First of all, the Native English Teacher, NET, usually gets, if they are lucky, 24 hours notice of this dinner being planned. Often you are told the day of, around lunch time, and are expected to be able to join. More often than not, these dinners take place in some of Mokpo's finest creepy seafood restaurants, where the serve the local delicacy of live octopus (as in tentacles still moving and sticking to your mouth), or stinky skate soup.
So needless to say, throughout the pregnancy I have been asking ahead of time what the menu for the dinners would be. Several times it was some variety of nasty seafood fare, so I politely excused myself, using the safetly of my baby as the reason. "In the west, we believe that eating seafood while pregnant can lead to allergies, so I think I better not come..."
However, this time we were going for meat, some good old fashion beef on a grill. That, I can handle. I was also given several days notice for once, which was a surprise, considering the way things are normally done so last minute here, especially when i'm involved! Another example: Monday morning, 8:20am, having just arrived at my desk, looking like shit due to a cold I picked up over the weekend, "Oh Shanna, I'm so sorry, I forgot to tell you today is teacher photo day for the school yearbook. We will have our pictures taken in 10 minutes." Fantastic.
Back to the meat.
Teacher dinners are extremely important in Korea, to show your fidelity to your school and your "oneness" with all the teachers. It is essential to have a feeling of belonging and togetherness in the workplace, and dinners serve to foster these happy feelings, since employees are overworked and get next to no time off. Case in point, most high school teachers are at school from 7:30 am until 10pm daily, work Saturdays and get usually less than a week of paid time off each year. As a foreigner, it is difficult to truly understand the importance of these dinners, but we try to play along.
So we went to a very nice beef barbeque restaurant, where you purchase your cuts of meat from the deli counter, very high quality stuff, and then eat it however you like it cooked.
The men usually like to eat that first tray of beef, in the middle of the picture, just as is, raw. The women mostly like to turn on the grills and start cooking it. Luckily I was sitting with three other women who did not care for raw beef, so we starting grilling!
A beautiful discovery in Korea: the many uses of the kitchen scissors. Koreans brilliantly have been using scissors for cutting meat for ages. How I never thought of that before baffles me; so simple yet highly effective!
The other important part of Teacher dinners, or any meal out with friends, family or business colleagues, is drink pouring. This is the penultimate way to show your respect and mutual friendship feelings. Generally speaking, the younger (females) pour for the oldest members of the group. There is a whole culture around how to give and receive drinks, that I won't go into too much, because there is simply too much to say and it's complicated. Placement of the hands is significant as well. Essentially, you pour a drink for someone to show respect and then they return the favour to show they appreciate the gesture and respect you, too. In the picture below, taken at a terrible angle, my co-teacher Moon Gu Seul, the youngest female satff member, pours beer using two hands for the Vice-Principal who is sitting beside her. The poor girl got fairly drunk at this dinner because the Vice-P kept requesting drinks with her, and she couldn't refuse. He offered me a shot glass of soju at one point, as well, but luckily the teachers around me quickly stepped in to explain I couldn't drink while expecting.
At the end of the dinner, bolstered by all the beer and soju flwoing frrely, several of the male teachers got brave and tried out some English skills on myself and the other English teachers. One man started singing to the Principal, another man was getting uncomfortably close to a young woman, basically confessing his love to her, and some time after I left the parry, a bunch of them went off to a singing room together. Oh yes, my Vice-P, well into his drinks at this point with all the "respect" in the room, insisted on going out with Joe at some point, to drink together and speak English. All in all a pretty normal outcome for a good teacher dinner.
