Jaws 5: Revenge of the Captivated Sharks

There is something about living in a foreign country that causes me to "go with the flow" much more often than I ordinarily would back home. When someone asks me if I want to do something here, the answer is almost certainly, "O.K. Sound good," regardless of the activity. I rarely think about what I'm agreeing to do.

"Do you want to join an Ultimate Frisbee league even though you don't know the rules to this sport?"
"O.K. Sounds good."
Should we go to a teddy bear themed DVD bang that exclusively plays crappy movies that were made ten or more years ago?"
"Count me in."
"Let's go to a sex museum teeming with phallic statues, puppets bent into shocking sexual positions, and uncomfortably giggling Korean couples."
"That could be fun!"
"Are you interested in going to the West Coast of Korea to drunkenly roll around in the mud with complete strangers all weekend?"
"That doesn't appeal to me at all. But sure. Why not?"

My recently discovered carefree attitude has caused me to wind up in a number of interesting situations, but it has never actually put me in serious danger. Until last Saturday. About 3 or 4 weeks ago, this query was posed to me:

"Should we risk our lives by diving into a confined aquarium loaded with sharks and other dangerous sea creatures?"
"Sign me up."

Ironically, the friend who originally asked me this question ultimately pulled out of the event due to the recollection of her shark phobia, but two brave friends and I nevertheless found ourselves in wetsuits and oxygen tanks a few weeks later. As is usually the case, I had no idea what I was in for. The world according to my imagination is impossibly disconnected from reality. When I previously imagined what my experience of shark diving would be, I expected to show up at the place, say "Yo. I'm Jess. I'm here to shark dive," and about 30-40 minutes later, it would be all over. I was expecting it to be mildly scary, but I somehow did not expect it to be complicated. I don't know why I thought a touristy aquarium would willingly allow a completely inexperienced foreigner who can barely swim and who knows virtually nothing about dangerous water animals to rapidly and freely jump into a tank full of sharks without first receiving proper training, but welcome to the world of my warped mind. It didn't take me long to realize, however, that the technical aspect of the dive was actually going to be a lot more challenging than the mental one. While a few captivated, docile, well-fed sharks who don't particularly enjoy the taste of humans realistically pose little threat to me, I realized that my own incompetency in the water could potentially threaten my existence. As soon as our diving instructor began talking about equalizing our masks, checking our O2 levels, and inflating our backpacks, I suddenly remembered that when I was 8 years old, I required private swimming lessons because I was such an idiot in the water. Luckily, I made it through training almost incident-free, but it wasn't especially easy. Even with your mouth firmly cusped around an oxygen tube, it still takes a huge leap of faith to submerge your head under a pool of saltwater and inhale for the first time. On my first try, I started spastically flailing around and taking rapid, panicky breaths, but after a few more tries it started to feel much more natural.

Upon the completion of training, it was finally time to get in the water. Much to my surprise, I never felt fear, even though several sharks were swimming two feet next to and above me. The experience mostly just felt surreal, and in some unanticipated way, peaceful. The only sound that could be heard was the sound of underwater bubbles and fish swimming. My inability to communicate verbally or to hear what was going on in the world outside the tank amplified my sense of sight since so much depended on it. It's incredible some of the things you think about in such bizarre circumstances and when certain senses are strictly limited. I would like to say that I thought about the meaning of life, the beauty of the world, the anatomy of sea creatures, or the potential danger that I was in. At the very least, I would like to be able to say that I felt such an incredible adrenaline rush that I couldn't possibly think about anything. However, instead, I thought primarily about three things. (a) I am cold, (b) I am hungry, and (c) I need to urinate. Perhaps when you are stripped of certain senses, you are left to only feel and think about your instincts. This is the lie that I'm going to tell myself to detract from the fact that I'm not a terribly complex individual at the core.



A few of the sharks that we shared the tank with...



Unfortunately, I don't have any visual proof of my dive at the moment, although we did create an underwater video of it that will be mailed to us soon. However, several Korean tourists do have visual proof of my dive. Living in and walking around Korea as a foreigner often feels comparable to being a zoo animal, but diving into a shark tank and being pointed at and photographed by gawking tourists took this metaphor to an all too literal level. I felt compelled to wave back at them to keep them sufficiently entertained. Unfortunately, in order to get into the tank, you must climb down a rope attached to a glass tunnel through which tourists can walk. What this means is that I am confident several Koreans now have a photograph of my crotch. And that is the image I am going to leave you with...



Michael and I, shortly after the dive, feeling quite proud of ourselves.

A South African, a Brit, an American, and an Irish lass travel to an island in Korea...

Nearly two weeks ago now was the Chuseok holiday in Korea. Chuseok translates roughly to "Harvest Moon Festival." It is essentially Korean Thanksgiving, a holiday which is meant to be spent with family. Chuseok is celebrated on the 14th, 15th, and 16th days of the 8th month of the lunar calendar during the full moon. This year, those days happened to fall on a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Although we Westerners in Korea don't celebrate Chuseok in the traditional Korean way, we do celebrate the fact that we don't have to go to work during this time. And this is why three friends and I spent our Chuseok on Korea's holiday island, Jejudo. We covered a lot of ground on our brief vacation, and rather than talking at length about it, I'm going to allow the pictures to do most of the speaking.



We visited some cliffs along the shore that reminded both me and Shell, my Irish friend, of the West coast of Ireland.







We visited loads of pretty waterfalls...





We sat on the rooftop of our hostel and took in the view with a bottle of soju...



...before going to a sex museum...



The following day we went to a trick art museum...









