Stumbling Through Busan: A Retrospective

This past weekend was one of our few long weekends off from teaching, thanks to Buddha’s Birthday, which was on Friday. After a week filled with drama club (better and better!) and an open class in which I was silently judged by my students’ mothers, I found Zach, a friend from the college salad days, and Brandy, and we set off for Busan. I had failed to make any arrangements for this long weekend far enough in advance, but Zach was planning on playing in an ultimate frisbee tournament on the beach. I decided to join him, against my better judgment, and Brandy came on board after realizing that she too had nothing else to do.

So after a meal of ddokgalbi (spicy chicken with rice dumplings and vegetables; I could eat it for days) we hopped on a train. There were no seats left on this train, mind you, so we all did our best hobo impressions and sat in the very back of the caboose (can you still call it a caboose?), which was not as fun as it might sound. Mostly it was sweltering hot. Anyways, we got to Busan, where we discovered that the whole city is actually in another dimension and you can only get to it by traveling through the Stargate.

Somebody get Kurt Russell.

After entering this mysterious Busan dimension, we quickly found a place to stay for extra-cheap, got some pizza (pizza does exist in the Alternaverse), and met up with some friends on the beach to have some drinks and wander around. Then we went to bed, and woke up Saturday for some frisbee.

My history with ultimate frisbee is not long or pleasant. Before this weekend I’d played maybe three times, and each and every time I got hit in the face with the disc, usually in the nose, once in the teeth. One time I got hit so hard that my nose began to bleed. Essentially, I have been conditioned to be afraid of a frisbee that is heading in my direction. I usually imagine it has teeth and huge claws that are going to tear my face apart the second I try to catch the thing. I drew you a little picture so you can better understand where I’m coming from:

That is indeed my blood you see trickling from its fanged maw.

Naturally, I had to overcome my fear of flying circles of plastic in order to have a good time on Saturday. It wasn’t easy, as you can imagine, but I managed to do just that for the most part. That might be because I was more afraid of the jagged rocks that were hiding under the sand of the beach than I was of the frisbee. I even managed to not get hit in the face by the disc across three whole games of ultimate, which I count to be one of my greatest accomplishments in Korea so far. My team went 3 and 0, too, although that was really through very little help from yours truly. I mostly ran around and provided someone for the slow guy on the other team to amuse himself with (but I did it well!). Also, it was pouring rain by the end of the day, so we all wound up covered from head to toe in sand.

That’s where jimjilbang came in. Jimjilbang is the Korean term for a public bath house, which is a place where you nude up and get clean in a big room with a bunch of other dudes. It’s better than I make it sound. In this particular jimjilbang there was a hot tub, a cold tub, a hotter than hot tub that made me feel like a lobster five minutes before meal time in Maine, a sauna, and a steam room. After a day of sprinting barefoot on sand, all of these things were pretty stellar. It wasn’t enough to work out the knots in my legs that have been making climbing stairs a Herculean task for the past two days, but it was a start. Add to that the hilarity of one of the other nude patrons of the jimjilbang trying to get us to leave because we were pretty much sand monsters, even as an employee told us to just go on in, and you have yourself a pretty fine first trip to a public bath house.

Anyways, the rest of the weekend consisted of a crazy post-frisbee party featuring some seriously intense Jenga action, and noraebang (I told you, you can’t stay away), followed by a Sunday that featured lots of exhausted trudging and the only halfway decent Mexican food I’ve seen in Korea. Looks like someone finally figured out the whole meat/cheese/beans combo is what really makes it tick. We also stopped by the World’s Largest Department Store, which was… well, it was very big, and it was a department store. Not sure what else you want from me on that one. On the way back, we tried three different routes before Brandy and I finally gave up the cheaper bus route and took the train, where Brandy got her fingers slammed in the bathroom door “for awhile” (that’s how she put it) and had to go to the hospital on Monday when they turned black. If you’re reading this Brandy, I hope your fingers have returned to a somewhat normal hue.

SO INTENSE.

While I didn’t see terribly much of Busan on this first effort, I did see enough to know that it’s probably the prettiest city I’ve been to so far in Korea. The whole beachfront area is gorgeous and shiny and filled with these awkward casinos which Koreans aren’t allowed into because it’s illegal for them to gamble (okay for us foreigners though; apparently the law cares not for our moral compass). I missed out on Korea’s largest fresh (read: live) seafood market this time out, but next time that is Stop #1.

This is where we played frisbee. Unfortunately the cones mark out a field, not a hidden-jagged-rock-free zone.

I realize that I have been totally crapping out on the whole “Short Creative Nonfiction” angle of this blog lately (okay, for at least a month), and I do apologize for that. I would make a go of it today, but I’m still exhausted from the weekend. Coming up, though, a possible MIME FESTIVAL! and an overnight excursion at a gorgeous Buddhist temple near Busan. Maybe I’ll have a more specific story to tell after those adventures. ‘Til next time, dear readerssszzzzzzzzz…

A Post About the Time I Learned a Lot About Korean Politics (Plus Some Other Stuff)

So it happened again last night. Around one in the morning, after being lulled into a blissful slumber by falling rain outside my window, I was once again awoken by sex noise. I wasted no time in turning on my music to drown it out, because I’m incompetent enough to have neglected to get earphones since the last go-round with these sounds. The music, however, didn’t stop the neighbors from waking me up again, an hour later, with raucous laughter. So raucous, in fact, that it sounded like they were inside my room and I started freaking out in my half-awake state that there were laughing people watching me sleep, which I didn’t know was one of my biggest fears until this morning around two. Anyways, this post isn’t about sex noise, or my phobias. It’s about last weekend’s increasingly random adventures and the pretty pictures I took to remember them by.

