How “a drink after work” turns into 4am at a Noribong

After first week of work, I decided it would be good for my coworkers, all of whom are Korean, and I to get together chat and have a drink. They agreed, so we planned ahead and went out after work on Friday. I had let some other people know that I was going out for a drink with coworkers but might meet them later. Little did I know “a drink” in Korea is not just a drink, and I definitely wouldn’t be going out with other people that night.

We left work around nine and wandered around our district of Ulsan, looking for a place to eat. The nice sashimi place the girls were wandering toward happened to close early that night, so we decided anything would do. Still, all the other places we checked were closing or closed, and after an hour of searching, we still hadn’t found a place. This was my first clue that the night was going to be long.

Because of the dead-end in our district, we headed downtown to a place the girls knew would be open. We ordered soju, beer, and a giant plate of sashimi, which of course, came with ten or so side dishes.

As we started eating, drinking, and getting more comfortable, we were sitting traditional Korean style on the floor, the girls I was with started joking about a second stage. I laughed and thought, ok I’ve done that before. Dinner one place, dessert another. At this point, I was pretty convinced I would be spending the evening with them, then going home, but I really had no clue what I was in for.

After about an hour of eating and drinking, another coworker showed up with her boyfriend, and we continued to eat and drink. He had been out drinking with coworkers previous to meeting up with his girlfriend and suggested almost immediately that we head to a Noribong, which is Korean style karaoke. The girls laughed, but obviously took it seriously because after we drank a bit more, there we were, outside, walking toward a Noribong. My coworkers half gave me the option to leave, by asking me if I wanted to go, but of course, they really expected me to come. While I’m not crazy about karaoke, it was definitely an experience I was curious about, so I went along thinking I wouldn’t sing, I would just sit and watch.

Fairly typical Noribong hall stolen from the Internet

When we got to the Noribong, we were shown our own private room fully equipped with tambourines, two microphones, two TV screens, a table and a nice cushioned bench to sit on.

Inside of a Noribong "singing room" also stolen from the Internet

The girls ordered more beer and food, and the singing started almost immediately. They handed me a book, showed me the English section and encouraged me to pick out a song. How can you say no to that?

Here’s the thing about Noribong. No one can get away with not singing. I mean, maybe if you have iron resolve, haven’t been drinking, and dislike the people you are with, it’s possible. No matter how much I stalled, saying I couldn’t find anything, my coworkers kept insisting and encouraging me. I tried looking for a song I listened to as a teenager, that I knew I would know all the words to, but failed. Finally, I saw a song I knew and thought, I listen to this song all the time and sing along, so I must know the words. Boy was I wrong, I knew maybe fifty percent of the words to a song I listened to all the time. It was a bit catastrophic.

When my turn to sing came, I got nervous. I had no clue how this was going to go. I grabbed a mic, pushed back my fear, and tried to imagine I was in my apartment just singing along with the song. This pseudo-self-confidence worked until about 10 seconds into the song when I realized I hardly knew the song at all. While someone with more confidence performing would have simply embraced it, I kept shaking my head, saying I didn’t know the words, shrugging my shoulders and the like. After a humiliating two minutes, the song finally ended, and I sat down. Perhaps because my coworkers were drunk, or maybe just out of politeness, or out of excitement that I had participated, they congratulated me and said it was great.

It wasn’t great.

The Noribong gives you a score. My coworkers had been scoring in the 90s, making me think it was impossible to get a lower score.

I scored a 76.

This was a fairly embarrassing affirmation that I didn’t know the song and sucked at singing it. I shook my head, and started looking for another song. I thought, I’ve got to be able to do better!

In the end, over the course of perhaps three hours, I sang three songs, one with the help of a coworker, and I discovered that regardless of how much Koreans argue that the words are on the screen, it doesn’t help unless I actually know the song.

I have no idea what time it was when we arrived at the Noribong, but after an hour or so of singing, the boyfriend who suggested Noribong in the first place, fell asleep. No one seemed to pay him any mind, and we continued to hang out, singing until I started showing obvious fatigue. I danced less, was less interested in finding a song, and generally was overwhelmed by the cultural immersion I was experiencing.

Finally, at four o’clock in the morning, we all headed home. My first initiation into Korean night culture was complete. Afterwards I was surprised how going out for “a drink” turned into all night, but it was a Friday night after all, and we did have a pretty great time.

