Chuck Masterson’s Actual Blog

우리 마을 (Uri Ma'eul—Our Town)

2012-01-05T09:50:00.018-05:00

As I said last post, it's about time I posted a few pictures of the town I live in. Here they come.

Before anything else, I must post a picture of the Thanksgiving dinner I made. I made the potatoes, bread, and chicken. It was delicious.

This picture was taken at sunrise from the top of Chang'an Mountain next to Sachangni. The catch is that, since Sachangni is west of the mountain, this is actually some other village that I've never visited.

This is the least blurry picture I got of the moon during the eclipse. However, it had just barely started, so none of the moon is visibly shadowed. And then the failure of this picture made me give up. Instead I enjoyed it exclusively with my eyes. But I thought it desered commemorating here, even poorly.

Here is where I live. This is the back of the house. My room is the one on the right side of the third floor in the foreground. I'm not really sure why I didn't take a picture of the front of the building. Anyhow, this is one of the nicest places to live in town.

The school is directly next door. When I got here they were in the middle of remodeling it—putting in the nice steps out front and the big stage thing.

It's laid out as a long corridor. Beyond the end of it in this picture is where my house is.

Looking the other way down the corridor, there's another building not quite connected to the main building, so you have to walk outside to get from one to the other. This building is where the Sanae English Experience Center is located.

And here we are in the SEEC, which is never referred to by that name. (It's the English room.) The computer on the left is where I spend hours each day.

This is the back part of the room. It's only occasionally used. During English camp, I was urged to make activities that take place in this part of the room because they make great photographs to show during the slideshow at the closing ceremony.

Here is a view in the other direction. There's a fancy recording studio set up on the back wall. I've never seen it used, not once. Although there's a camera hanging from the ceiling that's been continuously on since I got here. I've tried to figure out how to turn it off twice now, and each time it gave me an electric shock. Amanda and I discussed whether this means that it's actually spy equipment.

This door is perhaps slightly more weatherproof than the rest of the doors into the school. That half-inch gap above the doors lets wind in freely.

Here's the main hallway of the school. Classrooms on the right wall, windows on the left, just like a loggia. The windows are single-pane. It seems that hallways are thought of as extensions of the outdoors, except with no precipitation. The thing is, the doors into the classrooms aren't insulated. They're made of plastic with a wood veneer. I really don't understand the logic that led to these architectural principles.

The front entrance. Good-bye, please.

This is the area right next to the school. In America it would be a lawn, but here it's put to practical use; I think during the growing season they had cabbage here.

The school is high on a hill, so here's the road down to the rest of the town. Coming off the left is a little road to a Buddhist temple, marked by a swastika.

This is the temple at the end of that path. It's just down the hill from my house. But it's not the main temple in town; I guess it's just an auxiliary, or maybe it's for civilian Buddhists while the nicer temple is for soldiers only. At any rate, we'll get to the other one soon enough.

The upstairs of these buildings are occupied by hagwons, a thriving industry in Korea. They're places where children can go after school to study more. They're not such a big thing with elementary school students, but I still have quite a few kids who mention that they go to hagwons. They're mainly popular with high-schoolers, who must take an exam at the end of high school that will determine the course of their entire life. The government recently passed a law that all hagwons must close by 10:00 pm. Before that, students would study there until perhaps 1:00. Now they study at home until 1:00.

Beyond the hagwons, the town peters out and the road goes off to the mountains and to Seoul.

A little outside town is an old bridge that Sean found while wandering one day. It looks pretty dilapidated.

But a swing is slung underneath it: wonderful. Unfortunately, it's so close to the ground that you can't pump your legs with full energy, so you can't get up very high at all. Maybe that can be fixed.

Coming down the hill from the school in the other direction, this is the road that I normally walk when I'm getting into town. People live in this house; it's about typical for town.

This building has a sign that says 인쇄프라자 (Inswae Peuraja, Print Plaza). I'm not sure if it's even used, but clearly at one point it was. I had a dream once that soldiers were housed there and I slept in it with them. It was rickety on the inside too in my dream.

This is the Dungji Restaurant. They make a mean soft tofu stew.

The main street in town. Buy the Way and GS25 are everpresent Korean convenience stores. Also present but not quite as prevalent are 7-Elevens. This area is mostly restaurants and convenience stores, which are useful for the soldiers who come into town.

Here's a look inside GS25. Of all the pictures I've taken in Korea, this might come closest to summing the place up. We've got it all: pictures of beautiful people, alcohol (in the fridge on the left wall), packaged goods, the military, cute romance, bad weatherproofing. (However, missing are: mountains, Buddhism, traditional food, and tradition itself.)

Off the main street is the hapkido dojang where I learn. The white door belongs to it. Next door we have 돼지나라 (Dwaeji Nara)—"Pigland". I do not know what kind of business it is. I hope I am right that they sell pork. In the background you can see the church that's next door to my house; it's built with lots of glass, in the style used when ostentation is considered important to a building's design.

It would be hard to find yourself in any kind of populated place in this country and be more than a short walk away from a Paris Baguette. Almost everything they sell is delicious, and some things (like pizza toast and hot dog pastries) can almost serve as a lunch in a pinch.

This is the street where the market is held on calendar days ending in 5 and 0. I'll make a point of coming back on such a day to get pictures of the market while it's happening.

This place sells me fresh whole chickens (생닭—saengdak). They also sell ducks (오리—ori), which I may have to try sometime.

Here's a bank, another example (like the church from earlier) of the lots-of-glass style of apparently impressive architecture.

The bus station. This and Ben's car are the only ways I've ever left Sachangni.

Nearby, at the bottom of the town, is the entrance from the highway. I don't know what the rock says (because it uses old-fashioned Chinese characters and is thus very hard to translate). But the light-up marquee says, "If we are prepared for natural disasters, we can overcome them." I don't know why it says that.

This is the Sachangcheon; cheon is a suffix that means "stream".

Another example of the endearing Korean practice of growing food in every place where it can be grown.

Sachangcheon from its level.

Across the river is the road up to Chang'an Temple; the trailhead up Chang'an Mountain is at the temple. On the road we have this place. Here, I believe, when it's warmer rabbits are raised for consumption.

And here I believe is the same sort of facility but for dogs. Though I'm not sure.

The beginning of the trail up the mountain. I didn't climb it during this walk.

Instead I went to the temple. These are the steps up to its parking lot.

The facilities for the New Year's Day festivities. The tents were open on the other side and had four-foot-tall heaters in them.

The osaekcheon (five-color banners).

This bell isn't rung just on special occasions. It's also rung several times at 5:00 pm every day. I hear it as I walk back to the house from work. The log is special, though.

The Buddha watches over the town.

The Buddha stands on a prominence next to the temple. From it you can see the layout of the whole celebration a little better.

This is what the Buddha sees.

On the other side of the prominence is one of many series of tomato greenhouses where they grow the tomatoes that this tomato town is famous for tomato tomato. Which is a perfect segue to the tomato park. It is a place that I did not know existed until a few weeks ago. I can't explain this fact well.

Come, walk with me as we journey through a land of wonder and tomatoes.

There's nothing I liked better as a kid than climbing the tomato tree and plucking myself some nice, juicy, red tomatoes.

As I walked toward this statue, an old man was coming in the opposite direction. He pointed meaningfully to this statue and to my camera. After I took a picture, he seemed satisfied.

So that's it for this. Tomorrow I leave for southeast Asia. Twenty-four hours from now, I'll probably be sleeping in Incheon International Airport. Forty-eight hours from now, I hope I'll have found a hostel on Khao San Road in Bangkok. I've been staring at computers for probably more than half my waking day every day for weeks now, so I'm planning to unplug completely during this trip. This may mean that you have no way of determining how I'm doing for about three weeks. That may seem extreme, but I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling in the future, and I think it may be something that you may have to get used to. I'll be in Mongolia for three weeks come September, and there's no chance that I'll be able to log in to Facebook while I'm there, because I'll be out on vast plains where the closest thing to an internet cafe will be the scattered yurts of nomads. Don't panic. I'm a careful person and I plan on taking all reasonable measures to ensure that I'm not beaten, mugged, or otherwise thrown into an undesirable fate. All the countries I'm traveling in are considered pretty safe, and I'll mostly be in wild old-fashioned cities where con artists and lowlifes aren't drawn, because all the easy marks are to be found in Bangkok and Hanoi and such places. It may be possible for me to note quickly once a week that I'm fine, but if it doesn't happen, just consider no news to be good news.

And incidentally, I am going to have so much fun. I'll tell you all about it.

합기도 (Hapkido) / 근하신년! (Geunha shinnyeon—Happy New Year!) / 김정일 (Kim Jong-il)

2011-12-29T09:35:00.007-05:00

Russell recently requested that I write a shorter entry because mine are epic (as opposed to Sean's). I can't do that this time because so much has happened lately that I've been putting off writing about, but I'll keep it in mind for later.

