Two posts in one day!

I know, I know, but try to stay in your seat. I figure you’ve all got extra time on your hands with the Christmas/New Year’s vacation and all, so here’s some extra reading material.

There are few good things about not being home for Christmas, but one of them is that I don’t have to fight the traffic barreling down I-81, cowering in my tiny Civic between ever-present pairs of 18-wheelers. Admittedly, crossing the road in front of the Home Plus to get to the Christmas party that I am attending may well be a harrowing experience, as is crossing any road in Korea (never assume you have the right of way as a pedestrian), but that should only take 5-10 minutes as opposed to 7+ hours.

Christmas cheer at the Nutcracker

Christmas in Korea, while it is commonly observed, is not nearly the huge holiday that it is in the West. It’s a religious holiday for those who are religious, but the secular angle is not nearly as played up as it is back home. Mostly, Christmas Eve is like Valentines Day – a big date night when you hope it snows not because you’re dreaming of a white Christmas, but because the first snow of the year in Korea is thought to bring new love with it. So, in order to fill the void of family and warm fuzzies, we waygooks had to make our own Christmas cheer. For me, these activities included making 12 dozen Jack-Daniels-because-I-couldn’t-find-bourbon balls with the help of a green but promising Irish baker; helping to raise 670k won for the family of a migrant worker through a caroling session downtown (ok, so raising money was just gravy – I love caroling, especially with jingly antlers!); and attending a very Korean performance of the Nutcracker by the Gwangju city ballet company. The sentimentality of simply attending the Nutcracker at Christmas – and the fun of introducing the uninitiated to such a ritual – were quite enjoyable. However, the meat on a stick at concessions, what looked for all the world to me like a giant Tigger on stage during the party scene, the appearance of a tie-dyed flag and countless other features of the performance that were just slightly off all served to remind me approximately every 5 minutes that I was, in fact, still in Korea, Tchaikovsky or no. In anticipation of this, my group decided to class it up. Instead of purchasing an overpriced cup of mulled wine at intermission (there was none to be had anyway), we snuck in homemade eggnog and noshed on Christmas cookies during the performance. As a former usher, I was mortified at first, but since the Korean ballet is apparently an usher-less affair, I quickly relaxed.

In non-Christmas-related news, I enjoyed a nice day trip with……

…..Ok, I don’t know why I’ve danced around the subject for so long, especially since a good number of you probably already know that I now have a boyfriend. [Insert sigh of relief from the entire Korean community. Another case of the singles, cured!] As do all of my students, who have reported back to my co-teachers that Caity Teacher’s boyfriend (whom they’ve seen with me on the street) is handsome and that, therefore, they approve. His name is Paul; he’s from Ireland; and yes, he’s very handsome. Now you officially know and I can refer to him by his name and quit coming up with ways to work around his existence when I write my posts.

So, I enjoyed a nice outing to Namwon with some of Paul’s high school students a few Saturdays back. A group of them attend school on scholarship and live at the school like boarding students. Paul occasionally takes them on day trips to practice their English and expand their knowledge of their own country. (Koreans travel surprisingly little around Korea, despite its small size. I’m pretty sure I’ve already seen more of the country than a large portion of the teachers who’ve lived here their entire lives.) He gets to bring other Native English Teachers with him as co-chaperons, and we all end up with a bit more cash in our pockets and a bit more sight-seeing under our belts. Namwon is a village known as the setting of the famous love story of Chunhyangga. In a nutshell: Nobleman and woman of low birth fall in love and are secretly married; nobleman is transferred to Seoul; woman is taken as a wife by the mayor of Namwon but remains loyal to the nobleman; nobleman, having gained more power, returns to claim the woman and publicly takes her back to Seoul as his wife. A much nicer ending than Romeo & Juliet. We visited two lovely sets of gardens with love, of course, as their theme. Appropriately, this was the first time that any of Paul’s students had seen me, so I was also part of the love-themed entertainment. They were damn good students, though, and even the girls who have crushes on Paul caved and said nice things to or about me by the end of the day.