Now that I have been here nearly two months, I am beginning to discover that going out for “a drink” with Koreans is never just that, regardless what day of the week it is. This last Thursday evening the scenario repeated itself. When with Koreans, the night will have many stages - first grab food, soju and beer, last head to Noribong, with a few unknowns inbetween.

How Korea sees its neighbors, through the eyes of a teenager, as viewed by a foreigner

At the beginning of my class with two teenage girls, I usually just encourage them to talk to each other, to me and say what’s on their mind. I have found that this leads to interesting discoveries about my students, as people, and also creates a more natural environment in which to speak English.

During one of these warm-ups, one of the girls drew a cartoonish map of Korea (north and south together), with Japan along side. Anyone who has looked at a map of Asia, will recognize that Korea and Japan are fairly comparable in size, though some of the northern islands of Japan actually make Japan larger. My student’s map of Korea made Japan look tiny in comparison, so I joked with my teenager about it.

“Wow! Japan is tiny!”

“Yes. I don’t like Japan …”

She went on to explain to me that despite how cool Japanimation is, the Japanese are jerks. She told me that the Japanese changed the spelling of Corea to Korea for the Olympics, so Japan would come before Korea at the opening ceremony. This is the first I had ever heard of this alternate spelling, and a quick Google search will come up with various reasons for the different spellings. After mentioning spelling, my students wrote Corea and Korea on the map, with Korea crossed out. Then they labeled the East Sea, and I mentioned that the rest of the world knows this as the Sea of Japan. Of course neither of my students approved of this renaming and said Japan only thought of itself, but I also pointed out that the East Sea is west of Japan, so it doesn’t make sense for them to call it east.

The map my student drew not only begged the question about how Japan is viewed, because it presented both North and South together as Korea, it begged the question of how my students see the division between the two halves. The rest of the world sees Korea as split into North Korea and South Korea, but as evidenced by this map, the idea doesn’t hold much weight in Korea. Part of the issue is that many Koreans have family in the North. Family they haven’t seen for a couple generations, but family, none-the-less. South Koreans seem to desperately want reunification, and really, who wouldn’t if some of their family lived across a border that not many people can cross.

This short conversation regarding the countries drawn, segued into a conversation about Korea’s other neighbor, China, which was only added to the map when I mentioned it. It seems that just about everything that goes wrong in Korea can somehow be blamed on China. While things like crappy weather and a lot of pollution really do come from China on occasion, other things like, “I got food poisoning, this food must have come from China,” seem a bit exaggerated. From many students’ points of view, China is dirty, cheap, a land where they eat weird things, and part of the reason the North and South have not been reunified.

From this single window of conversation which arose because of a simple drawing, it may seem that Korea has a fairly cool relationship with its neighbors, but it is actually quite common for my students to have visited Japan or China, though they may prefer their own Jeju Island.

Alien status

While I have yet to be asked for it, after nearly two months of being in Korea, I now have my official alien card. If my school hadn't been kind enough to set up both Internet and cell phone under their name, now I could finally get these on my own. The alien card also means I can establish a bank account, get free wi-fi at Starbucks and I'm sure countless other privileges that I didn't even realize I had been going without. Of course, it all seems that it is in exchange for some type of authorized surveillance and tracking.

My alien card, about which, my coworker said, "I don't like this picture of you." When I tried to get her to explain what she meant, was it a bad picture or what, she got really evasive.

Comparing bureaucracy in Moscow and Ulsan, while the paperwork here seems much more detailed, strenuous and ridiculous -- they required a notarized, apostilled copy of my diploma even after I had sent my original diploma -- for some reason the system seems more efficient, even though it took me a little over a month to get my alien card. This month was, surprisingly, not on the government side but was my employer. After my boss finally applied for the card, I had it in less than a week.

Here's to being a legal alien! Not even my boss understands why this registration is necessary.

Four seasons, one weekend

For anyone who loves the ocean, going to the beach, on a warm day with the sun on your face and sand between your toes, will cure any longing for another season, another time, or another place. When the bus dropped us off at Haeundae metro stop, we had no clue which way to turn to find our hostel, or the market it was in, or the beach. Usually, going with my gut leads me in the wrong direction, but this time it led me straight to a map of the city and toward the smell of the ocean. As soon as the ocean caught my attention, I no longer had any wish for fall. I simply enjoyed being a bit warm in my sweatshirt and occasionally cold enough to put on my scarf.

