If Korea Was Like The Oregon Trail, Everyone Would Be Dead From Cholera.

4 of the 6 people in my host family are sick, which means I was prepared to get sick myself, but not this way.

My host father has it the worst, two nights ago he got about half an hour of sleep since he was coughing so violently. Last night I gave him some Tylenol PM that I smuggled out of the union and he was out like a light. I hope he's alive because when I woke up for work this morning, he'd already been asleep for 10 hours. That's a lot for old people, I hear.

Anyway, last night I went to dinner with my family and, in the elevator taking us down to the parking lot, my host dad goes into a coughing fit. I playfully pretend to be disgusted, covering my face and turning away in fear... to which he responds by laughing, walking over, and coughing repeatedly directly in my face. No hand over his mouth, nothing. I'm literally feeling his breath hit me.

Of course, this got the kids excited, so the little runts gather around me and start coughing all over me too. What once was a friendly elevator has been turned into an inescapable disease-filled metal prison.

So no big deal, right? Excepting that I'm completely fucking horrified at first, I shrug it off and go have a great dinner, which they pay for. UNTIL THIS MORNING, because now I'm SICK. Christ on a bike, what the hell did they think was going to happen? Just a playful joke? Let's show him what a fun and easygoing host family we are by spewing germs all over him? Don't these people understand cause and effect?

I'm seriously pretty pissed off, maybe more at Korea than my family. I HATE BEING SICK. Last year in college marked the sickest year of my life: every random cold lasted over two weeks and often mutated into something worse. I started coughing up blood one morning, which was definitely A NEW ONE for me, and it turned out I had pneumonia. Who the mother F gets pneumonia?

Before you judge my family as uncivilized, unsanitary savages, realize that it's not their fault. All Koreans are savages. No, of course they're not really... but I do think that the technology in this country advanced way too quickly for the culture to keep up. They became an economic superpower and technological innovator much too fast. 40 years ago South Korea had a population less than North Korea, now it's the 10th largest economy in the world. Saying that this is a first world country with a third world culture would be exagerrating, but that's kind of the image I'm trying to get across.

This sickness thing is a trite example, but maybe it'll give you some idea. Koreans share everything. It's a culture where food is always taken from the same plate, sauces are shared, soup is spooned straight to the mouth from a communal bowl, everything. I will never understand the rationale for wearing a surgical mask around all day (this is Asia after all, folks) when you're sick and then at meals proceeding to take it off and dip your saliva and mucus covered spoon into the same broth as everyone else.

It's also a culture where food is left out for long periods of time without concern. And this isn't just a matter of "don't worry, it won't spoil", leaving food out is actually a part of many "traditional" recipes. It's always great to walk into the kitchen at midnight when everyone is asleep and getting a whiff like a kick to the face of the ground beef my host mom has left out on the counter to spoil so she can cook it for breakfast in the morning. Yeah, you heard me, rotting meat for breakfast.

With that said, no matter what sort of sickness you come down with, be it food poisoning or a cough, you go to the hospital and they give you a shot and a prescription to take about 10 pills a day. At least a few of these are usually antibiotics, but many of them are herbal supplements that supposedly increase vitality or strength. At first sign of any sickness, everyone around you will suggest going to the hospital.

Ok, this hospital thing is a tangent, but I'm going to run with it. To me, the fact that an entire general population can believe that the common cold, which is a virus, can be cured with antibiotics or an injection of god knows what just screams a profound ignorance of science, medicine, what have you, and an orientation toward mysticism. You trust what's being done to you and you don't question it because it's the way things are done. This is a country of people that sincerely, and I mean SINCERELY, believe that kimchi is the reason why SARS and bird flu didn't spread in Korea.

In short, this country is a hypochondriac's nightmare, and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface by only addressing food. Let's talk about trash and bathrooms some other time. The point for the moment is this: when I get sick, it's because I don't eat enough kimchi, don't drink the hyper-caffeinated, vitamin-infused, ginseng drinks that all my teachers have delivered to them at school, drink too much alcohol (yeah right, compared to college?), and absolutely NOT because I was trapped in a 4' by 4' box with 3 people deliberately guaranteeing their airborne virus entered my body.

We Put The "Man" In "Mandu".

So it's finally time to write about The Mandu Challenge. It's been a little over a month since the challenge and I think the final mandu just crossed the finish line into freedom. Swim free, little buddy.