Saturday is the day that I normally have my Korean lesson with other English teachers, led by Ah Young. This Saturday, seonsaengnim (can’t remember what that is? Do your damn homework.) decided she’d rather take us hiking. Our lesson, therefore, was to figure out how to find the mountain we were to climb by asking bus drivers or passersby which buses went where. The difficulty was mitigated somewhat by a list of buses which would be surefire hits, but as it turns out this list was a pack of lies (somewhat expectedly, maybe, given Ah Young’s propensity for mischief). So I managed to find the mountain and be on time, but only by finally breaking through my embarrassment at my crappy Korean skills and asking the driver of the 616 why he wasn’t going where I wanted him to. After removing myself from this mystery bus I was able to easily navigate the rest of the way, partially (okay, completely) because I saw Ah Young sitting on the bus that would take me the rest of the way.

So we climbed the mountain, which was easy enough, at least for me, because I decided to wear shoes. Ah Young and another student, Trevor, decided to show Melissa and I how badass they were and hiked the last two-thirds of the way up barefoot. Why was I not badass enough to climb the mountain barefoot? Let’s just say that if you present me with a choice between A) Blisters, and B) No blisters, I will choose B every time.

The climb up the mountain was extremely rewarding, by the way. This particular mountain is home to part of a reconstruction of the ancient Daejeon Fortress Wall, which used to protect the town on all sides from various invaders. Korea used to be invaded roughly five times a week from all sides, so I’m assuming this wall was pretty useful.

Nope, no invaders here. Thanks, wall!

Anyways, after the mountain adventure, we went to check out the Buddha’s Birthday Parade by City Hall (even though the actual holiday isn’t until Friday). Unfortunately, we were all super-hungry and decided to stop off at an awesome buffet and stuff our faces for an hour and a half before searching out the parade. Naturally, the parade was over before we found it. But we did get some balloons and free gimbap from friendly monks (it’s like sushi, but it has eggs, pickle, and ham inside instead of fish)!

Anyways, on to the main event: Sunday. Ah Young informed me that she would be driving past my neighborhood on the way to pick some stuff up in a tiny village out in the country, and since hardly anyone ever comes near my neighborhood if they can help it (I am very far from most things in Daejeon) I asked her if she was going to come visit me. So she picked me up Sunday afternoon and we went to this village, where I learned that driving down back country roads in Korea is roughly one million times more awesome and dangerous than driving down back country roads in America. See, in Korea all the land that isn’t a mountain is either a building or farmland, so when the time came to build roads, they had to weave them amongst the farmers’ plots. The result is a confounding labyrinth of impossibly narrow raised roads winding through rice paddies. If another car is coming towards you, one of you better throw it in reverse and back up nice and slow or there’s gonna be problems. After this village excursion (which also included a market featuring delicious fruit and some absurdly frightening-looking farming implements) and a few further stops (Ah Young’s home, a sold-out baseball game we’d hoped to get into, dinner) we settled on a memorial/protest concert on the bank of a river in Daejeon.

Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on Korean politics or anything, and I’m not quite sure I’m even qualified to have an opinion, but the guy for whom this memorial was held seems like pretty much of a hero. He was President  Roh, Moo-Hyun. He worked his way up the social ladder, putting himself through law school, and eventually became president for the maximum tenure of five years. Despite repeated efforts from the Conservative Party to defame and even impeach him, he held strong until the time came to step down, at which point he moved back to his hometown (a very unusual move for a Korean politician, I guess; they normally stay in Seoul) and lived a farmer’s lifestyle. The most popular image of Roh today is him smiling beatifically and looking off into the distance, his head ringed by a farmer’s hat. President Roh killed himself almost exactly a year ago, after current President Lee repeatedly and publicly admonished and defamed him, as far as Ah Young explained it to me. Suddenly the Korean social value of “keeping face” seems a much more serious issue. So this concert was in memory of President Roh, and it’s moving throughout Korea, having started in Seoul. On Sunday it rolled through Daejeon, we went, and I may have been the only foreigner there.

When first entering the area, there was a lineup of pictures of Roh: memorabilia detailing his early life, rise to power, retirement, and eventual death. Even with just a small sketch of the full story in my mind, it was all very powerful stuff, especially knowing that I live in a country where the Conservative Party controls almost all media, and has banned speakers and artists from television who had spoken out in support of Roh. Ah Young told me that a couple of the artists who performed on Sunday had once been television regulars, but since publicly supporting Roh and criticizing Lee, they’re lucky to get an interview on cable.

Oof. This was some intense stuff.

Again, I’m not sure how entitled I am to even have an opinion of a government that I know so little about, but seeing as how I’m living in this country now, I feel that I should educate myself as much as I can about the Korean system of democracy. And the way it is now, with government-controlled media blocking out the voices of the opposition, it’s tough to say that it’s not more than a little scary. Of course, this is coming from the guy who wishes Obama would tell Fox News to put a sock in it or else, so take all this with a grain of salt.

