Bomb threat

Well today I had my first experience with a bomb threat on a military base. wahoo. The kids are in the middle of their school wide testing this week, and naturally they are feeling a little itchy under all the pressure. So what better way to relieve the pressure than to get everyone out of school for the day right? ha. One of the kids planted a fake note in the bathroom. This resutls in an onslaught of military police, the import from another camp of bomb sniffing dogs, and the evacuation of the building. Next come the fire trucks and goodness knows who else.

Now anytime something like this happens, I've been assigned to help with a first grade class since I don't have a class of my own. No planning, no structure, nothing to do, and we have seventeen seven-year olds who are surrounded by umpteen million other kids with nothing to do. This might be my new definition of chaos. First we hang out on the grass for a while, then since none of us has eaten lunch (and every single child is now doing the peepee dance), they put us on buses to go to a mess hall where we then get to try to corral the children in the middle of army lunch time. woof. Next all the kids are taken to a gym where they get to run around and basically entertain themselves at full volume. I'm exhausted. The kids had a great time though I think. And long story short, they got out of almost a whole day of school. Unbelievable. I'm actually surprised there haven't been more bomb threats given the success the kids had in avoiding school. And of course, your tax dollars are paying for these shananigans. Thanks for the lunch.

more Korean culture

Last weekend my friend Amy came up to visit me! She was the first guest I've had overnight at my place, and the guestroom has been deemed sleepable. So come visit me friends! ha. Anyway, so we went out for dinner with some friends Saturday night, and I got some serious perspective on my Korean skills. While I still understand little to nothing and my vocabulary is limited, I realized that I'm getting the gist of more things. I managed to negotiate with a cab driver that he was going the wrong way, and I was able to direct him in Korean to my house! Understand, this was a matter of saying right, left straight, but hey. We got home. I was proud! I'm getting hooked up with a Korean college student sometime soon too. She wants to learn English, and I've agreed to trade with her to learn some Korean, so I should be getting better at this. One can only hope. I've been here way too long to have picked up as little as I have. People weren't kidding when they said Korean was hard.

I also had my second go at a bath house this weekend. I called and arranged some massages for the girls, and I decided that I wanted to check out the hot tubs. Apparently I shouldn't have chosen a Saturday for my first venture. The place we went is an enormous four story spa with all kinds of services available, and for just a couple bucks, you can go and hang out in the hot tubs and saunas for as long as you want. I only needed about a half an hour to realize that there were way too many people there. Hanging out with a bunch of naked women isn't quite relaxing, but hanging out with over a hundred naked women and their kids and grandmas is just stressful. And it is truly a bath house. I was the only one there to relax it seems. Everyone else had a bucket of products and were cleaning themselves or their family quite vigorously. I did manage to find an outdoor hot tub that was almost empty and closed completely from the noise inside. This was quite pleasant. I also found turbo showers. These throw water down so hard that the only place you can stand for it to hit you is on your back. It seemed like something you would find at a water park. It was an adventure to say the least. I think next time I'll try a weekday. :)

Bamboozled!

Silly, silly Claire. I should know better by now how many things are lost in translation here. I should also listen to my gut instincts a little more closely.

So I'm walking home from the acupuncturist today, and I stop to wait at a crosswalk with a group of Korean women. They greet me, say they've seen me walking around that area, and that they are from the neighborhood. We chatted a bit and they were super friendly. Nice to meet some people from my hood right?

Then they tell me that their church is having a festival today, and they are there to invite people from the community to come and join them. To my credit, a tiny red flag went up here, but they did not have any pamphlets to hand out, they were all very fashionably dressed, and they weren't preaching. I was also slightly susceptible because I haven't exactly been excited about the church opportunities on base here, and it's hard to find English language services off base. So after verifying that the church was a protestant one and they did have English language services available, I thought what the heck. Besides, I was hungry.

Now, church festival in the south loosely translates to "good food." Be it a fish fry or a pancake dinner, all festivals have eats. In Korea, I learned that "church festival" translates to half hour propaganda video. So now I'm really hungry and slightly worried. Then the women start sharing their faith with me based on passages mostly from Revelations, and I realize that "protestant" loosely translates to "cult" in Korean. In the video, there was always an older Korean woman in Han-bok seated among the male preachers. I found out after about twenty minutes of bible study that they believe that Christ came again to Earth right here in Korea in the '40s, he died in the '70s, but his wife is still around for us to worship. They call her mother.

How did I end up here?! I can't really say that I'm pissed they fooled me into visiting their church. Really, I admire how well they carried it off. And I now have the pleasure of claiming I've been abducted by a cult! Honestly though, I think it's interesting to see how different beliefs get followings. If I had been a lonely soul, those women would have had me. They were so sweet and friendly. It would have been tempting just for the company.

So I interrupted the brainwashing session, thanked them kindly for their time, and left...glancing over my shoulder periodically as I went, and contemplating a circuitous route home. The conspiracy theorist in me also wanted to get home before the drugs I imagined they laced my tea with kicked in. It did taste a little funny........