Weekend

This has been a pretty good weekend. Yesterday at church we had our Thanksgiving service. We sang lots of songs in choir, and the African girls I go to church with wore traditional African outfits and sang a song and did a dance. The people there kept asking me is I could wear my traditional American clothes and do a traditional American dance. I tried to explain that since America is a relatively young nation of immigrants we don't really have a homogeneous group with the same traditional clothes and culture. One of my favorite guys there asked me incredulously whether or not I could do a Native American dance. I explained to him that since we killed most of them off, we apparently weren't too keen to learn their dances.

Thus they decided that I should be a traditional Korean girl. Someone prepared a 한복 (hanbok), the traditional Korean dress for me, and I wore that. Though I've been here over a year, it was my first time to wear one.

On Saturday I went to my student Paul's church to teach English for the afternoon. After teaching, we went out with his cousin and another student, Jinny, for dinner, a carnival, and the noraebong.

When we got to the carnival, the ride that they suggested was one that I had never seen before in America. The ride was a big circles with a bench running along the circumference--but there were no seats or seatbelts. You sat down, tried to hold on to the metal bar running behind the bench, and then the operator spun you around, and bumped the bottom of the ride so that you went flying off of your seat.

Since it's pretty cold now, the ride only had 5 people (it was built for 20ish), and I was the only foreigner. It turned out that the operator controlled the movement of the circle, and therefore you got shook up and bumped around. Unfortunately, the operator thought it was hilarious to stop the circle when I was over the flying out of your seat section. He kept exclaiming "외국인!" (foreigner) and then commenting on how funny my hair looked flying about and how strong I was. Paul decided to tell him that I was their professor, but it seemed he didn't have much esteem for the profession because that just seemed to egg him on.

The ride lasted about 15 minutes, and at one point my legs flew off to the side and almost hit Paul in the face. My butt was off of the bench for most of the time, and I was just holding on with my arms. It's two days later, and my arms are so SORE.

Now I know why I hadn't seen that ride in the US.