Entryway of the Seoul Museum of Art (10 colors of Seoul)
Seoul Museum of Art
After that I walked around some new areas of Seoul and visited Gyeonghuigung Palace, which was built in 1623. It was destroyed during the Japanese annexation (1910-1945) and a Japanese school was established. Only the main “audience hall” has been restored as well as a few of the inner courtyards.
Gyeonghuigung Palace
The entrance gate (Heunghwamun) has moved around Seoul but has been at its current place since 1988.
Entrance to Gyeonghuigung (Heunghwamun)
Following the palace I walked down the street to the statue of the Hammering Man. It’s 5 or 6 stories tall and made out of 50 tons of steel. American artist, Jonathon Borofsky, created it. This blacksmith has been hammering away silently since 2002.
“Is work just a meaningless ritual that we allow to dominate our lives?”
Finally, I visited the bronze statue of Yi Sun Shin. He was a general who...did something important in the 1500s? I sort of forget. I think he built some sort of warships that helped defeat Japan when they attacked Korea. All I wrote down on my notepad was “geobukseon = turtle boats” so maybe he invented those. Clearly I need to improve my note taking skills. This is also one of my favorite places I have seen in Seoul so far. The area surrounding the statue is a bunch of fountains that kids splash around in, and further behind the statue is an elaborate design of flowers. My camera is at the end of the road, however, and died before I could take pictures of it. Once I get my first paycheck (!!!) I’ll hopefully be able to afford a shiny new camera. They have some baller technology over here so I’m looking forward to taking part. Won’t be for a few more weeks though, so pictures may be few and far between until then.
Kids playing in the fountain in front of the statue of Yi Sun Shin
I also visited the COEX Mall during my week off here. It’s located under the World Trade Center here and is huge. I had a map of the mall and I still got lost. It has nightclubs, bars, restaurants, an aquarium, a 17 screen movie theatre, several arcades, a kimchi museum (the only museum dedicated to pickled cabbage and its health benefits), a karaoke room, and more. I definitely want to go back here when I’m not poor to do some quality shopping.
Jin has been a huge help in getting me settled in here. I still don’t have internet or a cell phone because I’m still waiting for my foreigner registration paperwork to go through, but hopefully will have those things very soon. Jin showed up at my apartment the other night with a box of pizza and miller lite and 4 bags of stuff from Home Plus for my apartment. Um. Yes. She rocks. She told me she was Santa Claus. Precious. She also cooked for me one night. She told me she was going to cook “Korean noodle” for me, so I thought it was some fancy Korean dish. Turned out to just be the Korean version of Ramen. It tastes about the same, but 20x more spicy. I went through a quarter of a gallon of milk just trying to finish it and was sweating by the end.
Friday was my first meeting with all the teachers at my school and I met the principal. I had to speak a few words in front of all of them, just where I was from and all that jazz. 95% of the teachers at my school can’t speak English so Jin had to translate for me, but I think she got the point across. My school is really big. Especially considering it only has 300 students, I was shocked at how much space there was for so few kids. Sam Soong High School was just built in 2008 so its brand spankin new and all shiny. The city its in, Yangju, is a newer city, just north of where I live in Uijeongbu. All of the buildings are new and the area is extremely nice. I wouldn’t have minded living there actually, but its sort of far from the subway which is my only way into Seoul unless I wanted to sit on a bus forever, so living in Uijeongbu actually works out better. After I met everyone and sat through a faculty meeting of which I understood absolutely nothing, it was time to eat!! Jin drove me and 3 other teachers to the restaurant. Jin and driving. Wow. Jin is 28, and has had a driver’s license for 10 years, but has actually been driving for a shorter amount of time than my 17 year old sister. She told me she’s only been driving for 6 months, and seems to think that traffic signs/rules/etc don’t matter. She either flies over the speed bumps in the road or drives off the road to avoid them. Her erratic driving has to stand out in a place where traffic laws are more or less followed pretty closely. She would fit in better in Italy with the way she drives. Also, I’m pretty sure its legal to turn left on red here, because I’ve seen so many cars do it. Either that, or people just don’t care as long as no one else is coming. Anyhow, after she got us lost even with her GPS, we made it to the restaurant which was in Dobongsan, just south of where I live, bordering Seoul. There was probably 30-40 of us in a private room with a karaoke machine. Karaoke (noraebang or 노래방 – which means singing room) is very popular here and is taken very seriously. I tried explaining to Jin that karaoke is something that only really drunk people do in America but she didn’t care, and made me sing anyway. I dragged her up with me and we did a little duet to a Counting Crows song (Accidentally in Love, from the Shrek soundtrack) – it was one of the few English songs on the list that Jin knew the words to. She knew it better than I did though! Dinner was amazing, and I finally got my first taste of Soju. It’s a type of Korean alcohol that’s most comparable to vodka, but not quite as strong. It’s also common in Korea to pour drinks for each other, and when someone offers you a drink you must drink it. I was seated next to the principal (big deal!) and he made sure my glass was never empty. I returned the favor for him as well. Soju is usually paired with beer, so after my 5th shot of soju I switched over to Hite (sort of the miller lite of korea). Everyone kept offering me drinks, since I was the newbie. Halfway through dinner everyone was quite drunk and dinner turned into a drunken karaoke dance party with people running back to their seats in between songs to take bites of their food. Watching my 60-year-old principal sing and dance to a Korean boy band was one of the highlights of the night. Absolutely hilarious. I think the only American song that played was the one Jin and I sang together, but the Korean music was upbeat and we raged for a few hours before the party finally broke up. I also learned that “cha bang cha bang” (자방자방) means “bling bling”. Bahaha I didn’t realize “bling bling” wasn’t a universal phrase and could be translated.