Anyways, that’s all I have time for today. Next time on EMA, it’s a trip to Busan! Beaches! Beer! And my old arch-nemesis, frisbee! I have a history of getting hit in the face with the disc, so if I return to Daejeon with my nose intact I’ll consider the long weekend of the Buddha’s Birthday a smashing success. ‘Til next time!

노래방: Why, God, Why?

If the above Hangeul lettering just looks like little boxes to you, it’s probably because you live outside of Korea, have a crappy computer, or both. If you can see it but can’t read it, that’s probably fine unless you live outside of Korea. If you live in Korea, look me up and I’ll invite you to some free lessons so you can be freakin’ literate. It says “noraebang” (NO-ray-bong). What is a noraebang, you ask? Simple. A noraebang is a place of humiliation and suffering where your dignity goes to die, if you ever had any dignity in the first place. Last weekend I inadvertently, through no fault of my own, went to three of them in two nights. Now I hate myself. Allow me to elaborate.

You have probably heard of Korean Karaoke joints. They had one in the Twin Cities, although I never went because prior to coming to Korea I was violently opposed to karaoke. We got along like oil and the Gulf of Mexico (ooh, too soon?). But I was informed upon arriving in Korea that karaoke is an essential part of the “Korean night out experience”. If you haven’t figured it out yet, a noraebang is the place you go for karaoke in Korea. “Norae” means “song” and “bang” means room, so roughly the two put together means “singing room”. And that’s just what it is. This isn’t a karaoke “bar” like in America. You don’t sit there and watch terrible singers who can’t hold their liquor sing Journey, unless they happen to be your friends. You go with a group of people, generally smuggling in soju or beer or makggeoli or some unholy combination of all three, go into a private room, and you sing your heart out into a tinny little microphone with an uncomfortable amount of echo to it. Which is actually a ton of fun, if you do it every once in awhile. But not three times in two days. Here’s the synopsis:

Noraebang #1: Friday Night – I met up with some friends for burgers and beer at Santa Claus, a "Western-style” bar in Daejeon with the best damn burgers outside of Saint Paul’s own Blue Door Pub. After this, we went to a few other places, including an arcade where we played some rigged basketball games and tried to capture ridiculous little stuffed creatures with metal claws. Anyways, most everyone went home after awhile except for Brandy, another English teacher, who had never been to noraebang but insisted, “I kind of want to sing.” So there you have it. Only two people, but at 2AM it hardly matters anyways. As I said, the first one is pretty fun.

Noraebang #2: Saturday Night – After resolving to meet up with DMZ buddies Danielle and Daniella, later to be met by Ah Young as well as a gaggle of people who I didn’t really know up until that evening, I discovered that Danielle had stealthily been planning to go to noraebang for her first time ever that night. We went a little after 9 o’clock, which for my money is far too early to go to noraebang, ever. What’s worse than this, though, is that Ah Young had been pestering me to learn how to “K-Pop Dance” , which, for guys at least, seems to involve hip-thrusting and tearing one’s shirt off to reveal glistening washboard abs. Unfortunately, I don’t thrust my hips in public nor do I have a washboard stomach, nor do I dance well in general, so my K-Pop Dance moves are limited to something like the following video, which Ah Young also sent me after informing me that she was sure I’d be able to at least pull this dance off. She was wrong.

I can’t even do the K-Pop Dance as well as this guy.

So basically, if you go to noraebang with Korean friends, they might ask you to dance, which is fine for some, but nobody wants to see me do that.

So after two off-key trips in less than twenty-four hours, a few of us decided to go meet up with Melissa (who also came on the Seoul excursion, you’ll remember) at a place called Yellow Taxi, where we drank a few beers, watched a decent rock and roll cover band, and, you guessed it, wound up at noraebang somewhere around 1:30AM.

Noraebang #3: Also Saturday Night – You may wonder why I was subjecting myself to this much torture. At this point, my throat was hoarse from “singing” and I was quite tired. But there’s something about the weekend that makes me believe that it may never come again, so I must spend as much time with my friends as I can before I have to go back to the classroom on Monday. It gets me into trouble sometimes. At this noraebang, the lead singer of the band we had just watched showed up and would not relinquish the microphone. Not for anything. And it was at this point that I realized that he couldn’t sing. Not in a noraebang, at least. Not only was he off key, but it sounded like he was trying to sing some sort of harmony in a key from the seventh circle of hell. After ‘90’s pop ballads, slogging through “Bohemian Rhapsody” (which should just be outlawed from every karaoke playlist, ever, even if I’m often the one that picks it… no, especially because I’m often the one that picks it), and being forcibly “asked” to show off my nonexistent  K-Pop style Six-Pack Dance, I think the last straw may have been standing in a room listening to this guy wail like a kicked baby into a microphone. The worst of it was, I wondered how many more noraebang trips I had left in me before I became that guy.

So after all this incessant negativity, how can I redeem myself? Maybe with a nice, concise, perfectly rational Pro and Con list!

PRO NORAEBANG

1.) You get to act like a fool with your friends and there’s no strangers around to judge you.

2.) You sometimes can hear other people singing in other rooms, and they invariably sound worse than what’s happening in your room.

