The day was so clear, I felt inspired to try to take pictures when I went for my little walk on the hill at Jeongbalsan, today.
I think I need a new camera – my phone's camera seemed inadequate.
The grove of trees behind the cultural center.
The observation platform at the top of the hill.
A view of Tanhyeon neighborhood.
A view of Bukhansan – the air was very clear.
A view of the Gobong hill with its distinctive radio tower.
A view of the Cancer Center through the trees – I probably have posted pictures looking out from one of the windows visible on the 10th floor of the main hospital building.
Some fall trees.
A trail at the bird park.
The weird streets of wealthy k-burbia, with their cheek-by-jowl mcmansions. And somebody parked a Hummer on the street.
The weird church whose architecture I prefer to its dogma.
All these pictures are within a 10 block circle of where I live. As I was arriving back home, the heavy clouds drew together and it began to rain.
I was walking to work the other day and saw a sight common enough for Korea – even in such urbanized and upper-middle-class locations as Ilsan: hot red peppers drying in the sun. People grow them in balcony planters and in community gardens, and then set them out to cure in the sun in the fall.
This time, however, some pigeons had decided the peppers might be delicious. I didn’t know pigeons would find peppers edible, much less delicious, but they seemed to be enjoying their capsaicinated feast. They were flapping and dancing around, and fighting with each other over bits of red pepper.
I have to say that this makes me somewhat wary of the idea of consuming home-grown red peppers – no one seemed to notice or care that the pigeons were slobbering all over the peppers, and I can imagine an oblivious halmoni gathering up her peppers at dusk and chopping them into her kimchi or stew, clueless that they included pigeon detritus. [daily log: walking, 6 km]
Recently, some civic-minded group of the sort which still abound in Korea decided to decorate the park benches along the pedestrian streets among the apartment blocks in Gangseon neighborhood, where I walk every day to go to work.
For example, someone placed a duck with ducklings on one bench.
Then I noticed there was an alligator – right in front of the church that annoys me so much because of the evangelists that stand on the steps handing out free packages of wet-wipes inscribed with biblical information (this is a thing in Korea).
I dubbed it the Ilsanigator. [daily log: walking, 6 km right past the Ilsanigator]
I went to a little island called 무의도 (Muuido) with my friend Peter. He is returning to the US soon, and so we had decided to get together at least once before he goes, although I have a feeling he’ll come back to Korea at some point.
Anyway, this island is a small, touristy kind of island west of the Incheon Airport, which itself is on an island west of the main part of the city of Incheon, on the west coast of South Korea west of Seoul. The airport, and thus the airport island, is easily accessible from where I live in Ilsan, so it was convenient to take the bus from where I live to make this trip.
To get to Muuido from the airport, we took a local bus to the southwest corner of the airport island, and walked across this cool causeway to get a ferry. It’s a short ferry ride – at low tide, it seems like the ferry trip was about ten boat-lengths – maybe less.
On the island, first we walked over the little hill from the ferry terminal to the west side. Off the shore on the west side there is an even smaller island, that can be reached by walking across the channel between them at low tide. We did this. Peter wanted to see this island because it had been some kind of prison camp in the 1960s, and was used to train some convicts for a dangerous mission against North Korea. Unfortunately, the convicts had different ideas, and assaulted a bus and tried to escape at some point, and were killed. This was memorialized in a movie that Peter had seen. I had no knowledge of this story.
After visiting the prison island, called Silmido, we caught a bus and rode around Muuido some. There is a beach on the west side farther south, made famous by some TV show sometime back, and now very crowded and touristy. I didn’t enjoy the beach that much, but Peter had come here before with some coworkers and was waxing vaguely nostalgic.
We stopped and had lunch. I had some 바지락칼국수 – something like a clam-broth hand-made noodle soup. Then we decided to go to the airport. This was not random – it turned out somewhat by coincidence that our acquaintance Basil was flying out of the airport this afternoon.
Basil is moving to Istanbul. He said he was giving up on Korea. He seemed in good spirits.
I have known Basil since we worked together at LBridge in 2008. In fact, we met before I started at LBridge, just walking down the street in Ilsan and exchanging greetings as two “foreigners living in Ilsan.” Anyway, Basil and I have criss-crossed paths many times, including my having visited him in West Virginia in 2009, and him visiting me a few times in Ilsan, etc.
