Aside from the jimjilbang (bathhouse), another Korean past time that I would like to bring back to the U.S. is the DVD bang. Bang means room (there are many great bangs in Korea—DVD bang, jimjilbang, noraebang, sarangbang…) but a DVD bang is like your own private movie theater. Imagine it’s a Friday night and you don’t want to stay home and watch a movie on your tiny laptop screen, but you don’t feel like the bars either. The DVD bang is the perfect in between, the best of both worlds. Social activity with minimal effort, plenty of entertainment, and all the food and booze you want to bring into your own private theatre.
There is at least one on every corner, so if one doesn’t have the movie you want, you just pop on over to another next door. The entrance walls are lined with DVDs, ranging from Pixar to porn, and once you’ve made your selection, you’re ushered to a small room where you’ll find a large, cozy bed/couch and a movie theatre screen spanning the whole wall.
The only downside to DVD bangs? They might was well be Love Motels for high schoolers, so it’s wise to rent a loud movie that can drown out any neighboring nookie.
While the frigid weather has made DVD bang-ing a regular activity, it also makes the school kids extremely restless because they can’t expel all their energy out on the playground, and must do it in my classroom instead. This wasn’t a problem until three weeks ago, when the curriculum changed and I had to start teaching out of this horribly boring Phonics workbook. The kids have been miserable, which makes me miserable, so last week I decided to throw them a bone and let them just act crazy. I taught them the song “Five Little Monkeys”, which is about five monkeys jumping on a bed and one-by-one they each fall and bump their head. The kids loved it and acted it out over and over again for an hour, two days in a row. I think I earned their love back after that and they’ve been putting up with Phonics Hell ever since.
There’s not much to say about Thanksgiving other than while all of you were eating stuffing and pumpkin pie I was eating seaweed soup and fish cakes. I can’t believe it’s already December. Time here is flying by, and I’m already anticipating how much I’m going to miss it here.
