Back to School

I took my Korean language placement exam at Yonsei University yesterday. Funnily enough, when I showed up at the building there was a team of lab coated men and women wearing face masks and taking the temperature of all the new students before letting them in. Swine flu, foreigners -- you know. After clearing security, I headed down toward the auditorium. About 300 people, mostly college age, were lined up and down the basement hallway waiting for the doors to be opened. It was the first "first day of school" feeling I'd had in a long while. I was eager to strike up a conversation with someone but slowly realized my classmates were from all over the world -- and the chances we spoke the same language might be slim.

I can't help talking to white people when I run into them here. It's just such a fail-safe way to know you can expect a conversation to take place in English. I was sitting next to a guy at the bank the other day while waiting for a teller, and before introducing myself, I sat there for a good minute, realizing I looked like most everyone else in the room, and thinking, "This guy has no idea I'm American." It feels like having a secret power sometimes. I hate to pick someone out for conversation based solely on their appearance but I don't have much choice these days. Anyway, it turns out the guy was a professor who'd been living and working here for seven years and probably knew more about this country than me. So much for my secret power.

When we got into the auditorium, the head of the language school spoke to us in Korean for about ten minutes. Basically, what she said was, "If you can understand me, you'll be taking a different test than everyone else." Which made me wonder what kind of Korean aptitude test you could take if you couldn't understand this woman. About half the room stood up to leave for the testing rooms and take the separate written and oral exams. A few minutes later, I found myself sitting quietly in a school desk four floors up. A white guy, who looked roughly like Jim from The Office, sat down next to me. My secret powers waited patiently for the right moment... until he busted out some Korean on me. It was something along the lines of, "Where are you from?" but all I could blurt out was, "Sorry?" Again, so much for my secret power.

The test was supposed to take two hours. I was done with both the written and oral portions in about 30 minutes. I think it's pretty sad my knowledge of Korean can be summed up in about half an hour. Jim was still scribbling in Hangul when I left.