The nonsense brooms and my disdain

I hate these brooms; they make no sense to me. I’m smiling in this picture because I am trying to be nice about it, but there is nothing to smile about. This broom alone makes having a small apartment worth it. I have asked countless amounts of Koreans why they don’t have taller brooms and no one knows why.

The two questions I ask almost all Koreans I meet:

1) Why do you use the peace sign in every photo you take?

2) Why don’t you have taller brooms?

Inevitably the answers:

1) Oh, I dont know. No Koreans know.

2) Oh, yes, good. I don’t know. No one knows.

I need answers to these two mysteries. Until then, I will enjoy the cute peace signs and mourn the act of sweeping our apartment.

-Mandi

The Skinnies

Sou-Ji is leaving for college. She’s the secretary and although she’s only 18 years old, we love her, and she will be a greatly missed friend and familiar face in Daejeon. Michelle and Sunny took us (all of the girls who work at Kid’s College and Josh) out last night as a little going away party for Sou-ji. We were taken to VIPS – a buffet. I was imagining the typical kinds of buffets back in the States that consistent of a smorgasbord of foods that are not considered edible in my book, but this was nothing of the sort. We were seated quickly, but like most situations in Korea, indecisiveness ensued, and it took us another thirty-five minutes before anyone made a decision on what to order. For some reason no one understood how the menu worked and the girls kept asking us what we wanted. They repeatedly put the only two menus on the table in front of us as if we could read what they said and make the final decision for the entire table. All of these small subtleties have something to do with their culture and no one wanting to seem pushy, forward or intrusive. I respect all of that, but I was getting hungry, so I decided to go check out the buffet and leave Josh to patiently do the back-and-forth with our co-workers who were desperately trying to piece together short strands of English words to create somewhat coherent English thoughts, not sentences.

The buffet was magnificent. Shrimp, smoked salmon, escargot, fried chicken, veggie soups, fruits, pasta, pizza, a vast array of salads . . . need I go on? I came back to the table gleaming. “It’s amazing!” I said. “I want the buffet.”

“You want, um, seafood?” Min asked while pointed to a picture on the menu of an enormous seafood platter that consisted on prawns, lobster tails, shrimp, scallops and salmon.

“A seafood platter and the buffet? No. Are you?”

“Oh no, I . . . I’m get steak.” She replied.

I was confused. Why would anyone order a meal when there’s the buffet?

“Oh, we get buffet too. Both.” Min explained.

“You’re going to eat a steak and the buffet?”

“I am!” Announces Josh

Everyone at the table, aside from me, orders a steak that inevitably comes with multiple side dishes, as does every Korean meal. We all make our way to the buffet. Josh and I spot a weird western girl that we had seen on the subway a couple of weeks earlier and are momentarily distracted from the incredible display of food because we must stare at her and recall where we saw her last (she dresses Goth with blue hair in South Korea. It would be impossible not to notice her).
I pile a stack of French fries onto my plate only to realize they are sweet potato fries, but the buffet has salt so I’m in heaven anyway. Tomatoes with cheese and olive oil? Yes, please. Fruit salad, fruit and yogurt, everything even remotely western is on my plate, unless it contains red meat, of course. We have not even finished our plates from the buffet when the steaks arrive. I sit for a minute watching everyone dig into his or her steak and side dishes. I think about returning to the buffet for a moment, but I am so conscience of looking like a fat, greedy American, so I sit overly aware of being lady-like and polite. After a few minutes I decided to hell with it and returned to the buffet.

Fried chicken. I apologized to myself before I even put it on my plate, but it looks so good with this sweet and sour sauce Korean style and they pride themselves on their chicken here, so I breakdown and there the little strips are on my plate. By the time I arrive back at the table and am cutting into my chicken the Korean girls are pretty much done with their entire steaks, side dishes and the first plate from the buffet. Josh is cutting the last half of his steak very slowly and I can tell that he won’t be able to finish it. He has that lethargic, full look in his eyes.

“Ok, we go back to buffet.” Min declares.

“Dessert?” I ask hopefully.

“Uh . . . no, pasta. You have?”

“Me? Oh, no. I think I’m too full for pasta now.”

The four petite, I wasn’t-even-that-small-when-I-was-ten, girls go back to the buffet for several different kinds of pasta and pizza and croissants and more meat. Josh and I sit at the table and look at each other in some kind of amazement or confusion. We watch them eat several more plates full of food. I’m thinking that there is no possible way these girls are going to eat dessert now, but they do and coffee as well. Frozen yogurt, little cakes, and fruit with yogurt. It’s incredible. I’m actually somewhat annoyed. These astoundingly thin girls just piled more food into their stomachs than I could in three or four days and they are thinner that I could ever be. I am almost positive they could out-eat my brother. Josh knows exactly what I am thinking. He looks at me and in a low voice says, “That’s when you know it’s genetics and not diet.” I feel better about it all now. It just happens to be in their cards and not so much in my Anglo-Saxon-Greek mix.

