Easter weirdness
Today was odd. Not that I haven’t seen weird stuff in Korea, most of it just rolls off my back now, but some of the little things are still just a bit off.
Today, I went to Suwon to check out the shopping center in Suwon station. I had the best Okonomiyaki I’ve ever had there, by the way, it was squid okonomiyaki and it was delicious.
On my way back home, I stopped at a skin store to pick up some face lotions, and started on my way home. I noticed a lot of groups of old, well-dressed people wandering the streets. Again, seen it, not a big deal. At one point, I come to a corner, and turn it to run into one of the bigger groups, out of which a young woman pops out and greets me with “Hi! Jesus I love you.”, and then hands me a single egg. One of the men in the group then snapped a picture of me looking at an egg with the most WTF?! look ever on my face.
I figured it out in a few seconds. Today is easter, so that explained the egg. The “Jesus I love you” was easy too. Koreans have difficulty with third person statements, so they often just say a name and then speak for that person to get the idea across, so obviously, Jesus loves you. She also gave me a pamphlet in Korean with a little stick figure guy being chased by directional arrows, and a cutesy anime Jesus.
Also, the lotion shop gave me free skin whitening cream.
My first day in Korea
Nothing too special, I got off the 14 and a half hour plane ride. After wandering around trying to find customs for awhile (clearly marked by signs with totally non-sensical English), and eventually got my passport stamped and got in. I managed to get a bus ticket and started on the two hour ride from Incheon to Pyeongtaeg.
The first thing I noticed about Korea is that most of its architecture is a little unimaginative. Just large, square buildings with pipes protruding from them, heading up to the roof for water, air, etc. I was really getting confused by several building I kept seeing. They were large wire fences, also fenced in over the top, probably about the size of a large office building. They were draped with green tarp on the inside. For days, I didn’t know what these were. Turns out, golf courses. There’s no open space here, so they have to fence off golf courses so the balls don’t fly into the awful traffic. God, I’m glad I don’t have to drive here. Imagine Houston’s traffic behavior, combined with the pedestrian behavior in Austin down by the campus, and that is Korean traffic in a nutshell. People frequently dart in front of cars, and cars always run red lights. I can’t imagine how the birth rate stays above the death rate here.
Anyway, I got off the bus in Pyeongtaeg City (although I wasn’t totally sure it was at the time), and my co-teacher greeted me with the school admin. They had set up a motel room for me since my apartment was not yet ready. After I dropped off my metric ton of luggage, my co-teacher, Nam, took me to see the school. As it turns out, there is a girls middle school, a boys middle school, and a girls high school and boys high school on the same campus. I teach at the girls middle school. I was a little surprised. It was 8 in the evening, and the school doors were still open, and many students were still here studying. Apparently, the school stays open until 10, and many students stay here very late to study. I could only imagine the destruction if you let students enter American schools alone after hours. Anyway, we talked for awhile about the school and students, and I went back to my motel (with help, of course, Korea is a confusing maze, more on that later.)
I got into my hotel room and decided to see what was on tv. Of course, most of it was korean dramas and kids shows that I couldn’t understand. There was also a televised StarCraft competition and Go. I did run across “That 70’s Show”, subtitled in Korean, so that was nice to see. Oh also, hardcore porn on korean cable, a little unexpected, just boom! there it is. No warning or anything. I needed to take a shower, so I got into the bathroom and noticed there was no shower curtain. In korea, bathrooms have drains in the floor, so you just splash water all over the floor, no big deal. It seems odd, but the more I think of it, the more sense it makes. The bathroom flooding is not a big deal, here.
Ah, it turns out my school is a private Christian school, complete with a chaplain (who studied in the US Army Chaplain school). My co-teacher teaches a high school sunday school, so he took me to his church. The sermon, according to him, was on Genesis 2, so it was probably about sexual purity, I don’t know, I was reading Numbers. The Sunday school was mostly just asking me questions about America. Most people here know at least a little bit of English, especially students, as it is required coursework here. Anyway, I fell right asleep, because not only did I not sleep much before the flight, I left in the morning, and followed the sun all the way to Korea, resulting in a 21 hour long daylight, which really screwed with my system. Oh, and I can’t sleep on planes, cars, or buses. It took 4 days before I wasn’t tired all day and waking up at 3AM.
