Culture Shock
I'm from New Zealand, that little set of islands out in the middle of the Pacific, and I've done a bit of travelling in my time. I "crossed the ditch" to Australia with my family when I was 14. I spent six weeks in a German high school on exchange when I was 16. I spent my entire high school career learning about two vastly different cultures, and spent a year of tertiary study learning how to teach English to foreigners. Culture shock was always a big part of my studies.
I learned that culture shock can sometimes take a while to hit you. I was told stories of international students giving up and going home when the culture shock hit. These were stories of depression, severe homesickness, illness, and grades hitting the floor. Yikes! My dad told me that he experienced culture shock when he was in Edinburgh, and if he'd known at the time what it was, he could have handled it a lot better. I consoled myself with the thought that if I knew it was coming, it wouldn't be so bad.
This sat me in fairly good stead for when I started experiencing the Real Thing. In February of this year, I quit my dreadful office job and went to South Korea with my fiancé, where we both had been offered work as English teachers. Neither of us had ever done anything like this before.
It was the tail-end of winter when we arrived. The first time I stepped out of the airport into the outside air, I felt my lungs seize up from the cold. Never before had I felt anything like this. It was the first culture shock moment for me. The first "Oh-God-it's-cold-I'm-not-in-NZ-anymore-I-wanna-go-home!" feeling. Fortunately it subsided with the judicious application of pocky and strange Korean snack foods.
There were about thirty other English teachers in the group, from NZ, Australia, Canada and the US. We were bussed to a beach resort on the west coast, which naturally was a ghost town in late February. We were put up in a nice hotel (whoa ... heated floors! Now that's something I'll miss back home) and informed that we'd be eating Korean cafeteria food for the two weeks we were there.
Gulp.
I'll address the food later. There's enough ranting material there to keep me going for a while. Suffice it now to say that they like their food spicy and don't know how to make cheese.
Daecheon Beach is a small town about ten minutes from a city called Boryeong. It's a real resort town. Motels and hotels are everywhere, many of them with flashy neon fireworks on the roof. Quite a few of them were the so-called "love motels" where you can park your car in a discreet place, away from the eyes of prying wives, and get a room for a certain number of hours. Dodgy.
The other buildings were mostly open-air fish restaurants, with little aquariums outside where the still-alive fish swam around 'til someone decided to kill and eat them. Yuck! I don't know why, but most of the restaurants were open despite there being only about a hundred people in the town, counting residents and thirty English teachers.
The town was quite poky and dirty. Many of the streets were lined with ramshackle little shops, lots of them looking like they were on the verge of falling down. Also, Koreans seem to have some kind of footpath aversion and people walk on the road and get honked at by cars all the time. I feel like shaking my fist at the drivers and shouting, "Hey! If you guys had footpaths, this wouldn't be a problem!"
Unfortunately, I can't speak Korean. Also, there's no time to do more than shake your fist and shout, "Hey!" Plus the drivers just don't care.
I believe this lack of footpaths must have been the thing that prompted the nicknaming of Korea "The Land Which Common Sense Forgot."
So there you have my first impressions of a culture vastly different from my own. Join me again next time as I describe how I set about settling in.