Tag: coffee

How to Survive the Subway, and other Seoulful Tales

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It was fifteen degrees in Seoul today. 15. I’m not quite sure if you West-Coasters can fathom this temperature.  Yes, I’m talking Fahrenheit.

The air outside is so cold that your face hurts. You pull your scarf up over your nose and your hat down to your eyebrows, and still your eyeballs hurt and every breath in is painful as it saps all the warmth from around your face. It’s too cold to snow, too cold to think, your brain cells serve one purpose: to keep your legs moving until you find the next available indoor heated space. Pray you don’t have to carry anything, as that would mean your hands are out of your pockets. Wear two pairs of socks. On your hands if you have to.

Koreans care a lot about how they look; it is a display of respect to others, and a sign that you respect yourself. I’m violently resisting the urge to just put on every article of clothing I own every time I walk outside. Instead, I layer up, bare my stocking-clad knees to the weather, hurry from one place to the next. Screw my hair. I’m wearing two hats.

Today is Boxing Day, I’m informed by Canadians and Brits, a day that never held much (read any) meaning for me in the U.S. Today is the day you eat leftovers, take out all the wrapping paper to the rubbish bins, and watch Junior League hockey. It’s “Recover from Christmas” day. Good one.

No recoup for me, though—today I made my first appearance on the Seoul subway and went to day one of New Teacher Orientation. Located across Seoul, I ventured out two hours early to ensure I was there on time and was introduced to Seoul commuter traffic.

Lessons from the Subway:

  1. If you want on the train, get your ass on that train.  The little Korean woman in front of you is sure as hell gonna elbow her way on. Follow her.
  2. Don’t bring coffee, and hold on to something. Luckily, I didn’t learn this the hard way. During rush hour it is super unlikely that you will have a seat, or even something to hold on to. If it’s busy enough the other bodies will hold you up. If not, learn how to surf.
  3. There is an area reserved for the elderly, pregnant women, etc. If you are a foreigner and don’t see the sign, you will get dirty looks until you get the hell with it and look around.
  4. Subway stations are incredibly well organized and labeled. Color coded, even. Run little mouse, run through the maze to make your connection.
  5. Wanna buy a dress in the subway? No problem. Coffee? No problem. Dried fish? No problem.
  6. Everyone EVERYONE wears black. Tomorrow I’m going to wear my magenta down jacket, stand in the middle of the car and let everyone play ‘Let’s spot the foreigner’. Heehee. Just kidding. I’m going to take up three seats because I’ll be wearing every article of clothing I own.
  7. Subway seats are heated. Things like this just make my day.

 

After arriving a half hour early at my station, I walk the two blocks to the training school and there on the corner is a Starbucks. A mother <beep>ing Green Mermaid Queen of the U.S. Starbucks. I felt my body go into this kind of confused-disgust-panic-relief mode, and found myself walking across the street towards it before I really knew what was happening. It was like some West Coast honing device suddenly switched on, my arms went up in front of me in zombie mode, and my eyes glazed over knowing exactly how it would look inside. Now THAT is marketing power. About two steps from the door I woke up, noticed a Coffine coffee shop two doors down (I’m assuming they were going for a clever ‘coffee/caffeine’ wordplay, but the similarity to ‘coffin’ didn’t escape me) and broke the magnetic pull only to walk in and find that a latte is 4,500 won, roughly $4.50 USD. Damn you, coffine addiction. Seriously world, let me keep my last—cough cough—vice! I’m really not asking for much, just coffee for under $3 in a land where you can get a whole pizza for $6. C’mon.

Orientation starts and I’m not only the first person there, I’m the only person there. The teacher gets a text on his phone and pulls one of the remaining two desks to the back of the room, continuing to make small talk while he repeatedly looks at the clock on his phone. Matthew: Orientation Teacher, five foot eight, big smile, definitely gay. Like, the gay where you just leave your gaydar gun in your pocket because his nametag says, “Hello, I’m Gay Matthew”.

