CAVEAT DVMPTRVCK

It was a strange sort of whirlwind weekend, I guess. Zooming up to Ilsan and back in just under 36 hours … was fun, but I feel tired. Plowing through a 400 page novel added to the slight sense of vertigo.

I had fun at the event, though mostly I was people watching, rather than interacting. I received gifts – I think Koreans like to give gifts at their parties to the guests – often cheesy, but still well-intentioned. This is a trait, if I recall correctly, that Koreans share with hobbits. Hmm… I mean that in a nice way.

I shall never have to buy a hand towel, in this country, as long as I can be invited to a social event every few months. And this time my hand towel was arranged to look like a cake (left, below). Here’s a picture of my haul of gifts.

I also got some tteok (rice cake – right). It comes in many different forms, but I love it when it’s just these featureless bricks of slightly sweet, slightly grainy, sticky rice meal. Maybe like a cross between polenta and elmer’s glue.  It’s perhaps one of the most abstract foods imaginable. The sort of thing that one day will come out “food dispensers” on a spaceship. And it’s delicious.

And I won a pretty nice bowl (with lid – center), too, in a sort of contest. I won it because I was the person who had “traveled farthest” to come to the event – two times over, counting, on the one hand, my status as sole foreigner, and therefore technically from outside of Korea, and on the other hand, my having come just that morning from Jeollanam, which was pretty far even within Korea.

Speaking of towels, when I was in my hotel room this morning, getting ready to leave, I absently tossed my towel down on the coffee table, and look what it did:

It stood up like that, for no apparent reason but its own inherent stiffness. Almost eerie – I’ve never seen a towel do that.

I finished reading the novel, Life of Pi. I don’t know if I like how it ends – I didn’t find it necessarily uplifting. Just vaguely ambiguous. But it’s still a pretty good book. And it’s the first time I’ve read a novel straight through, that way, in years.

I stopped by the Kyobo Mungo in Gangnam, which has, in my opinion, the best selection of English language books I’ve seen anywhere in Korea. I browsed for a while. I bought a book on syntactic theory. I’m not sure what made me do this. I had been reflecting the other day, on my very strange tendency to derive some kind of weird, abstract yet at the same time visceral pleasure in my contemplation of the most abstruse aspects of Korean grammar, and thinking, well, that’s always the part I liked best about studying linguistics, too. So, what the heck? Maybe I should get a book on general syntax and see if it’s interesting to me, after so many years.

If nothing else, it will provide me with an opportunity to become annoyed with Chomsky again, who still seems to dominate syntactic theory, even now – he’s moved on from GB (“Government and Binding” Theory [take that, Foucault!] which I spent a small amount of time with in a graduate-level syntax class back in the late 1980’s, when it was the latest concoction to emerge from Chomsky’s brain) to something called “minimalism.” Hah.

I saw my friend Curt, yesterday. We went to a restaurant in the building next his hagwon (that he owns) that we sometimes go to. We ate bibimbap with tasty veggies, and his daughter (around age 8 or 9?) was as shy as usual.

Later, he wanted to talk about what it takes to build a compelling a curriculum at the elementary level. I have some ideas, and I know he wants to hear them, but in some ways they run counter to what most Koreans believe a hagwon should be.

My dream would be to build an “Arts” hagwon that just coincidentally happens to be in English. The idea is to teach English “by accident” while the kids are having fun doing art projects, drama projects, music projects. I would want to strongly encourage team and peer teaching, too, and my work with my “town building class” over the summer confirms that finding an “intrinsic motivator” (like having a complex classroom economy with lots of fake money in circulation) is a great way to keep kids engaged and help them forget they’re bored.

Curt wants me to write something up about all this. I’m going to try – the above paragraph constitutes a “back-of-napkin” draft of a statement of purpose, maybe.

I walked around Ilsan a little bit, then I took the subway back to the bus terminal and got on a sunset bus bound straight for Glory [Yeonggwang]. I took some pictures.

Some trees live in Ilsan.

