one of the joys that i'm you'll get to experience when travelling overseas is the glorious glaring looks you receive wherever you go - people here stare, and they make no effort to hide the fact that you're the only one who looks out of place. "one of these things just doesn't belong here, one of these things just isn't the same...." - that song comes to mind for some reason. over here in Korea, the people, especially the older crowd, the "above sixty - but still working full-time" people are generally quite nice; they'll have no problem helping you out by speaking whatever form of language they seem to call english. if they don't know english, they'll just say whatever form of english they call english (referred to as Konglish), and when you give them a really confused look, they'll just move on as if they've never been talking to you. after a while, you get used to it, and you learn to ignore the blatant staring, and pretend as if you're the only one who's standing in line at the subway, bus, or at the supermarket.
for some reason though, just in the past week, as people start to come outdoors because the weather has become really nice, people are starting to speak english,or try to more and more frequently. for example, as i'm sitting on the bus tonite, i couldn't help but notice that four korean teenagers who were blatantly staring at me, and then, openly laughing at me, as i walked to the back of the bus. for some reason, they felt ashamed (who'd have guessed) at their rudeness, and then openly tried to say "sorry" about a dozen times, as if i hadn't heard them the first eleven times. the strange thing is that Koreans are so much more respectful in almost all other areas, except when it comes to foreigners who they won't talk to. this past monday, we were given the day off (as i wrote previously), and we decided to spend the day at Korea's "Everland" - basically a really small theme park built into a hill-side; so everywhere you go, there are hills to climb, even for just standing in line. the joy of standing in line however came in all of the people who were staring, pointing, and then saying, in english, "look, foreigners". now, we didn't help our cause by starting a beard growing contest (won by yours truly), and our beards were pretty bushy. any sort of facial hair here is about as common here as, well, english speaking people. so we stuck out, in a big way. but if you were in nearly any other country, and when you saw a foreigner, and spoke loudly, "look, foreigners!" you'd be ostrasized (sp?) - not only by the foreigners, but by regular english people as well. but over here, when i'm on the subway, if theres two open seats beside me, the koreans children will do rock-paper-scissors to see who has to sit beside the foreigner. when that happens, its funny just to laugh at the person who lost, and smile - it usually gets all the other Koreans laughing too, which helps the loser feel better.
as bad as it sounds, you learn to shrug it off. its just another strange difference between cultures. in some respects, koreans can be so understanding and patient, and in other circumstances, ignorant, rude and standoffish. as is always the case, its only when you understand their culture that they learn to appreciate the work that it takes to figure out this strange land of ancient customs and regulations.