Work was long today. I had 8 classes, which is the maximum possible under the scheduling system used. There were good, bad, indifferent – as usual. It’s pretty tiring, though, but I felt positive at the end of the day.
I took some pictures walking to work – not sure why, just a random impulse. Here’s a view of where I work. It’s the building with the bright yellow sign on the top floor (5th floor), across the street, a little bit left of the centerline of the photo. The sign says 카르마 [kareuma = karma].
Note that I’m standing in front of my previous Ilsan place-of-work.
Category: My Photos
Caveat: I took the #200 bus to North Korea
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.
We saw golden fields of rice.
We walked down a country lane in search of the observatory.
We saw a wealthy-person’s brand new house constructed in a traditional style.
We saw a statue of a man pontificating.
We saw treeless hills of North Korea.
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.
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).
We posed with North Korea in the background.
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).
We saw a man sleeping in the grass beside the road.
We received important advice from a trash receptacle.
Caveat: otoño
No tengo nada que decir. Entonces, un haiku por Mario Benedetti (escritor uruguayo):
tiembla el rocío
y las hojas moradas
y un colibrí
El día amaneció claro y con mucho viento, fuertemente saboreado de otoño. Debajo, una foto que tomé hace dos años en Ulleungdo (울릉도).
Caveat: Contemplating Blue Screens of Death
I had some computer problems over the weekend. Or rather, on Friday… I experienced the notorious blue-screen-of-death on my little Asus EeePC netbook, which runs Windows 7. It’s the first time I had one on this machine – I had, in fact, come to believe that Microsoft had done away with the infamous crash-o-matic indicator with the new operating system, because I’d never seen it before. But lo, there it was.
This made me worried. I managed to recover the little netbook, but I felt a dilemma. I rely on having a computer a lot. More than just for going online – in fact, I spend a lot of time on my netbook off line, and I’m pretty OK with having to cope with lack of internet at home, as I learned the hard way during my struggles with internetlessness in Yeonggwang last year (although obviously I ranted about it quite a bit). I do writing on my computer. Not good writing. Not writing-to-be-happy about, but it’s a compulsive exercise.
Until last year, I’ve always had two computers. Well, not always, but at least in the most recent milennium. The idea being, that if I had a crash, I’d go to the backup. Well, last year, my “main” laptop, an old Sony Vaio that I bought the month before coming to Korea in 2007, suffered an ignoble retirement. It has 3 operating systems installed on it – Windows Vista, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows Server 2003. I dropped it, and I guess I scrambled the Vista boot sector somehow. I can still boot it up, even now, but using Linux is virtually useless for surfing the Korean internet (although that’s changing rapidly, with the unexpected – to me – success of the iPhone and iPad and the various Android-running clones of those products, because Android is, after all, just Linux). The linux boot has got some other minor issues, too, involving the Korean-language input thingy, which I’ve been too lazy to resolve. The Server 2003 boot still works (and I use it when I’m searching for some old file I’ve misplaced, sometimes), but it never played well with the graphics card in the laptop, with the consequence being that it is only capable of presenting a bare-bones 800×600 half-size window on the already non-huge laptop screen. The upshot of all this, I consider the old “main” laptop to be dead.
So my backup computer, since my hiatus in the US in the fall of 2009, has been this $295 Asus netbook that I bought at Best Buy with a gift certificate. It became my new main computer. It’s very low-grade, but perfectly adequate for my writing and for doing things on the internet, if rather pokey running multiple applications, etc. I had to abandon my computer games habit, but that’s hardly been detrimental, in most respects.
Anyway, getting the blue screen of death, last Friday, set me to thinking… if this netbook fails, I’ll be in a world of hurt. I’ll be able to boot up “old main” if I’m desperate to write something, but it’s hardly convenient, and I can forget comfortably surfing the internet. And besides, I’ve been missing having a computer that can have more than 2 windows open at the same time without slowing to a crawl.
So Saturday morning, I tromped off to Costco and spent 800 bucks. I bought a desktop. Which seems ridiculous, but I’ve considered that one of the main things I do recreationally with my computer, these days, is watch movies or TV serious, and my netbooks 7 inch screen is pretty pathetic, that way. Those 24 inch flat screen monitors looked tempting. So basically I bought a fancy screen with a cheapo Jooyontech (a Korean discount brand) desktop PC attached to it.
