Korea is bound and determined to change me into a football (oops! soccer) fan.
After watching my brother and sister play soccer for upward of 12 years, you’d think I’d have gained some sort of attachment to the sport. However, I have proven entirely immune to the draw of soccer and have avoided most games and certainly never gone out of my way to watch any kind of soccer match. If I am going to a game it is probably because I am being dragged there, and if someone is trying to get me to watch it on TV, it’s simply a lost cause.
Until now.
As I’m sure all of you are aware, the World Cup has been going on for the last two weeks or so and, out of the blue, I have become a hard core soccer fan. I dress in my team’s colors, know all the chants and dance moves, scream when we score and generally make an obnoxious prick out of myself wherever I am watching the game.
The catch- I am supporting Korea. Well, I was, though we lost last night, so I imagine I will revert back to my normal, sports oblivious self very soon.
I still don’t actually care much for the game. I mean, it looks pretty fun to play, and I’m sure it’s great to watch if you’re into that kind of thing, but I’m really just in it for the mob mentality. Because when Korea gets patriotic, they get PATRIOTIC. They don’t do national pride halfheartedly here. This means that on game day, about 75% of the country is wearing red shirts that say things like “Korean victory- Begin to 2010”, “We will to victory”, “The shouts of the reds, United Korea” or my personal favorite “Korea fighting”. Every single one of my elementary students wrote about Korea’s first game in their journals, and I expect this week that they will write devastatingly depressing entries about the loss to Uruguay that sent us out of the running. Park Jisung (Korea’s star player) is a national hero and all of the boys I teach are eager to become him. My Korean coworkers have taken to chanting the national chant to their kindergarteners to instill them with the appropriate Korean pride. The chant, by the way, goes something like this:
Dae Han Minguk! [clapclap, clapclap, clap] (repeat as many times as interest remains)(Dae Han Minguk means Republic of Korea)
If one chants this on a game day to any passing Korean, they have about a 95% chance of getting a reply in kind. If one simply shouts it out on the street that chance will increase to 100%.
And so, for the first game against Greece, I found myself decked out in a “Shouts of the Reds” shirt and a “Begin to 2010” bandana, hiding from the rain and watching the game in a Korean BBQ restaurant. That meal was interspersed with restaurant-wide Dae Han Minguk chants, a few national pride songs and a lot of shouting at the screen. Later that night, I found myself in a pub half filled with Americans and half filled with Brits to watch the England-US game, but I found that less exciting than constantly cheering in Korean. (though still entertaining; Americans are bloody obnoxious and the Brits are excessively calm)
My next game was the most exciting, though also the most depressing to watch. I schlepped myself over to Hongik University on a weeknight to watch Argentina destroy South Korea. So I found myself surrounded by thousands of Korean university students wearing red devil shirts, blinking red devil horns and Korean flags. We clapped, we chanted, we sang, we jumped, we danced and I lost my voice and couldn’t talk at work the next day.
And I’ve just watched my final game, hanging out in the rain outside a convenience store on an island. I mean, that shows dedication, doesn’t it? I could have been in my nice little beach hut, but instead I came out to cheer for my team.
Apparently it took coming to another country for me to realize how much the rest of the world likes soccer, but oh, they do. We definitely just don’t get it in America and I recommend hanging out in a foreign country during the next World Cup. They know how to watch their soccer.
So, we may not have to victoried this year, but begin to 2014, we will to victory. Dae Han Minguk!
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
step aside, Klondike
One of my favorite things about my job these days are the field trips that we take with kindergarten. Field trips generally mean longer lunch breaks, no kindergarten classes, goof off time with the kids, some level of chaos, and an amusing destination to remind me that there is a world outside of my hagwon on weekdays.
Sometimes field trips are fun and work out well, sometimes they are a bit of a mess, and sometimes they are a little bit on the... odd side. I thought that things were pretty weird when we took the kids to the transportation museum where we talked about all the various ways they could get hit by a car and watched a Korean equivalent to Red Asphalt (fyi, if you weren't forced to go through that traumatizing movie in a driver's ed class, it's an intensely bloody movie about car accidents). I mean, I enjoyed our safety video with the little magical fairy man showing the children in the movie how they could have horribly died ten times in the course of their normal day, but really, I think this could have been a bit much for 3, 4, and 5 year olds. I have to admit, I was really entertained by the miniature intersections they had set up where the tour guides for the museum showed our kids how to raise their hands when they crossed the street and had us practice about 15 times.
But, by and large, things are normally pretty good. So when I heard that we were going to the "Fun, fun science museum", I was amused by the name, but not unduly concerned. That changed fairly quickly when we got to the place.
Now, I'd been expecting a building dedicated to teaching kids about science. Which isn't that weird... I've been to plenty of children's science museums back home, and they're all pretty legit. Most of our field trips thus far had been to real places, I had no reason to suspect otherwise. So when we pulled up to jankety three story building in a somewhat sketchy part of town, I figured that the bus driver had just gotten lost again (they rely way too heavily on their GPS units and will actually ignore you if you try to point out that there is a detour or roadblock, or that the entrance to where you are going is just off to the left even though the GPS says to go straight). Unfortunately, our bus driver was spot on.