I suppose the reason I haven't been writing here much lately is that it's winter. That means that I spend all of my daylight waking hours in the school, and when I'm not teaching a lesson I'm staring at my computer. I get a lot of communication done that way over Facebook, but it also means that when I get back from school, the last thing I want to do is look at a computer screen again. In other seasons I would energize myself a bit by taking a bike ride or looking for a path up a nearby mountain, but in the winter it's too dark to do any of that stuff. So usually, once I've exhausted other ways of occupying myself, such as practicing guitar or trying to do handstands, I end up at the computer anyhow, but without any motivation to do anything besides catatonically work on my endless font. You may have noticed that that list didn't have writing my story on it. I finished a scene one day a few weeks ago and, for reasons that seemed solid at the time, decided to work on my font instead. Mainly I think I wanted to just get the font completely done, possibly before leaving for vacation. That's a goal that will take quite a while, and now that I think about it, it's no reason for me to not write my story every day like I decided I should.

And I have even less excuse than previously because I've now started taking hapkido lessons in town. Hapkido is a martial art that's less popular than its big brother taekwondo, but apparently a lot more useful and less likely to cause serious damage to your body. Taekwondo mainly teaches you how to kick things really hard, and to a certain extent how to punch things really hard. When you look at taekwondo demonstrations, the practitioners' opponents are usually boards or paving bricks. In hapkido demonstrations, the opponents are humans, which is a clue that hapkido is good for practical purposes and taekwondo is good for showing off. I've only taken about five lessons so far, and one of them was the Friday fun lesson, so I'm pretty sure my fighting skills haven't appreciably improved. But I'm pretty sure I'm going to enjoy it, and if I get good, I've seen videos of all the cool things I'll be able to do. Like, if some guy tries to kick me, I'll be able to apparently effortlessly push his leg in a different direction to flip him over onto his face and then stand on his arms in a painful way to keep him from getting up. That's quite a ways in the future, though.

The lessons are held in a 도장 (dojang—which just means the place where lessons are held) just down the hill and two corners away from my place. I first set foot in it last Tuesday or maybe Wednesday, after a dinner when Deanna and I decided that we'd both like to try learning hapkido, because what the heck else were we doing with our evenings? It's up a creaky wooden staircase on the second floor of a typical Korean building. The floor of the main room is a giant rubber sheet, I don't know how many inches thick but at least a few. It's nice and squishy to get banged around on. Because it's in a typical Korean building, it's cold. (More about Korean architecture soon.) We came up behind a bunch of people standing and stretching and all facing the same way. The 사부님 (sabunim—the dojang master) noticed us straightaway and led us into the office, a little room off to the side, and Deanna and I managed to communicate that we wanted to take classes, and he managed to communicate that they're five days a week at 5:30 or 7:00. We watched the 5:30 class we'd just walked in on, which was full of mostly elementary- and middle-school kids; they practiced kicking a paddle, and some other stuff. We stuck around for the 7:00 class, expecting it to be a bit more impressive, and it was, thanks to having a bunch of adults in it. A lot of them were Deanna's high-school students, who speak pretty good English and were able to explain a few things to us that we'd missed.

We came back the next day, and I learned that I'm terrible at nunchucks. I was a bit discouraged, but I've kept coming in, and luckily we've learned stuff besides nunchucks, such as rolls, handsprings, kicks, and other neat stuff. There are a few black belts, and they're pretty damn impressive. Like the one middle-school kid who always plants every handspring perfectly. I usually think of myself as a pretty limber and coordinated person, but the things I'm called on to do in the class pretty generally make me feel like someone who woke up that morning to find that his skeleton has the wrong number of joints. I don't know if it's possible for me to work up to a black belt before I leave, but there are always dojangs in the States, and if I only make it a quarter of the way I'll still have learned a lot. Already I can tell my muscles are becoming stretchier.

But the physical part of the classes is only a fraction of the reason I wanted to go. You may recall that in a recent post I appeared to be pretty disillusioned and frustrated with Korea. By going to hapkido I aim to see if I can fix that. I'm going to have the chance to know some actual Koreans who aren't my co-teacher and many of whom can't speak more than a few random words of English. So far I don't really know the people in the classes as individuals, except that Donghun is good at English and the sabunim has a cute two-year-old daughter who likes to run around and shriek when she's in the dojang while he's teaching classes. But I figure that soon I'll know them as ordinary folks who have likes and dislikes, and homes and families and paychecks to earn, and have preferences on the proper way to party or handle chopsticks.

And as a bonus, I'm planning on learning Korean as much as possible during this part of the day. Sean has just recently directed me to an outstanding blog, www.fluentin3months.com, which told me something that I already had an inkling of, but had been resisting, probably because I believed my super linguistics powers made it irrelevant. That is that if you want to learn a language, the single most important thing is to speak it with actual people as much as you possibly can. I won't be able to use it at school, at least not until I'm back in the good books, because my co-teacher has decided that I'm interested only in learning Korean and I couldn't care less about teaching children good English. Plus she would always switch back to English anyhow. So I'm just going to have to start making a lot of Korean friends here, and refusing to use English even when it would make everything more convenient. (This is a strategy that the Fluent in 3 Months blogger recommends.) The hapkido class will be the beginning of that. So far I haven't been on my mission of experiencing the culture and language for real long enough to reassess any of my opinions about Korea in an organized way, but I'll be sure to let you know once I do. I can't see it being anything but eye-opening.

I was going to talk about architecture. They build here as though they were building for a tropical climate. The walls are single thicknesses of concrete with plaster on either side to make them look smooth. At the dojang the door to the outside is an unusually decent one but is always left open, and the door at the top of the stairs is at least kept closed, but in typical Korean architectural style they don't even pretend they're trying to make it airtight. At my school this peculiarity is visible on a much larger scale. The main part of the school is arranged as a hallway with doors to the classrooms on one wall and windows to the outside on the other wall. So, essentially, it's the South Campus loggia at Grinnell. (That blew my mind when I realized it. I figured out that where I work is the same as Main 2nd—and on this loggia, Quad is still a functioning dining hall, the school cafeteria.) There's a main entrance halfway down and various other entrances along it and at the ends, and most of them are about as airtight as a fruit crate. Not that it matters, because they're kept open half the time anyhow. I've tried to figure out why this is, and what I've found online suggests that it's to get rid of "bad air". It goes on to say that the traditional Korean floor heating used to be achieved by means of burning coal, and fumes tended to accumulate inside, so they needed to open the windows and doors occasionally in order to not die. Now there's no coal involved, but they keep doing it anyhow. It does help to keep the mold down, at least, by drying out the air. The walls are so cold here that water condenses on them like on a cold glass of lemonade, and then mold grows all over them. To keep it away you need a dehumidifier or you can just open the doors occasionally. Neither would be necessary if they built to last. I can't see most of the buildings in this town lasting much more than 20 years from now, and even 10 is probably pushing it for a lot of them. Some are actively crumbling. When Korea's GDP soared, the best way to show it was to build a whole bunch of new buildings, but they did it as quick as possible and as cheap as possible, and within not too long they're going to reap the consequences. (Actually, they reap an annual crop already when they get their winter heating bills.)

I went out yesterday on a photo safari because it occurred to me that after being here for over four months, I still have yet to post any pictures of what this town looks like besides a panorama that hardly gives any idea of it, and I had recently become preoccupied with the hilarious inadequacy of the buildings surrounding me. (I'll post the pictures in another entry this week once I've had a chance to take a few indoors at my school.) It made me take a closer look at some things; for example, I discovered that Mido Mart was once a bowling alley. I eventually wandered up the hill across town that leads to the soldiers' temple (the one I went to a month or so ago where I talked to the soldiers). To my surprise, there were a bunch of olive-drab canvas tents set up in the upper parking lot, and five banners in five colors strung overhead from the trees on one side of the lot to the shelter housing the temple's bell on the other side of the lot. The steps up to the bell had been covered with a red carpet, and there were decorations in the bushes on the edges. On one of them I saw "2012년" and realized it was for the new year, since today was December 31. The soldiers were having some kind of New Year's ceremony, I supposed—Koreans are big on ceremonies; almost any big meeting or conference is bracketed by an opening and a closing ceremony. I was walking down the hill, content with having approximately figured it out, when some soldiers came out of the temple and called my name. Tae-eun, the one with the best English, explained to me that at 12:00 there would be some hundreds of people there, and they would strike the bell 33 times for the new year, and they would eat tteokguk and generally have a real Korean-style new year. Then he invited me to come up and hit the bell tonight. The decision was instant and obvious—this would be where I would begin 2012.