And a teddy bear museum...





Then relaxed on a rooftop while sipping drinks at sunset...

The Banana Crisis

Upon my arrival into this country, I expressed a rather excessive zeal about entering into my first grocery store. A dip back into the archives reveals that "I tried very hard to conceal my absolute exuberance as I walked up and down aisles of foods that I didn’t even know existed; […] The excessive variety of herbs, sprouts, seaweed, tofu, noodles, and slimy fish was almost overwhelming. Where you would normally find the section of artisanal meats and cheeses in an American grocery store, you would find soy products and various organisms that came from the sea. Where you would normally go to pick up a whole frozen chicken you would go to pick up a whole frozen octopus."

I am mildly disappointed to admit that my unbridled enthusiasm for mysterious sea organisms and soy products on the shelves of Korean grocery stores has plummeted quite dramatically. I've seen the interesting ingredients that grocery stores here have to offer several times now, and I still have no idea what to do with most of them. Back home I would find exotic ingredients to be thrilling, and would get pleasure from experimenting with them; but here, I merely find them puzzling and a little terrifying. So it is on this date, my nine month anniversary with Korea, that I am ready to declare that I've had enough of Korean grocery stores: I want my Western grocery stores back.

Let's s start with the problem of produce. The bananas here infuriate me. I never expected this seemingly uncontroversial fruit to produce such a powerful emotional reaction, but bananas have caused me more stress than I'm willing to admit, even though I did just admit it. The thing about bananas here is that they mysteriously ripen at twice the rate as they do back home, and if you don't eat them fast enough, they literally start to peel themselves without even the slightest provoking touch. They are extremely sensitive. I can put a perfectly ripe banana into my bag before work, and in the 5 minute walk there, it ages into a brown, mushy senior citizen that is only vaguely reminiscent of its former glory. But here's what really irritates me about bananas: you are forced by what I assume is the Korean Grocery Alliance to purchase bananas in enough bulk to feed a family of eight. It is apparently a social crime to simply break off the number of bananas you desire from the bunch. You're either stuck with 10 of them, or you're forced to purchase a few single, heavily spotted nomads who are nearing the end of their natural life cycle. For me, the choice has become simple: stop buying bananas unless all the conditions for purchase are optimal.

Another issue I have with the produce in grocery stores is fruit flies. I've been to the grocery store on several occasions this summer in which fruit flies have been swarming around the produce section in heavy concentrations. Now, I've seen a few too many Monsanto documentaries to feel entirely comfortable eating genetically modified foods loaded with pesticides and other chemicals, but I'm not exactly crazy about ingesting rotten, bug-infested produce either. At least I can't see the chemicals that I'm putting into my body.

But while I may complain about the quality of the produce in grocery stores in Korea vs. America, at least a good portion of that produce is still available. There are several longed for foods, however, that are almost completely unavailable to me: Greek yogurt, proper bacon, palatable sandwich meats, kuchen, frozen pizza that doesn't include sweet potatoes and corn as a topping, and the most sorely missed item, quality Mexican ingredients. I can walk down entire aisles that exclusively sell ramyeon noodles or soy sauce, but I am unable to locate a bottle of ranch dressing within the perimeters of Daegu.



While I do miss a lot of foods from home, I have discovered some new staples. Hot pepper tuna is phenomenal!

Perhaps I'm being a little hasty to judge. After all, there are far more Western foods in Korean grocery stores than there are Korean foods in American grocery stores. Perhaps the larger issue at hand involves my lack of a kitchen. What good are 20 varieties of good quality, inexpensive mushrooms when you scarcely have the facilities with which to whip them into a tasty pasta or stir fry? My kitchen is, in a word, tiny. Furthermore, it has a triple function as a kitchen/laundry room/cat food and litterbox area. I have a two burner gas range, a microwave, and a toaster oven. My gas range and dish drying rack take up the entirety of my counter space, meaning if I need to chop something, I have to do so on my living room floor while my cat undoubtedly plunges at the knife. As if these harsh working conditions aren't bad enough, I am strictly limited in cooking options, not only by lack of ingredients, but also by lack of an oven. It's hard to remain passionate about cooking when so many forces are simultaneously working against my success. The act of cutting an onion back home used to give me pleasure; in Korea, the logistics of completing this simple task only cause me stress and anxiety.



Upon my brief arrival home in January, I plan to have a massive bake-a-thon, just because I can...



This is my oven, which is actually part toaster. Note that it is forced to reside on the floor.

Lost in Translation

One of the more amusing aspects about living in a foreign country in which English is scarcely spoken but widely used for marketing purposes is that I am in a unique position to make fun of the misuse of my native tongue. The average Korean wouldn't recognize a comb by the brand name of "The Cock" to be comical or perhaps even controversial, but for someone as immature as myself, the discovery of such interesting phrasal choices that aren't intended to be facetious is one of the primary reasons why I like living in Korea.



By far one of the most interesting moments of mistranslation that I have witnessed occurred a few weeks ago on a journey downtown. In downtown Daegu, there is a stage that acts as an axis point, connecting voracious shoppers to an number of potential streets on which to spend cash. It is at this centralized location that Koreans and foreigners alike habitually meet up with friends. For this reason, the stage acts as a multi-purpose venue for performing a number of different rallies, concerts, benefits, etc. On the particular day that Tim and I wandered downtown, we were halted at the stage by a rally that we assumed was promoting AIDS prevention, but to a native English speaker, it appeared to only be promoting AIDS distribution.



