The Start of Summer

The winter finally seems to have released its terrible grip on this island after months of false hope and seeming mockery. The true indication of this was that our plans for a large beach gathering, foiled in previous weeks by the sadistic weather pattern of "beautiful sunny weekdays/piss-poor dreary weekends and vacation days", was finally able to happen. So we packed our beach towels, sunscreen, and, with jaded skepticism, an umbrella and warm clothes for the unfortunately common meteorological bait-and-switch we'd experienced constantly over the previous months.

Our destination, Hamdeok beach, was described and pictured somewhere back in my first blog posts. Thankfully, it seems that the thriving beach-roach population was wiped out by the months of cold weather. We found the beach deserted when we arrived, save two or three Hamdeok locals; as it is not yet officially "beach season", the Korean population wouldn't dream of going near it, leaving us a deserted island paradise.

As an outsider living in a society where behavior is overwhelmingly dictated by social custom, we are uniquely free. While this has hurt us (in the freezing depths of February, a store informed us that "heater season" was over, and thus the heaters weren't being sold anymore), it also leaves us with open beaches and occasional sale of items going out of vogue. I am not sure if this indisputable cycle of goods and behavior is an imposition on the Koreans, or if they are truly of one mind on such things, but I do know that when it was miserably cold at the beginning of Spring, I personally was glad that I wasn't socially bound to shed my jacket and go out in skimpier attire like the Koreans. They looked miserable.

When we got to Hamdeok just after noon, we walked toward the small cove at the end of the beach where, during the official Beach Season, the ultra-strict beach lifeguards have no authority. While I have never been here during the height of summer when they are on patrol, I have been told that because Koreans are notoriously weak swimmers, swimmers aren't allowed out beyond, like, chest depth. Even if a foreigner tries to go out beyond these limits, they will circle around you on jet skis blowing whistles at you until you surrender and return to shore. As a result, the foreign population has found an adjacent beach to escape such harassment. Today, however, the group had apparently chosen to go elsewhere, so we started back up the path to the main beach where we supposed they must be.

On the way, we passed a small hut where five clearly high-school aged girls were clandestinely pounding down cheap beer. Drunk and excitable, one of the ran out at us after seeing my friend's dog Zeus. She insisted that we all take pictures together with her. We obliged, and she stumbled back to her friends, but it was hardly the last we'd see of them- they eventually found the group of foreigners later that day, and went from group to group trying to talk to people. They later claimed to be twenty years old... somehow I doubt it. Maybe that was part of them angling to have someone buy them booze or something.

Zeus, the (maybe) poodle-Cocker Spaniel mix


The high school girls Zeus attracted


Going on the inevitable beer run some time after we had settled down, I found a GS 25 store just down the main road. Outside, a man sat at a table and was, despite it being 12:30 pm, working on his 13th can of Cass beer. I passed, and had the distinct impression that I was nearly invisible to him. This changed rather dramatically when I left the store carrying two bottles of makeolli, the unfiltered country liquor popular with farmers, old men, and midday alcoholics (most fit into all three categories). As soon as the old man saw the milky-white beverage, he magically took an interest in me and started pulling out all the English word he knew to try to get a cup of it... which is rather strange, because at roughly $1.20 a bottle, it's not exactly vintage champagne. This happens every time I walk out in public with a bottle of this stuff- old men come out of the woodwork and start trying to make conversation. Maybe that's why I like drinking it: it makes me King of the Bums, like some kind of Pied Piper. Makeolli, the alcohol of mooches.

After several hours of laying out (or rather, burning my pale self) in the sun, I overheard one of the other foreign teachers talking about some sort of music video shoot taking place on the secluded beach we had first visited. A friend and I set off to check it out, though we did so unfortunately barefoot, and had to traverse progressively more and more painful stretches of barbed grass and volcanic rock shards to get there, under the mistaken impression with each step that we were closer to relief at our destination than if we went back and got shoes. As a result of our slow limping, we caught the very tail end of the K-Pop dance routine. The crew started to strike the set, and the dancers and a man that seemed to be the singer started climbing up the stone steps towards us. The man sheepishly said hello to us, greetings which we returned, and followed with a question about what was going on. A look of absolute terror spread over the guy's face, and he took off running, shouting "English No! English very very very no!". We found out from one of the crew that the video was for a new Korean dance artist called Miracle, who we understood to be the man who had just run screaming from our native language. That makes the first (but possibly not the last) time I've scared a pop star by simply talking to them.

