Halloween and Other Adventures

Allow me to begin with a list of firsts that help to sum up what I have been up to the past few weeks:
- I took attendance in one of my older classes entirely in Korean. I was so proud of myself, and if I butchered their names I specifically chose that class to practice because they are too shy to laugh
- I slept through my subway stop. It was bound to happen at some point, and I am just glad to live so near the end of the line that the mistake costs me 10 minutes tops.
- I had tea with a Korean family. Two actually in the same afternoon (cousins) - we met on teh subway and my minor celebrity status in the area makes me a catch of an afternoon guest. The parents helped to translate for the kids, and we have hiking/dinner plans in the near future.
- I ate pig intestine in a soup called Sundaeguk. The funny thing about food is, when you have no idea what you're eating, you give things a much fairer chance. And it wasn't bad at all really, however now that my mind has caught up it might be a different story!

Somewhere in there it was also Halloween, and Saturday evening saw five Plus Academy women dressed to kill as none other than the Spice Girls, out for a good time with all the other foreigners looking for a little taste of home. We even met a second version of the decade-old pop group on the street! At school, Halloween was an exhausting 3-day affair. I carried a massive jack-o-lantern from class to class that I carved (and afterwards toasted my first very own pumpkin seeds in my new toaster oven) along with a CD player for scary sounds; the sheer volume of photocopied sheets of papers for worksheets, scary stories, crosswords and bingo games could easily have killed a rainforest. I brought candy to each class but my students inevitably wanted to exchange their pieces for bigger and better ones, and once they were hopped up on candy I had even less of a chance to control them than I usually do. Nonetheless we had fun together. One of my classes even told scary stories in Korean with the lights off and though I couldn't understand a word it was totally adorable to listen to them all ooh and ahh at the same time.

This weekend has been great as well: on Saturday night I danced the night away to a wicked DJ called UNKLE at the poshest club I've yet to encounter (it had a swimming pool inside and beers were 12,000 won = $12!). It was here where I was introduced to a new (to me) Korean tradition: we watched in awe as waiters dragged girls, against their will, across the room, so that their male customers could be entertained, hopefully enough to increase their wages. I have come to call times like this 'twilight zone moments', usually classified by convoluted feelings of disbelief, shock, confusion, pure wonder, disgust, curiosity and/or a burning desire to check the calendar and confirm I am indeed in the 21st century. In any case, they always leave me feeling as though the world I have come to know and love holds such a very small place in reality.

I finished my weekend with the Leafs game at the Canadian bar in Itaewon and headed home on the last train to grab some dwenjang jigae, delicious spicy tofu and onion soup. I cannot even begin to describe the high of sitting in a restaurant, alone, ordering for myself, and inevitably striking up a hilarious conversation with my neighbours in broken Konglish (when you essentially speak neither of the two languages yet somehow manage to get your message across) about Canada, Korean food, my marital status, or whatever. This time I met a 7 year old student from my own academy who was apparently having dinner with his mother, grandmother, aunt and 3 cousins/sisters at 12:45 on a Sunday night. And to think I used to find these encounters awkward for their lack of predictability.