The Hubs makes a contribution....sort of.

So, not to be a downer, but I've been kind of depressed lately. I'm an extremely introverted person, and living in a culture where introversion and the desire to be alone is viewed as verging on having a mental illness, plus my inability to get a decently paying job in any other field but teaching (perhaps the worst career path for an introvert on the planet) is unbelievably, frustratingly exhausting at times. To make things worse, the school The Hubs and I work at has added new classes while removing literally all of our break time. We work with screaming brats for 7-9 hours a day with no breaks, not even lunch. It's enough to make me want to pull my hair out. The Hubs has it worse, he actually has to deal with the screaming parents as well as the screaming brats, and a boss who seems to have some sort of vendetta against him. While The Hubs can deal with the brats (he's an extrovert, and has the ability to find joy in dealing with kids), he has, over time, become fed up with the boss' behavior and being yelled at for things that were never even remotely his fault. He has decided to quit, and his last day is less than a week from now. Much to my dismay. I haven't protested against him quitting, because I know how the boss treats him like shit and I would never want him to stay in that toxic environment. That being said, I can't keep the sadness from showing on my face. The only thing that made my day bearable was him. When kids would follow me around and berate me with questions about my personal life, I could go to his room and find solitude and peace. If I was upset in the middle of the day, he would smile at me and make me laugh. Now, I feel like I'm being sucked into a black hole with no way out.

  But enough of being depressing. Today, when I went to The Hub's room to escape the hoard of children, He cheered me up by drawing a funny little rendition of me on the overhead projector with ms paint. The Korean he wrote is an inside joke of ours, it means "go inside". Here you have it, The Hubs' first contribution to the blog! Sort of.

He made me look so Asian... haha

Korean skin care

Korean skin care is...for lack of a better word, intense. If you ever wondered why or how Eastern Asians seem to stay young for so long, skin care can be a big factor. Korean skin care in particular is well known for its range of products as well as potency. In fact a large number of the Chinese an Japanese tourists found shopping in Korean duty free shops can be seen carrying large bags of what is typically facial lotions (and rice cookers, but that's another post entirely).

I want YOU..

..to vote in the Yeobo! facebook poll! Let me know what you would like to see me write about! http://www.facebook.com/kwifey

New years and the river of cooking oil

  It's that time of year again, here in Korea. The markets are packed to the bursting point with ahjummas yipping about and young women coming into their role as daughters-in-law, scrutinizing over the best quality ingredients for their Lunar New Year ceremonies. Among the chaos, you can sometimes even find a man or two. Typically, these men, if they are not there simply to carry the bags, are there to buy gift sets for their relatives, or fellow employees, or both. It is not uncommon to see people with their carts stacked full with the boxed sets. These sets come in many varieties, some including bathing products or makeup, some being alcoholic beverages, some being canned food, and others even including through-the-roof expensive fresh herbs and roots such as ginseng. The two most popular, and not surprisingly, least expensive sets being the shampoo/soap set and the spam/cooking oil set.



an advertisement for the gift sets from the Homeplus website

  On Chuseok last year as well as today, the last day of work before the new year, our (the Hubs and my) employer gave us spam sets. I love spam more than a normal person really should, so I'm always quite happy with this gift. However, considering that in America spam has a bit of a stigma around it as being a poor man's last resort, it struck me as just a tad odd the first time I encountered such sets. Spam is really expensive in Korea; the small half-cans can cost upwards of 4 bucks a pop. Even the off brand kinds are only a few cents cheaper. Which is why such gift sets usually include a little filler to make it seem like there's more in the box than there really is. This filler is almost always cooking oil. Canola, grape seed and on very rare occasion, olive oil. Now, this would be all fine and dandy, most people do use cooking oil on a near-daily basis, but these sets almost never come with less than 3 bottles. "Whats wrong with 3 bottles of cooking oil?" you might ask. Well, nothing really. Exept the fact that nearly everyone is buying and giving these sets.

   Let me paint a picture for you. The Hubs and I use MAYBE one bottle of cooking oil in a span of 6 months, and that's including making fried battered things. So at an average of 2 bottles per year, after recieving one gift set, we're still surplus 1 bottle. Okay fine. BUT, The Hubs and I don't recieve one set. Our employer gives us two. That puts us at a surplus of 4 bottles. HOWEVER this is not the end, we also recieve such  sets from an average of 2 of The Hubs' friends. Surplus is now at 10 bottles. Furthermore, this is PER holiday. With 2 holidays per year, approximately 4 sets per holiday, that's 8 boxes a year, 24 bottles, we only use 2, so our surplus, PER YEAR is around 22 bottles.  We're practically swimming in the stuff. But I can't really complain, because somewhere in there is delicious spam.

Incase you thought I was kidding, here's photographic evience. The crapy iPod snapshot depicts exactly one third of our current supply of cooking oil. I wasn't going to be bothered with digging the rest out. 6 bottles pictured, 6 bottles we just recieved and haven't taken out of the boxes, and 6 bottles we left at our old apartment. And the Lunar New Year festivities are only beginning, so there might yet be more to add to the pile. Eep.