That trip began what I shall refer to as Caity Teacher’s Grand Week of Korean Cultural Experiences (Part I, as I hope there will be more to come). Final exams meant that classes were over after lunchtime, so the week began with a trip to a grade 2 teacher’s house outside the city. I had never been in any Korean home, but I understand that the vast majority of people in the cities, including fairly well-off and well-established families, live in apartments. So it was also a treat for the other teachers to have a change of scenery. We had tea and snacks, complete with three different kinds of persimmons – green, ripe and dried, all remarkably different in taste and texture. I spent about 3 hours sitting on the floor, picking out the occasional word that I knew from the lively Korean conversation going on around me, and enjoying the fruits of the special chestnut-roasting drawer in the wood stove that was heating the pipes under the floor. My legs were asleep and my ass was sore, but surely I’ll never get used to it without practice. The home itself is newly built, covered in what looked to me like stucco (very unusual in Korea), and models a strange fusion of West Coast USA-Spanish Mission and Asian styles. In true Korean fashion, there was next to no furniture except for cushions and low tables (they always sit on the floor), and the kitchen had no oven. Now I understand why my apartment came so sparsely furnished. On another afternoon, we had a teachers’ activity in which we made our own natural moisture cream while being lectured on the benefits of aromatherapy and how it’s replacing doctors in developed countries (??).

You may have wondered to yourself in the above paragraph just how much Korean I can understand these days. Well, folks, I can understand as much as a person who has diligently studied (ha!) for 48 hours worth of Korean language course credit at the prestigious Chonnam National University. I can now say many useful things, such as고양이가 어디에 있어요?(Where is the cat?) and 앤나씨 도서관사에 공부 하고 있어요. (Anna is studying at the library.) We wrapped up last night, and presented our course instructor (who is probably the awesomest Korean teacher EVER) with this little gem as a Christmas/thank you gift. This was honestly one of the most difficult subjects I have ever studied, probably not any less so because I haven’t taken a real class in 5 years. But I attended every session, I actually passed, and I am quite proud of me.

And in my final bow to Korean culture this month, I caved under the pressure to wear a coat indoors. In my Western mind, coats are for outdoors, hallways should be heated, and windows should NEVER be opened in the winter. When the other teachers asked me if I was cold and why I didn’t wear a coat, I firmly told them that where I come from, our mothers make us take off our coats when we come inside. But after weeks of seeing my breath in the restroom, scurrying down the frigid hallways between my classroom and the office, and enduring frozen fingers and toes while an arctic wind blasts through the windows at cleaning time (“Air must be presh-ee!”), I decided that it might be better to walk around the school in my down coat looking like the Michelin Man. At least my core is now warm, if not my hands and feet.

For those of you still worried, I have one more thing to say: Not surprisingly, Kim Jong-Crazy's bark is worse than his bite.

That’s it; that’s all I’ve got to say this time. Merry (or Happy) Christmas to all! I wonder if the Land of Morning Calm is still calm on Christmas morning?

The few reasons I'm not really homesick yet

This has been one superbly shitty week. And it’s only Wednesday. Record-setting unruliness in my classes, an indescribably frustrating inability to effectively communicate with my co-teacher, a 2-day fight with Nonghyup’s online banking system, insomnia, and the midterm election results (I am sorely disappointed in you, US voters) have collectively resulted in one very surly Caitlin. On the bright side, it’s hard to feel homesick when I’m just as annoyed with my home country as I am with this one. Perhaps I should have been knocking on doors back home instead of having my selfish little international adventure. But we’ll never know for sure, now will we?

Let me expound upon the harrowing experience that is dealing with online banking in Korea, as it is the only thing I can bitch about and still have my bitching be somewhat informative for you, dear readers. After the aforementioned inability to get my co-teacher to understand the nature of an automatic remittance account, I finally gave up and just asked if I could transfer money overseas through online banking. This way I won’t have to trek down to the bank during the rather restrictive Korean banking hours, armed to the hilt with passport and papers, every time I need to make a transfer. I filled out the forms, signed in the tiny spaces meant for signatures a third the size of most Western ones, received a few mysterious carbon copies and password cards, and 2 hours later, I was on my way to online banking convenience, just like I had back home, right?? Not so much. I knew that many Korean websites require the use of Internet Explorer – on a Windows machine only – in order to work properly. What I did not know is that the most recent version of IE has something troublesome about it that required me to downgrade my browser to use the online banking site. It took a while for me to figure this out, since the error message that kept appearing was in – you guessed it – Korean. When I finally got that sorted out, I had to jump through 50 bajillion hoops in order to log in for the first time. Now, about half of those hoops will be eliminated in the subsequent times that I log in, but that’s still 25 bajillion hoops every time I want to access my account online (and then again to pay a bill, or make a transfer, or check my balance….). These hoops are supposedly for security purposes, but Korea still insists on relying on ActiveX controls (the reason for the Windows IE requirement), which have widely known security flaws. Go figure. Some day I hope that Korea will cease its hostile campaign against any and all non-Windows users, but I doubt that day will come while I’m still here. In the mean time, I thank God for Parallels. Oh, and I’m sure you’re wondering if I ever actually got my money to my US account. It seemed that I finally figured everything out correctly on this end, but the answer remains to be seen during EST banking hours, which have not yet started for today.