Mandu are little steamed Korean noodle dumplings filled with pork or kimchi. During orientation, there was a restaurant just outside of campus that sold 8 of those suckers for a dollar. This being an amazing deal, this joint was one of the most popular places for ETAs to go for a cheap meal. Well, one evening, I spied a photo on the wall with a date written under it. It showed 4 guys standing behind 30 metal trays in various poses of triumph and victory. I'll do the math for you: 8 mandu per tray makes 240 mandu, meaning 60 per person.

Well, that just got my Asian blood boiling. It's kind of like Irish blood except only with food. And math. And I guess Starcraft if you're Korean. Anyway, 60 mandu didn't seem like that much at all. I was confident I could do it, I just had to assemble an all-star team to help me. I was determined to leave my mark on Korea and by God my picture on the wall of that restaurant was how I was gonna do it.

I started having visions of this being a Fulbright ETA tradition, where every year 4 new people would try to match or break the record and get their own photo put up. Explaining this to scores of disinterested candidates, three kindred souls finally made the commitment to become pioneers. Jonah Popp, Steve Wulff, and Alex Page... I salute you.

We roll into the restaurant with about 10 cheering spectators and about 5 more show up in the next half hour. We decide that we should eat 31 trays to beat the record, so that comes to 62 mandu each. We start talking strategy: do we each order our own trays or share communally? Pork is more filling but kimchi is spicey, what should the balance be? The psychological game was just as important as the size of our bellies that night.

The owner of the restaurant tries to take our trays when we order more, but we point to the picture and ask him to leave them there. He laughs at us, but his mirth was shortlived as he realized the monumental task we had set out upon. In fact, around the 20th tray, he started to get very concerned about our well-being. Mandu service slowed to a crawl, I assume because he wanted to give us time to digest. He asked one of our Korean speaking friends, Amie, how much more we were planning to eat, she said just a few more trays to reach 31 and we would stop. Strange behavior for a guy that has seen this all before, right?

It took us about an hour and a half to finish. Multiple walks up and down the block were taken to let the food settle. We left our spectators there to make sure the owner didn't think we were skipping out on the check. All my confidence was gone by the last 10 mandu... I could barely swallow them and, in fact, finished about 15 minutes after my teammates. Honestly, if it wasn't for the moral support of our fans, I don't think I would have made it.

But we did it! 248 mandu later, there was cheering, high fives, a picture taken with the owner in front of our metal monument to gluttony. Just to give you some idea, I've eaten a 2 pound steak before in one sitting, and that didn't come close to how nauseatingly full I was after this. I was pretty sure each of us had over 3 pounds of food.

So here's the twist ending. During the challenge, our aforementioned friend Amie was speaking to the owner about something, and then turned to us and asked "So, if you knew that the guys in the picture didn't actually eat all that mandu, would you still continue the challenge?" I really don't know why it didn't occur to me in the least to ask any of the obvious followup questions to this at the time, but all I said was "Yeah, of course... this is a personal challenge, not a competitive one." If the Mandu Challenge ever becomes more official, this will be its motto.

Well don't you know it, once we finished, Amie dropped the bomb on us. Those guys in the picture came with a large group of people and, after everyone had finished, they stacked up all of the trays, 30 in total, and took a picture with it. There was no record. There was no challenge. And all I could think was... how much of a bigger bunch of TOOLS could you be? And I don't mean US, I mean THEM. Of course, we're tools too for not asking about the damned picture in the first place, but they would win the gold medal at the Tool Olympics (Toolympics?). I can go out to a dumpster and fish out 15 pizza boxes and take a picture in front of it too, but WHAT IS THE POINT?

In the end, the challenge turned out to be a personal challenge after all. I still felt a sense of accomplishment, and the memories are what's important. Besides, now we're the official record holders by a long shot. The owner agreed to put up our picture, but we have yet to send him a developed copy, so that's something to do. I still dream of a day that I can bring my children to Chuncheon to see that proud moment of my youth immortalized on the wall.

Tomorrow Never Comes Until It's Too Late.

Tuesdays SUCK... this is the first Tuesday that I've had to teach the extra two classes per week that were added to my schedule. This brings my total classroom hours up to 21, which is actually quite a lot compared to other ETAs (who seem to average about 16) and actually more than any of the regularly paid teachers spend in the classroom. Of course, they often have to teach on Saturdays and also have night duty once a week where they have to supervise the students until 10pm.