April is the Cruellest Month

Back again after another illness. I don't know exactly what it was, as the witch doctors in Jeju weren't able to scry from their casting of bones and reading of the planets what was wrong with me. Basically, it was a stomach problem, and the main result will be that I am not drinking alcohol or eating spicy food for a few months, and am probably done with soju for life. I was checked into the hospital for a short time, just to run some tests, and it was certainly an experience. Nothing like waking up nauseous and needing to use the restroom, yet having to traverse a hospital hallway full of half-eaten Korean breakfasts and the pungent aroma they give off. Mackerel is not a breakfast food. Radish is not a breakfast food. Seaweed, kimchi, and garlic are not breakfast foods. It was horrible. They heat the rooms to around 90 degrees, and were seemingly baffled when I asked them to turn the heat off. I paid for a private room (at a strangely cheap $30) because in the shared rooms, where old Korean grandparents were laid out in pairs, their entire extended family came and slept in the room with them. I didn't want to share my room with a korean family, so I upgraded.

Anyway, I'm doing more or less better. I managed to lose 25 pounds in the last two weeks, which is 500% of my previous achievement at the gym after a month and a half. What it means, though, is that my pants are falling off, and my belt is at least two notches too big. I was able to finally find a Korean shirt that fit me, in a Large size. And as long as I can't drink beer, I'm sure I will only lose more. Gotta find a silver lining, eh?

Drive My Car
We are now the proud owners of a car. The unique world of the "foreign teacher to foreign teacher" system of car sales here allowed us to get a $400 four-door sedan. It's a 1993 Hyundai Sonata; to call it old is a bit of an understatement. But it runs fine so far, and has a working radio, A/C, and the like, so I can't really complain. It even came with a bitchin'... um, leopard-skin paint job on the roof. The good news is that should the car maintain a level of functionality, we can sell it for the same price that we paid for it.

Learning to drive a manual transmission car in Jeju has been tough- the entire island is essentially a sloping mountainside running from the peak of Mt. Halla down to the sea, though occasionally spotted with smaller hills. Level terrain is the exception here. So learning to successfully start on an incline has been a incredibly important. My drive to school, as well as 90% of the rest of the island, is uphill from our house. And because Korean drivers will pull within inches of the back bumper of my car, I've really only one chance to get it right. The times when I have stalled out result in furious honking, gnashing of teeth, and tearing of beards from those behind me, which doesn't help at all. I think I've got it down now, though my current low gas mileage suggests that I need to ease up a bit. Should be great for the summer for going to the beach, now that the miserable cold has lifted, hopefully for good this time.

Alicia and the car, as she tries to learn to drive it.



Erection Day
For four weeks late last year, between the middle of November and December, the looming presidential election launched dozens of campaigning Korean to the street to promote their favorite candidate, all 10 or so of whom were conveniently numbered, which I suppose in a country full of Kims and Yangs makes thins less confusing. Yet instead of passing out fliers on their candidate's beliefs or giving speeches, they choose something far more relevant to the political process: synchronized dancing to irritating theme songs. A truck featuring a blown up photo of the candidate's face would pull off the road onto the sidewalk next to any major intersection, and blast any of several theme songs for that candidate, which usually featured a man shouting out the candidate's number, "O-BON!" for number five, for example. A team of women (and the occasional out-of-place man) in matching shirts would assemble in front of the truck and dance to the music. This was especially prevalent during rush hours.

This is how I learned that there are no noise violations in Korea. Our old apartment, Ido Officetel, was maybe 400 feet or more away from a major intersection, and several buildings stood in between. Despite this distance and degree of acoustic insulation, every morning at 7am, for that entire month of campaigning, the dance team for one of the candidates blasted their music so loud that they sounded like they were in the damn bed with me. Ear plugs and sweatshirts tied around the head weren't even enough to mute their horrible chanting. And because Saturday is a work day for an unfortunate bulk of the population, they were there to greet me into countless Saturday morning hangovers.

I felt like I could at least take comfort in documenting this silly practice, and judging by the escalation of the campaigning as the weeks went on, I could only assume that Election Day would be insane- traffic would be shut down so mobs of these Korean shills could dance in support of their favorite contender and ear-splitting anthems would fill the air. So I was more than a little shocked that nothing, and I mean nothing, was to be found on December 19th. There must be a law against campaigning on the day of the election, but I of course had no idea, and completely missed my shot to record any of the prancing for politics. I was pretty upset.

Lucky for me, Koreans wait until four months later to elect their Parliament.

Our apartment is far enough away from a major intersection to give us a break from the endless sonic assault we had to endure before. I didn't even know that there was an election coming until a week or two before. Unfortunately, I was checked into the hospital for two days during the final run-up to the election, and the hospital was on a major road. So, both days at 7:30 in the morning, a Candidate #14 truck with several loudspeakers began driving up and down the road playing a song repeatedly punctuated with cries of "SHIPSA-BON!". I swear he just circled the hospital area for hours, driving me out of my mind. There apparently is no escape from these people.

After my final check-up a few days later, I decided to enjoy my recovered health and walk back to my house, a fair distance away. I had luckily brought my camera along, and finally got the chance to capture some of the idiocy of this campaign process. Mr. Sa-Bon, candidate #4, had a truck parked next to city hall playing songs that alternately sounded like tragic Asian lamentations, or commercial jingles full of creepy laughter.



