It started with the story about the hotels. I wondered why the lobby of the hotel I was staying in during my English camp last summer was so cold and stark. The attendant couldn't be seen behind the opaque glass screen from which the keys were kept. Only a small, dimly lit opening of about 20cm X 30 cm indicated any life at all to the otherwise empty space. How unlike and American or European hotel was my initial impression! There was a reason for that, which fleetingly crossed my mind, but which I quickly dismissed as my lurid imagination. I told myself that it is a simple cultural difference that I didn't understand. Not that simple after all! Nobody wants to be identified, recognized, or greeted in full proportion in these places.

Discretion is the name of the game here. I wondered why the parking lot was surrounded by a medium-height wall with little fringe at the entrance like we pass under when in one of those drive-through car washes in the States. Was it decoration? Was the wall forsecurity? No to both!

It seems that the Korean men are infamous cheaters, especially the married ones. That explains, as my friend from Brooklyn says, the reason for the tiny window in the reception area of these hotels. And the preponderance of hotels in an otherwise dull, little town with no tourist attractions...the hotels do a thriving business, but not with tourists! And the little car wash flaps at the entry of the parking lot are designed to cover the license plates upon entry into the parking lot as quickly as possible. The walls are designed to prohibit the wives from driving around town to find their husband's cars parked at the hotels. The design of their lodgings, then is made to enhance an established custom.

I should have snapped to this when the superintendent of the school board took me to dinner, during which he asked me if it were true that American women are very experimental in the sexual realm! If he hadn't been such an aberrant looking individual, I might have been tempted. This seems to be a normal activity among the men, their gallantry and all; and the women have decided to take their revenge.

There was Jio, for example, one of the Korean teachers who hosted us during the English camp. She was very outspoken in explaining how she thinks of other men when making love to her husband! The women seem to accept their husband's infidelity as a given. They know it happens, but they overlook it, and now they've decided to do likewise, or at least make themselves totally available. The handsome, black New Yorker has plenty of opportunities, but he's cautious because the gossip network is ferocious. He says their favorite line is to ask him to "go for a drive in the car". Interesting. It's just like our old "going parking days" in the States.

I've continuously noticed the similarity with the Korean culture and the American ways of some fifty years ago. Some of his male English teaching colleagues prefer the mothers of their students. Others take on their Korean teaching colleagues. I began to wonder about my own colleagues. One could never imagine it by their superficial behavior, but I am convinced my twenty-something year old Korean/English co-teacher is doing the forty-something year old math teacher at our school. As someone else dared reveal to me, the younger single women like the married men because those guys can buy them lots of expensive gifts and they don't risk "being a burden" to the girls because the guys are married.

I wonder what I'll do the next time that big, hunky Korean guy comes around again and tells me in his broken English, "Let's go on a date. Out under the pine trees." I was taken aback and brushed it off to a bad translation. Surely he was joking. He'd already told me he is married. How silly of me. Those pine trees are looking better and better as the days go by, and after all, what's the matter when lust is involved!

Adventurous spirit at heart, Mitzi is oginally from the rock and roll music capital, Austin, Texas. She has pushed her way around the globe from an eleven year sejour in Paris to currently teaching in Asia. Although a hopeless Francophile, she can now be found in Saigon, where she is writing and teaching English. For her complete bio, click here.

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