waygookeen

Its rather embarrassing, but we have been here for 8 months now and our ability in Korean is alarmingly low. Its hard when we work at an English school and speak English with all our students. This leaves us with little opportunity to practice the rudimentary Korean that we do know. Even at a store, most Koreans want to practice there English and respond to our Korean with English. Oh well. We'll keep trying.
But one word we do know in Korean is "waygookeen" which means foreigner. Its funny when you dont understand 99% of what people say but you can hear the word for foreigner as you walk by a group of people. Rather than write a lot about this experience, here is a link for a person teaching English and writing a blog for Walrus magazine. He has a good blog post on this topic and looks at the experience of foreigners in Korea, which is one of the most homogeneous cultures in the world.