Anyway, starting from the earliest class period which starts at 9:30, my schedule goes exactly like this: class, free, class, free, class, free... ad infinitum, or 6:10pm. It makes the day drag by unbearably slow. Especially since I got over my self-consciousness of sleeping in the teachers' lounge, big free blocks are no longer a burden but a blessing! And God knows I can usually use a power nap in between classes most of the time.

The alternative is to pound 6 - 8 cups of coffee a day like the rest of the teachers do. I'm sure I could work on it, but my caffeine headaches are particularly bad lately, so that's something I'm loathe to try.

Ok folks, sorry for the mundane blog post, just a fresh nugget of frustration that I felt should be preserved in the warm recesses of my blog.

Chronologically Impaired.

Let's brighten the mood and talk about orientation a little bit.

I arranged for Fulbright to fly me from Maui to Seoul back in July so I could visit Jen for the preceding week. Little did I know, this decision probably drastically affected the entire course of my year in Korea. Boarding the plane in Honolulu, I found myself sitting next to a petite Asian girl with her hair obscuring her face, talking at 100mph on her cellphone. So what would your first instinct be? Of course, bitchy Korean-American flying to Seoul to stay with a rich uncle or something, right? Fortunately, she pleasantly surprised me by being a fellow Fulbrighter, friendly and interesting to boot, and my first official friend in Korea! Yay! Turns out she lives on Oahu and went to Occidental, just a bunny hop from Pomona. Here's to you, Rach!

And so we arrive in Seoul, and I meet two more Fulbrighters that were on the same flight. Traci also lives on Oahu and went to Pitzer (5-C representin') and turns out we have a few mutual friends (Glenna! Social Chair Extraordinaire!). I had never met her but apparently she had "heard of me" before. I guess I'm the "Asian guy who isn't Asian" around the 5-College scene, according to her. The last guy, Jonah, went to Bowdoin and was visiting his girlfriend in Hawaii, so he had his flight changed, just like me. Funny coincidence, huh? Doesn't stop there.

Jonah was also a philosophy major, wrote on the same thesis topic using the same primary source texts, and when we arrived at orientation, we turned out to be roommates. Freaky, huh? I bet we could switch girlfriends and they wouldn't even know the difference. Except he's a 6'1" white guy who listens to country music.

Anyway, the big thing is not that we were all on the same flight, but that we arrived one day earlier than all the other ETAs. We had one precious extra night and morning to unpack, get a good night's rest, and get to know each other before the dorm became a living thing, hosting 60 other strangers. Long story short, even though we were all meeting dozens of people for the first time, memorizing names, faces, schools, basically too much information to realistically remember, Traci, Rachel, Jonah, and I always had our cozy little clique to fall back on. Knowing each other for one extra day really meant we were light years further along in our friendships than anyone else. And being the only non-jetlagged folks in the dorm that first night, we decided to go out and have our first drinks on the town while everyone collapsed in exhaustion.

And that was how my year in Korea began.

To this day, the three of them are among my closest friends in Korea. Traci and I live in the same city and Rachel lives about an hour train ride away, but we see her several times a week. It's amazing to realize how each individual decision you make can have such an expansive influence on everything that comes after it.

Positive Reinforcement.

Reading back through some old entries makes me think that I'm a fairly negative person in my writing. I think it might be because I only feel compelled to write when I'm feeling strong emotions, and lately the most affecting experiences have been negative.

So let's begin.

Last night was the first time I've gotten really annoyed with my host family, but not through anything they did directly to me. It was instigated by the 6 year old, who has always been a brat, but maybe because it's never been my problem I found it endearing up until last night. Of course, it still wasn't my problem, but it caused the rest of my family a lot of stress, which got me quite irritated.

Here's the layout of events:
- 6 year old is whining for food that she can't reach across the dinner table. She NEVER asks, just whines and points. Mother ALWAYS reinforces this behavior by giving in.

- 10 year old says in English, "She is crazy!" This is a term thrown around a lot, constantly, by all the kids. It's a joke and has always been harmless.

- 6 year old bursts into tears and runs into her bedroom, crying much too loudly to be real. She's basically just screaming at the top of her lungs.

- Mother SCOLDS 10 YEAR OLD for teasing her sister. I couldn't believe this because they call each other crazy all the time and it has never been an issue... so much for consistent parenting. They argue in Korean for a few minutes, and the 10 year old storms off to her room.