So after eating a lot of food and drinking a bit too much beer and whisky with Ben, Russell, and Sean, I ducked out of the dakgalbi restaurant at 11:20 and climbed up the hill. Offputtingly, there was a military policeman standing at the top of the steps up to the parking lot, facing away from me, but I asked if it was okay to pass and he said it was. The hundreds of people were all soldiers, all dressed in their camo and huddling around the electric heaters that had been set up inside the big canvas tents. Tae-eun found me and explained a little bit about what would happen, and told me that the five-color banners (osaekcheon) have been around for probably a thousand years, and then, because this was the same day that I had read that blog, I went around and talked to a bunch of people in Korean. They tended to talk to me in English in response, but I kept up the Korean, mostly. I met some random soldiers, including a woman soldier and a lieutenant colonel (he knew the English for his rank), and also a clerical Buddhist (but I'm not sure if he's a monk—I just know he had cool gray robes). I wandered around speaking weird Korean until I noticed that everyone was now facing toward the bell. So I did likewise, and a voice came over a loudspeaker from somewhere and announced that there would be a countdown (kaunteudaun in Korean, so I could tell) and that the monk in charge of the temple would ring the bell first, and that it would be rung 33 times. I was proud of myself for deciphering it.

The countdown started: ship… gu… pal… chil… yuk… o… sa… sam… i… il. Instead of a zero, they were silent, and then the monk, together with a few other people, swung a big log, covered in white cloth and hanging from the rafters of the bell shelter, and rang the bell three times slowly. Everyone clapped. They walked down the stairs and another group of people went up. They rang the bell three more times to applause, and went down, and this pattern repeated. After a few groups had gone, Tae-eun found me and in a hurry told me we were up next. Someone handed me white gloves and I stood with Tae-eun and the other soldiers I had met before at the temple. Some people came down, and we went up. I hadn't been so close to the bell before. It's huge, easily big enough to hide in if you could hover above the ground a little ways, and with thick metal that makes it probably heavier than many modestly sized cars. One of the soldiers counted down from three and we swung the log into it as hard as we could, and it rang out loud enough for the whole town to hear. Two more times we hit it, and then I walked down with them, satisfied that for once in my life I'd properly rung in the new year.

But that wasn't all. Next to the temple, some people pulled out a bunch of paper lanterns. They were shaped like square hot air balloons. The bottom sides were circular and opened to the inside of the balloon, and had a bit of something suspended in the circle by wires. The bit of something was lit on fire, and the hot air expanded inside the balloon and blew it up. Then the people holding one of the balloons let it go, and it floated up into the sky, glowing red and drifting with meditative serenity. The rest followed, slowly riding the wind together like a company of airborne pilgrims. I discovered that people had written their wishes for the new year on the lanterns, and I found one that hadn't been sent skyward yet and scribbled my wish on it. Everyone watched them gradually disappear.

Then we were invited inside to have tteokguk. Each year Koreans eat a bowl of this soup in order to eat up a new year and become one year older in Korean age reckoning. I sat with some people I didn't know, including a high school freshman from Seoul (who got frustrated at my unclear Korean when he knew he could communicate better in his pretty good English) and a woman soldier. A middle-aged man made a speech about the new year, which I understood hardly any of, though I picked out the words "tong-il" (reunification) and I think "Kim Jong-il". He finished and it was time to complete 2011. Tteokguk is made with rice cakes (tteok) and in this case kimchi dumplings. It was delicious. I talked with the people around me and generally felt pretty content about things.

People finished eating and got up and left. I talked to the soldiers who lived there, and they said that for most of them it was the first time doing this traiditional celebration. They had seen bells rung for the new year before, but where they'd been, only important people like the mayor got the chance to ring. And it was their first time lighting sky lanterns. I guess that's evidence that I was on to something when I said the old traditions are more alive out here in the sticks. I could get used to a celebration like that every year.

The man making the speech was one of the first people I've heard talk about Kim Jong-il without being asked by me. Not that that's a fair measure, because I'm sure people are talking about it all the time here, and I just haven't been able to tell. But from what I can tell, it's not a tremendous concern in the day-to-day lives of people here, even though we're a day hike away from the DMZ and this is a town built around the huge numbers of soldiers stationed nearby. I haven't heard the issue broached in the dojang. On the day he died, I asked Amanda's co-teacher what was next. She just said, "I don't know." It sounded like she didn't know because she hadn't really considered it, not because she thought that trying to predict would be impossible—though almost everything in this part of the post is subject to the disclaimer that I could be completely misreading everything.

The military has been put on high alert, though I'm told that that's just a formality. All of us English teachers have read lots of articles about what's going to happen from here, and of course predictions are difficult with as much secrecy as surrounds this situation, but it appears that for a while, nothing is going to continue happening, and then about a month after the death, something or other might happen, but no one knows what or exactly when, or even if it actually will. Kim Jong-eun might decide to attack, or the state might undergo some serious turmoil, or they might ask a favor of China, or something. It basically boils down to, We'll just have to wait and see. And meanwhile people are going about their business about as they always have. There doesn't seem to be much worry on the faces at the market or in the kids at school. So I'm content to relax here and watch history unfold at unusually close range. I'm keeping a wise eye out, but I don't fear much for my safety, and I have the added benefit that at the crucial one-month mark, I'll be about halfway through my trip to Southeast Asia, so I'll be able to see from afar if there's anything dangerous going on.

I'll keep you posted, hopefully more often here than I've been doing.

얘들아 (Yaedeura)—Hey! Kids!

2011-12-04T05:49:00.008-05:00

If you read the title of this post and it sounded in your mind like a clown at the beginning of a TV show, you read it the wrong way. Imagine a slightly frustrated teacher instead. (Yae means kid, deul (changing to deur before a vowel) is the same plural I mentioned last time, and I gather that a is something akin to the vocative case ending, if you're familiar with Latin, or if not, it's what you use when you call out to someone, sort of a "Hey!".)

Sorry for not writing for a while. I decided a while back that I'd only write during my downtime at work, which worked for a while, but then I stopped having so much downtime, for little reasons here and there. Most recently I had to make a plan for a week-long winter camp that'll be held at the school ("camp" is a euphemism for "come in to school on vacation"), and after I made it, my co-teacher said it looked too "old-fashioned", and I should try to come up with "fresh, new, and brilliant ideas". Amanda was told to do the same, and later she asked her co-teacher what my co-teacher might have meant by that, and what she gathered was that my co-teacher just wants us to do everything over again because we aren't busy enough.

But besides that, I was also feeling pretty well up to date with most of the readership of this blog, as a consequence of a great Thanksgiving replete with Skype calls. You may have heard that I made some kick-awesome Thanksgiving food here, too. I was pretty satisfied with the way the holiday went.

Now, though, I ought to answer a question that people have been wondering about, because I haven't really mentioned it much. That is: what are my students like? Now that I've been teaching them for most of an entire semester, I think I can actually answer that question.

The short answer is that they're all different. When I got here I was sort of picturing a perfect grid of students, all looking dutifully straight ahead, the boys with identical, unimaginative bowl cuts, the girls with hair the same length and probably wearing dresses. Of course it's not like that; not even I really thought it would be, but I didn't realize precisely how wrong I was going to be. First off, although Koreans are racially very homogeneous, aside from a couple commonalities like straight black hair and eyes that are right up on the surface and remind you a little of a frog if you're used to the more sunken eyes of white people, the students all look pretty different, more so than I was expecting. I've got some gangly kids; some scrawny short kids; some plump kids; one kid, Gicheol, who reminds me distinctly of a penguin; and one kid who's wheelchair-bound. I've even gotten to where I know several of their names, though not that many. I'd know more, but the only times I hear them, they're embedded in Korean sentences that I can't understand, and also, Korean names do in fact all sound the same.

(I'll digress about that for a moment. They're formed on very rigid rules. Each one is three syllables long; I only know of one Korean with a name of a different length, of at least a hundred I've met. First comes the family name, one syllable long. There are only about thirty family names in Korea, and the top three most common—Lee, Park, and Kim—account for nearly half the population. Then comes the given name, which is made of two somewhat random syllables that are derived from old Chinese characters and combined by a sort of mix-and-match that's at the whims of the parents. Here are the given names of the kids in my after-school class: Jinseon, Jiwon, Jinmin, Minuk, Hyorin, Hyeyeong, Yun-gyeong, Dongnyeong. I long for something distinctive like a good old "Max" or "Alicia".)

