Culltural learnings of korea for make benefit glorious blog of dr. superbowl (I)

originally posted on 1/24/07

Yeah, I'm a teacher, but I've definitely learned a lot more than I've taught so far. I've touched on some funny cultural things before, but it's been awhile, and now I've learned a lot more, even funnier cultural things.

Like, for example, that the kids I teach have a pretty sick but pretty hilarious sense of humor. When somebody is absent, another kid will often say something like "Kevin (in case I didn't mention, the kids mostly all have English nicknames, and around 72% or so of the boys call themselves Kevin) no here, he die." Or, "John no here, he do the suicide." Each one always gets a big laugh from the rest of the class. Just to spice up their tales of their classmate's untimely demise, I've taught many of them the words "stab" and "chainsaw," the latter as both a noun and a verb, mainly because they wanted to know. A real vocabulary word in one of the levels I teach was "bar of soap," and when pointing to a picture of soap, I asked the kids what it was called, and one kid said, "that's a delicious bar of soap."

I teach one higher level class, which can of course be even funnier. These are kids that, after reading a long story about a worker and a manager developing friction at the workplace, all of the kids took the side of management and cheered for the employee to be fired. Also, in the same class, in a brief dialogue between 2 female characters in the text, both played by boys as the girl was absent, one boy was gloating that he got to read the part of the more attractive woman, while the other student was stuck reading the part of the uglier one.

Beyond school-land, I have made plenty of other cultural observations. I had prepared a long rant on the futility of chopsticks on my original draft of this (yes, sadly, this horseshit composition, crudely worded though it may be, is not a first draft, I've taken to writing most of these blogs in little notebooks in bars) but have decided against it earlier today. I'm finally getting a bit better with them. I can't catch a fly or anything, but at least my hand doesn't cramp so much anymore. But, as I was eating kimchi with my dinner, it occurred to me that a fork makes no sense for kimchi, it just wouldn't carry right. Being that the Koreans eat kimchi with every single meal (which in itself still doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I genuinely like kimchi now, and I miss it if I don't eat it for a couple days. But every meal? I still like, say, fries more than kimchi, but I sure as hell wouldn't want fries with every meal) the chopstick thing makes more sense now. I still don't see the sense in eating noodles with chopsticks when a fork works a million times better there, but maybe I'll learn to do that too.

On the fork, they do exist here, and Koreans use them for all kinds of things that westerners never do. Like pizza, for example. And I don't mean Chicago dish pizza, I mean Pizza Hut and lower, as most pizza places here are shitty, Pizza Shuttle – level type cheap pizza places. Not that they aren't awesome – 5 bucks for a pizza and a thing of pickles that are almost like normal pickles but are mildly spicy and therefore brilliant. Regardless, the point is, to eat Pizza Shuttle – quality pizza with a fork is almost an insult to the fork, yet this is what's done here. Fries too, with the forks. Not at Mc Donard but at, say, TGI Friday's. I almost expect to see a Seinfeldian knife-and-fork Snicker bar scenario. All of this comes from the notion of not touching your food and cleanliness, I presume.

There's an almost obsessive focus on cleanliness here. People brush their teeth like 7 times a day, it seems. You never touch your food. Though I don't mind it for the sake of comfort, the whole shoes-off indoors thing is totally based in cleanliness. Yet, half the public restrooms here lack soap, those that do have it have a delicious bar rather than liquid, and the bathrooms almost never have warm water or a means to dry your hands. Also, the cleanliness obsession ends outside, as everybody throws their "walking around" trash on the ground because there's no trash cans anywhere. I mean, who wants to walk around with an empty pack of smokes in their pocket and an empty water bottle in their hand? I think a major reason that showpiece American city regions like Chicago's north side and Manhattan are so clean is the fact that there's a trash can every 5 feet.

A lot of the kids are ridiculously smart, when you think about it. Some say that they knew some English words – you know, hello, goodbye, blue, red -- when they were three. I don't think I knew there was a place called Korea when I was 3, and I'm a map geek that knew which freeway went from Chicago to Michigan at that time. Plus, I still don't know "red" or "blue" in Korean, and I'm hit-and-miss on "goodbye."