I decided to make my life difficult for myself. Not on purpose, exactly: I somehow managed to click just the wrong set of initial choices on the “first boot up” of the Windows 7 Home Premium K (for Korea) operating system, such that the operating system knows I prefer English, but nevertheless refuses to use it with me about 80% of the time. As if that even makes sense. Haha. Let’s just say the remainder of the configuration process involved a lot of recourse to the dictionary. And I’m the proud owner of a semi-bilingual computer.
I decided that, well, wow, I had a desktop with an actual graphics chip set and a big screen, I should put a fun game on it. I have always had an inordinate and unhealthy love for the game called Civilization, in its various incarnations. I went to buy it and try to download it – only to be disallowed from buying by the download store thing (called Steam). I felt annoyed. I hate it when online vendors discriminate against me because of my IP address. They’re telling me they don’t want my money. Well, my reaction to being told by a product vendor that they don’t want my money is to not give them my money. It took me about 20 minutes to torrent and install Civilization 4 (not the latest version, but what do I care? I like the old version just fine) on the new machine. No money required. The internet’s like that, right? Probably, it’s a bit stupid of me to tell everyone this on a blog, but I feel pretty safe from the copyright police, because of the aforementioned discriminated-against IP address. Korean copyright police only care about Korean content.
Well, I played Civilization for part of Sunday, and then, in a long-unfelt rush of self-disgust at wasting such a vast amount of time on a virtual empire, I went on a walk. Such was my weekend. The picture below shows the new computer. It represents a certain degree of investment in my intention to stay in Korea, doesn’t it? I suppose if I end up leaving, I’ll sell it or give it away to a lucky friend.
What I’m listening to right now.
David Bowie, “Changes.”
The video someone made for it in the youtube, above, is clever, too. It’s an appropriate way to ring in the new computer, though Bowie always makes me think of freshman year at Macalaster College in St Paul. Life has changes.
Caveat: 92) 부처님. 저는 남을 원망하지 않기를 발원하며 절합니다
“Buddha. I bow and pray not to resent other people.”
This is #92 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
…
90. 부처님. 저는 남을 비방하지 않기를 발원하며 절합니다.
“Buddha. I bow and pray not to slander other people.”
91. 부처님. 저는 남을 무시하지 않기를 발원하며 절합니다.
“Buddha. I bow and pray not to disdain other people.”
92. 부처님. 저는 남을 원망하지 않기를 발원하며 절합니다.
I would read this ninety-second affirmation as: “Buddha. I bow and pray not to resent other people.”
Resent. Is this like jealousy? The dictionary also offers the word “blame” as a translation of 원망하다. It also lists “hold a grudge” and “feel bitter toward.” I see resentment and blame as being very different things. But I can see how they’re linked. I would say resentment and blame, together, are the number one “sins” of the expat community in Korea – foreigners like to sit in Korea and resent how things are different, or blame strange Korean culture for all the various misunderstandings and frustrations they have. It’s so very easy to slip into that mode. It’s why I stay away from online groupings of foreigners at all costs, generally.
Actually, I don’t feel like this is one of my bugaboos. Maybe my big problem isn’t with resentment but rather with metaresentment. By which I mean the fact of resenting others’ resentments. Haha.
I took the picture (above left) two years ago during my visit to Ulleungdo (an isolated island off Korea’s east coast by a few hours by ferry). Ulleungdo is by far my favorite rural place in Korea that I’ve visited. I’m mostly a city person, but I seem to like my rural places “extreme” or remote, in some sense: Patagonia, Southeast Alaska, Upper Michigan, Ulleungdo.
Caveat: Theory of Truth
Theory of Truth
(Reference to The Women at Point Sur)
I stand near Soberanes Creek, on the knoll over the sea, west of
the road. I remember
This is the very place where Arthur Barclay, a priest in revolt,
proposed three questions to himself:
First, is there a God and of what nature? Second, whether there's
anything after we die but worm's meat?
