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Week 42 (Dec 11th to Dec 17th) |
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Sunday Dec 11th,I attended my first-ever Korean wedding this morning. Ally, my Korean co-teacher for the morning, got married today! I was the absolute only foreigner at the wedding: Carey had to go to another wedding, and Ryan and LIndsey don't know Ally well enough yet to go to the wedding.The wedding itself was quite interesting. Weddings here are held in specific wedding halls, and they're usually all-inclusive kind of packages: food, dress, pictures, so on. Pictures are taken before the ceremony of the bride and groom (no bad luck custom), and then the bride sits in a little room outside the hall. All the guests line up to visit with her beforethe wedding, and take pictures. Then everyone makes their way to the hall. There wasn't room for everyone to sit down, so a lot of people (including me) were standing at the back. The mothers of the bride and the groom walk down the aisle first, dressed in traditional Korean hanboks. Then the groom, then the bride. What really surprised me was that people continued talking throughout the whole ceremony (so Korean!) Also highly amusing: the bubble machine! I'm serious, there was a frickin' bubble machine that would periodically spurt out bubbles during the ceremony. I'd been warned that Korean weddings are seriously tacky, but it was still quite a novelty. I'd also been warned to look out for trumpet guns thatshoot streamers at the end of the ceremony, but those were absent at this occasion! I was sorely disappointed! As for the actual content of the ceremony, I have no idea. It was all in Korean. After the ceremony, Ally was whisked away somewhere, and all the guests were sent into the dining hall for a really good buffet meal. After the meal, everyone went home. I don't know where the bride and groom were at this point.The whole thing took about 1 hour, which was such a relief! I was getting kind of tired of being stared at cause I was the only white girl there! |
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Tuesday Dec 13th, Ally, my Korean co-teacher, is currently on her honeymoon in the Maldives. Sue made arrangements to have a substitute teacher come in, but as it turns out, the sub couldn't make it for Tuesday and Wednesday. Rather than finding someone else, Sue decided to make my life hell for two days, and give me double classes for the WHOLE DAY. What pisses me off even more is that the other Korean teachers have lots of spares in the mornings, one of them could easily cover a class or two. Instead, I'm getting screwed by having to teach double the amount of kids and classes for two days, without so much as a thank you. I'm bitter. |
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Thursday Dec 15th, Tonight I went out to dinner with Ryan and Lindsey and Carey for some dak-galbi, which is chicken done on the grill in front of you, mixed with all kinds of vegetables and lots of red pepper paste. It was my first time having it, and it was delicious. I can't believe that I've been here almost 10 months, and never tried it! |
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Friday Dec 16th, My intentions for the weekend are to hole up in my apartment and work on nothing but singing and writing and arranging. I'm frustrated that there are so many demands on my time here, from work to social obligations. I feel like I never have time to really work on my music anymore, and I feel unprepared for March right now. At least in Toronto when I was working full-time at Starbucks, I had access to lots of live jazz, and I had lots of people to play jazz with. Here, I work much longer days, I don't have anyone to play jazz with, and I have no access to live music (unless it's me who's singing!). Plus I really do seem to have a lot of demands on my time. I rarely have a free night to myself these days. It's really hard to go from university where I was singing and practising and writing for like 9 hours a day to now, where I can barely squeeze in an hour of really effective practising |
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Saturday Dec 17th, My intentions for the weekend didn't stick today. I did get some practising done, but I also ended up going out. First, my favourite pair of jeans is ripped beyond wear, so I had the task of jeans-shopping this afternoon, which was quite unpleasant. It can be difficult to find specific sizes here, and a lot of stores don't have anywhere to try on stuff. Plus Korean girls just aren't built with hips and butts, so finding a pair of jeans that actually looked okay on me felt like an overwhelming mission. Then the evening: Ryan and Lindsey had their friends Mark and Miranda here from Ulsan for the night, and needed me to help show them a good time. Our first stop was Commune, just to show them where the party usually starts. Turns out that Phil (my bass player) and Jong Rak (my guitarist) had their blues band gig that night, so I unwittingly got roped into singing with them. I really really didn't want to sing that night, but it's kind of difficult to say no when Phil keeps asking the audience if they want to hear me sing! Our second stop was Gypsy Rock, a big dance club that's popular with foreigners and Koreans. There we met up with Charlotte and Anna. This was Charlotte's first night of dancing since she broke her ankle this summer, so we went all out! The night ended with the "traditional" (for my circle of friends anyway) early morning galbi. It doesn't quite seem real that Char and Anna and Ali are all leaving in a week and a half, just like it didn't seem real that Evan and Jason were leaving. But once they're gone, that whole circle of friends will be split up-- Rob and I will be the only ones left from that crew! Hard to believe, but I guess I'm going to be leaving Daegu really soon too! |
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