Category: Hiking & Travel

Caveat: $77.77

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / My Photos

Dateline: Upland, California & I-10 to Phoenix

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I took off to drive to Phoenix, today. I stopped for gas as the tank was nearing empty. It’s a big truck. It cost me $77.77 to fill it. That seems like a lot – compared to $30 tanks in Minnesota with the rental car. But then I reflected that the same tank would cost, hmm, maybe ₩170,000 to fill in Korea, which is about $150, or a bit less.

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Still, it’s a lot. But I’m going to visit my sister.

Here’s a view of San Jacinto Mountain (I think that’s it) near Palm Springs at a rest area off the 10.

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Lastly, not in chronological order, a view from my dad’s front porch, last night, at twilight.

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Caveat: A Churchy Library

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / My Photos

Dateline: Whitewater, Wisconsin.

After building the lego tower, we went to a state park archeological site called Aztalan, near here. I might try to write something more extensive about that, later – it was pretty interesting.

Then we drove to  a town called Lake Mills for dinner. It’s a cute town. We went to a kind of hippyish place where I had a humus wrap that wasn’t bad – it was a bit like something you’d find in Arcata. We went walking in a cute town square park area, and I saw an attractive older public library. Five year-old Henry was at my side, and as I went to take a picture of it, he said that he thought it was a nice-looking church.

“It’s not a church,” I explained. “It’s a library.”

Henry doesn’t like being wrong. But he was very good-natured. “Oh my gosh!” he exclaimed. “That sure is a churchy library!”

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Caveat: 3300

Hiking & Travel / My Videos

pictureEverytime I leave Korea from Ilsan, I think, “I should make a video of this airport trip.” I’m not really sure why I believe that would be interesting.

So this time, last Saturday, I made the video.

It’s not really that interesting. But, there it is, such as it is. I call it 3300 because that’s the route number of the bus from Ilsan to the airport.

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Caveat: Nietzsche and the obligatory driveway photo

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / My Photos / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Dateline: Eagan, Minnesota (about 9 am, Sunday, July 29)

I was reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals before I left Ilsan yesterday: killing some time with one of the great time-killers of all time. In the Third Essay, Section 6, I found the following quote, which I felt compelled to write down immediately in my notebook.

Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the “spectator,” and unconsciously introduced the “spectator” into the concept “beautiful.” It would not have been so bad if this “spectator” had at least been sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of beauty – namely, as a great personal fact and experience, as an abundance of vivid authentic experiences, desires, surprises, and delights in the realm of the beautiful! But I fear that the reverse has always been the case; and so they have offered us, from the beginning, definitions in which, as in Kant’s famous definition of the beautiful, a lack of any refined first-hand experience reposes in the shape of a fat worm of error. “That is beautiful,” said Kant, “which gives us pleasure without interest.” Without interest! Compare with this definition one framed by a genuine “spectator” and artist – Stendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur. At any rate he rejected and repudiated the one point about the aesthetic condition which Kant had stressed: le désintéressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal?

I’ve never been much of a fan of Stendhal – I never have successfully read one of his novels. But I found the above insight very interesting. I have always felt that aesthetics is central to my understanding of the world, and Neitzsche’s point about seeing art and beauty from the point of view of a creator and not just a consumer seems very important. I’ll think about it some more and report back later, maybe.

Meanwhile, it was a drizzly rain at dawn in Dakota County, here.

I took a rather unaesthetic picture of my rental car, a Ford with Missouri plates, in my friend’s driveway, and I thought, why am I always taking pictures of cars in my friend’s driveway? I think it has to do with this view from my friend’s front porch as being a sort of “first real confirmation that, OMG, I’m in suburban North America again” – a snapshot of the culture-shock moment.

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Caveat: 인천공항

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel

Dateline: Incheon International Aiport
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pictureFree wifi has become increasingly rare as the technology has matured. It is definitely true that Korea is the land of nearly complete wifi coverage – it’s available on subways, buses, in parks and everywhere. But… the issue is that more and more, you have to be signed up for one of the big telecom’s data plans to avail yourself of it. I’m not. Because I still don’t have a smart phone – I have a dumb phone – dumbest phone imaginable. It doesn’t even have a dictionary.
OK. But here at the airport, I find a lingering bastion of free wifi. So. Hello from the airport.
My journey begins. I’m always amazed at the ease with which one can navigate Korean security and immigration. I know it will be much less pleasant on the LA end. See you soon.
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Caveat: The Hill and The Mall

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea / My Photos

Yesterday I went with Curt to go on a small hike up a mountain (well, really just a hill). His daughter came along, who’s just entering 4th grade. The mountain we chose is called 심학산 [simhaksan]. It has a view of North Korea, like many mountains around here – it was hazy and not very distinct but I’m always very aware of it – I guess it’s just my geographical interest kicking in.

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After the mountain we went to a brand new giant mall and had dinner and bought his little one-year-old a Pororo-branded toy. It was fun. Here are some pictures. I didn’t get a picture of the boy with the toy. I should have.

This is near the top of the mountain.

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Curt and I.

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A view southeast, toward Ilsan. Somewhere near the center of that vast cluster of buildings is my apartment and workplace.

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Here I am looking dazed with the community known as Geumchon hidden directly behind me. Geumchon is important because it’s where I lived in 1991 when I was in Korea, as a soldier in the US Army.

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And here’s the striking view looking North – I’ve added some useful labels to this picture – you can click the picture to enlarge it.

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Anywhere in Northern Gyeonggi Province, if you go hiking on the hills and mountains, you will run across military structures – fox-holes, fortified hill-tops, bunkers and concrete tank traps and hidden installations. Here’s a covered “tank-parking-space” amid the trees on the side of the mountain.

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Curt’s daughter (and my sometime student at Karma, too), looking focused and tired on her way down the mountain. She was angry because Curt had promised a snack at the top of the mountain and he’d forgotten, and she failed to complain about it. We had a snack when we got back down to the bottom.

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Here’s a turtle-based monument seen along the trail.

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At the mall.

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Lurking in the dusky haze beyond the freeway interchange, there lies the Han River Estuary and the point of North Korea. I wonder what the Northerners think, watching this massive monument to blatant brand-name consumerism through their high-powered binoculars.

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Caveat: The Story About The Time I Got Shot At While I Was Riding A Horse

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Less Banal Than Usual / Life is a Dream

I often tell slightly edited but mostly truthful stories from my life to my students, as a kind of reward at the end of a good class. I’ve had an interesting life, and so some of the stories are pretty remarkable, I suppose. One of the stories that the students seem to most enjoy is The Story About The Time I Got Shot At While I Was Riding A Horse.

I really did get shot at while riding on a horse – but the bullet missed. Here is a slightly less-edited version of this autobiographical cowboy story.

After I quit my job in Mexico City in January of 1987, I went to visit a friend of mine named Jon who was living at that time in Morelia, in Michoacan state, about 8 hours by bus west of Mexico City. Jon was actually quite a bit older than me, but he sort of treated me as a younger brother. So we hung out for a while in Morelia, and one day he made an outrageous proposal. Well, actually, he made many outrageous proposals, but this is one outrageous proposal that I actually assented to, and this was it: we should buy some horses and travel around the mountains of Michoacan by horseback for a few months.

We did that. We bought horses (quite inexpensive in rural Mexico in the 80’s) and some low-tech camping gear, and we played cowboys in the mountains. We met many Mexicans, and even Native Americans (in that part of Michoacan, they were P’urep’echa indians, known sometimes as Tarascos). We visited villages which were not connected to civilization by automobile. We found scorpions in our shoes and drank raw eggs mixed with coca-cola, which seemed to be a sort of local delicacy, offered by gap-toothed farmers by way of hospitality.

We met a tribe of American exiles (superannuated draft-dodgers) and Mexican hippies living on a farm in a town called Ihuatzio, and while my friend Jon flirted with resuming his previously defeated drug habit, I read back issues of Co-Evolution quarterly and Mexican comic books about Condorito and a battered copy of El Poema de Mio Cid, which conveniently had the 12th century Spanish and modern Spanish translations on facing pages.

