Konglish Kafeteria

My knee jerk reaction is to complain about today, the increase in workload, the unfair accusations on my character, the waywardness of life, the insurmountable lack of will I have... but I won't.



Buckets full of babies. My life is good again.

I think New Year's Resolutions are fun. If I don't succeed (and seriously, who does?), I don't consider myself a failure, I don't wallow in disappointment and curse why I even held myself to such expectations. No no. So heck yes I am making resolutions.

1. Lose Weight. Who doesn't have this for their NYR except maybe anorexics. And actually, I'm positive anorexics have it too. I'd love to just reach a healthy weight but mostly I want to lose enough that when I come back to America in September, people are like "OMG, you lost so much weight, you look sooo gooooood!" ... because what's the point in exercising so damn much if it's not to rake in some compliments, am I right?

2. Fondle My Creativity. Once upon a time, I was a pretty good artist. I used to be complimented a lot on my work. Unfortunately, the taxation that is a college art program sent me running away from creativity, into the sturdy arms of psychoanalysis. I've had hints that I still got it, like how I got far more recognition with how I wrote the schedule on the marker board at the psych ward than I did my patient relations. Some friends and acquaintances are pursuing writing careers, art shows, and half-ass experimental bands and I'm wildly jealous. By the end of 2009, I'd love to have enough art to put up a show, a book/novel/screenplay to use as a catalyst into my new career choice (writer -- I know, I was doing that 3 years ago, I'm recycling!), and for Jon's and my experimental laptop band to come to fruition. You heard it here first--Jon and I are starting a band!! (boy is he reluctant! Who wouldn't want to be in a band with a no talent hack like me? C'mon, love!)

3. Graduate. Oh haha. For those that knew me, bet you forgot I'M STILL TECHNICALLY IN SCHOOL. Have been since 2003. So I figure 2009 is as good a year as any to finally close the book on St Cloud State forever, and hopefully within that book will be a stamped and signed diploma that will lead to a pay raise at whatever day job I have to take on while I pursue this writer's track. Anyways, to graduate, I'll need to write my thesis. I know I know, what's the hold up, right? I am my own worst enemy, EXACTLY like Christian Slater is in that TV show (canceled yet?).

4. Travel. Obviously. No work involved here.

5. Move. It might come down to Rock Paper Scissors, because as of right now, Jon and I are not officially agreeing on where to go. I want to go south, to AU/NZ. He wants to stay, because he is a change-hater! I 99% want to move while he 51% wants to stay. So clearly we should move, right? Anyways, I guess my real NYR is to just not move home. I just want to prove I have what it takes to stay away from that North American land mass for longer than the average study-abroader. Plus I need more time to get skinny.

Happy New Year's!

Yes, it only took 4 months but I've run out of things to talk about. So I'm just posting my to-do list for all to see.

1. Go to the Post Office. I have post cards and "Christmas presents" galore to mail. If you can call Korean food a present. I am scared of the post office. I know how to send a letter to America. It is easy enough, costs 600 won and takes just a week (that's like 40 cents). But we are sending PACKAGES. And will probably have to fill out CUSTOMS FORMS. SCARY. I wish we could go in the middle of the day. But we have to go like 40 minutes before the post office closes. What if there's a line? What if there are English haters? My life is so hard.

2. Play video games. I have a craving for Donkey Kong, Mario Kart and to finally kick Jon's ass at a round of Wii Sports. Last week when we played I was ahead in 4/5 games (turns out I can't box whatsoever) and he came from behind to win everything. I wanna beat that scrawny nerd! SO BAD!

3. Go to the gym. I have 42 days til I show up in Boracay and expect to look fabulous. I took pictures of myself in my swimsuit. NOT FABULOUS. Apparently if you do things like weights you will lose weight and tone up faster. Watch out! Rachel's gonna deadlift! Maybe even sumo deadlift!!

4. Put up my art. I got ART. I asked for art and I got art. Well, a few friends and my parents really fulfilled the request... I suppose everyone else is also planning on sending their art to me soon so.. no pressure. I know it's coming. Right? I'll let you know the psychological effects of living in tiny apartment PLUS meaningful art from home. Does it really beat plain white walls? We'll find out soon.

5. Go to the Busan Museum of Modern Art. Last time we went they were installing an exhibit and told us to scram. Seriously, being told to scram in Korean, in a good natured way or otherwise, isn't pleasant. I want all Korean interaction to be: welcome foreigner! I love foreigner. I love you. Love.

