Hello, everyone! Katy, here. This week I'd like to tell you just a little bit about a new hobby I've picked up that is both familiar, and hilariously Korean at the same time.
I recently looked into a series of classes that the local community center puts on for free. I had heard about them through a friend of mine who took a sewing class, and also through the foreign wives club in town. The foreign wives club, if I haven't mentioned already is where my textbooks come from for learning Korean. Being as proud of a nation as Korea is, it is important to them that women who marry Korean men get a good language and cultural education, and so our textbooks and classes are free. Mostly the women who marry Korean men are from Southeast Asia, and for some reason the population here in Goheung is mostly Philippine. I have no way of knowing if that is representative in the rest of the country or not. I also have no idea if foreign men who marry Korean women have the same resources as foreign wives do. It seems much less common though.
Anyway, so I looked through the classes with the help of a friend to translate the papers, for something that would not require me to be very good at Korean in order to follow along. That narrowed it down quickly to physical activity sort of classes, like dance and yoga. Since my friend was going to do the class with me, once I expressed an interest in dance, she picked the one that looked most interesting to her. Latin dance it is! Interestingly I've spent a couple years now living in Latin America and managed to completely avoid learning how to dance... until now.
So on our first day, we were pleasantly surprised to see that it was a big class, but less excited to realize that we were probably the only students under 40 years old in the room. It turns out that the middle age population of Goheung loves Latin dance! Many of the students, mostly women, were quite good and had clearly taken the class before. It was also interesting that though most middle aged people in town are married, none of these participants (though roughly half and half male and female) attended with their spouses. The class quickly took note of the youngest, and only blond classmate, and it didn't take long before I heard my poor friend explaining over and over again who I was. Interestingly, this is a conversation I could have actually had myself with my Korean level, but no one expected me to be able to speak the language, and, I was happy to escape some of the attention by letting my friend answer the questions even if all eyes were on me.
People are generally welcoming, and I've even been blessed with what I'm calling my Kmom. With regular gifts of kimchi, towels, and notebooks she informed me that her son, who is about my age currently lives in France so she feels like I am her child now. And I, of course, won't argue. I appreciate her help when I don't understand instructions, and she makes pretty good ban chan.
The first hour of class are individual line dances, while the second hour are partner dances. Most are variations on the Cha Cha Cha, and almost all are preformed to Kpop. I dance with my friend as my partner, since the one time I tried to dance with a Korean man, he grew visibly frustrated with his lack of an ability to correct me verbally. Fortunately my friend's husband prefers the idea of her dancing with me to dancing with any of the other men, so we have partnered up and (if I do say so myself) have gotten pretty good!
That's all for now. I hope everyone has a great week. Happy April!
-K
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