I feel fat just looking at it

 

   Happy Seollal (lunar new year) everyone! 새해복 많이 받으세요! I wish happiness and luck to you in the new year!

Korean Slang

Hello, all! Long time no write, I apologize. Things have been hectic here, with lots of planning for the future, the holidays, work and all of that other stressful adult stuff. But I'm back, and I finally found some time to sit down and write, so I thought I would talk about a couple Korean slang phrases that I find...interesting, as a foreigner.

  The first one is '날로 먹으려고 했지?' (Rom.: Nallo meoguryeogo haetji?) This literally means "You were planning on eating it raw, weren't you?"

Appetizing.

   What the phrase is actually saying is that the person it is directed towards was trying to take the easy way out, or to put no effort into something. I had heard this phrase before, but to my foreign ears, I had mistaken the '날로' (raw) for '난로' (heater) and all this time I had taken it to mean that someone was just blowing hot air. It wasn't until yesterday when The Hubs and I were talking to our students about their test that I realized I was wrong. One student said she hadn't studied, and The Hubs replied with this phrase. I was confused and asked about it. Now I know.

  The second phrase is one that sounds VERY strange to English speakers. It is "애먹었다" (Rom.: Aemeogeodda) Which literally means "I ate a baby."

Is it just me, or is there a trend forming here?

   If my co-teachers hadn't explained this one for me, I don't think I would have ever figured out what it could have meant...I mean really, what could eating a baby be a metaphor for, besides something horrific and/or disturbing?  Turns out it's meaning is pretty innocent. It is said when one has gone through a stressful ordeal, such as a big project at work, a tight deadline, or something of the sort. Say The Hubs comes home from a long day at work, his boss chewed him out, the printer broke when he needed to print out some important documents, and to top it off, he nearly had an accident on the way home. He looks beat, so I ask what happened. He could potentially reply, "Man...I ate a baby today!"

Isn't slang fun?

The First Son

  Korea still has very Confucian values interlaced within the modern culture. One such example being the importance of the first son. The first son and his wife are the primary caregivers for the rest of the son's family, including his parents, be they capable or incapable of taking care of themselves. The pressure put on the first son and his wife can be so great, that now, in the midst of their own sort of feminist revolution, many younger Korean women say that that would never even consider marrying a first son.
 
   I was clueless as to why they would say that until I came to marry a first son myself. The Hubs is not only the first child from his parents, but among the many children within the rest of the family, he is the eldest male. The Hubs' father passed away several years ago, and since then all of the pressure has been on him to bring honor and give care to the rest of the family. Now that we are married, the pressure is on both of us, though  admittedly not as bad as more strict traditional families. Being from the nation of marital and familial equality, adjusting to the Korean way of doing things has been kind of tough for me. Here, I am expected to do whatever The Hubs and his family tell me to do, be it cook, clean, work, or jump through hoops like a show tiger (okay, not the last one). As for The Hubs, he is expected to take care of all the big decisions for the family, and provide financial support for the two of us as well as The Mother-In-Law. My inner American feminist was getting quite fed up with being bossed around recently, and The Hubs and I got in a fight about it. Turns out, I didn't understand Korean culture quite as well as I thought. Our fight ended in a heartfelt conversation that really opened my eyes to just how much stress The Hubs is under. It was the first time I've ever seen The Hubs cry. 

    I've learned a lot from watching and being a part of a Korean family. I'm learning how to be responsible and humble, in the Korean sense of the word. But most of all, that marriage is not easy, and takes work, but is tremendously, wonderfully rewarding when you work together as a team to overcome (sometimes cultural) hurdles.

Konglish

  Korean usage of English words/phrases is often on target, but sometimes even the well used English is pronounced somewhat....oddly. For example, the children I teach for some reason, have trouble pronouncing the S sound when it comes at the end of a word. So one day, we were reading from the book and as they read, I kept hearing the wrong thing. They kept saying, "It's a tail from my toy whore." Maybe I just have a dirty mind...Anyway, the original text was "It's a tail from my toy horse." The kids weren't completely wrong, it was just their difficulty with pronouncing that pesky S. As such, sometimes plurals become singular, and things can get a little lost on translation, if you will.

   Well, something similar keeps happening when I turn the TV on. There is a car commercial currently running here in Korea for a car line, I believe it's name is PYL, from Hyundai. The first time it came on, I was dusting and didn't see it, I heard it. The song in the background sang out the lyrics to the PYL theme song, which to my ears said, in a very condescending, fake-happy tone, "You....Eunuch!" I spun around to see what the heck kind of commercial such an oddly upbeat accusation of castration could be attached to, to find innocently: a car commercial....Hmm. I put together that they meant to say 'Unique' but the pronunciation, to me, at first, seemed slightly muffled. In all honestly, eunuch and unique are so dangerously similar in pronunciation, that I can't really blame them.

It's just really hard to get out of your head once you've heard it the wrong way, you know? It didn't help that a few days later 2 boys were singing the song in class. It was tough not to laugh.