6. Grocery shop. I'm going to HomePlus aka the only place in Korea that sells black beans! If I'm feeling really crazy I might even spend $4 on an avocado. Sometimes I am pretty cuckoo for 'cadoes. I do however hate trying to lug home my 40 lbs of beans on the bus or subway. Last time I biffed and hurt myself. An old lady rushed up to me and explained to me in Korean that I had just tripped on a hole in the ground. Thanks, Korean lady. If you hadn't told me, how would I have known that I had tripped and fallen?????

7. Go to Gyeoungju. This is a mystery trip. We are going with Jon's principal, about whom Jon cares not. The thing about these Korean trips are they sound like they take 2-3 hours and they actually take 12-13 hours. So I'm not really looking forward to this one.

8. Clean my apartment. Just kidding. I just put that in there to get Jon's hopes up. Psych!

9. Post up new pictures. My new camera is awesome, I can turn it on and off all fast-like (as opposed to my last camera which took about 1.5 days to "warm up.") and thusly get some great SPY PICTURES, which are my fav. I just need to learn to turn off the picture-taking sound. How can I be a spy when you hear "click"? Anyways, new camera might be fast but camera owner is not. I'm slooow. Soooorrry.

10. Start my thesis. Again, this is like the apartment thing... it's a long-standing joke! Har har har. Kind of like Charlie Brown and that football. My life is a situation comedy!

I am so insanely jealous of Koreans long black hair that they wear with bangs. Its so long it goes down to their boobs. They look great. I'm jealous. And their legs are made out of toothpicks. Seriously. Same color and everything.



They are way more fashionable than 90% of Americans and they are always wearing high heels. I want to fashionable. And taller!

I was not blessed with hair than can be long or really black. But if I was...


I think I need skin bleaching too.

Next week for my Teacher's Class we'll be watching Mamma Mia. Today, however, my co-teacher (aka translator) is off at some training so instead of canceling the class, which is the smart choice, I'm teaching it by myself. She prepared the lesson for me. We are going to learn the song "Hero" by Mariah Carey. Yeah. Like I said she made the lesson. Anyways, the teachers always complain they can't understand me. And yesterday only like 3 people showed up so they sent out some big email demanding more people come. I hope 0 people show up today. That would be rad.

PS How come when I feel hungry it rains on me?

Being a girl in Korea, I know everyone wants to hear about my glamourous life! (I've been watching America's Next Top Model and using some transference, k?) So based on no particular day at all, here's the long version of what my typical day is:

6:45. I usually wake up before my alarm. I use this time to convince myself to join the dark side: I think about ways to hate my job, hate Korea, ways I can eat junk food instead of healthy food, and wonder how realistically I can live a life of eating junk food and watching TV.

7: Dark side doesn't win and I workout to a workout video. I hate workout videos and I hate exercising before work but somehow in a land full of thin people, I am still fat. I eat their food. I walk their billions of subway stairs. I bet they don't even have a word in Korean for "cellulite."

7:30 - 8: I use this time to mull around after my shower. Anything that makes me feel like I have no place to go is what I want to be doing. For breakfast I have yogurt or maybe ramen & cheese. Because it's nice to get 1.5 days worth of salt in one meal.

8-8:05: Pick out clothes, get dressed, do my hair, pack my bag, brush my teeth, say good-bye to Jon. So obviously I actually leave about 8:14.

8:15-8:40. If I'm lucky, two number 57 busses will come in a row and I can get on the 2nd empty one. There's no rhyme or reason to bus schedules. Busses just show up, sometimes two at a time. Once I waited for a bus for 20 minutes only to see it drive by and honk... like, hey sorry guys, I know I'm late so I can't pick you up. I stand on the bus when it's full. I'm not up to fighting ajummahs for seats.

8:40-9: This is when I do "important things" ... like emailing people with purpose or reading Google News.

9-12:20. I teach 4 classes. In the 5th grade, the naughtiest class is class one.  "A few bad apples can spoil the bunch" or whatever the saying is is RIGHT ON. I don't understand how one group of 30 students can be so much more unmotivated and disinterested than another group of 30. Anyways, in the lessons I start with: Hello. How are you? How's the weather? What day is it? What did you do yesterday? ... sometimes I make up things that I did just to come up with new material. Today I told them "I read a book yesterday." Totally untrue. Then we listen to dialogs like this:
Ann: Where's the bathroom?
Jinho: Sorry?
Ann: Bathroom!
Jinho: This is the bathroom.
Ann: Thanks.