After some time in Ihuatzio, we continued on around the Lago Patzcuaro to a town which was called, if I recall correctly, Santa Fulana de Tal, or something in that vein. Now, I should first explain, that my friend Jon had acquired a puppy. It was a husky, dirty white in coloration, which Jon, in his infinite naivite, dubbed “Negrita.” Negrita, unfortunately, although funny in a punny sort of way for a white dog, is a very bad idea for a name for your dog, becaues “negrita” is a way to call the attention of a woman of low-repute, in that part of Mexico: “Ey, negrita, negrita!” means something like “Hey, bitch,” or “Hey, baby.” That kind of thing. Or you could remark on the not-quite-accidental etymological relation it bears to a certain English-language slur, too.

So in this village named Santa Fulana de Tal, Negrita the dog ran off, and Jon, in his infinite naivite, began yelling at the top of his voice, “Negrita, negrita!”

Let’s just say, this was a bad idea.

Several of the women on the street appeared alarmed. It was a conservative village, where people came through on horseback frequently enough, but where gringos on horseback yelling “negrita” after their dogs where perhaps less well-known. One of the women who were inadvertently being offended by Jon’s yelling (and yes, I was yelling the name too, honestly, though I should have known better – my Spanish was better than Jon’s) had a husband or father who overheard this yelling, and this man decided to take offense.

Unfortunately, he was drunk.

Unfortunately, he had a gun, and so he decided to begin shooting at us.

Fortunately, he was drunk.

Fortunately, his aim was therefore really terrible. He hit my shoe. He hit Jon’s foot, with a graze. He was shooting low. For all I know, he hit a horse, though we found no wound on the horses later. Jon’s horse ditched him, leaving Jon sprawled on the cobblestone. My horse ran like the dickens, but I held on tightly. Several kilometers later, feeling more like Paul Revere than ever before or since, my horse stopped.

When Jon finally caught up to me, later, he blamed me for abandoning him. I said it was the horse’s fault, and I was just along for the ride. I blamed him for so stupidly naming the dog. Jon said I was saying the dog’s name too, and if I knew the dog’s name was offensive, why didn’t I say anything. I said that I had said something, but that Jon had been too drug-addled to pay attention at that time. And so we argued, for a while, there on the side of that hill among some scrub and cactus.

Our friendship effectively ended, that day. I ceded ownership of the horse to Jon, forfeiting my investment. I walked up the hill to a local road, and found a bus back to Mexico City.

My passport was stolen later that same week. It was a bad week. By the end of the month, I was back in Minneapolis. But it was a grand conclusion to my year-and-a-half in Mexico.

What I’m listening to right now.

Mexican Institute of Sound, “Mi negra a bailal.”

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Caveat: Trips Up North

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life is a Dream / My Photos

pictureThis is reminiscence (which is to say, I don’t mean a trip up to North Korea, a half-hour drive from here).

Lately, for some reason, I keep thinking of camping trips to northern Minnesota. It was an old, old tradition among my certain circle of friends, and camping trips to northern Minnesota and Upper Michigan were also a significant aspect of Michelle’s and my relationship.

In a related vein, I ran across a very old and somewhat embarrassing picture of me, possibly from the late 1980’s or early 90’s, standing in a campfire somewhere close to Hibbing, I would guess. It’s pretty funny – I reckon I was trying to stomp out the embers and was caught candidly. Dig the long hair.

Why do I post these things? Let’s just call it the spirit of full disclosure… 

So, sometimes when we drove to Hibbing or Duluth or the UP, we’d stop and camp at Banning State Park, which is just off I-35, pert’ near Sandstone, along the kettle river.

What I’m listening to right now (nice segue, huh?).

Pert Near Sandstone, “Save Me.”

This might be called Minnesota bluegrass. An interesting genre.

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Caveat: I took the #200 bus to North Korea

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea / My Photos

Well… within 2 miles of it. And I was on a hill, so I could see North Korea easily.

Lots of people know that my Korean “hometown” of Ilsan is quite close to North Korea – the northwest suburbs of Seoul have burgeoned over the decades to the point that they basically touch the DMZ in some places.  So the North Korean border is about 15 km from my apartment in a line pointing northwest, and it’s reachable on the local bus system.

My friend Peter came to visit because today is a holiday (more on that in a later post, maybe). We took the #200 bus that stops a few blocks from my apartment building toward Gyoha, and after about 40 minutes we got off at 통일공원 (Unification Park), a neighborhood on a point of land that is the spot where the Imjin River joins the Han River and the opposite bank is in North Korea.

There’s a museum and “observatory” there (통일전망대), where you can look through coin operated binoculars and watch the socialists going about their difficult lives in their cozy concrete burghs.

I find these “flexion points” of our global civilization fascinating. It’s an uncrossable border, demarcated by barbed wire fences and fox holes and guard towers and, probably, land mines and hidden weapons caches, too. This is not the sort of border one crosses for an afternoon. But it’s eerie how close it is – a local bus ride from my home is an utterly alien world, two miles distant across a river.

We walked around a lot, because finding the entrance to the observatory/museum area turned out to be a bit challenging. We walked on some trails in the woods, and there were foxholes and concrete and brick barricades snaking through the hillsides as if randomly. I speculated that, for all I knew, I’d dug one of those foxholes myself, 20 years ago, while on some field-exercise or another as part of my infantry support company of mechanics, as part of the US Army stationed in Paju County along the DMZ.  I didn’t have a clear recollection of all the various places where we encamped and trained and made foxholes and pretended to battle insidious communists. I wasn’t marking them on a map – I suspected that would have made my commanding officer suspicious.

Here are some pictures.

Here’s the #200 bus, that was very crowded because of the holiday. A woman had vomited in the aisle behind us, and we missed our stop and got off at the next one and walked back, which is partly why we got turned around as far as finding the proper entrance to the place.

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We saw golden fields of rice.

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We walked down a country lane in search of the observatory.

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We saw a wealthy-person’s brand new house constructed in a traditional style.

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We saw a statue of a man pontificating.

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We saw treeless hills of North Korea.

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We looked down the Han River westward towards its mouth. Right bank (north) is North Korea, and the Left Bank (south) is South Korea. Because of how the river snakes, jogging north, then south, then north again, you are seeing layers of South and North. The most distant mountains are Ganghwa Island, which is South Korean, but the mid-ground jut of land from the right (the interestingly denuded hills) is North Korea.

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We looked back down the Han River southeast, toward Seoul and Ilsan. I live within the scope of this picture, somewhere (Ilsan is the very urban skyline area to the right in the panorama, disappearing behind the little hill).

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We posed with North Korea in the background.

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We saw a mock-up of a North Korean class room in the museum (note pictures of Kim Il-seong and Kim Jong-il in upper right above blackboard).

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We saw a man sleeping in the grass beside the road.

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We received important advice from a trash receptacle.

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Caveat: Unreturned Calls

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

In the past I’ve sometimes used the joking metaphor that I’m in a “relationship” with the Korean Language. Learning (or trying to learn) a language is like that, sometimes.

On Monday (Chuseok day) my friend Peter, an American who had been living and working in Ilsan up until May of last year, returned to Korea for a new teaching job. He visited with me yesterday before going off to his new job, and we took a long walk (about 13 km, in a circle around Ilsan, visiting old haunts and things I guess).

All the walking around, we talked about things, too. One thing that happened was when he made kind of a laconic question to the effect of, “So, has the whole Korean Language thing lost its lustre?” (not exact words, but that was the gist of it).

Without missing a beat, I responded, “Oh, I’m as infatuated with the Korean Language as ever. But she’s not returning my calls. It’s very sad.”

This takes the metaphor to a new level. But it’s pretty accurate. Oh well. I’ve been feeling stuck on a plateau lately, and unable to climb past it.

I didn’t take my camera on the long walk – so no pictures. But here’s a map-plot of the walk, as best I can reconstruct it from memory. The loop was completed with a two-stop ride on the subway #3 line, back home to Juyeop.

