Free time!!! :-D

Happy Tuesday, everyone! We had Korean class in the morning, as usual. I got my quiz back and I got a perfect 20/20! :-) Yay! I guess my class had the highest average. Anyhoo, then we had a teaching workshop that was really interesting. She showed us all these games she used in her classroom. That was followed by a talk from a Foreign Service Officer from the Korean Embassy that was completely useless and boring for me. Oh well!!

After that, I went with Matt to study our new vocab words (places) at Dunkin Donuts. We had a fun time. At dinner we had chicken drumsticks! Well, I guess I shouldn't pluralize because we only got one, and they were rather small. But it was very tasty! :-) After dinner I have had free time all night! I worked on a group lesson plan, did my weekly "Cultural Adjustment Check" -- I've copied my answer to one of the questions below, just because I thought it might interest some of you. I tried to watch a Korean drama to get into pop culture, but the subtitles are all bogus, so I'll have to spend some time figuring that out. Who knows what I'm going to do the rest of the night, but I think I should go to bed early since I was up until 2am talking with my roomie Christine last night! :-)

Today was American breakfast day!
We learned how to sing "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" in Korean class today. This is my group singing for everyone! We also learned "Happy Birthday" and "Twinkle Twinkle little star". And a song about 3 bears. It was a pretty fun day.

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A. How would you describe Korean culture to a friend back home? Think about all aspects of culture: attitudes, dress, food, history, language, etc.

Korean culture to me is full of surprises. Some things I would guess to be one way, and they are completely another! For example, as far as “scandalous” dressing for women: you must cover your shoulders and for sure not wear low cut shirts. However, it is OK to wear short skirts. Today I saw a young girl wearing what looked like a tighter fitting, but overly long, sweat shirt. And that was all she was wearing. Her shoulders were covered, but the “dress” was rather short. However, I love how they dress here. They have a stylish sense of fashion that I hope I pick up on!

Greetings and interactions with strangers also surprise me. I love the Korean “insa” (or bow). It shows so much respect. Also, Koreans use very polite speech. I haven’t learned all the varieties of formality built into the speech, but from what I have learned, they are very polite. However, it is not “normal” to make eye contact with or to smile at passing strangers. I am in the habit of smiling at people I pass in the street, and my smile is almost never returned. (I think only 3 or so strangers have smiled back this past week) Making direct eye contact can be seen as intimidating or coming on to them. This will be hard for me to get used to, as at school I really worked hard to smile and make eye contact with people.

I love my Korean language class and I am so excited to keep learning throughout the year (hopefully). I think things will really start to pick up this week as we learn more about the structure of the language. Our Korean teachers are so cute. Today was one of my teacher’s birthday, so we sang Happy Birthday in Korean to her. J Korean history also fascinates me, but I haven’t learned very much about it yet. I am interested in their views of China and Japan, which seems to be a slight dislike…maybe how Americans always tease Canadians? I will have to get a better feel for this. I’m sure I will since my boyfriend will be in Japan this year. I am also interested in the relationship between North and South Korea. It would be hard to “stand firm” on political policies when the people being affected are your relatives, who are likely experiencing food shortages. A South Korean tourist was shot in NK just a few days ago. The government said something along the lines of “Now is not the time to debate with NK about whether this action was right or wrong.” If an American tourist was shot and killed in Canada, imagine how outraged the US would be. This whole attitude will be interesting to learn about throughout the year.