Cultural Differences aka Things that Make You Go Hmmmmm

Cultural differences come in all shapes and sizes, and here are just a few recent experiences that have caused me to do a mental double-take.

Hierarchies:

The other evening I was invited to go to dinner with my co-workers and some of the office staff as a thank you for teaching the gifted class this semester. The Principal and Vice Principal were also invited. Joe was not invited. My co-teacher, Ms. Park, drove me, and my two "Western" buddies--William and Shaun--to the restaurant, which was called Delicious. Delicious is a buffet-style restaurant with all kinds of goodies--sushi, traditional Korean fare, pizza, French fries, etc. The Koreans know how to do buffets. There are no smeary sneeze guards hovering over tubs of green jello or crusted-over mac 'n cheese. This stuff in Korea is good, really good. But here's the thing--we couldn't eat any of it until the Principal showed up. He was fashionably late. A half hour late. So we all sat there, watching heaping plates of deliciousness waft past us as we twitched and moaned in our seats. This is what is known as hierarchy in action, folks. Until the big wig shows up, the peasants starve. So we waited. And waited. Until finally he arrived, smiling and accepting bows from everyone as we all (manditorily) stood to greet him. Shaun and I were very confused about the standing part--did we have to stand, how long were we required to stand, what did the stand mean anyway, could the standing possibly lead to walking toward the buffet and finally stuffing our maws? These questions were not immediately answered, as we all just continued to stand as the Principal seemed to bask in the attention. Finally, after he had removed his coat and received the warmth of all of our smiling (starving) faces, he made some sort of non-descript gesture that indicated we could finally eat. The lot of us gratefully stampeded off toward the food. Shaun and I exchanged eye-rolling and heavy sighs over the whole thing. It was a very real lesson in the system of hierarchies that exist here, and while I'm sure that there are a million good reasons for this system, I couldn't help but think that the Principal might have seemed more magnanimous had he called from his cell phone and instructed us plebs to go ahead and chow down without him.

Cleaning:

There are a lot of issues about cleanliness that I have problems with here in Korea, and most of them center around the bathroom culture. There is one area in which (generally speaking) Korea is very clean, and that is in their restaurants--if food is involved, everything is spit-spot. As far as the bathrooms and the streets go, however, it's a completely different story. I read somewhere that Koreans consider bathrooms to be disgusting places and therefore see no need to keep them clean or to treat them well. This would explain the poo splatter that is not an uncommon sight in and around the toilets at my school. Or the perpetually wet floors. Or the overflowing buckets of used toilet paper next to the toilets. Or the often absence of soap. To my mind, the bathroom should be the cleanest place of the house (besides the kitchen) precisely because it is the grossest room in the house. Be that as it may. When I think about it though, it's not like America has cornered the market on clean bathrooms either. I'm having flashbacks of some truly horrifying gas station bathrooms in Wisconsin, and don't even get me started on bathroom conditions at music festivals.

Anyhoo, the thing that got me the other day was not the bathrooms. This time it was the "cleaning" that the students do of the teachers' office. A group of students come through the office with short brooms that resemble twigs bound together with twine. They sweep the office and then drag dirty looking mops across the floor as they chat with the teachers and each other. The kicker here is that all of the windows in the office apparently have to be flung open whil this is happening. The reason? So that we don't breathe in the dust that is being disturbed by the sweeping. Allegedly it is better for our health. Never mind the fact that it's 30 degrees outside and whatever money was just spent to keep the office heated has just flown out the window. And never mind that this reasoning makes no actual sense, not just generally speaking but in terms of basic physics. If you open a window and cold wind comes barreling in, this does not prohibit us from breathing in dust, but rather helps the dust fly at us and plunge into our nostrils and thereby into our lungs. Also, if you introduce vigorous air flow into any sweeping scenario, the dust inevitably gets away from the broom and hides in whatever dark corner it can find, and thus is not swept up at all. My co-worker told me to get over it. It's not going to happen. Some things just don't make sense, and this is one of them.

One more for the road--Eye-rolling:

In these last couple of weeks before the semester ends, there has been less teaching and a fair bit of downtime in all my classes, which has been kind of nice. It's given me and my co-teacher, Ms. Park, time to talk about cultural differences and for her to teach me some Korean. We've talked about a lot of things, but the one thing that really interested me on Friday was when she asked me what it meant to roll one's eyes. I explained what it meant and how if you did it as a child to your parents, you'd probably get a smack. She said that eye-rolling is something that Koreans do not do; apparently, it is a very "Western" facial movement. I never would have thought of this. Eye-rolling seems so universal. I didn't get a chance to ask what the Korean equivalent was, but I will. These sorts of discoveries are so fascinating, and pop up when least expected. Good stuff.