A group of people in shirts emblazoned with big orange 4s was slowly coagulating around the area into a small group, which, after a few moments of discussion, formed a dance line and tried to charm the passing traffic.



This one takes a little longer to load for some reason, just give it a second.


I have no idea who won the election (and I don't care, just as long as Shipsa-bon lost...), but I'm certainly glad to have had a second chance to get those videos. We had planned back in December to paint a number on our shirts and go try and dance with them, but alas, there's never enough time.

--------------------------------------------

It's nice to be back in the land of the living, and I hope everyone else is doing well.

The Fire Festival

A week of unrelenting winter passed. We had taken what remained of our vacation time for the winter semester, and had the next week off from work, a respite we desperately needed to recover and mostly used to sleep, sleep, and sleep some more. The camp had taken a huge toll on us; we had both caught awful colds and lost our voices. I had actually lost vision in my right eye on the last night of the camp- an electric fuzz rainbow, the kind you get after staring at a light bulb for too long, had spread in from the periphery of my vision until my entire right eye was sightless. I was fairly horrified, until it returned a full 20 minutes later. Needless to say, I was more than a little glad for a week off to recuperate.

Very little of note happened that week, which was just the way I hoped it would be. At a school dinner that Wednesday, I found out that both of my co-teachers were leaving, and I would have to learn to work with two new teachers starting the next week. You see, one of the more asinine aspects of the Korean education system is that teachers are relocated every three years or so to a different school (and usually a different grade level), whether they like it or not. In Jeju, this means they can be moved anywhere on the island, even to the town on the opposite side of the island- an hour or more commute in the morning. To make matters worse, they are informed of their relocation around a month before hand, then learn of the actual location about two weeks before classes start, and finally are told only 3 days prior to the first day of school which grade they will be teaching, and are then expected to spend their last weekend drawing up their lesson plans for the entire year. As far as I can tell, or have heard, this is a completely arbitrary process that could easily be done earlier, but is conducted as such to uphold "tradition". The staggering stagnancy that this culture at times displays is unbelievable.

Anyway- soon enough, the day of the Fire Festival was upon us. I had been loading up on a whole slew of pills, trying to get over my cold in time for whatever weather that Saturday could throw at us. As it turned out, it was the warmest day in several months, a beautiful clear day that seemed separated by several months of thawing from the previous Saturday. The stalls and stalls of pork vendors had vanished, along with the warzone clutter of the previous week's dozens of collapsed tents. Ultimately, it made for a more attractive scene, more natural and less white plastic flappings.

This weather made our early arrival at 3:30 pm much less of a mistake than the week before. After several hours of hanging out and meeting friends (and almost getting set on fire by an incompetent festival lackey who knocked a flaming log onto my backpack from the top of a stone tower), the sun began to set. Small campfires sprung up about the grounds, and men began to pass out little homemade constructs made with a long wire handle, attached to a tin can with holes punched in it, filled with tissue paper. When lit on fire and rapidly spun on the wire handle, they looked like this:


The entire hillside we were on was covered in glowing orange arcs, the majority made by children. Little children... spinning cans of fire in a crowd. It's nice to be in a place that's not overly concerned with safety sometimes, though we did have a few near misses (most of which were our own fault).

Light My Fire


The last of the evenings light was draining out of the sky when a procession of three little girls carrying torches began to cut through the crowd. They came from the very back of the festival grounds through swelling crowds (I had to chase after them 4 times to get a good picture without people getting in the way), then skirted the edge of the mountain and disappeared into the crowd. A minute or so later, accompanied by loud chanting and cheering and an unending, pulsing drumbeat, a small patch of flame arose in the heart of the crowd, as the first three torches sparked a dozen more. It spread from person to person, one gasoline-soaked bamboo pole to the next, until a massive faction had formed, and began marching like an angry mob toward the hill.







Once they were all aligned along the base of the mountain, each bundled bale with a small crowd around it, the firework display began.

(I suppose that song from the Requiem For A Dream is utterly ubiquitous now, if it's even being used in South Korea folk festivals)

Post-Fireworks Corona


The crown of the hill had an eerie red glow as the crest of the hill caught fire. There was very little time for anyone to appreciate this before a hoarse-voiced Korean man started screaming out a countdown, and the looming hordes descended on the hill. It went up in flames immediately.


[I was apparently too high up on the hill, and could have been blown up by the charges. Notice how I'm getting shoved down the hill while recording this. Oops...]


Great Balls of Fire! The Wish-Ball Burns...


The smaller bales of straw


Oreum ablaze.




Firefighters


This is a full 20 minutes after the fire was lit:


The fire went on for roughly 30 minutes without diminishing greatly in size, and in fact was still going fairly strong when we left after forty minutes. Following the ignition of the hill, there was another fireworks display. It was one of my favorite things about the festival; because of the immense heat, and the resulting waves of distortion flowing out from it, the fireworks looked like they were underwater, blurred and dancing through the heat. We sat down near the foot of the blaze and looked up into the stars. It was stunning.

