back on the road again

It's been a whirlwind of a week, and weekend, but here I am in the Incheon (Seoul) airport on Christmas Eve, waiting for my flight to Bali. There's been a 7-hour delay, and I'm missing the two books that didn't make the packing cut something fierce, but honestly I can't remember being more content in months.

It was a sprint to the finish at work, a week of both angelic and hellion children ... and not much in between. Getting through it - especially Saturday school with the little ones - is something of a blur, but by 6:30 Saturday I was scrunched into the Village shuttle amid animated Tagalag (Filipino) conversation, headed toward civilization and adventure. Spent a fabulous night on the town - my first since moving to the mountain - in the company of the best tour guide/translator/cultural ambassador, aka a native friend, and caught a few hours of remarkably comfortable sleep on the overnight commuter train to Seoul. (Tourist note: in Daegu, saw a great jazz/blues band of young Korean guys at a fun club called "That," then hit an upscale bar called "AU.") Then I rambled around in the big city for a few hours, sweet-talking my way into the newsroom of one of the major dailies (which ended up being dead, being as it was Sunday), hit the Namdaemun market and ended up walking in dress boots from there to the Seoul Tower (a mostly vertical jaunt), which wasn't my brightest idea ever, but definitely memorable. Finally dragged myself over to the hostel I'd booked near the airport and found a fairly ramshackle building but clean, comfortable, private rooms/bathrooms, a kind couple running the place, and a value that absolutely can't be beat - I definitely recommend the Incheon Airport Backpackers Hostel.

Then this morning I met a fellow passenger for my Bali flight on the shuttle over to the airport, a worldly Korean doctor from the Gwang-ju area, and the airport time has been pleasant enough, chatting away for the past few hours about language, food, culture and travel.

It's the first big trip I've done, and it's great feeling like I'm finally getting to what I came abroad for ... or at least one of the major reasons - travel. But being out and about has also made me realize I'm feeling more at home in Korea - that comfortable sense of knowing transit lines, landmarks, enough phrases to get around, good friends, and the revelation that I'll miss those Korean staples kimbap and kimchi a little in the next three weeks. Even the markets don't overwhelm me the way they used to. Plus it reminds me of all the things I love about this country - mostly the kind and friendly people, and the perks of being American here (though there's baggage with that, too, but I'll save all that for another post).

And it's vacation, one in which I'll be seeing old friends at the day's end and heading to holidays on the beach. So call me Pollyanna, but I swear life couldn't be better. How did I get lucky enough to be born where I did, when I did, to whom I did, to afford me the opportunity to do this? Thinking on it too much puts me dangerously close to guilt-trip territory, especially the more I see all the lifestyles in the world, but today I feel like it's the best Christmas present ever.

^_^a

You know how sometimes computers screw up certain characters - like when apostrophes become question marks and accents turn into ampersands? For the longest time, I thought there must be something really buggy between Korean computers and American ones.

Whenever I got e-mails from Korean friends^^ (in English^.^), all sorts of strange marks would appear. Dashes, periods, underscores, random letters ... and tons and tons of carets. (You know, those things that sound like the crunch-munch-bunny kind - but are actually upside-down-Vs: ^). @.@ But then I noticed them on instant messages -_- and when someone would send me a text message on my cell phone. -.-

I just couldn't figure it out. (?_?) Could it honestly be a mass electronics bug? o.O Maybe Koreans decorate their text with symbols like they decorate their products with English words. O_o Maybe I just knew a lot of typo-prone people. @_@ Maybe their keyboards were setup in such a way that they couldn't help but hit a bunch of odd things. -_-;; Maybe they were politely cussing me out. \(>o<)/ And just what was this obsession with the caret? ^_^a Pretty sure it wasn't about beta carotene. OTL

Well the mystery was solved the other day (*´?`*) when I finally got around to asking one of my Korean friends what the heck was going on over on the keyboard there.

You know that ever-present :) that people use to show they're joking? Academics call them "emoticons," but the more common term is "smiley faces" or just "smileys." There are a few theories about where they developed, but basically computer people realized their value sometime around 1980 to clarify written messages that could otherwise be misinterpreted.