Third, how should men live? Large time-worn questions no
doubt; yet he touched his answers, they are not unattainable;
But presently lost them again in the glimmer of insanity.
How
many minds have worn these questions; old coins
Rubbed faceless, dateless. The most have despaired and accepted
doctrine; the greatest have achieved answers, but always
With aching strands of insanity in them.
I think of Lao-tze; and the dear beauty of the Jew whom they
crucified but he lived, he was greater than Rome;
And godless Buddha under the boh-tree, straining through his
mind the delusions and miseries of human life.
Why does insanity always twist the great answers?
Because only
tormented persons want truth.
Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and
women, not truth. Only if the mind
Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness:
then it hates its life-cage and seeks further,
And finds, if it is powerful enough. But instantly the private
agony that made the search
Muddles the finding.
Here was a man who envied the chiefs of
the provinces of China their power and pride,
And envied Confucius his fame for wisdom. Tortured by hardly
conscious envy he hunted the truth of things,
Caught it, and stained it through with his private impurity. He
praised inaction, silence, vacancy: why?
Because the princes and officers were full of business, and wise
Confucius of words.
Here was a man who was born a bastard, and among the people
That more than any in the world valued race-purity, chastity, the
prophetic splendors of the race of David.
Oh intolerable wound, dimly perceived. Too loving to curse his
mother, desert-driven, devil-haunted,
The beautiful young poet found truth in the desert, but found also
Fantastic solution of hopeless anguish. The carpenter was not his
father? Because God was his father,
Not a man sinning, but the pure holiness and power of God.
His personal anguish and insane solution
Have stained an age; nearly two thousand years are one vast poem
drunk with the wine of his blood.
And here was another Saviour, a prince in India,
A man who loved and pitied with such intense comprehension of
pain that he was willing to annihilate
Nature and the earth and stars, life and mankind, to annul the
suffering. He also sought and found truth,
And mixed it with his private impurity, the pity, the denials.
Then
search for truth is foredoomed and frustrate?
Only stained fragments?
Until the mind has turned its love from
itself and man, from parts to the whole.
- Robinson Jeffers, 1937.
The greatest American poet, IMHO.
I took the picture above in November, 2009, not far from Point Sur, California.
Caveat: Mixed-Grain Rice Pilaf, Garlic-Rosemary Red Beans, Curried Apple-Onion Chutney
It being Saturday, I got home from work relatively early. I had been feeling motivated to go do some shopping, but when I stopped by the bank to get cash, I discovered that my ATM card had expired. I guess that’s one of those signs that I’ve been in Korea a long time. I need to go by the bank and get a new card.
So, being low on cash, I did a minor grocery run in the GS Mart instead, and came home.
I had this big pile of apples that have been getting older. As in, beginning to get soft and brown-spotted. Obviously, I’m not eating them fast enough. Feeling some minor inspiration, I decided to make some curried apple-onion chutney. It turned out to be one of those random, no-recipe-in-sight culinary experiments that was utterly successful. I try to keep wine around for cooking even though I don’t drink much alcohol, and I had this intriguing bottle of Korean chardonnay (Korean!), called Mujuang (see picture). I heated the chutney in that, with some lemon juice and lots of spices (tumeric, cumin, clove, cinnamon, red pepper flakes, etc. – a homemade curry powder), just long enough to make the apples and onions tender and to blend in the spices, and then I let it cool.
Then I took some of my already-cooked dark red beans that I keep in fridge (I have no idea what variety they are, in western parlance – they’re just a kind of generic Korean dark red beans, which I cook in a large batch in my rice cooker and keep in a tupperware in the fridge) and I heated them up with a dash of sesame oil, with rosemary and garlic. I scooped some rice out of my cooker into a little pilaf-thingy. I always cook my rice with some 혼합곡 [honhapgok = “medley” (a fifteen-grain medley)] mixed in, about 2 parts rice to 1 part grain medley, to give it more texture and flavor, and that lends it a purplish color.
Here is a picture of my dinner.
It was a creative and tasty meal – its flavors and textures reminded me a lot of the vegan, Indian-cuisine themed restaurant I used to frequent when I lived in Mexico City in the 1980’s, which is still one of my favorite restaurants of all time.