We stay at the restaurant laboriously trying to communicate with our co-workers. After quite a while, we decided to find a bar and hang out a while longer. This process lagged on as no one could decide where to go and they kept asking us where we wanted to go even though we had never been to any of these places and only vaguely knew where we were. Min eventually decided on a place, because she is the least indecisive in a culture that almost demands indecisiveness. It’s a clean little spot on the fourth floor. It’s smoky, but not dingy. The waiter brings over a menu that Min opens and starts pointing at enormous platters of fried foods and fruit. She speaks in Korean for a minute and then asks Josh what he wants. He takes her to be joking, and laughingly points at an oversized platter of cheese sticks, fried chicken, mounds of fries and fruit slices.

Min nods, “Ok, you want?” She’s pointing at the picture on the menu.

Josh is smirking, “Yea, ok, that one.”

We both think they’re joking because it had not been but an hour ago that these girls piled plates and plates of food into their stomachs. But to our astonishment she orders this grossly oversized portion of food and one small pitcher or Korean beer for the table. Josh and I laugh because there is nothing else to do, and they don’t understand what’s funny and we couldn’t possibly explain so we pass it off and say,

“Nothing. Nothing’s funny.”

No internet at home

Our internet has been down for three days at home, so sorry there have not been many updates. I will post as soon as we have internet again. I don’t have time from work.

-Mandi

Santa Clause? Really?

We’ve heard a lot about this bar / lounge called Santa Clause here in Daejeon. It’s supposed to be the main hang out for foreigners in our area. “That’s seriously the name?” is my typical response when people tell us about this place. Since this was the first weekend that I wasn’t sick since we stepped foot into South Korea, we though we would give it a try.We’ve been here for five weeks now, so I guess we should start meeting people. There are some foreigners living in our same apartment building, but I’ve never seen them. I hear them at various times of the night once they’ve drank too much and their voices carry through the cheap walls of this old apartment building. Sometimes I run out into the hallway when I hear them out there, because I think that maybe I can catch a glace of what they look like before they make it through their doors. I don’t know exactly what I would say if I did catch one of them. Yesterday I caught two Korean girls by surprise because from inside our apartment it sounded like they were speaking English. They looked at me strangely and then said, “Hi,” and started laughing. It was an odd moment so I just closed the door going back inside our bedroom without having gained any new friends.

It’s within walking distance . . . that’s my first thought when I think about Santa Clause, so that tells you how overrated it is. You can chose songs for the play-list, which is sort of cool, I guess. But it’s actually only cool when the songs you chose play, because for the rest of the night you have to listen to the songs that other people chose which, last night, consisted of country, early 90’s rock, and an overabundant amount of song about getting high, drunk and treating women like meat. Everyone there was strange. The sort of people who we would never befriend back in the States, so we sat there for a while wondering why we were there. That’s something we’ve noticed here and have heard about from our directors: A lot of people who come here to teach are misfits back home, but they think they will be cool here, or something along those lines. I know I sound uppity and snobby right now, but it really all just means that we miss our friends who are like us and understand us. Won’t you please come visit?

Josh and I played Jenga at Santa Clause for two and a half hours. That was fun. The people – weird, the music – terrible, but my husband – fantastic.

“Oh, good song, finally. Hey! I know what movie this is from! Don’t tell me . . . Eternal Sunshine and the Spotless Mind”

“Yep. Do you know who the director was?”

“Yes. Umm . . . hold on. Lemme think. Ok, give me the first letter of his first name”

“He’s from France.”

“I know.”

“First name: M. Last name: G.”

“Don’t tell me, don’t tell me!”

“It sounds like the name of someone from work.”

“Michel Gondry!”

We smile at each other because we both realize that this is useless information that Josh cares about and because of that I now know director’s names because he talks about it too much and we are both thinking about how much we love each other and how wonderful this experience is and how we are best friends and the moment is really good. We’re in this terrible little bar filled with strange people speaking English, but we don’t care because we have each other and that’s enough.

We left Santa Clause and 1:30 in the morning and found another place, with fewer people and only Koreans. We get chocolate martinis. I pull out my recycled notebook from my purse, Josh gets his moleskin from his coat pocket, and we both start asking the bar tender questions about Korean and vigorously writing down anything we understand or think could be useful information.  It was 3 when we finally walked home in the freezing winter cold, ran across the streets, almost got hit by a car and finally made it back to our little one bedroom apartment that for the next year is our home.

