I went to the DMZ in October. That was trippy. It’s so easy to forget that the war isn’t actually over until you’re there and North Korean soldiers have sniper rifles trained on you. Our tour guide, Sergeant Han, was definitely worth the price of admission. Perhaps will spend more time on military bases. There was one place where we stood at an observation point and were surrounded on three sides by North Korea, and, more importantly, a minefield.
That’s something that’s totally outside my experience. So far outside, in fact, that it was completely unreal to me. You can tell me as many times as you like that there are people with guns pointed at me, it’s not going to register. It didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t understand. Well I did and I didn’t.
You can see the border quite clearly because it’s where the trees end – N. Korea has cut all of theirs down. There are tourist trips that foreigners can take – South Koreans are not allowed – and I’m sort of curious to go on one, but at the same time I’d feel sort of…well, disgusting. For a few reasons. For one, I’d see only the part of North Korea that they’d want me to see, and it wouldn’t be real. And it’s hard to go into a starving country and eat well as a tourist. Not to mention that I’d be turning people’s suffering into a tourist attraction, which is sort of reprehensible, and my money would be going to fund Kim Jong-Il. And I can only go to Pyongyang if I go through China. If I thought I’d see something real and could come back and write about it, I’d do it in a second, but I think all I’d do is go hiking on the sacred mountain that South Koreans are no longer allowed to go to and spend the night in the kind of luxury North Koreans don’t know exists.
South Koreans are also vastly uneducated about North Korea. At least, my students are. According to South Koreans consitution, everybody in North Korea is a citizen of South Korea, and yet South Korea does dick all, to the point where in votes about North Korea in the UN, South Korea actually abstains from voting. The children here are convinced that the people in North Korea are happy, which is probably how they deal with their guilt, or something like it, (though, to be fair, I’ve heard the same argument from Canadians. “No no, they LIKE being hungry and scared! they don’t know anything else!”), and have no idea about the hunger and fear and control.
Kim Jong-Il is a source of joking in my class. I’ve even heard teachers using it towards their kids as a form of discipline: “In this class, I’m Kim Jong-Il and you’re the North Koreans.” To me, that’s as bad as saying “Pretend I’m Adolph Hitler and do whatever I say.”
Even I’m careful about talking about in class. It comes up as a topic of disucussion quite frequently, “would you like Korea to unite?” “what do you think about mandatory military service?”, as I strain for topics to make these kids talk in class. But I’m always aware of the fact that, just as in Eastern Europe you may find yourselves speaking to survivors of or family members of survivors of the Holocaust, in the classrooms here, I may find myself speaking to students whose grandparents are in North Korea. And to me, it’s just as bad.
I don’t know what’s worse: that a strange man kissed me in a bar, or that it was more action than I’ve gotten in months.
Usually, I let my little ones get away with a lot. They climb all over me. We have punching matches (fake ones, obviously, but I occasionally take a bit of a beating). They hug me. They come up behind me and wrap their arms around my stomach. They play with my hair, lead me around the room, and hold my hand. Sometimes, they’ll spend a long time just rubbing my arm, marvelling at the whiteness of the skin or the vast amounts of hair I have compared to them.
This is all fine. More than fine. There’s something very peaceful about a kid sitting happily in your lap, even if that kid is wriggling around and refuses to sit still and you’re pretty sure that if he elbows you again you’ll either pee or throw up. It’s still pretty cool.
One of them, Rex*, races to finish his test every class so that he can help me mark them all. He either sits in my lap, or if I’m sitting forward, climbs onto the chair behind me and leans on my back, reaching over me to put the grades on the tests (he’s eight you perverts). This is fine.
Yesterday, he climbed up on the chair behind me, and when I didn’t acknowledge him right away (the level of attention this kids sometimes needs is much like the cat who sits on your book or insists on chasing your pen across the page as your write…) he licked the back of my neck.
Go back and read that again. Remember that, similes aside, this is an actual child, and not one to whom I am related, and not, in fact, a cat.
This is not fine. This is a good way to get syphilis.
Filed under: food
I’ve eaten a lot of stuff I don’t recognize, and I’ve gotten to the point where if something isn’t alive, I’ll put it in my mouth. That won’t go well in Canada! Street food is a way of life here, and I got over wondering about health and safety laws my first month. I figure there’s 65 million of them and they’ve been around for 4000 years, the mortality rate would be a lot higher if they were getting salmonella from the FRIED CHICKEN THEY BUY FROM THE BACK OF A TRUCK.
I won’t eat, however, san nakchi.. That’s octopus that’s still alive. They chop of the tentacles and force them, still wriggling, into their mouths. The suckers are still working, so people have been known to choke to death. I’m sure it tastes good, but I don’t like to fight with my food. I should have already won that battle.
I also haven’t had dog soup yet, but I am planning on having it at least once before I leave, if only so that I can say that I’ve done it. It can’t be that different from pig, or cow, really.
My parents were here to visit me from Canada last week. Everything weird that had become normal for me – toilet paper rolls on the tables, red-hot coals being carried in close proximity to my head, communal soup bowls, tiny hole-in-the-wall kimbap shops covered in graffitti and dirt – was brought sharply back into focus and my parents wondered why and how I could possibly dig comfortably into a bowl of food without first finding out what was in it. They looked for bowls to pour the soup into. They ordered from the menus using pictures and were shocked when the food they got was not, in fact, a salad, but frozen chunks of raw fish. They were a little grossed out by the plate of raw beef sitting on the table while we were eating dinner. They felt rude pushing a button to summon a waiter.