The fire festival had lived up to its reputation, and merited the return visit. I wish that the massive crowd of hundreds of thousands had been present like in years prior, but there was something special about the intimacy of a small scale, mostly-Jeju residents kind of event. I was interviewed again for TV (#7) on the way out, and got to share my inebriated enthusiasm. It definitely was a high point of my time here so far.


(see if you can read my hat)

Winter Camp and the Wind Festival: Disarray and Disappontment

Vacation time has been tough on my bank account. Sometime toward the end of January, it seemed that the combination of all the money spent on winter vacations, forking over a $1,500 deposit on our new place, and just the general mindless spending that comes with having no sort of daily routine had nearly bankrupted me. Additionally, the summer approaching we had our hearts set on getting a car so as to not spend countless hours busing around the island or bumming rides from our friends. Thus, when one of our friends first mentioned a week-long camp sometime in February the would pay an additional 900,000 won ($900), I was all about it.

We learned that it would involve 5 days of teaching at one of many different possible sites around the island, then end with a 2-day overnight stay with all of the 400 participating children at Jeju National University. All lessons plans and materials would be provided. We would essentially be reading a script for a week, which ain't a bad deal at all for the money, despite a schedule which we later calculated out to 80 hours of teaching.

We were fortunate enough to get a site near our house, unlike some others in our city who had to drive an hour and a half into the countryside to teach extremely low-level students. Within 15 minutes of arriving at the school, the lies we had been told about this camp became apparent- the "material" we were provided was woefully inadequate, a textbook of five-minute worksheets, each intended to fill a full 40 minute class period. There were no lesson plans to speak of, no goals or material to be focused on, no instructions for the P.E. activities... An awful day of improvisation followed. The kids, selected from low income families, went along pretty well with it, though both Alicia and I had a kid run away from us during P.E. and try to go home. I noticed mine, and had to chase him a block and a half down the road to get him to come back. Alicia's kid was threatening the other kids so he was sent inside to a sort of "time out", which he found unfair and decided to disappear. He was eventually returned to the camp by his mother after an hour of fruitless searches by Alicia and our Korean teacher.

We later found out that this Korean woman went behind Alicia's back and told the runaway youth that Alicia was being unfair, essentially validating the kid's response. She was a major pain in the ass, and went on to cause trouble a friend at the overnight camp. All the while she was cheery and nice, though, really demonstrating the backstabbing and lying that goes on in a language barrier situation such as ours.

By the end of the first night, we and everyone we talked to wanted to quit. The rest of the week was only marginally improved once Alicia and I instituted our own break periods, yet every evening was filled with dread for the coming morning, and made worse for me by a cough that progressed from a slight tickle in my throat to full-on hacking tuberculosis territory, from having to yell over the kids all day.

The overnight camp managed to top the day classes in disorganization and sheer madness, which could be illustrated by an endless number of stories, but this one really sums it up:

The administrators decided to split the different site groups up. No teacher, therefore, knew the children they were now in charge of, the children didn't know the teacher, and they don't know each other, which means we were constantly hunting for children who had run off somewhere on this huge college campus to be with their old friends. The plan for the second day was to take our new and unfamiliar groups of children from the countryside, load all 400 of them on a series of city buses, and unload them in the heart of the shopping district during rush hour. After getting them all into a movie theater, we had a short break, then we were told we would walk them down a mile of busy roadway to the McDonald's near the harbor for lunch, then onto the city bus down to the airport to show some of the more rural children airplanes for the first time. This plan was only changed at the very last minute (that morning, an hour before) when government officials learned of it and forked over extra cash for rental buses to avoid a catastrophe. The rest remained the same, and went about as well as could be expected: children were nearly run over by taxis, the movie was delayed while we tried to get them all inside, kids ran off at the harbor and wandered down the main roads or hung precariously over the seawall, and at the airport they clogged up the security booths and one group of teachers and students was even abandoned for an hour after the buses all left.

By the end of the day, I had almost completely lost my voice and had to resort to using a bamboo rod to direct, gesture at, or threaten the kids.


There were some cool parts- I guess we did help out some underprivileged kids. Some of the kids really seemed to appreciate it, and I saw some really change in the improbably short span of a week. When we were at the movie theater, there was a kid who had never ridden an escalator before, and stood nervously, sizing it up, until he worked up the courage to jump on. A number of my students have written me emails since the camp was over.

This was my original class. (The kid in back was trying to hide.)


But in the end these positive points were merely diversions from the damnable chaos created by poor planning. Another American had signed on to help set up the camp, and was stuck in the unfortunate role of playing the middleman and whipping boy for the criticism... so in the end I don't even think the Koreans in charge knew just how bad they messed this up. We stayed the week because it would have been unfair to the kids if we left. But we sure as hall won't get fooled again.

