Kyle In Korea

The Start of Summer

2008-05-19T21:23:00.011-05:00

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

2008-04-11T23:57:00.008-05:00

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

2008-03-10T01:04:00.010-05:00

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

2008-03-04T20:17:00.012-06:00

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

2008-02-10T21:40:00.001-06:00

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

2008-01-27T21:02:00.000-06:00

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!!!

2008-01-02T10:24:00.000-06:00

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!!!

My Absence (or, Ho Ho Hospital)

2007-12-25T19:28:00.000-06:00

Where has Kyle been for the last few weeks, you may ask? Well, funny story: in what seems to be a necessary part of traveling to a foreign country for me, I was once again hospitalized for severe food poisoning. There is no small irony in the timing of this occurrence, as roughly one week prior the illness I had decided that in an attempt to improve my health and save some money for Seoul, I would significantly cut back on my alcohol consumption, and make an effort to stick to less exotic (and more affordable) foods. I followed this plan, eating a fair amount of western or chain restaurant food during that next week, yet somewhere in the period between eating an innocent bowl of rice and vegetables for lunch and a chicken sandwich later for dinner I apparently consumed an insidious little bit of nastiness that would send me to the emergency room the next day. the other possibility is that I got sick from eating at a Mexican food restaurant here on the island. While I fully realize the parallel here, that after getting sick in a Latin country from eating Oriental food I have now done the same thing with Latin food in an Oriental country, in my defense it was not just a cheap hole-in-the-wall sort of place, and everyone gets homesick for elements of their old life every one in a while.

The ER in Korea is fairly modern (certainly less 70's retro than the one in Ecuador), and the procedure was rather standard, with an x-ray and an IV, then hours of waiting. It took some effort to get to the actual "treatment" stage of all of this, as when I first came into the hospital, hardly able to stand, I was met by two attendants who looked at me, then each other, and began to debate who would try to speak English to the foreign guy. After about 30 seconds of this nonsense, I was frustrated and nauseous enough to simply take matters into my own hands and pick a bed, though it seems that me walking away was the necessary action to prompt them to overcome their shyness and do their job. I find that Koreans are often so hung up on saying things the exactly correct and proper way, that they often will say nothing at all, a problem which as an English teacher is of some concern, but as a distraught and disoriented food poisoning victim who is trying his best not to make a mess in the hospital lobby, it is a much more distressing issue.

Hell, it's better than the other hospital visits I've had, in which while trying to set up an appointment with a physician or ask directions to the pharmacy I am met with naught but giggling nurses who seem to find the idea of a westerner in the hospital amusing and absurd. Anyway...

So, I'm better now, though it's been a long weekend. I had to go back a few days later because the condition I had, enteritis, or the inflammation of my abdomen, had not subsided. This led to a CT scan which, though pricey, was significantly cheaper than in the US, costing only around $130. Perhaps the strangest element of the entire ordeal was the CT scan. Though I had an interpreter who had lived in Baltimore for 38 years, there was little she could do when the technicians were vague in their descriptions of what was going to happen, which happened quite a lot. I was told that following an IV injection of some sort of clear liquid (tracking solution), I "may feel hot, and smell". I couldn't imagine what the last it meant. The heat came quickly after we had begun, and I could actually feel the stuff as it spread through my blood. It was only after my entire body was flush and burning that I realized what "smell" meant. I thought I may have some sort of odor later on. What it actually meant was that there was such a high concentration of the solution in my blood that I could smell it through my own vessels, and for that matter, taste it in my tongue as well. It hit me right as I was supposed to be holding a deep breath, and was almost too much. Then, just as it had come, it seemed to all disappear.

The results showed that whatever it was had made itself at home, and I would be required to take a seven day course of antibiotics and for one week eat only juk, or Korean rice porridge, which is quite possibly one of the most boring foods there is. Christmas was difficult, and I can't say I didn't sneak a few other foods, but the next three days are nothing but juk, juk, juk now. I've got to be recovered for Seoul: we leave on Friday.

A result of this is that I've once again got a bit of a blog backlog, so I'll be trying to post as much as I can once I get back from Seoul. I should have a whole new set of stories by then too. More to come!

And, by the way
Merry Christmas!

Hold Yer Horses

2007-12-18T05:21:00.000-06:00

I'll be back as soon as possible. Maybe tomorrow. I've been busy with Korean taxes, Christmas plans, and an awful case of black mold that's taken over our apartment. Tomorrow is election day, so we have it off, so it's likely that between planning out my winter camp lesson plans, I'll post tomorrow.

Thanks, and happy holidays!

From the Stable to the Table: Equine Cuisine Part 2

2007-12-09T22:14:00.000-06:00

Last Friday night, a group of nine foreigners descended on the back alleys of Sin Jeju (New Jeju) near Halla Hospital to search for a very special sort of restaurant. After several weeks of attempting to marshal up enough interest from a few of my fellow foreigners, the night had finally arrived, and now, walking through the frigid winter we were wandering through aging blocks of flats, trying to find a place that one of our ranks had been to long before, but apparently forgotten the precise location of. Finally, after asking a number of the locals, we found what we were looking for- Malgogi Chanmun
, a horse restaurant with a specialty in malgogi hoe, that is, raw horse. Since the moment I had heard of its existence, I had wanted to try this. The fact that even the less adventurous individuals who had tried it all agreed that it was delicious made this prospect even more appealing. An unfortunate number of months passed in between, but finally we had settled on a night and gone out for horse sashimi.

The cost of this delicacy (I assume it must be a delicacy, because of the cost) was around $25, which included three courses. Shortly after popping open our bottles of soju and starting in on the standard marinated horse banchan, the first course was delivered to our tables. It was rather thick for raw meat (compared to, say, carpaccio), and was flecked with sesame seeds. The middle-aged woman who owned the place showed us how we were to consume it, sandwiching it between sheets of dried seaweed, and dipping it in a wasabi/soy sauce mixture. She seemed to believe that this demonstration, though perfectly clear in pantomime, required her to lovingly shove it in to our friend's mouth as an example to us. I dunno, maybe she was interested in him. She told us that this course was very much like tuna, and I definitely see the parallels. In fact, just very recently in Japan, a tuna shortage led to the consumption of horse sashimi as a substitute. The dried seaweed laver was a bit overpowering, but without it, the soy-and-wasabi mixture did a wonderful job of bringing out the sweetness of the meat. When eaten completely unaccompanied, it had a very bizarre texture, like wavy fish, that was a little off-putting, but completely masked when coupled with the seaweed or sauce.

The first course.

The first bite.

The next course, the proper horse tartare, usually came with a raw egg cracked into it, but my friend did the best she could to stop this, though I am almost certain that the kitchen didn't listen- it came out fairly sticky. This dish consisted of much more roughly chopped meat topped with poppy seeds, and laid out on julienned Asian pears. The best part about this is that, in something that struck me as belonging much more in Santa Fe than Korean, they brought out a fried egg as a side dish. Without the fried egg, the tartare was very good, and surprisingly a bit more tender than a similar preparation of beef would be. The Asian pears matched quite well with the meat, but I have to say that nothing was as strangely delicious as the mix of the raw horse and fried egg. It was almost like comfort food, something Southern, to be served in a diner.

Horse Tartare

A (Not-Too-Appetizing) Close Up

The Egg 'N' Horse Combo

It was a bit anticlimactic to have begun the meal with the most exotic dish and then proceed to a simple stew, but it was nonetheless delicious. The stew, galbijim, is in my opinion one of the better Korean stews of the vast multitude that exist, as it is light on the vegetables and heavy on the meat and mushrooms. The rib meat used in the dish again defied my previous notions of horse meat being tough and stringy. It had been stewed long enough to give the broth of the stew a shimmering glossy appearance, but not to reduce the meat to stringy ribbons. The meat was lean (presumably due to the amount of fat that had soaked out into the broth), though occasionally I'd scoop a a chunk comprised of more than half horse fat, which I found pretty tasty, but my friend actually spit out after accidentally eating a piece. Once we had picked out all of the meat and the scarce vegetables, the owner poured a bowl of horse bone marrow broth into the remainder, and provided us with a palette of multicolored noodles for it. The noodles were black, orange, and purple, which were made from buckwheat, tangerine, and cactus respectively. Did they taste any different? Not particularly, but they at least looked kind of cool.

The Horse Rib Galbijim

An abundance of horse fat

The multicolored noodles in marrow broth

I really enjoyed the raw horse meat, an opinion which was shared by a great majority of the table. Alicia's reaction was a bit different. To each their own, I suppose. I definitely will be repeating this experience whenever my pocketbook will allow. And as an indirect result of this meal, I have become aware of some substantially more bizarre foods here. When we told a Korean friend of ours about having eaten malgogi hoe, he was able to offer up a few other suggestions. Like fried whale. Or the occasionally deadly toxic puffer fish sashimi (if you watch the Simpsons regularly, you know what I am talking about), which I had been saving for Japan, but now that I am aware that it is offered in Korea, I just might try it here. There are a few more which, in my opinion, are far more strange and horrifying than anything I've eaten so far... but I do need to hold on to a few surprises, right?

Crocodile Town

2007-12-02T23:18:00.000-06:00

Still recovering from the previous night, and now stuffed to the gills with yellowtail, we descended from the main road and under an overpass to the parking lot sitting on the side of a rather absurd-looking reptilian head, which given the sort of animals housed at this establishment one would assume to be modeled after a crocodile, yet the presence of horns jutting from it's crown indicated that it was more likely than not recycled from a more medieval-themed venture. Banners clung to the outside of the warehouse-like complex, depicting a Thai girl putting her head inside of a crocodile's gaping mouth. Intrigued, we followed her example and bravely marched through the jaws of the dragon, to a small ticket booth where dropped down our $12 and dashed off to make the 3:30 show which had begun three minutes earlier.

Dashing through corridors filled with objects too blurry to discern at the speed we were traveling, we followed the unique, warbling, and terrible sound of the layered reverb and crooning that is Korean balladry. The act had just begun, we saw, as we walked in on to see a woman wearing a bright red hanbok, or Korean traditional dress, doing her best to sing but still strangling the cat, perched on a platform surrounded by paleolithic killing machines. Thinking that at the end of the song she would be risking life and limb in the maws of these crocodiles, we sat on the edge of our bleacher seats, waiting with bated breath for her attempt at music to end. Disappointment soon followed, as she bowed and shuffled of the stage to backstage safety. Soon enough, a pair of Korean men came out into the enclosure, carrying Mongol spears and dressed in what might have been some sort of traditional croc-wrasslin' attire, but just looked like basketball jerseys and shorts. When they began their hunting dance, both Gabe and I got the distinct impression that we had been ripped off, that the thrills these Koreans were peddling would turn out merely to be "hey, look at these idiots dance in an enclosure of sleeping animals! Exciting!". We were relieved, therefore, to see that once the musical number was done, they ran into the water and began saturating the tile, then proceeded to drag the awakening beasts about the enclosure by their tails. While some may call this abuse, I would guess that would such a sight have ever bothered me, it has been months since that point has passed. They proceeded to try more and more daring stunts with the crocodiles, using wooden wands to seemingly hypnotize them, stroking the inside of their mouths and the tops of their heads in a repetitive, rhythmic fashion. First hovering in the general vicinity of their jaws, the performers became increasingly bold, progressively inserting more and more vital parts of their body into their open snouts and undertaking increasingly difficult stunts, starting with fists, moving to arms, then laying out on their backs. They would get a running start, slide on their stomachs across the smooth and wet tiled enclosure, coming to a skidding halt just within range of the crocodile's mouth to give it a kiss. The advert-promised climax came when they stuck their heads into the (suspiciously lethargic) beast's mouth. But if there was a grand finale, it was certainly this- an event eliminating any doubt about whether these reptiles were on drugs:

Animals and Artifacts
After what we agreed was an amusing but strange show (something about the manipulation of indifferent scaled monsters backed by blaring Korean techno is patently odd), it was time to set out to explore the rest of the CrocTown facility. I didn't know what to expect exactly, though I would have leaned towards 'more crocodiles', but such foolish notions were soon put to rest as I walked through the next door, and came across the BRIGHT BLUE HAND OF SATAN! There, mere feet away from a croc stunt show, was erected a massive fiberglass hand (plus a few extra fingers here and there) clawing out of the ground. As out of place as it already seemed, a survey of the room leading out from it left us in an even greater state of confusion- a swarm of vulture-sized animatronic ladybugs flexed their wings from their mounts on the walls. Around the bend and into the next room, we found a miniature zoo of sorts, lined with glass cages displaying, on one side, numerous small reptiles, and on the other, a collection of small mammals that could very well have been dinner to their neighbors across the hall. Highlights included the Sudan Plated Rizard, and the Ratte (presumably a caffeinated rodent mixed with hot milk). There was what looked like a mix of a porcupine and a possum, the name of which I am sure I would have known when I was a child, but which has been erased by the years in between. My favorite were the panda mice, little furry pets that I found incredibly reminiscent of the dalmatian mice in The Royal Tenenbaums.

