Korea and Mexico...long lost twins?

In my last post I was writing about my trip to the Korean Folk Village. I forgot to mention that when I was there and was watching the Koreans do their little dances and tricks on the horses, I couldn't help but think of some of my previous visits to Mexico and watching similiar types of shows there. The performers looked the same, with their dark skin and colorful costumes and the crowd even had similiar reactions as I remember from the Mexican shows (raucious cheering and awwing at everything).

Well the other day, I was supplied with one more shred of evidence that Korea and Mexico are not so different... It was a regular Thursday and I showed up to work 15 minutes early, as I always do. I went into the Teacher's Room (which has all of our desks, books and supplies) only to find that I could not even get to my desk because now there was a portable chalkboard and 4 student desks plopped right in the middle of the room. Furthermore, all of the teacher's desks had been completely cleared of books, papers and anything else we might have. I didn't get too excited about all this because you just never know what to expect in Korea so I knew there would be some sort of crazy explanation.

I went and asked the school director what had happened and he explained how the government was sending "auditors" to come see our school. Apparently when our school filed its papers with the government authorities, it claimed every room we have on our floor was a classroom. This meant that the lunch room and the tiny storage room were also "converted" to classrooms for the day! The only problem is that we don't have enough teachers to fill all of the regular classrooms plus the new additions so several of the regular classrooms were empty. I guess the auditors here are maybe not that smart if they couldn't figure this one out. The Academic Director of the school seemed real stressed out about all of this and at the end of the day one of my coworkers asked her if she was going to have to go to jail. She just sighed. You gotta love corruption! As far as I can figure, there must be some kind of financial/tax incentive to having more school rooms. Why else would you lie about that?

One more Mexican similiarity - most stores in Korea operate on a barter system similiar to Mexico. Even when you are buying clothes in lots of the departments stores, you still haggle on the price with the person behind the counter. I know that I am not good at this but I am getting better. In my opinion, this system is a good way for them to screw us Waygooks (foreigners) out of our money. Fortunately, they aren't nearly as pushy as their Mexican cousins and don't try to entice you into their stores with claims of "Korean Kmart", "Real Prada" etc...

I remember a quote from a European we met in Mexico who said that "if you looked up 'liar' in the dictionary, it would have a picture of a Mexican" and sometimes I also think that a picture of Korean wouldn't be so bad either;)