Eventually the other teacher comes in, nose red with the cold, carrying a small suitcase. He’s travelled from Daegu, and managed to only be fifteen minutes late. He is definitely not spiking the Gaydar meter, and his shoes confirm it. Straighty straight straight. Matthew, however, looks like it is Christmas morning all over again and his present just arrived. I just sit back, happy to be done with my end of small talk and pleasantly surprised that I get my own live Korean drama to watch. Actors: Nicolas and Matthew. Set: Korean elementary school classroom. Plot: Gawkwardness (that’s my new term for when a gay man gawks at a straight man and it’s awkward). It’s hilarious. At least I think so.

What’s NOT funny is that our heater seems to be broken. Did I mention it was fifteen degrees outside? Nick and I both huddle in our student desks still fully bundled in our outdoor gear, passing furtive “What the heck? How am I supposed to learn like this?” glances at each other.  I start making jokes about burning our workbooks in the middle of the floor for warmth, and a new friend is made. Sometimes it’s that simple. Common problems, survival, comic relief.

It makes me wonder about the people in North Korea, and if they have heat.

Lessons from Day One Orientation:

  1. Korean superstitions include: If you leave a fan on at night and have all your windows closed, you will die. If someone writes your name in red ink, you will die.
  2. Almost 50% of Koreans ‘don’t have a religion.’ I’m not sure if they are atheist, agnostic or just don’t practice one, but I still found the number interesting. A personal Plus One for Korea. The remaining percentage is divided between Buddhism, Protestantism, Catholicism, etc.
  3. If you wrap your scarf around your legs and sit on your hands you may save them from frostbite.

 

If I remember any of the actual lessons, I’ll let you know. It was pretty basic. I led a 20 questions mock game. With two people. Woo.

Insert: subway travel, reverse order. Once back to the apartment, I turned up the heat and lay down on the floor to defrost my bones. The temperature outside is twelve degrees. Holy sweet baby Atheist-Buddha-Jesus. Some cold sweet potato curry pizza (you heard me, and yes, it’s amazing), a cup of tea, and it’s time for this old girl to hit the hay.

Merry Boxing Day.

 

 

The Great Korean Adventure Begins

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And so… Here I am. The Mayans may not have predicted the end of the world, but they certainly had an idea when my world would take a drastic turn.

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IMG_3673It’s Saturday, around 1pm Seoul time (you are all just finishing dinner, I expect) and I’m sitting in a cafe a few blocks from the apartment I’m crashing in. Americano in hand, I’m almost enjoying the Christmas music blaring on the stereo. A few songs in, you can tell the Korean cover of ‘White Christmas’ from the others and it is rather endearing with its ‘May arr your Christmas be white.’ Ill take little bits of home where I can get them. Next up: Korean techno Christmas song. My favorites are the ones with an English chorus and a Korean-rap verse.

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The apartment where I’m staying belongs to Tim Teacher, one of my fellow English teachers from Canada. The place is kind of what you’d expect from a 25-year-old male recent college graduate: dirty, clothes everywhere, a few necessary dishes getting cycled through the dish rack, nothing in the fridge save some eggs I definitely won’t touch and an entire condiment shelf packed FULL of Korean Taco Bell hot sauce. Homey. To tell you the truth, I’m super grossed out, and the thought of having a place of my own in about a week feels like the best prize someone could give me for completing a week of training.
There are some perks of the place though, namely the heating. It comes through the floor, I’m assuming distributed by heated water in pipes. It’s awesome. It keeps the room warm and when you step out of bed it radiates up through the soles of your feet. Ok yeah, that’s really the only perk I can think of.
YBM Sungbuk ECC (my school) is pretty amazing. The children already know so much, and they are only six! In Korea you count your age from when you are born, so when you turn one in America you are two in Korea. The age system makes a lot of sense, and explains why the kids here are so advanced. I certainly couldn’t read another language, much less do addition and subtraction, when I was in kindergarten! It almost makes me feel better when they count on their fingers.