The Bright Blue Hand Of Satan

As if trying to top itself in the absurdity of its disconnectedness, the next room we entered was a hodgepodged collage of antique gadgets and furniture, complete with old rotary telephones, cracked and aged Korean movie posters, war memorabilia from the Korean war, and replica of furniture from the thousand-year-old Joseon dynasty period. I have to admit that, knowing the somewhat bitter way that some older Koreans feel about Americans in relation to the Korean War (not to mention the grudge held on Jeju towards America for 'simply observing' during the Jeju Massacre during that period), I did feel a little bad about having a Korean man take our picture as we crouched in helmets behind the plastic battlements, in front of a mural no doubt depicting the sacrifices of the Korean people in that war. This was, however, comparably solemn and respectful compared with the tourist attraction we now spotted in the far corner of the room.

War is hell...

Ghengis Kyle
Nestled back behind a large assortment of recreated royal thrones and gama (Korean litters), we saw a raised platform occupied by what appeared to be recreated scenes of ancient Korean palaces. A large clothing rack next to it held a wide array of costumes. Lingering briefly out of curiosity, we were called up onto the dais by the old Korean man who was in charge. He told us that for 3,000 won, we could have our pictures taken dressed up like important people from Korean history. Not wanting to refuse the old man, we adopted a 'might as well' attitude once again, and were promptly dressed. The only costume large enough for me was a Mongol warrior. My friend was dressed up as either a king or Confucius. The man used our camera to take around 15 pictures, though he was decidedly unhappy later when he turned around to find the king wearing the queen's wig, and the Mongol warrior having unsheathed his sword and swinging it around.

Departing from what we believed to be a dead-end in the exhibit, I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of a shabby curtain hanging on the far side of the war exhibit. We luckily chose to investigate, and found a dark room lit only with blacklights. It seems that, just for good measure, they had also added a haunted house on to the Crocodile Park, whose downright creepy atmosphere it owed as much to its unexpected location as to its actual contents. The contents, however, didn't hurt; styrofoam mannequins of children were painted with fluorescent paint so that in the blacklight, it looked like they were crying blood, others were chopped up and strung across the room. The first room in particular was incredibly disturbing, as we had no idea what the place was, and it was full of cute forest critters smeared in neon paint.

This photo was taken with flash, so you have to use your imagination.

One the way out, still confused and a little creeped out, we passed by the last exhibit before the door: a macaque, who because of the thick glass we were unable to hear. It was by far the meanest monkey I have ever met, as upon seeing us it charged across its habitat and began shouting at us, eerily moving it's mouth like it was swearing at us. We tried to get it to repeat the performance, and that's when it got really mad.

As it cursed and screamed silently at us, we departed from the madness that was Crocodile Park, a place that seemed to be put together from scraps of old theme parks . We can only assume that the reason for the additions was its direct competition with the other crocodile theme park on Jeju, Crocodile World. I can't wait to see how they are competing.

A Fish This Big

2007-11-25T22:10:00.000-06:00

Early one Saturday morning several weeks ago, I managed to drag myself out of bed like a corpse from the grave following a rather over-enthusiastic Friday night of celebrating the work-week's end. Early, when taken in the context of my Saturday mornings, is 10:30, but it may as well have been the crack of dawn; I awoke squinting at the world in an early morning misery I very rarely subjected myself to on my precious days off. This morning, though, there were plans: another festival, of course, this one for yellowtail fish. After arriving on the tail-end of several festivals in a row, me and my friend Gabe decided that we needed to get a headstart on the day and make it out to the events earlier to see anything worth seeing at all. Thus it was, with no small amount of effort, that I pried myself out and got dressed, fighting off the advance waves of nausea heralding a full-blown hangover, and crept down to the car waiting to take me to the far side of the island.

The Yellowtail (or Bango) Festival is one of the more popular festivals on Jeju Island, and after last year's it is perhaps the most infamous. Last year, the weather was much worse this time of year, but those in charge of the festival did not think that a little choppy water should stop the festivities from taking place; they loaded (or rather, dreadfully overloaded) a fishing boat with a number of festival-goers and dignitaries, only to have it sink in the rough seas, killing around eight people, including the mayor of Seogwipo City. This would be the first occurance of the Bango Fest since that time, surely relaunched with new safety measures.

We were hoping that no such disasters would disrupt our morning as we arrived at the outskirts of the seemingly-enormous tent grounds, packed with shops selling everything from medicinal herbs to knock-off North Face jackets to back-flipping robot dogs. On the way in, we passed by a what was possibly the least safe carnival ride I have ever seen, which I gave wide berth to even in taking a photo of it, lest the ride come undone and fly off, crushing me. As if trying to top the shock of the truck-back disaster-waiting-to-happen we had just witnessed, a food vendor perched right outside the entrance to the actual festival grounds had a steaming bowl on his cart, right beside the rather common snails, of what appeared to be roaches. It was days later that I found out that these were actually silk worm pupa shells, which I suppose is better than steamed roaches, but I imagine if I had known, it would have still been disgusting to watch the lines of smiling kids shoveling these crunchy brown insects into their mouths.

As we arrived, we saw a crowd gathering at the foot of a group of what looked like raised platforms in the center of the docks where the festival was being held. Men in green neoprene waders were marching to a shallow pool constructed within steel barriers which were full of yellowtail, and being steadily stocked by fisherman carrying net-fulls of the fish from nearby fishing boats. After an endlessly long introduction (though I suppose every speech I have to listen to here seems to take ages, since I cannot understand a word of it), the large group of men plunged into the pool of fish, and began a race to see who could catch the most fish by hand. It was clearly a skill which must be acquired, as the younger men and sole child who participated ended up missing far more than they caught, the child falling face-first into the water as he was bested by one particular quarry. The fish, now caught for a second time since they had been snatched from the ocean, were taken over to long white tables, where burly fishmongers filleted them, and I, who was forunate enough to have obliviously wandered over to exactly the right spot before this occurred, was first in line for what I had been praying for since arrival- free fresh fish. It was a matter of minutes between the fish being knocked out and it being laid out on a plate, and as a result it was some of the tastiest raw fish I've ever had.

The fishermen's prey.

Moments after the scramble began.

A professional at work

Seaside sashimi

Not content, however, with the measly mouthfuls I was given for free at the chopping blocks, I traipsed (or I suppose that I traipsed; having perhaps never seen a clear example of traipsing, I cannot be sure that such an action occurred) over to the food tent, where I used the one useful Korean skill I have achieved, that is, reading hangul characters, to order a $20 platter of yellowtail for myself and my friend. I soon learned that he did not in fact enjoy eating raw fish, which raised the question in my mind as to why one would attend a festival celebrating one of sashimi's (using the term both loosely and transculturally) most celebrated fish breeds if not to consume said fish raw? I stuck to my order, however, and soon received a massive plate of sliced yellowtail, which I consumed in its entirety, all the while being covertly filmed by a cameraman for the local news station, whom I pretended not to notice. I suppose footage of foreigners doing Korean things, like eating a whole raw fish, for example, is a novelty; this was neither the first nor last time I have been filmed in Jeju doing something which undoubtedly, and perhaps unnecessarily, surprises the locals. I do not, in this instance, know if I made the cut and was featured on air.

Before (after having a few exploratory bites)

After (chopsticks added for size reference)

The day had only just begun, and soon got even better, as we, in our travels homeward, glimpsed a gaping dragon head emerging from a roadside building. We stopped to investigate, and learned that we had found the Crocodile Park. It was indeed a crocodile park, yet so much more... well worth the admission price. But that's a whole new entry.

Pepero Day

2007-11-20T18:41:00.000-06:00

There is a certain marketing genius to be appreciated in convincing an entire nation of people that, for one day a year, they are only truly loved if they are given boxes of chocolate-dipped cookie sticks. And not just any sort of cookie sticks, no, only Pepero-brand confections will do. In what can only be compared to a brand-centric version of Valentine's Day, November 11 is known all over Korea as Pepero Day. It's namesake is a brand of snack cookie, owned by the mega-corporation Lotte, which is little more than my above description: pencil-thin shafts of rather disappointly bland cookie, dipped down to the hilt in milk chocolate. And Koreans buy boxes and boxes of the things every Pepero Day, including often-ridiculously elaborate premade Pepero baskets stacked outside of convenience stores. It's silly, cutesy things like this that it makes it apparent that the Koreans aren't really as different from the Japanese as they would like to think.

The 'legend' behind the holiday is that four schoolgirls, hoping to make their friendship last forever, pledged to send each other a box of Pepero's once every year to stay in touch. (Well, I suppose it's better than a magic pair of blue jeans.) Anyway, they laid out four skinny Peperos on a desk, an thus the date "11/11" was decided on. Somehow, Lotte's lies stuck in the public consciousness, enabling street vendors to sell baskets of cookies and stuffed bears at prices occasionally surpassing 500,000 won (or $500, but I though the won value sounded more impressive).

The least welcome aspect of Pepero Day, and one which I had no warning of, was the greed it seemed to engender in my students. Now, it would seem to go without saying that as I have more than 800 students (around 1400 if the students I teach only once a week are included), there is no way I could afford to give them all Peperos on this holiday. They were of a different mind, however, and when I told them I was in fact Peperoless they all, with very few exceptions, punched and slapped at me as if I had insulted them. They, for some reason I cannot understand, have always believed that I am a magic Westerner with pockets full of candy, and there is nothing I can do but disappoint them. The reaction on Pepero Day was much more extreme than ever before. How could I hold out on them on Pepero Day?! What kind of monster was I?! Maybe they will one day understand that I am not Willy Wonka, and give me a break.

Well, Pepero Day may be silly scheme by a cookie conglomerate... but in the end, though, I can't say that I was above it all.

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Happy Thanksgiving!!!
More later... busy week.

The Food Chain

2007-11-14T21:58:00.000-06:00

I suppose that my blog entries have been getting progressively longer and longer, so to avoid becoming a JK Rowling, here's a short(er), but hopefully interesting, entry on a couple of Korean... um, experiences I have had in the last two weeks. In terms of trying diverse and exotic foods, I've been doing my best, trying a couple undeniably Korean foods. Here we go.

Up The Hill
On the Wednesday after I arrived back from Daegu, I was taken with the entirety of the school's teachers to climb an oreum, the parasitic volcanic hills that litter the island. According to my students, this particular oreum was a piece of cake, and I should have no trouble. It turns out that my students were a bit more generous in appraising my level of physical fitness than they should have been. After a short walk in the woods, the trail shot up at a dramatically steeper angle, and for the next 2 miles I found myself climbing up stone steps and rubber matting. None of this would have been much of a problem if 1.) I was in better shape, and 2.) my shoes didn't have a hard-plastic sheet in the middle of the sole, causing me to slip of the slick stone stairs and the folded rebar holding down the matting. This stumbling happened enough times for me to eventually sprain my kneee, an injury which didn't truly manifest itself until the next day. Making it to the top after around 45 minutes of climbing, I met up with the teachers who had beat me to the top (only about half made it, in the end), and saw that the view was wonderful, though the crown of the ill was exposed enough to force me back into the sweater I had removed during the climb.

Walking the crest of the hill. The entire island is covered in this eulalia grass.

The view from the top (yes, I know I need to pull up my pants, and get a haircut).

The descent was much easier, and it was after a seemingly short amount of time that we were hiking out of the forest that skirted the mountain. While crossing the plains back to the bus we ran into a band of horses blocking the roadway. My co-teacher was afraid of it, and warned me to be careful as I approached it to pet it's nose. These were the same short-legged Jeju horses I had seen at the racetrack weeks before, and looking into their sad eyes as they gazed at us while we passed, I almost got the impression that they knew what the teachers and I were doing next, where we were eating dinner.

The rogue horses.

The Famous Mr Ed-ible
The horse, quite aside from being a sturdy work animal and an excellent means of transportation for cowboys, Mongolians and the like, is in fact one tasty animal. I have to say, malgogi (horse meat) is one of the better meats I have had on the island so far, if only for the diversity of preparation showcased in the meal that night. That night, the main course was maltang, which literally means horse soup, a clear broth with leeks and a nice amount of horse meat, which in this dish tasted very much like pork, with a tasty thin layer of horse fat lining the bigger pieces. Horse soup was in no way the star of the show, in my opinion. The first course served was steamed horse slices, something alone the lines of a tenderloin, which was good, though it too tasted like gamey pork. I had the opportunity to try a piece of the more expensive horse tripe (it was only brought out to the prinicipal, who offered me a piece). It was one of the better types of tripe I've had, chewy and thankfully lacking the awful sewage flavor found in chitterlings.

Malgogi kui, or horse barbeque, is among the top three most tasty things I have eaten in Korea. It was cut into tiny morsels, and marinated excellently, the end result tasting very close to beef fajitas from Goode Company Taqueria back in Houston. If there was one thing that sold me on eating horse again, it was this; with malgogi kui, horse went from being a novelty to a legitimately tasty meal.

The Horse Restaurant. I don't know what it's name is, though if I owned one, I would name it "HorseShack".

Horse tenderloin, maybe, and one piece of horse tripe left on the plate behind.

Horse barbeque, or malgogi kui. Tasty.

