Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Construction in Korea

One thing I have noticed here is that they construct and renovate things at a blinding speed. Often I'll be downtown and realize that a store has completely disappeared and been replaced by a totally different one and I was there only 3 days ago! Right now we have some construction happening around the school. I haven't been able to get a clear, straight answer about what they are making exactly but apparently there is going to be a building of some kind and a parking lot. They haven't been working at this for very long, maybe a couple weeks, and already they have dug a massive hole, built a wall and poured a bunch of cement. I took a few pictures.
One of the workers started gesturing wildly when I was taking pictures and when I walked over there it turned out he could speak a little English.




Basically our conversation was as follows:
Man: Hello? Uhhhh... picture (makes a picture taking gesture.)... WHY? (arms thrown in the air in an extremely bewildered fashion.)
Me: (pointing to the school) English teacher, seonsangnim. (Korean word for teacher.)
Man: Ahhh... America?
Me: No, Canada.
Man: (smiling) Ahhh! Canada!
Me: Take picture so my mother can see. Oma. (Korean word for Mom.)
Man: Ahh, ahh! Okay. Baby teacher English, okay.
Me: It's okay? (He nods and smiles.) Okay, good bye!

It seems he thought I was out of my mind until he realized I taught kindergarten, then he knew I was out of my mind. Hehe. Either that or something is not up to code with the building and he was afraid I was here to document it and get them shut down.

Since I turned out to be just a Canadian kindergarten teacher my level of threat went down to 'Low'. Thank goodness since the army has been driving around all day and I definitely don't want to have to answer to them.

Anyway, we're no longer surrounded solely by monks, forests and rice fields, now we have a huge crater filled with concrete too!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a Norae Bang. In America it would be a Starbucks.

Anonymous said...

I miss you both, but keep posting because I need entertainment!