Day 25: And Now A Message From Our Sponsors

Things have improved so much at work! The new school semester in Korea began this week, and so as a result we have new students and a new schedule. Many of our former kindergartens have graduated up to elementary levels, and there's quite a lot of new faces around the school these days, including some new teachers. Things are much more organized now than they were before. In my first three weeks of teaching things were still very much 'in transition' and I never really knew what was going on. I just took it day-by-day and a lot of times just had to make it up as I went along (lessons and such.) Well now we have textbooks and worksheets and formal lessons for the kids, and it makes my job so much easier. I actually have a pre-set curriculam to follow and it's so much nicer to have proper materials to work with! I can walk in everyday knowing what to expect and I think the kids are enjoying the new materials as well. Also, my schedule varies a bit, so some days I start at 10am, and others 11am - both times work well for me and I'm thankful that I don't have to wake up too early! One thing that I definitely appreciate about this job (that I was not able to enjoy while working at Delany's) is never having to work at the crack of dawn, and always having my entire weekends free! I think this is the first job I've ever had in my entire life where I have both Saturday and Sunday off every single week - IT'S AWESOME!!!

I've been watching a fair bit of TV these days during my weeknights and I've made a lot of observations. And thanks to the tape that Barb sent me, I've been able to do some comparative studies between Korean and Canadian media/television programming, and particularly with commercials. For example, in Korea, a lot of times you get all your commercials at once, at the beginning of the show generally, and then you get to watch the entire show straight through uninterrupted. This is both a blessing and a curse. It's great to be able to watch a show without having some annoying commercial break it up, but to have to sit through ten full minutes of commercials can be agonizing sometimes!

I've noticed that there's two main styles of Korean commercials - there's the 'music video', and there's the 'infomercial.' The first is very enjoyable and kitschy and fun to watch, the latter is not! Most commercials here tend to be very energetic and lively and super cheesy full of pop or rock or techno music, with the actors dancing around or being extremely animated. Lots of Western music finds its way into these commercials and it can be hilarious! For example, I've seen a commercial for instant noodles featuring Mary J. Blige's "Family Affair" where the guy in the commercial is trying to woo over a saucy Korean vixen who's grooving and moaning against this wall at a party, with her own package of instant noodles, rockin' out to Mary J. And there's another one I've seen with Kelly Clarkson's "Miss Independent" that's used in a cell phone commercial, where some sexy Korean chick is getting blown through the air around downtown because of these waves magically coming out of her phone "what is this feeling taking over..." Very cheesy, very funny!

And then there's the informercials, which are sooooo long and so annoying! They are honestly a full ten minutes long (one commercial, for ONE product!) and are structured just like how you would see on The Home Shopping Network. Often the commercial will repeat itself so it's like having to watch it several times in a row. These infomercials always have the same ingredients: one absolutely useless product + one Korean male in a suit who invented it + at least 2 Korean women who act all excited about the product while either demonstrating it or discussing its amazing qualities + one hot Korean female model to make you watch the commercial in its entirety + one audience full of fake cheesy actors to "ooohh" and "ahhhh" at just the right moments + one fake award/'official' recognition of some sort (ex: Best Invention Of The Year!: 2002!) to make the product seem more credible + an amazing and sudden slashing of the price to make it seem like it's on sale + one or more *Wow! Free!* other useless shit products thrown in to close the deal. The result is a cookie-cutter recipe for selling useless shit on TV (pretty much the same style as Western infomercials!) These commercials were mildy entertaining at first, but when you have to watch the same ones over and over, it gets really old, really fast!

I've learned to just 'tune out' when these annoying Korean informercials come on screen, but this has caused an unusual side effect while watching Western programming.... When I was watching the tape full of shows that Barb mailed me, I felt *compelled* to watch all the commercials and pay great attention to what the sponsors were trying to sell! It's like because I almost never hear anything English (as in on the streets, on the bus, or while channel-surfing here) that anytime I do hear English, I HAVE to stop and listen! I've become so accustomed to just not hearing my native language on a daily basis that whenever I do it almost shocks my ears, who do a 'double-take' and just have to SOAK IN whatever it is they're hearing, even if it is just a silly Tide or Sleep Country Canada commercial on a tape that my friend sent me. Why this is, I can't explain, and it's a little disorienting, I must confess. I'm not sure if I should laugh at myself, or be concerned! :-)