Catholic Camp
The very next day following the hike up the oreum, I went away with my 6th grade students and teachers to an overnight sleep-away camp, run by the Catholic church through a handful of Korean nuns. Now, being so used to the utter division of church and state in America, I found it quite strange that they would choose a Catholic center to have a camp for a public school, but it was justified to me by the teachers, who said it was meant to teach them about ethics and such, and that it didn't involve religion. I can only imagine the uproar that a plan like this back home would cause. The ACLU would form a human wall to prevent it. Not that it mattered to me either way, but it was, in the end, a seemingly secular affair (though not knowing the words for salvation or transubstantiation in Korean, I can't be sure). The camp for me, as well as the rest of the teachers, involved sitting in a break room, reading or watching TV. I finished about half of the Harry Potter book I was reading. The night ended with the kids performing dance routines to Korean pop songs, which was cute, though around the end of the first of two hours, I was sick to death of K-pop. That night was my first time to ever sleep on a Korean yeo, or floor-bed, which did little to help my sprained leg. I woke up the next morning to another first- it was the only time I had ever been around Koreans this early in the morning, and thus was the first time I had had a real Korean breakfast of fish and rice. I just don't know how I've lived so long without experiencing the appetizing wonder that is scraping flesh off of a soggy fish at 7 am. Ugh.

My favorite dance skit. Look at that kid dance!

The next week, after a brief weekend trip to Seogwipo for a pub crawl, I again settled back into my job, where each week has been getting progressively busier. Sometime in between the construction of powerpoint presentations on Halloween (a week late) and various bodily ailments, I found time to research a plan that me and friend had been discussing for a few weeks at that point. Everytime we had seen each other, we had proposed that we should go and get a certain meal, yet after half a month of inactivity, it was time to make it happen.

Man Bites Dog (or, Oh, Kae!)
A Korean-speaking friend of ours polled her office coworkers for their suggestions of a good restaurant to get boyangtang, a (somehow) euphemistic name adopted around the 1988 Seoul Olympics for bosintang, though both terms mean exactly the same thing: "invigorating soup". Bosintang is itself a euphemism for kae jang, which literally means "dog stew". We were given directions to a restaurant named Giwachon, which we found to be little more than a converted house sitting in the shadow of a massive apartment highrise building. A family both lived and worked in the restaurant, with the spare bedrooms being used as dining areas. Both Alicia and my friend's girlfriend had accompanied us, and were relieved to see that the restaurant also served samgyetang, a whole boiled chicken filled with rice and ginseng.

The kids serving us were a bit shocked when two westerners ordered bosintang, and came back to double-check with us a minute later. After what seemed like mere minutes, our soups arrived, still boiling in their black pots. We were provided with a number of seasoning ingredients including ginger and pepper oil, which I decided to wait to add until I had tasted the actual dog meat as it was. It turns out that it is not too different from beef, tasting very similar to a good pot roast. The meat was actually incredibly tender, if occasionally stringy, and had just a bit of fat left around the edges of some pieces (in lesser amounts than the horse meat). The really suprising thing was the sheer amount of the dog meat that they added to the soup; I had eaten all of the large pieces floating in the broth, and scraped the bowl's bottom with my spoon to find a whole trasure trove of kaegogi still waiting for me.

I must say I was lucky. My friend Gabe got a lot of meat, but he also got a bit of bone, and a bluish, tough patch that looked like skin or ear. Though he was perhaps less enthusiastic about his meal, we agreed that it was good enough to try the steamed dog meat we had heard of, but been unable to find on the island (I have since been informed of its whereabouts). For such a rarely-eaten delicacy food, it was surprisingly cheap, at only 7,000 won (roughly $7) a bowl. I managed to get Alicia to try a small piece, though as she put it into her mouth and chewed it she nearly choked. She said she kept imagining a wet dog smell as she ate it.

Perhaps the greatest part of this was returning to class the next day and telling my students that I had eaten "mongmongijjigae", which translated to "bark bark soup", but comes across as "puppy soup". They either found it hilarious or horrifying, and while some kids have in fact tried it, giving me a thumbs up and shouting "very good!", the bulk of the class had not, especially the girls, who in some cases looked as if they might throw something at me.

The converted bedroom/restaurant at the Dog House.

Testing the waters...

My first time eating dog.

There was a whole lot of meat. It was great.

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Oddly enough, this was not the strangest thing that we did that week; the upcoming weekend held many strange surprises. We found out, for instance, that though Jeju Island is a pretty small place, only 15 X 30 kilometers, it has not one but two Crocodile Parks. And whatever we might have thought a "Crocodile Park" would be, there was nothing that could prepare us for the truth. All this and more, next time I can get a break from my classes.

Daegu Part Deux

2007-11-04T23:29:00.000-06:00

Our first night out on the town in Daegu, we were introduced to the major difference between our small Jeju Island and the big cities of the Korea mainland: the overabundance of foreigners, and the lack of hospitality from the locals. It is probably safe to assume that the first of the pair causes the second, as I cannot imagine the large presence of American military in the town can help- the few groups of GIs we saw wandering around gave off the impression of muscly street gangs. The result is that, unlike Jeju, being a foreigner does not evoke interest from the locals, indeed in some cases earning scorn.

The first bar we went to was called Commun, which was another example of the vinyl-only music bar. They had Guinness on draft, which was beyond incredible, priced at only $7 a pint (I would have scoffed at paying that much a few months ago, but was by this point actually relieved to hear it was so affordable, and not the $12 Seoul pint I had heard of). The bar was choked with foreigners, which, as I stated before, was a bit of a drag- I think we all experienced a bit of culture shock, and were as a result huddled into the back corner of the large basement room the bar occupied. Seeing the album cover of Captian Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica hanging on the wall behind the bar, I tried talking to the older Korean owner about it, only for him to respond "So what? Everyone knows that album, it's common, I mean, if you actually like real music." I don't think that's the case, and certainly not in 2007, in Korea. Nonetheless I, a scolded country mouse in the big city, sat quietly finishing my seven dollar Guinness. The other bars were unremarkable aside from their utterly Western atmosphere, with American bartenders and, in one case, a kid belting out Arcade Fire covers on a small stage. I've got a video of Alicia singing along with the song 'Wake Up', but I think she'd kill me if I posted it. She might kill me for even mentioning it.

The night went on until far later than it should have, failing to keep in mind our goal to wake up early the next morning to explore the city. The night ended in an intoxicated, and therefore infuriating, session of crane game outside a convenience store. Our friend won a butane lighter on his first go, which set the hook in us to keep trying for far too long. Maybe an hour.

No Lures, Just Light
The next morning we awoke somewhat later than we had anticipated (around 11:30), and it took more than an hour to get everyone out of the hotel and into a cab for lunch. Our friends, during their extensive wandering while trying to find us the night before, had seen an Outback Steakhouse tucked away in the shopping district of downtown, on the second story of a building on top of a McDonalds. Agreeing that after a few months of fatty pork and kimchi there would be nothing better than a rare steak and a bloomin' onion, we made our way to the restaurant (telling the cab driver "Outa-backu Steaku-housa", which is apparently correct). And get a rare steak I did, perhaps one of the rarest steaks I've ever eaten. It was amazing, though even at lunch special prices, it was still $25... and it took about 2 hours or more to get back on the street.

Fighting the urge to go back to the Love Motel and take a nap, we soldiered on; My friend Gabe and I set out for a traditional Korean medicine market, while Alicia and his girlfriend went off shopping. But before we had left the main road, we found the Halloween store we had been hoping for. Quite different from the meager selection of Halloween goods found in Jeju Si, this was an entire store devoted to costumes. After considering the oversized mascot heads (see below), I settled on a cheap rubber chicken mask which, being designed for a much smaller head, I would later have to modify (as in, rip the face out of, and sloppily tie the shreds of the beak into a mask.)

A glimpse of what could have been.

Doctor, Doctor! Gimme The Newts!
Soon thereafter, we came upon the medicine district, full of ginseng peddlers and shops stacked to the ceiling with dried herbs and various animal bits. The first store that we stopped in, of the many dozens on that street alone, happened to be owned by a young English-speaking couple. It is perhaps for this reason that they were able to sell so much of their merchandise to us; they had to do little more than say "oh, that is ginseng whiskey" for us to have purchased a fifth of the liquor, and after another ten minutes of questions about the assorted wares, we came away with some red ginseng (the area's specialty) and a spicy black tea made from roughly ten different herbs. We learned that in addition to ginseng, the antlers of deer are incredibly popular as a medicinal food, boiled and eaten for a variety of ailments. We had considered buying some at a later store that seemed to specialize in them, but they are by no means cheap, and apparently are rather foul; we asked the shopkeeper, using the tiny bit of Korean we knew, if the antlers were delicious, and he nearly laughed us out of the store.

Rather inexplicably, there was an entire block of this medicine market area that was dedicated not to remedy but to... fake food displays. Groups of older women in nearly identical shops were toiling away making elaborately ornate representations of Korean foods, using a pasty substance that looked enough like dough to fool us into thinking that they might be fancy cakes, encourage us to, once again, inquire in Korean as to whether these things were delicious (really, it was the closest we could come to 'edible'). We received the very same reaction as before. These creations, made from what appeared (after a reinspection) to be the same inedible hard sugar stuff that the Mexican Dia de los Muertos calavera sugar skulls are made from. I suppose they are for restaurants to display their speciality in a window front, though I have yet to encounter a restaurant that serves entire full-grown octopus platters, or prawns larger than a baby.

The fake-food district

A particularly fine example of quality octopusmanship.

The very last store we came upon in the medical district was an old traditional Korean doctor's office, and inside we found the most wondrous things. Lining the walls were animals (or rather, parts of animals) of all shapes and sizes. Inside, we were ushered around by an elderly Korean woman, who claimed (we gathered, from her long string of Korean words peppered occasionally by an English one) that her son was a doctor in America. Starting with a large and authentic stuffed sea turtle, she showed us the doctor's menagerie of fragments, which included reindeer antlers, ox horns, mice pelts (to make you rich, she said), sea horses, and jars full of fish, scorpions, salamanders, and cockroaches. The two things that we actually tried to buy were both suspended in alcohol: white snake whiskey, and dog penis vodka. They were, unfortunately, very expensive and rare, and thus not for sale. At the very least, it was amusing to watch the old Korean woman use a stiff forearm to forcefully demonstrate the virility one would gain from drinking these liquors.

Cockroaches, for swelling and bone problems:

Newts, for the legs I think:

White Snake Whiskey, which sounds more than a little like an 80's hair band launched a liquor brand... hell, it's a better name than Cabo Wabo.

Dog Potion #9:

One-Stop Shopping
Departing from the medicine market, we caught a cab to the area around the massive Seomun Market. It is one of the three largest shopping areas in Korea, and dates back to the mid-1600's. On the way there, we walked through the red light district (the Lonely Planet guidebook recommended it), but apparently the trade is slow at four in the afternoon. Seomun market loomed ahead, and we could just begin to see how massive it is. Half and hour later, after walking through stall after stall of bootleg clothes and food vendors, we realized that we would never see all of it that night. I bought an awesome watch for around five dollars, and tried a delicious green tea pancake stuffed with cinnamon and syrup. After passing another few streets, we stumbled into the meat section, which I'll dub Animal Alley.

Cage upon cage of animals (including one obnoxious cat that would not shut up) lined the streets, either being sold for meat, or in the case of the puppies and cat, for pets (not good economic sense to eat something with such little meat, I'd think). The seafood section was impressive, with massive shark fins, skinned and dried rays, and a myriad of other strange aquatic beasts. I also got my first look at kaegogi, or Korean dog meat, seeing a half-slab of Rover laid out in a freezer, tail nub and all. We took a photo of the puppies for sale as pets, and took photos of a few hanging beef cuts, and later managed to convince our girlfriends that they were puppy fillets. They were not so happy when they learned the truth.

The entrance to a vast network of market stalls.

Animal Alley, with everything from pheasants to puppies.

These hideous monsters are called monkfish, or anglers, or (in Korean) agu, and they are, as I found out later that week, a bit on the chewy side.

What time is it? DISCO TIME!

Halloween Night
After a few hours of rest, we outfitted ourselves in our costumes, and headed out for the Thunderbird Lounge, the bar at which a large Halloween party would be held, forgoing dinner as we were all still full from our Outback excursion. The party itself was nothing too remarkable; we had attended the same bar the night before after leaving Commun, and aside from seeing a lot of familiar faces from the EPIK orientation in August (many EPIK teachers from all over Korea had come), it was quite similar to the night before... except the Korean girl tending bar had an Afro and a moustache.

Alicia and I had to do the best we could on such short notice, settling on a retread of our costumes a few years ago, though I am sure I was a much shabbier chicken this time around, with my ripped face mask. We actually came in second or third in the couples costume category, though there was only one prize, and it went to a pair of mimes. Our friend, who had made a ballerina costume from scratch, won the grand prize, though I really like another teacher's interpretation of an aggima, old Korean women who sell fruits and various other things, and can be quite rude and pushy (and spit a lot). He had the squat down exactly- they perch like that for hours at a time. We left the Thunderbird around 2am, and wandered from bar to bar until around 4:30am, then, utterly exhausted, made our way back home. The bars close at five in the morning in Korea, but I have never, even on a good night, been able to make it that late.

Cat and Chicken, The Sequel

Aggima

Pump You Up (Or, T-shirts In The Wintertime)
Departing Daegu after a rushed trip to Burger King, we arrived back in sunny Jeju Island around mid afternoon. Looking forward to a quiet afternoon of relaxing, we wheeled our suitcase out into the airport lobby, where we set eyes on a banner that immediately dismissed all of our previous plans for relaxation. The International Federation of Body Building was holding their World Championship in Jeju Stadium. Within an hour, we were at the gate of the stadium with our friend Doug, paying the nominal fee to see what promised, judging from the spectators walking around the grounds alone, a very amusing Sunday afternoon.