Welcome to the Fun Fun Science Museum, which is on the second and third floor of this building, up a narrow flight of stairs. If you want to go to the third floor, you'll need to ask the nice lady with the keys to open it for you. But why would you want to go up there anyway? There's lots to do downstairs- like look at the beer can fountain, examine the tongue shaped bottle opener, listen to the head of the Maestro tell you your future from his magical box or put on the gorilla head mask.
Perhaps needless to say, I was creeped out. As were the other three foreign teachers. It was sort of like some really bizarre knick knack collector had taken the contents of his garage and stuffed them onto shelves in a room. We hung back as our kids seated themselves for a show (we were the only group at the Fun Fun Science Museum), and began discussing where we should be expecting to find the dead babies. The suit of armor was a major contender.
When the Korean equivalent of the mad professor (our show host) pulled out a huge canister of liquid nitrogen, I began to wonder what it said in my contract about my responsibilities if the children were hurt on a field trip. I mean, I love playing with liquid nitrogen as much as the next nerdy science person, but I'm pretty sure that three is an early age to be exposing children to dangerous substances.
Things seemed to be going okay though. The nutty professor was freezing balloons and feeding the children frozen crackers to make them breathe steam. Assuming that the crackers weren't poisoned (to add to the dead baby collection)(I really hope they weren't, since I was dragged up as an amusing foreigner to eat a cracker too), this seemed pretty benign.
I began to calm down. The kids were having a good time, any dead bodies that may have been there were either fresh enough or well preserved enough for us not to smell decay, and I was even growing used to hearing the Maestro's creepy predictions about my dire end with Disneyland's Haunted Mansion-esk music playing in the background.
And then the mad professor went for the fish.
We should have seen it coming. I mean, you've got two fish hanging out on your demonstration table (in a fish tank) and a canister of liquid nitrogen. What better ideas do you have?
Yes. Yes, he did. He froze the fish.
As it turns out, there is no language barrier for horrified gasps.
And if that wasn't bad enough, he then dropped the fish popsicle on the table accidentally. My coworkers and I almost all had simultaneous heart attacks. The kids were looking severely shocked and even the Korean teachers were looking a little uncomfortable with this rather inhumane treatment of a frozen fish. So, with apologetic looks, he dropped the fish back into the fish tank where it made like a zombie and came back to life.
We were still shocked. So was the fish. It swam in spastic little circles for the remaining 20 minutes of the show, though that may also have had something to do with the active Tesla coil next to its tank. I later examined it closely for dents, or chipped bits, but it seemed to have remained mostly intact.
So it is true, that you can freeze a fish with liquid nitrogen and then bring it back to life. But I don't recommend it, unless you feel like severely traumatizing someone. Then, I definitely recommend it. I'm not sure I will ever be able to look at a goldfish the same way again.
Sometimes field trips are fun and work out well, sometimes they are a bit of a mess, and sometimes they are a little bit on the... odd side. I thought that things were pretty weird when we took the kids to the transportation museum where we talked about all the various ways they could get hit by a car and watched a Korean equivalent to Red Asphalt (fyi, if you weren't forced to go through that traumatizing movie in a driver's ed class, it's an intensely bloody movie about car accidents). I mean, I enjoyed our safety video with the little magical fairy man showing the children in the movie how they could have horribly died ten times in the course of their normal day, but really, I think this could have been a bit much for 3, 4, and 5 year olds. I have to admit, I was really entertained by the miniature intersections they had set up where the tour guides for the museum showed our kids how to raise their hands when they crossed the street and had us practice about 15 times.
But, by and large, things are normally pretty good. So when I heard that we were going to the "Fun, fun science museum", I was amused by the name, but not unduly concerned. That changed fairly quickly when we got to the place.
Now, I'd been expecting a building dedicated to teaching kids about science. Which isn't that weird... I've been to plenty of children's science museums back home, and they're all pretty legit. Most of our field trips thus far had been to real places, I had no reason to suspect otherwise. So when we pulled up to jankety three story building in a somewhat sketchy part of town, I figured that the bus driver had just gotten lost again (they rely way too heavily on their GPS units and will actually ignore you if you try to point out that there is a detour or roadblock, or that the entrance to where you are going is just off to the left even though the GPS says to go straight). Unfortunately, our bus driver was spot on.
Welcome to the Fun Fun Science Museum, which is on the second and third floor of this building, up a narrow flight of stairs. If you want to go to the third floor, you'll need to ask the nice lady with the keys to open it for you. But why would you want to go up there anyway? There's lots to do downstairs- like look at the beer can fountain, examine the tongue shaped bottle opener, listen to the head of the Maestro tell you your future from his magical box or put on the gorilla head mask.
Perhaps needless to say, I was creeped out. As were the other three foreign teachers. It was sort of like some really bizarre knick knack collector had taken the contents of his garage and stuffed them onto shelves in a room. We hung back as our kids seated themselves for a show (we were the only group at the Fun Fun Science Museum), and began discussing where we should be expecting to find the dead babies. The suit of armor was a major contender.