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Caveat: holding up the sky

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea / My Photos

I needed to get out of the house yesterday. I took a long walk – along a route I took before… some years ago. I took the subway into the city and got off at Oksu, on the north bank of the rain-swollen Han River.  I walked across the bridge into Apgujeong. From there I went to Gangnam, and after stopping at my favorite bookstore, I ended up at GyoDae (University of Education). I walked maybe 7 or 8 km. It was heavily overcast but it wasn’t raining. It was kind of steamy hot. I took a few pictures.

Looking back down the stairs up to the bridge. The subway runs in the median of the bridge, that’s Oksu station on the right.

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I love the view along the river, here. For some reason it makes me think of Italy – maybe it’s the arches along the river bank and the way the buildings climb the hillside.

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The bridge itself, with its embedded subway tracks and industrial feel, is New Yorkish.

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Apgujeong (and all of Gangnam) is a very high-rent area. I would compare it to New York’s Upper East Side, LA’s Westwood/Brentwood.

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But there is still the occasional cardboard-carting ajeossi, blocking the forward progress of honking Mercedeses.

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The view at dusk looking east along Teheranno, one of Gangnam’s main drags, just west of its intersection with Gangnamdaero.

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Here is a rather famous recently-constructed building that even had a write-up in the Economist, if I recall correctly. It’s your basic glass-and-steel box skyscraper, right? But it’s wavy. Wiggly. And there’s a giant sculpture of golden hands, holding up the sky, in front – you could stand under the outstretched hands to shelter from the rain, for example.

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By the time I was headed home on the subway, it was starting to rain again. Just a sort of humid drizzle. I got home and made some tricolor rotini pasta with olives and pesto (I found jars of pre-made pesto at the Orange Mart across the street).

I did a lot of reading today.

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Caveat: Hace 25 años

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life is a Dream

I am one of those people who’s a little bit distrustful of facebook. I worry about how it “owns” my social network. It’s partly why I mostly stick to posting and maintaining this blog, instead, where I more explicitly control the content and can curate its exposure to the world.

Having said that, facebook has proved an amazing experience from the standpoint of how it makes possible the renovation of old friendships, the rediscovery of long-lost friends and acquaintances. The other day I got a message and a “friend request” from someone I hadn’t heard from in 25 years – she’d been a good friend of mine when I lived in Mexico City. She’d invited me to meet her family and relatives in El Salvador, too, and I had gone in early September, 1986 – at the height of the civil war there. I remember going through army and guerrilla checkpoints, and the eerie normalcy of helicopter gunships flying overhead and truckloads of armed men racing down the highways.

She’d been a student of mine (although older than me) in my volunteer English class (that I gave at my workplace), but because of our friendship, she ultimately became one of my most important Spanish teachers. Even today, I would say some of the verbal “tics” of my colloquial Spanish have recognizable echoes of her use of the language.

I suppose I’m thinking of this in part because that summer and fall in Mexico City were the point in time when I feel I reached that “critical mass” of linguistic fluency. And it happened so quickly. And my current efforts to learn Korean are clearly hampered in part by the lack of any such parallel “teaching” friendship in my current life’s constellations.

Here is a picture, which I scanned some years ago, showing me and her and some of her relatives on the pier in La Libertad, El Salvador. I am standing a bit off to the side on the left, looking a little bit dazed (which was a frequent expression for me during that strange, immersive, whirlwind trip). I think it’s funny that my hairstyle looks like a Korean pop-star’s or something. Sorry that the picture is pretty poor resolution – it is ancient and scanned.

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Caveat: Exercises in Humility

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea

Here’s why I sometimes have a really hard time working with opinionated 14-year-olds who have very limited English:

Student: Teacher!

Me: What?

Student: My school 원어민 [native English-speaking teacher] is handsome but you are not.

Me: I see…

Student: You have small head but big 배 [tummy]

Me: It’s very sad…

Student: Why are you 통통 [fat]?

Me: I don’t know…  I used to be fatter, you know. I dieted a lot.

Student: 와아아 [wow].

This student is not, otherwise, habitually insolent or impolite. In fact, I like the student a lot. And I know from previous experience that comments, negative or positive, regarding another person’s appearance, are much more freely thrown about in Korean society than in Western culture: long-time readers might remember the time the restaurant owner (a total stranger) in Busan greeted me with “You’ve got a bit a paunch” [in Korean]?

So what do I make of this? Should I take the time, yet again, to explain that this sort of talk will get a person smacked in the US? – Because I’ve explained it before, I’m sure. Does it even matter?

Regardless, it can take a strong ego to survive this kind of thing, can’t it?

Sigh.

Later, I had a more pleasant (but equally culturally interesting) conversation with my boss.

Boss: You [Westerners] like to argue.

Me: Koreans like to argue, too, I think.

Boss: Koreans like to fight.

Me: Fight… argue.  Yes.

Boss: No.  Argue is rational. Koreans just like to fight.

Me: Hmm. Yes, I could see that.

Boss: You know I’m right.

Point taken.

Tomorrow, my coworker Grace goes on her month-long special vacation home to Canada. That means my schedule is getting massively augmented. I’ll have 30-something classes, for the next month or so. I’m not even really dreading it, though I feel a little overwhelmed by mastering the content of the classes, I don’t feel particularly overwhelmed by the extra time I’ll be putting in – I’m really in a sort of “wanting to forget my dull, unaccomplished life” mood, lately. So I’ll throw myself into my work. I’ll dedicate myself to hearing the unintended insults of a hundred teenagers.

What I’m listening to right now.

Travis, “Sing.”

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Caveat: Map-apps

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Hiking & Travel

I’ve been playing around with trying to figure out how to calculate the distances of my evening jogging. I have just been guesstimating up to this point, but today I found an app connected to google maps called mapmywalk.com that works fine for South Korea. So I used it. It turns out that the route I was thinking of as 5 km was actually a little under 4 (so much for guesstimating, right?). I worked out a slightly different route that was a little over 5, and tonight, I ran it. And here it is. I like map-apps.

[UPDATE 2024-04-27: The embed link here rotted, I happened to notice. And I have no idea how I could reproduce / recover the cool map that was shown. Thank you, internet!]

Meanwhile. I’m feeling a bit grumpy about work, today. The “write me a textbook” project is going badly, and I felt like a kind of boring, crappy teacher today for the classes I had. Sigh. Not every day is good, right?

What I’m listening to right now.

The National, “Conversation 16.”

This song has awesome lyrics.  Check’em out.

I think the kids are in trouble
Do not know what all the troubles are for
Give them ice for their fevers
You’re the only thing I ever want anymore

We live on coffee and flowers
Try not to wonder what the weather will be
I figured out what we’re missing
I tell you miserable things after you are asleep

Now we’ll leave the silver city ’cause all the silver girls
Gave us black dreams
Leave the silver city ’cause all the silver girls
Everything means everything

It’s a Hollywood summer
You’ll never believe the shitty thoughts I think
Meet our friends out for dinner
When I said what I said, I didn’t mean anything

We belong in a movie
Try to hold it together ’til our friends are gone
We should swim in a fountain
Do not want to disappoint anyone

Now we’ll leave the silver city ’cause all the silver girls
Gave us black dreams
Leave the silver city to all the silver girls
Everything means everything

I was afraid I’d eat your brains
I was afraid I’d eat your brains
‘Cause I’m evil
‘Cause I’m evil

I’m a confident liar
Have my head in the oven so you know where I’ll be
I’ll try to be more romantic
I want to believe in everything you believe

I was less than amazing
Do not know what all the troubles are for
Fall asleep in your branches
You’re the only thing I ever want anymore

Now we’ll leave the silver city ’cause all the silver girls
Gave us black dreams
Leave the silver city to all the silver girls
Everything means everything

I was afraid I’d eat your brains
I was afraid I’d eat your brains
‘Cause I’m evil
‘Cause I’m evil
‘Cause I’m evil

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Caveat: Karmic Commute

Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea / My Videos

This is my latest installment in my efforts to document what it's like to go to work.  My commute in Ilsan is just a walk to work, but not so short as the walk from my last Hongnong place to work, and not so far as to require a bus trip like my previous Yeonggwang apartment (which required several installments to document).

