Winter has come!

I was so excited to see snow on the ground today in the village where I teach! This is on my walk to school from the bus stop on Monday mornings; my school is about a minute farther up this hill. It also snowed where I live on Saturday night! I was so thankful that Devin and I were walking outside when it started! I've always thought the first snow of the year is magical. 

In two days it'll be December so I'm looking forward to more snow, though I've been told they rarely have snow days here. I'll just enjoy it from my classroom window!

11 things about my day that might surprise you

 

1) Before leaving for school this morning, I turned off my heated floors. (Instead of heating air Koreans heat the floors which in turn heat the air.)

2) I filled up my water bottle with water that I had boiled last night in my electric teapot, which is one of my favorite appliances of all time now. (I boil my own drinking water because I've been told that the tap water isn't very safe here.)

3) Then I boiled more water and filled up my travel mug to take to school. At school I added an instant coffee packet (which includes creamer and sugar, of course, Koreans like sweet coffee) and voila, coffee. (The adjustment to instant sweet coffee wasn't easy, but it was necessary. Now I enjoy it.)

 

4) For breakfast I had my usual: a roll filled with red bean paste. It's sooo good!

 

5) When I arrived at school, I changed into "school slippers" (we would call them sandals) in the front hallway, and put my shoes in a shoe cabinet cubby hole. (Don't worry, I won't wear sandals with socks in the States.)

6) To get into the English classroom where my mentor teacher and I spend our days, I used a funny-looking key to unlock the padlock on the sliding wood doors and removed the nail from a hole that keeps the doors locked in place. (I personally have never seen such a locking contraption before.)

7) I bowed my head a little and said "anyeonghaseyo" to every adult I saw in the hallways or cafeteria to be respectful and polite.

8) Right before lunch I washed my hands at two huge metal sinks in the hallway outside the cafeteria like all the other teachers and students.

 

 

 

9) I lined up with other teachers and students in the one lunch line in which we took chopsticks and a spoon (there are short chopsticks and small spoons for the littlest kids) and were served lunch by four nice cafeteria ladies (the first serves us rice, the second serves us veggies and meat/fish, the third serves us soup, and the fourth serves us kimchi). Students and teachers eat together at the same tables, but today it was only me and my mentor teacher at the table. (Important to note- friends sit across from each other in Korea, not next to each other. The first day of school I sat next to my mentor teacher and she moved.) There is no drink with lunch, but after we've cleaned up our plates (i.e. moved all leftover food into our soup bowls and dumped that into a trashcan, stacked our trays and bowls, and placed our silverware in a tub of water) we drink a small cup of hot barley tea.

10) This is just a cute (or tacky, depending on your taste) keychain, right? Wrong. It's my bus pass! I put money on it at a convenience store, and I used it this afternoon on the two buses I took home from school. I have a one hour commute in the afternoon.

11) On my walk home from the bus stop, I ran across this old woman drying things on the sidewalk and (possibly) threshing this plant. Every week she has something new drying on this stretch of the sidewalk, but this was the first time I actually saw her.

And that seems like a good way to end my short account of a day in Korea- I can't imagine that happening in the American cities I've lived in!

Rolling With The Punches

           This past week I've been working on an essay for the program that brought me to Korea. I was two pages into the essay (I had already gushed about my first visit to Korea in June of 2009 with Devin and two of our Korean friends), when I discovered that the computer I had saved my essay on had been wiped clean (granted, in an effort to help me by making it run faster). I found myself at the beginning again, wondering what to write. That situation was another chance to roll with the punches, which might be my motto for living in Korea as a “waegugin” (foreigner). I constantly remind myself that I’m being given opportunities to practice this skill that does not come naturally to my “worry is planning ahead” self. I like to plan ahead and I do not like to find out about things at the last minute. But while living in Korea, I’ve had to accept the fact that much of my life unfolds spontaneously.

For instance, I was about to go home one day when my mentor teacher asked me if I wanted to "play bowling." I thought she meant outside with some students and I said sure. Then she tells me to pack up my things because we’re leaving soon (I assume right after bowling). But after we change out of our school slippers into our real shoes and step outside, she leads me to her car, and I ask her if we’re going bowling somewhere else. We are. She tells me we’re going bowling in the small mountainous town where our school is, but she’s not sure where the bowling alley is so she calls another teacher. That teacher informs us that we’re going bowling in the city where we live, so we drive the 25 minutes to our city. When we get there, however, we get a call saying that bowling is off and the new plan is to meet at Dunkin’ Donuts for some donuts and coffee. Now I like bowling, but I love Dunkin’ Donuts- it reminds me of home because it started near my hometown. So after the plan as I understood it changed four times, I enjoyed drinking coffee and trying different donuts (including my current favorite, coconut tofu) with all the teachers from my school. Lesson: sometimes spontaneity and rolling with the punches ends happily with caffeine and sweet treats! When it doesn’t, just breathe and remember that spontaneity is the spice of life, which seems fitting since Koreans love spicy food and spontaneity. Maybe next time life will surprise you with coffee and donuts.

