Category: Life in Korea

Well, oops.  I missed a few days, there.  I've been supremely lazy the last several days, enjoying the temporary respite from work because of new year's to try to rest up and finally get over this flu thing.

I was strolling the aisles of the Homever (홈에버 "hom-e-beo") store where I shop, contemplating the many products I could buy.  I noticed a whole section devoted to what I thought were varieties of soy sauce and the like.  But on closer inspection of a label, I read a small fragment in English that said "drinking vinegar."  Hmm… I've never heard of that.  Not sure if it's a poor translation for a concept such as "cooking vinegar" or if they really drink vinegar here.  It comes in different flavors and brands.   I bought some, out of sheer curiosity.  At the least, I can make some cole slaw or something.

Each winter, Siberia comes to Korea.  Or rather, the air-mass does.  So despite the latitude (37 30, same as Washington DC or Seville, Spain), despite proximity to the sea, despite the endless cloudless days, despite the lack of snow (and thus none of the albedo phenomenon that helps cool e.g. Minnesota in the winter)… despite all these things, the air starts to push down from Siberia and Korea suddenly gets very cold.   Actually, still not as cold as Minnesota, this time of year.  But cold enough.  And it would be nice if there was snow, too.   It was about -5 C (about 23 F) when I walked to work today.  And colder, walking home. 

So I'm closing in on the end of my third month here.   Three months ago tomorrow, on a Saturday afternoon, I arrived in Korea.  And I'm having feelings of ambiguity, as in most things in life, I suppose.

On the one hand, despite all the frustrations, I still like my current job better than my last one – it's easier to look forward to, and less stressful, and sometimes downright fun.  And I have moments when I really enjoy where I am and the bits of the language I'm acquiring and all that.

On the other hand, I haven't felt like a particularly good teacher, at least lately.  Perhaps a bit of a crisis of self-confidence – these are not uncommon, for me, are they?  And although I often enjoy solitude and definitely require a great deal of it, I confess to feeling some loneliness, of late. 

It was foggy today around noon when I left my building.  The ground was damp, and it felt like Minnesota does sometimes in early Spring after an unexpected thaw.

I walked to the Starbucks at Juyeop (which is indirectly on the way to work) and had a 4 dollar latte.  The recent descent of the dollar has brought up prices of things that are tied to the dollar and the global economy, here.  But I suppose on the good side, this means I'm earning my wages in won at a good time relative to the global economy.

I read my Economist magazine, and tried to study my giant-and-always-growing list of Korean vocab items, and stared out the window.  About 40 minutes later, I walked the rest of the way to work, and watched a street sweeping machine snorting up the orange leaves from the street gutters.  The sun came out. 

I found an even better bookstore, and very conveniently located next to my Saturday hagwon.  I spent a few hours there, bought some magazines and a philosophy book (a collection of essays by Deleuze), and a matching pair of manga books:  volume one of "Deathnote" (which I learned about based on seeing a graffiti on a desk at my work), in both English and Korean translations – I've been thinking for some time that reading a manga in Korean might be a good way to work on my skills – especially having access to the English version too.  Manga are very popular here (they're called Manhwa) – there are whole sections in bookstores devoted to them.

I left work this evening and it was snowing.  It was a hard-falling slushy snow.  But by the time I got to my apateu it had fizzled to a weak drizzle. 

I bought some vegetables yesterday.  I don't know what they are… green shoot thingies.  I often buy vegetables I am unable to identify… just for the adventure I guess.   When I decided to chop some of it into my ramyeon this evening, I found a label:  "Product of China."

This is stunning, for some reason.  More stunning than the zillions of dollars worth of electronics and plastic crap and everything else China exports.  Because it's so easy to remember that within my lifetime, people were starving in China.  And now they export fresh vegetables to their neighbors.  I suppose this doesn't mean people aren't starving there, any more – after all, people starve in places like Guatemala, while bananas are exported.  But it's just weird, I guess.

Most fruits and vegetables in Korea are grown locally – even tropical varieties and even out-of-season – they have bazillions of acres covered in greenhouses.  It's weird to think that South Korea is almost self-sufficient in food, yet one of the most densely populated countries on earth – more densely populated than any other "large" country except Bangladesh.   Into an area of just under 100,000 km sq. (about the size of Kentucky, and similar topography), they cram 50 million.

I love snow.

I wish they would give me some kind of performance review or even the vaguest fragment of feedback at work.  I'm in the dark.  It's… frustrating.

The above was emblazoned proudly on a man's jacket, I saw on the subway coming home from my Saturday Korean class.