So Peter and I saw Basil off at the airport.
Here is a map I made of our meanderings at Muuido. I drew some low-tech lines on it: red is bus trips; orange is walking; pink is the ferry.
Here are some pictures from my niece and nephew’s visit to Ilsan a few days ago – in no particular order (I fished them off my sister’s facebook page.
They’re back in Colorado, now. [daily log: walking, 2km]
Yesterday was a rainy Saturday. I went into Seoul and met my stepmother Wendy. We shopped a bit around Insadong, had lunch of jeon [전] and donkaseu [돈카스], and stopped off at the Jogye temple.
I came home and ended up going to bed early.
Today has been supremely lazy. [daily log: walking, down the stairs and up again]
The neighborhood where I work is called Hugok [후곡]. In some ways, it feels more like “my neighborhood” than where I live (Janghangdong [장항동], oftimes referred coloquially as Ra-peh [라페] after the mall nearby, Ra-peh-seu-tah [라페스타 ] i.e. “La Festa”), which has a more big-city, downtown feel. Where I live is kind of like “downtown Ilsan,” while where I work is more like a real neighborhood, somewhere. In fact, from a development standpoint, Hugok is marginally older than Janghang, the former dating from the late 1980s while the latter was built with the subway line extension in 1993. Parts of Hugok along Ilsan Road were already built and inhabited when I was here in 1991.
I’m writing this because although there are 3 or 4 different Starbucks stores in Janghang, serving as an index of the area’s “downtowny” character and internationalist orientation, there has never been a Starbucks in Hugok.
That, apparently, is changing. I snapped this photo last Friday, looking across the street from my hagwon’s former location, a few blocks east of the new location. [daily log: walking, 6 km]
Sometimes I find myself saying something where I suddenly feel aware that maybe this is the first time anyone ever needed to say that specific thing. I think of these as some kind of syntactical hapaxes (hapaces?). This awareness harkens back to the linguistic commonplace (due to Chomsky, maybe?) that one of the most remarkable features of human language and syntax is that they allow the creation of utterly novel meanings, on demand.
So yesterday, at work, I looked at the color printer on the desk in the staff room, and I observed: “There is a lego snake in the yellow printer ink.” How likely is it that someone needed to say this before?
You see, lego (the toy) includes a “lego snake” – it comes with some sets that include the lego crocodile (which I prefer to call a legogator). It is small – a single piece, intended for the same scale as the lego minifigures – about 2 cm long and 2 mm thick.
On my desk, there lives a small legogator with his lego snake – generally in the legogator’s mouth.
Meanwhile, the color printer includes a set of external ink containers that are a kind of universal post-retail hack that Koreans have turned into a business, that avoids the need to buy expensive ink cartriges for one’s ink-jet printers. The external ink reservoirs are openable and can be filled manually from bottles of ink, and small tubes snake (ahem) into pseudo-ink cartriges embedded inside the printer. This system is much cheaper and more practical than buying expensive replacement ink cartriges, though clearly not in the best financial interests of the printer-manufacturers, who have always been pretty honest about the fact that they make most of their money on selling refill cartriges rather than the printers themselves. But I have never seen an ink-jet printer in Korea that did NOT include this type of aftermarket add-on.
That’s a technical digression, for those interested. What I saw yesterday was my lego snake floating in the yellow color printer ink reservoir.
I took a picture after making my utterance, because I immediately felt the need to record this syntactical hapax for posterity.
You can see the lego snake clearly, enjoying a swim in yellow ink.
I notified our technical/maintenance guy, Mr Park, and he popped open the ink reservoir (I was afraid to mess with it myself, not knowing the details of the device’s operation). I then used a pair of scissors to fish out Mr Snake, who was now altered from red plastic to a more orangish hue, understandably.
I suspected a young 4th grader named Chaejun of the crime. He spends a lot of time in the staff room, because his mom works at the hagwon. And he’s a little bit mischievous. Mr Park agreed when I suggested that Chaejun was the culprit.
So I asked Chaejun, later, when I saw him. “Did you put a lego snake in the printer ink?”
His English really isn’t that good, but he understood what I was referring to immediately, which was already immediate confirmation that he was the guilty party – what non-native speaker would know what that was about, if they hadn’t engineered the situation in the first place? For that matter, none of my coworkers could wrap their minds around what I’d discovered, even when I tried to explain it to them later: there were too many unexpected, strung-together nominal modifiers: lego + snake, printer + ink.
