The Boarders
I have a minute to breathe at my job here, so I'm going to start my first real entry on this here blog of mine (she ain't what she used be, ain't what she used to be - sorry, hunger getting to me).
This morning I was woken at 7 am by the food truck. I don't know what else to call it. It's a truck (I'm guessing - I've never seen one, just heard them) that drives around in the morning and hawks food via a recorded message that's broadcasted via bullhorn (again, a guess). Since I've been in Seoul, I've heard it just about every morning. Usually it's a man's voice; today it was a woman's. The music is quite piercing, and sticks in one's head most unmercifully.
It was rather annoying about being woken up at that time, because I really wanted to catch up on sleep. This week I've been staying up late for various reasons, the most recent of which is that I was reading a good book and stayed up to finish it. The book, Time and Again, was given to me by a coworker at TPG (thanks, Steve!), and was absorbing (clearly, since I stayed up til 2:30 to finish it).
I read the book in my tiny tiny room in the hasook jeep (boarding house) where I'm living. Hasook jeeps are very popular residences for university students here; for a few hundred US dollars, you get room and two meals a day AND an ajuma (older woman/auntie) who worries about you and finds things out for you and in general acts like a surrogate mom.
My ajuma is 62 years old (but looks about 50), about 4'11", sings in a church choir, and is very, very nice. When I mentioned I was interested in learning taekwondo, she called a taekwondo studio for me and found out how much it cost, how to get there, class times, etc.
The other students boarding at the house are also just about the nicest people ever. The first one I met was Yuki. She just graduated from a university in Japan this past May, and two weeks afterwards came to Seoul to study Korean. She's a Japanese Korean (ilbon gyopo). While she was in college, she spent a month in Nepal volunteer teaching kids how to speak Japanese. Then she spent another month in Mongolia doing the same thing.
There's Aya, a 28-year-old Japanese woman who's been studying Korean for about a year. She's also interested in learning taekwondo, so tonight we're going to go to the studio together. She majored in economics at Tokyo University (I think), and is a super student. I'm really inspired by her dedication to learning the language - at dinner last night, she learned some new words from the ajuma, and ran to get her notebook and dictionary so she could memorize them.
Actually, another student does that too -- the German fellow, Tomas. He just turned 23 last weekend, so most of the hasook jeep boarders went out with him and his classmates to celebrate. He's here on an exchange program from his college in Germany (I forget where, though - sorry, Tomas!). He must be at least 6'3" or so - towering over everyone else in the house. He's learning Korean quite quickly - in part because the ajuma is constantly teaching him phrases. Actually, she does that for all of us, but I think it's most fun with Tomas because he cheerfully horses around and mugs his way through each meal.
Uchidashi is an older Japanese man who is also taking Korean classes. Outside of the house, he looks like your typical Japanese tourist - shaded glasses, baseball cap, fanny-pack. But inside the house, he is much more accessible-looking in his gray sweatsuit. Last night, his face was rather red from drinking beer - he drinks a beer every night, he says, because it helps him study. Hee hee! The other night, he gave me and Tomas small calendars of pictures of Japan. How nice was that? I think he gave Tomas a dictionary for his birthday. Like I said, the nicest people ever.
There are two Korean students at the house also. Hesok (?) is a freshman studying physics, or something incredibly hard like that, and has a scholarship at Sogang. Uichol, who lived in Canada for two years, is studying computer animation at a hakwon (private educational institute) that is literally 20 feet away from the house. I told him that I had a friend starting a computer animation company, and he was all, "Hey! Help a brother out here!" So Wendy, he's just started this instruction, but he knows lots of animators in Korea, so lemme know if you want any info about animators over here.
Finally, there's a very quiet Japanese high school (?) student learning Korean, but he's a real beginner, so I haven't talked to him much. He does, however, have the coolest hair - about two and half inches long all over, mahogany colored, sticking straight up out of his head in all directions.
There are two other persons in the house - the ajuma's sons. One is a business man (or at least dresses in business clothes for work) and doesn't mingle at all with us. The other - well, I don't know what he does. He sleeps in the same room as his mother and doesn't mingle with the boarders either. He actually avoids us, I think - once, as I was finishing up a late dinner, I heard the ajuma tell him: "Everyone's done, except Helen, and she's almost done - so come out and eat dinner." I think he did, that time. But just when I think that he's a rather sullen loser, I see him jump up and hurry into a room because his mother's asking him a question about taekwondo studios. That might not sound like much, but I had this vision of him as a kind of weirdo, not going out much, staying at home living on his mom's dime because he didn't want to do anything - you know, that kind of thing. But he was very responsive to his mother's request that time, literally jumping from his seat at the table to go see what she wanted.
Ya just can't tell.