Caveat: And so begins a fifth year
At the risk of boring everyone with a third blog post in less than 24 hours, I feel compelled to observe that today is the fourth anniversary of my arrival in Korea. On September 1st, 2007, I landed at Incheon and made my way to Ilsan, where I was met by my new employer, Danny, of the eventually-defunct Tomorrow School, to begin my new teaching career.
I have spent all of the last four years in Korea, with the exception of a three-month, unemployed hiatus back in the US in the fall of 2009, and several shorter vacation trips – two to Australia to visit my mother (with side-junkets to Hong Kong and New Zealand), and one to Japan to resolve a visa issue.
I like Korea, But I’m not really a Koreanophile. Although my linguistico-aesthetic infatuation with the Korean language refuses to go away, I’m actually only lukewarm when it comes to Korean culture in more general terms. It has a lot of shortcomings, and I’m not always happy with it. But… I will attach two caveats to that statement: 1) I think the Korean polity is less dysfunctional that the US polity, and that’s a notable achievement (the current state of the US polity is so depressing as to leave me feeling embarrassed to claim US citizenship); 2) I reached a level of alienated “comfort” with life in Korea that is at least equal to the perpetual alienation I have always felt within my own country and culture.
The consequence of these preceding observations is that, as things stand, I have no interest in (and no current plans for) returning to the US – except perhaps for brief visits. For better or for worse, for now, Korea is my home. If, for whatever reason in the future, my life in Korea has to end, I will seek to continue my expat life elsewhere.
I have changed a great deal in the last four years. I have acquired some confidence as a teacher; I have built some good habits; most notably, I have embraced a sort of meditative buddhist zen (선) atheism that works well for me. Although I’m hardly content – often lonely, often aimless in a philosophical or “spiritual” sense (as much as I dislike the concept of spirituality) – in fact I have found a kind of inner peace that my life prior to this most recent phase utterly lacked.
So, there you have it. And so begins a fifth year…
I took the picture below on a long hike in October 2007. It shows some scarecrows in a field of cut rice, across the highway from the former Camp Edwards, in Geumchon, Paju-si (about 7 km northwest of where I live), which incidentally is where I was stationed in 1991, during my time in the US Army as a mechanic and tow truck driver. Thus, you see, my “roots” in Northwest Gyeonggi Province go “way back.”
Caveat: National liberation and other historical paradoxes
Today is Liberation Day in South Korea. It’s the day that Japan surrendered to the Allies, and 35 years of subjugation to Japanese colonialism were brought to a close. What followed was the division of the peninsula by the victorious powers, and a bifurcated, two-sided neocolonial regime (Soviet and American) that, arguably, persists even today, 20 years after the end of the Cold War.
The North is the world’s only surviving even vaguely Stalinist regime, and the South, despite having shifted to a sort of neolibral democracy (such as it is, and, erm, perhaps not coincidental to the moment in history when the Soviet Union fell), remains the largest “peacetime” host of American troops on foreign soil (i.e. discounting the active war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq).
Despite my cynicism, I continue to believe that South Korea may be the sole genuine success story in America’s highly questionable exercises in “nation building.” I think that this is true, in part, because of the unique geopolitical moment that followed World War II and that the Korean War consolidated – a moment when “democracy” was happily represented around the world by repressive neo-fascist regimes (such as Syngman Rhee and subsequently Park Chung-Hee) – true – but where the lip-service concepts such as freedom were paid would eventually result in an evolution toward more inclusive (if never perfect) political systems.
I think that one reason why the current neoconservative efforts at nation-building (in e.g. Iraq) have been such utter failures is because of the historical myopia that is unable to recognize that “nation building” is, in fact, almost never a democratic enterprise. Democracy can take root in nations, undeniably, but nations are rarely constructed as a result of truly democratic impulses – because true democracies are full of people who are not, in fact, interested in being part of this or that nation.
And don’t try to sell me on some kind of American exceptionalism in this matter – the “American” nation was built by a very narrow demographic of middle-aged and elderly white, male landowners, over and against the objections of all kinds of embedded subjugated peoples (Native Americans, women, Catholic immigrant-laborers, Jewish small-scale merchants, etc.), who were only subsequently, through several centuries of struggle and brutal war (e.g. the Civil War), ideologically homogenized into some degree of inclusion. Never forget: even now, Obama talks white – and that’s how he got elected.
