What a wonderful day to be writing you all!
I don't think I mentioned this before (when I described my apartment), but I do have air conditioning in one room -- my bedroom, so a couple days ago a rearranged a few things and moved the leather chair in next to my bed, so I'm currently writing to you from the comfort of this chair and the coolness of my bedroom. It's great. I also just finished off a bowl of some curry cabbage soup that didn't turn out very well at all … but since I paid for the ingredients and I poorly put them together, I'm making myself suffer through. Whew. So far my cooking has been too great, although earlier today I made a breakfast scramble with potatoes, fresh garlic, green onions, cherry tomatoes, eggs and some salt and pepper for seasoning. Mmm. It was great. I'll probably end up eating that a lot. haha. That's the way it goes, though. Also, before I write about anything else, I want to make a quick caveat: my opinions about things are obviously stemming from only 2 weeks here and lots of random observations and/or conversations; we'll see how things change as I stay here longer, but bear that in mind when I'm making generalizations throughout this post … and most any other, for that matter.
Last Saturday I did begin learning Korean. Woo hoo! Dianne took me to a bookstore Saturday morning, helped me find an appropriate textbook, and spent a few hours that day going through material with me. Each time I pick up a book here I think, "Ah, it'll be so great to be able to read this!" But then I remember how much work it's going to take, and I have to put it in perspective -- maybe I'll get to that book someday. In the bit of studying I've done so far, I'm slowly realizing various nuances of the language, and so far here are the two things that will be most interesting to figure out: 1. the way it's written and 2. the way some letters are pronounced.
Ha. I guess those are two basic components of any language, no? So what I mean is this: in English and Spanish and French (the languages I've studied up until this point), characters (letters) are written horizontally, one next to another. These letters, taken together, make words. In Korean, however, the simplest characters are vowels and consonants (these characters have their own sounds), and letters come from combining those, and then those letters form words. So in these letters, one would always find at least one consonant and at least one vowel. For a letter that only sounds like a vowel, there's even a consonant that has no sound when it comes first. When there's only a single pairing of consonant and vowel, the two will be side by side or one above the other, but when you add another sound to the mix, the third one will usually go below the other two. Let's say, for example, you were just writing my name, Ben. You would have a consonant for b, a vowel for eh and a consonant for n. So this time, the first two would be written side by side with the n consonant written below. In general, I've always thought that Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing looked really cool, but now I've begun to understand how this works, I'm even more amazed and intrigued by this language.
As far as pronunciation is concerned, I find this interesting because there are some sounds that I'm not always able to distinguish from other similar ones, and there are times when I simply don't know how a certain consonant should be pronounced in a particular word. Here's an example (and I'll even try to throw in some Korean characters here … we'll see if they work when I make this into an email): ㅂ is supposed to make a very soft b/p sound; ㅍ is supposed to make a p sound and ㅃ is supposed to make a stronger b sound. For the sake of this example, here's the last sound in question: the vowel ㅏ, which sounds like ah. The Korean word for rice is pronounced like bahp. How do you think it's written? Which characters would you use? Of course you'd use ㅂand ㅏ, but what about that last sound? You actually use ㅂ again. I can't use this writing to actually put it together as it should be, but if you'd use an online conversion tool, I'm sure you can see how it appears. So this is the kind of thing I'm encountering that makes it harder to learn the language. It's hard not only because when I try to read a Korean word I might not say it correctly, but it's also hard because when I try to listen to other speakers and conceptualize how the word is written, I end up using the wrong consonants. All this to say, this will be quite the process, and I'm looking forward to the reward of being able to read a book here.
Here are three little things that connect to this language thing that I found interesting or funny: 1. I want to make flash cards to learning vocabulary, so I went to a couple local supermarkets, and after walking around their school/supply sections, I found nothing that even vaguely resembles index cards or pre-made flash cards. I haven't yet conferred with my Korean coteachers, but maybe no one here uses index cards? I don't know. I'll let you know when I find out because that's one of those staple items that I'd expect to find anywhere. And since I couldn't even find some tagboard/card stock, I ended up buying a couple larger watercolor notebooks (that have heavier paper), and I'm in the process of cutting up all the pages to make my flash cards. I had no idea that this would be such a process. 2. Yesterday, when I was at the first supermarket, I went to the book section, and it was interesting to look for books that I knew because all the books not only are written in Korean, but they also have different covers (sometimes very different covers) than what I'm used to. Also, a number of the books were broken up into smaller books. I don't know if this is unique to this situation (ie- sometimes bigger books are made into smaller ones, but one can still find them as a single, larger book elsewhere … or this always happens), but both the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books were split up into smaller volumes. Each Potter book was split into 2, and I wasn't really sure how the Percy Jackson books were separated; I would be they were halved as well, but I couldn't readily tell. 3. Today, when I went to a different supermarket (it more closely resembled a mall actually), I recognized my first Korean word from a side conversation. A woman walked by and said, "Mother" when she was … you got it … addressing her mother. And in that moment that I (over)heard and understood, I wanted to give a victorious fist pump and exclaim to the world (or at least all those within earshot), "Yes! I can do this!" But I didn't. Probably because the vast majority wouldn't have understood me anyway. And who wants to exclaim such an important thing when no one will get it? I don't. haha. That was definitely a highlight of my day. (how fitting … it's vaguely reminiscent to a child saying "mama" for the first time, isn't it? oh, how important mothers are to the world!)
