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I find myself fitting in, losing the sensations of newness and wonder at the nuances of Korean culture as the weeks slide by. When I first got here it was easy to pinpoint cultural distinctions, to break down the weirdness and put it into words. Now it feels normal.

I wish I had done a better job of cataloguing just what Korea is back in those days, back before my mind was able to bend itself around the strangeness. I'm sure I see a thousand things every day which should be incredibly bizarre and noteworthy, but now I just shrug and watch them pass. I am forming myself to the landscape, fitting my life into this puzzle.

I am changing, I know.

In the end, will I leave unscathed?

The cursor blinks and the question is unanswerable, demands silence and faith and a hearty bite of a chocolatey Pepero stick. It's a waste of time, really, and who could possibly answer it but God or some kind of magical time-traveling ferret? I haven't seen any ferrets in Korea, not yet, and God usually doesn't have much to say in response to selfishly inane doubts about the future. It's almost time to shut up and sleep.

But first, the stream of consciousness brain-dump:

I got to name a kid, finally, and his name is SHETLAND! He can't spell SHETLAND yet but his face is decidedly horse-y. He is a rather abysmal student and I wish I had picked a cooler kid to bestow with such a cool name but hey, at least I named someone SHETLAND. I fear for his future in an English world, because sooner or later someone is going to tell him that he is named after a pony and then he is going to be pissed.

We also named a girl Kandi; Kandi as in Kandi the Stripper or Kandi the Denny's Roller-Service Girl. Kandi got it particularly bad during Halloween, when other kids would gleefully use their rudimentary English as a weapon: "Teacher, teacher! Can I have some KANDI?" They pointed and laughed and we all died a little inside for having turned this little girl's life into a cruel joke. And now she's smarter than they are and I think she's been bringing a kitchen knife to school in her tiny blue backpack.

They have these bath-houses here in Korea, these Jinju-bangs or however the fuck you spell them in their unnative language, and they are a trip and a half. Scads of naked men sit around watching TV, scrubbing themselves and taking showers and roasting their balls off in hot tubs and so forth. They look sideways at Westerners, frowning and ignoring in a passive-aggressive kind of way, and there is just too much penis in this place. It is a penis extravagenza and oh look, there's a kid we teach and his name is SHETLAND. Oh hi, Shetland! Smile and wave, horse child. Smile and wave. This isn't awkward at all!

And then we are out, out of the shrouded nudity and into the common areas where families sit and eat together and pass out peacefully on the floor, looking like some kind of very-successful religious cult in their colour-coded short&shirt sets. Men are blue, women are pink and children are yellow in case you had trouble figuring it out. Relaxation seeps from the floor, from the walls. Every chair vibrates with bone-shattering massage: ten minutes of Happy Time costs a dollar. You can sleep here - for an hour, for the night, for ten thousand nights. You can make this place your home and nobody will ever mistake you for a girl because you are wearing blue.

Straight is chick-chin, left is wen-cho, right is oran-cho. Conversation isn't an option but directions are forever.

Posted by Chris at 10:49 AM >> Commentations (4)