Nationalism is – as movements such as Nazism (not to mention Teapartism) should make obvious – all about the imposition of some totalizing ideological regime across an inevitably heterogeneous population. It’s only as a retroactive construct that such homogeneous nation-peoples (such as Koreans or Mexicans or even Americans) choose to perceive themselves as such.
All of which is my way of saying that I have, in fact, come to believe in a certain strain of South Korean exceptionalism, if only in that its relationship to the United States is utterly unique in the history of neocolonialism. There are lots of caveats attached to that, too.
There’s a perhaps-relevant quote, frequently misattributed to Sinclair Lewis (similar to something said by Halford E. Luccock, but probably invented in its misattributed form by journalist Harrison Salisbury). The recent proto-primarial antics of Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry set me to thinking about it: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
To which I will add: Yay, nationalism! Oh, and maybe, as a dash of seasoning, the old Samuel Johnson line: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Speaking of freedom… What I’m listening to right now.
Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee.”
Kris Kristofferson wrote the song, and this is an early demo version that is currently one of my favorite renditions. There’s a Willie Nelson cover I like, too. I never actually cared for the famous Janis Joplin version that topped the charts in the early 70’s, for example, and I suspect the version that I grew up on was probably one of the Greatful Dead’s covers of it – I couldn’t find anything that sounded exactly right in surfing around youtube, though.
Here is a view of Ilsan’s Jungang-no [Central Avenue], a block from my apartment at the Juyeop subway entrance. I took the photo earlier, shrouded in drizzle – there are a few limp South Korean flags hanging from light poles. I took a long walk today, but didn’t really do a lot. Trying to find inner peace.
Caveat: holding up the sky
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.
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.
The bridge itself, with its embedded subway tracks and industrial feel, is New Yorkish.
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.
But there is still the occasional cardboard-carting ajeossi, blocking the forward progress of honking Mercedeses.
The view at dusk looking east along Teheranno, one of Gangnam’s main drags, just west of its intersection with Gangnamdaero.
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.
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.
Caveat: My Life as a Zen Zenoist
Miscellany….
“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” – Oscar Wilde
I took an online quiz that told me what kind of philosopher I am. It turns out I’m a stoic – I was linked to Zeno of Citium. The modern meaning of “stoic,” by the way, doesn’t really capture the original nature of the tradition. Here is Seneca, perhaps one of the best known exponents of stoicism in its classical incarnation: “As long as you live, keep learning how to live.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
Here’s an interesting thought: does my stoic orientation, combined with my sometime pursuit of mahayana meditation, make me a zen zenoist? Or maybe a follower of Zeno is a “zenist”?
Here is a vaguely arty photograph I took in 1983, of the mountains east of Eureka (near Kneeland, I think).
Caveat: Moon
I went out to do my little jog around the lake. I like doing it at night when I get home, after work – jogging in the dark suits my personality quite well – it’s less hot at night, and I don’t feel like people are watching me. Ilsan’s Lake Park is well lit and has lots of paths and trails.
I took this really cool picture of the amazing, full, bright, shiny moon hanging and reflecting over the Lake, with part of the Ilsan skyline. My little digital camera did pretty well, I think.
Caveat: The Sun Was Orange
I was walking away from the Hugokmaeul neighborhood where I work after my early-ending Friday, over a foot-bridge across Ilsan-no. I looked west-northwest toward the Yellow Sea and China and North Korea off to the left there, in the haze, and the sun was orange. It looked very big, hovering there in the afternoon haze, but in the photo I took it doesn’t look very big. Or orange.
I went to a bookstore and bought some EFL materials – I’ve been tasked with making a “Debate Textbook” at work, the first thing that resembles, vaguely, the “curriculum design” aspect of the job description I’d discussed with my boss before accepting the position. I’m excited about it – I hope I can do a good job.
