Gyeongbokgung Temple
November 3, 2009
South Koreans Struggle with Race
The New York Times published a very interesting article about race and South Korea here. A Korean woman and a foreigner were merely traveling together and they found themselves being harassed. They took the man to court and it is the first time in this country that racial discrimination laws have been upheld. The laws were only adopted in the first place at the suggestion of the UN.
Before coming here, Kelly and I had heard about how ethnically homogenous South Korea is, and xenophobic. We wondered how that would affect us in our daily lives. Now that we are here, we find very little racism on a personal level (although lots of “I feel like I am an animal at the zoo” moments) but every day we hear in the English newspapers or translated versions of Korean newspapers about the concern of foreign influx, the low birthrates of Korean women, crimes commited by foreigners, etc. The other night, a middle-aged woman began yelling at Kelly and me on the subway, waving her umbrella. We didn’t even know at first that it was directed at us. But, perhaps, this was our first encounter with racism.
October 29, 2009
Samcheong-dong and Coffee
Awhile back, during Chuseok, Kelly and I discovered cafe heaven in Samcheong-dong, which is near Insa-dong. Many of these cafes were in renovated traditional Korean houses (hanoks) and were wedged into a hilly cobblestone neighborhood. Add some quirky boutiques, a little bit of art, and some restaurants, and you have a pretty awesome place to go to!
Now, as many people know, Kelly and I are hopelessly addicted to coffee and, in addition, are coffee snobs. We decided to pop into one of the many cafes to try out some coffee. Not all coffee is equal, but when we first started flipping through an extensive menu that offered siphoned coffee, I felt like we might be at the right spot.
The first time I had ever heard of siphoned coffee was when Jack Nicholson’s character in The Bucket List claimed that Kopi Luwak coffee (you know, the coffee berries which have been eaten by and passed through the Asian Palm Civet) that had been siphoned was the best coffee he had ever tasted. I forgot to check for Kopi Luwak coffee on the menu–there is a distinct possibility that it is, given the amount of choices there were–and opted for my normal latte, pictured above. Kelly was adventurous and sipped on the siphoned stuff, claiming it was wonderful.
In fact, the only problem with our impromptu coffee date was that the coffee roughly cost double what it normally does. Ah, the cultural differences we must overcome on a daily basis!
October 28, 2009
A Middle School Festival…
A festivus for the rest of us.
Three of my girl students all dressed up and nervously belting out a K-Pop song.
On a day in the not too distant past, my co-teachers invited me to attend the annual Suseo Middle School Festival. Now, for me, it was one thing to take the day off of work on Friday to walk along the river with the students and cheer them on while they played various games–tug of war, frisbee toss–but it was quite another to come in early on a Saturday morning to watch part II of the festival. So, I stalled on giving an answer on whether or not Kelly and I would attend. As an aside, Kelly was especially invited to this event. Then, one of my friend-teachers came up to my classroom, translated the entire program from Korean into English, and told me that going to this festival was one of the few ways that I will learn about Korean culture while in Korea and that the former Native English Speaker Teacher (quite a mouthful, but that’s the job title) didn’t go and was negatively affected by not going.
Well, when it’s put to you that way…
Kelly and I showed up bright and early to a neighboring (and by neighboring, I mean right next door) high school to see the festivities on Saturday. We arrived on the scene at 9am (the starting time) to find the gymnasium in a state of havoc. Apparently” starts at 9″ really means starts sometime before 10. What, I thought we weren’t Ecuador anymore?
Shortly after our arrival, several students started swarming around us.”Teacher, your husband is…very handsome!!!” Yes, although my students’ English is fairly limited, they are very familiar with the vocabulary word “handsome” and used it numerous times throughout the day to describe their amazement at Kelly’s dashing good looks. In fact, Kelly made such an impression on the student body and staff that for an entire week after the festival, I heard, in every single class, about how lucky I was to have a husband as handsome as Kelly.
The festival turned out to be more like a talent show. There was an amazing drum routine that was my favorite part, a Taekwondo routine to the Amelie soundtrack and a couple of my students tried to rock like K-Pop stars. There was, of course, a couple of obligatory squeaky recorder and violin performances, a few musical prodigies on the violin and singing, and an electric guitar solo by the teacher who belted out Canon in D in some pretty tight jeans. The highlight of the festival for just about everyone one was the Miss Suseo beauty pageant. But, in lieu of girls trying on prom dresses and showing off, the awkward 13 and 14 year-old boys cross-dressed and competed for the crown. It was hysterical! Some of my students looked like funny boys in high heels and others looked disturbingly pretty.
In conclusion, did we witness an event that will completely fulfill our cultural insights into South Korea, possibly overshadowing everything that we have seen and will see in the course of a year? No. However, it was incredibly fun to see my students outside of the classroom, goofing off and showing off, being themselves. For that, I am glad that we went.
October 26, 2009
Picture please
Some sweet news from Kelly: An online travel guide called Schmap.com has published a photo he took at Pike Place Market this summer in their latest online Seattle guide. They have been making some editing decisions over the last few weeks and his photo made the final cut!
If you move your mouse over the Pike Place Market section of this page Kelly’s photo will be in the top right:
The original photo is posted here
When asked how he felt about about being a newly published photographer, Kelly said, “It’s pretty cool. The best part was I didn’t have to do anything.”
