Pretty Much a Korean Now

Here I am, just another miguk saram (American person) living in Korea. I do feel though that I am becoming somewhat Koreanized (just made that word up and it didn't pass spell check). I now always hold out two hands when I exchange money, which I found a strange custom at first, but it has grown on me. I'm pretty sure that this is done because when you are handing over something important you do it with two hands.

I also have the important accessories that a Korean person would. A bank account, health insurance, cell phone, etc. Below is my ID card, called the 'Alien Registration Card', and my bank card. Doesn't the term 'Alien Registration' have a welcoming tone to it?

Bank card and registration card. Not my best photo ever.

I also picked up this cell phone last week, which I'm pretty happy about. It takes video, has games, and even has a Korean/American dictionary on it. Another Korean custom is to have a little key chain type thing, or dangle as I like to call it, on your cell phone. I have heard that it is bad luck to not have a dangle on your phone, though I'm not sure why.

I got my dangle in Thailand from a deaf lady

I have also come to really like Korean food. Be it Kimchi, Korean barbecue, Korean soup, octopus, or whatever I'll eat it. My bosses and I have a plan to go out and eat octopus for dinner some night next week because I haven't tried it yet.

This stuff Kimchi is pretty interesting. It's actually rotting cabbage which has been buried underground. I'm not sure if it's still prepared this way or not but at least historically it was buried to ferment. It's Korea's most popular side dish, and it's so popular that the Korean space program developed a dehydrated version to take with on space shuttle missions.

Mmm, rotten cabbage.

I've also come to find that I can read most of the Korean alphabet, 'hangul'. It started because I saw the name of the town everywhere, and eventually memorized it in Korean. From there I worked a little with my students and learned some from a book that was left in my apartment.

It is actually a pretty cool way of writing. Hangul has 14 consonants and 10 vowels and they are arranged in a block character which is read clockwise from the top left. Each block character makes one syllable. For example, my name is below:

In Korea I am 'Bradley Teacher'

It actually takes four characters to write just my first name, mostly because they don't use the 'br' sound. My favorite part of the alphabet is that some of the letters represent the mouth as they are forming the letter. For instance, M is a box because your mouth kind of makes that shape to say it. N looks like an L because the tip of your tongue presses against the top of your mouth so that your tongue is shaped like an L.

A few of the other letters I learned easily are T, because in Korean it is an E. Therefore I just remember ET when I see the Korean E. I also remember H because the Korean character looks like a man with a hat on. The one that looks like a 2 (appearing three times in my name) actually stands for two different english letters. These are R and L, which aren't distinguished between in Korean.

It's a neat language, so check it out. I still don't know much about speaking it though.