Earth, Wind, and... Nothing

All week long we had been slogging onward with a light at the end of the tunnel- quite literally. The annual Jeju (Jeongwol Daboreum) Fire Festival was to be held on the Saturday on which the camp ended. We were leaving from Jeju University straight to Saebyeol Oreum, a massive mountain/hill (technically, a volcanic parasitic cone) that was annually set ablaze in what was supposed to be one of the most exciting festivals of the year. The year prior, 3 million people apparently had descended on the island over the course of the three-day festival. That's 600% of the population of the entire island.

Saebyeol Oreum


When we arrived at the oreum at 3:30, slightly earlier than we had anticipated due to the curious lack of traffic, we found that there were maybe at most 500 people milling about, and that it was insanely cold and windy. The wind was constant, and was at 30 miles an hour, with gusts greatly exceeding that. More than half of the festival tents and exhibits had blown away- really, even the massive metal map guide sign was weighed down with heavy stones. Me and a friend went out walking towards the mountain, onto a plain of crumbled volcanic gravel, and the wind literally knocked me over.

To make matters worse, the previous two nights had featured mini-bonfires, meaning that the air was full of ash flake projectiles. Later that evening, and into the next day, everyone had wet black lines trailing out of the corners of their eyes like stage makeup. Yet we stuck it out, for four bleak hours of huddling around the warmth of barbecue pits and what minimal tent protection still stood.

At some point, we made the icy trek across the grounds to put little slips of paper with wishes on them into a great ball of straw resting at the foot of the hill. We found that it, like the rest of the hill, had been absolutely soaked in gasoline.

The ball of straw, bound with wishes and highly flammable (the bottle in the man's hand is extra gasoline)


One of the Gas Trucks that were spraying down the mountain.


As most people seemed to be clustered behind any sort of available shelter against the endless assault of the wind, the places around the stage and other "organizers-only" areas were relatively deserted, enabling my drunk friend to steal a set of fire poles, which would be used to later set the mountain ablaze. When we were spotted with them, as was more or less inevitable frankly, the staff sort of shrugged their shoulders and let us keep them. Things were working out. The sun had set. We only had ten minutes at that point until the fire began.

Then, a camera crew approached us. They asked us to talk about our feelings, now that the fire had been cancelled. Well, clearly we felt pretty fucking angry that they had waited until we'd been frozen and blown about for 4 hours to decide this. They interviewed my friend's father, who was in Jeju for a week. Some staff members came and took away our fire poles. It wasn't happening. It was "too windy". This was from a group of people who doused a mountain in gasoline. So, clearly, pinnacles of safety and security. Why did they have to get all responsible now?

On the way out, past the forming lines of endless traffic, we were approached by another camera crew; They were seemingly drawn to a the big white man with a tall bamboo pole, drunkenly shouting the only two Korean swear words he knew as he angrily marched home (I found the pole in a pile of wind-strewn debris- We later used it to stop traffic to cross the highway). This made my sixth television appearance- once they started the interview I was much less volatile. (The fifth one is a whole other story from a few weeks ago involving a wooden bull, soju, and the mayor, but I'm still waiting on the photos from a friend)

We initially tried to hitchhike home, but ended up flagging down a bus, and turning what could have been a $30 taxi ride into a $1.50 bus trip. It wasn't until the next day that we heard they would reschedule the festival, so the rest of the night following the aborted inferno was rather bleak. I think I went home at midnight, after falling into another alarming fit of coughing.

But repeat it they did, which I've decided to give it's own entry, hopefully to be posted this weekend. There's quite a bit of video, a lot of it over the youtube size limit, so if anyone knows of a hosting site that allows over 100MB, let me know. It was well worth the first trip out there, back, and out there again. It was awesome, as I soon hope to show you.

And just because there was really no where else to put it, here's a picture of a miserable clown vendor. It really sums up the feeling of that evening.

Moving Season

The last true holiday vacation we will have until July, the Lunar New Year period was about as uneventful as a five-day weekend could be; despite plotting with one of my friends to fly off to China for a vacation filled with fireworks and dragon parades, it was a combination of our finances, our girlfriends, and devastating nation-wide blizzards in China reportedly stranding visiting tourists that grounded our dreams. Instead, we were left with the far less flashy Korean lunar new year, Seol-na, which as far as foreigners is concerned is like another Chuseok: everything is closed. It's like being Jewish on Christmas morning, except that it lasts three days. Nothing to do but wait it out. And drink. A lot.

It's been a long time since I've woken up at 4pm, but I suppose that is to be expected after consecutive 5 or 6 am nights. Having just recently moved, we have now found ourselves located right next to one of the main foreigner bars on the island. What this means is, after what would by all other accounts be a full night out at the bar, "going home" has somehow become synonymous with "going to the Blue Agave for an hour, then maybe walking down the road to McDonalds for breakfast". Really, it is cheaper to convince a group of people to leave City Hall and share a cab with us back to our area of town, though I don't think those saving compare to the inevitable drink or two at the Agave. Somehow the flaw in my money-saving scheme has never occurred to me at the time.