3.) They’re a great place to seek refuge late at night when you don’t want to go to a bar but don’t want to go home yet, either.

4.) Singing and dancing.

CON NORAEBANG(…this title doesn’t work as well as the “pro” one, does it?)

1.) You will probably have a sore throat from “singing” the next day, at least the first time.

2.) Someone will invariably pick “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Sometimes it’ll be me. If you’ve been drinking soju, you may wake up with headbanger’s neck.

3.) You might get stuck in a noraebang with the guy from the band I saw on Saturday.

4.) Singing and dancing.

Anyways, I can’t really rationalize this rant because I got almost no sleep last night. Which leads me to the last part of this post, entitled:

***

A LIST OF THINGS WHICH WOKE ME UP LAST NIGHT BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 11:30 PM AND 6:00 AM

1.) A howling, unhappy Jindo dog. A Jindo is a rather cute Korean dog that’s bred only on one island in Korea. One of them lives across the street from me. I’m guessing he was trying to serenade me or something, but it just wasn’t working.

2.) My right shoulder. A few years ago I worked at a summer camp in Saratoga Springs, New York. It was the staff/student soccer game. I tried to steal the ball from some fifteen yeah old athletic beast, and instead tripped over my own feet and wound up tearing some ligaments in the shoulder, which yesterday started screaming in pain. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Jake, why don’t you just go get some Tylenol or something?” Well, I tried, smartypants. I failed at finding it because it takes me twice as long to find simple things here in Korea because I am not good at life.

3.) Someone using a circular saw to cut sheet metal. This sound became familiar to me during my time in the theatre shop in college. It’s one of the worst noises imaginable, and someone was making it repeatedly for the better part of an hour, up until about 12:30, half a block away from me.

4.) What was either a fleet of very old trucks with no mufflers or a parade of jugglers juggling rusty chainsaws. I’m serious here. I was woken up by some sort of unholy roaring outside my window around 1AM and after shaking off the initial reaction that there were dinosaurs rampaging through Daejeon, I went back to sleep. Now I wish I hadn’t, because I keep thinking that it might have been a parade of rusty chainsaw jugglers, and if it was then I’m super-pissed that I missed that.

5.) The absurdly enthusiastic lovemaking of my neighbor upstairs. This was around 2:30AM. Here is a note to all lovers who live in apartment buildings with paper-thin walls: keep it down. Nobody wants to be woken up, much less woken up alone, by what sounds like two cowboys yelling at cattle (I am not exaggerating; just before I turned my music on loud enough to drown out the noise, which was pretty loud, I actually heard someone shout “WHOOP WHOOP!”).

6.) The significant other of my neighbor upstairs leaving, quite noisily, at around 3AM.

7.) The construction across the street from me. This happened at around 5:30, which is a perfectly appropriate time to begin dropping large steel poles to the ground from a height of about twenty feet. This went on at one minute intervals for quite some time. At this point you’re probably thinking “Why don’t you just get some earplugs, Jake?” In response, I’d like to direct you to my answer to your Tylenol query in #2. So maybe you can forgive me for being a wee bit cranky in this particular post.

***

If this post seems a little long, rambling, and cynical, I do apologize. That just seems to be my sense of humor these days. I promise that I will try to bring back my sunny disposition for the next post, which will hopefully involve some kind of adventure over the weekend of Buddha’s Birthday. But allow my to leave you with a photograph that I should have put on a previous post. These are my ravaged jeans from Microwave Day.

I tore the pocket open myself after the incident because I like tearing things. ‘Til next time, dear readers!

PS In the time it took me to proofread this post, my upstairs neighbors started going at it again. I’m not kidding. WHOOP WHOOP!

If a Tree Falls in a School With No Students, Does It Make a Sound?

I think I might be going crazy. I was under the impression that a week of doing absolutely nothing and getting paid for it would be so much better than another week of doing things and getting paid the same amount. And it is. I have energy to spare, my voice no longer sounds like a chainsaw cutting through a petrified forest, and we’re getting real food from restaurants instead of lukewarm fried squid and watery soup. This is pretty awesome. But it’s doing nothing for my sense of self-worth.

Don’t get me wrong, I can handle plenty of time doing useless work, like writing this blog, and getting paid for it. But there came a time when I started to feel like maybe I’m living some sort of weird double life. For almost a week now I’ve done nothing in the day but sit at a desk and pretend to be working. Sometimes I’ve even done real work, like finally finishing assembling students’ nametags or planning for the parents’ lesson I had to teach today.

But for the most part I’ve been reading the news, trolling Facebook for juicy gossip (did you know that Zac, who signed onto the lease in Minnesota instead of me, stayed up until 2 AM last night? I know, crazy!), and growing a beard by virtue of being too lazy to shave certain parts of my face. And then sometimes I go out at night and do really cool stuff, like going to a Nintendo Room (a magical land where you drink beer, play Wii, and sit on thirty pillows), a wine tasting, or a shady slum filled with brothels and stores packed with (most likely) stolen electronics. These things are all new to me, and therefore exciting and invigorating. And then there was last night, when I cuddled with my floor chair and watched two episodes of the popular television show Angel. That’s right, Angel. In this way, I feel like maybe I’m turning into a really lame version of Batman. By day, I am a (relatively) mild-mannered English teacher/internet addict/blog writer, but when I manage to get out, I am an adventurous spirit of adventure and also punching, striking out into the night to take revenge on all sad stereotypes of nerdy twentysomethings who live alone and watch Angel. Really, I even punched some stuff last Saturday. Just because it was an actual punching bag doesn’t make it any less relevant.

