Amidst the strangeness last night surrounding South Korea's World Cup Soccer match against Togo, and the ensuing pandemonium over their victory, I now have the Korean Soccer battle cry stuck in my head; it's something like "DAAAAAAAAAE-HAN-MINGUK!!!!!" followed by a tribal pounding of drums or thunder sticks. (the chant, by the way, simply means Republic of Korea. Score one for the locals being able to take words so mundane and turn them into a battle cry.) It was equally odd being at the Red Rock, which is usually a refuge for the ESL teachers and other non-Koreans around here. The place was filled with Koreans, and I was asked by Yuk, the owner, to position myself BEHIND the bar, so as not to obstruct the view of other patrons. As something of a regular, I didn't feel bad about this, and readily complied. There were big-screen TVs set up in outdoor parks, so that if you didn't have any place else to watch the game, you could head down to the end of the block, and there you'd be. The result to me, of course, means there's not the slightest prayer of getting any kind of meaningful learning done today. God forbid they take their game all the way to a World Cup victory, I may as well just write off being able to do anything the rest of the trip.
And you know, the more I contemplate it, Koreans really do have a good sense of the rhythm of their own language. They can take the words and make them sound almost musical, something I noticed the first time I ventured into Lotte Mart to buy groceries. The air rang with the crescendo-decrescendo sales pitches of the food-sample ladies; it was almost hypnotic. It compensates for nothing when it comes to the Koreans utter destruction of the English language, but that's another matter. After the game last night, I caught up with some of my ESL teacher friends for dinner, and we discussed, among other things, the singular plight of "l" and "r" in Korea, because in Han-Gul, the Korean alphabet, the character for the "l" and "r" sounds is the same one. One of the guys lamented that just once he wished he could get a student to say "rainbow," and not "lainbow." Same with the "th" sound in "mother," which usually gets sloshed over, and comes out sounding like a "d." I could probably go on, but I think that's enough for the day. Tune in again, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.......