Linebacking in Korea

In early life we acquire skills in order to be successful in later life. We first learn to crawl then to walk, Iwe learn to speak then to read, and of course we learn so socialize.

Here are a few things that have directly helped me out -

1. High school football
If there is one skill I use on a daily basis it's football. I routinely have to navigate through the masses and in fact I also have to push women and children out of the way. Especially women and children.

Sometimes I'll be walking and someone would be in front of me and I'd have to juke him or her out. Or sometimes I'll be stuck in a crowd on the subway and I'll have to push people out of the way to escape.

But the thing that tests my fitness more than anything is when I see my bus or train coming and then I would have to make a dead sprint in order to catch it. Well that and stairs. Man oh man are there so many stairs here.

2. Taking Chinese
Now my Chinese isn't the greatest but I can sorta get around. When I first arrived here with pretty much no knowledge of Korean I relied on my Chinese to get around town on the tube.

3. Drinking
Omg Koreans drink so much. I would have been ill prepared if not for all the Korean friends (and friends that liked to drink) that I had in college.

During my first or second week at my school the PE teachers, all male by the way, took me out for dinner.

Now dinner does not mean just dinner - it also means lots and lots of drinking. While eating sam gyup sal the teachers poured cup after cup of soju to see if I could hang. And hang I did...and that meant going into work the next day with a massive hang over.

4. Growing up eating weird things
Asia has a lot of weird things to eat, for instance, sushi itself is a bit weird - it's raw fish! Don't you normally cook stuff before you eat it? Furthermore, it's weird how sushi has become more or less normal in American society.

However, since I've grown up in a Chinese Vietnamese American household I've been accustomed to eating lots of weird things, so when come face to face with things in Korea, like eating live octopus, I just kind of shrug.

Not touching dog though.

5. Having lots of friends who like kpop and dramas

Oh man this was huge. Because I knew practically nothing about popular culture on arrival, I had to sort of learn everything on my own, but it was a good thing I could always try to remember what my friends liked back home. Also it tremendously helped in my lesson planning.

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