Honeymoon=Over

So yesterday I got sick. Quite sick. Something started in my stomach and within a few hours I had a fever going. It was pretty miserable to sit through hours of training feeling like CRAP, and it was even worse riding the subway back to the hotel (a 45 minute door-to-door trip) feeling like crap. Yesterday I ate nothing all day and just the thought of Korean food was enough to make me feel even more sick to my stomach. I went to a Korean pharmacy with one of the recruiting officers as translator to try to find some Pepto-Bismol or something. This old man who was there rambled at me in Korean for a minute or two, even though it was clear I couldn't understand him. I'm guessing he was making jokes about how Westerners couldn't handle squid or kimchi or whatever, more for the entertainment of the other Koreans present then for my benefit. Finally, I got my hands on some Gaviscon (which I knew they had here because of these funny commercials involving firefighters in your belly spraying Gaviscon all over your insides to put out the "fires" of heartburn.)

(Here's another very entertaining example of Korean advertising culture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6eNqwaL1h8 )

The training is pretty rigorous--they expect us to internalize and memorize a lot of information, because at this point I'll be hitting the classroom in only five days.

I slept for about twelve hours after getting out of training yesterday (no easy feat, considering my roommate has had this terrible cough for the past three days). It's a good thing I'm feeling better today, because missing a day of training would probably be bad; it might mean I would have to go through the whole week of training again--so much is contained in a day.

By the way, the picture above depicts some traditional Korean folk music being played. I had the privilege to see a performance the other day at the palace--my favorite instrument was the "gayageum," which is the one you see in the foreground. That particular one is a "bass gayageum," which is played with the use of a popsicle-stick shaped plectrum, but I also saw some young ladies in traditional garb playing the regular kind, which one picks with the fingers of the right hands, while using the left hand to fret the strings. Some of the rhythms and hand motions reminded me of playing the banjo: before I leave, I definitely want to give the gayageum a try! One doesn't simply fret the strings with the left hand--since there's so much space between the frets and the board, you can create these interesting "shaky" sounds by pressing down with a vacillating amount of pressure.

Interestingly enough, most Koreans are totally uninterested in and disconnected from their folk history. This is a country that is drunk with the present technological boom... I tried asking some of my Korean native trainers at CDI about the gayageum and traditional Korean folk music and dance, and they really knew NOTHING about what I was interested in. Very strange, but I suppose it's consistent with what I've experienced as the "corporate culture" at CDI. Chungdahm Institute is definitely an education BUSINESS, and corporate ladder climbing is a part of the culture. My trainers keep telling us about all the opportunities for advancement if you're a successful teacher, which titillates many of my fellow trainees but leaves me a little cold. It's just very different from Canterbury, where the faculty is a tight-knit community of interlocked families, or the typical University, where the faculty is (ostensibly, at least) part of a community of knowledge. CDI is a community of business.