I call the commute karmic not because of a reference to Buddhism but because that's the name of new place of work:  Karma Academy.

Caveat: … on the bus

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea / My Drawings & Paintings / My Poetry & Fiction

On the bus, today, …

… I saw fields green with the young spring barley.

… I saw a man kneeling beside the tollway next to his SUV, which had a flat tire.

… I saw a banner with a Japanese flag and the words (in English): “Don’t give up, Japan.”

… I saw a motel designed to look like a Russian Orthodox Church.

… I saw a single broad patch of snow on a hillside of brown grass, near Gongju.

… I saw a shed on fire, in a field, with a great billowing cloud of white smoke.

… I heard “Aguas de março” sung by Elis Regina and Antonio Carlos Jobim, on my mp3 player.

… I saw a cow sleeping in some dirt.

… I saw a reproduction of a watercolor painting of Paris’ St.-Germain Square on the wall over a urinal at a tollway rest area.

… I heard grumpy old people with thick Jeolla accents pronouncing Yeonggwang as Yeom-gang.

… I saw a tall young man with tight jeans and shiny purple combat boots yelling into a cellphone and dropping his iced coffee onto the pavement.

… I heard Talking Heads’ “Found a Job” on my mp3 player.

… I saw brick farm houses with solar panels on their flat roofs.

… I read 50 pages of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.

… I saw many, many pine trees dancing under the sky, their roots sunk in the red-gold earth, looking like ink-drawings.

… I heard The Cure’s cover of David Bowie’s “Young Americans” on my mp3 player.

… I saw tiny villages packed up into narrow valleys, limned with leafless trees, where all the houses had blue tile roofs.

… I saw an angry-looking euro-dude with Miami Vice sunglasses, spitting onto the sidewalk like a Korean.

… I saw a giant statue of a squirrel.

… I ate something vaguely resembling tater-tots, with a spicy sauce.

… I saw a bridge over the tollway that had trees planted on it.

… I saw hundreds of plastic greenhouses, filled with hothouse vegetables growing, looking like large worms swimming in formation through the still wintery fields.

… I heard Juanes’ “Fijate bien” on my mp3 player.

… I saw families having picnics at the graves of their ancestors at random locations on hillsides alongside the tollway, and there were many children hopping happily, too.

… I saw a crow perched on the sign that indicated the Yeonggwang County line. I was almost home.

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[this poem is a “back-post” added 2011-04-24, copied from my paper journal. I added the embedded youbube videos because the poem needed a sound-track. A scan of a picture from the paper journal page added 2013-06-14.]

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Caveat: Day Two – Redemption Amid Snow and Orange Groves

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea / My Photos / The Wonders of Work / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

[NOTE: This is the second part of a two-part blog post. The first part is here.]

I awoke at 6, only a little later than my usual time, despite the poor night’s sleep. I escaped the snore-o-mania and explored the hotel a little bit. It’s what Koreans call “condominium” but that’s not what it is by an American English definition – it’s a hotel for large groups, where you cram 6 or 8 people into each room that is a little bit like a small apartment.

One of my roommates seemed to have set up camp in the bathroom, so I went out to the lobby in search of a public restroom. Koreans have a habit of posting small inspirational sayings along the walls and stall doors of public restrooms. I enjoyed the one I found there so much, I took its picture. Maybe that’s because I understood it.

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"생각"을 조심하라, 그곳이 너의 "말"이 뒨다
"말"을 조심하라, 그곳이 너의 "행동"이 뒨다
"행동"을 조심하라, 그곳이 너의 "습관"이 뒨다
"습관"을 조심하라, 그곳이 너의 "인격"이 뒨다
"인격"을 조심하라, 그곳이 너의 "운명"이 되리라

[control your “thoughts,” as they become your “words” / control your “words,” as they become your “actions” / control your “actions,” as they become your “habits” / control your “habits,” as they become your “character” / control your “character” as that is your “destiny”]

I talked to Ms Ryu in the lobby for a while about the my feelings about last night. She was her usual upbeat self, trying to put a positive spin on things, but she seemed to understand.

The hotel is on the northwest coast of the oval-shaped island. I walked around and took some pictures. The day was windy and overcast.

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At 8:30 AM we all piled onto a bus and went to get breakfast. We had the famous “hangover soup” that includes ox-blood and lots of red (spicy) pepper and vegetables.

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I admired the Jeju City-scape. Well. Not really. Urban Jeju is exactly as unattractive as I’d always imagined it to be (as well as some very vague memories from a visit to the island while doing some weird training exercise in the US Army when I was here in 1991, although it’s much more developed now). Still, all the palms and citrus and stone walls made of dark volcanic rock reminded me of rural central Mexico. Except for the patches of snow on the ground.

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Then we drove to Hallasan. Halla mountain is the extinct volcano that makes up the center of Jeju Island, and is, incidentally, the highest mountain in South Korea, despite its eccentric location. It was covered in snow – between half a meter and more than a meter deep, packed down, in most places. Here and there on the trail there were places where the pack was weak and your foot would sink down 20 or 40 cm. But mostly, it was hiking on top of snow. Everyone was using something called, in Korean, “a-i-jen” which they allege is English, but I have no idea what it might actually be. They’re strap-on rubber and metal cleats for the bottoms of one’s hiking boots.

Not all the teachers went. The group that did – about 12 of us – was a core group of teachers whose company I enjoy. It was a redemptive situation, hiking outdoors with people I like being with. I went from hating the trip to loving it. Which is why I went, right? Because things can change, like that.

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I saw a child who seemed to be hiking alone. I love how independent Korean children are – it seems so at odds with the conformity in their culture, but I think on deeper reflection, it’s not. It all works together, somehow.

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At the top of the mountain, we had kimbap and ramyeon for lunch, and the 4-1 teacher had packed a bottle of whiskey. She shared half-shots around, in a paper cup. We also saw many crows (or are they ravens?).

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Stupid 138

Coming down, we saw many fine views.

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We also did some “bobsledding” on our butts. I wish I had pictures of that. It was awesomely fun, careening down the trails with a bunch of elementary school teachers acting just like elementary school children. It reminded me how much I have actually enjoyed skiing, the times I’ve gotten into that. Hmm. Well, maybe again sometime. Anyway, I recommend “buttsledding” most highly.

Finally, at 3:30, we met up with the bus and the rest of the group again.  We drove down to the south side of the island, past many orange groves.

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We stopped and had some spicy fish for dinner, and then arrived at the ferry terminal at 6:00, for the return trip to the mainland. Ms Ryu and Mr Choi insisted on one last photo op.

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The drive back to Hongnong was agonizingly slow, and I was sore (from the 10 km hike on slippery snow the whole way) and damp (from the buttsledding). We stopped 3 places in Gwangju City, and also in Yeonggwang, dropping people off. I finally got home at 12:20 AM. I was tired.

I’m glad we had a second day, and that we got to hang out on the mountain with no principals. So to speak.

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Caveat: Intermission (Three Rules for Mountain Hiking In Korea)

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Life in Korea

I have compiled these rules after many excursions with Koreans, in many different social contexts, and I'm fairly confident that they are adhered to by most Koreans to some degree or another.

  • RULE 1. If at all possible, try to consume alcohol while hiking. Getting drunk before setting out is bad form, but getting slightly plastered while on the mountain shows commitment and, most importantly, sociability.
  • RULE 2. If the first rule cannot be followed, it is acceptable to set out with a bad hangover, or after a night of very little sleep. Extra points are possible, of course, in the event that this second rule can be combined with the first to some degree.
  • RULE 3. If the first two rules cannot be followed, some credit can be garnered by using inappropriate clothing, shoes and equipment (or no equipment). This rule is mostly to accommodate those who cannot consume alcohol: youths, hardcore Christians, Buddhist monks, and the like. This rule should NOT be combined with the first two – if either (or both) of the first two rules are being followed, then it is much more important to be dressed fashionably like a mountain climber and have lots of appropriate (if somewhat superfluous) equipment. In fact, combining all three rules is rank amateurism and will result is glares of disdain from those following the rules correctly.

