Amanda Takes Off...

I went to the studio Friday night, grooving on "Master says ice it, Master says use mentholatum." Then Master looked at my foot and told me I needed to go to a traditional Chinese medicine doctor to get some needles stuck in me. He also offered to go with me, but we needed to figure out when we could meet with my work schedule.

I'm staying with my new boss until my apartment's ready and I asked her if there were any traditional Chinese medicine doctors around here. She knew right away why I was asking because she's watched this bruise. She was huge into dance until she slipped and broke her leg when she was 19, so she knows how to do 부항 and she said she could drain it for me.

So I'm sitting on the floor in her guest bedroom, her daughters around me, being warned that "this will hurt." And she pricked my skin all over the bruise with a needle until it was bleeding, then stuck suction cups on it, turned on a machine, and started drawing out "the bad blood. See how that bubbles? Bad blood. See how dark it is? You need to remove it. Not good for you." The needles did indeed hurt, and this from the woman who can fall asleep getting waxed.

She then did it to the bruise itself, and after she finished she said, "You'll feel better, but we'll do it again in a day or two to get rid of all of the bad blood."
Her daughters took photos, which are on the last page of this post. I am saving you, in case you don't want to see them.

Back to tae kwon do! We played soccer in the studio for an hour Friday night, and Master took photos, which can be seen in the Survivor album. Cocky's best friend joined us for the game. He wasn't shy about speaking English to me, which surprised me. He asked where I was from in English and I answered in Korean and Master said in Korean, "See, she speaks Korean."

How kind of him to lie like that.

At one point I went to sit down and moved some bags. A pack of cigarettes came out. Master was sitting right there. I looked at him and asked in Korean, "Whose are these?" He said, "I don't know" and pocketed them. Laster, when Cocky's friend sat down, Master quietly lectured him. Cocky looked very alarmed, and there was a lot of mouthing and facial gestures on his behalf, so I'm not sure whose cigarettes they were.

We continued playing soccer at the elementary school for the second half of class. It was so cold! I have no idea why the guys voted to go out there! I griped to Studious, Tired Guy, and Powerful that it was too cold in Korean. "Where is everyone? Not here. Who is here? We are, of course. Where is everyone else? Not here. Too cold!" Powerful just grinned at me. "I understand, Amanda!"

After soccer, Cocky asked me if I wanted to go out for dinner with him. I knew that I would be paying since I'm the oldest. I said sure and six of us—Cocky, his friend, Grin's Brother, Tired Guy, the Girl, and I—went out and had gimbap and some other foods together together. It was a typical Korean meal, very quiet, but they all thanked me more than once afterwards. Koreans pay for my meals all of the time. The least I can do is spend $13 to feed six people, four of whom put up with my horrible Korean on a daily basis, two of whom are very, very helpful to me. For some reason, he didn't want Master to know we'd gone out (even though Master knew we were talking about it) and told me, "Shh, shh, Amanda."

Today there seemed to be some promotion at Bukhansan mountain where taekwondo studios were invited out to participate in "Survivor," or paintball. A photo album can be found in the Gallery tab in the Survivor album.

Ten of us (inclusive of Master) went to play paintball, ride scooterbikes, play soccer in a pool (dry, not part of the package) and putter around in small boats, complete with some sort of rice, seaweed, vegetable lunch with egg soup and...kimchi. And of course we had gimbap for breakfast ("Deep!").

I've never done paintball before. It was awesome. Master hit me right above my elbow and it ached. I went to go but had a lot more fun than I expected to. It was neat to run around, hide, and shoot things with pink paint. I can't believe I haven't done it before. When I was ducking for cover I thought, I'm spending the dark part of my 20s running around in the Korean woods, playing paintball with 17 year olds, never thought this would be my life. Ah, but what a splendid life it is!

While we were playing soccer in the pool one of my studiomates reached for his cell phone in his inside jacket pocket and nearly pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Everyone looked at me and said something in Korean. I said, "Shh, shh, I know." Grin's Brother said, "Amanda, don't say—" the other boys were looking around furiously to see if Master could hear us and they shushed him, "Shh, shh, she knows!" Boys! I don't care and won't say anything! Heck, I wouldn't even know what to say if I wanted to say anything.

Afterwards, Master took a very sleepy van full of people on a tour of Seoul (read: he mostly did it for me) and I got to see The Blue House (where the president lives) and where many of the embassies are. While we were playing soccer, Cocky invited me out with the guys to go play games at a PCbang, which amused me to no end. I said sure, but everyone was sleeping in the car, and it took hours to get home (welcome to Seoul traffic) so I doubt it happened and I didn't worry about it.

(I'm being invited to PCbangs and asked not to talk about cigarettes. I helped one of the boys perfect his English pronunciation of some...impolite words. Mom says they're treating me like the cool older sister. I said it reminded me of my high school debate coaches, who kept secrets for us all the time.)

Tomorrow I'm going back to the studio because Ghost and The Girl and a few others have a poomse competition and I'm going to watch. I don't think many other people are going, but Master asked me if I wanted to go and I really like watching the competitions.

Three side thoughts on studying Korean:

It's funny how something fairly basic can be very hard to describe. Friday night on the way back to the studio, Powerful and I were talking about food. I told him I didn't like squid or octopus. For a long time I was being told that 낙지, was not octopus. I was trying to find out if it was quid or octopus. To clarify I said, "ten arms," in Korean. Powerful looked at me, so I said it as many different ways as I could. Finally he said, "Oh! Ten legs!" Even Mirriam-Webster describes them as arms.

I realized that I'm bringing one of the most difficult aspects of English in Korean and confusing myself and everyone around me. I'm asking negative questions ("We're not going yet?") in poor Korean ("Going now? No going? Yes going?"). They'll answer "Yes!" and I'll think they mean they're disagreeing with me when they're agreeing with me and...it's a huge mess and I need to figure out how to eliminate those questions from my vocabulary because it's not fair to them.

Finally, I've been reading a bit about accents when learning a foreign language. I've read two interesting things. One of them is that it's not so much the sound of the letters but the rhythm of the language that's hard to learners to get down. I am used to trying to make my voice go up and down in Swedish or Spanish, but Korean is flat. It's hard to me to get flat when I'm still trying to get sentence patterns down. Half the time I sound like I'm asking a question because I am implicitly asking am I saying this right and do you understand me if I'm not?

The second interesting idea was that people have a hard time getting rid of accents because they're afraid of giving up their own language and culture. This is related to the idea that people can feel like they have different personalities when they speak another language. I've been thinking about this idea for a while because a lot of my students and studiomates use a very different voice when they speak English. They sort of lower and thicken their voices, if that makes sense. To a lot of Westerners, Koreans whine. I try to remember that this is just the sound of the language, the beat of it. Friday night when Cocky and I were going back and forth about who would go eat together, what we would eat, and where we would eat, I put this bit of a whine in my voice to match his. It did feel weird. I almost felt like I was outside of my body, watching someone else do this Korean Whine.

Being here in general makes me feel like someone else. My history, my past, my family, it's all new to everyone I come into contact with. I can tell as much or as little as I like. I can be more adventurous, less talkative, calmer, whatever. It's not that I came here to reinvent myself, it's not that I'm actively trying to reinvent myself, it's that the act of living in a foreign culture, away from most familiar things makes me someone else. Whining when I argue with Cocky adds to that "new person" feeling.

(Photos of the Chinese medicine method on the next page.)

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