I didn’t sleep well last night – not sure why. I’m feeling restless in a very undefined way. I’ve been getting more exercise. I walk 4 km. every day, mininum, in my round-trip commute to work. Plus, I even went jogging in Hosugongwon (“Lake Park”) twice, last week. I have a little, approximately 3 km. long, route that I’ve been trying to follow. So far I’m still stuck with the extra kilos that seem to be one of my least-loved Yeonggwang legacies.
Caveat: Coming Home
Moving back to Ilsan is like moving home, a little bit.
The new apartment isn’t perfect. I knew it would be very small – it’s marginally bigger than my last Ilsan apartment and it’s about the same size as my Yeonggwang apartment, but it’s older and a bit more run-down on the edges than either of those. Smallness, per se, doesn’t bother me at all. I wholly desire and approve a compact lifestyle, for the most part – the only reason I can think of to want a bigger apartment would be in the event that people came to visit me that wanted to stay with me – but in my almost 4 years in Korea, only one person has ever done that.
It’s also nice to have “full kitchen” which this place, like the Yeonggwang apartment, doesn’t have. But I can cope. I will buy some inexpensive furnishings that can help make up for that. Once I get the rest of my stuff here, it will feel like home. As it is, it’s pretty “bare” – I told Curt I would buy my own furniture, so I have to do that. Not going to buy a bed – I’ve gone native on that, and have no issues sleeping on the floor. It’d be nice to have a sofa of some kind, but that’s not super high priority. A small table or desk, and some shelves, I definitely need. I already bought a hanger-thing for my clothes – there’s no closet, which I may miss a bit – the thing I liked best about my previous Ilsan apartment was the relatively generous closet and storage space.
Okay. Enough of all that. No complaints – it’s entirely within the parameters that I was expecting. And of course, it’s in Ilsan. That boils down to the old dictum: location, location, location. Going across the street to the “Orange Mart” is like an entire day-long trip to Gwangju, as far as shopping opportunities. I bought some french whole-grain mustard, spinach and tricolor pasta, and cheddar cheese this morning. Plus the infinite variety of more typical Korean things that are buyable.
The building is about a kilometer northwest along Jungangno from my previous Ilsan apartment – which places me about 2 blocks from the Juyeop subway station and about 1.5 kilometers from my place of work.
Here are some pictures. The first one, I’m looking up at my building from the outside, from in front of the Orange Mart – I’m standing on the southeast corner of the intersection of Jungangno and Gangseonno (and isn’t it amazing, I know the names of all these streets now, which I once-upon-a-time didn’t, for several years, even).
I drew a giant green and gold arrow pointing at its location on the 7th floor – that’s my window that you can see open, there.
Here is from that little window, looking almost straight down and a little toward the street (note the “rooftop garden” on the next building across).
Here is a view from a less precipitous angle, looking toward the Orange Mart and the intersection (roughly east-north-east).
Here is view from the corner by the window, looking toward my kitchen and the entryway – bathroom door is open on the left middle.
Here is a self-portrait of me sitting on my bedding in the corner by the window, pirating an unreliable wifi connection. I’ll get internet of my own soon, I hope – meanwhile, this is uploaded from a wifi in a nearby cafe.
Caveat: 얄러뷰
Two of my first-grade students, Min-gyeong and Dan-bi, wrote “I love you 얄러뷰” in a big heart in their good-bye message.
I was trying to figure out “얄러뷰” – but it’s not Korean. I think “yal-leo-byu” is a transliteration of “I love you” – sound it out!
I got portraits of the fourth-graders today. Here they are.
4-1:
4-2:
4-3:
The 4-2 class did some role-plays today, and I took a few pictures.
I am going to miss Ye-won especially (on the left, below). The other day, she said to me: “I will hate the new teacher, already, because you are the best teacher.” That’s way too good for my ego. Plus, her English is pretty good, eh?
Here I am goofing around with some fifth- and sixth-graders during recess today. Note that the girls provided me with a disguise – can you tell it’s me?
Here are some memento photos of the cafeteria during lunch time.
My lunch tray, and my co-teacher Ms Lee across from me.
Here are some boys hamming for the camera.
Finally, here are some kids brushing their teeth at the communal teeth-brushing place:
I am going to miss this school so much. Should I have stayed? Maybe.
