I know I've been slacking a little on the whole blogging thing. Part of it is laziness, but part of it too is that many things here have become the new normal. I'm starting to actually LIVE here, not be a tourist who is amazed by everything that's so different from home.
But there are a few things I've neglected to blog about that I probably should. So here goes nothing.
The past week my school was conducting midterms, so for me that meant no classes. But don't go thinking I just sat around and surfed the web all day, every day for a week. I mean, I did do my share of that, but I spent most of the week hammering out a plan for what I'm going to teach the rest of the semester and formulating details on some of those lessons, especially the lesson for the coming week!
But midterm week also meant no school lunch (the cafeteria is closed because the students only have exams in the morning and then they have the afternoon to study, or at least that's how the thinking goes). This also meant that I had a chance to broaden my Korean cuisine experience a bit. Tuesday, my office mates and I (my co-teacher, my head teacher and the other teacher in our office) went to a seafood restaurant where we cooked noodles, shellfish, shrimp and other delectables in a pot of boiling broth right in front of us. It was delicious. If you like seafood Korea can satisfy your itch; that's for sure.
We went back to the office for a bit, when all of the sudden it was time to go. I was warned in advance that the teachers were going hiking Tuesday afternoon, but I was never told a time. The warning was nice, so that I could bring different shoes and clothes to chance into, but the sudden notice that we had to leave left me no time to chance. So I had my first hiking experience in dress pants!
It was a pretty decent hike (about 3K, I think), with a long set of steep stairs at the very end. The view was nothing spectacular, but it was a new view of my city. We snapped some group pictures at the top and began the descent. Once back on level ground we hurried off to dinner to meet up with the teachers already at the bottom. We found our seats (well, floor mats) and dug in to our spicy, chopped octopus. And when I say spicy, I mean spicy. This stuff had a kick. But it was pretty good, and the texture of the tentacles wasn't as bad as I thought they'd be.
The meal itself wasn't the memorable part of the night though. That would come when a non-English teacher who I try to talk baseball with came over and sat next to me. Apparently he had starting drinking with lunch, but I didn't notice when he first sat down as I was too focused on trying to communicate with him. He wanted to drink some soju with me, so not wanting to be rude I obliged.
And here's one of the things about Korean culture that I don't think I'll ever fully adjust to. He put one arm around my shoulder and the other on my thigh, make that upper thigh. He wasn't hitting on me; he's got a wife and a young daughter. That's just normal interaction between Korean men, so I really didn't think anything of it, especially because I knew about the custom ahead of time. But part of you still feels a little weird. You'll see it with women too. Female friends, and sometimes male friends, will hold hands in public. It's even more common than couples holding hands, although that seems to be changing with the younger generation. So if you ever visit Korea, don't just assume you've found the Asian San Francisco, it's just a culture difference!
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