But aside from their looks, they're also wildly different in how they learn, and even, it sometimes seems, whether they learn. In all my classes, there are a few standouts who answer the questions most of the time. Jiwon and Jinseon tend to dominate their respective classes, especially Jiwon since she's at the front. And the same way, there are some students who just don't get it. I've been amazed at the depth to which some of them don't get it, actually, especially considering that they've been learning English since age 4, supposedly at least. Some of them have to be coached through every single word if they're going to read aloud, and given half a chance they'll furtively write down the pronunciation in hangeul even though hangeul can only vaguely approximate a lot of sounds in English. ("The rabbit is faster than the turtle" would become something like "Duh rebbiteu iseu peseutuh den duh tudder.") Even my co-teacher, who once preached to me about not letting any kid fall behind, has given up on the worst kid, Jaemin, who clearly doesn't even know the alphabet. Asked to read any word, even a simple one like "must", he'll just stare at it, or (equally effectively) off into space, and if you're lucky he'll make a guess like, " 'Can'?" He tore up his English book a few weeks ago and now he reads comics in class.

Between those two ends of the spectrum, there are kids with every level of ability in between. Most of them seem to be most comfortable when we do listen and repeat exercises, which are probably the most prominent thing in the classes. Which is discouraging, because it's not an effective way for the kids to learn anything but pronunciation, and maybe not even that, since I can't tell if all 27 kids who are chorusing out "Jinho thought about asking Santa for the presents" pronounces each word correctly, or even at all. The much more effective way for them to learn would be for them to talk to each other in English in pairs or in small groups. But whenever we do anything like that, such as pair games, at least 80% of what I hear spoken is Korean, verging up to 100% depending on the kind of game or activity. English comes out of their mouths only with a great effort of extraction, is what I'm saying.

That about describes them academically. But they also have personalities, lots of them. I don't know everything about this matter, since I can't understand most of what they say to each other, but I get the gist. My after-school class, eight kids, is especially good for observing this.

The girls are very cliquey. Typically they all come in at the same time, since they were just hanging out outside or downstairs together, and all five of them sit at the same four-person table. Unless I'm doing something unusually fascinating, which I have to keep on my toes and try to do every class, they mostly lean in close and gossip among themselves. I have no idea what stories they're telling, but I imagine fashion and love are heavily involved. Maybe next time I'll ask them if they can say it in English, though they'll probably just say, "I don't know, teacher." Sometimes, when the discussion gets heated enough, they whack each other with stuff, or chase each other around the room. Jiwon and Yun-gyeong seem to be especially good gossipers, but the other three, Hyeyeong, Jinmin, and Hyorin, seem to be pretty well involved too. Jiwon is definitely the loudest. If I split the class up into teams, the girls will insist on being their own team even if the numbers are uneven; I've had them ask for a girls' team even when all five of them were there and the boys were represented by just poor Minuk.

The boys are more loners. They come in one at a time. Jinseon shows up ten minutes before class, Minuk comes in ten minutes after it starts (as do most of the girls), and Dongnyeong shows up at random times every few days (when he doesn't have Japanese lessons, I think). They sit together, but it'd be kind of ridiculous not to, since there are just three of them and the desks are in clusters of four. They also don't talk much until I call on them, which is nice. However, they're usually the ones responsible for getting on the computer and opening up webpages about knives or video games or K-Pop. Jinseon is bookish and in the minutes before class he sits and reads about something or other. Dongnyeong likes to call people stupid and probably makes lots of fart jokes when I'm not around. Minuk is quiet in English class and I get the impression that he's probably quiet all the time. It seems like they're a more diverse bunch than the girls, although I could be totally stereotyping just because I can't understand them. But they're definitely different from the girls, I can tell that for a fact. In Korea the men are meant to act manly and the women are meant to act womanly, and I can see it starting in this bunch. (That's not to say anything of their looks; Korean men are pretty androgynous and fashionable, as I mentioned last time.)

They're mostly fun people to be around, very energetic and apparently getting a kick out of lots of things, but occasionally they're disappointing. I decided I was going to start a big thing with the after-school kids, since I don't have to follow any particular curriculum for them. I started writing a story. I decided to base it off of Daniel Pinkwater's The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death—I can't decide whether this or Pinkwater's other book Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars is the best children's book ever. I wrote the beginning in simple English and brought it in to class to have them read it and decide what the next plot development in the story would be. In this story the protagonist, a Korean kid, has to move to Chicago, but finds some friends there. At the end of the first installment, the characters have just strolled by a movie theater that advertises that it's open 24 hours and tickets are $2. One of the protagonist's friends says they should come watch a movie in the middle of the night, because that'd be a great adventure. All the other characters say that sounds pretty cool. Will Jeonghyeon come to the movie? The kids voted no. Why? "I must do my homework." Or, "I must sleep." Apparently there's no such thing as a sense of adventure in Korea. I've since had to scrap the story because they weren't paying any attention to it. Maybe it was my writing or my pacing, but I think they just have a total lack of curiosity about anything that's a little strange or offbeat. It's popular culture, love, and video games for them. All the rest is for deviants.

But they're still all great to me. In some of my bigger classes it's hard to keep them on task, but even when my co-teacher's not around, I still manage to get most of them to do what they're supposed to be doing. They're polite to me and they generally listen when I tell them to stop tearing around the room hitting each other. And they even sing the stupid songs that the textbook's companion CD foists on them. Maybe they won't all speak English fluently, but for the most part they're trying. So I suppose I could have it worse.

한국 사람들 (Hanguk saramdeul)—Koreans

2011-11-15T22:45:00.005-05:00

(Linguistic note: For me it's hard to remember, or sometimes even pronounce, words in another language if they're long and I don't know what each part of them means. So: "Hanguk" means Korea; "saram" means "person", and "deul" makes it plural, although plurals are optional in Korean and mainly used only with people.)

By now I've had a few months to get used to the Korean Way, so I ought to be able to explain, at least a little, what it's like being around Koreans all the time. Although I should also disclaim that I'm not actually around Koreans all the time—only when I go out, really, because at home I really only hang out with the other Westerners in this apartment house. Still, dealing with them in school, in the cities, at the market, and everywhere else, I think I can say at least something.

When you're a young college graduate in some English-speaking country and there's not a whole lot looking immediately attractive to you in your home country, and you start thinking about coming to Korea, you naturally want to know a little about it. If you're considering this, you're probably also the kind of person who wants to travel abroad and experience other cultures, so naturally you want to read about what the Korean culture is like. What you find are message boards and blog posts, written by Westerners, that tell you that, basically, there's no such thing as Korean culture. For the most part, they express this thought almost entirely by relying on a few words, like "shallow" and "superficial". The message for you is cryptic at best, so if you decide to come to Korea, you end up coming with a vague sense of dread about what awaits you in your dealings with Koreans.

Now that I've been here, I can say that it turns out all the blogs and such are right, more or less: Korean culture is pretty shallow—at least these days. And I can see why it was so easy for them to rely on the same few words as crutches. Korean society is shallow and superficial in many different ways, and it's simple, but not terribly helpful, to encompass them all in one word. For starters, this is a place where you can see ads for plastic surgeons in the subway and on walls everywhere, offering to take the character out of your face for a certain fee. It's a place where you can find a YouTube ad for "169cm Heroes"—a dating service where you can talk to men who are at least 169cm tall. On the trains, the overwhelming majority of people who are carrying bags have gotten them from expensive clothing stores. It's not just the women, either, like it would be in America—men have to be in high fashion here too. I see them wearing skinny jeans and designer jackets and things that would normally lead me to believe I'd stumbled into the gay district, except that I already knew that homosexuality is all but invisible in Korea. At Everland, I saw one guy wearing a pristine punk outfit—black pants, black jacket with lots of metal things, shining dog collar, lots of pointless bling—looking as if he'd just bought it earlier that day at prices that could feed a North Korean family for a year, and had it pressed at a dry cleaner's shortly afterwards. Way to rebel. From what I gather, the way to get into a relationship in this country is to be extremely beautiful. If all you've got is an amazing personality, there's a lot of loneliness in your future.

Once you've become a beautiful person, if you have no beautiful counterpart, you must find one by clubbing, also at great expense. Once you have become a beautiful couple, you must spend all of your time in public appearing beautiful, by hugging each other constantly, moving at a languorous and ostensibly love-drunk pace, and gazing into each other's eyes when stationary. You see couples all over the place doing these things. When I was at Seoul N-Tower, the place with all the padlocks representing relationships, the railing overlooking the city was totally choked with couples staring out over the romantic sight of Seoul at night, motionless, standing there admiring each other's beauty and their beauty as a couple. You may recall from the picture that even the padlocks themselves are extremely beautiful: none of these practical Master jobs; you want something pink and heart-shaped. The economy is built around this concern for beauty. The bars are fed by it, the clothing shops are booming harder than any economist could predict without losing his tenure, and there must be companies that specifically manufacture pink, heart-shaped padlocks. I may be overstating the case a little bit, because I haven't actually talked with a Korean couple about their romance, so I can't fairly represent their side of the story. But in my classes, the word "beautiful" seems to be a strong favorite, and I must say, the girls' hair always looks perfectly styled.

