The Time / Friend Continuum

As I start my second year here, and brace myself for a second round of saying goodbye to friends leaving Korea, I've been thinking a lot about how making and maintaining friendships works differently for us ex-pats.

Back home, with no language barrier to overcome, I usually ended up befriending and socialising with most of my work colleagues, till my work and social life looked like a particularly cosy Venn diagram.
Here in Korea, with only two colleagues I can chat with easily in english, one of whom is a busy single mother, the two circles hardly overlap at all!

So evenings and weekends become my serious socialising time, allow me to illustrate:

• Monday  -  this used to be my Korean class night, though now it's blessedly free, for casual meet ups and   laundry.  We'll see how long I can hold out for!
• Tuesday - Breakfast in a coffee shop with Ms. Amused, as we try to do some writing and wrestle some semblance of order into our lives.   After work it's off to dinner with friends, or home for two hours before heading to yoga class at 9.
•  Wednesday - Dinner Club!  This night is a life saver for ten or so of us Waygookin girls. We take turns hosting a pot luck dinner at our apartments and discuss everything from feminism in Korea to favourite cartoon theme songs.
• Thursday - again, dinner with friends or sundry hair/nail/other appointments before yoga class at 9.
• Friday - phone teaching has me finishing work late, then off to salsa class before meeting Ms.Amused for pizza and wine and a Thank God it's Friday celebration!

It doesn't seem so much, written out like that, but remember into this schedule I also need to cram: cooking, cleaning, laundry, paying bills, Skyping home, learning a foreign language, supporting a full blown Korean drama addiction........oh,yeah, and writing a blog!

Then there's the weekends - those two days which are held utterly sacrosanct by every ex-pat.
This is when we can get out and explore Korea, in carefully organised, bite size chunks.  These are the days for meeting the friends who live too far away or who work too late to see during the week. 
This is the time for trips to Seoul, Busan or any other city you fancy.      
Or, if we're staying in Ulsan, Ms.Amused and I get busy cooking up batches of curry, tuna pasta bake, Kimchi jjigae (korean kimchi stew) and other dishes which we can parcel up to feed us for the week.

Take such a busy timetable and mix it into the ex-pat experience and you will begin to understand the importance of the Time/Friend Continuum.
We are regularly meeting new people, both Koreans and fellow ex-pats, and the longer I am here, the more I find myself running them through a mental checklist before I will commit to spending time with them.

1. Are they a good person? Can I hold an intelligent conversation with them?
2. Where in the city do they live? Close to me or more like turn left at pluto? Will it, in the end, be a complete pain in the arse just trying to physically get to them?
3. How long will they be in Korea for? Are they leaving in two months or two years?  (Just before Christmas I met a girl who was going back to the States the next day. Upon learning that it was just for vacation and that she would be back, I blurted out, "Oh good! I'll remember your name then!"  I DID remember her name, we became great friends and now I'll be very sad to bid farewell to her at the end of this month.)
4. Can I shoehorn them into my existing schedule?  'Hey, wanna come to yoga class with me?!'

This probably seems very calculating, almost ruthless but it is for three good reasons:

ONE:  I already feel like I'm spinning plates....and doing it badly....trying to keep up with the friends I HAVE. So if I am going to start spinning an extra plate, it had better be worth it!

TWO:  Living so far from home, and for such a long time, your close friends become your de facto family.  Now, you can't choose the family you're born with, but if you don't select your surrogate family carefully and wisely, then you are nine kinds of stupid.
I had a sharp reminder of the importance of ex-pat families last week. One of my friends lost her grandmother, another was quite sick and yet another finished with her boyfriend.  Three very different problems, but all of them are times when you want your family around you.

THREE:  I am a damn good friend!  I will spend time with you. I will come see whatever performance, race or charity event you are taking part in. I will help organise your wedding or bring you chicken soup when you are ill.  I will help you study for your english exam or declutter your wardrobe.
Finally, after years of being a professional doormat, I am learning to surround myself only with friends who will also go the distance for me.

Disclaimer:  All of this must make me seem like such a picky little prig, but honestly, take a look at your own friends and you'll discover your own (possibly sub-conscious) check list.
Back home, with no ticking clock and a common language, if I met someone who, I don't know, didn't like Freddie Mercury, or thought that 'The Lord of the Rings' was for kids, I could afford to declare 'You are dead to me!'
But being part of the foreigner community here in Ulsan has actually broadened my friend horizons. 
I was always pretty open and tolerant about having friends of every religion and orientation, but now I'm learning to be that open and tolerant about music and movie tastes as well!  (much more difficult!)