Yeah, something like this. 

I’m living in a foreign land, learning a new language, eating a new food almost every day, and generally having a blast. But this week, sitting in the mostly-empty office with little to no work to do, something is definitely missing. I think the void I’m talking about is the same one that took root in my soul while I was working at Mall of America for the better part of a year: meaningful, fulfilling work. Is it weird to say that I actually… miss teaching just a little? Oh, well. Next week, then. At least I still have Angel’s chiseled biceps to hold me when I get home tonight.

Microwave Day: A Living Nightmare

“Surprise!” is what Sookhee should have said when informing me of my school’s testing schedule. This week has already seen some effects of the rigorous testing of students, from a mildly rearranged schedule to the cancellation of some of my classes. As of the end of the day on Tuesday, I’ve taught four classes this week. Friday, I have no classes, but I do have a teacher outing that involves climbing a mountain. Next week, I have no classes at all. All week. But I do still have to go to work.

All this is to say that while surprises keep coming, my job is still treating me very well. Payday number two is on the horizon, I’ve been invited to play some sort of combination of volleyball and soccer with the other male teachers, and my school even bought me a microwave, which I didn’t deem necessary until around the fifth time I was reheating leftovers on the stove. Which leads me to the reason for this post. As if I haven’t already made myself out to be a buffoon, a klutz, and possibly a drunk here on EMA, I will now willingly hand even more ammunition to you, dear readers, in the form of Jake’s Most Embarrassing Moment In Korea So Far: Microwave Day.

But first, cherry blossoms!

Hooray! Aren’t they pretty?

Anyways, now that that’s done, I suppose I can tell you about the ungodly horror of Microwave Day. This story actually begins a few months ago when, as I was searching for what to pack for my journey to Korea, I came across some jeans that can only be described as “very old”. So old, in fact, that I’m not sure I’d seen them since high school. But they fit, and quite well, too. So I took these ancient tubes of denim with me to Korea thinking I’d just saved money by not having to buy another pair of jeans.

So on Microwave Day, the day that my school (perhaps unwisely) handed me its credit card to purchase a device with which to reheat my leftovers and make popcorn, I was wearing these jeans. I walked to Lotte Mart, which is sort of like a less depressing Korean version of Wal-Mart; it’s about a ten minute stroll. I was thinking that even if the microwave was heavy, it wouldn’t be too big, so I could lug it back to my apartment no problem, right? Right. Mostly.

See, as I got out of Lotte Mart, I decided to set the microwave down on the ground to rearrange myself and get a better grip on it. So as I bent down to pick it back up, guess what I heard? That’s right – the heart-stopping scream of tearing denim. Riiiiiiip. And this was not a small, nobody-will-notice-it tear. This was more of a deafcon five, let’s-just-put-up-a-windmill-to-catch-this-draft kind of tear. This was pants Armageddon, and I was just starting my journey home.

Naturally, I hitched up my pants and swung my stylish leather man-purse over my ass in an attempt to cover up the hole, picked the microwave back up, and did my best to amble on home like I didn’t know anything was wrong. All was going swimmingly until I heard the three words I was dreading the most:

“Hello, Mr. Dischee!”

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. In the span of no more than one minute, Microwave Day had gone from a joyous celebration of cooking at the atomic level, to an embarrassing little anecdote, to an incredibly low watermark in my dignity. In fact, the water of my dignity was so low that I’m pretty sure the whole pool was drained.

“Hello,” I muttered back to the group of no fewer than four girls, who were leaning against the Lotte Mart wall eating ice cream.

“Where are you going, teacher?” one of them asked.

Great, I thought, conversation. Awesome. This will go well. “I am going home,” I said.

At this point I was passing the group, but taking great pains not to turn my back to them. This led them to think that I had more to say, so they watched me expectantly as I backed up as quickly as I could.

“You are hurry!” another one of the girls said.

“Yes, this is very heavy,” I said, hoisting the instrument of my doom to demonstrate that it was indeed quite heavy.

“Ah, heavy!”

“Yes. Goodbye!” I said, then turned sideways, still not showing them my full back, and scuttled off down the sidewalk like some sort of giant ungainly crab.

When I was about a block away from the students I stole a glance back in their direction. They were still there, eating their ice cream in silence and watching me. I’m pretty sure they were watching me simply because I was walking funny, so after checking to make sure that my bag was still in place over the gash in my pants, I bravely turned my back and walked like a normal human being. I prayed that I had managed to wear boxers that day that were roughly the same color as my jeans.

Three blocks from Lotte Mart there’s a stoplight. I figured if I could make it across the street I could take the back road home and minimize the risk of running into any more students. The thing is, stoplights in this country are notoriously slow. All lights are timed, and they seem to take anywhere from two minutes to an eternity to change. Today, this particular light took an eternity.

I leaned against the post and looked back over my shoulder. Guess what I saw? If you guessed more students, congratulations, you win a prize. Three this time, only a block and a half off and coming my way, with the light showing no signs of changing. I glared at the little red man on the sign across the street, willing him to turn green so I could try to outrun the students. For some reason the theme from Jaws started playing in my head.

