Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The sun was beating down this afternoon on SD Vamos, the Sogang Dae Korean Language Education Center (KLEC) soccer club, and the wheaty dust of the undongjang had already given our team, the dark shirts, spots and stripes on its way up from our kicks. After chasing a player chasing a ball out of bounds, I began to shuffle backwards on my toes when a small crunch slowed everything down for me.
Resting my swollen foot against the side of my minifridge as I set about to net just the butterflies of my past twelve days with this sudden gift of slowness, I see now in more ways than one that shuffling too far backwards is a dangerous thing.
Seoul saenghwal is awesome. If I’ve been bad about turning my receipts and vocabulary-graffitied paper gum boxes into daily reflection, it’s because life here has kept me wholly engaged.
(Whenever I talk to someone about my good friend Bryan, I start with his labels — child actor, commercial star, world-class hula dancer, state champion Greco-Roman wrestler, judo, freestyle, and folkstyle wrestling champion, Eagle Scout, filmmaker — and move on to his equally brilliant personality, centered around a rare and unrelenting curiousness. As my recent stories about him are usually an explanation of how I’ve gotten some new injury while exploring coasts and caves and rooftops with him, I lead in to my sunburn or sprained ankle with: “Do you remember when we used to read in children’s books about great scientists? About how as children they were always coming home late and with pockets stuffed with salamanders and rocks and chunks of amber? Well, I’ll be walking on the beach with Bryan mulling over some Hawaiian ghost story he’s told me, or some quirk in Japanese literature he’s discovered, when I notice he’s no longer around. When I turn to find him, he’s a hundred yards back, squatting over a tidepool and ready to tell me stories about the various anemones he’s found.”
I hope that the people unloading each night their pockets jammed with paper scraps have a similar canon.)
But I’ll begin at the beginning with history; cobble my emails and expenses together.
Tokyo’s Narata was the first I saw of Asia. Not much, I wrote to my friend Alexandra, was novel about the airport, but I did manage to note a few differences, those truths we imagine for the very sake of seeing:
“About Narata – it’s funny how airports are all the same. Aside from some cigarette-brands I’ve never seen (not that I’m a connoisseur), the Duty-Free store here looks exactly the same as the one in Los Angeles, or in Rome, or London. And it’s just as packed with travelers buying alcohol and cologne. But, there are some differences. I get two hours in “Japan”, so I’m trying to make the most of them. (Which is why I’m writing to you.) The store across from me sells the ordinary tourist stuff, but the cashier is wearing a beautiful kimono. There is a playroom for children. In the bathroom, one can choose between Western style and “Japanese style” toilets, with the Japanese style stall’s bowl on the floor. There are a million ways to recycle, but no apparent way to get rid of trash. I felt like a real criminal throwing away the leftovers of my box lunch in the “other” bin. That’s about it for my observations of Narata. Maybe I’ll find some other stuff when I close my computer.”
So… not much there. On my flight from Tokyo to Incheon, I discovered that Orbitz had gotten me a first class seat. I had to check twice before sitting down and felt gaudy in my seat as others passed by. But, acting on the same worries about preparation I’d felt writing hours before, I pulled out my notebook and jotted down a script for my call to Kim Mun Nam — just so I didn’t find myself on the phone fumbling verb endings late at night. As I set the script aside and picked up my Sogang textbooks to review, an older woman sitting next to me leaned over and stared at what I was doing. I suspected she was Korean from her copy of Chosun Ilbo, but I was shy about striking up a conversation just because I thought she was Korean. (Incidentally, the first dialogue I listened to and practiced in Sogang 3A last Tuesday was about this exact situation):
비행기에서 처음 만난 사람과 이야기합니다.
마이클: 저…..한국 분이세요?
진호: 네.
마이클: 캐나다에 여행 다녀오세요?
진호: 아니요. 출장 갔다 와요. 캐나다 분이세요?
마이클: 네. 토론토가 제 거향이에요.
진호: 아, 네. 그런데 한국어 찰 하세요.
마이클: 아니에요. 학교에서 배우고 있는데 나직 잘 못해요.
진호: 언제부터 학교에서 배우셨어요?
마이클: 학교에서 배운 지 6개월쯤 됐어요.
Two people are having a conversation during a plane ride [from Canada].
Michael: Um/Excuse me…are you Korean?
Jin Ho: Yes.
Michael: Are you coming back from vacationing in Canada?