Anyway, Chaejun didn’t bother denying it. He simply nodded, grinning proudly. [daily log: walking, 6 km]
I was walking around my neighborhood yesterday, running errands, and noticed a new “Caffe Fuckaccia” (light blue sign).
I wonder kind of café this is supposed to be – I didn’t look closely. [daily log: walking, 7 km]
Today is our show day for our annual talent show. Unlike last year, when my coworker Ken was the mastermind behind making it successful, this year (since Ken has left Karma) I’ve had to be more managerial and I’m not very happy with the result. I wasn’t preemptive enough with various issues and concerns – I’m worried about the timing, which is important because of the bus-shuttle schedule for the students. And I didn’t memorize my MC lines well, either. I think my students are better-prepared than I am.
Ah well.
Here is a bucolic, summery picture I took walking to work the other day. A bicycle parked in front of a senior citizens’ center in Hugok, with some flowers climbing behind. [daily log: walking, 7 km]
The place I live is called Ilsan. That’s not actually the name of the city – the city is officially called Goyang, but Goyang is more like a consolidated city-county, in US terms, as there are several urban clusters with intervening agricultural land within its boundaries.
There are two city districts (boroughs), West Ilsan (Ilsan-seo-gu) and East Ilsan (Ilsan-dong-gu) which together form the area informally known as Ilsan. The name Ilsan, itself, comes from the train station, I suspect, which is on the main northwest Gyeongui line (Gyeongui means “Capital-to-Sinuiju”, Sinuiju being the city in the northwestern corner of North Korea – so this was the main rail line between Seoul and the Chinese border, prior to Korean partition in 1945).
I remember actually spending time at the Ilsan train station in 1991, when I was garrisoned a few stops northwest of Ilsan at Camp Edwards, in the US Army. At that time, Ilsan was a village-like entity surrounding a single-room wooden structure that was labeled as Ilsan train station.
Now, of course, “Ilsan” has half a million residents – it is one of Korea’s most successful “new cities” (신도시 or planned cities).
I’m writing about this because there seems to be some doubt as to where the name “Ilsan” comes from, even among Koreans. “Il” just means “one,” so the name of the city is “One Mountain.” But there is no mountain nearby called “Ilsan” – and most of Ilsan is pretty flat, actually, although just to the north there are some ridges and peaks in the area called Jungsan and Gobong, and within Ilsan there is a very low hill called Jeongbalsan, where I walk frequently, and on the northeast flank of Jeongbalsan is the Cancer Center.
Both Gobong and Jeongbalsan seem like candidates for the “One Mountain” of the name, but I have decided that seems implausible. Neither of them are positioned quite right, relative to the train station that originally bore the name.
On the other hand, a much more distant mountain, called Simhaksan, seems a likely candidate. On Saturday, on the pedestrian footbridge next to my work, which is a few blocks from Ilsan train station, I snapped this picture.
Looking northwest along Ilsan Road, it shows clearly the single, noticeable peak of Simhaksan in the somewhat hazy distance, about 10 km down the road. I [broken link! FIXME]once went up Simhaksan, from whence you can see North Korea easily – basically it is the only mountain between Ilsan and North Korea, in that particular direction.
That’s definitely One Mountain, I thought. [daily log: walking, 6 km]
It is spring, I guess. I took this picture from the pedestrian footbridge crossing 일산로 (Ilsan Road) as I was arriving at work. That’s work: “카르마어(학원)” = “Karma Language (Academy)” – the last word obscured by blossoms.
I didn’t have a lot to do today, what I did do was a bit stressful. I’m not happy with my Alpha class. I need to rethink strategies. [daily log: walking, 6 km]
Walking to work, the haze was terrible. Here is a view up 강선로 (gangseon-ro) heading toward Hugok neighborhood, where my work is.
This is why I hate Spring in Korea. The smog is partly natural (the Gobi Desert dust – 황사), but I suspect also partly due to the fact that we are 300 km east of Beijing, and Spring breezes prevail from the west (while in other seasons they tend to come from other directions).