The games got intense.

of course

At our Hogwon we get every National Korean holiday off, which we were told would equal out to be about 14 three day weekends in the year. Of course this year, most of the Korean Holidays fall on a weekend, so we only have 2 three day weekends in the entire year.  Goodness . . .  this is going to be a looooong year.

Better

I am finally feeling better today (Sunday), and Josh is a really good nurse. He waited on me hand and foot on Saturday. I guess he didn’t have a whole lot of choice, because I couldn’t even stand up on my own without his help, but he served me all day with a smile on his face. What a Valentine’s Day, right?

At the moment I’m debating whether a detailed story of my illness is too gruesome to blog about, so for right now I will say this: I spent nine hours on Friday in a clinic a block from the school. By the time we all realized how sick I was, it was too late to get me to a hospital which would have been far more suited to deal with my condition. I thought I had caught a virus from some of the kids at the Teddy Bear Museum the previous day because I woke up Friday morning throwing up and couldn’t stop. Once I got to the clinic, the doctor thought it was more serious than a virus and decided to take x-rays, which revealed severe digestive problems. (It’s all this confounded rice I’ve been complaining about.) Plainly speaking, my intestines backed up into my stomach and overflowed everywhere is the translation I received. I was having toxic shock among other problems as you can imagine. I continued to throw up all day and was excreting much blood from places that shouldn’t shed blood. I was also suffering from severe dehydration when the nurses finally gave me an IV, but by this time my veins were hard to find because I was so dehydrated.

It was the worst day of my life, and I’m not just being dramatic. Josh had to teach both classes at the school to cover for me, so the Korean staff took turns being there at the clinic to help me get to the bathroom. There was someone there for most of the day, I think I was only alone for maybe 3 or 4 hours. Interestingly, in Korea buildings don’t have bathrooms in every office like in the States. More economically and energy savvy, every floor has a bathroom that is shared by all of the offices on that floor. So, that means that I had to go from my room in the clinic, down a hallway, through the waiting room, past the heavy front doors, down another hallway, over a step and into the bathroom while pushing my IV and picking it up over the step and bleeding. You’re getting the idea. It was hell.

But, I’m better today. Yesterday (Saturday) I was still in significant pain on and off throughout the day, but today I can stand up and even walk around on my own. It feels like a real accomplishment after what I went through on Friday.

Thank you for your prayers and concern.

Much love,

Mandi

sick

So not to scare everyone, but mandi got pretty sick yesterday (Friday) morning. She spent the day in a clinic near our school. I am sure that she will blog about the whole ordeal so I wont steal her thunder. She is feeling better, I am a good nurse.

josh

Cats are amazing

I miss Margot so much. I can’t think about her too much because it still makes me cry.

Homeplus is that gigantic grocery store I told you about before, remember? Well, aside from carrying groceries, shoes, pencils and clothes, they also have a pet store. I went there last week to look at the cat they have. That’s right. The cat. There is only one. She is a solid white persian and has a stained poo face like Doc, Jake and Carrie’s dog. It made me so sad that I wanted to buy her. She was living all alone in such a tiny glass cage. No other cat friends. The cage was so small she couldn’t even walk around.

Margot used to spoon with me in bed. I miss Blackey, too, and Shay a little. I definitely miss Perry. I hope he’s still eating like the fat little glutton he is. I was just thinking about ways that I could get Perry over here. Don’t you think he could make the flight? We need a fish in this apartment or something. I really miss Margot.

Margot knew we were leaving. She knew things were getting different. It’s incredible to think how we packed up everything, rented our house, gave our lovie cat away, and left with four suitcases in hand to a country that we have never even visited before. I know people do it every day, but it’s definitely different when you’re the one doing it. It all seems sort of brave when I look back on it now. We’re lucky that we ended up with great directors and a fantastic school. Lots of people come here with less teaching experience than us and aren’t so lucky with their situation. I don’t regret coming here. I am so happy that we decided to do this. We made the decision and then everything was set into motion. It all happened to quickly and now we’re here, actually living in South Korea. I guess this is everything sinking in, right? All the same, it’s good. It’s different and exhilarating  and good.

Much love,

Mandi

Video upload on facebook

I am uploading a video from the Teddy Bear Museum fieldtrip we took today. I will write more about that later. . .

I am also uploading a video of the school we are working at that I took before classes started. I was planning on taking another with the kids in the school, but it’s too hectic during the day, so here is one without any kids and just of the building and Korean staff.

Love,

Mandi

Little hands

My favorite part about teaching kindergarten are the little hands of my students reaching up high over their heads to pat my stomach while saying, “Teacher, teacher!” Or gym class when we play “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” and the little girls hold on to me around my waist and the boys grab a hold of my legs and beg me to drag them around the gym floor in search of the BIG BEAR!

Just a few of my favorite things,
Mandi