The "Free AIDS" slogan has a double meaning in English that certainly does not call for the termination of AIDS. On the one hand, "Free AIDS" could mean that it is being given away for no cost, in the same way that free samples of cheesecake are given away at Costco and free shipping is given to orders of over $200. (i.e. "Excuse me sir, would you like some free AIDS?") On the other hand, "Free AIDS" could also mean that it should be released and uncontained, in the same way that captive animals should be freed to their natural habitats or our imaginations should be freed from the stupidity of Stephanie Meyer's insults to literature. (i.e. The land of the free, and the home of the AIDS!)



If receiving free AIDS or spreading AIDS to the general public seemed a little rash, it was also an option to simply "Hug AIDS," which doesn't seem like the smartest idea, but it's still probably safer than freeing AIDS. I'm a little unsure what the creator of this sign was intending to communicate, but since it was an option at the rally to hug a few men in condom suits, I assume it meant "Embrace the prevention of AIDS."



While the English signs and slogans provide ample entertainment in Korea, the people of Korea themselves are like walking advertisements of hilarious English confusion. T-shirts bearing English expressions are extremely popular here in the same way that tattoos of Chinese or Japanese symbols are extremely popular back home. And in the same way that these tattoos often carry little meaning to the person who puts it on his or her body back home, the English t-shirts here typically register little meaning to the person who is wearing them. And that is precisely why it's so funny.

One day at work, my friend Hannah spotted one of her students wearing a t-shirt that said, "Olde English: 40 oz. of fun." For those of you unfamiliar with Olde English, it is a malt beverage sold in the U.S. that is consumed almost exclusively by minors and/or the homeless. It is typically not consumed by 12-year-old Korean children. Feeling a certain nostalgia for the glory days of late adolescence, Hannah purchased the shirt off the student's back for 20 bucks.

I, too, have witnessed some interesting apparel choices in my classroom. One tiny, smiley-faced girl routinely wears a t-shirt that says nothing more than "American Red Indian." It shocks me every time I see it, not only because of the racist connotations, but also because of the futility of the message. It's kind of like wearing a shirt that says "The Green Bananas," without offering any picture or further explanation. What about the green bananas?!?! Just yesterday, one of my brightest and most likeable students wore a dark gray t-shirt with bold white lettering that said, "Talentless but Connected." At home, people would wear this sort of shirt ironically, but 11-year-old Korean girls rarely have the same sense of humor as 20-year-old American frat boys. I didn't have the heart or simplified syntax to inform her that her shirt essentially claimed she was Paris Hilton. I am confident that if Amy knew she was offending a group of people, and if Yuri knew she was offending herself, neither of these girls would wear these shirts ever again. But if their enlightenment would detract from my own amusement, then I'd prefer they remain in the dark...

A few more misunderstandings...



Perhaps more hilarious to the British, as "bin" in the U.K. is the equivalent of "garbage can" in America. Probably not the preferred location where I'd like to get my spaghetti and wine...



It is truly amazing how simply altering one letter of one preposition in a phrase can so drastically change the meaning of the sentence. Notice the phallic connection between the elephant's trunk and...errr...nevermind...



I seriously don't understand how this could get misconstrued...

It's Too Late to Apologize

One of the first phrases that I learned upon arrival in this country was "Mi-an-ham-ni-da," which translates to "Excuse me/I'm sorry." I assumed that this would be one of the most useful phrases I could learn when moving to a foreign country in which I scarcely spoke the language. I imagined myself constantly apologizing to strangers for my inadequate Korean linguistics and for my innate clumsiness and poor depth perception. However, it didn't take long to realize that my efforts at implementing this phrase into my everyday Korean interactions were almost completely futile. When I first got here and I bumped into someone, it was a natural reaction to apologize. However, every time I tried to offer the "polite" gesture of apologizing with a pseudo-sincere smile, I was aghast to discover that my attempt at forging a short-term amiability between strangers had been completely disregarded. There was never any hostility about my incompetent mobility; it was just that the stranger failed to even notice that I was attempting reconciliation for doing something socially unacceptable by the standards of most Western countries.

Initially, it angered and confused me when someone would nearly run me over with their scooters without acknowledging that they had done something wrong, even if it was an innocent mistake. However, upon months of further contemplation I realize that it's just as natural for Koreans to not apologize for an accidental boob graze as it is for Westerners to apologize for this same offense. The idea of personal space is just different here than it is in most Western countries. I suppose in a West Virginia sized country with a population of nearly 50 million, you can't get too comfortable with your personal space. A movement into someone's personal bubble here is less of an invasion and more of an expectation. Nevertheless, this doesn't entirely explain why someone would fail to care when they sever your pinky toe with the wheel of their cart. Truthfully, the only Koreans that I think I've ever heard say "excuse me" or "I'm sorry" are my Korean co-workers, and I have exclusively heard them say these phrases in English. It makes me wonder if "Mi-an-ham-ni-da" is reserved only for social misdemeanors of the most severe variety. It seems that apologies are meant to occur exclusively between friends and acquaintances in Korea. Apologizing to a stranger appears to be unnecessary and perhaps even inappropriate.

This isn't a judgment on Korea; it is merely an observation. The truth is that I'm not exactly sure that our incessant apologizing back home is exactly healthy either. The problem with our apparent politeness is that it is rarely sincere. Back home, someone could cut me off with their shopping cart and step on my big toe with a 3-inch stiletto, and I'd still be apologizing all over the place while writhing on the floor in pain, as if it were somehow my fault for perceivably being in the way. Servers apologize profusely when their guests find a hair in their food, customer service workers tell you they're sorry when they inform you that the damaged merchandise that was sold to you can't be returned, and faceless automatons working for credit card companies mechanically announce through the receiver that they're sorry you've been on hold for the last 45 minutes. None of these people are truly sorry, and why should they be? It's not their fault. While you may deserve an apology from someone in all of these situations, you're getting it from the wrong person. Does it really offer any form of reassurance when someone scarcely connected to the grievance at hand tells you with vague indifference that they're sorry they can't find the hotel reservation you made a month ago? Does their scripted apology leave a less bitter taste in your mouth?