Jin Ho: No, I went there on a business trip. Are you Canadian?
Michael: Yes. I’m from Toronto.
Jin Ho: I see. But you speak Korean very well.
Michael: No…even though I’ve been learning in school, I can’t yet speak Korean well.
Jin Ho: How long have you been learning Korean?
Michael: It’s been about 6 months.
When she leaned over to look at my books, I took my chances and said Annyeonghasimnikka?
Though I quickly dropped the formal polite endings for lack of practice, I hit most of the above points and she seemed fine with the informal polite -yo form. We talked for the rest of the flight about her kids, who she had been visiting in California, and places I should go in Korea. She was patient and kind, and I haven’t had such an opportunity for sustained practice since, so kudos to Sogang for such a useful dialogue.
All in all, the travel turned out to be a language exchange, as at Incheon, another fellow traveler smiled at me and practiced her English with me while we waited for our baggage to arrive. After our brief conversation — mostly choppy phrases back and forth about the long wait — I headed out to catch a bus. Incheon has a great English-language information center right in the ground transport center, so I had no trouble getting directions and a schedule for the buses, which were, contrary to what some pretty aggressive taxi drivers told me, still running. My cell phone does not work in Korea (even with a global SIM card — Korea uses a different system so don’t bother), so I purchased domestic and international phone cards from a FamilyMart and called Kim Mun Nam. My chat with him went according to script, and I got on the airport bus to Sinchon.
I was not able to figure out the international phone card, however, and could not call my parents. I got to Sinchon, figured out after one or two of the twelve or so street crossings required to traverse the mammoth Sinchon Rotary what Jane had meant by head toward Exit 3 of the subway stop, walked down the stairs to the station, and crossed underground. From there, the Shereville Livingtel was a three minute walk in the most vibrant neighborhoods I’ve ever seen. Sinchon is home to three of Korea’s most famous universities: Yonsei Dae, Ewha Womans Dae, and my own Sogang Dae. All day and all night, the streets here are jammed with beautiful young people walking hand in hand through bright clothing, cosmetics, cellular phone, and stationery stores, eating and drinking in the thousands of cheap, delicious restaurants and street carts, enjoying juices, ice creams, patbingsu, coffees, and pastries in hundreds of big, comfy, stylish cafes, drinking soju in noraebangs and streetside barbeque restaurants and makkoli in earthy wooden bars and sweet beer in fried chicken restaurants and generally living loud and laughing and together and young. Plus, nearby Hongdae is forms a parallel universe. Kim Mun Nam is a quiet and pleasant young guy who runs a safe, comfortable, and spotless goshiwon full of diligent, bleary-eyed, and preoccupied students cramming for finals, plus us. I checked in, figured out how to send text messages via email to let my parents know I had arrived, and crashed. (For the sake of continuity, I have not yet purchased bedding and sleep on the small mattress cover that came with the room. The problem is, Matt paid $100 for his set, but I think that he hurried into things. I am not sleeping on the floor as I expected I would, so bedding has become a minor concern. In the meantime, I wear my water polo hoodie backwards as a blanket, so anybody coming into my room while I am sleeping would find a weird blue body with a hood over its face and a large white Y on the chest.)
I spent my first few days of school in Level 2, where I had been placed after that phone interview I mentioned last time. The class was challenging, as the other students had all come up from Level 1 last term and were much more comfortable with speaking and vocabulary than I was. After reading some of last year’s Light posts, I expected my class to be jammed with Japanese students inspired by Hallyu, but this was not the case at all. My class had Chinese students studying to enter Sogang’s international trade studies graduate program (and to think that all last year I thought Sogang 1B’s strange insistence on muyeok hwesa as a vocabulary word and reading subject was strangely arbitrary), Vietnamese, Chinese, and Mexican women studying to become nuns (though I did not recognize their uniforms as such and dumbly wondered for two days what link these identically dressed women of all ages might have), a Singaporean from Cornell, an Australian woman married to a Korean man, an older Japanese woman, and two young Japanese women. Presca at Seoul Dae commented the other day about one of her teacher’s first actions: grouping the class into nationalities. We spent our first days doing the same. When you get people together from all over the world together just to communicate, anything has to be a topic of conversation. Last year, I always enjoyed Spanish Thursdays with Adam because it was one time each week we had no choice but to be simple and bright. But I go in circles: while language learning’s basic communication is a magical and unlikely triumph, language is big and precise and powerful and has expectations of you. It’s like growing up, I guess. I might as well enjoy it all.
