Age in Korea, and other oddities.

I visited my school today and learned some about Korean culture in the process. One of the stranger things was that in Korea they count age differently. You turn one on the first January first of your life (I have no idea if what happens if your birthday is on January first), two on January first of the next year, etc. (On a related yet improbable note, two of my fellow teachers have birthdays on January 19th, and another shares my birthday of January 20th.)

I also found out that Koreans learning English to have an English name in addition to their Korean name. This explains the Koreans in my high school who tried to go by Andrew and Daniel, etc. We eventually convinced them that we were perfectly happy to learn their real names, but I didn't realize at the time that that was standard practice for any Korean learning English, not just something they did because they were living in an English speaking country. I feel like this says something about the laziness of Americans that no one even expects us to be able to learn names that are strange to us, but maybe people just think the name will help with the immersion in the language, or the practice started for reasons that I haven't yet considered.

[I am entirely too exhausted to try to use transition sentences to link the paragraphs. Sorry.] I had Korean food in Korea for the first time today as well, and liked it. I rather enjoyed kimchi (or at least, the types of kimchi that I had), which is good since it is something of a staple here. I have had people complain that they couldn't stand kimchi and hence hated Korean meals; I've also heard people say that the whole country smells like drying fish. I took these complaints (the latter of which is totally rediculous, which I thought when I first heard it) with a grain of salt since they came from some rather close minded and culturally insensitive people who were stationed here.

[I'm too tired to wrap this up properly either. The information overload is overwhelming my brain. I had to learn where I am staying, how to use the subway, the school's curriculum, Korean customs, the names of my co-teachers, how to read Korean letters faster, etc, etc, etc. Plus I'm probably jet lagged. Whatever the cause, my head is kind of fuzzy right now, so I'll sign off.]

Update: It seems (from the comments) that being assigned a name stereotypical of/common to the people of the language being learned is a common practice for learning any language. I only ever learned Latin, which is different from learning most languages because we didn't really speak it. We mostly translated existing texts rather than trying to learn how to interact with each other in Latin, so we never had Latin names. My incorrect assumption about English names is probably due to my ignorance of normal language classes and because of my guilt for feeling releaved when I learned that I would only be learning the kids' (and fellow teachers') English names, not their Korean names.