I looked back. They were only a half block away now. I had no choice but to turn around and face them or risk, shall we say, exposure.

I saw one of the students gasp and nudge the student next to her. This is a common occurrence when I am spotted in town – the kids always seem shocked that I can exist in any other place but school. All three of them waved in unison.

“Hello, teacher!” they shouted happily.

“Hello,” I said.

“Nice to meet you!”

Usually I would correct this mistake, but at this point I was in no mood. I just sighed and said, “Yeah.”

“Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“You live where?”

I gestured vaguely in the direction of my neighborhood and said, “Over there.”

By this point the students were right next to me. After turning to face them I now found myself standing in a little circle, students staring expectantly up at me. And this time, I had nowhere to go. Instead, I shifted on my feet and fiddled with the strap on my bag and made a concerted effort not to make eye contact with any of them.

When they all walked away quite suddenly (shouting, “Goodbye, teacher!”) I realized that the light had finally changed. The students were walking ahead of me now, which was obviously far preferable to the alternative. I checked once more to make sure my man-purse was covering up the disaster area, reasserted my grip on the microwave, and carried on home.

The rest of the journey was fairly uneventful. There were no more groups of students, no more pauses for awkward conversation. I just hurried back to my apartment hoping that no one who worked at the school would pass by and try to stop me. When I got home I discovered I had been wearing my Green Bay Packers boxers that day, so the team may have gotten a little free advertising in Korea.

Anyways, there are three things I learned from this whole experience:

3. A man-purse is good for more than just carrying books and an iPod. Never be without one.

2. Your jeans are not as rugged as you think they are.

1. Never go commando. It’s just not worth it.

That’s all for today, readers. I hope you have enjoyed my shame.

I’m a Seoul Man: The First Trip Out of Daejeon

Welcome back, loyal readers. I apologize yet again for the long lapse between updates, but by this point, you have already heard variations on many of the things I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks. Teaching, hanging out, running English Drama Club, being confused by my lack of Korean skills, and so forth. I did go on an impromptu bike ride on some free public bikes, though. That was fun. But this post is about my very first exploratory excursion outside of Daejeon: to the Demilitarized Zone and the wonderful metropolis of Seoul. I warn you, this one gets a little lengthy and a lot ridiculous.
I suppose you may need a little background on the Demilitarized Zone, so here goes. After the Korean War, a Military Line of Demarcation was drawn, breaking the Korean peninsula in half. In the northern half, the Chinese and the Soviets supported the communist regime of the Eternal President Kim, Il-Sung. In the southern half, the United States supported a democratic system. To ensure a minimum of incidents, a buffer of two kilometers was instituted on either side of the Line of Demarcation. This is the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, and it is about as close as you can get to North Korea without actually going there.
The DMZ is a very interesting, but very odd place. Can you think of another place in the world that symbolizes so much suffering and loss of life, yet features not only frequent bus tours, but an amusement park at the place the buses leave from? The air is thick with tragedy, especially near Freedom Bridge, where fences are lined with bows and flowers and pictures of long-lost loved ones and a bombed-out, bullet hole-studded locomotive stands silent guard. Yet there are colorful cartoon characters adorning walls and even a slightly whimsical piece of sculpture formed from the letters DMZ.

Odd, indeed. The two ladies in the picture with me are Ah Young, who helps me struggle through Korean lessons every Saturday at Talkholic, and Melissa, a friend I met through Ah Young. They invited me on their journey with them… or did I invite myself? It’s hard to remember. Anyways, the highlight of the DMZ is a horribly claustrophobic little tunnel that runs about 70 meters underground. This was discovered in the early ‘70’s and was an apparent attempt by North Korea to tunnel under the DMZ and invade South Korea. Now, though, it’s filled with chattering tourists. It’s a long trek to the bottom (and longer to get back up) but the experience of mucking through an invasion tunnel built to accommodate much shorter men than I is one I certainly won’t soon forget. And my calves still remember racing Ah Young back to the top… ow. We did not, unfortunately, get to the Joint Security Area (see blog post #2); that will be an adventure for another day.

From the DMZ we went for a brief excursion to Heyri Art Village, a magical little land where trees grow through walls and giant purple see-through teddy bears stand ready to be hugged… or punched. This is a place that demands a day rather than an hour, but it bears mentioning (see what I did there?).

After Heyri, it was bibimbap time. Bibimbap, for those uninitiated in its simple joys, is basically a Korean salad with rice, vegetables, and chili paste. And it is supremely tasty. After bibimbap, it was Seoul time. Specifically, Hongdae, a massive student/party zone filled with shiny lights and unintended non sequiturs on English language signage. We parked in the parking garage of one of the giant apartment complexes that litter the landscape here – Ah Young’s friend gave us the express permission to use his building’s garage – and drank DMZ makggeoli (a delicious, sweet, milky rice wine, pronounced MACK-go-lee) as we trekked to the subway. This particular makggeoli is rather famous, in fact: it is so good that Kim, Jong-il has it specially imported for his own consumption. I must say, the man does have good taste in makggeoli. On the subway, we bade goodbye to friends Danielle and Daniella, who accompanied us to the DMZ but were too tired to continue the journey. We arrived at the Hongik University subway stop, where I’ll begin my writing exercise for this post, entitled:

***

BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY, OR BOOZE BRINGS US TOGETHER

***WARNING WARNING Events in this story have been retooled to streamline the narrative. As a result, we come off as raging alcoholics with no place in civilized society. Sorry about that. No names have been changed, as no one involved herein is an innocent. Leastways, not anymore.  END WARNING YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***

I take a huge swig of the stuff.