In a different vein, it's also a country where even one's leisure time often appears to be dedicated solely to looking like one is having a good time in the proper fashion for having a good time. When my friends and I climb mountains here, we see the same sight each time: small gaggles of Koreans, often wearing single-color track suits (even when the weather is perfect for T-shirts and shorts), and carrying name-brand hiking sticks, which Sean called "the most unnecessary invention". (On more than one occasion, some of us have been nearly tripped over by a stray hiking stick.) Once recreating, a very important task is getting a picture of yourself recreating. I think the only pictures I've seen Koreans taking outdoors are pictures that included their friends, almost as if they needed to prove to someone that they spent the requisite time outdoors. I don't remember seeing Koreans actually stop, stare at some kind of transcendent sight, and enjoy it for a while. Transcendent sights make wonderful photographs. Sean went to Seoul with his school on a field trip once, and they went to a lot of museums and palaces. At each place, they made all the kids line up, took a picture of them, and shuffled them on to the next sight. At no point did they actually look at the priceless cultural treasures on display in a museum, or anything unproductive like that. They had their picture, so they could now say the kids had been to the Great Eastern Gate or the Royal Palace, with the help of the school, which had now educated them in culture.

The picture that you begin to get from this is that in South Korea, appearances are everything. And you see it in buildings too. I've mentioned before how clean everything is kept inside, and how my co-teacher sometimes sweeps the classroom in between classes, and how the goal of building upkeep seems to be that if it doesn't look better than when it was new, you're failing as a housekeeper. I haven't mentioned the decorating. In this school, the hallway leading up to the English classroom is covered with full-wall posters that show shots of probably-English-speaking cities. There are clocks showing several different time zones and even a lamppost indoors. The lamppost has never been lit that I've seen, and the clocks are out of battery so they no longer show any time zone at all, but if a very important person came, I'm sure they'd light the lamp and put new batteries in the clock so the important person could see the ideal learning environment in which the kids spend their days.

So, having read this, you might now conclude that South Korea is sort of an awful place. But I haven't given the whole picture yet. There is such a thing as South Korean culture, it's just that you kind of have to look for it. You won't find it easily in Seoul, but out here in the country, it's easier to see. You can especially find it when you look at older people, because when you think about it, they've lived through most of Korea's immediately important history. Yes, Korea has existed as a nation (or sometimes as a patchwork of a few warring nations) for upwards of 2000 years. But lately, it's been transformed enormously—basically it's been bodily lifted out of those thousands of years of stability that made it seem almost frozen in time, and been plunked down straight into Western-style industrial civilization. Before the Korean War, this country was, I believe, the very poorest country in the world, or if not, it was pretty close to the bottom. Since then, it has, with unprecedented speed, become an absurdly wealthy nation for its size, which led it to go from being one of the world's top recipients of foreign aid to one of its top donors. All of this has happened within the lifetimes of a huge demographic in this country made out of not only the wizened and shriveled but also just the modestly old, and even the middle-aged remember things from when South Korea was just starting to become a rocket. It's as if all my grandparents, and all my friends' grandparents, could remember the Revolutionary War, and my parents could remember the Industrial Revolution. So much of their history has happened so fast.

And you can see that out here in the country, they still haven't really caught up. They've certainly tried to appear that they're on the same timeline, by erecting a bunch of tasteless concrete buildings full of norae-bangs and bars and putting up some of the half-meaningless statues that pepper Seoul (we have a monument to tomatoes in this town, though to be fair, we also have a tomato festival, which I just missed by coming a little too late). But in among all these are gardens everywhere—cabbage and peppers and kkaennip in all the unlikeliest places, wherever there's a few spare feet of dirt, like next to the bus station, evidence that out here, people still haven't conceded that the spotlessness of your town is more important than your ability to grow your own food and do with it what you want. In the last few weeks I've seen old women cleaning huge tubs full of cabbage and other vegetables whose names I don't know, right there next to the street. A little while back, I helped a couple women prepare radishes to make radish kimchi right on the back stoop of my apartment house (one of them lives on the first floor). I haven't had talks with any of the old people in town about Korean history or anything like that, but—and I have to admit here that it's possible I might just be projecting my preconceived notions onto the people I see, but I don't think so—the way they carry themselves seems to reflect how much perspective they have on where Korea has come from and where it's come. In Busan, my college classmate sang top-of-the-charts American music to the young people on the street, and they sang it all back, thrilled to get a taste of the original Western culture (and of course, pretty drunk as well). If I tried that with the old man who works at the little diner down the hill from me, I'd just get a blank look. It's not just that old people aren't conversant with pop culture, it's that they're conversant with a time when things were completely different. It's as though they're foreigners to the country of the future.

So what it seems like to me is that a lot of the elements of real Korean culture—the dignity, the sense of an immeasurably long history, the community—are largely lost on the younger generation. And because of this it's going to be really interesting to see what happens if and when North Korea collapses and unifies with South Korea. Because the people in the North are still basically where they were when the war started, still right down there at the bottom of the wealth chart, the young and the old alike. When the South Korean youngbloods start trying to chat with their Northern counterparts, it's going to be like traveling back in time for them. In order for North Korea to become culturally anything like the South, it's going to take at least as long as it has for old South Korea to become new South Korea. And maybe longer, because before they can even be like the old South, they still have to let go of all the brainwashing that's been crammed into their heads by Kim Jong-il. Here I can enter the realm of the purely speculative and say that around the same time, another big thing will be happening that everyone will need to adjust to, namely the peak in oil will have started in earnest to totally transform the economic structure of the world, and what I would be excited to see is whether the North Koreans, although they'll obviously be getting plenty of help in some ways from the South, will actually end up unexpectedly helping South Koreans a lot in this situation, by reacquainting them with what life is like in the Korean Peninsula when it doesn't revolve around glamor and glimmer but instead around making sure food and community and other such things that were formerly considered important stay intact. After so long making themselves look svelte and weak and downplaying the importance of the old ways, South Koreans may find themselves surrounded by harsh surprise when days come where a farming getup and some old-fashioned know-how are what you need to get by, and if the North still has those things after being so inhumanly oppressed for so long, I think that would be one of the most interesting ironies of all. For now, though, things churn on at the pace of South Korea's broadband signal, at least on the beautiful-looking surface, while down below things are biding their time and continuing as they always have.

(I was going to write this as something to describe Korean people entirely, but I should've known better than to think I could describe an entire country's culture at one go. It was plenty enough just to tackle the shallowness. I'll wait until another post, or two, or however many, to talk about the other stuff about Koreans that I didn't even get to.)

Getting my flower together

2011-11-06T23:18:00.004-05:00

First off, in order to understand the title of this post, I highly recommend you listen to this conversation between the frontman of one of my very favorite bands and some other guy who's in a band as well. You will then understand not only what it means to have your flower together, but also what sideburns can do for you and the importance of the fat man watching The Price Is Right. Well, maybe you will.

It's taken me the better part of three months, but I finally feel like I'm getting my life together here. For one thing, I finally got my story going. This is a story that's been kicking around inside my head since last spring when I took a biology class. I've been telling myself ever since then that I would get to writing it soon, very soon now. First, it was supposed to happen after I graduated, because then I would no longer have a college workload to contend with. But then I decided I had too many questions about the plot that I hadn't thought of, and too many other interesting things to do before leaving the US, like going to Crowduck and Chicago and other cool stuff, and anyhow I shouldn't expect myself to write a story in a household with so much stress permeating it. So I put it off until Korea. Then I reasoned that I was still settling in, and I should wait until I was comfortable to write. Once I was distinctly settled, I discovered that I just couldn't write it without all my words coming out drivel. This led me to fear that I couldn't write fiction, and my strengths would always lie in the unexciting realms of journaling and travelogging. I tried to write characters but they just ended up as words. Something was wrong.

Then the other night I was thinking about it and I made some kind of mental breakthrough. It wasn't the most profound or philosophical of breakthroughs, but it did the job. I thought about how satisfied I was with my last Imaginary Week in my journal. That was fiction, wasn't it? And I wrote it and it turned out okay, even though I was on a time crunch and didn't know where I was going from one installment to the next. What was the difference? I figured it out: I didn't expect anyone to read my Imaginary Week. I wrote it purely for the sake of writing it, and if someone enjoyed it afterward, well, so much the better. I guess I have a mental block when I think about people reading something I write, because I consider every possible kind of person who could come across it, and I think, "Will this make sense to that person?" And then I end up overexplaining and everything becomes wooden and stilted. But if I write just for myself, it flows out in torrents and the making sense ends up taking care of itself. So yesterday, with this in mind, I sat down and wrote about six solid pages in my notebook, and when I read them back, they didn't sound like crap. Now, I'm only one day into this, so I can't say for sure if I've found my lifelong solution to writer's block. But I'm going at it again tonight, so we'll find out, and hopefully it keeps on coming.

