There was one family, one middle aged woman, who kept speaking to me in Korean. I smiled and nodded sleepily. An older woman, either her mother or mother-in-law, could speak Chinese and we communicated simple things: I was traveling alone, I was from America. Her husband ( I assume) was Chinese. She spoke Chinese with him. This family ended up surrounding me when we actually boarded the plane. The enthusiastic Korean woman sat across from me and up a row, she kept turning around and smiling and speaking Korean and patting my knee. She had a very motherly feel to her, or that probably should have bothered me. The elderly Korean/Chinese couple sat next to me, and the wife sometimes translated what the younger woman said. The man across the aisle from me listened stoically to his headphones the whole hour and a half flight, but lent me his ball-point pen to fill out my customs forms. I don’t think he knew what to think of me. I couldn’t understand most of what was being said around me, but I was polite and deferential in Chinese and not English (as pretty clearly no one but the recorded safety instructions had any grasp of my native Western tongue).
When we landed in Seoul I asked the woman at the desk right outside to help me re-schedule my flight. I started explaining my situation in Chinese (因为我们从上海的飞机迟到了，我现在没有时间到我去济洲岛的飞机， 来不及。。。) when she stopped me with “I’m... sorry, I don’t speak Chinese.”
“Oh, sorry sorry sorry!” I cried. I didn’t mean to assume she was Chinese because she was Asian. I was flying China Eastern Airlines, so I think it was a forgivable blunder. She helped me reschedule my flight with no questions. I had been worried because my second flight was with a different airline (Asiana, though I think they are partnered with China Eastern) and I had booked them online through a third party. She did give me a flight that left only 45 minutes after I got there, but I made it! I scurried off as soon as she wrote my new flight number on the sheet I had printed my travel info on- through customs (delightfully painless! So much more friendly than China!), to grab my luggage, to the English-less shuttle (luckily a couple of students boarded just after I did and confirmed that this was, in fact, taking me to the right place), to the domestic airport, to check-in and give back my duffle bag, up the stairs to the gate. The flight left at 1:20, I got there at 1:14. But I made it.
Luckily the switched flight only landed 40 minutes after I was supposed to land, so Christian wasn’t too worried yet. I walked out to find him (holding a sign which said “Kara Poop,” I might add) and then went back for my luggage. I dozed through the 40 minute bus ride from the airport to Jungmun where his apartment is, and then fell asleep at his apartment and didn’t do much other than sleep and eat the curry he made the rest of that day.
On Monday we went into Jejuxi (Jeju City) to have dinner with Jei (our classmate from UIowa) and Tom (Christian’s friend from home, since fifth grade I think?) and Thai-An (another teacher friend of theirs in the Teach and Learn Korea- TaLK- program). We ate at Crazeburger, right on the coast, and watched the waves crash as we walked up. It was hard to see much once we were inside, it was already dark, but I’m hopin’ we’ll go back sometime during daylight.
The next day I FINALLY finished my anthropology paper. I wrote it on the Women’s Script (女书) of Jiangyong County. Women were not allowed to attend school or taught to read and write in traditional China, and women’s social roles were quite limited. A community of lower-class, rural women created a script, probably sometime in the 11th or 12th century CE, which was written in embroidery and illegible to literate men. They composed poems and songs and recorded personal histories and classic tales. It was used until the Cultural Revolution (from 1966 to 1976) so there are still a handful of elderly women who can read it.
We ate at a Mexican place and hung out with folks the next day, and had a reading and chilling day after that. On Friday Christian and I walked over to the shore. There’s a rocky area a 20-or-so minute walk from his place. I climbed out on the stones and let the surf splash my hand (and less intentionally a good portion of my coat sleeve). We climbed around on some craggy rocks nearby. I found shells! And a couple of urchins, and some clam-bits. I didn’t bring them all home. Just a couple.
Yesterday we went back to the city and walked around. We went to the coast again (there’s a lot of coast on this here island) and eventually to a supermarket and dinner. We bought waffles on the street for dessert.
Today we’re in a coffee shop on the main street in Jungmun, a couple blocks from Christian’s apartment. Christian’s writing fiction I assume, and may assume that I am doing the same. haHA! Fooled you, sir. I might, yet, I might. First I’m gonna keep reading 《明朝那些事》, a book that Xiaoxuan helped me pick out. It’s about the end of the Yuan dynasty and the beginning of the Ming (明). I’m definitely not understanding all of it, pretty much every sentence has words I don’t know and I’m not allowing myself to look them all up. I’m getting the overall picture and looking up words when their pivotal, so I don’t get bogged down in flipping through the dictionary.
Okay, this has been your weekly (ish) update! Love!
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