When the Korean equivalent of the mad professor (our show host) pulled out a huge canister of liquid nitrogen, I began to wonder what it said in my contract about my responsibilities if the children were hurt on a field trip. I mean, I love playing with liquid nitrogen as much as the next nerdy science person, but I'm pretty sure that three is an early age to be exposing children to dangerous substances.
Things seemed to be going okay though. The nutty professor was freezing balloons and feeding the children frozen crackers to make them breathe steam. Assuming that the crackers weren't poisoned (to add to the dead baby collection)(I really hope they weren't, since I was dragged up as an amusing foreigner to eat a cracker too), this seemed pretty benign.
I began to calm down. The kids were having a good time, any dead bodies that may have been there were either fresh enough or well preserved enough for us not to smell decay, and I was even growing used to hearing the Maestro's creepy predictions about my dire end with Disneyland's Haunted Mansion-esk music playing in the background.
And then the mad professor went for the fish.
We should have seen it coming. I mean, you've got two fish hanging out on your demonstration table (in a fish tank) and a canister of liquid nitrogen. What better ideas do you have?
Yes. Yes, he did. He froze the fish.
As it turns out, there is no language barrier for horrified gasps.
And if that wasn't bad enough, he then dropped the fish popsicle on the table accidentally. My coworkers and I almost all had simultaneous heart attacks. The kids were looking severely shocked and even the Korean teachers were looking a little uncomfortable with this rather inhumane treatment of a frozen fish. So, with apologetic looks, he dropped the fish back into the fish tank where it made like a zombie and came back to life.
We were still shocked. So was the fish. It swam in spastic little circles for the remaining 20 minutes of the show, though that may also have had something to do with the active Tesla coil next to its tank. I later examined it closely for dents, or chipped bits, but it seemed to have remained mostly intact.
So it is true, that you can freeze a fish with liquid nitrogen and then bring it back to life. But I don't recommend it, unless you feel like severely traumatizing someone. Then, I definitely recommend it. I'm not sure I will ever be able to look at a goldfish the same way again.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Just plain bizarre
Well, I've been here three months now and the weather has finally changed. The winter that would never end has given way to balmy nights, hot days, humid air, and blazing hot mornings in my apartment (the windows face east, which means that I cannot keep my apartment below 88 degrees in the morning). At my yoga studio (I did end up joining one that was better, cheaper and did not involve stomach molestation), they no longer need to heat the room for hot yoga. Restaurants have moved seating outdoors and my stingy director has even given in to turning on the air conditioner in the school so that the children will not die of heat stroke.
In keeping with my environmental nut-case ways, I have avoided turning on my AC yet (this might help with the whole 88 degrees thing, but I am a stubborn mule when I want to be). Instead, I have employed the use of a trusty fan. Or at least, so I thought...
Turns out in Korea, fans are not so trusty.
Unbeknownst to the rest of the modern world is the strange urban legend that having a fan on in a closed room will kill a sleeping person. This phenomenon is known as Fan Death. I'm not exactly sure where this idea came from, as it only exists in South Korea, but Korean reporters have regularly claim that a number of people have died in the summer due to fan related causes.
Now, I haven't really tested this one out on many Korean adults yet, but many of the students at the school have assured my coworkers and I that Fan Death is a real thing. We will apparently die because the moving fan blades will cut up the air so small that we will not be able to breathe it...
Most fans sold in Korea come with timers so you can set them to turn off before they kill you in your sleep.
So now I'm tempted to ride on bus number 4 (the Korean superstitious number- my school does not have a bus number 4 even though there are 4 buses. We skip from 3 to 5.) on Friday the 13th as a black cat crosses my path. When I get home I will open an umbrella indoors. Then I will shatter a mirror as I walk under a ladder to get to my bed where I will sleep with a fan on.
I can disrespect superstitions multi-culturally!
(Much love to all my superstitious readers.)
In keeping with my environmental nut-case ways, I have avoided turning on my AC yet (this might help with the whole 88 degrees thing, but I am a stubborn mule when I want to be). Instead, I have employed the use of a trusty fan. Or at least, so I thought...
Turns out in Korea, fans are not so trusty.
Unbeknownst to the rest of the modern world is the strange urban legend that having a fan on in a closed room will kill a sleeping person. This phenomenon is known as Fan Death. I'm not exactly sure where this idea came from, as it only exists in South Korea, but Korean reporters have regularly claim that a number of people have died in the summer due to fan related causes.
Now, I haven't really tested this one out on many Korean adults yet, but many of the students at the school have assured my coworkers and I that Fan Death is a real thing. We will apparently die because the moving fan blades will cut up the air so small that we will not be able to breathe it...
Most fans sold in Korea come with timers so you can set them to turn off before they kill you in your sleep.
So now I'm tempted to ride on bus number 4 (the Korean superstitious number- my school does not have a bus number 4 even though there are 4 buses. We skip from 3 to 5.) on Friday the 13th as a black cat crosses my path. When I get home I will open an umbrella indoors. Then I will shatter a mirror as I walk under a ladder to get to my bed where I will sleep with a fan on.
I can disrespect superstitions multi-culturally!
(Much love to all my superstitious readers.)
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