October 23, 2009
We Travel
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers can accommodate…And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again–to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more
-Pico Iyer
October 20, 2009
The Nuts and Bolts of Elementary School
Although Kristin and I have essentially identical contracts, the details of our days are quite different. She has her own classroom with little talking robots and students who visit for fun during lunch while I have a mobile classroom consisting of a USB drive and book and am based out of an office with three other English teachers.
My school is older and surrounded by high-rise high-end apartments, in which almost all of my students live. In general, their English is quite a bit more advanced than Kristin’s students although her school is a Middle School and mine only Elementary. I have some kids who have lived in the US or Canada for a few years. Unfortunately in those same classes I also have students who don’t know the response to “Hello, what is your name?” which makes for a interesting lesson.
I teach out of a book with my co-teacher whom I work with to plan and execute the lessons. These plans usually vary from class to class because of student levels, attention spans and any other variable that can change how we teach. Most days I just write down a skeleton outline of the steps or activities so I know where to go next and how long to give certain sections.
For the first month I ate lunch with most of the other teachers in the cafeteria. Although I liked the desserts we got on Fridays, there were not many other positive things to be said about the food itself so I have begun bringing my own meals for lunch. Usually a rice stir fry of some type complemented by the Kimbap that I buy from a very nice older lady near our subway stop.
In general I teach 3 to 6 40 minute classes in the morning and have the afternoons free to plan or do with what I will. When I first came to my school I was encouraged by the staff to do everything – overtime, extra classes for free – but I knew that I couldn’t do that for long. After establishing that I don’t live for promotion within the Korean School system and therefore I will not be working for free, things have become a lot more relaxed. There is no more of the uncomfortable pressure from the Vice Principal that I experienced a month ago.
Classes each have their own personality an dynamic that I have gotten used to and, in most cases, look forward too. The Fourth Grade teachers still invite my teacher and I to a hallway cart filled tea and cookies after first period most days. It seems that things are settling in nicely for the long term now.
-Kelly
October 15, 2009
People
We signed up for Blog Action Day where we, along with almost 6,000 other blogs post on a single topic in an attempt to bring greater awareness to that topic. This year’s topic is Global Climate Change which is appropriate because I have been spending some time thinking about how I think about the warming the planet is experiencing.
There has been a series of articles that have come my way that have prompted some reflection on my perspective and my ideas about why we should take this topic seriously. The articles combined with recent reflection on how healthy it is to regularly evaluate what you are doing and why has brought about another time of evaluation on our time here in South Korea and what we will do when we return to the Northwest.
Every morning I start my day with a browse over the New York Times online. Two articles, on two consecutive days, drove home an obvious, but not commonly spoken about point. When this point was the subject of a third article I read elsewhere it was a clear issue that I had lost track of why Global Warming is a frightening issue.
Global warming is effecting the US through the glaciers on it’s mountains, the slow change in weather and farming patterns and animal migrations. These realities will grow more apparent with time but they are, however, not things that will alter our lives in the way that the aforementioned articles claim Global Warming will effect others. The people who will face the greatest changes are those in poorer countries closer to the equator – especially coastal countries.
South East Asia has tremendous shoreline and very low lying deltas and coastal areas. If the sea level rose just a few feet the effects would displace millions of people and cut off food production for many millions more. In a report paraphrased by the New York Times, Vietnam’s government projected “that more than one-third of the [Me-Kong river's] delta, where 17 million people live and nearly half the country’s rice is grown, could be submerged if sea levels rise by three feet in the decades to come.” On top of permanent flooding the report also said that “greater total rainfall, wetter wet seasons and drier dry seasons” are to be expected. In a country where too much rain means flooding and too little mean no food the effects would be horrendous.
No nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change. Rising sea levels threaten every coastline. More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent. More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive. On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees. The security and stability of each nation and all peoples — our prosperity, our health, our safety — are in jeopardy. And the time we have to reverse this tide is running out.
- President Obama to the UN General Assembly
Many times I see Global Warming as a much simpler issue. An issue that can be fixed with economic clarity regarding the true market price of goods, or through a reduction in consumptive lifestyles. These solutions will help the greater problem, but if I only see these solutions when I think of something as potentially abstract as Global Warming, then I believe that I am missing the point. The issue is much more of a reality for those who already have food shortages and issues with housing and basic sanitation because for those people life is going to get immeasurably more difficult in the decades to come. It is the people that I cut out of my pictures when I reduce Global Warming into terms of cause and effect or problem and solution. This is not a math problem, it is a humanitarian problem.
There are many articles that have been written about this topic, but to see it as an issue of moral responsibility to those who are poor and without the means to change much, if any, of the situation is far less common and much more challenging. It is less likely for news sources to tell us to get our hands dirty with the moral challenges of talking about people and how best to care for them. I found an article that did challenge me to do just that. The author believes, and I strongly agree, that is is the responsibility of every person to “speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.” He challenged his readers to look at Global Warming as something that directly effects the health and well-being of other humans in a very real way and because of that we should approach it as a humanitarian issue that we have direct influence in.
If the Maldives, “an Indian Ocean island state threatened with extinction if global warming causes seas to rise,” can “commit to being carbon neutral by 2020″ then I feel like it is our responsibility to love our neighbors as our selves and to respond in a significant way.
-Kelly