So that's the writing aspect of my life possibly taken care of. Which is good, because one of the big things I was looking forward to in coming out here was the vast amounts of free time in which to write stories upon stories, and ideally at least one book. But that only accounts for one puzzle piece. Another one is the guitar. I'm picking one up next weekend from a guy in Seoul. Then I'm going to devote some time every day to learning it. For a long time I've wished I could play a real musical instrument. I can whistle pretty good, and I can snap my fingers real pretty, but I can't play a lick on any real instrument. So that's another goal I'll be pursuing. And that way I won't spend every single night only dealing with words.

Recently I've started coming very close to getting my latest font into a form that can actually be used. Once I've done that, it'll be a tremendous load off. So there's another piece.

I'm starting to get the hang of Korean cooking, enough that tonight I'm going to try to do some without a recipe on the screen next to me. On Friday I made some dakgalbi that everyone agreed was pretty good. Russell even went so far as to say it was the best he'd had, mainly because I used only chicken breast, and I didn't leave any bone in like Koreans do when they serve it to you at a restaurant. When I get back I'll definitely be proficient at several different dishes. I'm learning cooking not just to get an authentic feel for the culture or to be environmentally responsible by only buying local ingredients, though those are two pretty good upsides. I'm also doing it because I love Korean food so much and I want to be able to make it all from scratch when I get back to the States so I can keep on having it whenever I want. If I want to make dakgalbi back at home, the only three specialties I need to find are gochujang (pepper paste), gochutgaru (pepper powder), and rice wine. So, feeling accomplished in the kitchen, and having other people agree that it tastes pretty good, is another piece.

This one is only potential, but the other night we all went out to a bar, and a Korean guy latched onto us. He turned out to be a sergeant-major from the base nearby. He was very anxious to tell us little things like "Nice to meet you" and buy us soju (which left me the next morning with a lot of enthusiasm for taking things slowly). But he couldn't Englishy, so he called up a guy in his command who lived in Canada for 15 years and came back to Korea to satisfy his military obligations. I talked with this guy and found out he's living in our town, over in the barracks. I got his email address and told him it'd be interesting to hang out with him and get to know a little more about just what it is that the military does in this town. Because really, I have no idea. I just see lots of soldiers all the time, and occasionally I hear explosions or fighter jets. And I could practice Korean with him. Not to mention he may well be a fun person to hang around with. I haven't heard back, but if I do, that may help me solve one of the big problems that I've had with Korea, which is that the only Korean I have regular and meaningful contact with is my co-teacher, and Amanda, who's been here for a year before this year started up, says my co-teacher is pretty much the most disagreeable person she's ever met here. So that's given a certain unfair pall to my feelings about Koreans. Hanging out with a different person could be a pretty good antidote.

Speaking of my co-teacher, I may have solved that situation as well. The key, I think, is not to hope she'll change, because she probably won't. Instead I should just develop coping strategies for dealing with her moods. So far that's worked out for me.

So that's it for blathering about how my life is okay. Since I didn't write last weekend, I suppose I could mention what I did. Amanda, Sean, Natalie, and I all went to Everland. It's the biggest theme park in Korea, and perhaps the fakest place I've ever set foot in. What made up a great deal of the atmosphere was the fact that cheerful music was playing at all places and all times, except where it had been changed to spooky music for Halloween. But also, every building, and every ride, and every bit of pavement, was full of carefully measured whimsy, and no inch of the park escaped the transformation into an element of a fantasy world. There was no concrete such as you'd find everywhere else in Seoul, and the buildings were all brightly colored and festively decorated. I felt like I was betraying most of my core principles, but since I was there, I gave up and focused on having a good time.

And I did, especially when I was riding the T-Express, the park's biggest roller coaster, featuring the world's steepest drop on a wooden roller coaster. I hadn't been on a roller coaster since grade school, so it was pretty fun. They had it engineered so that beams swept by just inches over your head all through the course of the ride, and all I could think of was my very tall friend Jordan. Later I found out he probably wouldn't have been allowed to ride - I believe there's some kind of height restriction. When I say it's the park's biggest coaster, I should really say it's the park's bigger coaster, because only two of its three were operational. It's a shame: I was really looking forward to the Eagle's Fortress coaster, located in the American Adventure. Instead I had to settle for the Rolling X-Train, which has some pretty awesome loop-de-loops.

As for the others, Amanda was highly satisfied with the Halloween Parade (which would make many people call their broker and tell him to buy lots of stock in Korean plastics companies), and Sean persuaded Natalie to go into the Haunted Mansion. She was the one dreading it the whole time, while Sean was really looking forward to seeing lots of disturbing things. It turned out that Sean was the one who screamed while Natalie laughed at it. Amanda and I were there too. I was in front, blazing the way for everyone and figuring out where people were going to jump out at us from, and Amanda was directly behind me, holding on to my shirt as one might hold on to a branch growing from a cliff wall a thousand feet up, and shrieking almost constantly, maybe not even inhaling. I grinned the whole time. It was a hilarious experience. Then the park closed and we all slept and went home. And that was that.

The JSA

2011-10-24T05:37:00.007-04:00

Whenever I write two entries in a row, I like to let you know in the second one that there's another one just below it. This is such a time.

The other day, Sean, Natalie, Amanda, and I went to the Joint Security Area. The JSA is the only place on the DMZ where North and South Korea can meet to have discussions. At all other places on the border, there is only a four-kilometer-wide wilderness and a lot of guns pointed into it. The JSA is also the only place where a person can see up close, and even step into, North Korea without consequence except if you go on the package tour offered by North Korea's government—which costs about $15,000, one hundred percent of which goes to the government.

To prepare for stepping into the most totalitarian country in the world, we ate cake in Seoul.

Then we went to our DMZ tour agency on the 6th floor of perhaps the poshest hotel I've ever trodden in, paid (W78,000 or about $70), and waited downstairs for our bus.

The road to North Korea is a lonely one, and gets lonelier the closer you get. While we were still edging out of Seoul, we stopped to have a nice lunch. Sadly, we didn't eat at this place with bearded jars; it was just nearby. The food was good where we ate, but not nearly as hip, I expect.

As we progressed northward, our tour guide, a quick-talking guy with a leather jacket who added "the" before every other word in a misguided attempt to speak better English, pointed out the signs that we were nearing the most heavily defended border in the world. For example, the anti-tank walls. You'd never pay any attention to them: they're big, concrete structures that rise up next to the road and then arch over the traffic, like a bridge except that they don't go anywhere. One of them had a billboard on it. Their secret is that they're wired with dynamite, and if North Korea ever sent any tanks down the road, the South Koreans could blow up the anti-tank walls and cover the streets with impassable rubble to slow down the invasion. There were also very elaborate fences, always at least two in parallel, sometimes with rocks placed in the mesh just so, so that they'll fall down if anyone tampers with the fence. The highway continued to have the same number of lanes, but the traffic dwindled and soon we were one of the only vehicles passing through these estranged rice paddies.

As we moved on, our guide told us the reason behind some of the strict and apparently arbitrary rules they have in place at the JSA. It used to be that you weren't allowed to wear blue jeans. This is because, once upon a time, the North Koreans took photographs of some JSA tourists who were in blue jeans, and put the photographs into propaganda that said, essentially, "Look, Western people are so poor the only pants they can afford are blue jeans." Now you're allowed to wear blue jeans, because even North Koreans have become aware that there are some pretty damn expensive blue jeans out there and some pretty chintzy khakis, but your jeans still aren't allowed to be scruffy. You're not allowed to wear sandals, but that's for a different reason: simply put, if something happens, you need to be able to run like hell. Something I found particularly compelling was the reason you're not allowed to point at anything there, anything at all. It's because if you point, the North Koreans have an excuse to say that they thought you were pointing a gun, and they may shoot you. "You think it's a kidding," our guide said. "It's not." Once, a woman went out for a morning stroll somewhere in or near the JSA, something she wasn't allowed to do. She was shot dead.
We stopped at Imjingak, the farthest north that South Korean citizens can freely go. They've built a sort of park there, a confused kind of place as though they couldn't really decide what they wanted to mark this milestone with. There's an amusement park on the way in, and then after that they have monuments and a modestly tall building on which you can climb to the top and see what's around. This is what you can see from up there:
There's a monument that I couldn't read, but the feeling was clear enough. And there are two bridges. The smaller bridge is for ceremonial purposes. At one point, when things were still settling down in the aftermath of the war, that bridge was the way a few people were allowed out of North Korea. First they had to cross the river using the larger one, which was and still is a railroad bridge. Once they got to the smaller bridge they turned, because other people were waiting on the tracks to head north. The reason they had to use a railroad bridge is that the other bridge had been destroyed. The columns are still there.

