Yu-Na Kim: Korea's Favorite Girl

A short walk down Gangnam's main drag in Seoul guarantees multiple poster sightings of South Korea's biggest celebrity: Yu-Na Kim. In anticipation of her expected Olympic gold medal victory, I went to the nearest Smoothie King and got a "Be White" smoothie. It was great, electrolyte flavor and all, although I'm not sure the title would go over well in the States.

Korea has good reason to be proud of their 19-year-old miracle. She's sweet, beautiful, talented and just a little bit sassy -- and she's slayed every possible competitor in the past several years -- except that one time with Japanese arch-rival, Mao Asada. The whole country is biting their nails for the golden girl, and with all the hype, I'm starting to feel nervously sick for her. Yeah, she's made a killing by promoting everything from cell phones to banks to tissues, but the weight of pressure in a perfectionist culture like Korea's is tremendous.

How will the country react if she loses? I don't want to find out.

In the meantime, I'll sing along to her grocery store commercial and be proud to be in Korea for the momentous moment. Yay Yu-Na Kim! C'mon, girl!

Mysterious English Machine

Strategically stationed outside my "English Zone" classroom, is what everyone calls, "The English Machine." Similar to one of those motion-detecting singing reindeer your grandma has, it speaks English every time someone walks by.

It's an expensive investment for the school, so Mr. Min, my co-teacher, was recently working himself into a frenzy trying to figure out why it kept shutting off. Yesterday, we were getting lunch, when some 4th-grade students rushed into the room yelling and pointing toward the hallway. At first I was worried when Mr. Min bellowed and jumped into action, charging out of the classroom toward the English Machine. He returned somewhat amused, but mostly miffed at the elusivity of a special needs student. After a lesson about electric conservation, the little guy decided that turning off the English Machine would be his personal contribution to saving the planet.

Seodaemun Prison

It's no news that there's bad blood between Koreans and Japanese. After my visit to Seodaemun Prison, I understand why. The 35-year Japanese colonization is referred to as a hellish period where Koreans were given new Japanese names, forbidden to speak the Korean language or teach Korean history. Schools were closed and a brutal, iron fist governed the small country until the end of WWII.

But before that, a 17-year-old girl named Yu Gwan-sun tried to create a wave of change by organizing a 2,000-person demonstration with the mantra, "Long live Korean independence!" For her efforts, she was sentenced to seven years in Seodaemun prison where she died in 1920 from torture. Now she is remembered on the anniversary of the demonstration, March 1, Korean Independence Day.

I'd always heard about how the Japanese were infamous for creating torture methods, and at the prison I saw the proof. The prison was a mini-concentration camp that packed so many prisoners into cells that they had to sleep in shifts for lack of room. Beatings, sexual torture, hangings and starvation were regular punishments for independence activists. They may have beat the Gulf Coast to electrocution and definitely the rest of the world to the "nail under the fingernail" technique. Also, there's the kind where prisoners sit in a box full of sharp spikes and guards kick the box around. Below I'm standing by a secret tunnel in the back of the prison where Japanese guards passed out bodies of dead prisoners to avoid public scrutiny of the number killed.

Largest Church in the World

South Korea only slightly trails the U.S. in the number of evangelical missionaries it sends out annually. This is especially remarkable because the U.S. population is around 308 million and South Korea's is 48.5 million. Considering a fervent population of that size is crammed into a space the size of Indiana, it makes sense that Korea is home to the biggest church in the world. At 500,000 strong, it blows America's Saddleback out of the water. Amanda and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to attend one of the seven Sunday services at Yoido Full Gospel Church. Even though the service was in Korean, there were a lot of American songs (translated for us) and U.S. references to people like Joel Osteen. We donned special head-sets in the "foreigner" seating section and flipped to the English channel where the service was translated live for us. Seven other languages were offered, too, from Chinese, to Russian and Arabic. I enjoyed the service, choir and energetic worship, but was sad that such a powerful Christian presence is preaching a health and wealth gospel.

A Typical Korean School Lunch

My arrival to Korea brought a cyclone of change, not the least of which was a new diet.

I was vaguely aware that Korean food involved a lot of rice and fish, but I didn't know what a "normal" Korean meal was until I got to school. Luckily for me, school lunches introduced typical Korean fare and exposed me to a myriad of things I would never have tried otherwise.

Rice, or"bop" in Korean, is the centerpiece of the lunches, accompanied with several side dishes and soup. Pictured is my favorite of the daily soups, what I call "seaweed soup," but it's really a mix of various greens, potatoe, seaweed and a spicy broth. Garlic and red pepper paste are behind many dishes, giving Korean food a brand of spicy unique from Mexican or Indian.

Today we were lucky enough to have strawberries to accompany the scrambled eggs (left corner) and signature of Korean food -- kimchi, most commonly fermented cabbage or radish -- but more on kimchi later.

I can't count how many times my co-workers have complimented me on my adept use of chopsticks -- for a foreigner. It's kind of like a guy telling someone she's good at punching -- for a girl.