One of the funniest things I've encountered here so far has to be Korean driving. haha. I can't help but chuckle when I even start thinking about what I can write. There are street lights and stop signs and things like that, but it seems that from time to time, those things (and quite a few road rules that I learned when starting to drive) just aren't followed. Mind you, as I write this, I have yet to see an accident or any sign of a vehicular collision, and I've always felt safe when riding with others, but it's just a world of difference from what I've seen before. In the last email I mentioned the "Korean standoff," which is a term that a couple of my coworkers passed along to me. Quite a few of the streets near my apartment and schools are pretty narrow, and when cars park along both sides of the street, it becomes essentially a one way -- or at least a one way at a time -- path. There are times (and I've witnessed so many already) when one person will just start turning onto one of these streets, and as they turn, they realize that another car is already on the street and should be exiting soon. Most times this has happened that second car is practically upon the first as the first makes their turn. Now at this point, both cars stop, and truly, there's just barely enough room for them to squeeze past one another … but it'll be a super, super close fit, and when both drivers realize this, they begin to creep up to try to get past the other person. And both drivers will keep slowly, slowly creeping up until they finally pass. And this whole exchange could take a couple minutes (probably not that long, really, but in "in the car time" you know how it always feels longer). The thing is, if that first driver would reverse a foot or two, the second car could pass, and everything would so much faster and more smoothly, but I have yet to see a time when either driver decides to back up, give ground and yield that first pass. It's such a strange thing. I'll try to get a good picture of this to illustrate, but I don't seem to have my camera handy when I see it happening.
Koreans seem to be very aggressive drivers, but as I write this, I want to draw a very clear distinction between the driving style here and the one back home. Back home, it seems that aggressive drivers often are just one step away from road rage. I tend to be a pretty calm driver, but there have been times when another driver would legitimately do something stupid, and I'd be pissed for a while. American drivers tend to get angry when another driver cuts them off or steals the right of way or does some other such thing, and they tend to hold grudges, which is the key to road rage. Here, though, I would be really surprised to actually see that kind of thing pop up. It seems that because the aggressive driving is so common and expected from other drivers, these kinds of things that would really irk an American driver, just rolls off the shoulder of a Korean counterpart. We'll see how my time here shapes this perception, but right now it seems to hold water. Even after the standoff happens, the drivers just go their separate ways. No giving the finger. No yelling profanity (that I'm aware of, at least). Even when a taxi driver jacks a red light or just goes blazing through. haha. Such amusing times.
So for this job, I do have to have my resident alien card, and Don waited until all the new teachers arrived (since there are 4 of us) before starting the process to get the alien cards. This past Monday we went to a local hospital to get our health exams … just to make sure we're good enough to be here, and this was another amusing experience. We arrived and Don had to fill out all the forms for us, so we handed over our passports because none of us can write Hangul (the written Korean language). Then we were shepherded to one hallway where most of the exams happened. One one side in a room a nurse took our vitals, while in another room on the other side, they tested our hearing and vision. One the vision chart, I couldn't make out the very last line of small print. boo. And the hearing test was funny; it seemed to be the mass produced kind of test. The nurse only tested one side at a time, and in the same intervals, the pitch slowly went down such that if I had wanted, I might have been able to fake slightly better hearing … just by continuing to push the button when I should have heard it. It wasn't anything like the back and forth for varying amounts of time kind of hearing test I've been accustomed to. Also, just in case you cared to know, measured up at 190.2 cm, which means I'm still just shy of 6'3". Bummer. haha. After that we received chest x-rays, a urine test and a blood draw. The x-ray was interesting as well; it was the fastest I've ever gotten an x-ray. Essentially I stepped into the room, the nurse adjusted the backer/plate/whatever it is to my height, pushed me up against it and zap! it was done. The speed here blew my mind; I was in and out in 90 seconds I'd bet. Urine tests are also funny to me, which brings me to this general comment: some things around here just seem very open and public. Of the 4 new teachers, 3 are men. So when we were given the cups and vials for urine, we were just sent to a multi-stall bathroom and told to put some pee in both. The cup didn't have a lid, and when we went into the bathroom, we chatted a bit about racing to finish. I definitely came in last place -- for both speed and productivity. A couple days before, Don had told us not to have breakfast before going … because of the x-ray, and in typical Ben style, come Monday morning, for some weird reason, I thought, "I better not drink any water either … it might mess up something." haha. I completely forgot the urine test, but fortunately the gods or fate or karma were on my side because I was able to squeeze out just enough. And then we brought the cup and text tube back into the blood draw room, and we set them on a single tray with other open samples. Talk about faith that one won't mess with a sample before bringing it back. And then came the blood draw. For this we individually sat down at a table for a nurse to take a small syringe of blood. Here's what stuck out the most, though: neither that nurse nor any other person handling the blood behind the desk (whom I could see) was wearing gloves or face masks or other kinds of protective gear. Whew. Talk about awesome safety standards. Also, there was a really sketchy looking shards container on the desk next to us when we had the blood drawn. If I didn't have any diseases going into that room, I've probably contracted something now. haha. I kid. But I truly wonder how often one of the nurses has a problem and might encounter some contaminated sample.
Ok. I think that brings it to a close for today. Next time look forward to some thoughts on food, Korean baseball and beaching it up (as long as the weather holds out tomorrow, that is).
Much love to you all.
pfn,
bg
ps- This week has been a vacation week, and since I don't have internet access at home, and I can't use the school's internet either this week, I've been slow at adding more pictures. Next week I'll get some more shots up for you all.
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