Well Americans use only a handful with any regularity, and they generally revolve around a face torqued 90 degrees counterclockwise. So, for example:

• :) traditional smiley
• =) another version
• :( sad face
• ;) wink
• :P raspberry (tongue out)
• :-) smiley with nose

Turns out Koreans use an entirely different set. The main difference is that their emoticons tend to run vertical and emphasize the "eyes" - quite frequently written as those durned carets. In fact, the classic Korean smiley is actually a pair of smiling eyes only: ^^. Variations on that theme include:

• ^-^
• ^.^
  
• ^__^
• ^ㅡ^

(Not sure about the nuances of these.)

But unlike Americans, Koreans are far from content with a piddley handful of emoticons. And once I hit up my old friend, Google, for more on the subject, I realized it's more than just a collection of symbols - it's a veritable artform. (This is the land of anime and manga, afterall.)

Anyway, here's a compilation of some of the Korean emoticons I've seen in everyday use as well as some of the more creative ones I've happened upon. You can check out my sourcelist at the bottom of this post for more. I've put them in blue so the list is clearer to read, but they're typically just in black and white. Also, it appears that the meaning of several of these is fairly subjective, so don't take this list as any sort of authority, just some examples.

• ~_~ = content
• >_< or >.< = angry
• ^_^a = scratching head
• =^.^= = blushing
• \(>o<)/ = shouting/angry
  
• (^o^) = laughing or excited
• (*^^*) = shyness
• ;_; or ㅠ_ㅠ = crying (the second one is made with a Korean letter, but it can also be done with English capital T's in some fonts)
• -_-;; = cold sweat or unbearable (basically something that is a source of stress); can also be embarrassment or chagrin
  
• (-.-)Zzz = sleeping
• o_O or o.O or any variation of this = surprise
• ^_~ or ^.* = wink
• @.@ or @_@ = dizzy or confused
• (?_?) = perplexed, wondering about something, "What?"
  
• -_- or -.- = something like "hmm" or just no emotion
• ~~~~>_<~~~~ = extreme weeping
  
• \(^_^)/ or \(^o^)/= cheers, "Hooray!"
• (>^_^)> <(^_^<) = hugging
• OTL = frustration (it's a person banging his/her head on the ground - the O is the head, the T is the arms, the L is the legs)
  
• (*´?`*) = sigh
  
• (^(oo)^) = a pig
• @}-;--`-- = a rose
• >(/////)< = a candy

Here's the best one, though ...

()()() ()()()
(-(-(-.-)-)-)

... a rabbit gang.

Know any other good ones? Feel free to leave 'em in the comments.

SOURCES: Dave's ESL Cafe forum, http://blogger.xs4all.nl, Locomote.org, Lets Learn Korean

it doesn't get any better than this

OK, so I just hit the high point of teacherdom: my first letter from a former student. Probably my only one, being as we are now subject teachers and I only see the students for 90 minutes a week each, rather than having them all week long, so not much time to form any sort of bond. (Not that I'm complaining - subject teaching makes far more sense with our constantly changing schedule, and is much more manageable.)

So this letter is on the traditional cutesy Korean paper decorated with flowers and hearts and nonsequitor, nongrammatical English ("Today is happy day." "Good things might come to those who wait." "Welcome to Flower garden"). Korean products, including clothes and stationary and mugs, tend to use English letters/words as decor rather than for meaning, and some of it is pretty funny.

The letter is from my one student, probably about 12 years old, who cut her finger in art class (no more big scissors). Her English name is Tracy, and she plays a traditional double-reed Korean instrument sometimes written as "piri." Apparently her brother plays it, too. It should give you some insight into how fantastic and cute the kids can be, and how they tend to talk very dramatically for humor and emphasis. I've tried to preserve the spellings, capitalization and spacing in typing it here.

Hello, Kristin marsh teacher?
I'm Tracy. How are you? I'm fine.
I want to see you. My finger is ok. Teacher, thank you. I'm crying. And I'm sad. Because, I miss you. I'm crying every day. I miss you, teacher!
Oh, dear. Soon, my brother's concert. It's the Pili. There is Donga shaping [shopping] 10thfloor.
Good, bye - Kristin marsh teacher!

- Tracy -

I'm prety. You are prety.
I'm kind. But. You are very kind.
I miss you.