We found ourselves seated front-and-center, directly behind the American team. It was too late when we realized that sitting behind these hardcore bodybuilders would leave us very little room to make jokes about the proceedings, but thankfully, after an hour of struggling to keep a straight face, they departed. The opening ceremony involved a Parade of Nations, as the weightlifters from each of around 70 nations paraded out onto the stage, accompanied by a man or woman in a suit, presumably their trainer or assistant. All were not so lucky, however, including the poor little Chinese Taipei contestant who, aside from being remarkably scrawny and sporting a weaselly mustache, had no one to carry his sign.

Poor old Chinese Taipei

The competition consisted of nine weight classes with six contestants each (we only made it through the fourth round, with both hunger and antsy boredom overtaking us by that point, 3 hours later). Each contestant had an individual floor routine, consisting of freeform posing, with musical accompaniments that ranged from the overly-dramatic to the silly (see videos below). The six were then lined up side by side and made to perform mandatory poses, and then came the Pose Down. The Pose Down is the bodybuilding equivalent of a dance-off, with each contestant trying to outdo each other, often stepping in front of others, or bumping them out of the way. They are called back out, and ranked from 6th to 1st place.

Weightlifters:

Despite his cocky pose, he was in fact last place in his category.

A group of burly Brazilians were sitting above our head, and were by far the noisiest of any of the spectators in the arena. When a Brazilian contestant was on the stage, they would yell obscene cheers in Portuguese and cheer endlessly. The Koreans sitting around them often looked terrified, having no idea what these large tan beasts were capable of.

Here are a few videos:
Livin' on a prayer
Pose Down!!! (a tamer one, but the only one I've got)
The Brazilians cheering for their teammate.

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After such a busy weekend, I was ready to have a relaxed, calm week at school. I realized that this was too much to hope for on my first day back; as I walked into work on Monday morning, I was told by my co-teacher, "On Wednesday, we will climb a mountain. Get ready."

Daegoween

2007-10-30T00:41:00.000-05:00

Halloween in Korea is much like the Fourth of July in Korea. Outside of the transplanted expats, very few people find any reason to celebrate October 31st. Our plans were therefore somewhat subdued, deciding to go out to the foreigner bar, the Blue Agave, for a Halloween party being thrown by the bar staff. Our plans made, we set out to scoure the tiny bins of Halloween merchandise at EMart (Walmart's Korean equivalent) to try and find some manner of a costume. It was quite late in the game when Alicia and I were informed about a massive EPIK first-years party being thrown in Daegu. So late in fact that every flight out of the city was booked, not only to Daegu, but also to Ulsan and Busan, the two nearest major cities. Aside from flying to Seoul and taking a 4-hour bus trip (the express trains were also booked), there was no way we could make it. We therefore once again resigned ourselves to staying in town, and commenced planning our weekend out.

That is, until Thursday, the day before we would have to leave, when we once again decided against all advise to go to the airport and try to get a standby seat. Hastily packing our bags, and, at least in my case, half-expecting to be coming home the next night, we agreed to leave work early and arrive at the airport at 3:30pm, an hour and a half early.

Alicia met me at my school at 3, just as the kids were getting out of school. Chaos ensued. While she was waiting on me outside, a girl asked her if she knew me. She said, "yes, I'm his girlfriend", and soon had a group of sixth grade girls swarming around her. By the time I arrived, a throng of students were shouting Girlfriend! Girlfriend! Pretty! Pretty! and mobbing us as we walked down the street. A little girl gave Alicia a stuffed animal as a gift. It was very cute pandemonium.

Arriving at the airport, we learned that we had dramaticaly overestimated our chances of getting on the 5:05 to Daegu. Korean Air was so overbooked that even standby was closed. The thought occurred that we hadn't tried Asiana Airlines, so with little hope in our hearts we approached the counter, and succeeded in securing a set of standby tickets. We were numbers 12 and 13, and were informed that there would probably be 5 people let on, though we could wait if we wanted. Wanting to say that we had at least tried our best to take this trip, we waited the hour and a half until we were to return to the counter.

When we came back up, a small crowd had formed, and a man was reading information off a sheet, in Korean of course. Just as we were panicking, we saw that the Jeju Education Director (our bosses' boss' boss) was standing in front of us, a man who could speak English much more successfully than we could speak Korean. We tapped him on the shoulder, and he, though taken off guard, agreed to act as an interpreter for us. Soon thereafter, we were told that they would begin announcing standyby ticket numbers for the Daegu flight.

Two people were allowed to board. Only two. Dejected, we walked over to the counter to get a refund for our unfulfilled dream. We had just turned in our ticket when the Education Director ran up and said something to the cashier. She nodded, typed on her keyboard for a rather long period of time... and printed us boarding passes. Apparently the flight had been delayed for 15 minutes, therefore, for a reason I don't believe I'll ever understand, that magically freed up at least another eleven seats. Grabbing our passes, we sprinted for the gate. We had made it- We were going to Daegu.

A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy
After an hour-long flight, we arrived in the city. It was only then that we realized we had no idea where we were going. Calling our friends from Jeju, who were only just then leaving the island, we were told to take a taxi to Camp Walker, a US Army base in Daegu, being told we would find a cheap hotel near the entrance. after a 20 minute cab ride, we were dropped off near the guarded gate, in what was by far the seediest area I've been to in Korea. No sooner were we dropped off on the side of the street than a carfull of GIs cursed at us for standing in the road. In the dimly lit street we could see shady-looking Koreans stalking the shadows and groups of prostitutes escorting wayward servicemen off the streets into dark houses. We later learned from a local EPIK teacher (who had finally called us back) that we had come to the back gate of the base, a markedly different kind of area from the front entrance, but by then, we were already back in downtown waiting to meet up with the other Jeju teachers.

While waiting, we saw a rather interesting idea to get around paying high downtown rent: a big pink bus was parked along the main shopping district, which had been converted into a clothing store. It seems to park on the main roads after dark on weekend nights, selling various Korean-couture items, departing late that night (it was gone the next day). Alicia (finally) finished shopping, and we set out, cell phones edging tenuously on the brink of death, to find our Jeju friends, who had just arrived. After numerous instance of 'just missing each other', we were finally able to set off in search of a hotel, at 10pm.

The Love Motel
We wandered into a bustling and crowded network of streets, similar only in the most basic layout to the City Hall district of Jeju Si, full of restaurants, shops, and bars, labelled with the requisite copyright-infringing names found all over Korea: the Sex and the City boutique, The Beatles bar, the Sleepless in Seattle coffee shop (I think that last one's actually pretty clever). Lost if left to our own devices, we asked the first foreigners we saw (one of many on the street, actually) if the could help us. They agreed, leading us through street after street of the large downtown district until we came to a small sign pointing to a hotel called Mellow Yellow. Walking down the small back street, we saw the there were actually two hotels, the Yellow and the Mellow. Joking that the Yellow must be for locals and the Mellow for foreigners, we checked to see if the had space, but there was nothing in either. We were told to walk around the corner to another hotel, and soon we found the signs for ZOO004 (I guess it's zoo-thousand-and-four, approximating the word 2004, but that doesn't really work in Korean, when it's something like zoo gong gong sa...). Rooms were available, with names like the Diamond Room, Ruby Room, and ours, the Sapphire Room. We grabbed the key, eager to unload our baggage, and entering the room learned something interesting about ZOO004, which I suppose should have been obvious from the downstairs movie rental shelves- it was a Love Motel.

Now, even if the love motel isn't a uniquely Korean invention, they have certainly done much to proliferate the concept. Rented out for two different periods, the day block and the night block, or both, love motels serve as the equivalent of the pay-by-the-hour motels back home, but are far less seedy. Honestly, it was a fairly nice hotel room, complete with an internet-equipped PC, two TVs, and in the case of the nicer rooms, everything from Japanese wood Hanoki tubs, to saunas, to projection screen TV's and LED constellations on the ceiling above the bed. Our room was unique in having a loft bed (called a 'second story for the business man' in the room descriptions)... complete with mirrors on the ceiling. The TVs had basic cable, but when they were turned on were tuned to the more 'adult' choices the hotel provided... weird, Asian 'adult' choices. Now, as far as I've heard, this was a relatively tame version of the love motel, with others having many more unusual adult conveniences, ranging from unusual adult vending machines to massage services. Quite regardless of its purpose, the hotel was a bargain for 45,000 Won a night, and honestly had the softest bed I've slept on in Korea so far. Here's hoping it was a clean, soft bed.

Mellow Yellow

The mirrored ceiling

The Love Motel Room

ZOO004!

Having settled in, we made our way out to the bar scene. Both of the bars we stopped at were choked with foreigners, and even had a few tending bar. Having been in Korea for a long while now, I suppose, I think we all experienced a bit of culture shock coming back into such an environment. It was like being dropped back home, and I don't think I liked it.

This was merely the first night in our adventures, the next day being far more exciting, with ancient Korean medicines and one weird Halloween night. To be continued...

Best of the Rest of the Fests

2007-10-23T00:33:00.000-05:00

Horsing Around
The number of festivals in this country is simply astounding; even as a foreigner who cannot speak the language, I have attended more festivals in the short time I have spent here than I did in the last year in Houston (my heart is breaking that I will be missing Art Crawl this year, however). We seem to stumble into them often, and also have the added benefit the veteran foreigners' combined years of experience to guide us. They are quite frequently travelling all about the island, bringing along anyone else that they can.

It was therefore surprising that the Jeju Horse Festival had hardly been mentioned, though I knew from a tourism pamphlet that it was taking place in early October. However, such pamphlets and postings are often incredibly wrong- I had, for instance, read in the very same source that the festival was in late September and was called the Pony Festival (it was not). So I set out one rainy day, taking a $12 cab ride (about 20 minutes) to the Jeju Horse Stadium, where I was relieved to find a festival actually taking place.

I had two very specific goals at this event, but it seemed that my late afternoon arrival had foiled them both. I had heard, weeks earlier while eating some raw fish, that a similar meal could be found in Jeju, known as malgogi hoe (by the way, I found out I was saying 횟 wrong, thanks to Wikipedia- there's a short 't-stop' at the end... no wonder my students had no idea what I was saying). Malgogi is the name for horse meat in Korea, thus malgogi hoe is raw horse meat. It is a very expensive meal but it's also undeniably uniquely Korean; how could I pass up my opportunity to try something like this while here? The steep price was no longer an issue when I learned, from the group of Koreans that came with us to Loveland, that the Horse Festival would have free malgogi hoe. Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I decided I should give it a shot.

My second goal had far longer dwelt in my heart, since I first viewed a short promotional video of Jeju Island, and saw a spilt-second clip of what appeared to be two horses charging at each other. After some research, I learned that Jeju is one of the the last four cities in the world that has sanctioned horse fights. By which I mean, horse on horse combat. Everyone I asked about this, be they expats or natives, had no idea what I was talking about, and no doubt thought it was a strange question to ask. I was almost convinced that what I had read on the matter was incorrect, yet thought that if hope indeed remained to see such an event, it would be at the Horse Fest. It's not that I'm a fan of animal violence- of course I'm not- but I find this to be such an unusual practice that I feel like I would be missing out on something if I didn't experience it. Just like eating the raw horse or live octopus, right?

Walking through a food court full of the usual fried snacks, and what appeared to be a roast pig on a spit, I made my way to the small horse arena in the back of the grounds. I saw a large, crazed-looking stallion running after two mares, who were trying to politely refuse his advances by kicking him in the face. Not knowing what was happening, I stayed around and watched. These horse were soon thereafter brought back into the stables, and Mongolian trick riders came out and put on a riding show. They were pretty impressive, doing flips over the horse and jumping from one side to the other, though the rain which had just started caused them to make a few big mistakes. The downpour soon became torrential, and the furious neighing of the horses in the exposed trailers up the hill signalled that the day's outdoor festivities were over.

The special and genetically unique Mongolian-descended Jeju horse

Mongolian acrobat remounting his horse

What shame he has brought on his Mongolian brothers!

I left, clutching my backpack to my chest in the raging storm, and headed for the large building at the head of the park. On the way, however, I rain into a sign which confirmed what I had so long believed to be true. Despite what everyone else had said, I now had indisputable proof:

Horse-fighting was real!

I found out later that day from another foreigner that I had missed a session of horse combat by mere minutes, having arrived at the arena just after it ended. I also learned that the roasted 'pig' on the spit I passed in the food court was in fact a young horse, indistiguishable due to having it's legs removed, and now long-since packed up because of the rain. I was told that if there was malgogi hoe, it had long since been given out. I was 0 for 3.

The only consolation I had at the moment was gambling. I arrived at the large track building, where I met with a group of foreign teachers and tried to decipher the Korean language stat sheets. I picked a quinella and chose two horses whose names we had translated using a pocket dictionary, "Mountain Success Oyster" and "King-cloth Lord Zero". Neither of them did very well. Thus I went home empty-handed, having lost both 1,000 won (that sounds so much more dramatic than $1) and my shot at eating horse. I was disappointed to be sure, but there is no sense in beating a dead horse, so I'll move on.

