real korean people

Real Korean people are actually not uncommon here. (Duh.) And I've actually got a number of Korean friends that are students in the international summer school, but friday night some friends and I went out with some new real Korean people in Seoul that are not attached to the international program, which was kind of different. Debra, Anna, Azusa (whom you haven't met yet), and I rode a bus to Seoul and met Joseph and He-won for supper. Then we walked around a little, had ice cream, walked a little more, and then they helped us find the right bus home and off we went.

This is the four girls, Azusa, me, Anna and Debra, from left to right. Azusa is Japanese, but she has lived many places. Her father is in the military, and so she lived in Japan when she was young, then moved to Bahrain for a while, then lived in Washington D.C. a little while, then somewhere in California, then back to Japan, and maybe some other places in between that I'm not remembering. She went to five different high schools, with four of them in the last two years. Her English is excellent, with so little accent that I at first thought she was an ethnic Japanese American, but no. She said that she had studied English a little bit in Japan when she was young but hated it and quit, and actually picked it up mostly while she was in Bahrain because the only school to send her there was an international school that was run in English. I am surprised that her accent is that good, starting that late; I think from the times I've met Ayumi Fukuda, if you're a reader that knows her, that Azusa's accent is much less than Ayumi's, and Ayumi came to the states at a fairly young age.

Next are Joseph and He-Won, in that order. Joseph is Debra's friend. He is the brother of a girl who is studying in Maryland and lives in an apartment downstairs from Debra's. He studied for one semester in Maryland at the same school as Debra and his sister, and now he lives and works in Seoul. He-Won is Azusa's friend, and I didn't get the story of how they met, but I'm sure she found him somewhere in her many moves; besides, she has actually visited Korea briefly before. All Korean males have to serve two years in the military, and he finished his a year or two ago, so perhaps they met through that somehow. He is currently interviewing for jobs in and around Seoul.

Joseph and He-Won picked out a good local restaurant for us for supper. They ordered for us, which was a little odd to me because I don't think I've ever let a guy order for me in my life except for Daddy, but naturally I can't order for myself any better in Korean. It wasn't weird, though, because it was a meal that gets served in the middle of the table that everyone eats from. In Korea, eating is very communal. Usually you have your own rice dish, and you get a small bowl you can use to set things in while you cut them into smaller pieces or let them cool from a hot serving dish, but you don't get a dinner plate that you put your own portion of food on and then eat from. Well, sometimes you can order an individual meal that comes on its own plate, but you always share side dishes unless you go out to eat by yourself. Anyway, everybody takes their bites straight from the serving dishes, from chopsticks to mouth and back to another dish. (Unless you are me and afraid of starving, in which case you use the big spoon that they give you for soup. I am trying valiantly to use the sticks effectively, but it's not going very well most of the time, and about twenty different people have given me instructions, and every single one has been different. I give up when I am very hungry and have already dropped a piece or two of kimchee before I could get it to my mouth. Fear not; if you ever come to Korea and need to use the spoon to get by, no one will make fun of you, and if you look obviously foreign like I do, occasional waitresses will even dig up a fork for you.) Korean meals, depending on their exact nature, are sometimes a personal plate for you and sometimes a big pot of meat and vegetable on a grill or in a skillet that you serve yourself from as described above. Then you always get a variety of small side dishes, from three to eight or ten of them depending on how fancy the place is. The side dishes include kimchee, Korean coleslaw, pickled yams, fried cucumbers, eggs cooked around pieces of fish, and a variety of other things. There are no rules about what's standard in side dishes except for the kimchee, which everyone eats with everything, including breakfast. I didn't take a picture of this meal, but I think I have an earlier one of a meal like this that I'll try to attach. This meal was pieces of pork that cooked on little grills on the table. You took a piece of pork with your chopsticks (or spoon), dipped it in pepper sauce and/or salt if you wanted, then wrapped it in a piece of lettuce with pieces of kimchee or slaw or any kind of side dish you wanted to add. Then you wrapped the lettuce up all the way and ate it with your hands. It was extra delicious, mmmmm.