And I ask them questions like: What's wrong with Ann? Where are they? What does Jinho say? What does sorry mean? ... then I make them repeat sentences:
This is the bathroom.
This is the bathroom.
This is the bathroom.

Songs and chants are the worst. Especially when they have motions. You know how elementary school teachers always look way into motions for songs? Well, as an elementary school teacher who looks very excited to do motions to songs, lemme tell ya, I am NOT!

Games are generally the bright point of the lesson, for me and the students. If it's a game I can referee, i.e. they must listen for me to say words and be the fastest person to grab the matching card, that's fun. If it's a game where they're supposed to speak English but could totally play WITHOUT speaking English, that's not, because I have to go right up to all their scared little faces and make them speak English to me. Especially when I have to make obnoxious boys stop beating each other up and tell me "Do you like grapes? Yes, I do. No I don't."

12:20-12:50. My least favorite part of the day: Lunch. I've been here for 2 months and I can tell you THREE things I've had that I really enjoy: bibimbap (rice, vegetables & hot sauce), tofu squares, and potato cream soup. That puts everything else that I found somewhere in the range of so-so to really gross. And that's me excluding octopus salad, pork cutlets, anchovies, squid tentacles (I ate these for 6 weeks til I figured out what they were), fish soup and pork salad. At lunch my principal likes to practice English with me. That is usually him repeatedly saying "Nice to SEE you. Nice to SEE you TOO." I like him a lot, actually, he's probably my 2nd favorite person at school after my co-teacher. But the vice principal likes to make comments about my lunch tray being too empty. And I still get bad-chopstick-holding comments. Boo.

12:50-1:05. I hope hope hope hope hope my stalker is not hanging out in my room. If she is, she likes to give me "English lessons" where she will look for a word, like English and write E G I H on the board and look at me. It took me awhile to realize she's doing like, Hangman. I throw out "see you tomorrow" at least 5 times to get her to leave.

1:10-4:40. This is the wasteland of my day. I write blogs, I read celebrity gossip blogs, I read others' blogs, I look up stupid, pointless crap, I daydream about going on vacation, moving somewhere else, and I think about goals I have like completing my thesis but I don't actually work on my thesis. Everytime I hear footsteps, I hope they aren't coming to visit me. For someone so bored, I get pretty antisocial.

4:40-5:10. I walk the gamut home. The road to the bus is overflowing with students. I was talked to once previously that someone said hi to me and I ignored them and they consequently thought I hated them. Most likely I didn't even hear them but now if I think I hear the word "hi" I turn and look. So I basically get whiplash walking to the bus. When I get home, I try to convince myself to take the stairs up 23 floors and get 6 minutes of exercise. The stairs generally lose.

5:10. Time for dinner. I want more ramen. Jon tries to convince me otherwise. He wins half the time. We figure out what was on TV in America the previous day and look for it online. The night is shot. I do nothing but watch TV and look up stupid crap online. Sometimes I make a to-do list for things I want to do after work TOMORROW. But not today. The internet TV is on. It's too late!

10:30. Bed time. See you tomorrow!

The phone number for the local cab service is 333-3333. The phone number for the local cab service in Minneapolis is 333-3333.

There is no Daylight Savings Time in Korea. Apparently they've had about 6 different stretches of trying it out but, like religion, it's just not for everyone.

M83 is great music for looking at Korea. I want to make a movie about Korea and have them do the soundtrack. But I'm afraid it will be the Korean version of Lost in Translation but not nearly as cool since Korea still has to prove itself cool to me.

RotiBun slogan: Don't bite me or you will love me!! (sidenote: What's a RotiBun?)

I give the Korean language credit for being more formualic than English. Fewer exceptions to the rules. Allegedly a mathematically based alphabet. But I'm going to have to award English some substantial points for not making all of their words several syllables long. Seriously, attaching -imnika or -imnida to the end of everything? My tongue hurts!

Speaking of, I had previously been appreciative that generally I can pronounce the romanization of Korean. Hasimnika is pronounced ha-sim-ni-ka. Not like French or Spanish with the accents and silent letters. But then I realized--Korean is ROMANIZED. The written form is meant to be pronounced as is.  If rapport is supposed to be RAHpore, then Koreans will romanize it rapore. Except for Geoje. I wouldn't have guessed Ko-gee.

After a lot of pouting and sulking, turns out my new used camera with the scratched-to-shit LCD screen works perfectly fine when you turn it on (had to wait 10 days for the battery to show up). Thanks Jon and sorry for making you look at my fat lower lip.