Doors!
We've finally made the move out of our molded, claustrophobic former living arrangements- what the Koreans call a "One-Room Officetel"- into a much more spacious arrangement... still an officetel, but now we actually have doors! And not just a front door, or a bathroom door, because of course we had those before, but now we have a mini-patio room to dry clothes in (there are no clothes dryers in Korea, but now instead of taking 5 days to dry in a shut bathroom, they take 2 days to dry!). Most exciting, of course, is the fact that we have bedroom doors now... or that we have a proper "bedroom" for that matter. And by creating a bedroom, we simultaneously gain a "living room". No longer is the bed a kitchen table and couch. As an added bonus, I finally have a full-sized refrigerator, which is a huge improvement and a welcome change after years of living in Guinan Hall, and then stashing my food in my own small fridge for the last year, because, let's face it, that fridge in the Corner House was never mine. I'm not even convinced that half of it's contents belonged to anyone. They were just there, always had been, always would be.

It does come as something of a blow to have to leave the warm neon bosom of City Hall, with its scores of galbi restaurants and literally hundreds of bars within a half-mile radius. The old one room place was up a sharp hill shooting out of the heart of it all, a late-night climb often lamented but in no way comparable to the distance between us and the heart of the city now. Aside from the one aforementioned bar, we essentially live in a gloomy medical district, populated by pharmacies and funeral homes huddled around the hulking and sterile gray mass of Jeju University Hospital, a proximity which is convenient only in illness, a state which I feel I have had more than enough of. No doubt our plans to purchase a car within a month or so will reduced the isolated feeling that has come with this relocation, but for now I feel like I've gone from Manhattan to a New Jersey suburb.

At least the taxis are relatively cheap. And at least we have friends in our new building already.

Considering the circumstances, however, it's plain to see that location preference took a back seat to immediate necessity. Due to a series of strained and misinterpreted exchanges between me and the series of relays I had to use to talk to the owner of our former unit, concerning the mold problem, and following what was perhaps an ill-conceived attempt to bluff that we'd "have to think about leaving" if the problem wasn't solved (which considering the amount of subtlety and nuance often lost in translation probably came across as more of an ultimatum that I had intended), we were informed that despite our year lease agreement, the unit was being sold as soon as possible. Our contract had been with the "owner of the unit", thus if he sold said unit, he was no longer a party in the contract. Or some such bullshit. So, we could be kicked out as soon as someone bought it.

So, we moved. We were fortunate enough to have hit the prime season for moving in Jeju, and by "prime season", I mean, "superstitious annual wave of relocation to escape from ghosts". I'm not kidding. This is not a few people moving, it is a huge number of people who feel the need every February to uproot themselves and their loved ones, and move to a new location. Whether or not they all subscribe to the superstition behind the idea of "moving season" here, I can't be sure. But it is fairly prolific, I understand, to find a new house in order to escape from evil spirits that have taken up residency in one's old place. I've heard of such extremes as individuals not giving anyone their new address until some time has passed and they are sure the ghosts have lost their trail.

Thus, by the grace of this mass exodus, we were able to find a unit in Jina Tower Officetel, and on February 1st we packed the surprising amount of crap we've accumulated and hauled it down to the new place, with our new bed and couch delivered later that afternoon. We finally got out of the damp, cramped cage we had so long been living in.

Where We Lived: Ido One-Room Officetel
The first two were taken from the same spot, with a slight angle of pivot.




Why We Moved
An example of the state of the wallpaper.


Our New Apartment
Complete with actual rooms (though in the middle of being unpacked)




We have to shower over the sink now, though.




And as a final aside, I met a guy on the island who had some photos from the wrestling competition, taken with a better camera.. Photo credits to Brian Miller.

On Returning

The winter months here are hardly kind. It is not particularly colder than other climates (though certainly moreso than Houston), but it is rather the near-universal lack of central heating in Korea that makes winter so damn unenjoyable. Right now, I am sitting in my office at school with a well-meaning but woefully weak and aged electric heater which is succeeding only in making one of my pants legs uncomfortably warm, while leaving the rest of me freezing. This sort of existence is particularly difficult on my fingers, who are somewhere between numb and frozen, rendering each keystroke into a Herculean effort. I suppose I could blame my online inactivity on a reason as suspect as cold-crippled fingers, but I don't think anyone would buy it. The truth is there are a number of reasons why both my blog and email output has dropped off rather miserably to nothing.

The cold is certainly not free from blame. Jeju Island, during the first few months of our stay, was a fantastic adventure full of trips to the beach, going out with friends, and seeing all kinds of wonderful and exotic sights. Then, sometime around the middle of December, it got painfully cold, a state of affair made far worse by the ceaseless winds on this island. Going to the beach was now an absurd idea, as they were perhaps the most exposed and windy parts of the island. With the change in the weather also came fewer and fewer social events, and everyone seemed to bunker down in their homes against the dreary world outside. With Christmas came yet even greater disappointment, as it seems (from polling my students) that less than 10% of Koreans here in Jeju celebrate the holiday. I had never really appreciated how much I would miss the lights, music, and celebrations of Christmas back home. Instead, we had a bleak swath of winter to wade through with very little light on the horizon. Honestly, the most festive Christmas decorations I saw were during my repeated visits to the emergency room for food poisoning and other illnesses.

