Glucose

As of last Wednesday, teacher sports day is back! After over a month of wondering if our principal had finally done away with the weekly volleyball, soccer, or badminton games for the teachers at my school, I was pleased to receive a message from the PE teacher announcing pick-up volleyball at 4:30 in the gym.

Although my volleyball skills are rusty (oh, who am I kidding, they were never even greased), I can hold my own on the court. I run fours for whatever team I'm on -- a position I was never permitted to play in high school -- and my mediocre attacks have earned me the admiration of some of my colleagues. Even better, my skills improved a lot last year when we played every week. Needless to say, I love playing volleyball with the other teachers at my school. I also love that we order pizza, fried chicken, and beer after the game, and that some female teachers come to watch and cheer us on, but mostly come for the food. Mr. Pizza is growing on me.

Anyway, yesterday I noticed that one of the chemistry teachers kept saying "Glucose!" over and over again throughout the game. I thought that he might be smack talking a player on the other team, since he always called it out every time the other team missed the ball or made an error. When a particularly good serve wasn't returned: "Glucose!" When I spiked and the ball went through someone's hands: "Glucose!"

I was really amused by the nickname, and I tried to figure out which teacher on the other team it was aimed at. It must have been someone else in the chemistry department -- why else would they be called Glucose? At least two of the teachers on the other team were definitely not very experienced on the court, but neither was responding directly to the name, so I was left uncertain.

Then, the teachers reset the court for a game of foot volleyball (족구), and after making a fool of myself for one match, I sat out the next one and munched on some pizza. The chemistry teacher took my place and resumed his name-calling: "Glucose!" right after a serve. "Glucose!" when we scored a point on an error.

I turned to a physics teacher who was there for the pizza. "Teacher, who is Glucose?"

"What?" he looked at me quizzically.

"Glucose... what that teacher said. Who is it?"

"I don't understand."

Embarrassed, I waited for a pause in the game, and then I called out to the chemistry teacher himself. "Teacher, what is Glucose?"

"Glucose?" he said. "포도당."

"Oh..." He had literally translated glucose into Korean for me. "That's not what I meant," I thought.

The physics teacher turned to me. "Why did you want to know that, anyway?"

"No," I tried to explain, "the teacher was saying 'glucose' to someone on the other team... Glucose! Glucose! Who is it?"

Suddenly, a light bulb lit up in his head. "Oh... 굿코스 (goot-kohss)! Good course! Good shot!"

"What? Good course?"

"It means 'good shot'," he explained. "Wow, then that must be Konglish, right?"

"Yeah, I guess!" I replied. It all made sense: Glucose wasn't a person, I had merely misheard a bit of garbled English. "Good course" was his version of "good shot", and it wasn't directed at the other team, but at our own. The physics teacher found this whole thing very funny and made a point to tell the chemistry teacher that what he had thought was English was actually Konglish.

It reminded me of how some of the teachers had picked up my habit of shouting "Nice serve!" after every serve (even if it wasn't remotely nice), but since I didn't really enunciate and they didn't really speak English, they eventually turned it into "나이서브 (nai-seo-bu)!"

They also laughed at me every time I called for the ball, saying "Got it!" quickly and repeatedly, like a machine gun: "Gotitgotitgotitgotit!" But I haven't yet been able to switch over to what they say: "마이 (mai)!", which I assume comes from the word "mine".

Every time I play sports in Korea, whether it's soccer with my students, padminton with my dojang, or anything with my teachers, I'm constantly amused and intrigued by how English has loaned so many words to Korean athletic vernacular but has also watched them become unflatteringly repurposed by the phenomenon of Konglish. Off the top of my head, there's 아웃(이다), 플레이, 블랙홀, and, of course, 화이팅.

My friends who champion the cause of sports diplomacy assert that sports can unite people from different cultures in a way that language cannot. While I agree, I believe it's also worth noting that sports can rarely be played successfully without verbal communication, and when it comes to the language of sports, English has lived up to its reputation as the language of conquest (or the international language, if you prefer). But this is precisely why it tickles me so much that English's ruthless incursion into Korean athletics has been tripped up by the fact that the Korean language will do whatever the heck it wants with whatever words come its way from outside the peninsula, proper syntax and pronunciation be damned.

Long live Konglish! And long live teacher sports day!

Foot Volleyball

The other day, I got to play 족구 (jokgu) for the first time ever. Well, it was less "I played jokgu" and more "I watched the other teachers play jokgu while I stood in a corner of the court and didn't even pretend to know what I was doing."

족구*, called foot volleyball** or footvolley in the Western hemisphere, is pretty popular here, especially since it seems to feature the most popular aspects of soccer (Korea's uncontested sports craze): headers and roundhouse kicks. Here is a video of what it looks like.