While I certainly wasn’t a superstar in Level 2, running into Masato, who had been placed into Level 3, cemented my lingering doubts about spending time on grammar and half a book I already knew. I wrote to my parents that first afternoon that:
“I’m tired from today. I slept pretty well last night and got to class this morning, where I’d been placed into level 2. Because the people in my class have all been living in Korea for some time, and have done level one here, it’s pretty challenging — the speaking and listening, and tough when everything has to be explained in Korean.
However, I am trying to move up a level because, although I need the practice, I did most of Sogang 2A back at school, and Sogang 2B is mostly vocabulary, not grammar. After running into a grad student from my class at Yale, Masato, and finding out he’d been placed into 3A, I went to the office to ask about placement. I met with my speaking teacher at 2pm to discuss this, and she suggested I take the final for level 2 and see about placement. It’s tough to make my case, though, when everything I say in my terrible Korean seems to contradict my assertions about being so familiar with level 2 that I should move up. So though I’m going to give it a shot, if it doesn’t work out and I end up in level 2, it won’t be the end of the world: I’ve only completed about 1/3 of the curriculum, and it’s not like I’m the best speaker in class.
So after exploring Sinchon a bit with Matt, the other Light fellow here (Kaila and Jane arrive tonight), I lay down to rest my eyes a bit and ended up napping for a couple of hours. Now I am going to study over level 2 — vocab and grammar — for tomorrow. I’m taking the test after school.
As you can tell, my first day has been mostly logistics. Seoul is huge — it’s a similar feeling to being in New York — with restaurants, shops, and signs everywhere. Walking around this afternoon with no idea about what I was doing or where I wanted to be was a bit tough, but I expect that after I get placement and equipment (phone, extension cable for this poorly-placed plug so I can fit my computer charger in — right now I charge in Matt’s room and come down here to email until my battery runs out) sorted out, I’m going to have plenty of time to read my guidebook and find places to explore.”
That day I also tried to get a plug adapter from Grand Mart (the fact that I’ve placed so much faith in Grand Mart is testament to how well the Light SAC Korea guide was written), but I ended up reporting to my friend Ailya that
“I made it to the second floor before being helped by a host of sales ladies (so far, the Korean department stores I’ve seen have functioned like confederations of sales ladies and their wares — this is not unlike US department stores if you think about it, but since I run into these ladies more frequently and much less successfully (thanks to my awful Korean), I’m inclined to notice) with each. Unable to tell them what I needed when asked, I was directed to the best of their knowledge to the subway and some district. So not wanting to ignore them, but having no idea what they were saying, I could not keep looking through the store and had to leave…
Like I was telling Naveen, I really need to get over to Yongsan for a cell phone and a dictionary. Then, I can function outside my little closet of a room. As it is now, I have no way to look up words unless I’m with Jane or Kaila and can ask them, and have no way of getting in touch with people here aside from borrowing or sitting in phone booths with one hand jammed over my ear. Adam and I may have been singing the tune of cyber-liberation in our most desperate moments, but in a place like this, technology is the easiest way to get free.”
I eventually did get my plugs at a dollar store near the rotary. And in the past days, I’ve become more comfortable with dealing in Korean. The first few days were tough because I had a placement debacle to keep me busy, and going out with the other fellows usually means that only one of us has to speak, so it’s nice that all my watching is turning into learning — I have more occasion to deal with Kimbab Cheonguk when I buy a $1 kimbab roll that Kaila and I split for breakfast, or with the ajummas at Rotary Sikdang, a great place for a $3 lunch, in my own words. But I still find it hard to practice my speaking. With the fellows and Hye Jin, my English conversation partner from Yale, I’m inclined to speak in English, as we would very soon become very bored of each other if I were always telling them about the kind of person I’d like to meet, or the things I intend to do, or how my weekend was. Getting a conversation partner and some consistent extracurricular practice is something I’m still trying to do.
