how to eat small bones

Today was the second day of my five-day weekend. I only teach first and second graders; the first graders are on an excursion to Jeju Island, and the second graders have some sort of camping trip/training, thus I found myself with no classes Wednesday through Friday. I had hopes to take advantage of this break and take a trip within Korea, maybe up north to my friend Rachel's town, but it turned out not to be a good weekend for that. Thus I am still here in Suncheon, trying to put off starting my fifth or sixth novel of the past three weeks, and with plans to hike with Rachel next weekend, at a mountain near Jeonju.

Today actually turned out to be pretty eventful. I woke up intending to visit school, though I'd gotten permission from the vice-principal to not come in. Even though I only teach twenty hours a week, teachers are expected to come to school whether or not they have classes, and I am generally at school from 8:30 am to 6:00 pm, even though I never have more than four hours of class a day. On Tuesday I'd made plans with some third grade girls to go out and do something not this weekend, but next weekend. The third graders have pretty good English (third graders are the equivalent of high school seniors in the U.S.), and a small group of them has gotten into the habit of coming by my desk and chatting during breaks. Now that my travel plans had changed, I wanted to see if I could reschedule with them and go see a movie or norebang (karaoke) this weekend instead of next.

When I told my host mother (who is also a teacher at the school) my intentions, she told me she could call the school and talk to one of them, so that I wouldn't have to go. Luckily, I remembered one of their names, almost--Oo Jong (though I remembered it as Eun Jong). Oo Jong had the foresight to tell me that her name meant friendship in Korea, which helped me remember as much as I did. I find Korean names hard to remember in general, though hopefully that will improve in time.

My host mother called up Mr. O, the homeroom teacher for all the third graders, and a nice man who took me out to eat my first week in Suncheon, and asked to speak to Eun Jong. After Mrs. Lee reminded me repeatedly of what Oo Jong's name actually was, I spoke to the student.

"We have a test in two weeks," she said, a little woodenly. "Sorry. We can't make it. Maybe we play after."

"Oh," I said, sensing something a little strange. They'd already made plans to hang out with me within the next two weeks (and had been extremely excited when I'd suggested it). And they probably didn't just hear of this exam. "Okay," I said. "See you later."

I hung up feeling bad, wondering if maybe I'd gotten them into an awkward situation. I didn't think the school would object to me spending time with students outside of school, but high school students in Korea, especially third years, have a lot of pressure to study constantly. On Tuesday the girls had told me about places that they liked to go for fun, and they used (admirably, since it is an idiom) the expression "playing hooky." I wasn't sure whether to interpret it to mean that they actually skipped school, or that they just neglected their studies--studying for hours outside of class is so ubiquitious, so it was easy to assume that by playing hooky they meant simply not studying as much as they usually do.

Sure enough, maybe less than an hour later I received a call on my cell-phone. "Do you know who this is?" a young female voice said. "It's friendship!" She sounded excited and cheerful, the disposition that I was used to when conversing with this group of third graders. In fact, I could hear the voices of the others in the background. She admitted that when talking to me earlier, she'd been 'embarassed.' I drew the conclusion that Mr. O or some other teacher had been present, and possibly disapproving of the fact that the girls were going to take time off from studying when there was an exam coming up. Oo Jong and I had a quick, and somewhat difficult conversation through which we decided that we would meet near the school at 1 pm on Saturday. We'd go out to lunch, and then maybe go do something else. I hung up feeling better, until I realized that the third graders had class until 6 pm on Saturdays. So I found myself in another, similar quandary. My host mother was a teacher at the same school, and I would have to tell her where I was going when I headed out to meet them for lunch. If they skipped class that day, it would be understood that they skipped it in order to hang out with me, the new English teacher. That obviously could be a bit problematic.

Mrs. Lee was home today in order to get a medical check-up. She was going with Mrs. Kim, a chemistry teacher at Maesan Girls' High School who is very warm and friendly, and enjoys attempting to speak with me, even though she knows very little English and Mrs. Lee often has to phrase the entire question for her--so that when she does finally ask me herself, I've already had the question previewed a couple times. My host family knows that I've been pretty bored lately, so Mrs. Lee invited me to come along, and afterwards we would go somewhere. We met Mrs. Kim down in front of the apartment, and it was realized that Mrs. Kim had forgotten that she wasn't supposed to eat this morning, in preparation for the check-up. Thus the doctor's was skipped and we simply continued on to Gurye, a small rural area just outside Suncheon.

As usual, I had no idea what we were going to do in Gurye until we got there. I'm not consistently kept informed of what's going on, even though Mrs. Lee speaks English pretty well. So I've gotten used to sort of sitting back and waiting to see what happens. The only time this causes any frustration is when Mrs. Lee, or the other Mrs. Lee (my co-teacher at the high school), reminds me to say 'Thank you,' or properly insa (greeting someone when arriving or leaving). I get a little (inwardly) frustrated because it isn't that I don't know how to be polite--I generally try to say thank you, and we were well-apprised of Korean ettiquette during orientation--but I've become sort of slow on the uptake, due to generally being surrounded by people rapidly speaking Korean, and telling me what to do and where to go. So my timing is off. I'm often not sure if we're actually leaving, or if the person is coming with us, or so on.