All the teachers already know that I'm laughably bad at soccer. We play together every other Wednesday or so, and I usually end up in defense, charging and intimidating any forwards but contributing little else. However, they also know that I love volleyball (배구/paegu). Unfortunately for me, 족구 is about 90% soccer and 10% volleyball, so I was 90% useless to my team. I'm just glad that my fellow teachers were gracious and patient as they taught me the rules and encouraged me even when my serves went out of bounds. That's right, I can't even kick a ball in a straight line across a basketball court.

Well, my school's Sports Day (체육대회, a field day where all the students play sports and other active, outdoor games) is just around the corner. While I think it'd be fun to get in on the competition, knowing myself, I'd probably better prevent my own embarrassment and just watch from the sidelines.

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*literally, "football", whereas "축구" (soccer) is translates to "kickball", and kickball itself is 킥볼 (kikbol) or 발야구 (literally, "foot field ball")

**not to be confused with football tennis/futnet or sepak takraw

배구 - Volleyball

This one's for Tracey, a fellow Norcal-er who randomly played professional volleyball in Slovenia for one year. In Korean language classes during Orientation, Tracey was our go-to sports example person because she talked about volleyball at least once a day. Seriously, nobody in our class will ever forget that paegu means volleyball.

I also happen to really enjoy volleyball, although two years on the high school JV team and two years on the college club team have proven to me beyond a doubt that I'm perfectly mediocre at the sport. Still, when I was invited by some of the other teachers at Changwon Science High to their weekly "Sports Day" with hints that they liked to play volleyball, I was more than happy to accept. First of all, I want to get to know the other teachers at my school better. There are only around thirty total. (The English department consists of three teachers, including myself, and because I spend all day in the English department office, I basically never see anyone else at this school except for during lunch. It's maddening sometimes.) Secondly, I've been a total couch potato for the past week, sitting at my computer for six or seven hours a day, and coming home to sit on the couch to play board games with my younger host brother. I've definitely been restless, and I am sore in need of exercise.

So, yesterday was my first Wednesday sports day! I had brought along a change of casual clothes, and at 4:45pm I wandered over to the gym to see what was up. I was met by about a dozen teachers, all male, some of whom I'd never seen before and some of whom I recognized from the teachers' conversation course I threw together on Monday. All of them knew who I was already, of course, but I still felt a bit out of place. I think the youngest of these teachers is in his mid-thirties; I'm closer in age to their students than to them!

But whatever. We played three games to twenty-one, and it turned out to be tons of fun. 생각보다 재미있었어요! Much more thrilling than I'd anticipated. I don't know how long these middle-aged men have been doing their sports club together, but they mostly knew what they were doing when it comes to volleyball; some of the rules had been simplified, but I had no trouble fitting in during the match. My team recognized in the second game that I had some spike potential, and our setter gave me some great fours. The third game, our tie-breaker, was especially close and intense; the gym teacher (who runs the club and who was obviously the most competent of us all) went for a tip I sent over the net -- which was lower than usual, definitely helping my spikes -- and slightly pulled a muscle. Oops :(

In the end, my team lost, and my t-shirt was soaked through and practically dripping with sweat, but that was okay. It was all fun and games! At least, it was just fun and games for me; I gathered from what little Korean I understand that all the other teachers had placed bets on the outcome! Like, serious bets: ten bucks to each player on the winning team! Ha! And that's just the first of three stereotypically Korean additions that I witnessed to our little competition.

The second is that none of the men would ever dive for a ball -- for obvious reasons -- but if a ball did happen to go short, they would all invariably stick out their feet to kick it back up. This wasn't even done for humorous effect; it seemed as if this randomly thrown-in soccer move was just as legitimate as a normal bump or set. As far as I'm aware, "foot digs" are technically not illegal during play. It's just that while they're super-rare in American volleyball, I'm not at all surprised that soccer-obsessed Korean men made ample use of it, an often to great effect, to boot.

The third is that when we took water breaks, there was no water. Instead, there was Gatorade (normal), Pocari Sweat (normal for Asians), and... Hite (하이트), which is a rather cheap Korean beer (not normal?). Oh, and there were chips. Haha! I think that next week I'll just bring my own water bottle. And to be sure, I will be there next week. I had a fantastic time this time around, and I'm looking forward to getting my butt kicked in indoor soccer (축구, chukgu).

P.S. One thing I forgot to mention was that after Sports Day, all of those teachers go out together to eat (and probably drink themselves silly). It's known as a 회식 (hweshik), which I guess roughly translates to a dinner meeting? But it's not really a meeting at all, just a camaraderie-building hangout time. I've already been to one, but it was with my school's soon-departing principal (long story, I'll explain later) and probably isn't what a normal 회식 will look like. The point is, I wasn't aware that they were going out after the match, so I had to awkwardly and politely decline, but I'd like to go next week.