“I must take a picture! White people drinking makggeoli in the street!” Ah Young says.

“Is that… not normal?” I ask.

“Korean people don’t even drink it in the street,” she says.

“They do now.” I hand her the bottle, still open.

“Makggeoli stop!” she says, then stops cold while we keep walking, Melissa and I, for a few seconds before noticing.

We are in Seoul. It’s my first time in this particular city, and we’re strolling through Hongdae in search of… something. Going to a jazz bar has been discussed, and there are many to choose from. But for right now, staring at the garish lights and amazingly blunt signs (SEXY PARTY! proclaims a banner suspended precariously over a crowded street) while guzzling milky rice wine from a 7-Eleven is more than enough.

“I think we need more,” Melissa says, giving a disapproving look at the empty bottle, our third of the night. “I’m not feeling it yet.”

“I am,” I say, no doubt looking like a fool, what with the perpetual grin of the tipsy plastered on my face.

“I know,” she says.

Our goal is, as near as I can tell, this: to find a place or two to bunker down and drink something while listening to music, dancing to music, or both. But we are in no hurry: none of us have been to Hongdae before, and it is infamous for its party atmosphere. Tonight, one of the first truly warm nights of the young spring, Hongdae is hopping.

“Makggeoli man!” Ah Young exclaims, pointing out a man pushing a rickshaw through a crowd of revelers waiting at a cocktail pickup window. The bar is selling cocktails in what appear to be colostomy bags to folks on the street. I’m reminded of Capri Sun, the juice I used to bring for my lunch in middle school.

Ah Young runs up to the man with the rickshaw, which is laden with extra large bottles of makggeoli, and starts speaking rapidly in Korean. I pick up numbers at this point, and that’s about it, but the Makggeoli Man tells Ah Young that, for us, it will only be three thousand won for two massive bottles. A steal. Ah Young tells us it’s because he likes us, and I wonder how we made such a good impression so quickly.

We wade through the line of people waiting for their colostomy cocktails and notice that the man gave us about fifteen Dixie cups in our bag with the bottles. A luxury, after swigging straight out of the bottles all night, though we wonder why he did this for a second before it hits me.

“We have to share!” I say.

I grab the cups and fill one up for myself. Then I hold the cups up and shout “Anyone want some makgeolli?”

This is the way to make friends on the streets of Hongdae. Almost immediately a group of three Australian girls waves us over.

“We need a drink!” One of them says. "I feel like we’ve been waiting here for hours.” I look at the line behind them, and how far they have to go, and conclude that she may not be too far off. Apparently cocktails in a bag are just that good.

I distribute the cups and Melissa pours for the three girls, who thank us pleasantly, while Ah Young tells them that we are from Daejeon and visiting for the weekend and it is our first time in Hongdae. Names are introduced in a blur; everyone knows we’re not expected to remember. After one or two more Dixie cups are filled with rice wine and made empty again, we bid goodbye. One of the girls tells us that they were just starting to get desperate for a drink when we showed up out of nowhere, and calls us her Magical Makgeolli Mates. Fifteen minutes later, after a stop off at a food stall for some noodles and deep-fried Korean pancake, we see them again and she waves us over with the same moniker. We fill their cups one more time before wandering off into the night.

We eventually settle on a place called the Gorilla Bar, a very sweaty but very free bar/dance club with sign out front informing us that ALL HORNY PEOPLE are WELCOME. I wonder if people who don’t have much in the way of a sex drive are also welcome. Eunuchs like to dance too, don’t they? The night becomes a blur of thumping bass and temporary friendships formed with smiles, clinking bottles, and a few words drowned out by the K-Pop. In the morning, Ah Young will wake us after four hours of sleep, chipper and ready to go, and I will fall face first off the top bunk in our hostel room and lie shirtless on the floor, contemplating the virtues of going back to sleep on the cold hardwood.

It was totally worth it.

***

Ridiculous, I know, but it’s probably more fun than reading a fictionalized account of the DMZ tour, or anything from the slow, sleepy Sunday we had. Speaking of Sunday, it involved a trip to Itaewon for a halfway decent hamburger (or veggie burger, in Ah Young’s case), some new shades for yours truly and an excursion to Deoksugang, a palace near the heart of Seoul with the National Museum of Art inside it. The palace was gorgeous and much of the art exhibit quite beautiful, too, but even thinking about it makes my eyelids start to droop in anticipation of sleep. After a day of forcing ourselves into having high spirits and pretending we had energy, we drove back to Daejeon, tired and sore and satisfied.

