Girls and Boys Can’t Be Friends

I was sitting around with a couple Korean female friends the other day, waiting for an Indian restaurant to open so we could go in for dinner.

I was going to tell an anecdote about babies in Korea, but before that, this: I was just sitting in the office chatting with one of those ladies, who is a math teacher at my school. An English teacher, who just happens to be a man in his late 40s, waltzed by the two of us and asked this question:

“Do you think that men and women can be friends?”

After I incredulously said “of course”, he proceeded to say something along the lines of “not in Korea”… heavily implying that we must be dating.

This is not the first time I’ve heard this notion, and I find it generally amusing that Korean boys and men of any age think this way. My Korean students, all of whom are male, think that I’m dating every female teacher in the building in the face of overwhelming evidence that I’m not that good. At first, I thought they were joking, by this little run-in with the male teacher has me thinking otherwise.

My experience in Korea has led me to believe that single sex education is the root of this insanity. My students’ knowledge about women seems to be derived only from their insatiable appetite for hard-core pornography. They study all day with boys, they play sports with boys, and then they go to the PC Bang with boys. The only girls that they are spending any time with are Candy Kim and Lexus Park, and I think that’s pretty sad.

Actually, it can’t be Candy Kim or Lexus Park, because the stuff they like comes from Japan.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I turn to the fact that I have only 20 days left in Korea. I’m not sure where that leaves the future of Stray Blog, but I plan on going out with a bang. A Big Bang. I’m aiming for 20 straight days of blogging, reflection and poo jokes that answer the question: What has this year meant to me?