Looking north from a pedestrian bridge on the Juyeop esplanade.

Turning to the right on the same pedestrian bridge, look – a Domino’s.

Some girls at play at a fountain on Juyeop esplanade.

Here is the street I like to call “Academy Road” [real name is Ilsan-no = Ilsan Avenue].  Looking west (can you see North Korea?  It’s just behind that hill in the far distance). All the buildings’ inifitude of signs are advertising hagwons.

Looking east, more hagwons, including my 3 former places of work (all clustered in two blocks along the right side).

Here is the Honam Line bus terminal, looking down on some ticket windows.  Seoul’s main express bus terminal is confusing, because it’s actually more than one terminal, separated by several blocks of mall-like real estate.  Honam Line serves the southwest part of the country.

As I was looking out the bus window, the sun set near Osan.

People kept smiling at me, today. Randomly. This isn’t typical, in Korea, where strangers ignore (at best) or are gruff (at worst) with other strangers. Are Koreans in a good mood, because of the holiday? Or am I putting off some weird “good mood” vibe that people are picking up?

I returned to Sim City, today.  Sim City?  Every time I come back to Ilsan, now that I’ve lived other places and spent lots of time in other parts of South Korea, I realize just how untypical it is. It’s all organized. It’s extremely upper-middle-class. It’s got right angles and wide streets and trees planted in rows along them, and regularly placed schools, police stations, parks. Ilsan was designed by a guy playing Sim City.

This place was my home, for two years. I liked it here – partly, the kids were great students, because they all come from highly motivated, upwardly mobile families. Partly, it’s high density, easy to get around, convenient for a foreigner, without being so far from Seoul that it’s hard to get there. And to those who imagine coming to Korea to teach, I can recommend it as a “soft landing” – it’s kind of a cultural halfway between American suburban lifestyles and Korean urban lifestyles.

Here’s Ilsan-from-space, from Google Earth. The evenly-spaced white rectangles are all schools, with their matching, uniform schoolyards (I think this satellite photo was done when there was snow on the ground, hence the whiteness).

See all the perfect squares? My place of work was near the top center of this image. My apartment was just off the bottom center. My commute consisted of a two kilometer walk with only right-angle turns, of wide pedestrian esplanades with lots of trees and modernist public sculpture, and playing children on every side. Quite different from the Yeonggwang fish market behind the bus terminal, the busride through rice fields, Hongnong’s high street. Both have their charms, to be sure.

I decided to go to the Costco, at 백석 [baek-seok]. There are many Korean Costcos closer to my home (in fact, I’d bet that the Ilsan Costco is actually the one that is absolutely farthest from my home, given it’s about 15 km short of North Korean border), but I go to the one in Ilsan for two reasons: 1) I know exactly where it is, and it’s only 1 block from the subway station; 2) I like coming to Ilsan anyway, for nostalgia reasons, since I lived here in 2007-2009.

I never (literally NEVER) shopped at Costco in the US. I found it inconvenient, to have to be a member, and bargain-hunting, per se, is not my style of shopping. But I like Costco in Korea, because it’s one international retailer that makes very few concessions to local market differences. The consequence is that walking into a Costco in Ilsan is like teleporting to suburban Los Angeles – the ethnicity of the clientele is even roughly similar, although skewed differently. So it’s a chance to make a quick shopping trip back to the US, without the expensive airfare.

I shop at Costco for pants. Why? Because I have had bad experiences getting Korean-sized pants, even doing conversions. Costco puts the traditional (and irrational) American sizes right on them: I know if I pick up 34W30L jeans, they will fit, more or less.

In my 15 minutes in Costco, I heard the following things, all uttered by different children under 12 years old:

“eom-ma [mom], can we get this?”

“oh, cool!” – brother;  “it’s stupid.” – sister.

“oh my god! they have THESE.”

So… the children in Ilsan’s Costco speak English. That makes sense. This is a place for Korea’s aspirational classes. But it’s a little bit disorienting to hear, after months out in the provincia.