Tonight my school's staff and I all went out together to a very tasty duck restaurant here in Seogwipo, which is owned by one of our bus drivers who recently quit because he no longer had enough to do it. To say goodbye, he treated us all to a meal in his restaurant. I've been several times, with my bosses and with friends and they consistently serve a delicious meal of roast duck that is cooked again at your table along with onions, cabbage and mushrooms, which all take on the flavor of the duck oil that naturally cooks out of it. I'm very picky about kimchi, and at the beginning I didn't even like it, but I really started to like it more when I started frying it in this duck oil...then it's so delicious! It's amazing how much its flavor changes in this process. What's even more amazing to me is how normal this way of eating and living has gotten to be for me. Now when I eat out, it seems so normal for me not to have bread or potatoes, to wrap my food in lettuce, to always have rice and some kind of soup (nothing like the western type), and to never have dessert. I'm also now so used to being surrounded by a language that I mostly don't understand, except for the few words or phrases that I can pick up, and in this way I can sometimes figure out what the conversation is about successfully.
This night, while sitting on warm floor heated from beneath, left to my own thoughts since I couldn't understand what was being said (the other teacher translated some things for me, but, I understand that gets tiring after a while, so she usually just did it when something interesting was said). I began to reflect on how my life has changed since I've been in Korea. The night that I arrived in the last week of June of last year, the co-director and his family took me to this very restaurant for my first meal ever in Korea, and I have to say I was totally exhausted and don't remember much except that the meal was strange to me and that the meat and mushrooms got stuck in my teeth. haha. But over time, and it didn't take too long, I learned to love this cozy little duck house, and to appreciate a certain unique quality that it has to offer at a very reasonable price, not to mention that it actually seems quite healthy. And I've grown very accustomed to being surrounded by people speaking only Korean, and am comfortable with it...even though it gets pretty boring after a bit. As conversation during dinner with Koreans doesn't require an active role for me, their voices become a sort of background noise to my own thoughts...when I hear a word or phrase I know, I am snapped back to the conversation momentarily, but quickly it fades again.
My first night here, not only was the duck meal strange to me, but also the language, the mannerisms, and even the sights and smells of my week-long host family's (the co-director's parents) home just next to the restaurant. Every time I catch a whiff of plug-in mosquito repellent oil, I'm immediately drawn back to the guestroom where I stayed before moving into my first home (which of course had a mosquito repellent plug-in in operation due to the fact that it was the rainy season, and concurrently, the height of the mosquito season), I remember waking up at odd hours because of jet lag, I remember the daily cool heavy rains, and going to the five-day market for the first time, and my boss's parents treating me like a small child feeding me milk and bread with jam and Korean pancakes and buying tons of snacks for me while walking around the market, and just thinking to myself in general...and ~in a good way~ what the hell did I get myself into? Other than repelling mosquitoes, that's what that particular smell does to me. Amazing.
I also remember the couple of dinners that all the staff had together when I first came, and how strange and even uncomfortable it was that they talked and talked and talked and all I could do was eat and get lost in my own head. But now it's just normal life, and I find myself thinking...when was it ever different? I'm now used to this lifestyle, this rhythm, to the extremes of the couple of hours a day where I'm intensely surrounded by a wave of happily jabbering children, and to the complete silence by which I'm enveloped during the mornings and evenings when I'm home alone. And then I'm drawn back to the restaurant again, thinking about the gesture by the former bus driver to invite all of us...the directors, the teachers, the secretary, the bus (van) drivers...to have a meal on him, at a place that he clearly takes pride in and shares his time sitting and chatting with his customers, sharing in the soju too (which the men really put away at our table!). Though it really just seemed to be a natural thing for him to do, as he was leaving our school, it was his way of saying "goodbye and thank you for letting me work for you, I hope that we can continue to have a pleasant connection in the future". In Korea, connections are very important, and most of all in a small city like this one. Everyone knows everyone (our secretary is somehow related to the owner, and one of the teacher's husband's brothers was eating in the restaurant too), and it's really important to keep a good image and to maintain amiable connections and relations at all times...even if someone were to piss you off, for example...there is a very tangible and hierarchical structure for interacting socially. It's just funny to me, thinking right now, how normal this all seems to me. And now that the end of my time here is now closer than the beginning, I'm beginning to think about what my life will be like after Korea. When I have a meal with my family back home now, will it seem odd to me? Will I crave the fried duck and vegetables, the rice that's then mixed with the remaining meat and veggies and oil with seaweed and such, and the soo-jae-bee wheat-cake soup that tops it all off? My thought is...definitely so. On both accounts.
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