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Week 50 - Y2 (Feb 11th to Feb 17th) |
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Tuesday Feb 13th,
I finished a book today, "The Girl in the Picture",
that I bought in Vietnam. It's about the young naked
girl running from the napalm bomb attack in the famous
picture from the Vietnam war. Aside from how horrible
her story is, it made me think about women's roles in
Southeast Asian culture. In Thailand, most families
would rather have daughters, because the sex trade is
so profitable that a daughter can make a family more
wealthy. Hence the large number of "lady boys". In
Vietnam, the women are the breadwinners of the family.
They work in the food shops, doing the tailoring,
sell things in the markets, run the hotels. Men drive
moto-taxis and drink. Kind of a big change from the
generally male-dominated society of Korea. I'm not
sure what's better, working like crazy while raising a
family, and while your husband does pretty much
nothing; or being forced into being a housewife as
soon as you're married off. (Obviously I have a lot
of free time to consider these issues these days)
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Wednesday Feb 14th,
Today, my hagwon students had their final concert for
this term. I was really proud of all 6 of my
students. It's nice to have students who are such a
high level of musicianship. I only wish all of my
students were like this. Two of them are hoping to go
study in the US soon, and I think they'll both
probably get in.
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Thursday Feb 15th,
The last class of the semester. Today I treated my
girls to a listening/analyzing session (they were all
somewhat hungover from their party after the concert),
and they treated me to lunch and coffee. For the
first time, I appreciated the value of being close in
age to my students. I can still understand their
lifestyles (I remember all too well the parties we
would have after concerts!), and it's easy to be
social with them without appearing unprofessional. If
only my PaekChe students were like this too!
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Saturday Feb 17th,
It's Lunar New Year, which is Korea's biggest holiday,
kind of like our Christmas. Anyway, that means that
everyone's got vacation time right now, so I had some
Daegu visitors this weekend. Charlotte, Jenny and
Anna came over on Saturday afternoon. Anna just came
back a month ago, and it was great to see her! It
feels like all of the original "gang" is united again,
albeit slightly spread out over Korea now. We went to
Starbucks in Itaewon (you have NO idea how much I've
been craving lattes for the past 3 weeks), where we
met up with Lee (who som of you might remember as the
first guy I dated in Korea, coincidentally also the
one who annoyed me to no end with his clinginess). I
hadn't seen Lee in almost 2 years, and turns out he's
engaged to a South African girl, and will be moving to
Africa shortly to work on a wildlife reservation!
Talk about cool jobs-- he's going to be minding the
chimpanzees all day long.
We were expecting about 10 people to join us for
dinner, so we made reservations at Petra, this great
Middle Eastern restaurant, also in Itaewon. Stupid
part was that I had to take a cab the 3 blocks. This
sucks! Charlotte, who broke her ankle at the mud
festival a year and a half ago, was awesome. Since
she spent 6 months on crutches; she knows exactly what
I'm going to need and when.
At the restaurant, we met up with Evan and Ali, who
are also visiting, Tristan, Annabelle and Adam. The
food was great, and it was nice to be eating something
other than my own cooking. After dinner, Evan and Ali
went to Hongdae and the rest of us headed to Jenny's
apartment with the intention of watching a movie. We
got distracted by wine, You Tube and conversation
instead, and didn't even manage to start the movie,
which was fine by me-- I'm a little movied-out these
days.
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