After dinner, I went back to Uijeongbu with 3 of the other teachers who live near me, my neighbor Sang-Eun included. Jin told me when I first got here that Sang-Eun can’t speak English, but I think she was just nervous about speaking or something because her English not only exists but its not bad at all! She struggled with some translating and her vocabulary is limited, but overall I could understand her just fine. The 4 of us stopped at a bar near my and Sang-Eun’s apartment for another round of drinks and then went home. It was a great night overall. Everyone was very curious about me and Jin told me that a lot of them had so many questions for me but couldn’t speak English and so everyone was really hesitant to ask. I told her to let people know that if they have questions they can ask away as long as she doesn’t mind translating.
First day of school was interesting. All the kids stared me at, and they kept peeking into the office to look at me and giggled every time I smiled or looked at them. Some of the “brave” kids would say “HI!!!” to me, but when I asked them how they were, they giggled and didn’t know what to say. Guess we’ll have to work on that phrase… I also helped to show some kids on a map of the U.S. where I was from. And another girl wanted to say hello and ask a few questions but didn’t know how, so one of the other English teachers wrote out a few sentences and the girl just read them off the paper to me. I knew she had no idea what she was saying when “I am excited for your class” came out of her mouth, and when I asked the teacher she confirmed that the girl did not have a clue what she had said. Once again, most of the teachers don’t speak English, but at lunch I sat next to a teacher who had clearly memorized a phrase so he could say something to me before I ate: “Have a good lunch”. Absolutely adorable. I think a lot of people here are really hesitant to speak English, especially to me since its my first (and sort of only) language. They learn English throughout their schooling, but have no real application of it, and so I think a lot of people question their own ability and therefore become really shy when the time comes to speak.
I got to leave early to get the results from my drug test (mandatory for all of us English teachers) and had planned to head straight to the immigration office to apply for my foreigner registration card but um...they lost my pee at the hospital. So I had to retake that test and can’t pick up the results for a few more days. Jin was disappointed because it meant she had to go back to school sooner than she had planned (I was allowed to take the rest of the day off), but she put it off by ditching with me to get ice cream. I helped a teacher ditch school on my first day. Already bringing the American way to Korea.
Today was my 2nd day of school and the kids still seemed scared of me. I also had to get up in front of the entire school at their school assembly and speak/introduce myself to everyone. I thought it was kind of pointless since no one could understand me, but I stopped after every sentence so Jin could translate. I had a few more "HI!'s" today, as well some "i love you"-s and a "will you marry me" from some of the boys. If it weren't so funny it would probably be illegal. I just can't help laughing at them though, its really quite adorable. School lunch, on the other hand, is not so adorable. You just sort of get what you're given at school, no choices really, and no one ever brings their own lunch. Today, was fish. And I'm not a big seafood person to begin with. But then, it was literally like a chunk of fish had been cut off and cooked. And I had to pull the bones out of my fish with chopsticks and a spoon. All I wanted was a fork and knife. And maybe a cheeseburger. So I ate the rice, the veggies, and tried to tolerate the unbelievably spicy kimchi. I sort of picked at the fish, but really couldn't bring myself to eat it.
Anna has arrived in Korea safely for those of you who read this that haven’t heard from her yet. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to meet up this weekend and I can show her what soju and 노래방 are all about.
And just to make you all jealous, here is the view of the sunset over the mountains that I get to see out my apartment window every night.
"To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted." - Bill Bryson
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