Caveat: Day One – “Go Home!”

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Less Banal Than Usual / Life in Korea / My Photos / The Wonders of Work

The semi-annual Hongnong Elementary School staff field trip – an epic adventure in Korean cultural immersion, over two days.
The Named Characters.

  • Jared – yours truly, a-bloggin’.
  • Mr Moyer – the new “other” foreign English teacher at Hongnong, Casandra’s replacement. A nice guy.
  • Ms Ryu – the English department head (direct supervisor) and a 3rd grade homeroom teacher. My favorite person at Hongnong.
  • Mr Lee – the “vice-vice” principal (#3 in the school’s administration), a very kind and intelligent man, and a 2nd grade homeroom teacher (2-1). I like Mr Lee a lot.
  • Mr Choi – An older 2nd grade homeroom teacher (2-3), who has been very kind an generous with me.
  • Mr Kim – A 3rd grade homeroom teacher who will be retiring NEXT WEEK. He has been kind to me but I have sensed he’s not popular with the other teachers. He’s got some “short-timer” attitude and is very traditional. Also, he mumbles, and I’m not the only person who finds him hard to understand – the other teachers and the kids too, often have no idea what he’s going on about.
  • Mr Song – the school’s bus driver, an uncomplicated but friendly man, and maybe a bit of a “party animal.”
  • Ms Lee (I think?) – the really kind preschool teacher whose Korean I find eerily easy to understand. Perhaps she’s realized that if she talks to me like she talks to her students, she can be understood for the most part – she talks very slowly and methodically, with a kind of sing-song rhythm, and enunciates those difficult Korean vowels very clearly.

The Unnamed Characters (Korean culture can make it hard to learn people’s names. These are people I know and interact with by their roles or titles rather than by their names, although for many of them, if pressed, I could probably figure out their names).

  • The Principal – the king, on his throne.
  • The Elementary Vice Principal – the will to power.
  • The Preschool Vice Principal – the always-smiling queen, with her many highly cute micro-minions. Actually, all the preschool leadership and teachers are much nicer, more fun, and less machiavellian, on average. Probably, this comes with the territory.
  • The 6-1 Teacher – also the technology queen of the school, but she’s always so stressed out… so the school’s technology infrastructure suffers. Her English is excellent, however. Lately, since Haewon has left, she’s sometimes gotten stuck with translator duty, when Ms Ryu and Ms Lee (Ji-eun) aren’t around.
  • The Preschool Administration Lady – I don’t even know her job title, but I think she’s #2 over there at the preschool. She helped me with my internet problem last spring. Of course, now, I have a new internet problem. Sigh.
  • The 3-1 Teacher – one of the teachers I wish I knew better. I sometimes decide which teachers must be “great” teachers based on the collective behavior of their homeroom kids, and her class is one of my absolute favorites at Hongnong.
  • The 4-1 Teacher – the school’s main music-person. Very cheerful and positive. And another great group of kids, too.
  • The Social Studies Teacher – he’s a floater, like us English teachers – a kind of specialist with no homeroom. He’s a younger guy… I really envy the amazing rapport he has with most of the kids. I think he’s one of the most popular teachers in the school, with the kids, and he’s also extremely conscientious and kind-hearted with his fellow teachers. One of the new generation of Korean teachers that are of a very high caliber.
  • The Male Preschool Teacher – this is so rare in Korea that often the school staff refer to him in this way, as if it were his title. He’s a really nice guy and although he doesn’t often show it because he’s rather shy, his English is quite good.
  • The 4-2 Teacher (I think it’s 4-2 … one of the 4th grade classes, anyway) – this is the guy I would end up being, if I were a Korean. He’s full of rambling, intellectual trivia about history, science, culture, etc., and he will talk long after others have lost interest, but they keep listening because he’s also sometimes funny, not to mention the fact that he’s a nice guy.
  • The New 5th Grade Teacher – she’s so young and small, she could pass for one of her students, and, being at the utter bottom of the hierarchy, she’s the recipient of a lot of crap and mistreatment by the other teachers. I don’t feel like I have any kind of interaction with her, but I feel sorry for her sometimes.
  • The Quiet, Mysterious Administration Guy – he’s new, and seems to have replaced the man known as “the big-headed administration guy.” Or something like that, anyway.
  • The Tall, Bitterly Resentful Physical Plant Guy – he’s the one I pissed off last spring, with my complaining. One of the reasons why I don’t really get along with the admin office people.
  • A half-dozen other teachers, all female

A final note regarding the people: not all the teachers or staff attended. Many stayed away – and I understand their various reasons. But from what I’ve come to understand, staying away is only an option for those unmotivated, career-wise. So if you want to advance your elementary teaching career, you’ve got to play the politics, and that means coming on these kinds of trips.

The trip started at 11 AM. We piled onto a bus and drove off into the hazy, mountainous southern extremities of the peninsula. Snacks were passed out: tteok (rice cakes, both savory and sweet), almonds, beef and squid jerky (with dipping hotsauce), beer (I had one can). After about one and half hours, we arrived at a restaurant, somewhere between Naju and Jangheung.
We ate saeng-go-gi (raw beef) and other delicacies. I avoided alcohol, except for one shot of soju (soju, for those uninformed, is Korean drinking ethanol, a sort of vodka-like substance) poured by the vice principal.

The 4-2 teacher discoursed at length, on subjects including local history, the evolution of Korean agricultural practices, Thomas Jefferson, architecure, King Sejong the Great, Julius Caesar, the Egyptian political situation, and other topics I wasn’t even able to identify. Listening to him is a bit like listening to someone reading out loud from the Korean version of wikipedia. I only understand about 15% of what he’s saying, though. But I enjoy it, nevertheless.

When we finished lunch, we stood outside the restaurant while some of the staff smoked. There was a cat in a tree. The principal, entirely deadpan, explained that this was a rare Korean cat-tree, and that the cat in the tree appeared ready to harvest. This is the first time I understood one of his jokes.

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We got back on the bus and drove to the ferry terminal below Jang-heung. There’s a fast (hydrofoil) ferry that runs from there to the eastern tip of Jeju Island. The ferry terminal was very crowded, but our little group of people was well-organized, relative to the prevailing chaos. We boarded the ferry at about 3:30.

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The ferry is one of those environments more amenable to mass transportation than to sightseeing. They only allowed us out on the deck for a short time, and ALL 500 PASSENGERS wanted to be out there. It was crowded.

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The Male Preschool Teacher bought and passed out ice cream sandwiches with bean paste (kind of like sugary refried beans, a Korean favorite), in the shape of carp.

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Some of the male teachers and staff began to drink in earnest. A lot of soju was consumed, and some of the other teachers got seasick – but only the Bitterly Resentful Administration Guy got both drunk AND seasick. There was general amazement at Moyer’s ability to consume alcohol – perhaps I’d led them to believe that all foreigners are weak pushovers. But no… it’s only me.

We arrived at Seongsanpo around 6:30. Mr Song was waving and happy with his new-found friend, Moyer.

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The principal needed a cigarette.

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We got onto a new bus. We drove to a restaurant in Jeju City, about an hour west (a quarter of the way around Jeju Island, which is a little bit bigger than Oahu in area, but similar in its overall degree of urbanization, I would guess). The island is volcanic, and there was an extinct caldera hovering on the coast shortly after departing the ferry terminal.

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There are a lot of palm trees in Jeju, which strikes me an effort at horticultural fantasy on the part of the Koreans, for, although Jeju is at the same latitude as Los Angeles, it gets snow in winter even at sea level – I saw many patches of old snow alongside the road as the sun set.

At the restaurant, we had a very traditional dinner of hweh (sashimi, with some sushi and other seafoodish things). Moyer and Mr Song continued to drink soju.

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Many of the others were drinking heavily, but I only drank when required to do so by protocol (i.e. when the principal or vice-principal offered) and otherwise stuck to beer. I thus avoided getting drunk.

The principal, vice principal, and the preschool leadership began hosting the long, drawn-out process of having the various members of the staff come and sit in front of them and offer and be offered shots of soju. It’s rather ritualized.

