Friday Night Boxing

        Friday night.  I had no plans. I was looking forward to staying in and just relaxing.  But if you know me you know I can’t say no to anything, so I get a call around 11:00 from Robby saying that he and our boxing trainers were drinking in the middle of the boxing floor and did I want to join?

        Oh sidenote, I’ve been kickboxing these days.  Our boxing trainers are hilarious.  They don’t know any English, so they always just say “come on!” (with the emphasis on the “come” so “COME on”) and “Hey!”  and “Fighting!”  These are the only words they’ve learned so far.

        Anyway, so the idea of drinking in the middle of the boxing floor seemed pretty hilarious to me so I went along.  All they kept saying to Robby and me were “Hey!  Come on!” and occasionally “Hey! Be quiet!”   The main kickboxing guy kept saying, “I am king!”  And then he made us drink somek and somek and somek.  And we had to do somek “one shot” every time.  He’d pour us somek and then say “Hey! Come on! One shot!”  Alas, I got so drunk, I don’t really remember the whole night.  But I do know that for a while there I could not get over how amusing it was that we were drinking on the boxing floor.  Koreans would.  They just would.

        Also, I don’t think I trust these guys with my diet anymore.  I started kickboxing to lose weight, but last night they ate fried-chicken and drank somek and smoked cigarettes IN THE KICKBOXING ROOM.  They asked us if we like Ramen and the head trainer showed me a picture of him when he had a six-pack “yesterday, yesterday, yesterday, yesterday, yesterday.”  No six-pack now eh?  What are you doing wrong?  Maybe I should find a new trainer…

Benaphobic

  Not to continually talk about my dog like one of those annoying dog people everyone hates, but I was walking Benes this morning when I came across a bunch of cute little girls.  They all huddled around Benes and started petting her.  The youngest girl must have been about 2 or 3.  She would come over to Benes, touch her, then jump back and scream her lungs out.  She did this over and over and over again.  She’d pet Benes, and then scream as loud as she could.  I was the funniest thing.  It got to the point where she would hug Benes for a moment or two and then, rest assured, she’s jump back and scream at the top of her lungs.  Maybe today she made some headway in her apparent dog phobia?  I like to think Benes and I are slowly changing the course of Korea and their anti- dog ways.  A girl can dream anyways.

Roman Baths

Finally, after being here for 7 months, I got myself to a jimjibang.  A jimjibang is kind of like a sauna/spa thing.  There's no exact replica in America, so allow me:

On Sunday, Lydia picked Robby and me up and took us to the jimjibang.  She said stage one is taking a shower in front of a bunch of naked people.  Separate rooms for boys and girls.  She said to me "everyone will stare at you because you are a foreigner and the agimas will touch you."  Oh goody.  So we undress and walk into the shower room and I am immediately reminded of what I imagine Roman times to have been.  There are huge public baths spouting water from stone replicas of dragon heads.  There are tons of naked women parading around, splashing about, washing themselves...it's like the empire never fell, they just developed squintier eyes.

Stage two is the sauna.  These saunas are HOT.  We choose to go into the hottest one because we like a challenge.  So Robby, Lydia, and I walk (and by watch I kinda mean crawl) into the sauna that is 90 degrees Celsius.  Remember that 100 degrees Celsius is boiling.  The sauna isn't a room exactly, it's a cave.  There are a bunch of mini caves set up with varies degrees of heat.  So you choose which level of heat will suit you and then you open the cave door and crawl into the heated cave.  While we are in the 90 degree cave I can't help but think of every Sci-Fi movie I've ever seen.  The caves look like caves.  Protruding from the interior walls are huge (probably fake) quartz crystals.  And on one side of the cave is a huge metal plate from which the heat is obtruding.  One second thought, maybe it's what planet Krypton looks like...

Then, if you want to cool down, you can go into the ice room.  This can't be good for your health, going from one extreme temperature to the other.  The ice room has crystals hanging from the ceiling and a huge block of ice sticking out of three of the walls.