Nucifer Rising
Last weekend, we had the unique opportunity to be shuttled around by a friend with a car. Such an experience really drives home the need of personal transportation on Jeju Island, with its many secrets lying well off the main roads. We had been invited to attend a nutmeg festival on Saturday, or rather, we thought we had, having misunderstood our friend at the bar a few nights earlier. We were in fact going to a nutmeg forest called Bijarim, full of very aged nutmeg trees. I for one had no idea nutmeg grew on trees, but it does- in this case, the Japanese torreya nucifera. The oldest of these was the millenium nutmeg, a 837-year old tree with a trunk quadruple the size of the others. It was so ancient and enormous that it had a number of small trees of a different species growing out of its massive trunk. A placard next to the tree claimed that it was the physical manifestation of the perserverance of the ancient Jeju people, and that it would guide them and protect them. A major cold front had come through that morning, and the meager coats we had brought provided little protection from the elements. I traded my warm sweatshirt for Alicia's paper-thin windbreaker, which was tight enough to make me look like I was wearing a wetsuit.

Millenium Nutmeg

Following the nutmeg forest, we attended (crashed, actually) the Korean TESOL dinner at a galbi (grilled pork) restaurant. I found it a bit strange that it was owned by a Buddhist couple, as I was under the impression that most Buddhists were vegetarian. The first thing we noticed was the massive magpie hopping about the floor. It was apparently a fixture at the restaurant, having it's own little perch under the 'daily specials' menu. The galbi here was different than anywhere else I've been to; they took the slabs of pork and smoked them in an oven over a wood fire, the result being not far from the barbeque back home in Texas. The method of delivery was by far the most amusing, as they would literally shovel the meat out of the oven, and bring said 'meat shovel' to the grill on the table. The handle was detachable, and the meat finished grilling on the shovel face at the table.

Magpie (I think his name was Chongi)

Meat Shovel!

An A-maze-ing Pumpkin Festival
I swear that will be the last forced pun in this entry.

That Sunday, we attended yet another of Jeju's myriad of festivals, the Pumpkin Festival. We had heard that there would free beer, and were therefore suprised to see a rather modest turnout from the foreigner population (many were undoubtedly still sleeping that afternoon, having stayed up until 6am to watch the New Zealand/England rugby championship game). The festival was held at the Kimnyeong Maze Park, which featured a large hedge maze. Seeing a number of children ringing the bell on the platform at the maze's end, I assumed that it would be simple. Instead, I wandered lost through the hedgy folds for nearly 45 minutes, occassionally crossing under a group of victorious youngsters celebrating their conquest of the labyrinth. I can only guess that I was over-thinking all of it, but I eventually made my way out. Returning, I saw that the pumpkin carving contest was nearing its end. I think the one below was my favorite. Alicia and a friend carved a traditional Jeju 'stone grandfather' statue, hoping that the judges' nationalism would win the contest for them, but soon found out that they were not the only ones to have that idea. They didn't win the contest, but the "Too Much Soju" pumpkin did take third place.

From one of the bridges in the course of the maze.

Lost.

"Too Much Soju"

It was, all in all, an easy, laid-back weekend. We finished it off with the excellent Indian food restaurant Bagdad, which is easily the best Indian food I've had anywhere. Next weekend should be much more exciting, as we attempt to make it to Daegu for a Halloween party. I'm still at a loss for what to do for a costume. I've got a Boy Scouts shirt here, so I may just keep it simple and go with that... but I'm open to suggestions. We've considered the Dog/Grill couple costume, but maybe that's a bit tacky.

Because anyone who has seen our costumes for the last two years will know, Alicia and I are all about classy Halloween costumes.

Festivals

2007-10-15T00:31:00.000-05:00

Sports Day
I haven't counted, but sometimes get the distinct impression that I have in fact had more days of 'vacation' than of actual teaching. The first week or two were, until last week, the only full weeks of work in the classroom I'd had, and those consisted more of introducing myself to the students than actual teaching. The week following Chuseok (itself only a 2-day work week) was the shortest yet: I taught only on Tuesday, and even then only some of my classes. Class on Monday was canceled, though I was not made aware of this until I showed up to work that morning, so I sat in my office for 8 hours with no clue as to whether I should be preparing for class the next day or simply surfing the internet (in the end, I wrote a blog entry).

The reason for all of the cancellations (the weeks before were riddled with them as well) was to practice for the mysterious Sports Day, an event I had been told was equivalent to Field Day back in the United States, though it always seemed strange to me that one would need to 'practice' for a day of capture-the-flag and relay races. It turns out that the real essence of Sports Day lies somewhere between Field Day, a recital, a school play, and an open house.

The Wednesday that it was held on was a holiday, but my attendance was compulsory. I was told that I would have Thursday off, though I was already obligated to attend an EPIK conference that day. I do not resent attending Sports Day, as it turned out to be a very unique opportunity to see Korean culture, as well as get in the good graces of everyone from the students to the faculty to the PTO. Many parents attended on the day of the event, and the opening ceremonies involved much fanfare, including the detonation of a pair of gunpowder tubes that were apparently taped up right above my head...

The requisite races were run, along with the standard tug of war (though I did find the competition on the rope between the old married women quite amusing). However, there were also musical performances and dance routines done by the kids and teachers, and two martial arts performances, one of which was a kung fu or wushu routine with real swords and spears (I can't even imagine 3rd graders jumping around with weapons in America), and the other was a taekwondo demonstration. Well, kind of. Watch the video below. My camera picked up a lot of the crowd screaming so in case you can't tell, the background music is Billie Jean.

The entire event lasted from 9 am until 4 pm, meaning that I was quite sunburned at the end of it all. One of the final events was a race in which 5 students would run around the track, and a posterboard was held up which had (in Korean of course) a physical description of a person on it, such as "old woman" or "male teacher". The kids would have to grab someone from the crowd encircling the track and finish the race running hand in hand with that person. I ran around 5 times, answering (or being told to answer) to the call-ups of 'handsome guy', 'big head', 'smart person', and 'S-line figure'- meaning well-shaped woman... The students and parents seemed to really like that I participated, apparently something that no foreign teacher had done in the past there, and I guess that as long as everyone likes me, I've got a bit more job security, a fact which is somewhat of a comfort every time I teach (or rather, fail at teaching) my solo class... those kids are brutal.

Some pictures of Namgwang Sports Day:

Longest tug-of-war that I've ever seen: 150 vs. 150

The kids raced down the back of their classmates.

What would a festival be without festival food. Here is a double-fried corndog, so thick that the first time I had one the middle was cold even after being deep-fried for half a minute

Hittin' the Bang

That night, I was taken out to eat with the entire faculty group as well as the heads of the PTO, and yet again, it was samgyeupsal and other fatty pork. Following dinner (and more than a fair share of soju), I went with the teachers out to a Korean karaoke, called a noraebang (pronounced nohr-ay-bong). Koreans have a tradition where they will offer you soju from their own cup, which it is apparently rude to refuse (there are few who are harder drinkers than the Koreans). So, after far to many 'shared shots', I arrived at the noraebang, my face burning red and my head spinning. I came in just a bit after the others had arrived, and thus walked into a party already in progress; I was greeted with the sight of my principal- a short, old, and seemingly dour man- clutching a microphone, jumping on a couch, and beating on a tabletop with his removed shoe.

After getting such positive feedback for participating in Sports Day, I felt incredible pressure to relent and give into the teachers' demand that I sing a song. I certainly needed to sober up just a bit before I did, as my heart was racing and I didn't think that continuing to drink would help me. Eventually, I settled on the Beatles, thinking they were both easy enough to sing and popular enough for this crowd. There has been little up to this point as surreal for me as singing Hey Jude to a room full of middle-aged Asians. They even sang the na-na-na-na chorus.

G'Day Mate?
The 1st Annual Jeju International English Festival was held that Friday and Saturday, and attendance was, that's right, mandatory. We were asked to volunteer for a spot in the festival, to work at the booth set up to represent our nations, or to serve as a judge in one of many competitions. I asked to be a judge in the "King Of Debate" contest, and was instead told that I would be working in the Australia booth, explaining, to the many hundreds of kids that would come, all that I knew about Australia... a country I've never been to. I guess the logic was that because I was white, I should have a working knowledge about all white countries? I found this reverse stereotype kind of amusing, and I know that a lot of Americans (or Australians, for that matter) may make the same assumption about Asians, so I decided to go along with it and try to make the best of it.

So, it turns out that there were a few inaccuracies in the booths, with this costume hanging in the back of the Australia tent...

The other main attraction in the tent was a hula hoop, which, according to Wikipedia, was suggested to the American company Wham-o by an Australian, but that's kind of stretching it... I mean, they couldn't find anything else? A boomerang, a digeridoo, a can of Fosters, nothing?

The America tent was fun, though it had quite a few inaccuracies of it's own. We put on an assortment of American music, mostly Iggy Pop or Lou Reed, though I really enjoyed the Slayer CD we found lying around, which made good background music for the kids trying on hats.

One of the more blatant lies:

The strange Anti-Nixon poster which appeared 4 times around the booth:

All in all, the festival was a good chance to see a lot of the southside Jeju people who rarely make it up from Seogwipo. We had a good couple of nights of going out with the whole group, including visiting a well-over-capacity hole in the wall bar to watch England beat Australia in the Rugby Cup semifinals, and a really, really late-night (4:30 am) trip to McDonalds. And I learned a rather important lesson from all of this:

Never call your friends back home after a long night out. You may be struggling to form full sentences, but they are eating breakfast and in no way similarly impaired.

Back to Thanksgiving (or, Two-seok)

2007-10-08T00:32:00.000-05:00

Now, it's been quite a while, a few weeks in fact, since we celebrated the Korean holiday of Chuseok, but due to a number of obstacles and obligations (see the post below) the second half of the Thanksgiving roundup had to wait until I had enough free time to write it. It was also just recently that I finally figured out how to download videos and images from my phone, which I think will make this post a bit more interesting, particularly the seafood bit.

Now, following the Teddy Bear Museum, we did do a bit more touring of Seogwipo, the resort town to the south of the island. I was rather shocked to see that directly across the street from the museum was a Hooters, a restaurant chain whose uninteresting food and only marginally "attractive" waitstaff seems to have an international appeal exceeding my understanding. I cannot say, however, that we will not make a journey out to this restaurant during our stay here, nor will we be alone when we do; all those we have told about our discovery are understandably curious about how such a restaurant can live up to its name yet draw employees from the local Asian population.

Seogwipo has a number of other sights, such as the hexagonal pillars of volcanic rock called jusangjeollidae, formed when smoldering lava collided with the ocean. The sight is rather surreal, and in the summer there is a sky-blue mist that hangs all about the place, but upon our visit it was still quite overcast. We were here for around 5 minutes, as Alicia's co-teacher, Tae I, had become rather worn out and was thus waiting for us in the car. It is one of the many places we will need to visit in the prettier months next year.

Our final destination in Seogwipo was the Hyatt hotel, overlooking the island's most famous beach, Jungmun. The beach is much more impressive in fair weather, as we had a chance to learn the very next day when we came back down with some friends. Jungmun beach is considered one of the best beaches in Asia, with clear water and white sand surrounded by tropical vegetation. As I said, we returned the next day, and I spent several hours laying out on the beach, working on my sunburn. I did swim a bit, until my beach phobia was reignited upon seeing a jellyfish the size of a hubcap. For those of you not so well acquainted with my history, I was stung by a Portuguese manowar when I was around six years old, and still bear scars all over my body, with my left hand being completely covered with them (the long one on my left wrist that looks like Japan is how I learned to tell 'right' from 'left' when I was younger, and I still use it for reference in the matter). Thus quite despite myself I still jump at shadows under the waves and panic when seaweed brushes by me, and will certainly not get back in the damn water when I can see for certain that there is danger. I don't even think a jelly fish sting is as painful as I think it would be, and it's pretty significantly different than the creature which I encountered, but this kind of logic does very little to actually change my emotional reaction. I was told that the jelly fish are at their worst this time of year, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised, or let it scare me off from going out again when the weather warms up. I don't suppose that it will, yet now that I know there are jelly fish in Asia (and really I should have known, they are on the menu at Mai's) it'll always be in the back of my mind.

After leaving the beach on our second trip to Seogwipo, we snuck up a set of cliff-side stair into the pool area of the Hyatt resort. We used their showers and restrooms while attentive Korean staff enthusiastically waited on us, assuming that our race somehow confirmed that we were in fact guests of the resort. We went for a swim in a pool area complete with waterfalls, palm trees, and a swim-up bar (closed for the off-season), then ventured off to try to celebrate Chuseok at a decent hotel buffet in the area.

What we in fact found was that hotel buffets in this tourist town are $60 a person, and that all other restaurants are closed on Chuseok, including, to our dismay, Hooters, which the men in the group had been holding on to as a last-resort option. We ended up eating dinner on Korean Thanksgiving in front of a convenience store, eating seaweed rice rolls and pre-made sandwiches. By the time we had settled on this course of action, we had been walking around for more than 45 minutes, so we all sat quietly, a bit dejected, drinking our cheap beer and wondering if a 60 dollar buffet was so unreasonable after all.

Jungmun Beach

Our misappropriated swimming pool at the Hyatt.

The Seafood Odyssey
Long ago, I ended an entry with the statement that I was looking forward to eating sannakji, a term which I did not elaborate on. I was able to try sannakji over the course of the Chuseok break, as it seems that expressing one's interest in the stranger foods of Korea to the Korean people is a great way to get taken out to try them. All I had to do was mention sannakji, and within a few hours we were eating it. But our first adventure began on the night of our first trip to Seogwipo with Alicia's co-teacher Tae-I.