I acclimatized to these things gradually. I didn’t notice when I suddenly became comfortable with them, the same way that I don’t know which day I was finally able to use flat metal chopsticks with any degree of competency. But with my parents here, commenting on everything that is now normal and everyday for me, I suddenly realized how accustomed I am to the food here, and also to how central food is to being comfortable in a new culture, or a new country. Everything else can be laughed off, or be interesting, or not important, but if you can’t handle or are uncomfortable with the food you’re in trouble. I can now find my way around a Korean grocery store and get everything I need, and I can order whole meals in Korean, and I know what to take a chance on trying and what to avoid.
This is not to say that I am native, or that I never get a food surprise (like the time I nonchalantly popped <i>Korea’s hottest chilli pepper</i> into my mouth), but having my parents here showed, in sharp relief, just how much I’ve changed in the last six months.
Filed under: idiocy (my own)
My parents have been visiting me for the last nine days and they just left this morning.
That was hard. They wouldn’t let me come to the airport with them, so I ended up saying goodbye to them at the bus stop. Which, of course, made perfect sense and was absolutely logical. As my mother said, “You’ll fag all the way out the air port, and fag all the way back by yourself, by which time you won’t be able to sleep before work.” Perfect sense.
Still sucked.
Not that I’m not glad to have my apartment back. Holy JESUS am I glad to be living along again. My apartment is incredibly tiny. It has one room. Which means they drink their morning coffee right beside my bed, and we have vastly differing schedules. My real, grown-up job allows me to sleep until noon every day. Also, my dad cleaned out my fridge, sighing and muttering the whole time, on his first day.
But this morning sucked, and now I’m going to bed.
Filed under: quotes
student 1: “teacher! are you married?”
me: “no.”
student 2: “why? because you’re not pretty?”
I have just re-read my last post. It would appear that, as well as regularly using prepositions and articles wrong, or leaving them out altogether, I have also developed a problem with using tenses correctly or consistently.
and there were so many things I could have done with that university tuition.
Wednesday: I went swimming without goggles. As I spent much of my childhood in a swimming pool without goggles, this was not a situation that caused concern. Certainly no red flags were raised. The day before I nearly swam into a big ball of snot. Swimming in a public pool is like eating a hot dog: you know it’s there, but you don’t think about it until you find the cow lip in your bun. But, you know, snot’s gross, but in a pool full of chlorine, probably not life threatening, so I got on with it.
Friday: Get through work no problem. Walk home. All useful stores, medical clincs, pharmacies, hospitals are now closed for the weekend. Starbucks is, of course, open. Notice, upon arriving in my bathroom, that there is a strange yellow liquid seeping out of my bloodshot eye. Oh, shit.
Saturday: Try medical clinics anyway. No luck. Eye getting worse.
Sunday: Wake up with thick yellow gunk gluing both eyes shut. Start panicking. Not only do I have an ill-fated psuedo-date (more on that later), but I’m starting to seriously consider the possibility of a)going blind and b)having an infection that could travel to my brain and kill me. Spend evening surreptiously applying moisturizing eye drops and wiping gunk out of the corner of my eye. During dinner (a lovely seafood risotto with a nice Chilean cabernet) it began to feel as if something quite sharp inside my eye, and by the time I got home my eye was puffed up as if I had spent the night crying (I didn’t).
Monday: Got three hours of non-consecutive sleep, and spent the night not sleeping with cold wet cotton swabs over my eyes. Stumble to a doctor’s office at 9am, point at my eyes at the receptionist’s desk, and get in to see a doctor in record time considering I had no appointment.
Doctor: well, you have an infection.
Me: …duh.
Doctor: I don’t know if it’s viral or bacterial.
Me: what’s the difference?
Doctor: Viral conjectivitus (pink eye. I have motherfucking pinkeye) is highly contagious.
Me: I work with small children. Who touch me. A lot.
Doctor: Well, let’s start you on antibiotics. I’m not an eye specialist, so if the antibiotics don’t work, it’s viral, and we’ll refer you.
Me: So…in three days, I’ll know whether or not I should have been working?
Doctor:…..yes.
Me: I have a problem.
Boss: What’s wrong?
Me: Well, take a look at my eyes. I have pinkeye. Two of them.
Boss: It doesn’t look like anything’s wrong.
Me: Liar.
Me: The doctor doesn’t know if it’s viral or bacterial, but if it’s viral, it’s highly contagious.
Boss: Are you ok?
Me: Yes. But I work with 14 high octane eight year olds who touch me. A lot.
Boss: Well, it doesn’t look so bad.
Me: As long as you’re ok with me working with a potentially highly contagious infection of the eyes…
Boss: Yeah, that’s fine.
Me: (hands behind my back) Children, today – no clapping games. No lap sitting. No high fives. No touching. Ok?
Children: WHYYYYY?
Me: My eyes are very sore. If you touch, your eyes will be very sore.
Children: Ohhhhhh. Ok. Teacher! Monster!
Me: Yes. Hey, don’t touch!
Children: Oops, I forgot.