After you've had enough of the heat caves, you go back to she shower room, shower once more, and that is the average jimjibang experience.  I'm happy to report I was not touched by any agimas...this time.

The Korean Wedding Singer

I should have seen this coming.  A few weeks after May's wedding, another Korean teacher - Christine - announced her engagement.  One night after work, we went out to a restaurant and May was joking and said "Katie you should sing at Christine's wedding, haha."  That "haha" is how I got myself in trouble the first time, mind you.  Anyway, I thought I was in the clear because Christine said "no, offense, but I don't want singing in my wedding."  And of course none taken.

A few weeks later Christine came to me and asked "would you sing in my wedding?"  Dumbfounded, I answered yes while wondering what changed.  Then she asked if I would sing a Korean song that she picked out.  She asked me this two weeks before the wedding.  But I love a challenge and I miss those days in choir when we had to memorize a foreign song in 45 minutes so I of course said yes.

I memorized the song in two days and then was left for twelve days wondering if I'd have accompaniment or if I'd have to sing a Capella.  The day came and turns out I had Karaoke-style accompaniment once again. 

Despite how strange it must have been for 200+ Koreans to watch a foriegner butcher a beloved Korean song, the performance was pretty uneventful.  I remembered all the words!

I think one more wedding officially makes me The Korean Wedding Singer.  No?

Chop Chop, No?

           Every day I walk my dog in Turtle Park and every day this walk always provides some sort of entertainment.  Whether it’s people running away screaming at the sight of a dog or people wanting to pet her, or people yelling me that I’m not allowed to walk my dog in the park (to which I like to respond (fuck you-se-yo), it’s always something.

             

            These past few weeks, every morning when I walk Benes, a group of agishis stop me, take Benes’ leash from me, walk away, and then say “chop chop no?” as they gesture eating something.

             

            The first two or three times it was funny and I fake laughed and then took my leash back and walked away.  But this has been going on for weeks now.  No one’s laughing anymore.  And yet, everyday they take my leash and say “chop chop, no?” as if one day I’m just gonna be like “ok, I’ve plumped her up, she’s ready for the feast.”  God DAMN agishis.  It’s getting to the point where I’m gonna kick-box an old dude in the face.

            Addendum.  I will take dog-hungry agishis over crazy Christians any day.  I wouldn’t mind the crazy church people if they stood around waiting for people to take interest.  No, they are fake nice to you.  They make you think they just want to pet your dog and then all of the sudden you have twenty different fliers with Jesus’s face on them and your being talked at a mile a minute in Korean and THERE IS NO ESCAPE.   

            I have to find a new park.

Abusing My Power?

I really love being an ESL teacher.  I basically just entertain myself in 50 minute intervals for six hours a day because my students rarely know what’s going on.  I sing to myself, laugh to myself, tell myself jokes….  My students often ask me what time it is and every single time I say “time to buy a watch hahaha.”  They never understand, they just stare at me and say “teachah, time whaaat??”  I refuse to answer with anything but “time to buy a watch.”  Refuse. 

Sometimes I’ll tell them to take out their books and they’ll go “teachahh, whhyyyyyyy” and I just respond “because ‘Y’ is a crooked letter,” admittedly a saying that I don’t even understand but my mother always said that to me whenever I asked too many ‘why’ questions.  Anyways, then I just giggle to myself because my students have no idea what I’m talking about.

I can get away with saying basically anything to them because they have no idea.  It’s sad sometimes when I have a really good quip or retort to something a student has said so I say it and then I laugh to myself for 5 minutes and my students just have blank stares.

I do love when a class just decides to repeat everything I say.  When I notice this happening, no matter what, no matter what transpires in between, I always make it end with “supercalifragilisticexmialidocious” because they end up just going “supercali-alalalalalalalalalalalalalala” and it’s hilarious.

I also love the things kids come up with.  Today, I had the class that is in competition with each other.  They were coloring and then going “Done! I am number one!”  “Done.  I am number two!” and so on.  I REALLY hate it so in the midst of it all I’m just sitting there yelling, “No one cares!  No one cares!  No one cares!” over and over until one students starts going “Yes one cares!  Yes on cares!  Yes one cares!”  Can’t argue with the logic.