We had been told earlier in the day that we would be going out for raw fish at the end of the trip, but as I was at the time in between waves of bar-sausage nausea, I hardly relished the thought. It was only right as the day was ending that I began to get excited over the prospect of real Korean hue, a dish distinctly different, and cheaper, than the Japanese sushi we had eaten here earlier in our stay. It is in essence a multi-course sashimi dinner. The restaurant we came to was quite modest, but it had the many varieties of fish we would be consuming swimming in tanks out front. We were brought course after course of raw fish, from small bits of salmon to full snappers, sliced and laid out on a platter. The importance of soju and garlic in these kind of meals is stressed repeatedly by the Koreans, as they believe both to kill bacteria potentially living in the fish. I thus needed to drink a few shots of grain alcohol despite my weak stomach.

Tae I had heard that I wanted to try sannakji, and asked if it was available. We found out that they instead had hanchi, which in a sense is very similar. So, what are these mystery dishes? Well, sannakji is a small live octopus, cut up and covered in sesame oil, and served while it is still moving. Hanchi is cuttlefish served in the same way, though without sesame oil. The tentacles are still very active, and will grab onto your tongue while you try to chew them. It can be quite dangerous to fail to chew them adequately, as they have been known to stick to the inside of a person's throat if they get a chance. I found them to both be quite tasty, though hanchi is both me and Alicia's favorite, and hanchi was much more of a fighter than sannakji. Unfortunately, the only video I have up right now is the sannakji, which is below:

When I get the hanchi video, which is truly my first time I tried live seafood, I will post it too. Over the break, we had a chance to attend a few other seafood restaurants, once more with Tae I and her family, and then again with a group of young Koreans that we met in the Led Zeppelin bar (we also went to Loveland with them). Below are a few images from the trips, the first being sora, a small conch which is twisted out of its shell with a toothpick, and has a dark green tail with a crumbly texture.

The sannakji is the purple platter, and the hanchi, of which there was much more provided, is the white one to the right.

If that was shocking, we were still in no way prepared for the sea life dance party that was haemultang. We encountered this dish after going to Loveland, which, for those who have not yet guessed it or looked it up, is a sex amusement park meant to break the ice for the island's many honeymooning couples. The Koreans we went with took us to a restaurant afterwards for "seafood soup", a boring name which belies the complexity of the dish. A number of live shellfish are dumped into a broth, including mussels and scallops, and on top of these a live, full grown octopus is flipped on his head, presumably so he can't escape, and living, wriggling abalone is placed on top. I have to say that watching the abalone squirm around after a night at Loveland brought about a few giggles around the table. Anyway, so the animals are essentially boiled to death, then chopped up and eaten. I must say, it's cruel but delicious.

Those are the abalone on top. No comment.

This is hardly the end of my food adventures, as for every new food I had the chance to try, I learned of at least two more. Pheasant shabu-shabu, malgogi hue, boshingtang, and many many more. There's even a smaller sannakji that is eaten whole, not chopped up. I'm looking forward to learning enough Korean to find these places on my own, or just start dropping the hint around the Koreans. That always seems to work.

Gimme Shelter

2007-10-01T02:36:00.000-05:00

Before getting back to the adventures of Chuseok (something I am not now undertaking as I have yet to figure out how to download the videos and photos from my phone), I guess I should catch up to the present. The last few days have been eventful, though in less of a "fun Chuseok" kind of way.

Once again we experienced the drawbacks of the language barrier which are more or less ever-present in all aspects of daily life here. I was made aware of a rather troublesome situation last Thursday, as the month of September ended and the process of finalizing a housing contract began. We had been living for the last month on a tentative "trial lease", where we could determine if we wanted to stay in our apartment or find another place. Whether it was in fact satisfaction with our digs or had just been too lazy or helpless in this Korean world to go out and find new lodging, we were now getting ready to commit to living in our place. Thus the night before I went in to pay the rent, we began unpacking our suitcases, which we had not yet done, being unsure up to that point if we would stay.

It came therefore as a bit of a shock when, upon discussing the term of the lease, it was mentioned quite casually that we would have thre months more to live, and then leave the apartment just in case the owner's friend came back to town around that time, needing a place to stay. I was shocked and indignant, wondering who the hell this mystery fellow was who was so important that the mere possibility of his return put us out on the street.

Well, it seems like this was always the plan, and that suspiciously curtious "trial lease" was given to us with the assumption that we had knowledge of the shorter lease term. We of course did not, and though the parties involved claim to have mentioned it to us, I do not doubt that it was simply not translated for us but rather incorrectly taken to be understood by all. Regardless, we were now in a bad situation, and rather than trying to find a 9 or 10 month lease later down the road, we felt it would be best to look for a place to move to by the end of the month... which was within 3 days.

Now, it's needless to say that finding housing in Korea is difficult, and I realized this, but I had no idea just how difficult it would be to actually both find and see a place. After finding a potential apartment for us, Alicia's co-teacher Soo took us out a neighborhood about 10 minutes from our current location. There we waited on a street corner until the man who owned the property showed up, an hour late. The space was larger, with actual multiple rooms, but it was unfurnished, and there was a bit of a mold problem- the wallpaper had fallen off from around one of the windows.

We spent the night debating, fretting, and generally in anguish about making this eleventh hour decision. We never really settled on one side, as each clearly had its advantages and drawbacks. It soon became irrelevant, however; calling Soo the next day to ask some questions about the property, we were informed that the place had in fact already rented out, an hour after we had seen it the day before. The family which had been living in the apartment before it had become available had moved out the day before we saw it. It was on the market for around 18 hours, and it wasn't even a great place. This supremely discouraged us in our house hunting endeavor.

We learned around this time that we may have put ourselves through an unnecessary ordeal, as the building owner changed his mind and allowed us a 12 month lease. So, here we will remain, it seems. We finally got rid of the nice, but not very functional, coffee table, as well as an oriental lamp, a dirty rug, and a large plant which has survived incredibly well despite being ignored for a month or two. So, less crap means more space, which hopefully means less stress. Alicia and I haven't killed each other yet, and it looks like we've made it through the roughest, most cluttered part of our time here.

5-Day Weekend (or, Chuseok It To Me: Round One)

2007-09-28T16:30:00.000-05:00

Wonder why it's been so long since I updated and why I haven't been responding to emails? Well, it seems that around mid-September the nation of Korea shuts down for a festival somewhat equivalent to Thanksgiving. And when I say 'shuts down', I mean everything: restaurants, grocery stores, and bars. And, strangely enough, it seems the holdiay also shut down the three wireless internet signals we had been stealing from our apartment... so, we were pretty unconnected. So now comes a (too) long round-up of our many adventures over Chuseok.

FRIDAY - Wild Duck Chase
Getting off from work early, and having a bit of relatively rare 'free time' (Alicia was at the dentist), I met up with my friend Isaac and travelled off to get a new set of tuning pegs for the broken old acoustic guitar I managed to get here. I have as of one week later still not replaced said part, not having a screwdriver or any sorts of tools to speak of, but knowing that I could fix it and learn to play guitar anytime I wanted makes me unexplainably complacent, like I actually believe that tomorrow I'll wake up and do it... and that will be the reason I probably will fail at my goal of learning guitar.

That night, after Alicia returned, our friends invited us out to dinner at a restaurant allegedly located in the far-but-not-too-far away Shin Jeju (New Jeju). Instead of actually being located in the city, we instead took a cab for 45 minutes into the dark dead countryside, arriving at a duck shabu-shabu restaurant (thin strips of raw duck cooked in a hotpot). Now, whether it was in fact too close to the closing time of the restaurant, or if instead the group of 14 foreigners was simply too intimidating, we were turned away, and left to making our long and hungry way back to the city, ultimately eating some cheap bar food- spicy chicken soup and some sketchy cheese sausages.

The night took an incredibly positive turn thereafter, as we met the aforementioned Isaac at a bar called Led Zeppelin, duly decked out in it's namesake's paraphenalia. The bar is one a few of it's sort in Jeju, having a collection of roughly 3,000 vinyl LPs of classic rock, as well as numerous CD's, DVD's and even 8-tracks of all manner of other music, which is requested and played on demand for the bar's clientelle. If the owner can't find a song in the stacks, he will download it. All in all, one of my favorite bars in the world, and incredibly close to our house. Nine beers later, and I made the short trip back up the hill to prepare for the long tomorrow ahead of me.

SATURDAY - Seogwipo: Scenery, Sickness, and Seafood
I was amazed to find myself perfectly fine the next morning when we woke up at around 9 am. Alicia's co-teacher (well, one of the many she has, being at four schools) was taking us out to see the island, an opportunity that we, the car-less, couldn't refuse. Seogwipo is the resort town which comprises the lower half of the island, and is often compared to Hawaii, having similar scenery, greenery, and such. It was about 45 minutes into our trip to this tropical paradise that my hangover hit. In reality, I later learned that it was probably the bar-food sausages that made me sick (a friend was ill as well). Regardless, I felt like an iron hand was crushing my stomach. If my body's goal was to teach me not to eat strange sausage, this feeling last much longer than it needed to to drive that point home. It was in such a state, clutching my gut and hobbling behind the group, that we came to our first destination.

Jeongbang Falls
A beautiful sight despite the overcast sky, the waterfall was quite impressive, though Alicia, apparently having run out of wonderment and awe in South America, found them to be nothing new or special in comparison to the falls she had seen in Brazil. We had to descend a steep cliff-side stair and hop across the volcanic rock to get close to it. At the bottom, near the cliff face, I saw the haenyo for the first time. These old women dive in the ocean for up to 2 minutes at a time without any sort of gear and collect sea life to sell as food to those visiting the seashore. Despite my curiosity, the thought of eating abalone or sea urchins made the nausea I'd been fighting all morning so much worse that I had to leave.

Yakcheonsa Temple

A beautiful Buddhist temple, and certainly the biggest I have ever seen. Apparently it is the oldest on the island. It looks out over the ocean, and has soft chanting and music piped in through speakers hidden all over the temple grounds. It really was an amazing place which for all to brief of a moment made me forget my stomach cramps. The ceiling was covered with small prayer sheets, and many monks still walked around the temple, going about their daily lives looking for enlightenment. We only were able to explore the inside of the temple, and not so much the grounds, because it started raining, so I will definitely need to go back. Here are some photos:

Now, the only way to top the serenity of a Buddhist Temple is with a:

Teddy Bear Museum
Seriously, this was one of the silliest things I've ever seen. And I don't really like to use the word 'silly' very often, but I don't feel as if I have a choice in this case. With a space about a third the size of the MoMA in New York, this gallery of ursine plushes was divided into three sections: History, Art, and Outdoor Bear Wonderland.

History included bears made in the likeness of historical figures, or reenacting various historical episodes, including landing on the moon, the Titanic, the discovery of the terra-cotta (or, as we quipped in the first of many puns, beara-cotta) warriors. Perhaps most disturbing was the fully armed teddy bears storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. But my favorite is shown in the video below.

[In trying to caption this video, I came up with: "The Bear-lin Wall", or "Mr. Gorbearchev, bear down this wall!". I couldn't decide which to go with, so here's both]

And (because I just found out how fast YouTube can upload videos) here's another:

[B-Day]

The Art section consisted of famous paintings and sculptures fastidiously recreated in bear form, some of which are shown below. The Van Gogh-Bear was one of my favorites. The outdoor bear garden was full of fiberglass bears having this or that kind of fun- fishing, having a picnic, happily rolling around. In some ways, it seems as if it would give a young, impressionable child the idea that bears are friendly, when they most certainly are not. Ask Timothy Treadwell.

Here's a smattering of bears to give you an idea:

To Be Continued
The Teddy Bear Museum was only the beginning of our day, yet it's all too much for one post. As indicated by the Seogwipo subheadline, I have eaten some of the strangest seafood, or any food for that matter, over the last few days. Many of those photos and videos are on my phone, so I will have to wait until I leave how to upload this media to my computer. Hope to do so this weekend. Live octopus, anyone?

And, yes, we did visit Loveland. But that's a whole 'nother story all together. Sorry to disappoint you, but that's how it is... Love isn't always on time.

Go Go Gogi

2007-09-20T23:20:00.000-05:00

The first three days of my week were saturated in pig fat.

Perhaps it was the need of the residents of Jeju Island to forget the tragedies of the previous weekend that led to their desire to eat plate after plate of pork cuts, or maybe it was simply a continuation of that same bad karma that stuck me in the middle of that storm. In the end, the fact remains the same: I consumed somewhere around 3 pounds of pure, solid pork insulation over the course of three days. I want to blame something besides myself for this occurance, maybe the 5th grade teachers who insisted I came out to lunch with them or the mandatory all-staff dinner I attended... but I know that it's nobody's fault but my own.

I have spoken before about samgyeopsal, the pork cut with three layers of fat on it. Well, this week, I was introduced to o-gyeopsal, with an absurd 5 layers of fat on it. It was, however, but one of many new cuts of meat I tried this week. You see, I have know for a while that the Korean word gogi means meat... but I didn't fathom that one could walk into a restaurant and simply say "Gogi!" to recieve a platter of meat as wide and high as a deep-dish extra-large pizza. I had two experiences with this 'gogi' this week, the first being when the school's cafeteria was closed on Monday, having lost either electricity or running water as a result of the storm, and I was thus invited out to lunch with the fifth grade teachers. It was delicious, though as one might expect, the o-gyeopsal's overabundance of fat was a bit overwhelming. In a single cut, it was as much fat as it was pork.

