Before you make the obvious and not funny joke regarding the name of the title of this entry, no it is not about Korean people's penis', fallacies not phallus'.
There are many purely fabricated stories floating around this little off-shoot peninsula of East Asia. Before I enlighten you to the mystery of "Fan-death" and the "Korean tongue syndrome", I will mention a couple of the strangest conversations I have ever had.
One student when we were discussing food, allergies, diets and vegetarianism, was convinced, and trying to inform me that a man is not a 'real man' if he does not eat meat or fish, apparently it is a fairly common belief that men need many forms of ingested aphrodisiacs to enable him to 'perform' in the baby making process. This student of mine, in the common broken English of newly enrolled language students (this is not an insult to language students or Korean people, for I attempt in vain to study Korean), this student tried to tell me that a non-carnivorous human could indeed not sustain an erection, due to the language difficulties I could not tell if this was a question or an attempt to inform me of problems I may endure. Two words, "VERY strange".
Fan death refers to sleeping with a fan on in your bedroom, apparently a "Scientific" study here in Korea found that sleeping in a room with a fan on reduces the levels of oxygen so dramatically that the dormant person will die from suffocation. After informing people that I have indeed slept in rooms with a fan on and consequently not died, therefore this story is balderdash, I was told that I am indeed wrong due to the 'Scientific' study proving the contrary to my anecdotal evidence.
The next is the story about Korean people's tongue's being different, therefore people needing tongue surgery in order to speak English correctly. I am yet to come up with a response to this story, I am literally struck-dumb.
I find stories such as these one of the fantastic parts of living abroad, they are the subtle differences that make life here surreal and interesting, I suppose we have urban myths of our own in the UK, but it's not the same when you have heard them all of your life in your native tongue, they must be heard first time, spoken in broken English from and unlikely source, and then the affect is perfect, the classic 'lost in translation and culture story'.
There are many purely fabricated stories floating around this little off-shoot peninsula of East Asia. Before I enlighten you to the mystery of "Fan-death" and the "Korean tongue syndrome", I will mention a couple of the strangest conversations I have ever had.
One student when we were discussing food, allergies, diets and vegetarianism, was convinced, and trying to inform me that a man is not a 'real man' if he does not eat meat or fish, apparently it is a fairly common belief that men need many forms of ingested aphrodisiacs to enable him to 'perform' in the baby making process. This student of mine, in the common broken English of newly enrolled language students (this is not an insult to language students or Korean people, for I attempt in vain to study Korean), this student tried to tell me that a non-carnivorous human could indeed not sustain an erection, due to the language difficulties I could not tell if this was a question or an attempt to inform me of problems I may endure. Two words, "VERY strange".
Fan death refers to sleeping with a fan on in your bedroom, apparently a "Scientific" study here in Korea found that sleeping in a room with a fan on reduces the levels of oxygen so dramatically that the dormant person will die from suffocation. After informing people that I have indeed slept in rooms with a fan on and consequently not died, therefore this story is balderdash, I was told that I am indeed wrong due to the 'Scientific' study proving the contrary to my anecdotal evidence.
The next is the story about Korean people's tongue's being different, therefore people needing tongue surgery in order to speak English correctly. I am yet to come up with a response to this story, I am literally struck-dumb.
I find stories such as these one of the fantastic parts of living abroad, they are the subtle differences that make life here surreal and interesting, I suppose we have urban myths of our own in the UK, but it's not the same when you have heard them all of your life in your native tongue, they must be heard first time, spoken in broken English from and unlikely source, and then the affect is perfect, the classic 'lost in translation and culture story'.
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