I had some strange experiences during my first few days. The food, naturally, was a little unusual. I tried Haemultang – an eel soup with various fishy side dishes around (including pieces of crab that require you to bite through the shell to get to the meat). I tried Kimchee (pretty much the favourite, if not the national dish of Korea) which is, when it comes down to it, just a spicy cabbage – these weren't, to be frank, my favourite meals in the world. However, the deajagalbe (completely the wrong spelling), which is a pork dish, cooked over hot coals in the middle of your table (again with side dishes – everything comes with a million side dishes) and some kind of sushi-esque (gum-bap or something – feel free to correct me if you know!) meal that I had last night were gorgeous.
Attitudes toward me have been completely mixed as well – the Korean people appear to have a complete love-hate relationship with westerners; I always expected to fell like the proverbial alien here, to experience what life is like 'in the minority', but it hasn't really felt like that. Of course everyone around me looks different and is speaking a different language (I've found it incredibly rare to come across another westerner without it being pre-arranged), and you do most certainly get some funny stares and see people talking about you, but there's no real sense of animosity or of being ostricised.
In fact very often the attitudes toward me are completely opposite – a couple of people have now, in the short period that I have been here, already approached me in the street purely to talk to me (to be a little more cynical, this is generally just for a free English lesson, but I am still new enough here for it to be nice), and as I mentioned earlier people in shops, taxis etc appear to be more than eager to help you out, whether you are buying or not. At my school every day is some kind of Christmas (note: Christmas will not exist for me this year – I will miss it sooo much!), as I very often get back to my desk from teaching and there will be some kind of gift for me – a yoghurt, some fruit, mints etc. today I walked in and found some coffee (they mix their instant coffee with sugar here, and I moan about so much that one of my co-teachers brought some without!), earl grey tea and ziplock bags. In fact purely in the time that I've been writing this blog I've received a load of mints, a chocolate cake thing, a bowl of fruit, some sweet fruit crisp breads, pizza, a carton of milk, some soup and two notebooks. (and believe it or not I am actually losing weight…) All compliments of the co-teachers and the lady who works behind me but can't speak a word of English but regularly comes bearing gifts, proffered with a smile and a bow. Imagine that in England!
It is not of course all positive though – there is a vein of wariness and even contempt for westerners here – they are very often seen as drunken womanisers (a very fair summation, if you ask me), and you will very often draw looks if you start walking around with a tin in your hand…(and I would say a woman on your…but, well I wouldn't know about that!)
I have managed to make a couple of mistakes since I've been here of course (once for offering someone money, MONEY for pete's sake), but to again quote one of two stooges, 'Yeah, you'll upset people without even knowing it all the time – get used to it' (that'd be Hannah). The cultural differences here are certainly many, and very often subtle…but there's only so many times I'm going to get away with the 'I'm just an ignorant westerner' argument…
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