Fish, anyone?
Fish, anyone?
The classes themselves are small, usually under ten kids to a class. We have a set curriculum to get through but if we finish early we play games like hangman or quackdiddilyoso or Simon Says or Freeze Dance. The ‘kindies’ are so adorable. One girl came up to me and just put her cheek on my arm and didn’t move. I think she was trying to be a kitten. Another boy tried to tickle me under the arms and I had to ask him to stop a few times before giving him a stern look… Which totally worked. Guess I can be scary when I want to be! Ill have to remember that. They are all very interested in my tattoos (I actually put a cardigan on after the first class), and are a little surprised at how big I am. The door in the bathroom is covered in ‘being slim’ propaganda (well, I think it’s propaganda): posters about ‘you are what you eat’ and why ‘slim is healthy’. It made me immediately feel bad for the one girl at the school who is bigger than the others… And for myself,  if you must know. I am definitely the tallest of the female teachers, and all the male teachers have quite slim, Emo body-types. As we were walking back to class, one little boy said, “Teacher, you are heavy,” and I just smiled and said, “It’s because I’m so tall!”  He seemed to accept that after a minute of mulling it over, although I think he was trying to get a rise out of me. Ahh children, you don’t know but you will teach me so much about myself.
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Can you find the heron? 
***
Ayesha meets me at the coffee shop after we message back and forth on Facebook. She has spent the morning at an international fair at school, and is tired and a little grumpy having had to work on a Saturday. We head off to Daiso (the dollar store that has EVERYTHING) to pick up some things she needs, and walk the couple blocks to where her apartment is. I have been so looking forward to seeing what my apartment will look like, and apparently I will be in a different building that is much nicer. That’s always good, although her apartment is nice enough, and definitely big enough for one person to live comfortably.

 

Let me tell you something about Korean apartments. The bathrooms generally don’t have showers. Well, not the shower you would think of, rather a hand-held nozzle on one wall and a drain in the middle of the floor. You basically stand in the middle of the room and get water on everything, including the toilet, washing machine and sink. In the states this might feel luxurious, but here it is taking a little getting used to. Bathroom Slippers, plastic slip ons that you can wear after everything is wet, are necessary for survival and will be my first Daiso purchase.
Everything is new, and strange, and exciting, and overwhelming, and wonderful. Minor moments of panic are pushed aside by the amazing feeling of walking down the street of a completely strange city and realizing that this is probably one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. I really do thrive in moments of change, and this… this takes the cake.
Notes on Korea:
1. If you don’t jaywalk, you won’t get anywhere.
2. Octopus is more likely to be roadkill than squirrels. (Probably off the back of a truck, but still. I’ve seen three with tire marks today. Took me while to figure out what it was.)
3. Convenience store gimbap (rice rolls) are perfectly acceptable. The orange triangle ones are quite good. And cheap.
4. Coffee is big here, and refills are available. My americano this morning cost 2,500 won, and my refill was 1,000. Not too bad, since in the states I could spend upwards of $5 on coffee a day. To save money, I bought some instant coffee today. It tastes like… instant coffee.
5. Men on the street are polite, the old women are the ones you have to look out for. Shameless. They look you up and down and sometimes shake their heads. I always wonder what they’re thinking.
6. Everyone wears dark colors. I feel super flashy in my magenta down jacket. Not like I wouldn’t stand out anyway.
7. Faux fur vests are super in. So are super baggy sweaters. Hopefully a baggy sweater on a Korean will be a decent-fitting sweater on me.
8. There is no flouride here, in the toothpaste or in the water. All the kids have silver molar teeth. Their baby teeth have cavities!! They also brush their teeth after every meal. Someone please send me some American toothpaste.
9. Korean BBQ is amazing. You can sit for hours, eat slowly, drink slowly (or not), and come out smelling like a campfire. They have bottles of Febreeze by the door in case that smell is not your thing. I think it’s homey. There are worse things to smell like than smokey delicious meat. (ha)
10. I have never seen anyone carry this much stuff on the back of a motorcycle. It basically becomes the size of a small car, and you can barely see the person driving. INSANE. I will not be jaywalking near anyone driving a giant moving pile of garbage bags.
Until next time, love from across the pond.
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