Although many of those in America had already been self-quarantined, Maryland’s governor has urged the residents to stay within the state at home. I enjoy running outside with my siblings at night, but because of the order that we can’t be outside after 8:00 pm, I haven’t really been outside of my home lately. Instead, my family liked to do movie nights together, so I was glad that for homework, Jenna assigned me to watch and reflect on a Korean show. Like I mentioned before, I chose to watch Reply 1997 on Netflix. Since Jenna had already seen the show before me, I was able to ask her any questions I had. The show is about the life of a teenage girl and her friends starting from high school to their high school reunion. The fun part of this series is that you have to use which one of her friends ends up as her husband. As the story progresses, most of the boys can eliminated, but they only reveal the husband in the last episode. Sadly, while I was talking to my mom about the show, she spoiled the ending (even though it was who I thought was going to be the husband).
As I started watching the first episode, I noticed right away that the setting was in Busan and all the characters spoke that region’s dialect (saturi). It was actually very difficult for me to completely understanding what they were saying. Also, the fact that they were also speaking much faster than how my family and I speak challenged my listening skills. Even with these obstacles, the content was pretty easy to understand because the characters were supposed to be around me age. Since the setting was in 1997, it was interesting to see what kids of activities teenagers in Korea did during that time. Some of the scenes were taken at their school and I found it interesting how each class had a head representative. The pressure on how each student was ranked was also shown. I thought that I had learned a lot about the culture of Korea, and I was able to compare that to how much Korea has changed in the past 2.5 decades. While most students have phone nowadays, one way that Korean students communicated in in 1997 was through pagers. Some of the characters mentioned that if one of them needed something, they should “beep” the person. This sort of reminded me of how doctors might’ve communicated with each other in the hospital. Another method of communicating that was shown was the online chat rooms. The main character would sometimes chat with random people (or her friends of course) online. This make me think of the chat rooms my friends and I would use with our Nintendo D.S.
When I was writing my first reflection, I didn’t have much to say because I had only watched an episode and only knew some of the background information. For the second week, I watched a couple more episodes and I was able to compare some of the experiences the main character went through with some of my own. It was difficult at first to write all of this in Korean because I knew what to say but didn’t know how to. When I was in this scenario, I tried to repeat what I wanted to say out loud before attempting to write it out. It felt good to write multiple paragraphs in Korean and I could see my progress.
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