I'm so uplifted by the knowledge that clothing-marketers' English is almost as bad as my Korean.  But seriously… I think that it should be the name of a novel.  A complex study of eschatological metaphor and post-modern epistemology, set in an imaginary Asian country dominated by American consumerist values and inhabited by largely identical tribes of evangelical christians and half-hearted, retrograde buddhists.

Is there any room for a devoutly atheist, libertarian marxist half-quaker such as myself? 

It might snow tonight. 

In the bookstore where I went to buy my magazines for the week, I heard Abba.

And here I thought I'd seen it all.  Everywhere you go, middle-of-the-night television is pretty dull.  But I didn't think I'd ever see a game of go (the japanese game, with white and black stones) televised, and commentated.  Awesome way to spend 20 minutes at 1 am!

The leaves are leaving the trees.  I really should go out and take some pictures… they're quite beautiful.

I got lost on the purple line (Line 1) of the subway today.  This is not something that happens to me often, but line 1 is a bit odd… it's really just the old commuter rail lines, grandfathered into the subway.  As a consequence, there's a lot of branching of lines, and each direction goes by on multiple platforms.  Anyway… I didn't mind getting lost, but it took me 3 hours to get from Gangnam to Jonggak. 

Last note:  I heard a radio bit this morning about a new sport that's being tried in Germany, called "chess-boxing."  Competitors alternate rounds of boxing with rounds of speed chess.  This is intriguing for all the wrong reasons.

Yesterday at work we had a birthday cake for Grace, one of the teachers.  It was a very western looking birthday cake, and we sang happy birthday in English.  Somehow this made the fact that we all dug into the cake with chopsticks seem all the more alien, somehow.  Odd, the things that strike me as alien here.

I've been working pretty hard Monday and today… I'm feeling like I need to put more prep time in, to be a better teacher.  Some classes go very well, and others, not so well.  With some classes I seem trapped in a spiral:  students don't do their work, come unprepared, so I "crack down," giving more homework, checking things more, and this quickly becomes profoundly frustrating for both sides.  I need to work on not getting caught in these loops.  But that's a minority of classes.  Most of my classes are quite fun, for the most part, and the students are engaged at some level or another.  And with this new schedule, I have pretty fun classes at the end of my daily run, each day.  So this is nice.

On Sunday, it was raining again.  I thought it would be a good day to ride the subway to a random location, so I got onto the orange line here at Jeongbalsan, and rode it all the way through downtown and past the river to the southeast, and got off at Dogok.   I have this idea that I will try to visit every single subway station in the Seoul Metro – not for any particular reason, except that I tend to do such a thing wherever I'm living:  explore the public transportation system far beyond mere curiosity.  The only subway system I've really done that with is the one in Mexico City – and since I lived there 5 or 6 new lines have been added, meaning that I can no longer even say I've been in every subway station there.

I'm wondering… perhaps if I set it as an explicit goal, and made a task of taking a picture or two at each subway station and documented my visits here. 

So I wandered my way to the Daechi station, next down the line, and then proceeded to go to the Youngpoong bookstore, where I splurged and bought myself a detailed atlas (on near-street-level scale) of South Korea.  I also found a quirky trilingual edition of Le Petit Prince (Korean, English, French) for only six bucks, and bought that too.  I have now successfully deciphered the Korean version's first paragraph, with much help from a dictionary.

Today, we had a Halloween party at the school, for the younger kids.  A few went all out and brought costumes, but, unlike e.g. Mexico, the Koreans haven't really bought into the commercialized, American-style holiday, so it's a bit of a novelty, though you do see the inevitable displays in large stores and suchlike.

One reader of this blog has observed that, based on my descriptions, Korea sounds like a gray, overcast and cloudy place.  That's not really true – at least not since the start of October, when the summer rainy season ended.  But, since I dislike sunny weather, I tend not to write about it much.  So what you see here is my commentary on the weather I enjoy.  Regardless, to remedy:  today was sunny – but it was also a cool 10 degrees (C).

Over the last several weeks it's become steadily drier, and the last couple of days have even been marginally smoggy – though nothing like Mexicopolis versions 1 or 2.  Perhaps the smog would be more intense if I went into the city proper – out here on the western edge of the Korean megalopolis, with the breeze off the Yellow Sea (oh, wait, a breeze laden with pollutants drifting from north China's industrial heartland).

So I walked to work today, looking at the sudden appearance of little piles of leaves under some of the trees that are beginning to change color.  It was sunny and vaguely hazy, and as warm as it's been for a while.  Yet when I looked out of the windows of the school a few hours later at dusk, it was drizzling.  First rain we've seen for quite some time.  I walked home on the shiny wet streets, and watched a cat attempting to get into a garbage can for a while.

I thought about how big the world is, and how small our minds are.