About breakfast, last week we went to Paris Baguette for breakfast quite often. In fact, Matt goes every morning. Buying a roll or a delicious green-tea hoddeok with cream-cheese there, or seeing the advertisements for Red Bean Frappuccino at Sinchon Starbucks or Misutkaru Shake at Macdonalds, reminds me of “The West Remade,” a chapter of Ken Ito’s Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds that I read for Literary Modernization in Japan and Korea last semester. Ito discusses how the Japanese in the Meiji and Taisho periods completely refashioned Western culture as they consumed it — everything from appliances to opera — to fit Japanese desires and ideas. If I remember correctly, Ito’s argument is that the Japanese versions are not “untrue,” however unlikely some of their “bunka” products might have been. With everyone talking about the Macdonaldization of the world, it’s nice to be reminded of the Koreanization of Macdonalds. No Form, culture answers to nous.
On our first weekend here, we got together for barbeque and ate some delicious bulgogi and kalbi with soju, and chatted while we waited out a sudden rainstorm (the word is pokpungu 폭풍우, I think, but the important thing is that Presca had learned the word just that day). The next day, I went to Grand Mart with Jane and Kaila. Real, relentless customer service seems to be a pretty important part of retail in Korea, and Kaila suspects that its part of the strategy for dealing with unemployment. Every aisle had two or three women extolling the merits of some particular toilet paper or soap or juice. Near the cash register, beautiful young women were dressed in bright colors and thigh-high white boots, speaking quickly into microphone headsets. I asked one of the detergent ajummas for help and was shown to a nice Spring Water soap set. I also pretty inexplicably bought a package of banana milk and a bottle of regular milk. Jane had an armful of these cute little banana milk bottles, and all I could think to say was “I want some.” Go here to see what I mean. Since that day, I’ve truly fallen for banana milk.
I had ddalk kalbi with Kaila, which was amazing enough that I’d take Sogang 2B up on its reading passage and head to Chuncheon to taste some of its legendary variety. On Sunday I met up with Hye Jin for the first time in months and we strolled around Sinchon and Yondae together, hand in hand like everyone else on the street. I had my first bingsu at Red Mango, and it was a scrumptious mountain of shaved ice, frozen yogurt, kiwi, pat (red bean), watermelon, and peach. Cafes here are fantastic — the drinks, running about 4-6 dollars each, can be a little expensive, but it’s easier to think of it as a cover charge for a great spot to hang out. The cafes in Sinchon are bright, tasty, look out over busy intersections, and are jammed with comfortable seating. The seating is the trick — and most are fine places to spend a few hours chatting.
Last Monday, I finally tried Korean Fried Chicken. Since watching Donggabnaegi Gwawoehagi over winter break, I’ve been dying to try some. At Kyochon Chicken, we had to wait 20 minutes while our order was made from scratch, and when it came out, it was unlike any chicken I’ve ever had. The seasoning was hot and sweet and the crunch was fantastic. When I told Hye Jin about it, she told me that Kyochon was a huge food craze a few years ago, but that in her institute, the craze continues with frequent deliveries.
Kaila, sad that the chicken is gone.
Matt and I.
Jane, with chicken.
On Tuesday, we went to go see Hwang Jin Yi, which was a topic of conversation at our delicious dinner with Choi Seonsaengnim (Thanks!) on Friday at Korea House. While I was missing almost all of the dialogue, I worked on interpreting the film visually, which, apart from certain key dialogues about why Hwang has to become a kisaeng or how she decides to start exerting power over a number of powerful male scholars, officials, and monks, was not hard to do. Choi Seonsaengnim told us that the North Korean version of the story, which was the basis for this film, put more of an emphasis on the class aspects of the tale, while the South Korean versions behind earlier films and TV dramas concentrated more on Hwang’s rise to power.
On Wednesday I got out of Sinchon for the first time to meet up with Presca. We walked from Jongno 3-ga up the Buddhist cultural street, filled with calligraphy shops selling rich writing fabrics and artisan brushes as large as mops or as thin as reeds, and both of us wished we knew enough to patronize such places. Reaching Anguk Station, we turned South to explore the beautiful black-stone streets of Insadong, sprouting at their edges bright papers and textures and electric-green water flowers floating in the middle of benches, winding through the galleries and antique shops and boutiques, coming across a synchronized-swaying, synthetic-sound-playing quartet giving a concert in a back lot to celebrate the start of Insadong’s June Arts Festival. We then made it over to Unhyeongung, the house of the Taewongun and a site for late nineteenth century governmental reforms.