Nowadays the smaller bridge dead-ends at a fence, and people attach their wishes for unification and peace to the wire mesh.

Nearby they keep the last train ever to enter North Korea. It looks like its trip wasn't the easiest.

We only had a short fifteen minutes to wander around Imjingak, and then we had to either get back on our tour bus or be left behind. We were taken to Panmunjom, which is another name for the JSA. The name Panmunjom comes from the name of the village that used to be there before the war tore through; now, they have buildings, but of course the only people living there are soldiers, and they don't exactly have that neighborly down-home feel. Despite that, on the way there I was surprised to see rice paddies everywhere, even flanking the one-lane road that the bus used to get in. Prepared for our puzzlement, the tour guide explained to us that yes, there is rice farming done even all the way out here inside the Civilian Control Area. The rice is harvested by farmers who have been given special permission to live inside the DMZ. They have to stay inside after a strict curfew, and in order to keep their right to live there, they have to sleep there at least 200 nights out of the year. But their rice fetches a premium, because everything inside the DMZ is known for being very pure and clean as a result of no one ever daring to mess with it. I suppose it's all worth it to them.

Before we could progress any further, we were required to show our passports to some soldiers and put on badges. Before long, we had arrived at Camp Bonifas (pronounced BONN-i-fuss). It's a small complex of buildings where the South Korean troops and some American troops stay. They showed us a slideshow about the JSA's history, but we weren't allowed to take any pictures. (This is a rule they never really fully explained to us—we could take pictures in some places but not in others, and the choices didn't seem to make a lot of sense sometimes. Why not the slideshow?) From this we learned that Camp Bonifas is named after one of two men who were killed in the '70s, during more innocent times in Panmunjom. Back then, the whole village was a "free zone" where soldiers of either nationality could go wherever they wanted, though it was of course very strictly regimented and everyone was stationed at well-defined posts. Taking advantage of this, North Korea set up three posts to surround one of the US Army's posts. The only other US post that could defend the surrounded one was blocked from seeing it by a big poplar tree. So the US Army sent a small dispatch out with an axe to chop the tree down. While they were at it, a North Korean soldier came up to them and told them that Kim Il-seung had planted that tree with his own hands and made it grow using his magical lifeforce, and so they had better cease chopping at once. The US soldiers told them to get bent because they had a tree to chop. The North Koreans brought more soldiers and told them to stop again, and the US soldiers merrily ignored them. Then the North Korean soldiers grabbed the axe and started chopping into the Americans. By the time everything was back under control, Bonifas was dead, and so was a soldier named Ouellette. In time they both had something nearby named after them. More immediately, though, a few days later the US Army brought in a massive number of troops and some of their heaviest equipment and stood there chopping the tree down the rest of the way and daring the North Koreans to do something about it.

We came out of the briefing room and walked through a pristine building and came out face to face with North Korea. There's a small row of modular, nondescript, blue buildings that straddle the border. Between the buildings there's a slab of concrete that shows exactly where you are not allowed to go. We were allowed inside only one of the buildings, the conference room. It looks like this.

This South Korean soldier stands guard on the North Korean end of the room.

The South Korean soldier in the background, against the wall, has one foot in either country. Amanda is the one hamming it up in the front.

Same divided soldier.
The row of microphones down the center of this table marks the border. I'm on the North Korean side.

Amanda, Sean, and Natalie, all in North Korea.

Standing next to the South Korean guard on the North Korean side.
There were no North Koreans inside the building; I believe this is because South Korea owns it. In fact, we only saw one North Korean all day. He was peering at the crowd through a pair of binoculars from the leftmost doorway in the building on the North's side of the border.

From here we all got back on the bus and the guide showed us some of the other strange things here, but we weren't allowed to photograph many of them. Each country has a huge flagpole. North Korea's is considerably taller, but South Korea has a far larger flag on theirs. The borderline is marked by precisely placed white poles, and on the North's side you can see lots of wilderness, while the South keeps its lawns very tightly crew-cut. Around a bend, you can see a few miles across the border. It's a beautiful country, completely undeserved by Kim Jong-il. There are gorgeous mountains and trees and natural splendor and fervor. I saw a couple dozen birds fly through the air as our bus trundled past.

We passed by guardposts and the site of the poplar tree that led to the Axe Murder Incident. One thing we were allowed to photograph was the Bridge of No Return. Citizens who were on the wrong side of their border when the armistice was signed were given the choice to cross this bridge to get back to the right side. Once they crossed it, as you've guessed, they were never allowed to cross it again.

Once we passed this, there was nothing else imbued with much history, so our tour guide turned over the microphone to the soldier next to him, who spoke outstanding English and answered all the questions we had left. Except for the deeper, much tougher ones that we didn't ask, like: "Why?" I passed the time thinking about how ridiculous this would seem from the perspective of, say, the birds I saw earlier. Once North Korea fails, and it will, this place will become just a place, with some uncreative buildings and an old bridge and a bunch of white poles. People will walk freely in it, and it will seem strange that there was once a time when just pointing at something here could cause you to die. I suppose that's humans for you.

What I've been promising you

2011-10-23T08:24:00.012-04:00

I keep saying: "I'll post pictures soon." By now I've been stringing you along for a good while. Here are some pictures that go back a ways. I have so many that I'm going to need to write two blog posts to fit them all in it... even this one is a bit of a stretch.

Let's start it off with some garbage I found on a mountain a few weeks ago. This is the package from an army ration of bibimbap. I thought perhaps Dad might get a kick out of seeing another country's MREs. Bibimbap is actually not that hospitable to being put in a bag—you're supposed to keep all the ingredients separate inside the bowl so that, until just before you mix it up to eat it, the bowl from above looks like a pie chart (a pie chart with a fried egg in the center). I guess they don't bother with all that separation in the rations.

Here are a few pictures of Myeongdong, the main shopping district for fashionable tweens in Seoul. It is an amusing place.

(I think this one may actually be in Chuncheon, but it's in the same spirit.)

This is what the street vendor system looks like. These vendors are everywhere, but in Myeongdong they aren't too far away from some kind of critical mass. In Itaewon, the foreigners' neighborhood, they line the sidewalks, and they all seem to be selling the same three things: socks, flat caps, or T-shirts. Either Itaewon is the only place in Seoul where you can get flat caps, or there must be a huge demand for flat caps among the foreigner community in Seoul. Or it's another example of how Korean economics don't really make sense.

Some subway advertisements make more sense than others.

Here are pictures from the time we went to Sokcho and Seoraksan—I wrote about this a few posts ago. First here's what the zipline was like. We were this high up:

And we went over this:

Here's Natalie.

There goes Natalie.

While looking for a restaurant or a taxi, we accidentally came across this impossible place.

(Sean and Natalie.)

Later on, back in town, I took a walk around and looked at things. I wasn't surprised to learn that fishing is important to Yangyang.

I was less able to explain this large-balled bull.

The following morning we went to Seoraksan. Here are the other three considering the enormity of this cable car.

As I recounted before, Sean and I decided the cable car was for sissies, so we took the cool way and climbed up to Ulsan Rock. (This is also a part of Seoraksan. As far as we could gather, Seoraksan isn't one single mountain, but rather a sort of complex of peaks all answering to their own names and also to Seoraksan.) On the way, we passed a giant Buddha that just happened to be there.

To contrast with the serenity of the previous shot, here I demonstrate my ability to look like a total yokel.

Our destination.

When we got closer, it started to dawn on us that this was a serious rock.

I desperately wanted to do this.

I believe I told you that this hike was crowded, but I don't know if I was able to convey to you the severity of the situation. This is what I meant. This, as I said, is what happens when there are 50 million people in a small country and you convince them all that one mountain is the very best.

But if you can ignore all the humanity for a moment, you can see why the ordeal is worth it. Please click on this one to enlarge it.

Unfortunately, the Korean apathy toward nature stretched even to here.
It puzzles me. They keep the insides of their buildings so clean. Amanda and I have to sweep the classroom every day before the end of school. It's tiled with tiles that have a picture of carpet on them. We have to sweep each and every tile, even if there's clearly nothing on it. Last Friday, my co-teacher channeled her perpetual agitation into sweeping: she swept between classes—and she's not an idiot, so she fully knew that the kids would just mess it up again. She's not an exception—most Koreans I know of would say it's extremely important to have a spotless house. But outside, they toss garbage anywhere, even on their national treasures. I guess the outside isn't worth considering. Or maybe they know that there'll always be someone along shortly to tidy up. This is true. Wherever there's garbage, people—usually really old people towing huge carts—come pick it up and lug it away in massive loads. I don't know where it goes, but I assume they're getting paid for it somehow, somewhere.