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Meanwhile, I spent some time talking earnestly with Ms Ryu, and subsequently Mr Lee, about my decision to not renew. I shared my “decision spreadsheet” in its final form with Mr Lee, and he was very thoughtful, but he felt I wasn’t being fair in how I had made my decision. He, and later Ms Lee (of the preschool, and unrelated – remember, Lee in Korea is like “Smith”), both felt that the most compelling argument for my staying was one of continuity – for the kids. And in that, I am very much in agreement.

I found myself mulling, somewhat fuzzily, the idea of changing my mind. Which was their point, of course. I’m as vulnerable to flattery as the next person, and the three of them were piling it on. But then…

The worst moments came when I was ushered to sit at the table in front of the Principal, and he “talked” with me for a good 15 minutes, including many impossible-to-answer (almost zen-koan-like) rhetorical questions and remonstrances and possibly humorous cultural observations that failed to translate. One of the teachers with fairly good English (the 6-1 teacher whose name I always seem to forget) sat at my side and made some effort to translate as I got lost in his Korean.

Most of the specifics of his speechifying were lost on me, but I remember some things. A lot of it seemed to be, obliquely, about the fact that I wasn’t renewing at the school. He asked me repeatedly if I was able to understand “Korean culture,” only to repeatedly trap me in such a way that it was clear I did not, based on my failure to say the right thing to his questions or requests. He said he thought foreigners can never understand Korean culture, but offered few hints as to why. He did discuss the “we” not “I” issue. He told me that as far working in a Korean school, “it’s for the children” – I could hardly argue with that although so much of what they do (from my perspective) seems to forget children are even around. Things are structured so differently.

He complained that in fact, English is NOT important. It’s not a global language, he insisted. He expressed some xenophobic commonplaces about what “foreigners” and specifically Americans are doing in Korea. And his conclusion: “Jared: Go home” – this last in English.

Actually, given his age and geographical origin, I can easily imagine that 30 or 40 years ago, he stood in some anti-government protest and shouted this exact phrase at some gathering of American diplomats or US Army personnel. Anti-Western sentiment runs deep, in “red” Jeolla.

Context: He was very drunk. He always gets very drunk at these gatherings. Several teachers (including the one translating at my side and Ms Ryu, later) offered that as an excuse for his rhetoric. But I’m one of those people who believes, strongly, in the aphorism, “the drunk man reveals the truth in his heart.”

The principal showed his xenophobe credentials plainly. Not that I wasn’t already aware of them. And that’s that. Some people in Korea are xenophobic, and there’s very little that I can do, as a foreigner, except avoid those people and focus on the rest – don’t try to imagine you can change a xenophobe’s mind through some combination of argumentation or behavior. I don’t think it’s possible. In any event, in my experience, xenophobes are not a very high proportion of the population – maybe 10%.

Afterward, Ms Ryu began a song-and-dance of excuses, seeing the damage the principal’s behavior had done to any vestigial will to renew that I might have had up to that point. As she points out, it’s complicated. He’s not an unkind man, clearly, in his rigid, paternalistic, Korean-traditional fashion. He likes children, which is good to see in a school principal. He’s charismatic, which is great to see in a school’s leader.

Ms Ryu tried to tell me that the principal tended always to say the opposite of what he desired or believed, to those under him. For example, he would tell her that she did a bad job when he thought she did a good job, or that when he would tell her not to worry about something, this meant it was important. At some simplistic level, I might see this as being true. As an explanation that he presumes a kind of obstinacy in those around him – such that he is always compelled to operate on the assumptions of reverse-psychology… well, this struck me as more a coping mechanism on her part than anything with even a grain of real psychological truth in it. Ultimately, the idea that by “Go home” he meant “stay” is patently silly – it seems to be grasping at straws.

No. He said “go home,” and that’s exactly what he meant, from the depth of his Korean-patriotic heart.

Needless to say, I felt depressed. I wasn’t extremely drunk, but I wasn’t sober, either, and everyone knows, I’m not a happy drunk. I’m a moody, grumpy drunk. So the principal’s words combined with that factor to produce a very gloomy feeling for me. I lay down, and listened to my three roommates in my hotel snoring in synchrony (well, only after several had stayed up for several more hours still, playing poker and eating and drinking yet more).

I didn’t sleep well – Korean hotel rooms are always over heated, which I cope with when alone by opening windows, but with Korean roommates, this is not really an option.
Perhaps for the first time in more than a year, I found myself meditating on the possibility of simply giving up my quixotic “Korea project” and moving on to something else in life.

[this is a “back-post” added 2011-02-20.]

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Caveat: Bloody Auckland

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / My Photos

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I arrived at downtown Auckland around 10:30, finally. I drove around and explored a little, but I had to turn in my rental car by 1:30, and so I didn’t end up parking or walking around the downtown area as I had planned.

If Wellington is like San Francisco, then Auckland is like LA. All sprawling and patchworkily multicultural. I like the multicultural aspect, but the sprawl I can do without. The New Zealanders pronounce the name as Californians pronounce “Oakland,” and they also call it “the Big Smoke” – which is a great nickname for the metropolis of the South Pacific. But in my several days in New Zealand, when overhearing locals speaking of the city in conversation, it was always only referred to as Bloody Auckland.” I guess that’s how the rest of the country feels about it.

I’m at an airport hotel in Sydney tonight, because I have to check in really early for my flight back to Korea tomorrow morning. I’m freeloading some crappy free wifi – very slow. So no more pictures.

Maybe later. I’ll see you from Korea, probably.

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Caveat: Late Night Radio

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

I drove late last night, and slept at a rest area.  What road trip is complete without a few nights like that?  I surfed the late night radio as I drove across the North Island.   Some items of interest.

1.  Item.  There are Maori radio stations.  They speak in a mixture of Maori and English, and play a lot of reggae and R&B.  What's with that?  Relatedly, what's with all the LA-looking gang tags on rural bus shelters in this country?  I should try to get a picture of one.  Interesting.

2. Item.  NZ is crazy for the NZI sevens tournament this weekend, in Wellington.  Which is why the ferry across from Picton yesterday was so crowded that there were no seats.  I sat on the deck.  They love their rugby.  A lot.  And talk about it, too.  At least I more or less understand when they talk about it, whereas when they talk about cricket, I can barely figure out that it's a sport, and not some kind of abstruse mathematical recreation.

3. Item.  Racism and rants, part 1.  There seem to be a lot of Limbaughesque clones ranting on the radio about entitlements and lazy, freeloading Maoris and the need to limit immigration and the like.  It's depressing.

4. Item.  Racism and rants, part 2.  On the other hand, I heard a story about a Cambodian grocer / reataurant owner in New Plymouth who had another local businesswoman who owns a pizzeria handing out blatently racist literature in front of his establishment, urging the community to boycott his business.  The hurt was compounded by the fact she is a member of the town council.  But… the community rallied around the grocer, and he says business has improved a huge amount, because of the many people coming to his establishment to protest the councilwoman's protests.  "I think everyone needs a racist.  It's been so good for business," he comments, good-naturedly.  It's uplifting.

What I'm listening to right now.

Kanye West – Runaway.  This thing is getting almost constant airplay in NZ right now.  So in this way, Kanye West becomes permanently associated in my memory and imagination with rural New Zealand.  Is that wierd, or what?  [I added this youtube link later (2011-07-21)]

Caveat: Cyclone Yasi… and meanwhile in NZ…

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Hiking & Travel / My Photos / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

My mother survived Cyclone Yasi’s attack on Queensland. I guess I just missed it, eh? I was very worried when I heard that the town of Tully was “utterly destroyed” on New Zealand Radio. You see, she lives just off of Tully Falls Road. I know the town of Tully is about 60 km away from her house outside of Ravenshoe as the raven flies, but that’s still pretty close.

On the Australian Courier-Mail (newspaper) website, I saw the following picture of Tully, for example. More on the article, here.

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My mother’s email notifying family and friends of her survival is worth reproducing as a sort of first-hand account of the experience – so here it is:

But definitely don’t want to repeat the experience, EVER AGAIN. However, very lucky…house intact, simply have a completely new skyline to the north. Two huge trees down with parts of them about 2 meters from house. One is iron bark so will have plenty of firewood for foreseeable future.

