꽃보다 남자

Ah, where do I begin.  The title, of course.  꽂보다납자.  Pronounced "Kgoat bo-da nahm-jah", The best English equivalent is "Boys Over Flowers" or "Boys Before Flowers".  It's a Korean teen TV drama that took the nation of Korea like a plague in January, February, March, and April.  It ran for 2 short seasons (25 episodes total), and finished last week, but has still not let the public out of its clutches.  And I am one of its most affected victims.

I started watching it online with English subtitles about two weeks ago, after I read the synopsis and thought, "Hmm.  That sounds kinda fun.  Watching it might be a good way to relate to my students."  Little did I know.  Here's the official synopsis:

Jan Di is an average girl whose family owns a dry cleaning store located near the luxurious and well-known Shinhwa High School.  Jan Di meets the four richest and most spoiled boys known as the F4.  After saving a boy from jumping off the roof of Shinhwa High School, she is admitted into the school on a swimming scholarship.  Jan Di tries to avoid confrontation with F4 at all cost because she knows what happens to those that stand against them.  However, when Jan Di's friend, Oh Min Ji, accidentally gets ice cream on the leader of F4's shoes, she's forced to declare war on the leader of F4, Goo Jun Pyo.

Okay so first of all, Gu Jun Pyo actually declares war on HER because she stood up for her friend and wounded his pride.  Secondly, all that stuff happens in the first two episodes.  It's not that much of a spoiler to say that what of course ends up happening is that stubborn, quick-tempered Gu Jun Pyo falls in love with caring, spunky Jan Di, as does his best friend, quiet and musical Yoon Ji Hoo, who her friend and rescuer from the beginning.  Jan Di unearths Jun Pyo's tender side, and Jun Pyo, Ji Hoo and the other two members of F4, Song Woo Bin and So Yi Jung, become her best friends, and they have all kinds of adventures and love triangles and drama together.  :D

The show is admittedly cheesy, and the acting is kind of weak, especially at the beginning (but it gets better!), but the characters make the show completely addicting.  And not only middle school girls love it.  I meet adult women and even some guys who watch it.  It made the show's actors the most recognized and sought-after pop culture stars in Korea.  And even though the show is over, the actors are still appearing in commercials, on posters promoting everything from cell phones to donuts, and on the covers of fan magazines.

As for me, it was fun to go nuts over this show.  Not only is it packed with Korean culture and words that I can pick up as I watch, I have been able to relate to Koreans on a whole nother level, simply because we can start a conversation when they notice my F4 cell phone charms.  I can instantly engage my students in class by using the characters' names in example sentences.  And the obsession is cheap!  My cell phone charms, postcards and socks were less than a dollar each, my fan magazines were 35 cents apiece, and I got my posters for free from some guys I made friends with who work at a cell phone store.  :P  Have you gotten the picture yet?  I am in love with F4.

For a quick little video introduction to my boys, please click here.

Ahhh my sad little blog--sorely neglected once again!  I think it's time for a facelift.  Starting with this post, in which I'll update on my activities of the past couple months.

So the new school year is well underway.  It began in March.  I am enjoying teaching this year more than last year as I feel more experienced, full of ideas, comfortable in my environment, and I have some really great co-teachers this year.  There is also another foreign teacher in my Girls' School this year--Kholo (see picture).  She is from South Africa, and she and I have quickly become friends.

In other news, I moved out of the KNU dorm and into an apartment off campus almost 3 weeks ago now.  All the foreign teachers will be moving into apartments within the next few months; my friend Karissa and I were just the first to go.  She lives above me.  We have studio apartments about a 15 minute walk from KNU.  I really love the independence and the bus ride downtown is actually quicker.  Plus, with the weather warming up (finally!) the extra walking is pleasant and good exercise.  And!  I bought a bicycle.  I found a used one at a shop near my school and rode it all the way home (40 min.).  This is a huge accomplishment for me because it means that I FINALLY know my way around this city.  It was really hard to get my bearings because I was always being driven everywhere (bus, taxi, car) rather than going there on my own!  I'll post pictures of the apartment as soon as I get it put together; I've been waiting on KNU to get me some furniture but that arrived yesterday so finally I can stop sleeping on the floor and pulling my wrinkled clothes out of garbage bags!

