the churches here had ashtrays in the pews considering how much people light up here. This means that I return every evening smelling like the bottom of an ashtray, and my sweatshirts tend to retain this wonderful odor for days. While Koreans may not be as civilized when it comes to relegating flaming tubes of plant remnants to the outdoors where they belong they are far more cultured in a different, but perhaps more important, area. Alcohol pricing.
Booze in Korea is cheap. Much cheaper than in any establishment in the US or Europe, at which I’ve had the pleasure of being gouged for over 5 times the retail price for a bottle of beer. Even at the noticeably more expensive ex-pat bars’ alcohol is still quite affordable with 2-for-1 deals and cheap pitchers everywhere. This is of course only true for local beer. I had known that whiskey is insanely expensive in this part of the world, but I am still astonished by how expensive Japanese beer is. Paying 12 dollars for a bottle of decent Japanese brew is highway robbery in my book. I know that the two countries have serious feuds dating back hundreds of years, with the Korea being routinely invaded, plundered, and torched, but that is no reason to punish me and palate. This is all pretty OK though, as most people here tend to head away from beer anyways, and towards soju. Soju is the Korean alcohol of choice. It is a vodka-like liquor traditionally made from rice, with an alcohol content around 20 percent. It also costs less than 3 dollars a bottle in a bar or restaurant. There is a reason that people here drink it, and it’s not the taste.
The most obvious upside of drinking at a foreigner bar is getting to meet people who speak English as a first language, refer to the sport where people kick around a black and white ball “soccer,” and use derogatory remarks that remind you why you don’t miss the assholes you left back home. Also, talking about sports is nice. It turns out that walking up to anybody and enquiring where they are from is entirely acceptable behavior, and a good way to meet new people. The first night I actually met somebody from the Boston area by asking about his Red Sox hat. We talked a bit about watching American sports in Korea, and then he invited me to a weekly basketball game in the area. I was very excited to meet other Americans, so I gladly agreed to play the following weekend despite my crippling lack of ability in jumping, dribbling, shooting, and general basketball ability.
I’ve noticed that it is pretty easy to tell who will be good at basketball just by looking at them on the court warming up for about a minute. Some people look like basketball players. I look like their agent. Basketball is one of the unfortunate sports that conspires to make me look good to the uninitiated (“But you’re so tall!”) while requiring every single skill I don’t posses, and none of the skills I do. Hell, if it required people to do math while ranting about political philosophies and awkwardly running into doors and table corners I’d be golden. However, I’m not so lucky. Even though I proved to be a total bust on the court, there were noticeable upsides. For instance, the people who play are all really nice, and diverse enough that I doubled the number of non-White-or-Asian-people I’d seen since arriving in Korea. One of the guys who plays is a former international basketball player. He is a very nice guy, but also very physically imposing at 6’10”. If it were possible to stand out even more, he is also Black, which as I mentioned is shockingly rare in this country. This brings me to the other upside of playing basketball. I normally stand out like the smelly kid in middle school in this country. On the other hand, next to some of these guys I look positively native. Sometimes it’s nice to blend in.
After being dropped off at what turned out to be an eyeglass store I found the sign for the bar that I had seen online. One thing about Korea that instantly popped out to me as being different is that most of the business establishments, be they restaurants, gaming rooms, or bars tend to not be at street level. I had never really thought about it, but it is rare to go to a store that is not at street level in nearly all of the US. In addition, those stores not at street level tend to have some extremely sketchy nature to them, such as being psychics, strange barbershops, or adult bookstores. The Santa Claus bar is actually located in the basement of its building, which continues the Korean trend of putting normal businesses in strange locations. Upon entering Santa Claus Bar I was hit with a wave of air so smoky as to be reminiscent of a combo Wu-Tang Clan/Dispatch concert. Korea is not a place with no-smoking policies. Smoking indoors is acceptable pretty much anywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if the churches here had ashtrays in the pews considering how much people light up here. This means that I return every evening smelling like the bottom of an ashtray, and my sweatshirts tend to retain this wonderful odor for days. While Koreans may not be as civilized when it comes to relegating flaming tubes of plant remnants to the outdoors where they belong they are far more cultured in a different, but perhaps more important, area. Alcohol pricing.
Booze in Korea is cheap. Much cheaper than in any establishment in the US or Europe, at which I’ve had the pleasure of being gouged for over 5 times the retail price for a bottle of beer. Even at the noticeably more expensive ex-pat bars’ alcohol is still quite affordable with 2-for-1 deals and cheap pitchers everywhere. This is of course only true for local beer. I had known that whiskey is insanely expensive in this part of the world, but I am still astonished by how expensive Japanese beer is. Paying 12 dollars for a bottle of decent Japanese brew is highway robbery in my book. I know that the two countries have serious feuds dating back hundreds of years, with the Korea being routinely invaded, plundered, and torched, but that is no reason to punish me and palate. This is all pretty OK though, as most people here tend to head away from beer anyways, and towards soju. Soju is the Korean alcohol of choice. It is a vodka-like liquor traditionally made from rice, with an alcohol content around 20 percent. It also costs less than 3 dollars a bottle in a bar or restaurant. There is a reason that people here drink it, and it’s not the taste.
The most obvious upside of drinking at a foreigner bar is getting to meet people who speak English as a first language, refer to the sport where people kick around a black and white ball “soccer,” and use derogatory remarks that remind you why you don’t miss the assholes you left back home. Also, talking about sports is nice. It turns out that walking up to anybody and enquiring where they are from is entirely acceptable behavior, and a good way to meet new people. The first night I actually met somebody from the Boston area by asking about his Red Sox hat. We talked a bit about watching American sports in Korea, and then he invited me to a weekly basketball game in the area. I was very excited to meet other Americans, so I gladly agreed to play the following weekend despite my crippling lack of ability in jumping, dribbling, shooting, and general basketball ability.
I’ve noticed that it is pretty easy to tell who will be good at basketball just by looking at them on the court warming up for about a minute. Some people look like basketball players. I look like their agent. Basketball is one of the unfortunate sports that conspires to make me look good to the uninitiated (“But you’re so tall!”) while requiring every single skill I don’t posses, and none of the skills I do. Hell, if it required people to do math while ranting about political philosophies and awkwardly running into doors and table corners I’d be golden. However, I’m not so lucky. Even though I proved to be a total bust on the court, there were noticeable upsides. For instance, the people who play are all really nice, and diverse enough that I doubled the number of non-White-or-Asian-people I’d seen since arriving in Korea. One of the guys who plays is a former international basketball player. He is a very nice guy, but also very physically imposing at 6’10”. If it were possible to stand out even more, he is also Black, which as I mentioned is shockingly rare in this country. This brings me to the other upside of playing basketball. I normally stand out like the smelly kid in middle school in this country. On the other hand, next to some of these guys I look positively native. Sometimes it’s nice to blend in.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)