So which is weirder: a bicyclist who fails to apologize for splashing a puddle onto a pedestrian, or a pedestrian who apologizes excessively for standing next to the puddle through which the bicycle was moving?

Do You Know the Muffin Man?

Working in an English language school in which the curriculum and lesson plans are neatly and rigidly laid out for teachers has its ups and downs. The major advantage is that it minimizes my preparation time for class to under 30 minutes a day. The major disadvantage is that I often disagree with the lesson plans, which focus more on memorization than on comprehension, and which stifle my creativity almost entirely. On an average day, I don't really feel like a teacher. I feel like an automaton. An English-speaking automaton with the ability to saunter through the day on autopilot, thoughtlessly correcting grammar and requesting that students cease speaking in their native tongue. My job is not particularly taxing, but it can be quite boring at times. Case in point: I wrote roughly 27% of this blog post during my first four classes of the day. It can often take a powerful catalyst to lift me out of my self-inflicted bout of lethargy. And today, that catalyst came in the form of a melody.

Having just successfully taught the extremely basic concept of "like," "love," and "hate," to students of a lower than average English proficiency, I was now content to listlessly walk around the classroom in a trance, my eyes scanning the pages of the students' workbooks to ensure that they indeed understood the simple concept that they learned long before today, while my brain was slowly retreating into my fantasy world. It wasn't long before my attention was roused by a brighter than average student who began singing, "Finish-ee, Finish-ee" upon the completion of his workbook activities. The lyrics of this song were unsurprising, as many Korean students tend to proudly and habitually celebrate the accomplishment of their brisk translation skills with a "finish-ee" jingle of their choice, but it was the tune rather than the lyrics of this song that successfully jolted me from my catatonia. It took a few runs through the chorus before I could place it, but before long I was teleported back to my living room in Mobridge, watching my nephews and niece running towards their Grandpa's leg, requesting an encore performance of a "ride" known to them only as "Pony Boy."

For those of you unfamiliar with the short tune, "Pony Boy," I'm sure you aren't alone. To the best of my knowledge, "Pony Boy" is not an especially popular song in modern times. However, this isn't the first time that a student has spontaneously begun singing a seemingly obscure children's song that happens to be extremely relevant to my former life. One of my students with undiagnosed ADHD routinely relieves his burning need to speak by screaming the lyrics of "Do You Know the Muffin Man?" Every time he breaks into the chorus of this song, I experience an almost painful nostalgia to be sitting in my eerily silent home in Mobridge when my mother suddenly bursts into an excessively sonorous version of this same tune for the exclusive purpose of causing me to wet my pants. While this may seem like a strange memory to feel nostalgic for, especially considering the ear damage it causes to my cochlea, it is nevertheless an integral part of what it means to be a resident at the Deacon home.

Although Seon Woo, my muffin man student, can sing the song with almost perfect enunciation, I am convinced that he doesn't, in fact, know the Muffin Man, nor does he know where to locate Drury Lane. Nevertheless, while I am fairly certain that his comprehension of the song differs from my own, and his personal experience with the song most definitely differs from my own, I still find it perplexing to conceive that a 10-year-old Korean boy in 2010 regularly sings the same children's song in English that a 10-year-old American girl used to sing in 1995. I don't know what I expected Korean children to be like prior to coming to Korea. I've been here for too long now to recall all of my initial preconceptions. But what I do know is that I didn't expect my childhood self to have much in common with a modern day Korean child. As is usually the case, my assumptions, however seemingly logical in this instance, have proven to once again be inaccurate. I will concede, of course, that there are plenty of differences between 1990s American children from the Midwest and present-day Korean children from Daegu. I never ate kimchi and rice for breakfast. I never began learning a foreign language at the age of four. I played with my dog after dinner rather than ate my dog for dinner. But while the specific experiences of Korean children may be different than those of American children, their personalities are strikingly similar. Throughout the world, girls and boys of a certain age are convinced that the opposite sex has coodies. While the pop stars of various countries may differ, students everywhere are obsessed with catchy pop music sung by disposable androids. While the content of tests may differ, kids still get stressed out over exams. Although the amount of free time kids have may differ, students still spend most of it playing computer and video games. While they may follow different sports, they still have excessive admiration for sports celebrities. While some things in their respective societies are more humorous than others, poop jokes are funny…always.

My intention when I started this post was to briefly and casually mention that a student began singing "Pony Boy" today in class and it made me deliriously happy. Naturally, I failed at the basic task I set out to accomplish. I had no idea it was going to spawn into a reflection about children of the world. Having now gone too far to turn around, I feel as though I need to wrap up with a profound and enlightening concluding statement. But instead, I'm going to leave you with a cliché that I only partially believe: Kids are the same wherever you go.