Phone will probably go out sometime today, so want to send this to reassure all. Probably without power for a long time to come. Heard from Debbie (Gary’s wife). They survived in Charters Towers with category 3, and hope to be back tomorrow–something I doubt will occur if the Burdekin is up which the continuing rain will probably ensure.

I endured 5 hours of category 5 and likening it to a huge freight train barrelling through house is as close as I can get to a comparison. I was SCARED and huddled down in hallway–only narrow panels on back door to threaten with glass. Huge thumps in night…will have to check out roof once it dies down some more. “Torrential” rains is not an exaggeration for present condition of weather. Wallabies and butcher birds pretty pathetic at present. Will probably run out of power on computer and my iPod speakers, boo, hiss. But can run the earphones if so inclined/bored. Will be sleeping today!!! Not a wink before it quietened down around 4:45 AM, and only 7:45 at present.

Ben stopped by and helped me set up my old camp propane bottle/burner. It works–we extracted it from my little shed under house. He says there are heaps of trees down on their property–more on the old creek flat than on the hill. But it sure looks bright with all the tops off the trees.  It’s going to be a long clean up, but he said he’d get around to getting the two-three trees down on drive off sometime in next couple of days. I’m cool for two days as long as I stay out of freezers and fridge. A lot of meat that needs to be cooked, but not sure when I’ll be able to get to it. May start giving it away.

Enough for now. I’ll see if I have an internet set up. It goes through Cairns and they didn’t suffer like Innisfal and Tully and Mission Beach. Feeling pretty lousy, nauseated from exhaustion.  Could almost feel you all wishing me well. Much love, and, despite gloom of rearranged skyline (a lot of my natives gone–mostly lovely grey-green wattles), laughter and a feeling of being both lucky and blessed. Will be in touch when things get back to normal, or a semblance thereof.

Meanwhile, here in NZ (EnZed, pronounced locally as we yanks would pronounce “InZid”)… it was Southern California-like weather, as I re-crossed the Cook Strait back to Wellington, and began my drive back up to Auckland this afternoon. Here are some pictures from today.

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Caveat: Patagonia Lite

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / My Photos

The similarities between New Zealand’s South Island and Patagonia are so striking as to be almost disorienting. And the fact of the matter is that traveling around, here, is just reminding me of how much I yearn to someday return to Patagonia. The scenery and topography and weather are all amazingly similar, and I find Patagonia much more culturally interesting than New Zealand.

Although it’s easy to say that New Zealand is a stunningly beautiful country, I hate to say that I find it rather boring. I like the people, to the extent that I’ve interacted with them, better than the Australians (who are brash and more “rednecky”) – perhaps it might be accurate to say that New Zealanders are like Canadians, contrasted with Australians’ more USA-style. But as much as I love my little hikes, my urban and rural random explorations, my real interest in travel is with culture. New Zealand offers the Maori angle, as Australia offers the aboriginal. There’s a great deal of interest there, but neither is particularly accessible to the casual traveler – you get something packaged and museum quality, and frankly you would learn more surfing wikipedia on the subject for a few hours. True cultural immersion in the damaged, ultra-colonialized native cultures of ANZ is basically impossible.

So what’s left? Just a bunch of Britishy pseudo-Americans. That sounds harsh.

I like the New Zealand accent – as a linguist, I like to try to work out what makes it different, and I think I’ve reached a point where I can tell it apart from Australian. They do weird things to the front vowels, in New Zealand.

There’s the other problem with traveling. I told myself while in Japan last year that I wasn’t going to travel, touristically, alone, any more. And yet here I am, less than a year later, traveling alone again. Why? It’s hard to resist. The opportunity arises, I have cash burning a hole in my bank account, and I go off on some adventure. But… though I enjoy aspects of it, I feel my aloneness, when traveling, that I never do when living day-to-day life.

The main purpose of this trip was to visit my mother. I don’t get down to see her very often – it seems to run once every two years. And the trip to NZ was spontaneous – I had some extra money (trust me, I needed it – NZ is easily the most expensive place I’ve ever traveled, more so than even Japan), and an extra 6 days to use up, and I don’t when I’ll get another chance. My original intent had been to go to Singapore and Malaysia after seeing my mom, but the Lunar New Year holiday created airline scheduling problems that I wasn’t able to resolve due to having procrastinated too long on planning.

I enjoy “road trips” which is the type of trip this has been. By the time I return my rental car to the Auckland Airport, I’ll have logged 3500 km trekking around NZ, easily. But the side effect of “road tripping” is that I have way too much time to think, as I drive. When traveling on public transit (airplanes, boats, trains, buses) I don’t think as much, because I can read, I can relax, I can nap, I can look out the window attentively. But driving requires more concentration, and all I can do, as I drive, is listen to music (which in New Zealand has proven difficult due to the sparsity of radio stations and a problem with my mp3 player) and think. Think. Think.

My thoughts are: I like Korea better than New Zealand or Australia; I miss Patagonia but like Korea better than Patagonia, too; I like Korea better than most places, so I guess I’m in the right place, for now, in my life. Just because I like Korea doesn’t mean I like some of the crap that gets pulled – I’ve been watching (via the weird, voyeuristic window that is facebookland) the misery of some of my fellow Jeollanam English teachers with dismay, and have essentially made up my mind to skip the renewal with the public schools and return to hagwon work. Most foreigners in Korea feel that hagwon work is much worse than public school work, and there are definitely ways in which public school teaching is a “cushy” job… but the utter disregard for competent administration seems pervasive and universal in the public schools, at least in Jeollanam, while with hagwon at least, it’s more hit-or-miss – so for every incompetent administrative experience you can also run across things done quite well. Whatever.

Here are some pictures (not in any particular order) showing the Patagonisity of the South Island.

This first is one of the long, one-lane bridges that seem extremely common here, even along fairly major highways. Just remember – trucks and RVs have right-of-way: might makes right.

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The town of Kaikoura, where I am at the present moment:

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Caveat: Change-of-plan

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / My Photos

Oops. Weather.

There was torrential rain after I left Greymouth – I was trying to get to Christchurch via the Arthur’s Pass highway (highway 73). The road was flooded and blocked by debris, and the rushing water was eroding the highway. I got there right as it happened.

There are only three highways connecting the South Island’s west coast and east coast. I had to backtrack more that 100 km to get to the next possible route over the mountains, and the consequence was that, because I have to meet my ferry back to Wellington tomorrow at a fixed time, I realized I would have to skip visiting Christchurch.

So I’m staying the night in Kaikoura, now – on the east coast but about 200 km north of Christchurch.

Here is the rain.

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Here is the flood blocking the highway.

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In other news, there’s a super giant humungous cyclone (aka hurricane) headed for my mom’s house.  I just missed it.  I hope she’s OK.  Do you see her waving, up just west of the red spot in the satellite image?

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Caveat: Cape Foulwind

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / My Photos

This blog currently being brought to you by McDonalds of New Zealand – the only reliable free wifi I’ve been able to find, driving around.

I went to a place called Cape Foulwind this morning, on the northwest coast of the South Island. Ironically, it’s the only place in all of New Zealand that I’ve been to, so far, where the air was utterly calm and still. Mostly, it’s been extremely windy – perhaps the tailing effects of the giant cyclone storm that is currently planning to harass my mother up in northern Queensland. I just missed it.

Here are some pictures from yesterday and today.

New Zealand’s parliament building, in Wellington. Called the “Beehive.”

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A view from the ferry.

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Here is the Marlborough Wine Country of the northeasternmost part of the South Island.

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Here is a very nice looking car parked next to my little Hyundai rental car, in front of the motel where I stayed at last night.

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The avian du jour.

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The view looking north at Cape Foulwind.

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And looking west across the Tasman Sea.  Maybe toward Tasmania – or am I too far south already?

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A place I stopped called Punakaiki.

