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.