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.