From there we headed back down to Jongo-gil in the direction of Tapgol Park, which I had been thinking about ever since I started studying about the Korean Independence Movement last year. While I wrote my paper in the fall for Food and Power, I kept imagining the what the day must have felt like, what those words must have sounded like, what thrill and what anger and what sadness and what hope this Pagoda Park (as it what known then) saw when student Chung Jae Yong read Choe Namson’s Proclamation of Korean Independence to the thousands of demonstrators gathered there at 2pm on March 1, 1919, exactly as other thousands heard it at other parks all over the country. A 600 year old Buddhist pagoda rises up over all of it, and among the drizzle and dozens of old men gathered with their newspaper seats and their pant sleeves rolled all over the park, the huge tangled rubber-band ball of all I’ve been learning in college about the living beasts of history and coloniality — monsters I’ve known since I was a little kid singing in Polish — quaked and snapped to take it all in, so recent that my version has to look no farther than the men smoking on the steps of the pavilion to see how alive — and how mixed up — it is. Outside the glass case on the pagoda, we came across a young man clutching his chest and muttering to us incoherently, but writing him off as drunk or crazy or sick seemed impossible — all of us in the park were mulling around trying to make sense of our minds. Back in Hannam, whose kitchen light spilling out of brick buildings made the place seem lived-in and homey in comparison with Sinchon’s shiny “lively”, talking about feminism tangled up my understanding of what I’d been seeing even further. As a way of overcoming my deafness to the meaning of most sound, just as with Hwang Jin Yi I’d been training my sight on the speakers during the dramas and variety shows I’ve been watching before going to sleep, or on the brass reliefs in Tapgol as a way of deciphering the stone words below them. To wonder about the women working at Grand Mart is to wonder about the Ledbetter v. Goodyear and Gonzalez v. Carhart rulings of this spring in the US Supreme Court, and the situation of women in Tapgol’s brass reliefs has me remembering Delacroix. And then I just think and think.
The bus back from Hannam was a gorgeous ride — something like going from East LA through Downtown and Mid-City into Westwood, something I have never done — that took me through hills and over bridges and into City Hall Plaza and past lit-up Namdaemun. On Thursday, Sogang KLEC took us on a picnic to Anseong, the “City of Masters” in Gyeonggi-do, where we saw a Namsadang performance and toured and ate at an artisan tofu, doengjang, and gochujang farm. Namsadang was the first Korean performance troupe, founded in late Joseon, and it practiced pungmul-nori (watch some here), salpan (tumbling and acrobatics performed by a jester), beona-nori (story-telling with dish-spinning), tightrope walking, and sangmo-nori (spinning streamer hat performance). Sogang is a really fantastic place to study — the teachers are engaging and enthusiastic, the students are friendly, and the program sets up trips and movie nights and conversation partners for us. On Thursday night, we went out to Choi’s Tacos in Sinchon, which was an unlikely but delicious partner for the traditional Korean cuisine we had eaten just hours earlier. On Friday, after Choi Seonsaengnim took us out to Korea House, all of the Light Fellows got together for patbingsu at Milky Road in Sinchon. Afterwards, we went to noraebang, where I sounded out the only Korean song I know, Jjillekkot by Jang Sa Ik, which I had learned on NPR a few weeks ago. Presca made fun of me and told me that I was a 60 year old man. Then she stunned all of us when she sang in Japanese.
Masato is being patient with my questions about Japanese
history while we waited at Korea house. Look out the window:
Seoul, Joseon rooftiles, and glass.
Our group of Summer 2007 Light Fellows with a court dancer.
Choi Seonsaengnim helping me with the Korean
knot of a hanbok. At New Year’s, I’d made the mistake
of just making a bow, and came out looking like a plump
peach present.
Kaila and I in hanbok.
Borrowing Presca’s kid at Milky Road.
Anastasia turned 18 on Tuesday and graduated on Thursday. I hadn’t felt far away until then.