This skill of rolling with the punches is necessary when teaching, too. Before every class I write out my lesson plan and intend to stick to it, but when the students get bored and sit on the floor when they should be writing the alphabet on the board or, conversely, are really into a memory game with vocabulary words and beg to play it one more time, I switch it up and stray from the plan, either jumping to the next activity or spending more time on the game that’s going well. The ability to be flexible and change things up is really important when teaching 7 different grade levels (K-6), because every grade reacts differently to the same activities.

I think rolling with the punches has two components: 1) being flexible/ready to adapt, and 2) not considering it a personal failure when things don’t go as planned. You can practice the second when the 5^th and 6^th girls are a bit moody/disrespectful and don’t want to participate in class. You can breathe and realize that their behavior is not about you, and it’s not a reflection of how good or bad of a teacher you are. They’re probably just having a hard day- after all, they’re going through puberty and dealing with growing up.

That said, my tendency is to blame myself when things don’t go smoothly. I like to plan and I like things to go as planned because I like to control my life, but that’s an illusion and it’s not rare for that illusion to fall apart. The other day I was trying to catch a train, but I left my apartment a few minutes late and couldn’t find a taxi so I had to walk the 15 minutes into town before catching one, and as we neared the train station I watched my train pull away. As I sat on the platform waiting an hour for the next train to come, I beat myself up- “How could you leave late? If only, if only, if only…” The flow of my day had been unexpectedly interrupted and in my mind I translated that as “ruined.” It took me until the next morning to get out of my funk. Looking back, I can see that that was a chance to roll with the punches, to give myself the same grace I want to grant other people. I missed that chance and instead vowed, “I will never be late again and I will never miss a train again.” I will, though. I was late this morning and I’ll be late again. Sometimes we just miss our train, and that’s okay.

This post is not to say that rolling with the punches is a comprehensive Korea motto, however. Some things are worth fighting for and should be fought for. Devin and I applied to teach in Korea with a joint application, looking forward to being in the same town after a year of long-distance, being 1400 miles or sometimes a continent apart. But just days before leaving for Korea, we were told that we had been placed 3 hours apart by train. We were upset and a host of other emotions, and it took all I had just to get on the plane. In the U.S. and Korea we were told too many times to count that nothing could be done, that at least we could see each other on weekends. But time together in the same physical place was worth fighting for, and we kept on writing emails and talking to people and praying. 2 days before we left for our province orientation, we were told that (by the grace of God) I had been moved to a city 30 minutes north of Devin’s city. That was joyous news because 30 min. apart is infinitely better than 3 hours apart! I have to admit though that for me it still felt hard because it was not the solution I had wanted, which was for us to be in the same city. The time for fighting was over, though; we had been given a blessing, albeit not the one I had hoped for. It was time to roll with the punches, to turn my expectations over to God and to start adjusting to life in Korea as it really was rather than spending all my energy being angry that things hadn’t gone as planned or pining for how I had wanted them to go.

I’ve been realizing these past few months in Korea that there are so many things in life that we don’t choose- hardships, illnesses, problems at work and in relationships and in our own hearts and minds- that it makes the choices we can make all the more important and precious. So I’m choosing all the more purposefully to love God and love others. I want to fight for what is most important and roll with the punches when it comes to most everything else. I’m learning that having free will does not mean that we can control life, but it does mean that we are free to choose to love, in happy times and hard times alike. I’ll end with a quote that I really like from John Paul II: Freedom exists for the sake of love.

A Few More Cultural Differences From The Wedding

So I realized there were a few more things I noticed during the wedding last weekend that struck me as surprising cultural differences (or perhaps just different from what I've seen in the States). At weddings I've been to in the US, the large majority of women wear skirts or dresses, but at this wedding most women wore dress pants and blazers. Some women in their twenties wore short skirts or dresses, and the older female relatives of the bride and groom wore traditional Korean clothes called hanbok (interestingly, the male relatives all wore Western-style suits), but dress pants were definitely the norm:

I also thought it was interesting that besides toddlers (whose parents dressed them up in fancy skirts or little sweater-vests) all the kids at the wedding wore jeans and sweatshirts:

Another thing that was unexpected was that I was given a pretty ticket that allowed me to enter the luncheon hall and eat lunch. Maybe that's because anyone can attend the wedding ceremony but there's only enough food for a set number of people? 