Actually, no matter how tolerant I become, I could never be friends with someone who didn't love Freddie.

The Long Good Friday

** Disclaimer: this post is fairly whiny, but hang in there, it has a happy ending.**

It all began at bedtime on Holy Thursday night. 
As a teacher who is in daily contact with 119 snot-nosed, germ riddled students - taking vitamins and supplements has assumed vital importance.  If I was forced to choose between brushing my teeth and taking vitamins, dental hygiene would win out..............eventually.

So on Thursday I committed the cardinal sin of forgetting my various pills that morning, and went to rectify my error by downing them before bed on Thursday night.  In a horrible moment of clarity, as I swallowed, I remembered that one of the pills came with the warning, do not take after lunchtime as it will disrupt your sleep. 
It was 11.30p.m.
I was screwed.

I fell into an uneasy, Tim Burtonesque dream haunted sleep sometime after 4am and rose again at 8 with the leaden stomach certainty that 'oh God, it's gonna be a looooong day.'

And not just any day.  Good Friday.  I was already feeling discombobulated by having to work today.  Thirty four years on this planet as an Irish Catholic has me irrevocably indoctrinated that Good Friday is for quiet contemplation, fasting and other worthy spiritual endeavours. It is not a day for work.
Understandably enough, I fell into the trap of comparing and 'what if'ing.  What would I be doing if I was at home? Who would I be with? What church activities would I be taking part in?
Just before lunchtime I was hit by a wave of my first real, sonofabitch bout of homesickness. 
I've been in Korea for over a year now. I've missed Christmas and endured three days of the stomach virus from hell, but neither of them made me long for home like this pathetic, non-Good Friday.

I battled back tears three times at work and, contrary creature that I am, I managed to be both proud of myself for hiding the tears and secretely miffed that no one noticed how quiet I was!
So I was already feeling homesick and weird as I headed upstairs for lunch.  Now, Good Friday is a fast day, which means abstaining from meat, but I hadn't given much thought to the school lunch because in good Korean style the meat is usually just one of the many side dishes and therefore easy to avoid and while still eating my fill.
Alas, today I sat down and gazed mournfully into a dish of rice and curry.
I turned to my Head Teacher, "What is this?"
Head Teacher: "Curry."
Me: (apologetic smile) "Yes. Does it have meat in it?"
Helpfully, Head Teacher used to be Catholic and quickly realised why I was asking.  It was indeed a meat curry, so I was left with a bowl of rice and a seaweed soup that was so salty I felt like I was swimming at Spanish Point! (beach on the west coast of Ireland)
So now I was feeling homesick, weird and flippin hungry!
Not the best recipe for a light heart.

Here's where teaching kindergarten comes in handy!
I learned today:

•  that happiness is watching 11 five year olds attempt to draw a bumble bee.
•  that  teaching six year olds the actions to a new song is a great cure for the blues.
•  that seeing a childs whole being light up just because they see me is a great way to get me crying again!
• that having a sister and friends that I can text whines to is priceless.

 


 Just what the doctor ordered!  These are from two of my eight year olds, Dana and Kristen.


On Fridays, the other NET (native english teacher) and I do phone teaching: we call our elementary school students for phone conversation.  This means I work late on Fridays, which sometimes I resent, but it also means I get to hear my kids improve week by week, which I love. 
As well as getting in some scary/valuable practice in speaking Korean with their mothers!

So by the time Lush and I met for dinner at 8.30 I was mindlessly ravenous.  I kept remembering one of my Dad's semi-blasephemous quotes: "I'm so hungry I could eat the Lamb of God..........and then make a drive for the ewe!"
The delicious Vietnamese food and Lush's sympathetic ear did much to restore my spirits and when we met Sister Dear after she finished work I was back on an even keel.  We only had a brief chat with Ms.Amused, as she had to be up at the truly ungodly hour of five am to go cheer friends running in a marathon.  (whole body shudder on several levels)

Lush and I repaired to a DVD Bang in search of a particular Korean rom-com called 'Spellbound'.
We had tried to watch it at a DVD Bang in Mugeodong last week, but they didn't have subtitles.
This time, our luck was in, the bang in Samsandong had subtitles. It was already being watched so we had to wait twenty minutes for it, but we were so intrigued by the plot and I know and love both main actors, so we decided it was worth the wait.
Thankfully, it was!

 

After two hours laughing, 'awww'ing and telling Lush, "It's ok, you can look now." (it's a rom-com with a horror twist!) I headed home, content that my long Good Friday had come to a happy ending.

God bless my lovelies, and Happy Easter wherever you are!