I've developed a bit of a tradition (I don't always follow it, but a couple times a month) of spending my Sundays doodling my imaginary maps and architecture schemes, listening to strange music, and buying and eating take-out pumpkin porridge (단호박죽).
So that's what I did with my Sunday.
What I'm listening to right now.
[UPDATE 20180330: Video embed changed due to link-rot. The new embedded video is a different remix of the same song, and not the one in my mp3 collection. It's similar enough, but the lyrics might not match…]
Absurd Minds, "Herzlos."
Lyrics.
Unwahr ist, was nicht meinem Wahren entspricht. Unwahr nenn ich alles, was das Wahre verbirgt Und unwirklich, begrenzt oder einengend ist, was Täuschung und Wahn, was vergänglich ist. Unwahr ist Begrenzung durch Zeit und Raum. Unwahr – die Tränen in meinem Traum. Was unwahr ist, das BIN ICH nicht. Denn ICH BIN das Wahre, denn ICH BIN das Ich.
So bist du also wieder einmal hier. Und dennoch hälst du an deinem Unglauben fest. Es ist der eine, starre, unveränderbare Glaube der Welt, dass alle Dinge in ihr geboren werden, nur um wieder zu sterben. Und doch ist dieses Leben ein Spiel, aber du bist zu den Glauben gekommen, dass es die einzige Wirklichkeit ist. Die einzige Wirklichkeit jedoch, die es gab und je geben wird ist das Leben. Meißel nun in alle Grabsteine: Hier ruht niemand.
(… herzlos.) Das verstehst du nicht, denn du bist mein Traum, der zu mir spricht. (Du bist herzlos.) Was willst du von mir? Denkst du immer noch ich bin außerhalb von dir?
Das freie Denken kann nicht durch irgendwelche Grenzen gebunden werden. Die wahre Bewegung, die allen zugrunde liegt, ist die Bewegung des Denkens. Und die Wahrheit selbst ist Bewegung und kann niemals zum Stillstand, zum aufhören des Suchens führen. Deshalb liegt der wahre und wirkliche Fortschritt des Denkens nur im umfassendsten Streben nach Erkenntnis, die überhaupt nicht die Möglichkeit des Stillstands in irgendwelchen Formen der Erkenntnis anerkennt. Meißel nun in alle Grabsteine: Hier ruht niemand.
As I was leaving for work today, I happened to walk past an open closet area near the lobby of my apartment building, and my eyes were drawn by a bunch of blinking lights – like Christmas tree lights. I thought, "why are they keeping a Christmas tree lit up in that storage room, but then I realized it was a bunch of blinking ethernet connectors. This, apparently, was my building's "switch room." I had a momentary thought, as I realized the vast majority of apartment buildings in Korea must have something like this, and the vast majority of Koreans live in apartment buildings. That's a lot of internet infrastructure. Staggering, even.
Meanwhile, a woman got attacked by a robotic vacuum cleaner. Actually, I suspect there may be some missing information, and, this being South Korea, I suspect that missing information involves alcohol.
Walking to work in the falling snow, I saw a sign that announced that Goyangites (is that what people who live in Goyang can be called?) should clean the snow. I was struck by the fact that I just kind of “read” the sign without really working at sorting it out, just overlooking the words I didn’t know. That felt like a kind of banal linguistic milestone. This picture utterly fails to show the sign – I thought it would when I took it, but I was wrong. It shows the snow, though.
What I’m listening to right now.
Son Volt, “Dust of Daylight.”
Lyrics.
Hand in hand there are angels that are holding warning signs
Show you the way like teachers and prophets of doom
Everyone has their idols, there will always be a story to tell
The search goes on, a balance in the final say
When you’re lost in folly, out of luck in the worst way
Love is a fog and you stumble every step you make
The dust of daylight holds you down and makes you wait
Love is a fog and you stumble every step you make
There will be words and fault lines to fill the hours of the days
There are ways to buy trouble but a bail bondsman finds friends in jail
Time to leave now, time to pack up all that you’re leaving
Your contest’s here but you’ll be judged just the same
When you’re lost in folly, out of luck in the worst way
Love is a fog and you stumble every step you make
The dust of daylight holds you down and makes you wait
Love is a fog and you stumble every step you make
Love is a fog and you stumble every step you make
Walking to work the other day, the colors on the trees seemed striking. The photo failed to really capture it.
What I'm listening to right now.