- Mother goes into 6 year old's room to comfort her, within seconds she is back at the dinner table with a big grin.

Now I know I shouldn't generalize, but I have a feeling that this situation is common in many Korean homes and correlates with how I've seen a lot of Korean kids behave. First off, they are LOUD. And even though the entire country is loud, I'm not banking on it being a genetic thing. It's part of the culture that kids, when they want something, SCREAM for it. And if a child's logic is that they need to scream to get what they want, that's just a step off from getting attention any way possible, including whining and crying. Mind you, this is primarily with parents. Most of the discipline in this country is left to the schools to exact, which is why the same demonspawn at home are sitting in neat rows of terrified, well-behaved students at school for 14 hours a day.

Second, amongst peers, bullying and fighting are accepted as legitimate ways of getting what you want. It's actually so ingrained that the bigger dog gets the bone that the losers often aren't even sore about it. Imagine two kids fighting over a bag of chips. They argue and bicker, maybe wrestle a bit. Once one comes out the winner, the loser pouts for a moment, then cracks a joke and both start laughing. That's Korea.

I don't know enough young Korean adults to know if this developmentally makes sense later on... but I'm working on it. I need a bigger case sample, preferably some rebellious youth that are creatively resisting their oppressive school life. This is turning out to be such a strange country, many times more foreign than Japan was.

Restrategizing.

Okay, obviously this trying to catch up thing isn't working... so I'm just going to write about my day and let you WONDER about the context that got me here.

On Tuesdays I teach the best and worst classes all week, both in terms of enjoyment and English level, in the morning and afternoon respectively. The best class is the advanced second year students and the worst is the lowest level first years. So, comparatively, not only does the second year class have an extra year of English under their belt, they're the ones that are exceling beyond their classmates. So Tuesday is like the cream filling of my week, except there's a mayonnaise filling-filling that I always forget about until it's too late.

At any rate, the students in the lowest class are hellions. Really, really misbehaved. Sleep in class, talk to their friends at normal volume, blatantly ignore instructions (even in Korean). Some of them are there because they really don't know any English, but others are obviously there because they're "problem children". This one student has the most laughable "tough-girl" attitude I've ever seen. I really think she's seen one too many campy Korean movies with the bad-girl meets dorky guy storyline. I call her up to the front of the class and she stands there with her arms crossed, head-cocked to one side, with a bored and impatient sneer on her face. I ask her a question and she squeals "I don't know!", stomps her foot and makes for her chair, but I don't let her sit down. Rinse and repeat until she says something halfway constructive.

The second year class is great, but it's mostly because they understand everything I'm saying. I can joke with them and they'll get it. The pointy side of the stick is that they manage to finish the material I prepare in half the time it takes any other class, so there's a lot of improvisation, lesson extension, general bullshitting on my part. But the class represents my best opportunity for what I'd hoped to accomplish well before arriving here: developing meaningful relationships with my students. I wrote it in my application, in my Cultural Adjustment Log at orientation, and in my orientation evaluation. But of course, once you're faced with the task, it's a lot harder than expected. These are high school girls after all, and they're at school until 10pm every night (Yeah, that's right... 8:30am to 10pm school day folks. More on that later.) Take into account an extremely high language barrier in most cases and it's hard to connect with them at all on a personal level.

I'll conclude with a short anecdote from today. Class with the first years today was the first official time I've had to pretend to get mad at the students. I really don't get mad in general, except when teachers are beating the crap out of students that didn't do anything to remotely deserve physical punishment, but I just didn't see another way of handling the situation.

It wasn't anything extraordinary, just two girls that were not paying attention, would not shut up, would not do any of the work. So when it came time for students to come to the board to write answers, I called on them first... asked them a simple question that I knew everyone else knew because I had just said the answer, and watched them squirm as they had no idea what to write. Then I turned up the theatrics and angrily asked them why they didn't know the answer, why weren't they paying attention, and so on. I had the class say the answer and I told them to write it and sit down. Two minutes later I called on them again, same result. Two minutes later, again. After a few repetitions of this, they got the idea that they were going to be the class guinea pigs that day and got to work quickly finishing the worksheet everyone else had done 20 minutes ago.

It felt good punishing students productively instead of violently. I feel like it's my moral obligation to show my co-teachers that there are better ways to discipline children than leaving them with bruises.