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Caveat: It Floats

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel

This blog is live, online, on a ferry boat, in the Cook Straight, New Zealand. And there's a cricket match on the television. I'm going from Wellington, at the bottom end of the North Island, to Picton, at the top of the South Island. I'd provide a picture, but bandwidth is limited.

I stayed in Palmerston North, last night. That's an oddly named town – I mean… where's Palmerston South? I can't find one. The town reminds me of Eureka, California. Or Temuco, Chile. A small town but too big to be a small town in its region, maybe. And the city geography is relatively flat and the streets are a dull, treeless grid. Wellington, on the other hand, is a beautiful city. It's one of those cities, like Duluth or Nagasaki, that I knew I would love before ever visiting there. Just that I have a sort of instinct for what places I will like, based on looking at things like maps and encyclopedias.

Caveat: Taumata-whakatangihanga-koauau-o-tamatea-turi-pukakapiki-maunga-horo-nuku-pokai-whenua-kitanatahu

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel / Language & Linguistics / My Photos

I drove to Taumata-whakatangihanga-koauau-o-tamatea-turi-pukakapiki-maunga-horo-nuku-pokai-whenua-kitanatahu. It was very beautiful. Onomastics aside, New Zealand is a lot like California or western Oregon.

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Here are some other pictures. I saw a chicken at dawn (at roadside rest area where I slept a few hours).

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I saw some redwood trees (they’re not native to NZ, but they do quite well here – another reason why it reminds me of California).

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I saw some lakes.

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I saw the Hawkes Bay region, which reminds me of Monterey or San Luis Obisbo Counties, and the town of Hastings, which might as well be a funny-talking Salinas. The hills were golden.

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I saw the beach, on the east coast. It was very, very, very, very, very, very windy. I waved across the vast Pacific to Validivia, Chile, where I lived in 1994 – same latitude. I watched the Antarctic clouds glowering.

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Caveat: Highway Service Plaza. McDonalds. 2AM.

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel

I landed in Auckland at 12:20 AM.  I went to get my rental car, but they didn't have my reservation.  Fortunately, there was a guy there to rent me a car, who was very friendly and gave me the rate and car I would have had if my reservation hadn't failed to be entered into their system.  Something about the fact that I tried to do it online from Australia.  Oh well.  It all worked out fine.  And so then, with hardly a plan to my name, I began to drive south on the expressway out of Auckland.

Light drizzle, 2 AM.  I stopped at a service plaza.  There's a McDonalds, open 24 hours.  Now… as some of you may know, I have a certain strange tradition.  I'm very proud of having completely kicked my junk-food habits, years ago, but I still have this tradition of ordering a Big Mac each time I visit a new country.  And although it's 2 AM, this McDonalds has free wifi, too.  So… I ordered a Big Mac.  That's country number… um, around 25, I think.  There's a few countries where I never got a Big Mac:  Cuba, Morocco and Belize spring to mind.  But all the rest, yes.  I'm loyal to that weird tradition.

And I logged onto the free wifi and here's my first blog post from New Zealand.  I have no plan.  This is Jared-style free-form road-tripping at it's absolute best.  I guess I'll find a hotel or motel or pub somewhere to crash, or maybe just drive south  - I don't feel that tired.   It's only 7 hours to Wellington, if that's where I intend to go.  Holy crap:  we think of New Zealand as a small country, but the North Island is bigger than South Korea!  So… more later.  

First impressions:  New Zealand at the international airport at 2 AM isn't that different from Long Beach, CA.  That sounds funny – but I'm just going with what I know.   The fact is, Long Beach has one of the highest concentrations of Pacific Islander people in the continental US – and obviously, being on a Pacific Island, Auckland is … similar.  Ha.  And the freeways and industrial architecture and the vegetation, too.  But then, it's really dark outside.  So hard to judge, really.

Highway service plazas are the same everywhere.  More or less.

More later.

Caveat: Sunset, Sunrise

Hiking & Travel / My Photos

Despite dial-up, I don’t have much to say, so I will try to post some pictures. Really, I probably have a lot to say, but I haven’t yet digested it into something sayable. So, later.

I accompanied my mom to an appointment yesterday morning, and then I took the car down the road a bit further as I waited for her, and took these pictures.

The view from a roadside view-point.

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An abandoned motel in the desolate, depressing, yet charmingly-named town of Millaa Millaa.

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Sunset as viewed from my mom’s house’s verandah.

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This morning, I saw the crescent moon, before sunrise. Venus was right below it, but I don’t think it shows in the picture.

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Caveat: Lookings Around

Hiking & Travel / My Photos

Here is a view of the tableland from the Tumoulin Road between Kennedy Highway and Ravenshoe (my mother’s closest town, still about 10 km from her house). I took it on the drive back from Atherton yesterday, after passing through Herberton.

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Caveat: The Wrong Side of the Road

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel

I took my mother's Toyota and drove on my own into town today – this is the first time I've come to Australia where I haven't rented a car, but since my mom doesn't go places much, I have the freedom to use hers.   I've probably logged well over 5000 miles in my various visits to Australia, with my worst incident having been a speeding ticket in Melbourne some years ago. 

But driving on the "wrong side" is always a bit challenging.  The hardest single thing is actually the turn signals – they're positioned on the right side of the steering column instead of on the left, and so every time I need to signal a turn, I turn on my windshield wipers.  Turning right isn't hard – you pull into the right-turn lane and wait, as one would a left hand turn in the US or Korea.  There are lines on the pavement that prevent one from making a mistake.  I actually find left turns more difficult, especially where there are no lines or traffic in the street or road being turned in to – it's so easy to just allow oneself to drift over to the right as one completes the turn.  The worst I did, with that, was a time in 2008 when I was here, when I was in Cairns and turned left and put myself on the right side of a median strip.  I realized my mistake immediately (the truck coming head on at me was a good hint), and pulled into a parking lot and got myself turned around.  All of which is to say, it really isn't that much of a problem, but it's mentally intense during the "adaptation" phase. 

I drove into Atherton, which is about 50 km north of my mom's house.  They have a "Woolies" in Atherton – a sort of full-scale grocery store rather than the small-town grocery or convenience store in Ravenshoe.    I bought a guide book for New Zealand (since I'm going there next week for a few days and I have absolutely no plan as to what to do).  And I got some high-speed internet (though I'm not going to upload any photos because I haven't been taking many – I'll try to take more). 

Driving around the "tableland" – as this part of Far North Queensland is called – always reminds me, scenically, of the Tehuantepec area of southern Mexico – the point where Veracruz and Tabasco and northern Chiapas and Oaxaca all join together.  It's highland, but verdant and green with rolling hills and intermittent rain-forest in the gullies on the windward side of mountains.  There are cows standing around in fields, and palm trees in people's yards.  Tropical savannah farmland, it might be termed.  It's quite beautiful, I will concede, but I'm not sure I could ever live in place such as this – it's quite isolated, with Cairns, 2 hours away, being the only "big city" but still having well less than 100,000 residents.  The closest metropolis, Brisbane, is nearly 1000 km away.  And that's not much of a metropolis, to be frank.

I will maybe try to post one other thing, unrelated to my current traveling, while here at the high-speed internet spot – might as well get my money's worth, right?

Caveat: Australia Day

Banalities & Journaling / Hiking & Travel

pictureToday is Australia Day, which celebrates the “founding of Australia” at Port Jackson (Sydney) in 1788. It’s not dissimilar to the Fourth of July in the US. I’m celebrating it with my mother, a naturalised Australian, by postponing our trip into Atherton, the nearest big town, until tomorrow – since everything would be closed today. Isn’t that a great way to celebrate?

The aboriginal people of Australia call it “Invasion Day,” according to the wikithing.

So my vacation, since arriving here at Ravenshoe, has consisted mostly of reading books and having long conversations with my mom. It’s pretty relaxing.

It’s very summery here, with temperatures over 30 C during the day, but the nights are quite cool, because her house here is up in the mountains. They were recovering from a lot of rain just as I arrived, but the days and nights have been stunningly clear since. Last night, looking up at the sky, the stars were so vivid I felt like I was in outer space.

There are many birds, wallabies and geckos about. My mother often yells at them. I think it’s a fairly good-natured coexistence, though.

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