I went home feeling rather unhealthy, though quite full and satisfied. The real problem with such meals is that it isn't just a bunch of fatty pork-- no, there is so much more. Recalling the list of foods that promote stomach problems, I believe we have them all: garlic is roasted on the top of the metal slab, with greasy, popping slabs of meat resting just below. The bottom is lined with kimchi, the pickled and spicy national cabbage of Korea, which catches and absorbs the fat running down the board. As I said before, the Koreans love their fat, and seem to want to make sure that none of it escapes being consumed. The drink of choice for meals like this? Soju. I believe I have written about soju before, but I have just learned a new fact (one which explains the headaches):

(from Wikipedia)
From 1965 until 1991, in order to alleviate rice shortages, the Korean government prohibited the traditional methods of distilling soju from pure grain. Soju was then made primarily through dilution by mixing pure ethanol with water and flavoring. The vast majority of inexpensive soju available today is produced in this manner.

What better way to chase down such a meal than with grain alcohol cut with sugar and water? I will say, I have grown to like soju, as it is cheap and, in my opinion, better tasting than vodka or tequila and such. It's much worse for you, however, and is drank straight up and not mixed.

So after leaving lunch on Monday, I went home to try to rest for a while. Soon thereafter, Alicia came home and told me we had been invited to dinner by some of our friends. Though I was incredibly full, the prospect of waiting a few hours and eating Lotteria (Korean McDonalds) by myself was much more unappealing. So, we walked down the hill, and towards the samgyeopsal restaurants. I panicked.

Now, there is an entire alley full of grill-your-own-meat restaurants in the back streets of City Hall. The fierce competition between them has led them all to employ a man simply to stand in the street outside their establishment and loudly extol their quality cuts. We have traditionally chosen to avoid these places and instead go to the unannounced yet completely packed restaurant near the middle of the alley. Despite often having to wait for a table, it is the clear choice. And they have free soda.

Despite promising myself I would take it easy, I ate another full meal, and finished it with something wholly unexpected: the remaining pork and kimchi was mixed with rice, chili paste, a fried egg, and CHEESE! It is such a rare occurance to find cheese in Korean cuisine that I felt obligated to soldier on and eat my portion.

Wednesday came, and I arrived at school to learn that class was cancelled, at least for me, since my third co-teacher with whom I was to teach class that day was entertaining the district supervisor as he toured the school. I was told that the entire teaching staff would be going out for dinner... and I can't say I was suprised to find out that we would be again eating the gogi platter. Now, there was a certain feeling of obligation for each table to finish the entire plate, which might have been a cultural thing, and sitting at a table with three women, one of who was on a diet, made that task very hard. But I did, and I soon regretted it.

I went out with the sixth grade teachers afterwards, and we finally were able to talk to each other... a bar is a better environment than the teachers' lounge at 9 am for breaking the ice. I guess I more or less had my introduction into the world of Korean social outings. I went home around 11pm, but they apparently stayed out and sang at a karaoke bar until 1 or 2 in the morning... and were visibly affected the next day in school. There is a microwave ramen type of thing that is supposed to help hangovers, and they had a full pallet in the lounge the next morning.

Chuseok is coming this next week, so I'm looking at a five-day weekend, which means I get to do a lot of the things I've been reading about since long before I came here. Looking forward to sannakji, Seogwipo, the beaches (I hope they weren't washed away), and...

Jeju Loveland.

Nari By Nature (or, Obligatory Scorpions Reference)

2007-09-17T00:36:00.000-05:00

Before departing from work last Friday, the last thing I did was to write Brian Rod and gloatingly wish him a happy Hurricane Humberto. I was at the time sitting near a window, enjoying the cool, windy, and otherwise wonderful weather here on Jeju Island. And though I would not call myself a believer of karma... I am one step closer now.

After a fun (yet expensive) Friday night visit to the local microbrewery, followed by a some-what disappointly tame Saturday night, I awoke Sunday morning around 10:30am to a rather violent storm. The screen outside our window was clattering angrily, and the building itself was swaying just a little in the wind. We could see the rain being whipped around the corner in huge sheets, and found this interesting enough to break out our camcorder for the first time and get some of the tropical rainstorm on film, or at least what we could before the batteries ran out. It turns out we shot too soon, so to speak.

Now, not knowing Korean has many disadvantages. You can not speak to anyone but other foreigners, travelling in cabs or by bus is difficult, and ordering food is a nightmare- for example, I went out alone the other day to eat, and thinking that I had found a nice chicken breast dish, instead got incredibly spicy chicken feet which I couldn't eat at all. Arguably the worst disadvantage, however, is that it is well beyond our reach to listen to the radio or watch the news. Had we been able to, we would have known that a Category 2 typhoon (same as a hurricane, but it instead forms in the Pacific) was bearing down on poor little Jeju Island. It was called Nari, which is pronounced 'nah-ree', but every Korean I heard pronounced it 'nah-dee", so I referred to it incorrectly as Typhoon Naughty for quite some time.

Though we didn't realize it at the time, our room was on the far side of the building from where the storm was hitting, which is why it was pretty surprising when Doug, an Australian who has been a resident of our building for six months, came by and asked if we needed help with flooding. I told him we were fine, and followed him as he continued on his way up to the roof. The roof is essentially a shallow basin encasing some pipes, and I saw that it was quite flooded, and the winds were incredibly strong. It was only going to get worse, though.

We went down the stairs and visited some of the EPIK teachers we knew whose rooms were on the side of the building facing the storm. Opening the first door, we were yelled at to close it right away, as the open door created a vacuum, and water literally gushed through the seams of their windows. Nearly everyone on this side of the building had a lake in their room, while one girl in particular had a stream of water coming from here ceiling. We found out soon thereafter that the apartment above her own was vacant, and with no one to stop the torrent from coming in, the entire place was flooded, with water running under the door out into the hall.

Now, during this time, another resident named Isaac and I decided to go 30 feet down the street to the store. We ran out into the horizontal rain, came to the now-locked doors of the store, and ran back as fast as we could- it was much worse than we thought. But neither of us had food in our apartment, so it was decided that Isaac, who had a car of his own, and had lived and driven regularly in Fairbanks Alaska in weather much worse, would drive the two of us down to the local supermarket, Woori Mart. On the way, we missed a turn, and needed to take the main road down. In doing so, we ended up in a traffic jam and were thus committed to crossing a three-foot deep stream of runoff water raging across the street, and as we were in a small and low budget car, we just barely made it. We couldn't find the way to Woori Mart, and not understanding why all the streets leading there were flooded, we drove around for another 15 minutes, until we realized that not only was there no way to the Woori Mart, but there was no way home. Parking his car on a hill, we set off on foot to make it home and out of the now-peaking typhoon. I was only wearing my swimsuit and a sleeveless shirt, which is by no means the 'ideal' hurricane attire; it is hard to believe how bad rain can hurt at 110 mph.

As we made our way home, we faced the inevitable river, the seemingly omnipresent flood that made it impossible to drive home. Fording through 3 feet of brown rushing water, I struggled to keep my footing, and worried about all the possible diseases swimming around my knees. This river was the first place we saw the destruction this storm was causing, with a line of cars all piled on each other, washed down into a convenience store by the storm.

Running through the tempest for nearly 15 minutes, we finally reached the base of our hill, but decided that having come so far, we may as well go and see if the Woori Mart was opened. Descending the stairs from the base of the hill (which now looked like a waterfall), we saw that the Woori Mart was very, very much closed, and realized why no roads leading to it were opened: the entire street, including the store, were under four feet of water. Cars were drifting alonglike boats in the current, and the shopkeepers who were outside were frozen in dismay, unable to stop the rising tide.

Soon after going home to report what we had seen, a group of the other guys wanted to go out and see the Woori Mart River and the 12 car pile up we had passed on our way home. The storm had just come to it's eye, and though still a strong storm, it was nowhere near as rough of a journey. While walking down the stream again, now slightly shallower, we passed a Buddhist temple whose wall had collapsed when two cars, a taxi and a minivan, had been swept into it. The monk told us, as far as we could gather, to go home because the storm was about to come back in full force. The orange grove on the way up the hill, tucked away in a low area between two major roads, was utterly under water, and all the trees had been levelled.

We headed home, and finding that, conveniently enough, the store 30 feet from our apartment building had opened it's doors again, we bought the rice, ramen, and beer we needed, and having thus finally completed our errand, went inside and waited for the storm to die down.

It was only after several hours had passed that we were able to take our cameras out into the city, the rain having since stopped. At first I felt bad for taking photos, especially as a foreigner, but many of the Koreans were doing the same, and very few of the shop or car owners were on the scene yet, so we discreetly documented the moment. The river had absorbed into Jeju's porous volcanic terrain, and though it was far less dangerous and frightening than our first visit, the destruction was still very visible. These photos are mostly from the Woori Mart stream, post-flood, though some are from elsewhere, and will be thus noted.

These next three are of the Buddhist Temple:

A store owner draining out his shop:

More car-nage (sorry, I know it's sort of an insensitive pun):

An underground car garage. Every car, including one of our friend's motorcycles, was completely underwater:

By far the strangest state of an automobile we saw. I can't imagine how this happened:

The ground was soaked with oil and gasoline:

Pile-ups:

I believe this house was already on it's way out when the storm hit:

The flooded orange grove:

The former site of the 3-foot deep river we walked through on foot:

Just so this whole thing isn't a downer, here's some ice cream we had the other night... and yes, that is corn:

Despite having record-breaking rainfall, the schools on Jeju were not closed, so I still had work today. And while I was at work today, I was warned that another typhoon is on its way. So... we'll just have to see how this all works out, I guess.

Heartbreaker (or, The Cruel Injustice Of British Rock Reunions)

2007-09-12T20:03:00.001-05:00

Would I pay $2,000 to fly to London to see the one-off reunion performance of a forty-year-old band whose members are either well passed their prime or dead? The answer of this absurd question would usually be a resounding no, but in this case, I feel like I will always regret missing Led Zeppelin's first show in 22 years. This is of course despite the fact that I have about a 1 in 500,000 chance of winning the privilege to purchase the tickets, as they are being raffled off in an online drawing, and that I have far less than the ridiculous amount of money needed for such a venture. Having been in nearby Spain when Pink Floyd reunited for Live 8, this is not the first time I've missed out on Britain's seemingly endless string of "not to be missed" London-only concerts. Just this last summer, I had to view Spinal Tap on a tiny little browser window, while a stadium of indifferent limeys half-heartedly watched them live. Enough is enough, England. This time you've gone to far.

...Anyhow, despite such saddening news, things are going well here in Korea. Earlier this week, I taught a series of 9 fifth grade classes, giving the same powerpoint presentation about myself, and mostly expecting a dramatically lower level of both proficiency in English and general interest in learning. I was wrong on both counts; the fifth graders were far more enthusiastic, easier to control, and much easier to impress (you would not believe how much the kids love barbeque, though I don't know where on the island they would have tried it). My co-teacher in fifth grade speaks English well, and it was an easy process sharing the class with her. Next week, I have been told to prepare a presentation on Thanksgiving, as the Korean version, Chusok, is coming a week later. I need to come up with Thanksgiving games as well, but short of drawing hand-turkeys, I am stumped.

Third graders, of whom there are mercifully only two classes per week, are nice enough but their level of English is tragically lower; after showing them my powerpoint (necessarily toned down to their level) I answered questions for around 25 minutes, all of which were in the format of "Do you like ...?" (they just learned this). There are 8 third grade classes, and since I have only 2 per week, I'll be repeating this experience for the next month. I'm not one to complain about easy work... so I won't. I was just hoping to be done with that damn powerpoint by now.

There is a delicate balance between eating healthy and saving money, one which was often a problem for me back at home, but has become much more pronounced here in Korea. Everywhere there are snack shops with fried everything- fried chicken, fried pork, fried rice rolls, fried quail eggs... just about anything that can fit on a skewer. And they are, like most fried street goods, very very cheap. On the other hand, anything that is remotely healthy is pretty costly, and comparatively rare. I have found myself going out on a particular night, eating a healthy but pricey meal, and thinking "wow, this is great, I'm gonna lose so much weight!". Then the next morning, I wake up and look in my wallet and, despairing, think, "It looks like I'll be eating fried dumplings and ramen tonight". Maybe this will subside when I get paid, and am not watching my stack of 10,000 Won notes shrink down to nothing. Just one more week, I guess.

I've got to go teach class now (my first two were moved to later this afternoon because of class elections, though no one told me). I'll write more later, see ya!

Out Of The City (or, Jeju sans Si)

2007-09-11T00:31:00.000-05:00

Following my first week (or half-week) of teaching, I finally had my first free weekend in far too long, and was able to go out and explore a bit more of the island. It was the first time I was able to leave Jeju City proper, and I found out that the areas outside of the metropolitan area are very beautiful, even if it often smells like a farm. The EPIK teachers who were unlucky enough to end up living 20 minutes out of the city at the rural Foreign Language High School dorms threw a party on Saturday night, on their roof. Despite providing us with an opportunity to meet up with some of our friends from orientation, there were certainly a number of drawbacks to a country rooftop party. First, it was incredibly dark outside, this being quite dangerous, when combined with beer and soju, due to the lack of a railing on the ledge and a fifty foot drop to a thorny lawn below. But even worse was the wildlife, the insects drawn to the lonely light coming out of the trapdoor we crawled up through. They were relentless in their swarming, and seemed to really want to sample whatever food or drink we had in our hands. Here is one of the bigger moths, and though I know this picture provides little scale, trust me when I say that it looked like a little bird.