The guys taught us some interesting and useful things about table manners in Korea. In Korea, you never pour your own drink (well, you're not supposed to, but if you're a dumb american among other dumb foreigners, it is easy to forget and try to take care of yourself). You pour other people's drinks for them, and then they take the water pitcher and pour for you. When you pour for someone else, you always use your right hand (left hand is very disrespectful even if you are lefthanded; kids get pressured from a very young age not to exhibit signs of lefthandedness), and if you are being very polite and formal, you use touch your left hand to your right arm, supporting it at the elbow. When someone pours for you, you also always use your right hand to hold the cup, and for extra politeness you can either support your right hand with your left or hold your cup with both hands. You never set your glass on the table for someone to pour into. You also never hold your glass in your right hand to recieve a drink while holding a half-finished lettuce wrap in your left hand, which I tried; no double-fisting. It seems like they also told us things that did not have to do with drinks, but I didn't take notes and I'm afraid I don't have any immediate tidbits for you on food etiquette. All of us girls made mistakes about at least one thing, like my lettuce-holding. Joseph and He-Won were very nice to us, telling us clearly what was wrong and what was the proper way to do it. Normally a Korean would never comment on an impolite action; they were clearly making an effort to pleasantly educate us, and it was very nice of them to tell us these things so we'll know next time.

By the way, one thing about Korea that's sort of pertinent here is that trash cans are very difficult to find in public places. There are never trashcans sitting around, and yet there is no litter. I thought perhaps Koreans just have no trash, but Dave told me last week that it's because it is rude to eat in front of other people here. You don't need a place to throw away your hamburger wrapper because you'd never get a hamburger and then walk away eating it was you went; you'd eat it right there, close to where you bought it, and throw away your trash in the same place before you left. Except it wouldn't be a hamburger, it would be a kabob of some sort or something like that. So now I know not to get doughnuts downstairs at the hospital and eat them on the way back to class, but that's a pity because I really really am enjoying the occasional doughnut here. Comfort food, you know.

And while I'm on the subject of things that are hard to find in public places, there are no paper towels in restrooms here. I've seen them in 3 or 4 places on this whole trip. They don't have electric hand dryers either. This is just a country full of people with wet hands. Also, they do not have napkins for laps. When they have napkins at all, it's little square napkins like you set your drink on in the states, and you just dab your fingertips on them.

Then we walked just a little bit around the area, went in a couple of shops. Debra and Anna bought a couple of bootlegged dvds. Seoul at night is all lit up. The area we were in was much sleeker and less busy-looking as far as the businesses went than most of urban Korea that I've seen so far, though it was packed with as many people. A lot of the cities remind me of what I saw of Hollywood some few years ago, busy and dirty. This was more like New York but clean and new, with tall walls of buildings lining the streets.

Then we went to an icecream shop, which was amazing. I'm not sure how well you will be able to tell in the picture of the place, but it was cavernous, like a big cafeteria, and it was packed. The boys sat us down to save a table and went and ordered the ice cream for us. It was lucky that they ordered, because we would have come back with single scoops in cups. What they came back with immediately was a small round buzzer like you get in restaurants at home that tells you when it's time for you to be seated. It took a while for it to go off, and when it did, they returned with three dishes of absolutely amazing stuff. It was soft serve on top of fresh fruit on top of snowcone-like flavored ice. The green dish pictured also had a type of sweet red beans in it. It would never in my life have occurred to me to put ice cream on top of beans, but it was good (believe it or not). The second picture of the dishes is after we mixed them all up to get them ready to eat, so that every spoonful had some of everything in it. He-Won said I mixed ice cream better than Azusa; congrats me. All three were different, but they were all really really good, and definitely more exotic and more fun than a single scoop in a cup. The guys said it would be their treat, so I have no idea what a dish like that costs, for those interested in prices here.

Then we shopped a little more and went home. The line for the bus went for a whole city block, but the buses coming to that stop were arriving mostly empty, so many people were able to load at once and it didn't take too awfully long to get one. We got to the head of the line just barely too late to catch one bus, but that worked out well because it meant we all got seats on the next one. We rode standing the whole way down to Seoul. They pack as many people into things as they can in Korea, with a different notion of how much personal space you actually need, so it is not uncommon to have lots of people standing for long times on public transportation. Elevators are really ridiculous for that. Claustrophobic people should perhaps beware of Asia, but actually I think they'd do better to just get over it. Probably easier said than done, but Asia is a whole different world and everyone would do well to come try it on for size. It's size small, is all.