So, in summary,
Points for Korean banks: awesome optical bill-scanner thingies on the ATMs, which make paying bills super fast and easy even though I can’t read them; on-demand printed bank statements rather than monthly ones in the mail; ease of making domestic deposits/payments/transfers via bank account numbers instead of checks or credit cards.
Points for American banks: reasonable hours; tellers who share my native tongue; online banking that doesn’t make me want to pull my hair out.

Fortunately, the happenings of last week were considerably cheerier. The fireworks festival in Busan was a blast (pun intended). I saw some fireworks like none I’ve ever seen before – cubes and flowers and strings of slowly floating lantern-like lights – and I also experienced crowds like I’ve never seen before. Even the 2008 inauguration was no comparison for the oppressive masses of the fireworks festival. The shoving was literally constant, and while I had no idea that so many tall Koreans even existed, they were all there at the festival, standing in front of me. Happily, fireworks are mostly in the sky, so I only had to stand on tiptoe and do some of my own shoving when the Gwangan bridge started raining sparkly fire. (Yes, raining fire. I’m trying to get a video to post in the photo collection.)

Friday was my official birthday celebration, since it’s never a good idea to drink on Mondays (at least not too much). I spent the afternoon looking after a student’s kitten that was rather unceremoniously dumped on me while the student was in class. I was quite happy to watch it, though my afternoon of lesson planning had to be scrapped and was replaced by gaggles of squealing ‘tweens (girls and boys), drawn by the siren song of cute that was climbing over my desk. I was unable to extract myself from the hordes, for fear that the kitten would be squashed or torn to bits by their eager hands. I then escaped to my apartment for a rousing yet all-too-short session of reliving college in the USA (a.k.a. beer pong), followed by a party at a bar in the nearby nightlife district. I was spoiled by all of my friends, sung to, fed cheesecake, and given the always en-vogue gifts of Engrish. Oh, and there was the Death in a Glass. I’m not sure if it’s common to feed the birthday girl a blue-flaming tumbler full of something akin to anise-flavored gasoline, but that’s what the bartender gave me, and demanded “One shot!” Ha! Who was he kidding? I had to share that thing with 5 other people before it was gone. Rough stuff, I tell you.

Apparently my birthday was such the occasion for everyone that some people even considered staying in on Saturday despite numerous Halloween parties being thrown by waygooks all over the city. Fortunately, they rallied and made it out. The party I attended featured a Mad Hatter with a very impressive homemade hat, a bust, a flasher, and FAN DEATH. I went as a Shot in the Dark – dressed all in black with a shot glass around my neck. Yes, it’s lame, but I must be allowed my occasional linguistic indulgences. Koreans don’t understand Halloween any better than they understand “a shot in the dark,” so what’s the difference?

School festival tomorrow. I currently have students running around me with tape, box cutters and giant roles of colored paper preparing for the circus that I’m sure it will be. They're all quite eager to have me visit their particular stations -- eager enough to come talk to me about it in English! I’ve also been roped into the performance part of the afternoon, and though we’ve been rehearsing our two songs for a month now, I was just informed this morning that I will be singing one of the verses as a duet with one of my co-teachers. That’s sure to clear the house in a hurry.

My budding Korean social life

This bit has little to do with Korea, but I feel that it’s necessary. On Wednesday night (morning in EST), my cat of 15 years passed through the veil to the state of true feline enlightenment (with lots of critters to chase and sun to lay in, I imagine). There’s nothing like the passing of a pet to make you feel both incredibly miserable and incredibly silly for feeling so incredibly miserable over an animal. I am fortunate to have friends here who understand, and was the recipient of one of the best group hugs EVER right when I needed it. Thanks, guys. You can all add “Comforter Extraordinaire” as a bullet point on your resume under the EPIK teaching section. I’ll even make you a certificate if you want, since everything in Korea comes with a certificate upon completion.