Seoul undoubtedly gave us a break from the frigid boredom of Jeju, and I have plenty to write about that later. Yet for all the good it did, it really made the reality of what we were missing abundantly clear- all of Western influence pervading Seoul only highlighted its lack in Jeju. For the weeks following New Years, Alicia and I stayed at a friend's house while she was away in Canada. It was nice to avoid the worsening mold problem in our one-room apartment, though our elation at having more space was soon dampened by the reality of such old Korean houses- they are drafty, and with a method of heating based on heating the water in pipes running through the floor (ondol), they take hours to get even marginally warmer. When the oil ran out in the ondol system during our last week, there was little left to do but wrap up in blankets and try to read. We could clearly see our breath everywhere in the house. Alicia took to cooking nonstop, just to be near the warmth of the stove and oven.

In short, it was just winter depression. Somewhere in the combination of it all, I felt like I lost my sense of excitement in being here, and certainly didn't feel like writing about anything at all. How could I convey the excitement of eating new foods or the fun of visiting strange theme parks, or anything for that matter, when I had trouble even coaxing myself out of bed and to the computer? I couldn't, or, if not that, I certainly didn't.

So what's the good news? Well, I've been feeling much better lately; all the stomach problems have been greatly reduced by just drinking a lot more water. We found a new place to live, one with an actual separation between the bedroom and living room, with a full kitchen to boot. Seoul was a whole lot of fun, and it was great to see Spencer- I think he enjoyed the trip as well. I'm done with my winter camps, which were classes that I taught alone (despite the guidelines set up by my employer mandating that I should always have a Korean co-teacher). The kids seemed to really like them; one 3rd grade girl gave me a little cat-shaped envelope she made with a thank-you card in it. I'm done with classes for the next month, though we found an opportunity to make roughly $900 for a week's work in the middle of February. It's the money we need to buy a car, just in time for beach season. It's only looking up from here.

And of course, with cold weather comes some unique events...

The Penguin Swim
Once I got past the health issues, things took a decidedly better turn. And the timing couldn't have been better- less than three days after my last visit to the hospital, it was time for the Jungmun Penguin Swim, an event I had been looking forward to since I arrived in Jeju, and certainly one of the greater reasons I packed my Speedo.

The event is essentially a Polar Bear swim, a freezing mid-winter plunge into the Pacific ocean. I'd had difficulty finding out the exact date of the event, as there are no two Jeju event guide books that provide the same date for any event on the island. I had originally believed that it would be occurring on the 6th of January, the day before my brother returned to Texas. I learned that it was in fact a week later. Not only that, but the agency through which I am employed, EPIK, had decided that, in hopes of encouraging a greater level of participation from the foreign community, all EPIK teachers would be given an extra day vacation for attending the event. This meant that not only would I be compensated for an activity I had planned on attending months in advance, but it would also draw out the other teachers from around the island to the first big event since the winter began.

The morning of the event was intimidatingly cold in Jeju City, the north side of the island where we live. After cautiously driving through impossibly thick fog down to the south end in Jungmun, we found the weather a little less unbearable, though a Jeju City-born storm was creeping over the mountaintop seemingly intent on raining on our parade. Walking down a slope hugging the cliff-side down to the beach, we were presented with a 20-foot tall example of what an island with an excess of tangerines does with the leftovers. The crowds were immense, and included a sizable troop of Korean soldiers, dressed in identical red jumpsuits under camo jackets, and clearly trained to show their appreciation of pop ballads in a uniform fashion:



As we waited through a series of warbled Korean love songs and drum performances, the storm clouds continued their march to the sea. As the temperature steadily declined, a woman took the microphone and began to announce what I hoped was the beginning of the swimming event. My Korean-Canadian friend informed me that this wasn't the case, and being able to speak Korean, she did her best to understand what exactly was going on instead. She said, "they're saying something about showing off your body," which was enough for me to accept the challenge, and strut out into the open arena formed between the parted crowds. The woman announcing the mysterious competition stopped and laughed, and said "ah, waygook!" (meaning, "a foreigner!"). We were lined up into two lines, the other seven volunteers and I, and assigned numbers 1-8. I was becoming less and less convinced that my friend had been correct in describing the event, and my suspicions were soon confirmed as Number 1 and Number 5 were called to the middle of the ring and proceeded to grapple with each other.