And the last thing from the wedding that I wanted to share, that was wildly different from what I've seen in the States, was after the bride and groom were married by the officiant, their friends put on performances for them. One friend sang a song for them with music playing in the background, and then six of their friends (three guys and three girls) did a two-minute-long choreographed dance for them which was pretty hilarious. I tried to upload it but the file was too big so hopefully I'll find another way.

I got another surprise today, more than a week after the wedding! After school the teacher whose wedding it was came up and handed me a little incense canoe from her week-long honeymoon in Phuket! (It's really popular for South Koreans to go to Southeast Asia or Europe on their honeymoon.) She thanked me for coming to her wedding, but I felt like I should be thanking her! My mentor teacher told me it was common for people to bring friends and family souvenirs from their honeymoon, which struck me as so nice for all the guests but probably a lot of work/money for the newlyweds. I'm quite pleased with my little gift from Thailand though:

A Korean Wedding

My first post! Very exciting. Also exciting is the fact that on Saturday I had a cultural experience worthy of my first post- I attended a Korean wedding! I love weddings (I'm a romantic) and I've always wanted to go to a wedding outside the US since a wedding is one of those life ceremonies that is important in (almost?) every culture, so I was thrilled when my mentor teacher asked me on Friday if I wanted to go with all the teachers/administration/staff at my school (a grand total of 16 people) to the first grade teacher's wedding on Saturday. Two things may strike you as odd about that invitation- 1) I was invited to the first grade teacher's wedding by someone other than the first grade teacher, and 2) I was invited 1 day before the wedding. I think that in Korea it might be okay for anyone to attend the actual wedding ceremony, and being invited to things at the last minute is very common here- but I'll save the subject of spontaneity for another post. So less than 24 hours after being invited, I put on the one nice dress I have here and carpooled with the kindergarten teacher and my mentor teacher to the city where the wedding hall was. The wedding ceremony didn't seem to have any religious aspects, so I'm not sure if Korean Christians also get married in wedding halls or in churches, but I've seen a lot of wedding halls in Korea so I was excited to see the inside of one.

We walked up to the second floor where we posed with the flower arrangement that our school sent and admired the beautiful professional wedding photos that were on display:

L-R: Me, my mentor teacher, the kindergarten teacher, and another nice teacher

I was surprised to see the bride several times before the wedding started! Right before the ceremony she came out in her wedding dress and a tiara and went into the bride's room where she took photos with the groom's parents and her mother:

Doesn't the bride look beautiful?

The wedding was held in this room, which only had 80 chairs, but about 50 people stood in the back of the room and in the hall to watch the wedding (and have side conversations- there was no hushed silence like at the American weddings I've been to):

The aisle was unique: raised and see-through with artificial flowers inside:

The front of the room was really brightly lit with electric candles (and a blue candle on the left for the groom and a red candle on the right for the bride):

The ceremony started with both mothers walking down the aisle, lighting their children's candles, bowing to each other, bowing to us, and sitting down in special chairs up front:

I was surprised by what happened next: the bride and groom walked down the aisle together, bowed to the officiant, and bowed to each other:

After that the officiant spoke some Korean that I didn't understand, and the groom said the equivalent of "I do" in a way reminiscent of a soldier saying "Yes sir," and then without saying vows, exchanging rings, or kissing, the groom and bride became husband and wife. The first thing they did as a married couple was to bow to the bride's mother, the groom's parents, and to us. After the groom bowed his head to us, he actually got down on his knees and bowed to us!

Next the couple blew out the candles on their wedding cake (which we didn't eat later- though I left right after the wedding luncheon so maybe they do eat it at some point).

Then the couple walked down the aisle together and two fake trumpets sprayed metallic streamers on them as they walked:

I guess that was the end of the wedding ceremony because some people got up and left. The bride and groom, however, turned and walked back up the aisle where they posed for professional pictures with family and then friends.

As we walked out of the wedding hall I saw men opening the wedding gifts (envelopes with money inside) and writing down who had given what amount in two books, one for the bride and one for the groom.

The teachers from my school and I walked next door to a big building where the casual luncheon was held. I was surprised that the bride and groom were nowhere to be seen; people just wander in, sit down with the people they came with, and enjoy a Korean meal of kalbi tang (beef rib soup) and of course rice and a thousand little side dishes:

I had fun at lunch sitting across from Yuju, the daughter of one of the teachers. And before we left I picked her up and she kept wanting me to pick her up again =)

It was so cool to experience a wedding that was similar to American weddings in some aspects (wedding dress, mothers lighting their children's candles, etc.) and yet quite different in a lot of ways (no bridesmaids or groomsmen, no vows, no rings, no receiving line, no reception in which the bride and groom are the guests of honor, no cake-eating, no dancing). Cool to see and really fun to get to be a part of! Congrats to the happy couple!