I'm completing my Master's sometime next year. Yup, I opened that  bag again. And I'm nervous and scared and overwhelmed and whatever I felt all the other times that made me quit.

It's weird how being away from America makes you want to vote SO BADLY! I've heard others mention this as well. Maybe this is why foreigners are always bitching: "Gee, I think WE should get a vote in the American elections!" It's like you don't trust those who are still on the island (...of North America).

Jon lost 10 lbs without trying. I lost 1 lb trying really really really hard.

My goal for the weekend is to go to the Job & Life bar. I've never been but I think you just go with friends and talk about your job and your life. Sounds simple enough. And it's a bar. So that should help.

Tomorrow I have a demo class. That means that students from Pusan National University of Education will be standing in my class and peeping in the window to watch how my co-teacher and I teach. Just for the occasion, I prepared a powerpoint presentation of animal pictures, including pigs playing soccer and cows wearing berets. English doesn't have to be BORING.

I just realized that nobody seems to have Korean writing on their clothes, only the romanized alphabet.

Except for socks. By the way, most of my students wear face socks like this.

From my 3rd graders teaching manual in the cultural tips section:

In the west, people stand in line even though there are only two people. No matter how long it takes waiting for the other people who are ahead of them, they don't complain and just wait for their turn.

Also, when they wait for their turn in a public place such as a post office or a public bathroom, they usually wait for their turn not in front of the individual stalls or doors, but at the main entrance of that public place. When a seat becomes available, they enter and claim it in order.

Normally I let the ajummahs run in front of me to get on the bus. Really, they are older than me and I'm usually not travelling very far so if there are no seats left, I'll just stand. Yesterday, after letting about 6 older women on in front of me, as I was stepping onto the bus, another one ran from the side and tried to squeeze in the inches of space to get past me going up the stairs. So I stuck out my hand to hang onto the railing, essentially clotheslining her if she attempted to go further. She did not and I managed a seat (she did too, so really, what's the point??).

Korea is generally a really polite and conservative country. But when it comes to lines, it's Mob Rule (or rather Ajummahs Rule, as they will always be first).

It's Thanksgiving Day (Choseuk) and many Busan families are trying to have a picnic by the sea and enjoy some rice & octopus. I think it looks like a photo opportunity!


That's 100% real dyed dog fur, baby. I had to wait until this lady stopped smothering it with lady kisses. Don't you want to lady kiss it too?


Again, what's a traditional Thanksgiving in Korea without some traditional music... played by drag queens? At first I thought they were really hard-living ajummahs.


Almost as much as I love the internet, I love creepily watching 100 families each night in their apartment trying to enjoy some peace and quiet. Somebody's going to report me I think.


Take a guess
(It's a convenience store!)

Everyone knows Asians have a pretty effortless ability to be teeny-tiny. But other things in Asia are also quite small. I'll start with the obvious:

1. People. Height-wise, girth-wise, we got them beat. I was initially surprised to see many near-tallish Koreans but eventually more surprised at the all the women in their three inches heels who are still inches shorter than me (at 5'2). As for weight, yah yah, we are fat... but not really. The most overweight people in our crew are from New Zealand. There are not many very overweight Americans here... but still Koreans are naturally sticks and foreigners naturally have spare tires.

2. Dogs. Everyone loves mini dogs.



I haven't seen any larger dogs. Maybe they are just in the country. Or maybe they just eat them.

(by the way, search "Korean dogs" in Google Image and be prepared for a lot of pictures of dead and skinned dogs on their way to becoming food)

3. Non-alcoholic beverages.



Nearly all soda comes looking like this. And iced coffee in a can is very popular here and it all comes in cans the size of those mini V8s.

4. Chopsticks.


I guess Korea is known for having thinner, yet heavier metal chopsticks (China, they have plenty of trees to cut down). A lot of people have complained that they take some getting used to but not me because a) when did I use chopsticks before? Come on! and b) Emily U bought me a pair in Korea a couple years ago so if I do use them, it's Korea-style.

5. And finally the reverse bonus round: things that are a lot bigger here: Girl's shirts.

I swear girls wear night shirts with their little jeans.



It's still short skirts and/or tight jeans, just miles and miles of shirt.

This is my new livejournal since nobody uses MySpace anymore.

I leave America in 46 hours. I will be in Korea in ??? hours.

...so let's be livejournal friends!