To follow up on a previous post, the purchase of my cell phone has come with a sizable boost on the Korean end of my social life. As far as Koreans are concerned, if you do not have a cell phone, you do not exist in the social sphere. But now that I have a phone to call, they are not afraid to call it. All of the promised outings are coming to fruition, fast and furious. A couple of weekends ago, one of my co-teachers invited me to go shopping with her, which was followed by several beers with her friends. Naturally, the very first question out of her friend’s mouth was, “Boyfriend?” But we’ve already covered that. It wasn’t long before we were chatting it up in halting elementary-level English, munching on dried squid and describing our ideal man. Dude, girl talk is so much more difficult with a language barrier. I have a hard enough time with fluent English speakers, let alone with people who don’t know anything beyond “tall” and “handsome” in my language. I eventually gave in to the temptation to just say the few words I knew they would understand and leave it at that. Despite (or maybe because of?) the fact that they have a somewhat skewed view of who I am and what I like, they told me that they “feel intimacy with” me and that I am like a Korean woman. I’m not sure what this means, exactly, but I’m taking it as a compliment.

This past week I was invited out with my other co-teachers for some makgeolli, a milky-looking traditional Korean alcohol typically served in an enormous metal tea-pot-looking thing that is then poured into and drunk from small bowls. [It should be noted that this time, we all decided together what day to go. I am a fan of this change in m.o.] It turns out that, contrary to what I hear about most Korean teachers, my co-teachers don’t drink very much. By contrast, I ended up looking like a lush with the fortitude and constitution of a rotund German man. Unlike my soju, I can hold my makgeolli pretty well. Conversation flowed freely with my flush-faced co-teachers and I’m sure we’re all better friends for it. In other social news of the week, I was invited to eat grapes in the administration room with the vice-principal and the music teacher this afternoon. I’m sure this has nothing to do with the cell phone, but it’s still a step in the right direction!

Last week we had midterms, which means that we had the afternoons free for lesson planning. Or, as was the case on Wednesday, sports day at the neighboring middle school! I am not a sports person. Sports may provide health and vitality for most people, but for me, they are a threat to my un-injured existence. I am clumsy, uncoordinated, and terrified of any and all balls that fly through the air, because in all likelihood, they will eventually hit me in the head. Somehow I made it through several rounds of a dodge ball-like game and another kickball-inspired game with some really weird twists without bruising or any major humiliation. Until the hula-hoop competition. Hula-hoops are a HUGE fad in Korea, and I’m pretty sure that all Koreans – men and women – spend several hours a day just practicing their hula-hoop technique. Probably while they watch those crazy TV shows about people in animal costumes with pop-up bubbles on the screen. They naturally assumed that this hooping prowess extended to me and the other native English teacher at the school we were visiting. They gave us three giant hula-hoops each and, when we protested that we couldn’t possibly manage all three at once, insisted that using just one would take too long. The first round was over in less than 5 seconds. The second round lasted maybe 10, but that’s because they let us use just one hoop each. We were then put to shame by two Korean teachers whose face-off lasted 5 entire minutes. With all three hoops. And I think they would’ve gone on longer if one of the teachers’ hoops hadn’t been slightly bent. We followed up the sports part of the afternoon with the eating part of the afternoon, an area in which I am much more skilled.

In food-related news, I tried my first persimmon a couple of weeks ago. Persimmons are very popular in many forms – fresh, dried, ripe, green, in teas and in sweets. I had to try one eventually, so a friend and I each purchased one from a halmoni (grandmother) on the street. We thought we’d been charged a rather steep price because we’re foreigners, but it turns out that may not have been the case. What we unknowingly purchased were the cream-of-the-crop persimmons, with very soft, brown insides and a particularly sweet/creamy taste. After that experience, one of my co-teachers brought me a huge bag of persimmons she picked herself that are now ripening in my kitchen. Being the nerd that I am, I’ve read up on persimmons and know to mind the laxative effect they can have if eaten in large quantities. I’m quite glad that I did my research this before eating the entire bag in one sitting. That could’ve been interesting. I also made it to the Costco in Daejeon last weekend, where I bought some proper cheese. There was no cheddar to be had (*sniff*), but they were selling some rather nice Parmesan (for a not-so-nice price, but what do you want?). Now the Parmesan from Daejeon is sitting in my fridge, beneath the personally picked persimmons, making me smile every time I open the door.

Things done and things left undone

My Notice of Appointment has arrived, my visa is on its way in the mail, and I have moved out of my apartment and said farewell to my city.  I guess this technically makes me homeless.  I'm staying with my parents and hanging out with the family for a couple of weeks, including a quick beach trip and my friend's wedding in Nashville, before I fly out on August 17th.

