Here's a quick run-down of what I've been up to.
It's getting HOT in Daegu, today is probably about 90 degrees. Teaching in this weather is brutal (no aircon 'til July, they say, and even the July prediction is speculative). It's hard for the kids to pay attention when they're trying not to pass out and dodging wasps bigger than your pinkie finger:
Yea, try teaching with THAT bugger buzzing around your classroom. I don't even blame them for not paying attention. In fact, I may be more distracted than the rest of them. I make a much more available target standing all alone and unprotected. Watch this video if you've got the time, it's gruesome and horrifying:
With the warm weather blooming and summer looming, the kids are breaking out their t-shirts, and boy are they something. Today in a sixth grade class I had boy wearing a shirt that said "Kiss my monkey ass" sitting next to a girl in a little dress that had this across the chest:
?!?!?!?!I really wanted to warn her about what her dress said, but I knew she'd be mortified and would probably never recover from the blow to her prepubescent ego. That, and I couldn't really figure out what it's supposed to mean so I wrote it off as an innocent error. [I looked it up when I got back to my office (hence the picture). It's a t-shirt that says "tell your boobies to stop staring at my eyes," converted by some innovative Korean seamstress into a little girl's dress. Daegu, fashion capitol of Korea.]
Speaking of the fashion capitol, I was telling my parents about what you're about to read (unless you get bored and go watch TV instead) and they said it was worth jotting down. So, Daegu has proclaimed itself the fashion capitol of Korea, I think because they manufacture a lot of textiles (bored yet?). The women all dress to a really high standard, high heels and skirts pulled up to their armpits are the norm (but NO CLEAVAGE. That would be unfathomably indecent). It's the men's fashion that really stands out, though. These guys look like they're fell into a time-warp and popped out in Saturday Night Fever. Perms are chic right now, pants so tight they must use dish soap to get them on, and make-up galore. Seriously, these guys sport more make-up than their female counterparts. Ok, that's probably not true, because Korean girls pile it on.
There's a really unfortunate phenomenon in Korea regarding the ideal beauty. Their ideal woman has round eyes, a round face, a big mouth, a high ridged, pointed nose, is tall, slender, and generally western looking. Notice anything about nearly half of these traits? They're simply not native to Koreans. The Korean ideal is an amalgam of Hollywood influences with traces of Korean lurking somewhere under the surface. So their idea is something that isn't natural to them, yet it seems like everywhere you look you see girls that fit their standard of "perfection." How? Simle answer: Plastic surgery.
Plastic surgery in Korea is cheap, available, and usually provides the desired results. South Korea has the highest incidence of plastic surgery per capita, with one procedure in particular taking the cake: Sah-kah-pool surgery, or small eye surgery. At about $800, it's a common graduation gift, and it's so ubiquitous that nearly 90% of women in Seoul have had the procedure (an estimate I herd or read somewhere, don't ask me to cite my sources. Check it out though, you'll probably find a similar statistic). It's a procedure that adds a fold to the normally smooth eyelid, making the eye look more round and slightly larger. http://www.drmeronk.com/asian/asian-eyelid-photos.html For the girls who haven't had the surgery (yet), there's a special eyelid glue that you can use to plaster your eyes wide open. What really boggles my mind is that, since the Korean population is thus comprehensively altered, I have no idea what Korean people actually look like.
One final note on this ideal beauty/plastic surgery thing. With the ideal so definitive, and surgery so attainable, the appearance of Korean celebrities is converging into this stylized ideal of what Koreans are supposed to look like. Check these out:
Yes, those are all different people. If you want to see more or who these people are, check out this blog I shamelessefy stole these mash-ups from (less shameful now with the plug http://kimchilicious.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/eek-theyre-twins/)
Ok that's all for now, I'm really sunburned and tired and should probably grade start grading this massive stack of dictation tests I have sitting in front of me. Anyong!