Another treasure was the day one class was doing their reading book and one student saw a picture of what appeared to be a father so she took out her pencil and wrote “father” next to the picture with an arrow.  Then one of the students looked closer and it turns out the father only had one eye and thus was a cyclops.  The student who wrote ‘father’ in her book took a second look then exuded a look of horror as she gasped and yelled out “FATHER NOOOO!!!!” and feverishly erased her writing.  Hilarious I tell you.

Let's Caja The Fuck Outta Here

 

I went to Busan this weekend with two foreign coworkers at the prospect of drinking margaritas on the beach despite it not being remotely close to beach weather.

So we arrive at Busan station and as we are waiting for a Subway, two Korean girls come up to us and start talking to us.  They are like “so I guess you speak English so we thought we’d talk to you.”  Random but ok.  So we are talking to these girls for one or two minutes when Robbie, in attempt to keep the conversation going, asks the one girl if she grew up speaking Korean or English.  And then she told us about how she was born in Korea and was adopted and brought to America but then she found her birth parents and moved back to Korea and she discovered she has two older sisters (TWO OLDER SISTERS – that means her parents just had a third kid and were like “nope, we don’t want this one”) and she was going to her father’s 60^th birthday party.  First of all: waaaaaaaaaaaaayy too much information.  Second of all:  I obviously don’t know the details of her situation but if I were her, or her birth parents, or her adopted parents, or her siblings, I’d be PISSED OFF in all aspects.  But to each his own I guess….

Later on we find a hotel to stay at.  By the way, these hotels are awesome.  They just give you a little mat and you sleep on the floor.  I’m thinking of getting one for my room here.  Anyway, the hotel guy is showing us our room and then proceeds to demonstrate to us own to open and close the door.  Like, we’re foreigners, we’re not idiots.  I know you might think it’s one in the same, but give us a little credit, just a little.

We do some sight-seeing including hiking to a temple right next to the ocean at night and standing before the most gigantic Buddha I have ever seen in my entire life (it must have been three stories high) and everything is good. 

Then we go to meet up with a girl named Sunny I met in Yeosu.  She takes us around to a few bars including a bar called “Thursday Party” which sells flavored beer.  At first, like me, you might think “White Chocolate flavored beer?  Awesome!” but let me assure you that it is in fact, not awesome.  It’s too much white chocolate and barely any beer.  Bleh.  Anyway, we end up at a Macholi bar and they have plum flavored Macholi!  (I didn’t learn anything from the flavored beer incident.)  So I’m all “we have to get plum flavored Macoli!  Because I LOVE PLUMS.”  And it was delicious.  What wasn’t so delicious was as a side dish they served the worms that I tasted at Nagan.  Now everyone at the table was mocking me because I didn’t actually eat the worm at Nagan.  I put it in my mouth, bit down, and then spit it out.  So now I was under pressure to actually eat one.  And I did.  And it was gross.  But now I can say I have officially eaten a bug/worm thing.  Gross.

Sunny leaves but we continue our drinking shenanigans eventually ending up at a bar that’s playing awful techno music.  The guys at the bar, apparently inspired by the hypnotic beats, are dancing on the counter and taking their pants off to reveal their speedo-like under wear.  That was about when Meg turns to me and goes “Let’s caja (카 자<let’s go>) the fuck outta here.”  So we “cajaed the fuck outta there”  (I love that) and went back to the hotel. 

We were talking about movies and plays and Robbie had never heard of A Streetcar Named Desire (my all-time favorite play) so I was telling him he had to watch it.  The conversation eventually turning into talking about Darrell from The Office and Hot Tub Time Machine and before we all went to sleep Robbie goes “I’ll remember to watch  A Hot Tub Named Desire or whatever it’s called.

            Our last little adventure before calling it a weekend was sitting on the Subway and watching a 10-year-old looking kid lick the poles on the Subway train. Dis-gus-ting.  Overall, a really good weekend.