I am still waiting for my TEFL exam to be graded and my certificate to arrive, and for an elf to show up and teach me how to make this blog look the way I want it to by magically imparting to me all knowledge of HTML while I'm asleep.  I'm sure I could learn this myself if I put my mind to it.  However, if I'm going to spend brainpower studying right now, I'm going to spend it on finishing the linguistics textboook that Kat loaned me or plowing through the Rosetta Stone Korean package that the choir gave me as a bon voyage gift.  So yeah, any pretty-blog-making advice that anyone can offer would be great.

The only bad news at this point is that my poor fat kitty, who had been taken into a new foster home by a very generous woman, can no longer stay in this new foster home.  Apparently the other kitty with prior claim to the home is none too pleased with Sabina's presence, and has made this fact quite clear by transferring her litterbox activities to the bed.  This is not acceptable, so Sabina must now be transferred to....someplace.  I just don't know where yet.  I'm rather worried.  Poor fat kitty.

On a more positive note, I am spending the next couple of weeks enjoying a lot of things that I couldn't in DC and probably won't in Korea:
Swimming in a pool that is not filled with hundreds of other people
Taking a hot bath in a tub that's large enough my legs don't stick out
Cuddling cats that don't try to kill me when I pick them up
Sauerkraut (The German equivalent of kimchi. It's my heritage.)

Ok, I probably ought to do some real work now.  Like knocking out some of the 15 units on developmental psychology and survival Korean that are part of the required pre-orientation course for EPIK.  I will also be shopping, packing and generally freaking out.  You may or may not hear from me again before I arrive in Korea, but leave some love in the mean time!

I've got to get started at some point.

My English teaching job with EPIK is 99.9% confirmed.  I'm just waiting for that all-important Notice of Appointment so I can quit my job and take care of the bajillion other little (and not-so-little) things that must be taken care of before I leave the country (preferably before I leave DC).  My recruiter, Footprints (who have been amazing, by the way, those crazy Canadians), says there's a package of appointment notices en route to their offices.  Hopefully mine is among the many, and I can get started sooner rather than later.

Something you should know about me: I'm a planner.  I like to plan ahead.  I like to have goals and a map of how I'll reach those goals.  In the latter segment of my life, I've been trying to balance this with a belief in Spirit and the Universe having its own ways, which is pretty tricky.  How do you both plan and "make it happen" while still being open to opportunities that are put in front of you, and back off of plans you were making when the Spirit says, "Um, that's so not gonna happen. Sorry."  So what I currently call flexibility is really more of me making Plan A along with Backup Plans B, C and D.  I'm ok as long as I don't have to resort to Plan E or some variation thereon, at which point I freak out.  But I'm really and truly working on it.  And my entire Korea teaching application process has been a powerful learning tool in this area.

There have been many last-minute scrambles and readjustments of the mental Plan (and Backup Plans) throughout the entire application process.  How does this happen to a Planner who gets started early and researches all the details she can possibly know ahead of time?  Suffice it to say that I had talked a dear friend from high school into going with me who is (a) not as much of a Planner as I am, (b) does not have the same understanding of "make it happen" as I do, and (c) doesn't have the ingrained ability to navigate bureaucracy as I have (something you learn in order to survive five years in the Bureaucracy Capitol of America).  We had our applications tied together so we could go have a grand adventure AND be partners in crime, but then we ended up with somewhat different timing when it came to acquiring and submitting our documents to Footprints, and, well.....yeah.  Our applications aren't linked any more.  God love him, he did try.  My mother was talking of mailing a cream pie to him but couldn't figure out how to get it to launch from the box into his face, so she gave up.  For my part, I'm bummed, but I'm not mad at him.  This whole Grand Adventure of our Late 20s was my idea anyway.  Live and learn.

So, why the name of the blog, you ask?  I'm told that the Koreans are completely uninterested in dairy, particularly cheese (and Mexican food, but that's secondary to the cheese).  And dairy is an inordinately large part of my diet, particularly cheese and yogurt.  Now, I can make yogurt myself; I'll just throw some packets of culture into my suitcase.  But cheese?  I think not.  So I will most likely be spending a proportionate [amount of time:searching for cheese] as [cheese has been:my diet].  And I'll report every delectable (or disgusting) detail back to you, the few readers that I might have, and hopefully I'll be able to throw in some humor/interesting situations/life lessons with it.

Oh, and the kitty needs a new home.  Neither of us is happy about it, but there's nothing much we can do about it.  The Koreans aren't keen on importing pets, which I can understand.  Besides, whether it'd be her or a baggage handler, someone would likely die during Sabina's transit to the other side of the world.  I certainly don't want her to die just so I can spend a year abroad!  So, who wants a charmingly fat, furry, talkative cat??  I'm leaving DC at the end of this month....