During the day Haeundae Beach held a magically warm pocket of air. It reminded me of summer and made me not even want to think about finding a good winter coat, but at night Busan fell into lower temperatures and my sweater, jacket, scarf combination did not even begin to protect me against this biting preview of what winter will bring. Not only did I get a taste of summer and winter this weekend, I also found fall and spring on my walk to the Busan Museum of Modern Art. While there was traffic on one side of the sidewalk, an unexpected green patch lined the other side. I saw flower buds and flowers in bloom and a bit further down the sidewalk, fall colors, leaves on the sidewalk, and wafts of the smell of fall interspersed with car exhaust and the crunch of leaves underfoot.

I couldn’t have asked for a better weekend to see Busan for the first time, and the forty minute bus ride means I will be exploring the city a lot when I need a break from Ulsan. While I never imagined I would think a city of 1.5 million was small, I’m happy to have a slightly more cosmopolitan city as a break from what I have discovered is a quite small (in attitude and options), big (geographically and population wise) city.

Music enables a comparison of apartments and cultures

It’s nowhere near the first of September, the first day of school for Russian children, and I’m in Ulsan, Korea miles away from Moscow. Yet, from somewhere outside, there is music emanating into my apartment, dredging up memories of those early days in September 2009 when I awoke to children’s speeches and patriotic Russian hymns.

At the beginning of the school year, Russian schools hold ceremonies to welcome the students back. The music at these first of September events usually was performed live by children, but the music in this case feels like it’s coming from a record being proudly played into the streets. While I have no idea what they are singing about, and wouldn’t even if it was in English, because it is not quite that clear, the orchestral background to the singing makes me think of patriotic anthems.

It’s early morning, the sun is shining in my window, and while it’s two months later and 10 degrees colder, the memory-pulling this music is causing is a bit unreal.

Suddenly, I can remember very clearly my dingy little apartment in a rundown part of Moscow, where the vacuum cleaner put more dust on the floor than it picked up, and where my room was basically a small partitioned off part of my roommate’s giant room – an afterthought. While we had separate entrances, the wall separating our rooms was paper thin. The entire apartment smelt old and very well used. The floor in the kitchen hadn’t been cleaned for years, so any attempt left the water dingy and the floor still dirty with caked on grim.

Because I lived in this apartment for nearly six months but never had people over because of my embarrassment, it is relegated to a different memory box, which isn’t negative, but is deemed as a “cultural” experience. It was a true, Soviet style apartment. It had not undergone any European remodel or facelift but was probably exactly the way it had been nearly 40 years before I lived there. The electric wiring had issues. The security to get into the apartment was insane. A key code on the outside of the building, which seems fairly standard around the world, a giant double steel plate door with a skeleton key to get into our hallway, and finally a double door into our apartment. The itty-bitty kitchen held our washer, refrigerator, stove, and a dining room table which barely constituted a table. It was a rickety, makeshift thing about a meter squared, covered in a nappy, old, plastic tablecloth and two wobbly stools. Because I lived there, I made feeble attempts to clean or make the apartment not feel as grungy and worn out, but many things, like the worn-out porcelain in the bathtub which absorbed the strange color of the water, were just old. It was a true, post-Stalin era, Soviet apartment building and felt like it was going to collapse.

It’s difficult to even compare the apartment I am currently sitting in with this older apartment, and the two cultures which created them are two entirely different beasts. The Soviet era apartment was rough, old, ragged, but served its purpose. Like the attitudes in Moscow, it did not mince words or attempt to sugar coat the reality of it. It was what it was, a small little abode on the top floor of a rundown building in a rundown section of Moscow. My Korean apartment is brand new, streamlined and efficient with niceties I never would have dreamed of at my old apartment in Moscow, heated floors, control of the hot water temperature, but it’s in an industrial section of the city, with no green space. Like my first encounters with Korean people, first impressions of my apartment were wonderful. It’s only when the weather gets colder and wear starts to show that the bugs are forced out, but even then, they remain shy and elusive.