Isn't that the best thing ever? :)

the holidays a la Asia

I'm sitting in my dorm room on a cold December night, looking out on our resident fuselage, listening to some mellow blockbusters on MySpace music, thinking about careers and tomorrow's lesson plans, and trying corn ice cream. It's not as weird as you'd think - kinda like frozen creamed corn.

We've got our first official batch of five-day kids - about 45 from a private school or schools in a more rural region northeast of Daegu. That's 4 or 5 kids per class. Last week it was 18 in each class, and we've had all manner of daycamps, overnights, half-days and three-day sessions, so we've really seen the gamut. They're all awesome, though, and what makes everything worth it. Tensions have been high recently over various things, but these kids are the best part of everything, and what make me thankful every day, if not quite every class (We are considering getting "I Survived Group 12" T-shirts after one particular crew), that I took this job. They're just fun and creative and goofy and crack themselves up with these jokes that aren't even funny, but it totally cracks me up that they find them so hysterical.

The holiday season has fallen here, too, which I'm coming to find means giant anime-style Santas and who knows what other Christmas creations parading the streets, a plethora of cooked-batter streetfoods, and the traditional merchandise explosion you find back home. Oh and the karaoke version of "White Christmas" is about the best thing I've seen yet - one long string of pictures of Korea's verdant hills and Buddhist temples. Not one flake of snow.

Mostly it's been cold and dry and rather sunny, but this weekend was one miserable long drizzle ... the perfect kind for curling up in a downtown coffeehouse with a new book (or three) and watching civilization scuttle by outside, and I definitely indulged. It's strange finding myself reading again - entranced by the bookstore and perpetually in the middle of about six books, just like when I was a kid. I guess that lifestyle of eight-hour days of staring at words is finally relaxing its grip. Now I've just got to figure out what to do with the library I'm amassing.

I get pangs for American holidays and family time every so often - like the other day when I saw pictures of the Iowa Mills' Thanksgiving, or tonight when I told a Korean friend about last year's holiday outing to Kansas City's jazz district. But I'm also looking forward to trying out this whole island holiday thing this year, spending Christmas and New Years on the shores of Bali with good friends from college, now spread around the world.

Oh but I never did quite get my Thanksgiving story put up here ... so the 20 of us Americans at the Village (with the very important help of certain Korean staff) coordinated as traditional a dinner as we could muster the Sunday after the holiday, and I volunteered to do the last-minute shopping, thinking I was being smart to avoid the chaos of climbing over everyone else in the kitchens with all their Korean machinery. Well, the short of it is that I ended up being very much the turkey and having my most fabulous "weird foreigner" moment yet in this country, loaded down with a ridiculous amount of food, answering relentless phone calls and trying to navigate Korean public transportation.

With considerable effort, I had dragged my overladen bags down to the bus stop near the local Costco (a Sam's Club-style warehouse of mostly Western things), but the bus pulled up before I was quite ready with my fare. But I leaped on anyway with all my cargo, much to the amusement of the onlooking passengers and the bemusement of the surly driver. The next bit all sort of happened at once - me fishing for change, one of my bulging bags tumbling down and various Thanksgiving offerings rolling out across the floor of the 739, the bus jolting forward and my shoe sliding off my foot into the stairwell and just barely slipping out the closing door. I don't think anyone else saw the shoe go, and I was quite the wild-haired freakshow there, still digging for a darned 100 won piece and debating the worth of a Size 12 shoe, laden down as I was and sock-footed, two busrides and one walk from home in Asia. To top it all off, my phone started ringing again.

The shoe won out.

Seven blocks later, I had found the coin, collected my things and finally managed to hit the stop button, and all the wide-eyed Korean "aunties" watched me clamber off the bus. I then hobbled back the direction I came, at one particularly poignant moment passing a true bag lady (a rare sight here, but you just can't make up the stuff that happens in real life - no one would believe you). And even in the middle of my "I am ridiculous" haze, I did realize that my lot even at that moment was something to be thankful for, because I was strong enough to huff and puff it back, rich enough to afford a taxi for the last leg of the journey when I had missed the right shuttle, and lucky enough to have an amazing, nostalgic feast waiting for me when I got there.

And I got my shoe, dadgumit.