During the drive I received a text message from Jin Hwa, one of the other third graders. Once, when I'd been walking with them during lunch, she'd sprayed one of her classmates with melted chocolate ice cream while gesticulating a bit too wildly as she struggled to construct a sentence in English. The text message simply said, "Hi, this is Jin Hwa," but I saw an opportunity and seized it. "hi!," I wrote back, "are you going to skip class on saturday? i must tell [and here I wrote my host mother's name in Korean letters, and began to run out of space] i am lunch with u." I followed it with a second message, "i don't want to get you in trouble!" Eventually she wrote back, "we are not trouble maker! only self study-time, not class time." So there, that problem was solved, to my relief. If they weren't worried I wasn't.

Mrs. Kim turned down a dirt road that appeared to cross farmland. We pulled up in front of a house with a long half-cylindrical tent attached to its side. A large square tank near the door was filled with large silver fish. Mrs. Lee explained that this was an eel restaurant, and we were stopping here for lunch, a little early because Mrs. Lee had not eaten breakfast and was very hungry. I was a little excited, I'd been looking forward to trying the eel dish in this area, and a little worried. I'd liked the eel that I've had at sushi restaurants in the states, but they called this eel here 'baked eel' so I wasn't sure what to expect.

Turns out the 'baked eel' that is popular in this area is quite similar to unagi, the barbequed eel I'd had back home. Except this eel was warmed on a metal grill over some coals at our table, and like all of the barbeque or grilled food that I've had here, was eaten wrapped in lettuce or sesame leaf, with red pepper paste, raw garlic, and a couple other options (which actually included soy sauce and wasabi). It was preceded by small bowls of eel soup and some long thin fried things that turned out to be eel bones.

"Lots of calcium," said Mrs. Lee. They really do use everything here when it comes to food. They even make a kimchi from the leaves of pepper plants. Mrs. Lee echoed my thoughts a little later. The eel is very useful, she explained. "This is the bones, and this soup is made from the eel's head." Eel's head soup. I'd already tasted some and enjoyed it, though it did have a slightly odd texture. But I couldn't write it off now. I liked the eel bone too, though I had to admit that while crunching on them I couldn't help but be reminded of some fairy-tale where a giant chews a man up whole in his mouth--the way it crunched was disgestable but strangely and undeniably something's spine.

I enjoyed the main course, like unagi but a whole lot more of it. A little boney, but at this point I've grown used to just eating the smaller bones, the ones I know won't hurt me, sort of like watermelon seeds.

After the restaurant we headed to a nearby temple, another half hour's drive. There are two fairly famous temples near Suncheon; I'd visited the other with the vice principal of my school in the first week of classes, on Friday when my classes were canceled for a mock test. This one was nice as well, with a couple national treasures--including an arched bridge over a small river, with a carved dragon's head on the underside. I think it was originally built in the 800s.

We walked for a little while, then headed back home, arriving around four in the afternoon. In the car Mrs. Kim gave me a present of a traditional tea cup--a fairly large clay cup with a lid that also serves as a small dish. I wasn't sure how to respond, and felt a little bad for not being more talkative. Mrs. Lee sometimes gently scolds me for not being more talkative, ("Why don't you say a word?") when I answer a question with just yes or no, or when I was sitting quietly in the back seat during the ride. I'm not a very talkative person in general, and it's a bit harder when speaking to be understood is more of an effort, and I often feel left out of the conversation by default. It's not really a complaint, Mrs. Lee is very caring and friendly, but more something I acknowledge I should do but for some reason don't have the energy for it. It's probably some sort of phase.

In fact, when we got home, I was unusually tired, and finally gave into a nap. After I got up, Mrs. Lee teased me about having weak muscles. I tried to explain to her that my muscles weren't tired (after all, I played frisbee a couple weeks ago, and didn't nap afterwards, and this walk wasn't difficult at all) but that I was lethargic. It was hard to explain, because I don't quite understand it myself.

A little later Mrs. Lee told me that Mrs. Kim wants me to tutor her daughter (a middle schooler I met the other night named So Young) along with Mrs. Lee's daughter, my host sister (Seo Young, no relation other than a similarity in names). This is the first time anything like this has come up, but we were told to expect it. We can easily decline, cite being too busy or our contract or what not, but it's only once a week and it probably won't be too much work. Even though I know Mrs. Kim is genuinely friendly and likes spending time with me, I couldn't help thinking, So that explains the gift. Especially after Mrs. Lee said that Mrs. Kim had this idea ever since she heard that Mrs. Lee was going to have a native English speaker staying in her home. But apparently this sort of gift-giving, that can be construed as bribery or something like that, isn't that strange here, and I don't think people view it the same way. I think Mrs. Kim wants me to help her daughter speak English better, so that her daughter can do well in school and eventually do well on the college entrance exam and go to a good college, but at the base of it I think Mrs. Kim really wants to be my friend as well.

That's it for today I think. Might post again in a few days. Tomorrow I'm not doing much, but Saturday I'm meeting Oo Jong and the crew, and possibly visiting Suncheon Bay which I've wanted to see for awhile. And then there's frisbee again on Sunday.

Current reading material: just finished Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, continuing with The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain.

Fiction written: this week, about 5 pages. Nothing today.