We did see an amazing thing up in the sky- and I call it a "thing" because I don't know the name for it- which somewhat resembled the Northern Lights. A bunch of vertical lights stretched out across the sky, like little candles. It was all at once that the partygoers seemed to notice them, and everyone stood quiet for a minute looking up at the unusual phenomenon. Of course, it was impossible to photograph.

As soon as everyone realized that going out on the town was a lot more fun that spending a few more hours on a roof in the middle of nowhere, we departed for the primary foreigner bar in the city, the Blue Agave. Despite being Korean-run, they had some of the best quesadillas I have ever had, and the beer was inexpensive and varied. It is a rather surreal experience to be in a bar surrounded by Westerners but knowing that just outside there is a bustling Korean city. It feels a bit like home until you look out the window.

On Sunday we finally made it to Hamdeok, one of Jeju's highly praised beaches, only to find it deserted. Apparently, Koreans come to the beach in droves during a so-called "beach season", and once it has concluded they stop coming altogether. The deserted beach was beautiful nonetheless, though the water springing out of the volcanic rock into the ocean was absolutely freezing. The sky was overcast in the morning, and unfortunately it only cleared up 5 minutes after our camera ran out of batteries... so here are some photos which despite being slightly less impressive than the beach later appeared should still provide an idea of what it looked like (Click to make them bigger):

This last one is of the swarms of "beach roaches" (not actually roaches, but looked a lot like them) that covered all the lower-level volcanic rock. Our friend left his black bag near the rock, and they quickly migrated over to it. They left our white plastic sacks alone, seeming to only like dark colored objects, to stay camoflauged.

We had our first non-Korean meal in quite some time last night, going to a Chinese restaurant instead. Now, the last time I ate Chinese food overseas, I ended up in the hospital being rehydrated intravenously. This time I had better luck; the food was some of the best I've had here. There is something distinct about the way Chinese food smells, much different than Korean food, and much more familiar to me and probably most Westerners. They have a fixed price menu that includes abalone and shark fin, which though it is quite expensive at $60 per person, I hope to have the chance to try it before I leave. Other than that, I have still been branching out culinarily, and have found the wonder that is galbi- simple, marinated grilled meat- and it is definitely one of my favorite foods.

I am about to go get my alien registration card, which will allow me to open a bank account, get a phone, and otherwise enable me to live a more normal life. I will try to write more when I get a chance. Bye for now!

Rooney Love

2007-09-07T01:02:00.000-05:00

Walking around the school, I am consistantly mobbed by children screaming 'Hello, I love you' and 'You are handsome!', both of which are probably exaggerations, but it's certainly going to my head regardless. They also continue to call me Rooney, who I have since learned is Wayne Rooney, a soccer star for Manchester United. This is him (me?):

I don't know how to respond, so I just say thanks.

Well, I have now completed my first two days of classes with the 6th graders, which in actuality consisted of eight classes of exactly the same material- the powerpoint presentation about myself, and the subsequent question and answer session following it. I was quick to learn that each class is a unique organism, and depending on this 'personality' the Q&A sessions ranged from enthusiastic excitement to tedious teeth-pulling. The trick I resorted to was to call out a number, as all students were numbered within a class, and the unlucky kid would have to stand up and ask me a question. These coerced responses were often something simple, like "what is your favorite color?". The questions which were most eagerly asked were often the strangest. They included:

"How much money do you make?"
"What blood type are you?"
"But why is green your favorite color?"
"How did you get so tall?"
"Do you think I am a handsome boy?"
"Who do you think is the stupidest student in this class?"
And... "Teacher, why are you so fat?"

The last one was kind of my fault, because in estimating my weight in kilograms, I guessed 125 kg... which is about 20 lbs too high.... but really, it took me by surprise. I told him is was because I ate a lot.

And on that note, here comes the requisite post about food. Last night, we had samgyeopsal, which is pork belly that looks like thick pieces of bacon which are cooked on a tilted metal grill, with tofu, garlic, and a layer of kimchi at the bottom to catch the grease (the best kimchi ever). The 'sam' in the name means '3', refering to the 3 layers of fat on the pork pieces. This fat doesn't really cook away completely, so it is a very chewy, though delicious, meal. It is also one of the most dangerous dinners I've ever had, with the continuous threat of splattering airborne pork fat hitting me in the face. Apparently there is a similar dish that has five layers of fat, and is much more expensive. Koreans really love their fat, it seems. The night before, Alicia and I split a large sushi plate at a rather Americanizd Japanese restaurant. It is very similar, though the salmon is much better and the halibut sucks. I have yet to experience the famous Jeju seafood, but I hope to do so this weekend.

Of this seafood, there is one that has really captured my interest- sannakji. I don't want to ruin the surprise, because I feel like it will be one of the first videos that I post up on this blog. Go ahead and look it up, if you want, or rent the movie Oldboy. I'm really excited, and now I know where to find it. I will have to go to Seogwipo (other side of the island), but I will probably be there anyway for Chusok (the 'thanksgiving' at the end of September).

I am feeling a bit less nervous about teaching now. I think it helps to have at least an idea of what I'll be doing, instead of being wholly in the dark. I will be teaching 5th graders on Monday and Tuesday, which makes me nervous, but I think I've got this powerpoint presentation thing pretty much nailed down. I now know what the kids find interesting (cowboys, space ships, and barbecue) and what I should just skip over (I still don't know why I put a picture of the Alamo on the Texas slide...). Still, the thing that got them most interested was the fact that the WWE wrestler Undertaker went to my school- they went CRAZY! Maybe he needs his own slide in the show.

Ahop to Daseot

2007-09-03T21:53:00.000-05:00

My first day of teaching wasn't so much of a "first day of teaching" after all. Instead, I have been, and will continue to be, constructing a powerpoint to introduce myself to my classes. This seems simple enough, but then again...

So, I guess I don't know Powerpoint by heart, and besides importing images, there is little I can do. So plain white background it is, I guess... And it may be of interest to some of you that you will be appearing in the slideshow, being ooh and aahed at by roughly 250 Korean youth. And for those of you who didn't make the cut, try taking a photogragh without having a drink in your hand. It took far to long to find 4 pictures of my friends when they were not holding a bottle or pint glass.

*(And for those of you who may have noticed that I said Houston had "many rivers"... whatever, I don't care. I'm not going to explain what a bayou is to the kids)

We have met a few more foreigners, and went out for shabu-shabu last night, a dish less exotic than pig spine and far better tasting. Brass hotpots with boiling broth are used to cook paper-thin slices of, um, I think it was maybe pork or beef? It's reminiscent of Vietnamese pho, but much more of a production. The whole "sitting cross-legged on the floor under really short tables" thing is killing me. I'm not really made for such abuse, and it's hard to walk when we finally stand up to leave.

This is only one of the issues my size has created. At the university, I regularly hit my head on the bunkbeds and other overhanging furniture. I finally found a pair of shorts (by that way, yeah, I forgot to pack any shorts...), but they are seersucker and a few inches too small, so I have to safety-pin them together. And as far as buying the indoor slippers I need for my school, apparently my foot is at least 5 centimeters bigger than the maximum shoe size here. So I've been cramming my feet into tiny little guest sandals and tottering around the school trying not to fall.

The kids seem to like me; I will walk pass a classroom and they will all turn and wave their arms and shout "HELLO!", and I've had a few run up to me and introduce themselves. They seem really excited, and that in turn makes me feel more enthusiastic about all of this. I had to address an assembly of more than 2,000 kids yesterday, not knowing if what I was saying was being understood in the least, but in the end they clapped for me, perhaps genuinely, perhaps out of curtious pity.

The teacher's lounge, my temporary office and where I am currently typing up this entry, is a bit strange to work in. Every hour, for at least fifteen minutes, a group of thirty-year-old Korean women come in and fill up the room. They are nice and everything, but it is a bit strange to sit in the midst of a conversation and understand not a bit of it. A few of them speak English, but not really knowing what to talk about with someone from such a different type of life all together, I usually just sit sheepishly, waiting for the hour to fall and the crowd to disperse back to their classes. I begin teaching on Thursday, and maybe I will have more common ground to discuss once I begin.

Hope everything is going well at home. From the sound of it, Joe has been trying to take over the house, though he needs to be a bit more... vigilant, maybe, so that the kids who come over for parties don't inrevocably wreck up the place. See you later!

The Other Side Of The World

2007-09-02T18:06:00.000-05:00

It was as good a time as any to start this blog right now, having been kicked out of our apartment for two hours by our landlady and a cleaning lady as they got rid of the traces of the previous inhabitants. Neither spoke English, though both seemed to have trouble grasping that we understood absolutely none of the Korean they were speaking, and so after 30 minutes of frustrating (and ultimately failed) phrasebook communication, they simply kicked us out.

So we walked down the street to a PC Bang, a small windowless room where adolescent Koreans play Counterstrike and Warcraft on superfast computers while sitting in padded recliner chairs. The door advertised a special rate for buying 10-hour blocks of time (only $7!), so it must be fairly common for kids to blow an entire day here. There's more smoke in here than any bar or nightclub I've ever been to, but the rates are really cheap, and we don't have an internet hookup in our flat yet.

Korea is by far the most "foreign" place I have ever been. We eased into it slowly, having a 7-day orientation at the rather isolated Korea University, sleeping in bunk beds and attending classes all day. A night, the entire mass of foreigners would descend the hill into the small and unsuspecting village below, swarming a bar or restaurant with a caucasian mob of around 100 people. The first major bar at the foot of the hill, K5, was actually closed on the first Saturday of our stay there (their grand opening was the following Monday), but the most charming members of our group convinced them to open their doors early, and K5 was cemented as the bar for EPIK teachers for the whole week. On Thursday, we ventured out into the nearby city, taking a fleet of around 20 taxis to the heart of downtown. We filled an entire city block, and jammed streets as we tried to find a bar owner who wasn't horrified by the number of us. Eventually, we found a noraebang (Korean karaoke), and divided into a few large rooms.

The list of songs was enormous, ranging from Meatloaf to Megadeth. We sang Sweet Caroline and Bohemian Rhapsody, and watched one kid struggle through Paint It Black. An hour later, we all took to the street again and found an unassuming chicken & pizza restaurant... which was much more of a family restaurant than a bar. So it was no surprise when we all were angrily kicked out an hour or two later by the owner. A group of the teachers had been extremely loud, refused to sit down, and one tried to steal beer out of the cooler. Our group of friends left as quickly as possible, having done nothing wrong and not wanting to be around if things got ugly. The owner looked like he may become violent if we didn't get out. The sad thing is that he will probably never let foreigners back in his business, which is a somewhat common attitude it seems- business owners and taxis will occasionally make an 'X' out of their arms and yell "No Foreigner!". I guess I understand why. Some foreigners are just assholes.

We finished our orientation, and spent a full 15-hour day in transit from KU to our placement. For those who didn't know, or have forgotten, we are on a small island province in the south of S. Korea called Jeju. Despite getting stuck with primary school (which seems easy enough, just frustratingly repetitive), our housing and schools are where we wanted to be, in the main city called Jeju Si. Our apartment is a bit small for two, and the bed is like a stone slab, but it is only a three-minute walk from the heart of the city, an area called City Hall (or whatever that is in Korean). We've met a couple teachers in our building already, and went out with an Australian and another newly arrived teacher from Wisconsin last night for dinner at a small house-restaurant off the main roads. We shared a dish that consisted mainly of pig spine and potatoes, which was surprisingly good. The couple who owned the house brewed some kind of moonshine rice wine, which had delightful cinnamon notes in the finish, but otherwise tasted like turpentine.

There seems to be a good community of ex-pats here, and we have already been introduced to the "foreigner bars" in our area. The food is good, with sushi being surprisingly cheap, and pizza costing around $20 for a small size. I have had some... um, trouble... adapting to the diet here, but I have heard that in a week or so I will be fully adapted. I just hope to avoid another "Ecuador-style" bout of illness before that point, though I have been avoiding food carts on the street and such to play it safe.

I start school tomorrow, and hope that everything works out. I was placed in a single primary school that is near to my apartment, and will be teaching for around 22 hours a week. My first assignment is to make a Powerpoint presentation about America, Texas, Houston, and me. So if anyone has any suggestions, I encourage you to help me out. I have met my co-teacher, the primary means of communication I have, and she is very nice. We spent 4 hours on Friday night getting my apartment set up, and she took us down to the E-Mart (a 5-story Walmart) to buy all of our necessities. Alicia's co-teacher and my own took us out to dinner at a Mexican food restaurant called El Paso... which was interesting, to say the least. And my pronounciation of "enchilada" and "quesadilla" was continuously corrected.

Anyway, I believe that the Korean women have probably left our apartment by now. I can only hope that didn't lock us out, because frankly if they did I wouldn't know who to call. Thanks for reading, and I hope to be able to post some photos of this place soon, as that is much more interesting than a big block of text. See you later!