Easy Peasy Lemon Sqeezy

It is Thursday evening and I have just returned from a greasy food/drink joint by the name of Beer Cabin. It is not my typical habit to go out for either dinner or drinks on a Thursday evening, but an impending September mini-vacation to Jeju Island (Korea’s holiday island) prompted the event. Drinks were not an original part of the agenda, but some particularly annoying students today led me down the inevitable path of intoxication, and now I find myself home alone at 1 a.m. in a highly problematic position. You see, there is only so much a person can do when they are (a) alone, (b) awake, and (c) slightly drunk. I can’t read my book because it requires too many brain cells, I can’t watch a movie because it requires an attention span, and I can’t do report cards because it requires unhazy judgment. This leaves me with approximately two options: cleaning my apartment, or writing a blog post. For reasons that don’t warrant an explanation, I have chosen the latter.

Of course, I don’t have a clue what I’m about to reveal to my nonexistent audience. Spontaneous blogging is not exactly my forte, which at least partially explains my infrequent posting. I’m more of a premeditated thinker, and I’m already having second thoughts about this idea, but since my only other plausible option involves rubber gloves, sponges, and chemical cleaners, I’m going to attempt to stick this out until the end.



Before I go any further, I feel like I need to clear something up. My earlier claim that I am alone is not entirely accurate. You see, at the present moment, there is a sexy, naked, young woman tenderly nibbling away at my fingers. Her name is Chamchi (참치)...her nickname is Chommers...her English name is Tuna. She is not human. She is Siamese. Those of you who visit my facebook page with even a minimal level of frequency have already been thoroughly introduced to the feline Korean terrorist living under my roof, so I will spare you too much unnecessary prattling here. However, I will say this about my little monster: kitten ownership in Korea is a lot more difficult than it is in America on so many levels. Part of this stems from the fact that kittens are not popular household pets in Korea. Then again, household pets are not popular in Korea in general. What this means is that finding the necessary provisions to please little Chommers can often be a small challenge that occasionally requires a translator. Additionally, the abundant trips to the vet for shots, vaccinations, and emergency eyeball care have proven to be anything but simple. The two-way 30-minute taxi rides bearing a squirming, meowing cat have not exactly been comfortable. Luckily, my incredibly sweet and helpful Korean friend, So Young, has been kind enough to meet me at the vet for some heavy-duty translation regarding Chommers’ various ailments.



Believe it or not, I am driving at a small but significant point with my ramblings, and my point is this: Living in a foreign country is hard. Of course, a large part of this general statement has logical fallacies in it, so allow me to clear those up. My present lifestyle is not hard. My present lifestyle is impossibly easy. Sometimes I find myself thinking about my future self looking back on my present self, and I end up feeling nostalgic and envious towards my present self. I hope that makes as much sense to me tomorrow as it does right now. Anyways, the point is that it’s a Thursday night, it’s well past 2 a.m., I am still mildly intoxicated, and I am not even slightly concerned about this fact. I don’t go to work until almost 4:00 p.m. tomorrow. I finish work at 10:00 p.m. I work 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, and I scarcely spend a moment outside of this time doing work-related activities. I make as much money as an average first year teacher in America, I work half as much, and I don’t pay rent. I have made close friends from no fewer than 7 countries, I drink like a fish almost every weekend, I go on random international vacations frequently, and I am still somehow financially in the green.

Contrary to obvious appearances, it is not my intention to boast. It is merely my intention to highlight the stark difference between my lifestyle and my everyday life. While my lifestyle (at least on the surface) may appear to be lavish, extraordinary, and ever-so-slightly surreal, my everyday life could not provide a greater contrast. When I refer to my “everyday” life, I am referring to those commonplace, mundane occurrences that happen to you every day that you fail to even notice because they are so ingrained into your daily routine. A trip to the hair salon. A take-out order via telephone. A dinner table reservation. When these situations arise in a country in which you fluently speak the language, they are merely tedious chores; when they arise in a country in which you barely speak the language at all, they become sources of severe anxiety. It’s easy to forget how easy the simple things can be back home. I have grown used to my grocery store interactions consisting of three phrases in Korean: “Hello,” (anyeong-ha-se-yo), “bag, please,” (bong-tu ju-se-yo), and “thank you” (kam-sa-ham-ni-da). Any variance in this routine causes my personal cosmos to realign in highly unfavorable ways; I simply cannot function if a cashier throws out a phrase I don’t know the answer to…I avert my eyes southward, smile bashfully, and blush uncontrollably while exhaling a quiet “a-ni-o,” never to learn exactly what it is that I am saying “no” to. Just tonight, a situation arose at the restaurant in which my friend ordered a chicken salad but was brought a salad containing a mystery meat that was clearly not chicken. In an English speaking country, this would be easy to resolve: “Excuse me, ma’am, but I ordered the chicken salad, and it seems that you’ve mistakenly served me a salad containing a few vertically cut Oscar Meyer wieners. Could you take this back, and bring me the chicken salad, please?” Unfortunately for Shell, between the four of us, we only knew how to say the word “chicken” and "please" in Korean. The situation was “resolved” when they cooked the mystery meat for a little longer and put it back on the salad. And this, in a nutshell, is why it is occasionally difficult living in a foreign country. It’s kind of like that dream in which you struggle violently to say something but the words refuse to come out, and the curious bystanders struggle violently to try to understand you, and in the end, you both fail abysmally at this most basic level of communication. Only it’s not a dream. It’s my everyday reality.

And the incomprehensible part is that I’m completely content with this arrangement.