I will not miss the feeling of isolation, which was exacerbated by a school administrative office that is xenophobic and stunningly incompetent, and which conducted itself without exception with utter disregard for my status as a fellow human being, despite my substantial dependence upon them for my outside-of-work day-to-day living.
I think that one way to put it is that I will miss the weekday 9am~5pm part of this experience intensely, but I will not miss the weekday 5pm~9am part of it not at all. And that, when you get right down to it, is not a good proportion for a sustainable lifestyle.
I have learned hugely, this past year – about myself, about teaching, about children and about what’s important in the world. I hope I can keep these lessons alive in my heart and carry them back to Ilsan and my next job.
Caveat: Countdown, 24 Hours
Today is my last teaching day here at Hongnong. The feeling is bittersweet. I hope I’ve made the right choice, in deciding to move on – one always has those moments of second-guessing oneself.
I was originally planning to jump on a bus tonight, but because some of my coworkers wanted to take me out to dinner tonight, I have decided I’ll be leaving tomorrow morning. So the countdown to leave Hongnong is 24 hours. I will be back at least once, to fetch the rest of my stuff – I’m only taking what I can carry on the bus, tomorrow – I’ll have to fetch my boxes of books and kitchen stuff (meanwhile stored with a friend here in Hongnong) with a car (maybe a friend’s, or worst case, rental) over some weekend in the near future.
A view of the alley on which my apartment building (owned by the school) is located. My student Seon-yeong actually lives in the farmhouse on the right – it’s one of the old-style courtyard farmhouses.
Caveat: Lotus Flower, Paper Boat
No, I mean nothing Buddhist.
I’m packing. I’m listening to Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Current” (dumb name, great programming). Radiohead’s “Lotus Flower” comes on. Nice track.
So. Where did I get all this crap? Wait… don’t answer that. I’m packing.
I went to Gwangju for a few hours, today. It was stupid – I needed to get some cash, and my bank has no local branch in Yeonggwang County. So I used it as an excuse to say “goodbye” to the City of Light, and procrastinate on some packing.
Inside the Gwangju subway, they post poetry. At the 송정공원 station, I saw this poem (above, right).
I had brief feeling of linguistic victory, as I managed to parse the first two lines of the poem without having to resort to a dictionary. The poem’s title is “Paper Boat.” I think that’s what it’s about. The narrator launches a paper boat into a stream from a bridge. Etc.
The Gwangju subway is desolate and not very useful. It only has one line. Mostly old people ride it. Here is the context of the poem I saw on the wall – note – there’s no one in the subway on a Sunday morning.
When I was leaving my home (well, my apartment, and only for two more days!) earlier, I walked past the school’s playground, and took a picture of some springy trees.
What I’m listening to right now.
Radiohead, “Lotus Flower.”
Caveat: Roleplayings
Yesterday was my last day with the third graders. It happened to coincide with “role play day” – a once-a-chapter event (about every two weeks given the current curriculum) that I very much have cherished. So some pictures were taken. This year’s third grade group lacks the charm and grace that I felt last year’s cohort had (who are now my beloved fourth graders), but they’re still a lot of fun.
Some of the third graders came to visit me later at lunch, and showed me an earnest, unexpected tribute – they’d written my name on their hands.
Also, I was visited by some fifth graders during lunch, one of whom had a hamster (there’s some kind of hamster fad plaguing the school’s student body, currently). I think it would be a very stressful life (and perhaps a rather short one, too) to be a hamster in a Korean elementary school.
Caveat: 40) 내 코로 맡은 냄새만 옳다고 생각한 어리석음을 참회하며 절합니다
“I bow in repentance of all the stupidity that I believe by only following the smells my nose finds.”
This is #40 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
…
38. 내 눈으로 본 것만 옳다고 생각한 어리석음을 참회하며 절합니다.
“I bow in repentance of all the stupidity that I believe in my own eyes to be right.”
39. 내 귀로들은 것만 옳다고 생각한 어리석음을 참회하며 절합니다.
“I bow in repentance of all the stupidity that I believe by my own ears to be right.”