I had inadvertently entered into a Korean Wrestling, or Ssireum, tournament. As I tried to understand the rules, Numbers 2 and 6 faced off, and as they were both soldiers, they felt the oh-so-manly need to strip off their shirts to show off torsos, which may have been impressive to the Korean ladies but were more reminiscent of high school track athletes than military killing machines. Following their fight, I was called out against a Korean probably around my age, and roughly my height. We crossed arms, each of us with our left arm under the other's right arm, and took a handful of the other's waistband, like binding on in rugby (see the first picture below). The object is to throw the other one over. I had seen the others try to use their legs in trying to hook their opponent's own out from under them, which I tried but soon realized that the way to go about this was just to charge them over backwards. So, like rugby, I just got low and managed to knock Number 3 off his feet, essentially body slamming him to the ground. I don't think anyone expected this to happen, and the crowd's reaction showed this.

The Ssireum Starting Position


Combat


Next up was the winner of the soldier's bout, who had re-clothed himself. His fellow soldiers cheered for him as the match started, and roared as he readied himself into the starting position. As we were given the call to start, he immediately tried to sweep out my legs, so I took advantage of his lack of balance and threw him around a bit, and in much shorter order than the first opponent he was knocked over backwards, and I rolled over him. The Korean soldiers stopped cheering immediately.



Now, there were three of us left, and after losing a series of "rock-scissor-paper" matches, I was immediately thrown back in the ring with a short man no younger than fifty, clearly a grizzled island native who had surely been doing this for years- so I was worried. In binding on to each other, he dropped his shoulder into my lower ribs, and I knew that he had an advantage with that. After just trying to shove him over on his ass, we struggled, and he threw me to the side around his shoulder. At this point, I knew we were falling, and in the hopes that it was more than a knee down to win, I wrenched the old man under me, pining him on his side a second after my knee hit the sand. The old man was on his feet first, fists in the air, so I supposed that I had lost and crept off. He was subsequently beaten by a younger Korean who was rather taller than I was, placing me at 3rd, though I am sure I could have taken the scrawny, wiry winner down given the chance.

Defeat


As my sense of the cold weather came back to me, I realized I had a hole torn along the seam of my jeans from one of the matches. The wind was icy on the exposed skin; thanks to the pageantry and pomp, the Koreans had let the storm roll, bringing the coldest weather when it mattered the most, for the most vital of the day's events. It was time for the Penguin Swim.

Well... not yet, apparently. An overlong series of stretches and Korean-style calisthenics dragged on for the next 30 minutes, followed by a maddening pause for the 10 minutes following it, and having now stripped down to my blue Brazilian speedo, every minute was a frigid chore. The aged Haenyo , a fading Jeju profession of free-diving fishing women, had assembled to act as lifeguards, as they were undoubtedly the strongest swimmers on the island, diving daily down to 20 meters to catch all manner of sea life. Finally, with no small fanfare, the swim was on, and with varying degrees of hesitancy the waiting crowd plunged in. I ran in right out of the gate, and into the freezing sea.

Penguin Swimmers


The water was very cold, but after a minute or two it was much less noticeable. I swam in all for about 20 minutes, and was one of the last ones out of the water. After climbing up on (and subsequently slipping headfirst off of) one of the buoys, I tried to make a straight shot across to the other buoy, but not having my glasses on, I ended up accidentally following a similarly-colored sailboat as it drifted out into open ocean, ending up 15 meters beyond the designated swim area, and being chastised by a Haenyo lifeguard as I passed back in.

As I came to the shore, I was ambushed in the surf by a camera crew, asking me to talk about my "feelings about festival". The crew were knocked around mercilessly by the increasingly large waves, but as anxious as the cameraman seemed to be about dropping his equipment, the interviewer persisted to ask questions for a few additional minutes. Less than a minute later, another camera crew from a rival station approached me, asking more or less the same questions as the last had. I've since been told that I appeared on both channels, bringing the total times I have been featured on the news in Jeju to four (five, if each news program is counted in this case). I guess that being a large white man here comes with some sort of celebrity.



Following the swim, it was recommended (for whatever strange reason) that the swimmers should rub themselves down with tangerine juice, a vat of which was to be found in the middle of the grounds. When I arrived, I saw a group consisting only of foreigners, all massaging themselves with the sticky orangish paste, in front of a line of Korean photographers. I joined them as briefly as I could, and can only hope that the photos avoid next year's brochures and billboards.

This was the first festival in Jeju since late October, and it made me realize how much I missed getting out of the house for stuff like this. With the biggest celebration of the year looming on the horizon, the Jeju Fire Festival, I won't have to wait long. And with the snow already melting on the top of Halla Mountain, it won't be long before this damn winter is over and life starts back up again.

Happy New Year!!!

Happy New Year! We spent the last 5 days in Seoul, which was a great time. We celebrated the new year in Jongak, near the middle of downtown Seoul, where every New Years Eve at midnight the pagoda's bell is rung. Adrift in a crowd of 10's of thousands of people, we managed to get an incredible viewing spot, on the high curb across the street. Here's the scene at midnight, with the bell being struck and thousands of roman candles ablaze.



I'll write more soon, but right now we are trying to show Spencer a good time here in Jeju.

Happy New Year!!!