Bob Dylan, "Idiot Wind."
[Update 2018-03-13: video link replaced due to link-rot on previous link]
Fall is Bob Dylan season, since the 1980s.
Lyrics.
Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out but when they will I can only guess They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me I can’t help it if I’m lucky
People see me all the time and they just can’t remember how to act Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts Even you, yesterday you had to ask me where it was at I couldn’t believe after all these years, you didn’t know me better than that Sweet lady
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth Blowing down the backroads headin’ south Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth You’re an idiot, babe It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe
I ran into the fortune-teller, who said beware of lightning that might strike I haven’t known peace and quiet for so long I can’t remember what it’s like There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars After losin’ every battle
I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes Blood on your saddle
Idiot wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb Blowing through the curtains in your room Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth You’re an idiot, babe It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe
It was gravity which pulled us down and destiny which broke us apart You tamed the lion in my cage but it just wasn’t enough to change my heart Now everything’s a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good, you’ll find out when you reach the top You’re on the bottom
I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you blind I can’t remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your eyes don’t look into mine The priest wore black on the seventh day and sat stone-faced while the building burned I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned Slowly into Autumn
Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth You’re an idiot, babe It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe
I can’t feel you anymore, I can’t even touch the books you’ve read Every time I crawl past your door, I been wishin’ I was somebody else instead Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory And all your ragin’ glory
I been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I’m finally free I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me You’ll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above And I’ll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love And it makes me feel so sorry
Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats Blowing through the letters that we wrote Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves We’re idiots, babe It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves
My student Jack did a poor job at homework, once again. I was berating him, mildly, in the typical way expected of teachers in Korea: "Why are you like that, Jack? These other students do well."
He shook his head, as if with world-weary sadness. "I am a mysterious man," he answered, and paused, looking up at me earnestly. Then he added, "… to myself." The joke was impressive for its timing, but more so when keeping in mind he is non-native-speaking 12 year old.
Unrelatedly, the fall is most definitely here. The trees are changing in the pedestrian plazas on the path to work.
Today was a holiday, but naesin is over so I have to work tomorrow. I walked a long route up to Gobong, and ended up in a very rural area behind the hill (the north side of it) that I had never seen before. There were some farms.
In the forest, I also saw the ubiquitous Korean fauna, Sedes koreanis.
I might as well do another test of this posting-via-email problem. This is the trashcan nearest my desk at work. I just recently happened to notice that it features profoundly fractured English. It is so truly horrible that it becomes a kind of poetry.
The rain day is a beautiful.
Rain water is feeled kindly.
The umbrella is
unfolded toward sky.
If it is stopped,
rainbow will raise out of cloud.
I have a largish lego alligator at work. I have blogged about it before. Today I was at the Homeplus store and I saw a similarly-scaled lego monkey. Now, my regular plastic alligators have an ongoing relationship with my stuffed monkeys (this makes for engaging EFL conversation with 10 year olds, trust me). So, the idea of getting a companion legomonkey for my legogator was impossible to resist. I bought and assembled the lego monkey. He was furnished with a legotoucan and a legobanana. Go figure.
I went on a walk today, but rather than tromp around my haunts in Ilsan I took the subway to Seoul and spent money at a bookstore too. I bought a fat history book about postwar Korea to maybe read.
Downtown Seoul was crowded, some kind of special event, I’m not sure what. I took a picture that showed the old-new contrast well I think.
[daily log: walking, 4.5 km]
Yesterday when I met Peter to go to that movie, we walked around afterward, some, with an intention to go up Namsan, but we missed the uphill path somehow. Anyway, I was struck noticing there were already yellow leaves on some trees.
Today I did not do hardly anything. I tried to study Korean but got frustrated and discouraged.
A while back I wrote about how I had bought some dirt (potting soil) because my gift plant from when I was in the hospital last year looked like it needed some new digs. I said that having bought more dirt than I needed for that plant might impell me to buy another plant. It did. I bought two more, but then I felt I needed more dirt, so I bought some. Once again having left over dirt, I bought more plants. This is what one calls a feedback loop. So far, the plants seem to be surviving.
The view from my window.
I tried to take a picture with my phone. It is almost invisible, but you can just make it out, right above the juncture of the two buildings, looking southeast from my apartment window. Well, if you cannot see it, take my word. . . there was a rainbow.