40. 내 코로 맡은 냄새만 옳다고 생각한 어리석음을 참회하며 절합니다.
I would read this fortieth affirmation as: “I bow in repentance of all the stupidity that I believe by only following the smells my nose finds.”
… but… but… those homemade tortillas I made yesterday with my illegally imported, well-traveled Mexican corn masa (manufactured in Texas, bought in an imported food shop in Queensland, smuggled into South Korea) smelled so delicious!
I made a cheese quesadilla. The Korean processed sliced cheese wasn’t very good – a kind of petrochemically-tinged decadence – but the corn-tasting tortillas were excellent.
Caveat: Bloglessness
I have been utterly devoid of interesting or meaningful thoughts to blog about. My brain has been in one of its periodic “imagistic” phases, where I’m thinking a lot about visual arts, surfing “art” websites of various kinds, and being anti-textual. So I haven’t blogged, or even thought about blogging. Nothing I felt like saying. Such neglect.
Meanwhile, here is a photograph from my archives, I don’t think I’ve posted it before. Sometime last Spring, I think.
Caveat: 35) 어리석은 말로 상대방이 잘못되는 악연을 참회하며 절합니다
“I bow in repentance of any ties to the mistakes made by others because of their foolish talk.”
This is #35 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
…
33. 오직 나만을 생각하는 것을 참회하며 절합니다.
“I bow in repentance of thinking only of myself.”
34. 악연의 씨가되는 어리석은 생각을 참회하며 절합니다.
“I bow in repentance of any stupid thoughts [that are] the seeds of evil.”
35. 어리석은 말로 상대방이 잘못되는 악연을 참회하며 절합니다.
I would read this thirty-fifth affirmation as: “I bow in repentance of any ties to the mistakes made by others because of their foolish talk.”
This is exceptionally pertinent to my principal’s Friday night pontifications. So I will try not to attach to his words.
In Suwon I stay at my Korean friend’s guesthouse, which is near the Hwaseong palace. Here is a dark and fuzzy picture of the palace I took last night walking around.
Caveat: Day Two – Redemption Amid Snow and Orange Groves
[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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?).
Coming down, we saw many fine views.
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.
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.
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.
Caveat: Day One – “Go Home!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The principal needed a cigarette.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
Caveat: Bloody Auckland
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.
Caveat: Cyclone Yasi… and meanwhile in NZ…
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.
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.
Caveat: Patagonia Lite
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.
The town of Kaikoura, where I am at the present moment:
Caveat: Change-of-plan
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.
Here is the flood blocking the highway.
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?
Caveat: Cape Foulwind
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.”
A view from the ferry.
Here is the Marlborough Wine Country of the northeasternmost part of the South Island.
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.
The avian du jour.
The view looking north at Cape Foulwind.
And looking west across the Tasman Sea. Maybe toward Tasmania – or am I too far south already?
A place I stopped called Punakaiki.
Caveat: Taumata-whakatangihanga-koauau-o-tamatea-turi-pukakapiki-maunga-horo-nuku-pokai-whenua-kitanatahu
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.
Here are some other pictures. I saw a chicken at dawn (at roadside rest area where I slept a few hours).
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).
I saw some lakes.
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.
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.
Caveat: Sunset, Sunrise
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.
An abandoned motel in the desolate, depressing, yet charmingly-named town of Millaa Millaa.
Sunset as viewed from my mom’s house’s verandah.
This morning, I saw the crescent moon, before sunrise. Venus was right below it, but I don’t think it shows in the picture.
Caveat: Lookings Around
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.
Caveat: Wallabies in the driveway
I got to my mother’s house last night, and woke up this morning to wallabies in the driveway. I won’t be posting a lot of content these days because she still has dial-up! Yes, it’s 1997 in Ravenshoe, Queensland. But here is a picture of what I saw, while having rye toast with homemade grapefruit marmalade.
Caveat: Almost Realtime Obligatory Operahouse Photos
Well, it’s a touristic obligation, right? Last (and first) time I was in Syd, I didn’t pay this icon a visit (it was a wintery June, I think, and pouring rain). So here, I did it, this time. I walked 2 km up George Street from the train station, took a photo, ten minutes ago, and put it here.