Something else I've done recently is to take up Salsa dancing as a hobby.  Some friends and I discovered a little place where a group of Koreans meet to dance to Latin music every Friday night (who would've thought Koreans could be good at Salsa!), so we go there every Friday night we can, meet once during the week to practice, and also we have a once-a-week private lesson from one of the Korean dancers we met.  It's something I've always wanted to do, and it's a fun challenge to learn all the steps, and good exercise on top of that!

I think that the weather is the thing I'm most happy about at the moment.  Highs in the 70's this week.  Yesterday one of my coworkers and I walked to a coffee shop downtown on lunch break, then came back and talked to girl students while we watched the boys play sports on the field.  (Amazing how even though Buk Middle school has 2 out of the 3 grades integrated now, the students still sex-segregate themselves for the most part.  Even in class.  Getting a boy to talk to a girl during an educational activity and vice versa requires almost a direct command.)

Okay well that's most of what I've been up to lately, with one major exception: 

꽂보다납자.  And that gets a separate post.  :P

Well I've finally started learning a little bit of Korean.  My first lesson was from a friend at a coffee shop last week.  She was teaching me some phrases and I started asking questions about exactly what things meant and why they were said that way and it turned into a regular hour-long lesson.

Then on Monday, I started taking a daily Korean class as part of the program I'm in.  It's only for one week, for three hours each day, so they're cramming a lot in.  On the first day we learned to read and write Korean.  Yesterday we learned some basic phrases and a whole list of verbs and how to use them.  My hope is that by the end of the class I will have the tools necessary to continue learning on my own, perhaps with the help of a book.  And maybe by the time I leave in 8 months I'll be fluent.  Just kidding.  But language-learning is still a good experience, regardless of how far I go with it.

It has been a long time since I updated my blog and for that I apologize.  I did have a nice holiday season.  The city was somewhat decorated, we bought a little Christmas tree and put it up in our common room, and we had several Christmas party events during the season including on Christmas day.  We on our hall also exchanged gifts among ourselves.  I think that the highlight of the Christmas season for me was the Christmas play at the Christmas Eve service at my church.  The story of the nativity was changed into a an anxt-ridden love drama between Mary and Joseph, true to the Korean obsession with romance.  :)  The youth group put it on and it was quite humorous.

I had to go back to school the day after Christmas, when all of a sudden it felt as if Christmas never really happened this year.  But I only had to teach for a couple of days and on December 30, I boarded a plane bound for Australia, where I spent the first two weeks of January exploring Sydney and Canberra with my Australian friend Emma.  I even got to be down at the Sydney Opera House/Harbour Bridge at midnight with a million other people for the most fantastic fireworks display in the world!  I took lots of pictures while in Australia, so you can check them out in my newly updated  links section on the right.

The rest of January I spent back in Korea on winter break.  I have been enjoying my time off hanging out with my friends, and the past two weeks we have taken a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) course provided to us by Korean Nazarene University.  It was quite comprehensive and I am thankful because when I finish the last two weeks of the course next summer I will be given a TESOL certificate, which is recognized throughout the world.

Next week I will go back to school for one week to finish up the school year, then after two more weeks off I will begin teaching full-time again at the beginning of March, with a new group of kids, as this is when the students advance a grade.

Alright well that pretty much catches this blog up; be sure to look at my pictures--I have 15 new albums!  The new ones begin with the Muju album.

I thought I would be informative and write just a little (ha) about Korean food.  When I first came to Korea I wasn't much impressed with the food.  And when I would go out to eat with people I usually hoped they wouldn't pick Korean.  But I think eating school lunch, believe it or not, has begun to change my mind about Korean food.  Almost every day I really enjoy the food at school.  More than most Korean restaurants.  For example, here is what we had for lunch today (and I admit--a lot of it is just that I'm hungry and I'm getting used to the food):

-kimchi (of course.  Koreans eat this with every meal.  Even breakfast.  And if you don't know, this is usually cold, crunchy, pickled cabbage or hot radish, and it tastes vinegary, salty, garlicky, and spicy (it's covered in spicy red pepper paste).)

-some kind of mixture of vegetables, chewy rice dumplings, and squid in a decently good-tasting sauce.  Squid is edible to me because it is almost tasteless, but it is not my favorite because sometimes there are suction cups on the tentacles and this bothers me, and it's too chewy, so, as another American put it, it's kind of like eating an eraser.