The Perpetual Discomfiture of Existence Abroad

It’s been nearly three months since I’ve written a blog post. A lot of interesting/noteworthy things have happened to me in this time span that are certainly worth mentioning. The reason that I have failed to mention them is partially due to unrelenting laziness, but mostly due to the fact that the longer you live in a foreign country, the less foreign it seems. All of those things that confused and amused me initially now seem so common that the urgency of talking about them seems less necessary. The maniacal swerving of taxi drivers, the unapologetic disregard for spatial awareness when walking anywhere, and the dried squid sold as a snack in convenience stores have all come to be expected, and it would now only seem abnormal if these realities didn’t exist. The feeling of awkwardness that was previously ubiquitous now only comes along in short-lived, fleeting moments. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt profoundly awkward for longer than a few minutes…until last Saturday. It was on this fortuitous day that I was reminded of exactly how weird it is to live a foreign existence.

It started off with a sleep-deprived trip to the hair salon. This was my first haircut since October, and my first haircut in Korea. I’ve been putting it off for quite some time. You see, I belong to that miniscule demographic of straight women who don’t enjoy having their hair done. While most women find special head treatment to be relaxing and pampering, it usually just causes me to feel immensely guilty and depressed. Guilty for the thick mass of tangles atop my head. Guilty that the colorist has to go back to mix more color two or three times due to underestimation. Guilty that the person who comes in after me always has to wait 30 minutes even though I warn the stylist in advance that this will probably be an issue and she should pencil me in for extra time. Nobody believes it. Nobody believes it until they see it. Furthermore, I feel guilty for my almost complete lack of social etiquette. I am fiercely repelled by small talk, particularly the variety of small talk that typically takes place in hair salons. I feel like I always bore my stylist to death with my one word answers and insufficient concern about who got the boot on “The Bachelor” last night. I always try to remedy this issue by forcing myself to do an unreasonable amount of smiling so as to suggest “It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s just that I’m socially inept!” Additionally, there is something disturbing about sitting in a chair and being compelled to stare at yourself for long intervals. You are never forced to focus on your head so much as when everything below your neck is covered in towels and your hair is covered in goop. It isn’t until then that you realize just how huge your head is. (I mean that in a literal, not metaphorical, sense.) Everything on your face becomes amplified. Your eyebrows look uneven, your nose looks obese, and your jaw line looks masculine. Your double chin suddenly looks like an unfortunate tumor that has been present since birth. The mole on your cheek that you used to think added character now just looks extremely unbecoming. The dark circles beneath your eyes look more pronounced under the unflattering lighting. Roughly 95% of the time, I hate what any stylist does to my hair, but I will never admit this to the hairdresser. I always act as though I am profoundly pleased with their work because (a) I don’t want them to feel bad, and (b) I already feel guilty enough for having merely stepped into the salon. They could probably shave me bald and I would respond with a resounding two thumbs up.

For these reasons, I found it incredibly difficult to pick up the phone and make an appointment, but my damaged split ends finally provoked me into just getting it over with. I opted to go to the same salon that roughly 90% of the foreign population goes to, which is run by an English speaking Italian/Australian man named Roberto. Because the salon gets so much business from foreigners, I wasn’t expecting this trip to the salon to be all that different than it would be back home, and apart from the translator who communicated between me and my colorist, it really wasn’t…until Roberto began cutting my hair. The moment I sat down to begin the haircut, a group of 4-5 Koreans who worked in the salon crowded around my head, observing the Australian protégé working his miracles on an impossible head of frizzy ringlets. I don’t know if it is the typical policy of the salon to have this many assistants helping out with one head, or if they were just seizing the opportunity to see how one goes about cutting hair of a certain volume and texture, but in any event, it felt just a touch excessive. Frankly, I don’t know what could possibly go so awry with my hair that Roberto would need the assistance of 4 people, but unless he inadvertently cut a gaping hole into my temple, I will never feel comfortable with that much special attention.

After my hair appointment, I embarked on a mission to find black flats, as I ruined mine last weekend at the mud festival, a giant party on the west coast of Korea which is inhabited almost entirely by foreigners who are looking for any excuse to get drunk and half-naked while playing in the mud. I spotted one shoe store that looked promising from the window, so I waltzed in. I knew it was a mistake immediately when I stepped into the store and I was the only customer facing a crowd of four smiling salespeople in a confined space. They all decided that they desperately wanted to try to speak to me in my native tongue while simultaneously trying to sell me a pair of grossly overpriced flip flops that suffered from the triple misfortune of being unattractive, uncomfortable, and too small. They succeeded in both missions. After unwillingly trying on four or five pairs of shoes that I didn’t select for myself, I spotted some flip flops that weren’t hideous and looked cheap enough to make me feel less guilty about compulsively buying shoes that I didn’t need. I tried them on and my heel spilled an inch over the back of them. The salesgirl tried to convince me that they were a perfect fit, but when I looked at her dubiously she decided to send another girl off to the mystery shoe warehouse in another building to dust off the shoes reserved for big-footed people with special needs. As soon as she left, the other two girls jovially requested, “Let’s have a conversation!” If a native English speaker would make this same blunt request of me, I would find it profoundly challenging. When this request is made by someone with a limited grasp of the English language, I find it utterly impossible. For me, nothing feels more unnatural than being forced to speak on command…except perhaps being forced to speak on command to someone who doesn’t understand an overwhelming majority of the words coming out of my mouth. What does one say to someone with a limited English capacity? “What is your favorite color?” came to mind, as did “Do you like fruit?” After a few uncomfortable seconds, I eventually settled on “Have you always lived in Daegu?” She didn’t understand this. “Daegu. You live. Always?” I said. For reasons that remain a mystery, I presumed that if I reversed the order of this sentence it might sink in. It did not. “How old are you?” I tried again with a less complex but potentially rude question. “You think,” she responded after a moment. Having been here long enough now to understand the subtleties of minimalist language, I knew she wanted me to guess her age. “22?” I asked after staring at her long enough to pretend like I was scientifically gauging her probable age. “Ohhh!” she said, utterly delighted that I am clearly psychic. “22 Korean age. 21 your age.” Ages in Korea aren’t based on the calendar year with one’s actual date of birth. It’s somehow more complicated than that here. As soon as I begin to understand the complexities of Korean age, I will attempt to explain it to you. So after exhausting my one and only question, the girl fortunately came back with the sandals I didn’t actually want, and I have never been happier to see something I didn’t like in all my life. I would have gladly forked over 30 bucks just to get out of that situation; the footwear was merely a bonus.

