No Big Deal

When I teach my intro-level adult class in the morning, I usually set aside the final 10 minutes for a discussion period, based on a question I gave them during the previous class. This week, the questions have gone from 'What do you think is more important: Physical Appearance or Intelligence?', to 'What is the happiest time of the year?', and today, 'How do you celebrate Christmas?'.

The answers I get are sometimes funny and unexpected, but always interesting. As it stands for the month of December, it's composed of 8 Korean housewives, all of which i've been teaching since the beginning of September - and it's great to hear answers from their own point of view. To the first question, my favourite answer was 'Intelligence. If you're intelligent, you can become very rich, and you can pay to make your physical appearance beautiful' - well, that was the gist of the answer. The sentence structure is still a bit shaky, but they've made great, great progress over the last four months.

To the second question, 'What is the happiest time of the year?', I had told them examples of holidays (Christmas is my favourite time of the year, because...). The problem we ran into, is that they understood 'What was the happiest time you had, this year?' - and that kind of stuff really highlights how much we 'native speakers' take for granted with our vocabulary. It never even occured to me that a generalized question could be misinterpreted that way.

Today's question, 'How do you celebrate Christmas?', was pretty interesting. I was starting to wonder what a typical Korean does on Christmas day - I knew it was a low-key affair, but not to what extent. As it turns out, most of them have very similar plans - a dinner with their immediate family, a little shopping, and going to the movies. Some were giving small gifts to their children. I think it's pretty close to the same level of hype as 'Family Day' is, in Ontario - no big deal. That same low-hype athmosphere is pretty much what I see everywhere.

There are very few Christmas lights and decorations. Christmas music does play in a handful of places, but not in the bulk of locales. In a way, i'm pretty happy with it - it sucks to be far away for the holidays, but since it doesn't feel like the holidays, it almost feels like i'm not missing anything. Here's hoping the feelin' continues.

Anyway, GEC has a staff Christmas Party on Saturday, so that should be fun. Unfortunately, I have yet another dentist visit tomorrow (which marks #4), followed by another on Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday the 27th. It's not that my teeth are horrible, it's just that he's taken 5 appointments to complete the root canal, one to do a tooth molding, and one to install the crown.

Ah well. At least for the rest of my life, i'll be able to say 'I had root canal surgery 5 times within two weeks - and in a foreign country'.

Beat that!