My head hurts AND I have to get up early to travel to the friggin Fulbright conference, but I wanted to take a moment to record my impressions of the Baekje Cultural Festival. Kim Eun Soon took me to Buyeo after work on Thursday and we met Pak Hye Ok, the fourth grade teacher at another school near Hongsan who I met on Tuesday, at my favorite restaurant in Buyeo. Ok, I’ve only been to three (four, if you can count Lotteria as a restaurant), but it’s really good. They ordered ginseng rice for me this time and it was mashisoyo (delicious)! It was the regular rice, which is already cooked with little vegetable bits, topped with crunchy cooked ginseng. After dinner, we went to the festival, which wasn’t really that exciting but maybe we just weren’t there for the good parts. It was not at all what I expected, in that everything was very modern and cheesy—very American in a way, actually. There were silly little trinkets everywhere and I was left wondering where the Baekje “culture” was. There were some drumming and singing performances that were the highlight, I believe, and I’m sure those were “authentic,” but everything else…well, you certainly couldn’t find it 1300 years ago. It was funny, though, because in any other place, it would almost seem like exploitation of the past to make money, but because Korea is so homogeneous, it is everybody’s culture that is being celebrated. Koreans tend to be very protective of and involved in their culture, which is unusual in my experience but strikes me as very much the right way to go about things. In America, it often seems that we are constantly attempting to erase the past in efforts to be “progressive” and “modern” and I think we lose a lot that way. When there are celebrations comparable to this festival, they seem (to me, at least) to be blatant money grabs and not a genuine celebration of history and culture. Maybe I’m just overly cynical when it comes to the mother country, though.
I also enjoyed the time with Eun Soon and Hye Ok. They are both really nice, but a little shy, and want to be friends with me. I am in no position to turn down offers of friendship, especially from nice girls my own age! Hye Ok, by the way, is the same age as me, but I think Eun Soon is probably in her early 30s. I wonder why she isn’t married…she is really pretty, and she is definitely in or nearing the old maid cutoff age. A mystery…anyway, it was a fun time overall, though I did end up getting home super late because there was ridiculous traffic leaving the festival. Like maybe the worst traffic I’ve ever been in, except Bonaroo.
Today was just a normal day in comparison. I toyed with the idea of coming home early to celebrate my last free Friday afternoon, but I decided it was a better idea to write some lessons for the week we come back to school so I don’t have to do them during my vacation. My teaching schedule was changed yet again and now I am teaching 4 full hours of the English Chat Class. I am not happy about it at all, for several reasons. First, now I only get to teach kindergarten, first, and second grades once a week, and they are some of my favorite students! Second, I think it is stupid to have two back-to-back periods of an extracurricular English class. They are only elementary students, for goodness sake! I am supposed to be instilling a love of English in them, but that’s going to be hard to do when I am also required to (in my opinion) overload them. I do understand that they want to get the most of having me here, but really…I will be teaching the fifth and sixth grade students for a total of 3 periods on Fridays! It’s redick!!! I think it’s the plan that was handed down from the authorities above in Buyeo, though, so it probably has little to do with me. I think it’s a district-wide plan, which makes it even stranger. I really think it should be two classes—low and high level—and each once a week. Otherwise, they are going to hate me and I will resent them right back for making my life harder. I already do, actually.
Tomorrow, I am Gyeongju and Fulbright conference bound. Here’s hopin’ it won’t be as bad as I am expecting…