On my way back to Chilgok, it began to lightly rain and I didn’t have the foresight to bring my umbrella with me. Standing at a stoplight, waiting for it to turn green, an older woman said something to me that I didn’t understand and then covered my head with her umbrella. We walked along together for a few blocks as she prattled on in a language I have a shamefully low proficiency in, while I smiled a little embarrassedly. After we parted ways, I found myself wondering if this could ever possibly happen back home. If a Mexican, Chinese, or Indian immigrant were walking down a rainy street in America sans protection, would someone casually lift an umbrella over his or her head, or would they walk by with bitter condescension, silently wishing that the aforementioned immigrants would just “go back to their own country?” The life of an immigrant is very different in Korea than it is in America. Foreigners in Korea are usually treated with curiosity. Foreigners in America are usually treated with hostility. While it can certainly be a bit irritating at times to be regarded as a particularly amusing museum exhibit rather than an actual human being, I would not exchange my foreign existence in Korea for the foreign existence of someone who comes to my country to live. I don't think anyone would...

A Potentially "Retractable" Thought

Ten and eleven-year-old kids are highly predictable. If one kid in a classroom decides to make a sentence about eating poop, then every other kid will make sentences with this same theme. If one kid leans her chair against the wall on two legs, everyone else will soon follow. If one kid decides to wear his glasses upside down, every four eyed kid in the room will imitate this same style. This is why I’m never surprised when I walk into one of my younger classrooms and all of my students are balancing their writing utensils between their nose and their lips.



What does (sort of) surprise me is that I recall being equally amused by this trick when I was their age. I consciously remember seeing Justin Lipp do this same thing in the first grade, and I consciously remember that I respected him more because of it. At age 8, I thought that the concept of this pencil “moustache” was ingenious and original. While I like to think that my criteria for being ingenious and original have since evolved, I still do feel some level of childlike mirth when I see someone with a pencil on their face.

Here’s the thing that really gets me: Across cultures, and across generations, kids contort their faces for the exclusive purpose of holding a pen horizontally on their upper lip. Why? At what point in human history did we decide that it is hilarious to place a pen between your lip and your nose, and why is this such a tempting behavior to imitate? Who was the first person who looked at a pen and decided that the most obvious thing to do with it was to balance it beneath the nose? How is it that multiple kids who will never meet each other, from multiple cultures and across multiple generations can all pick up the same writing utensil and almost instinctively decide to use it as a facial accessory, as if it were the most natural thing in the world? Seriously, where did this idea come from, and why is it so common when it should seemingly be so rare?

People like to pride themselves on their individuality and uniqueness. We’re always looking for little ways to differentiate ourselves from the masses. We drive cars with individualized license plates, we order our coffee with unnecessary complexity, and we accessorize our cell phones to the point of ridiculousness, at least partially for the purpose of setting ourselves apart from the crowd. But somehow, the more that I see of the world, the less convinced I become that people are truly original in any meaningful way. When I look around a classroom, I can see pencils of varying shapes, sizes, and colors, some retractable and some wooden, but these details are unimportant, because the only relevant point is that I know these pencils are all going to end up on the same facial crevice. Sometimes, it takes a bunch of kids with pencils under their noses to make you realize that, at the end of the day, we’re all the same. We are all amused by incredibly simple and incredibly stupid things…and there’s comfort in knowing that…

Makgeolli Wednesdays...

It is just past 2 a.m. on a late Wednesday night. Typically, on every Wednesday night, I go out for dinner with some friends, and this Wednesday is no exception. What makes tonight slightly different is that we went for makgeolli afterwards. This is also not all that different, because roughly 33% of the time, we will go for a few drinks after dinner on Wednesdays. But what makes tonight truly different is that I successfully came home at 1:30 or so rather than 4 or 5 or 6 a.m. Korea is a very bad place to try to abstain from alcohol.

Makgeolli, in a few words, is a Korean rice wine drink that tastes harmless going down but sneaks up on you pretty easily. I am currently in a state somewhere between soberness and intoxication, and I am comfortable in this state because it means that if I have a few glasses of water before bed, I will wake up fully functioning and able to be productive in the morn, and this is really all I want. A new makgeolli restaurant/bar just opened up exactly 44 steps (my friend Michelle counted) from my apartment. Having been open for a whopping two days now, we obviously had to check out the scene immediately. The makgeolli was among the best I've had in Korea, and this obviously horrifies me since, as previously mentioned, the place exists 44 steps from my residence.

I don't think that I actually have a point in writing this blog post. I think that I just have about 45 minutes to kill until the time that I naturally fall asleep in this country, so I need to fill the void by doing something, and since I don't trust myself reading Anna Karenina while semi-intoxicated, I decided that writing a semi-coherent blog post was a viable second option.

