The other day, one of Jenny's students was in a panic because he had lost his scissors. "Life is hard," Jenny informed him. "You're tellin' me!" he replied. This is the sort of response we dream of, but it had nothing to do with our merits as teachers. No, this was International Experience Camp, where Korean kids who have lived abroad spend three days together in the Suwon Folk Village. Along with one other teacher at our school, Jenny and I were loaned out for the duration to take charge of a few activities and generally behave like camp counselors.

The kids, who ranged from kindergarten to middle school, came from all over the world: England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Sweden, Australia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Fiji, Saipan, Dubai, Costa Rica, Panama, Brazil, India. The Japanese and Chinese kids were in their own groups. There were kids from all over America, too: Los Angeles and New York and New Jersey, of course, but also Arizona and South Carolina and Rapid City, South Dakota. The most curious extraction was that of the Iranian boy, who explained in broken English that his parents were both Iranian Muslims, that his father had died, and that his mother had remarried a Christian pastor who was now stationed in Korea after a stint in Canada.

For us, it was fascinating to hang around these kids and hear their stories. For the most part they spoke excellent English — even the ones from Malaysia or Costa Rica had spent their time in international schools where English is the lingua franca — and they had much to tell us both about the places they'd been and about Korea. We led a few activities and conducted tours of the Folk Village in the pouring rain, but mostly we just hung out. (The camp directors had no problem at all with the concept of free time, which struck us as very un-Korean.) The boy from South Dakota taught me a pig call. When the boy from Mumbai heard about my plans to visit India, he sidled up to me and asked, "Do you like dosa?" Yes, I told him. "What about samosas?" he asked. We went on to name about twenty of our favorite Indian dishes before he told me not to visit India because it was too dirty. The camp began with an orientation activity in which each child made a small poster to celebrate the country where she'd been, and many of the kids had photos to attach; the girl from Dubai had a snapshot of herself on a muzzled camel.

It was interesting to see how our colleague Matt responded to the whole experience. A recent graduate of the London School of Economics, he arrived in Korea only two months ago, and this was his first major excursion. The word he kept using to describe things was "surreal," and I could see what he meant. The kids' cabins were perched on a hill above an unfinished sculpture park which included, among other oddities in steel and stone, a pair of giant granite breasts. As you walked down the trail to the cafeteria and the "international" plaza with its pastel-painted cement mock-ups of European architecture, you could see a drive-in movie screen, which in the evenings was showing Men In Black II.

Ten months ago I probably would have found it weird too, but by now none of it was especially surprising. What for Matt was an initiation felt like a summation to us. Partly this was because of the timing: the camp served as a punctuation mark, separating the gradual progression of ordinary time from the concentrated activity of departure. What we have left now is a week of oral tests, and then we're into our final month. We are into the lasts: last visit to this or that place, last dinner with this or that friend; last classes, last students, last evaluations to fill out. The break for camp brought home how little time we have left here.

But there was more to it than that. The experiences of the kids matched our own so closely. Like us, they had been away from home for long enough to get comfortable in a new place, and they had only recently left their second homes behind. It was the first time we felt like a group of Koreans really understood what it's like for a foreigner here. These kids know what it's like to be an alien, and to make your home in an alien land.

Being understood had a strange effect on us. It fooled us, and for three days we fell into a kind of fantasy, letting ourselves believe that this understanding was a denouement, that somehow Korea finally got it. But then we returned to Anyang, and it was the same Anyang as before, where our experience is as foreign as we are.