This is pretty much the kind of experience I wanted to have while I was in Korea. New friends, new places, and adventures ranging from the well-planned (DMZ) to the ill-advised (obviously…). The travel bug is back; it’s crawled under my skin, laid its gloriously restless little eggs, and they’re beginning to hatch. And I can’t wait for more…

The First Month in Daejeon: Long Hours and a Dusty Respiratory System

Hello again! I know, I know, it’s been a long layover between posts. Believe me, when I look back and see that my last post was about Mount Bomunsan, it seems like I haven’t updated in years. But hey, I’ve been busy. To a point. This week, I kept telling myself, “Now Jake, if you’re going putz around during your off hours, you could at least do something productive, like working on your blog.” You know what I did instead? I read the news. I’ve read so much news this week that the politics of health care reform is actually starting to dribble out my ears because my brain is too full. It’s really pretty disgusting. But I must say, I’m happy to see someone in power in my home country finally growing a pair and making something happen. Thanks, Pelosi.
Anyway, on to the real topic at hand: where the hell have I been for the past two weeks? The short answer: training. I told you in my last post that all EPIK teachers in Daejeon were going to have to undergo a mandatory orientation AFTER the mandatory orientation that took place in Seongnam City back in February. For me, this involves an hour-long commute, followed by an hour and a half or so of sometimes helpful information and teaching practice, followed by the commute back home. This is why I haven’t been having much in the way of adventures: I’ve simply been too tired. Even after Korean lessons last Saturday (and a dinner where I ate a little too much extra-spicy Chinese soup and felt the consequences for a couple hours) I barely had the energy to try to make friends. Poor little old me, too sleepy to drink beer and have a good time. Just kidding, I’m never to tired for that.
I also promised a long time ago to keep you updated on the English Drama Club that Seonmi and I are running. I’m happy to report that it’s a total blast, and generally the most fun I have each week. Getting Korean middle schoolers to roar like lions, much less stop punching each other for more than thirty seconds, is a tough trick, but it’s tons of fun. I’m happy to report that the script for our competition performance is completed and will be posted up here very quickly for your (constructive) feedback and endless praise. I was told to find a script, but the best I could find frankly sucked ass, so I decided to write one myself. It’s based on Shakespeare. I do love me some Bard.

Anyways, this post’s creative nonfiction might get a little more fiction-y than non-y, mostly because it’s about a rather surreal experience. Last Saturday the worst “yellow dust storm” on record hit Korea and, as far as I can tell, gave us a preview of what the apocalypse will look like. Even today, walking to school, I spotted some cars that were caked in the stuff. Yellow dust is a result of massive deforestation and industrialization in China, and blows in across the Yellow Sea (hmm… I wonder if there’s a connection there…) and bathes Korea and often Japan in a sickening yellow light. So I decided to try to convey the experience in this installment of EMA.                                        

  (picture from Google Image search)

This week’s wee story is called:

***

IS IT JUST ME OR IS IT YELLOW OUT HERE?

Nobody bothered to tell me about the dust storms before I came here. Maybe nobody thought it was important, or maybe people thought that my impression of the country would be tarnished if I knew about them. It’s not. I’m really not bothered by it anymore, but I definitely was the first time it happened. I was walking back from school on a Saturday morning, being, I’m fairly certain, the only Westerner in Daejeon to go to work at a public school on that particular Saturday. It was fairly sunny out, but the wind was whipping mightily down from the mountains. It seemed like a pre-rain wind, and I’d forgotten my umbrella, so I was hurrying home. Suddenly it got dark. Not just rain dark, not even thunderstorm dark. No, this was more like the alien-ship-entering-the-atmosphere-in-Independence-Day dark. A supernatural dark.

Great, I thought to myself. I don’t even get to explore Korea for a whole month before the Apocalypse hits.

With the wind pushing and pulling me every which way, I picked up my pace, thinking that maybe if I got to my apartment before the Four Horsemen rode down from the sky that they might miss me and pass by. As I half-jogged down a side street lined with fruit vendors, often bustling on a Saturday but now all but deserted, I began to notice that everything seemed to have changed color. Even the haze that seems to perpetually shroud the furthest-off mountains had become a dirty yellow; for some reason my mind rested on radiation from a nuclear fallout and I wondered for a second if Kim Jong-il had finally pushed the button he’s been bragging about for so long.

“It’s yellow dust. It comes from China,” a friend of mine explained later in the day, when I asked why it had suddenly turned yellow outside. “It’s from all the industry and deforestation over there, and it gets carried across the sea.” And so we reap the benefits of China’s staggering march of industry whenever it gets too windy outside. Awesome.

As I neared my home, I heard thunder. I had known that rain was on the way that Saturday, but nobody had said anything about yellow dust choking out the sun immediately beforehand. Later I thought about weather graphics, the smiling suns wearing sunglasses, the angry-face clouds, and tried to imagine one for a pollution-dust storm. It would probably have fangs. Or tentacles, or horns. Or all three.

As I reached the door to my apartment I had just started to feel the effects of the stuff in my throat. That feeling would linger the rest of the weekend, as would a slight yellow haze in the air. I thought to myself, I will never, ever, ever complain about any kind of precipitation again.

Yeah, the stuff was gross, and more than a little scary, but at least it wasn’t the end of the world. This time.

***

Anyways, that’s all I have for now. I’ll be posting the script for my drama students, a madcap fifteen-minute romp through the basic plot structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directly below. And for your enjoyment, some pictures of my apartment and classroom! And also a bathroom in a park!

            The bed.                            The kitchen/entryway.

 

     The classroom, from the back.

The classroom, from where I stand and teach. 

Translation: don’t poop in the wall urinal, poop in the floor urinal.