On Saturday, I went to jjimjilbang in the morning. The one right around the corner from us is amazing — from the outside, it looks like a run-down, innocuous establishment, but inside, the place is palatial. It took me a few conversations to get directions from the changing room to the exercise room, but after going upstairs to the men’s sauna and downstairs to the unisex common room, I finally figured out where to go. For just $5, I enjoyed hours of exercise, sauna, and napping — jjimjilbangs are open 24 hours. After that, I met up with Hye Jin in Insadong, and she showed me around more of the area. In the evening, we ate Hanjeongsik, and the some 150 different banchan that graced our table that night left us stuffed. At one point in the stunning meal, Hye Jin screwed up her face after a bite of fish — I thought that maybe it had been too spicy. A few minutes later, when I took a bite, I told her it was delicious. As soon as she asked me, “really?” my throat and mouth filled with poison. I felt as if I had swallowed Pine Sol — and as it turns out, I had. This dish, a fermented skate called Hongeojjim, is a Jeolla province specialty, and the more ammonia the fish has, the more expensive it is. Though I was shocked, I didn’t change my mind — it was delectable. We saw a few street shows — including dragon’s beard candy making (the video is Jane’s from last year), an expat brass band, a Turkish ice-cream trickster, and a whole slew of teenage boys with amazing voices singing love songs in a mini amphitheater at the South end of the street. Hye Jin, a plant scientist, told me that Turkish ice-cream makers use plant resins from an orchid and an evergreen plant to thicken the ice cream so that they can do things like this. We then made our way over to Cheonggyecheon, the public works project that made Seoul Mayor Lee Myung Bak a contender for the presidency. It seemed that night that everyone in Seoul was on this stylish riverbank: families, lovers, and friends were walking hand in hand along the stream, reaching out their hands to brush the reeds, waiting for the crossing guard to wave them across the stones, and looking up at the sparkling downtown Seoul. Naveen asked me, “Conformist or romantic?” and I answered that I had a soft spot for people enjoying civic life and public works. Going North along Cheonggyecheon lead us right to
Seoul Plaza, where just as many people were out on the huge lawn just savoring the night. When I asked Hye Jin about Sicheong, she told me that while she had always loved its elegant clock, the building itself — a 1926 addition by the Japanese — had always made her feel a little sad.
On Monday I finally got over to Yongsan for electronics. Unfortunately, the huge E-Mart was closed on a yearly holiday, so Kaila and I walked over to another electronics mart. I got a card phone, but was unable to find a dictionary. Thanks to Kaila, getting service for the phone was easy — we learned the right vocabulary from a vendor downstairs and headed up to SK telecom’s friendly office to register my number. While we walked around the Yongsan Station area, we talked about how it felt to live in Korea. I feel really comfortable here. Certainly, I’m frustrated by my inability to read signs fully or to function in all the situations that I need to, but the living here (thanks Light) is great. Mary Jane told me that this is a city for young people, and it certainly seems that way from what I’ve experienced. For now, Seoul feels big and exciting and possible like New York, and also vast like Los Angeles. My life here is active — I’m always moving from school to restaurant to exploration and back — and I feel like I have only more things to gain (including my mobility). So far, I feel like I could just keep living here, and I think that I would have done well to have applied for the year. Afterwards, we got some drinks and ice cream at Cafe Pascucci, and I continued feeling good about Sinchon cafes.
Moving up to Level 3 has helped. After studying over the weekend, I took the check-up on the grammar that my Level 2 speaking teacher had noticed I’d had trouble with on the placement test she gave me, and she moved me into Level 3. It is also very difficult in Level 3, but I have been lucky to meet a great group of people in Level 3 who do a lot together — in Korean. One of my good friends here is Sung Ho, a zainichi studying so that he can move to Korea. Life in Japan can be extremely difficult for foreigners and minorities, and Sung Ho, a 3rd generation zainichi whose parents run a golf shop, is not considered a citizen and pays egregious taxes on his earnings. Sung Ho studied Russian in Moscow for awhile, so we can also scratch out a conversation between my Polish and his Russian. He’s an organizer — pulling together huge crews from all different levels of our program for crazy events like Chicken Day this Friday — and he’s eager to relate anyone he can in any language he can.
I’ve come to understand that being a student is something separate from just age or location — we are a miscellaneous crew at KLEC, but with the exception of a few strange old men, everyone here — young or old, Mongolian or Spanish — runs from floor to floor at breaks to chat with old friends from previous levels, grab yogurt and rice balls at the convenience store, joke around, hurriedly exchange numbers and emails for coordinating huge groups in lunchtime restaurant takeovers or SD Vamos soccer or weekend drinking or farewell parties for graduating friends. As we call out for more kamja at Rotary or yell out Jalhanda! when somebody makes a sweet shot, there’s something really hopeful and wonderful about just being a student.
So here I am.
1 Comment
14 June 2008 at 5.22 pm
[...] as they ready themselves for the last of their exams, and the air is filled with light from the noraebangs (노래방) and with an unshirkable [...]