Tonight while four of my friends and I were engrossed in conversation, an intoxicated Korean gentleman decided to inject himself in our company. I wasn't bothered by this at all, but on the contrary was rather quite amused. He spoke slightly more English than I speak Korean. This made communication an obvious barrier, but as we were all merrily drinking, nobody felt especially frustrated with the challenge of not having a common language with which to communicate. Frankly, I was surprised that he lasted 30 or 40 minutes, and probably would have lasted longer had we not decided to skidattle...around the third or fourth time that he asked us all what our names were and where we came from, he apparently decided to give up trying to remember that my name was Jessica and I am from America, and instead decided to point at me excitedly and say, "Image-ee Amazon! Image-ee Amazon!" Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have been all that surprised by this, as I am quite used to people presuming that I am from South of the border, but there was interestingly something very strange about a Korean speculating about my ethnicity...I frankly thought that I just looked like any other foreigner in the eyes of a Korean; I find it very insightful to know that I evidently look like an indigenous jungle woman across multiple cultures...

And that's really all I have to say about that...

Coming Down with the Travel Bug...

Just over a week ago, I returned from my first vacation in Asia: China. Four friends and I took eight days to explore two major Chinese cities: Beijing and Xi’an. Beijing needs no introduction, but for those of you who are unfamiliar with Xi’an, it is the city near which the 2,200 year old terra cotta army was discovered by a farmer in the 1970s. Both cities were unique and amazing in their own right, but I preferred Xi’an for its relative quaintness in comparison to buzzing Beijing. It seems unlikely to refer to a city of over 8 million as “quaint,” but the city wall that encloses central Xi’an as well as the small shops and street vendors that line the Muslim quarter indeed made Xi’an seem much less chaotic than sprawling Beijing. In any event, we covered a lot of ground in each city in just over a week. We hit up all of the predictable tourist sites: the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall, the Terra Cotta Soldiers, etc.










I have a very complex relationship with tourist spots, particularly tourist spots that are as grandiose and hyped up as the ones you’ll find in the Chinese cities we visited. It’s not that they disappoint me; it’s that they cause me to disappoint myself. While I recognize and appreciate the historical and artistic significance of these sites, I always feel slightly bitter that I have to share my experience with hoards of tour groups sporting identical fanny packs and baseball caps. What’s even worse is that I always feel like I’m supposed to have an almost spiritual moment of profundity and somber reflection when I visit such a monumental landmark. “I am climbing the Great Wall of China,” I imagined I would think, “and now I understand the meaning of life.” Instead, I spent a majority of the time huffing and puffing up and down treacherously ancient steps with the Fraggle Rock theme song stuck in my head. Now, don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed tobogganing down the Great Wall and getting trampled by tour groups running from one temple to the next in the Forbidden City. Really, I did. But sightseeing is far from my favorite thing about travelling. After all, I rarely have a moment of insight in the midst of an overcrowded tourist trap.


Katie and I have developed a somewhat embarrassing addiction to reenacting "The Circle of Life" scene from The Lion King in public places...



What I love more than almost anything about travelling are the unexpected surprises that shake up all of your preconceptions about a place and a people. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to see when I came to China, but I wasn’t expecting to feel perfectly safe everywhere I walked. I wasn’t expecting to see multiple toddlers with a hole cut out of the seat of their pants so that they could squat down on public sidewalks and train stations to take a dump. I wasn’t expecting dozens of Chinese tourists to request a picture with my friend Katie because they had evidently never seen a person with blonde hair before. I wasn’t expecting to see blueberry, kiwi, seaweed, and aromatic crispy chicken flavored potato chips, and furthermore, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy them. I wasn’t expecting to see such a massive number of capitalist American chain restaurants and retail outlets in the heart of a communist country. I even saw a few Dairy Queens! Admittedly, these may not be very profound revelations, but they did challenge me to think about China, for better or for worse, just a little bit differently when I left than when I came. And if you ask me, that’s one of the most useful services that travel can provide a person.


Utterly confused about why a complete stranger would want her picture taken with us...


It might only be a painting, but I assure you that this image is an all too common one in present day China...



But perhaps what I enjoy the most about travelling are the fellow travelers you encounter on the journey. There is something enchanting and almost romantic about developing an extremely short-term friendship with strangers that you spend some time with for a few days before going your separate ways indefinitely. It’s always interesting to hear about where people are going, where they’ve been, and where they come from. Some people might be quiet and introspective while others might be nutty and eccentric, and anywhere in between…One night in Xi’an, we went out to a club with a large group of people from our hostel. Countries that were represented in this group include the U.S., England, Mongolia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, possibly China, and probably more. At the risk of sounding like a total hippy, I find it quite fascinating and rather beautiful that so many different people from so many different walks of life can discover that they have so much in common (and I’m talking about more than just a mutual love for beer). People are often so preoccupied with focusing on the differences between each other, that they fail to recognize the glaring similarities. “New Yorkers are arrogant,” we tell ourselves, “The Dutch are pot smoking peace/love types,” “The English are prim and proper,” and “Country bumpkins from the rural Midwest of America are backwards and ignorant.” And then you find yourself in a situation time and time again in which you are surrounded by people who usually break the stereotype and occasionally reinforce it. While you may never be able to completely relate to someone coming from such a different place who natively speaks a different language from your own, if you throw out all of your preconceived notions for just a moment and choose to focus on the things you have in common with a person rather than the things you don’t, you will be surprised to discover just how alike you are. At the end of the day, you begin to realize that, on the whole, regardless of who people are or where they are coming from, we are far more similar than we are different. The experience of being human, in many ways, is universal.




On a lighter note, street food in Beijing is, in a word, interesting...


For those of you interested in nostalgia or interested in hearing the noise that was present in my head while climbing the Great Wall, please click...