The skies are often interesting in high summer, here.
This is an aphorism from my aphorism book. 굽은 나무가 선산을 지킨다 gup·eun na·mu·ga seon·san·eul ji·kin·da be-crooked-PASTPART tree-SUBJ ancestors-grave-OBJ guard-PRES A crooked tree guards the ancestors’ grave.
Even a tree that is crooked has a job to do – it bends near the ancestors’ grave and protects it. Something viewed as useless turns out to have a use after all. (Image: a bent tree found online, guarding someone’s ancestors’ graves). [daily log: walking, 5 km]
I have a stuffed toy mouse whose name is “Lunch” – because his job is to be eaten by the Alligator (who in his current incarnation is named “David”).
Lunch sometimes comes to my elementary classes because the kids like to play with him. Yesterday, my Betelgeuse반 kids (first and second graders) started torturing Lunch. The placed him on the floor under the end of a chair-leg. I caught them and took a picture with my phone. They were proud of their mistreatment of the mouse – as kids can be cruel.
I weighed myself this morning and the number was 69 kg. That’s 152 pounds. I have not weighed this little since my early 20’s.
As I’ve commented before, as a person with a history of both anorexia and obesity (at different times), I cannot deny that I probably have somewhat chosen to go ahead and just let this eating problem turn into a permanent weight loss program. Still… I think there is coming a time when I will have to confront this situation more rationally.
I joked with someone last week that eating, nowadays, is a chore on par with cleaning my toilet. To test this, later this morning after eating a breakfast of ramen noodles (with half the spice removed to make it more bland), I knelt down and cleaned my toilet right then, thinking of this comment specifically.
Sure enough, the toilet was less unpleasant.
So there you have it.
The Jains of India have a tradition called santhara. It is a sort of slow-motion suicide-by-self-starvation – sometimes drawn out up to 12 years. The practice is in line with other ascetic practices of the Jains, whose historical predecessors were likely the ascetics referenced by Gautama Siddhartha when it is said he tried asceticism and failed it, before he ennunciated his “middle path” which became Buddhism. This type of asceticism has a sort of fatal appeal to me, and I feel as if my post-cancer-imposed eating regimen is evolving into a kind of unintentional santhara.
In any event, my peak weight of about 265 pounds isn’t quite cut in half literally, but I’m feeling that way. Half the man I used to be…
For reference, here are two interesting pictures from my archive. One picture is from near my peak weight, from February, 2005, with my friend Bob (he’s on the left) in Utrecht, Netherlands.
The second picture is from 1986, when I was 21, near my current weight, I think (or a little less even, maybe 140 pounds). It is a scan of a picture (it was in poor condition, so sorry for the poor scan) that was taken near La Libertad, El Salvador, in September, 1986.
They are not native to Ilsan, but they are planted everywhere: Chinese "dawn redwoods." They create their own little eco-niche wherever they cluster. They are both exotic yet familiar to me, given my own upbringing amid the the redwoods of northern California. At left is a picture taken along a path to and from work among the high-rise apartment blocks.
I had been thinking, some days ago, how dry this spring seemed to me. Promptly, it began to rain later that day, and we have been having this sort of on-and-off drizzle ever since. Very Humboldty.
I was at the hospital for a portion of the morning. I didn't get a diagnosis – I have to go back and see the diagnostician tomorrow – they were not as efficient with their scheduling as they normally are, and there was some conflict between scheduling the scans and reviewing the results. So I'll get to see Dr Jo tomorrow morning.
Meanwhile, I get to experience suspense.
Oh, and teach 6 classes today. Really… the most exhausting part of the scans is that I have to fast (not eat) for the half-day beforehand, which leaves me feeling ennervated. The contrast medium injection is uncomfortable and a little bit freaky as you experience it entering your system, but I'm pretty used to it and I can recover quickly from that particular aspect.
I slept extra hours over the weekend so that I would have some reserve of energy to plow into a full-time week of work (first full week back to the full-time schedule with the end of the middle-school 내신 [exam prep]) front-ended by this hospital visit, but I felt really tired anyway. Oh well.
Walking from the hospital to work today, straight from my appointments, I saw a tree that had discarded the vast majority of its blossoms due to the rain, I guess. These are the remains of spring. The picture doesn't really capture it very effectively – it's washed out and blandish.
