Basketball

Korean class in the morning, which is fast becoming my favorite (and kinda only) way to meet people. After the lesson some of my classmates and the teachers walked down to the waterfront to play basketball. I haven't played in years, but I think I held my own! It didn't hurt that the Korean girls literally shrieked and ducked whenever someone passed them the ball, so compared to them I was a frickin' WNBA star.

After a few hours everyone sort of scattered. I ended up at the waterfront with three of the teachers. They're all Korean, and they all teach English as volunteers. Their English was great, so I had fun talking to them and shooting hoops.

We walked back into town to have lunch. They introduced me to budaechigae, which is a sort of spicy stew with ramen, udon, ricecakes, onions, potstickers, kimchi, hotdogs, bacon, and spam. It was delicious. Apparently the name comes from the word for "army base." The American GIs stationed in Korea during the war introduced some of their food (hotdogs and spam; way to represent American cuisine), and the Koreans incorporated it into their style of cooking. Awesome.

Two of the teachers peeled off to head home, so then it was just me and Hun-i (who told me that I could call her Honey). I was going to meet Rachael for dinner at eight, so Honey and I killed a few hours having coffee and talking. She's a lot of fun, and we have a lot in common. We commiserated about our bad luck with men: I complained that I can't get a date, and she complained that her mother keeps setting her up on blind dates. Haha.

Talking to Korean women I start to get a real sense of how different our cultures are. Honey studied abroad in Europe, and even had a serious boyfriend there, but she came back when her parents asked her to. We discussed individuality versus obligation to one's family, and the differing expectations on daughters compared to sons.

A more blatant example was when I was talking to one of Kris's colleagues, and she mentioned that she was going to start trying to get pregnant.

"Oh, you want to have a baby?" I said.

"No, I don't," she said without hesitation, "But my husband does, and my mother-in-law does. So I have to."

See, Korea is great, but this is why I wouldn't want to live here.

I met up with Rachael, but as soon as I saw her I knew she was in bad shape. She looked miserable and exhausted, with a bad cold. I was disappointed because when she invited me to have dinner with her, I was envisioning a group of girls going out, having a little soju, one thing leading to another, ending with us all drunk and in a club/bar/noraebang partying all night. That's what I've been wanting to do since I got here, and I always seem to miss out. I hear about those kinds of nights after the fact.

But I was still happy to hang out with Rachael. Even sick and miserable, she's wonderful. I told her that she didn't have to come out with me if she was so sick, and she said that she would have felt too bad blowing me off. Awww. Over chili cheese fries, we giggled about bad translations, clueless Americans, and racist Koreans.