-soup.  We always have soup, which is mostly broth, with things floating in it ranging from some type of greens, to bits of egg, or pieces of beef or seafood, or cubes of tofu.  Sometimes it's good; sometimes it's not.

-egg soufle.  This was pretty good.  It had onions mixed into it and chopped green scallions on top.

-rice (of course) with (and this part was my favorite) sesame leaves.  They were big cooked leaves about half the size of my hand saturated with hot red pepper paste, and you get a little stack of them, and then to eat them you take one with your chopsticks and lay it over your pile of rice.  Then you press down on the edges of it with your chopsticks horizontally, and then bring your chopsticks together under the bite of rice, which folds the leaf around a bite of rice into a little package.  Then you pick it up with the chopsticks and put it in your mouth.  And it's delicious.

Here are some other things I've really enjoyed eating at school:

-fried tofu dipped in soy sauce.  Sounds weird but it's really good.

-some kind of fried pancake thing they make out of some kind of flour with onions and scallions etc.

-Bibimbap.  This is always one of my favorites.  It's a bowl of rice with sprout-like mushrooms, egg, greens or lettuce of some sort, and other things I can't remember, and you mix red pepper paste into it.  If you order it in a restaurant it's even better because they bring it in a hot stone bowl still cooking and the rice gets golden brown and crispy.

-greens.  They are shriveled and sometimes they are cold and vinegary, and sometimes they are medium temperature and garlicky.

Notes:

1) I am becoming quite proficient with chopsticks and actually prefer them a lot of the time.

2) Something we eat quite a bit when we want to eat quick and cheap is gimbap (sounds like kimbap).  It's a long sliced roll that looks like a sushi roll (rice wrapped in seaweed) but instead of raw fish it has a piece of ham, a piece of egg, a piece of carrot, some sort of green, and a piece of pickle in the center of the rice.  It's good and only 1,000 won, which is about 65 cents.

3) On kimchi.  At first I didn't like it/wasn't impressed.  Then I just got tired of it.  But it kept BEING there, at every meal, so I kept having a bite here and there, until last night, I all of a sudden found myself craving it.  So weird.  And today at lunch I was looking forward to it and it was delicious.  I ate it all, first thing, really fast.  The Korean teacher across from me watched me eat it with an amused expression on her face.

Today I went to a wedding.  I had never met the bride and groom.  The mother of the bride is the pastor of a church I visited with my friend Karissa week before last, and she and I were both invited to the wedding in Seoul.  We took a fancy charter bus to the nicest hotel I've ever seen in my life (the furniture was all antique with plaques giving the year and country of origin, there was diamond jewelry displayed in lit boxes set into the walls in the hallways, and the lobby/lounge was this magnificent chandeliered mass of white Christmas lights and hundreds of poinsettia plants surrounding a copper statue fountain.  The hall in which the wedding was held took my breath away.  There was a white candle-and-white flower-lined runway up to the stage, and guests were all seated at tables covered with china, crystal, real sliver, and 6-foot candelabras crowned with 4 white taper candles and real white flowers.  The wedding was pretty much western-style minus attendants and with the mothers in traditional Korean dresses, and the bride's dress was a replica of Audrey Hepburn's dress in Roman Holiday, I heard.  After the ceremony she changed into a stunning red ball gown with the full skirt gathered at the hip with a diamond brooch, and a short tan fur jacket around her shoulders.  Here was the menu for our 5-course meal, all of which was some of the most delicious food I have ever tasted in my life:

Smoked Salmon filled with King Crab on Water Cress with Quail Egg, Caviar, and Basil Oil

Wild Mushroom Soup with Chives Cream

Orange Sherbet with Orange Zest

Grilled Beef Tenderloin Steak and baked Mero (a delicious type of fish steak) in White Wine Sauce

Chef's Special Vegetables (grilled zhuccini, eggplant, and asparagus)

Fried Black Rice

Opera Cake and Vanilla Sauce

Coffee or Tea

Served with Bread and Red Wine

In my opinion, it was the perfect way to spend a Saturday.

Well the last two days were pretty rough as I had the flu, but I'm fine now and back at work (gonna try to figure out how to catch up the classes that are now behind a week).  Last Saturday I went hiking at a pretty place (this was the day I got sick) and I put up pictures in a new album for anyone who is interested.