I Think I'm Turning Korean, The Art of Cheonan City Propaganda, and Middle School Drag Contests

(((Preface- If you cannot use Facebook, you won't be able to view all the pictures I have put up. I will try to put up a couple pictures here for those without access. Though I highly recommend that you find someone with a Facebook account, the pictures are great.)))

I couldn't come up with a title that encompassed such varied activities, so I just made three.

Since I last wrote, life has been strange, and yet more routine, if that makes any sense. I am finally starting to understand the flow of teaching, and I -think- I might be getting better at it. I wake up at 7:00am, get ready, head to school, do my teaching thing, go home, eat, hang out with friends on campus/read/fulfill my communication obligations, then sleep. That is a normal weekday in the life of Hal. On the weekends I get to make little excursions into the country, visit cultural sites, or act like a modern person and go shopping or out to eat. However, within all this monotony, there are at times pronounced spikes of weirdness. Korea is so interesting.

So early last week, we (the foreign teachers living at KNU) were asked to take pictures of ourselves teaching or interacting with the students. These pictures were needed by Cheonan City Hall for their political machi....I mean their public awareness campaign. Being a good little pawn in the hierarchy, I wanted to give the very best of photographs. I also wanted them to use my pictures for two more selfish and utterly base reasons, 1) These pictures will be put in pamphlets and passed out or shown all over Cheonan, so I figure I could become something like a local celebrity (Yes, people of Cheonan, you will Love ME!), or 2) as my friend Beth said, I have this really egotistical part of me that believes I am imparting some kind of grand, esoteric knowledge to the students, and I wanted to capture that (look for the picture where I am glowing...hehe). I have uploaded all of the pictures I took to Facebook, you can see them by clicking here, http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2167868&id=34304942.

More school events. Ok, so I am usually against this type of thing, and would rarely share that I was even remotely involved, but this came out of no where, and was hilarious. I am sitting at my desk when I look up at a flyer that was hanging on the door. It said, "Miss SeongSeong Competition!!!", and then the rest was in Korean. At first I thought that it was a bit odd for the girls to get up and have some kind of talent/beauty competition in a middle school, but then I remember I am in Korea and they are all about physical perfection, but that excellence is something they strive for in nearly everything, so it isn't quite as bad as our media-induced obsession with perfect bodies. While I was waxing philosophical about Korean beauty pageants, one of the teachers told me that the preliminaries for the competition were today. The top 8 students would go on to the finals.

At this moment, I was blindsided by an onslaught of middle school girls, all giggling and excited. They had burst into our teacher's room to show off the girl who had dressed up to compete. Two seconds later, I realized how horribly wrong I had been...it was no girl, but a boy dressed in drag who was about to compete! This brought about a whole new set of questions concerning Korean society, so I decided to set out, camera in hand, and undertake a little journalistic exercise. Here is a link to the pictures I took amidst the riotous mass of students, http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2167869&id=34304942. As you can see, these boys (and the girls) are very serious about their cross-dressing. The whole school gets into it, students, teachers, and administrators. I think I even saw the janitor (who is a 4' 11'' tall Korean man in his 50's) dancing in the hall later that day to a Wonder Girls (Korean girl pop group) song. The following day all the boys were back to their pre-pubescent masculine state, and if asked about dressing up they would just laugh and hit each other. So the time of feminine frolicking has passed for the boys here at SeongSeong, but I shall ne'er forget the wonderful day when I worked at an all-girls middle school.

Peace