Back at the base, Sean noted that his guidebook had a discrepancy from reality. He's pointing at it with his thumb, if you enlarge this.

Lastly, here are a few disorganized photos. I think this one is from Seoul Station. Most of the English I see around here is pretty sensible, but every once in a while you see evidence that a lot of Koreans just don't get it. The C here didn't fall off, it was just never there. I know because there was another sign identical to this one that also didn't have the C.

And here's Sachangni in the fall.

The statue of the Buddha that we have next to the temple overlooking town.
I biked up here the other day to stretch my legs and see a view that wasn't the one from my window. I met a soldier there, and we each spoke a little of the other's language, so we had a little conversation. There were two buildings, and he explained that one of them was the soldiers' temple where they could do ceremonies, and the other was for civilians. He also showed me the little clearing next to the statue, where you can sit and look up at it. There are benches and chestnut trees. Chestnuts are in season right now, and roasted chestnuts also happen to be one of my very favorite foods, so I picked one up, but he told me they were no good for eating, because they have worms and they're small. Nonetheless, I found a clean, decent-sized one and took it home.

The next day I decided I believed him about the worms.

Thinking out loud into the keyboard

2011-10-19T09:25:00.007-04:00

Built into my contract are five paid calendar weeks of vacation. Three of them are meant to be taken this winter, starting January 8th. For a while I really had no idea what I was going to do with them, but now I'm piecing together a plan that revolves around Southeast Asia. This is mainly due to Sean and Natalie: southeast Asia was a part of the world that I hardly ever thought of before I started talking to them about it. I mean, what happens these days in Laos or Thailand or Malaysia? These are the countries that people talk about in the United States only as a rhetorical device to talk about somewhere really far-flung and unimportant. If "What's that got to do with the price of tea in China?" means someone has just said something totally irrelevant, what does that say about the price of a night in a flophouse in Cambodia?

But in Europe, it's different. Europeans generally know Europe; it's old news. And America is just the England part of Europe with a bunch of other countries mixed in here and there. So if you want to have an adventure and you're European, southeast Asia is one of just a few places to go that are brand new. Which means that's where Sean and Natalie are going, and they talked it up and got excited about it and lent me their Lonely Planet guide so I could figure out more about these countries out in the parts of the world that are the most foreign of all to me.

Literally the only things I knew about Laos prior to cracking the book were from what Kahn Souphanousinphone said in one episode of King of the Hill:

HANK: So, are ya Chinese or Japanese?
MINH (Kahn's wife): No, we are Laotian.
BILL: The ocean? What ocean?
KAHN: From Laos, stupid! It's a landlocked country in southeast Asia between Thailand and Vietnam! Population approximately 4.7 million!
HANK: (Pause.) So, are ya Chinese or Japanese?
KAHN: Daaahh!

Actually, that's a lie. I had even forgotten most of that, and all I could remember was "Asia" and "Population something million" (I thought it was 6). But on reading the guidebook, I found out it seems to be a pretty nice place. It's supposed to be the most relaxed of the countries down there, and you can just kind of wander around. It has lots of tropical forest, and some interesting hill tribe cultures that you can go peek in on (somehow they've made this mostly unobtrusive for the tribal people, apparently). There are temples (wats, as in Angkor Wat, but that's in Cambodia) on par with the spectacular wats dotted all throughout the region. There's something called the Plain of Jars, which is exactly what it sounds like, if you add the words "Giant Stone" before "Jars" in the name: these things are over a thousand years old, big enough to hide two or three people in, and no one knows exactly who put them there or why. You can go tubing hiking or just hang out for a while drinking the cheap, tasty Beer Lao. These are things that I plan to do. So, Laos is definitely in my plan.

Also there's Vietnam. Apparently most of Vietnam has grown a thriving industry of scams and the country doesn't make easy friends with tourists in a lot of places, but I mainly just want to hang out on the Mekong Delta. The Mekong is a very big river, the world's 10th largest, and my very cursory research that I have done just now between starting this sentence and finishing it tells me that it's also second in biological richness only to the Amazon, and it's home to several species of absolutely enormous fish, and it flows backwards at high tide all the way up to Phnom Penh in Cambodia (which means, throughout its entire length in Vietnam and then some). It's a place that comes highly recommended and I've never spent much time on a river delta. There are floating markets and hikes and other cool stuff.

From the delta, I'll take a boat up the Mekong to Phnom Penh and use that as my jumping-off point to see, obviously, Angkor Wat, the one big thing that people see in Cambodia. But I'm interested in more than that, so I'll spend some time in other parts of Cambodia, looking at other wats, checking out hill tribes, hiking and seeing the wilderness, and probably generally relaxing. I don't remember as much about Cambodia as I do about the other countries, but that's okay because this isn't a travelog, it's just a pre-travelog, like I said, thinking out loud into the keyboard.

Lastly there's Thailand. There are other countries in the region that I haven't mentioned, of course: all the island nations (Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the little ones Brunei and East Timor), and Myanmar (which is only a little friendlier than North Korea). But in three weeks, even four countries is a big stretch if I want to really experience all of them. Thailand makes it onto the list because it's conveniently located and it has what I'm assured is amazing food. Actually, food is going to be a big theme of this trip. I'm starting to become something of a foodie, if not even a gourmand. I like almost everything about Korean food, and every time I think I know it all, something new appears and surprises me. So I'm going to get a taste of the local cuisine all over southeast Asia as much as I possibly can. And since Thailand is, proudly, the only country in the region that never got taken over by Europeans, its cusine is very intact and just as tasty as it's been for centuries. There's also Bangkok, which I'll check out a little, but I mean, you can see a big city anywhere. I'm into traveling to experience the cultures, and I feel like you can do that better outside of a bright metropolis where "nightlife" is a big concern. Even the idea of a metropolis is, if I'm not mistaken, fundamentally Western, so why do I want to see that when I could go to the gigantic Buddha statues and monuments peppered all over the rest of the country, see what life is like for people living the real life out in the country, and go learn about the oldest cultures around? Plus, there's not much natural beauty in big cities, so you'll find me out in the forests.

Here's a different random thought: I'm probably going to start using this blog more than I use Facebook. I recently read that those in charge are planning to change Facebook completely, with the main new thing being that it will show your entire life history in detail. That's a bit too creepy for me, so I'm planning to empty out my Facebook and start posting my photos and writing my thoughts on my blog. So that'll be nice. I like this blog: I can control it. It hasn't changed its look once since I started blogging in 2004. It doesn't ask for my date of birth or my interests. None of the text here is neatly organized into "interests" and "activities" for advertisers, and anyway it doesn't have ads. Why bother with Facebook?

So you may ask how school is going. Well, I'm still catching on. It's kind of a gradual process with me, it seems. A couple days ago I got told off by my co-teacher, who still seems to be moody and unfond of me. But I realized, talking to my friends later, something that I can improve. Which is: I've been teaching language the way I would want to be taught. But I've learned so much about language that I think about it in a completely different way from most people, almost certainly including a lot of the students. I think of everything as systems, rules, abstract grammar principles, logic. Maybe a few kids are like this to an extent, but most of them probably just want to memorize a few things and pass the test. And while that's no way to learn English, I've got to start realizing that, if I try to tell them about complicated systems when their highest ambition is to pass the next test with a score that lets them go on to do anything but English, they're going to learn even less. So I've started taking that into account while teaching. And I've also tried communicating better with my co-teacher, with the result that we've actually had some semi-civil conversations over the past few days. So, things may start to improve a little faster now. Which is nice.

I'll put up some photos soonish. I'm typing this at a school computer, so it's got kind of an unfamiliar feel to it and I feel like I can't write right. So I can't come up with some kind of conclusive last sentence. So there isn't one.

어려워요 (Eoryeowoyo) — Difficult

2011-10-12T01:32:00.011-04:00

I think I'm going to write about language. Hopefully that won't scare everyone off. As a reward, I'll also write about my latest trip to Busan. I suppose I can't prevent you from just skipping down to that, but, you know, it's the spirit of the thing.

I came with aspirations of picking up a ton of Korean more or less instantly. In my plan, by now I'd be able to carry on a pretty decent conversation. At the end of the year, I'd be able to read sophisticated novels. Maybe I'll still be able to read some books, but Korean turns out to be a far trickier language than I'd figured on. Of course, every language has its own idiosyncratic difficulties. Russian has a distinction between things you've finished doing and things you haven't finished. Finnish has fifteen cases (for comparison, English has two, and only for pronouns). Japanese has probably the most unwieldy writing system on the planet. Lots and lots of languages have tones, which we speakers of toneless languages just can't hear. But that's one or two difficulties per language. Korean seems to have them in every direction I turn.

For example, in Korean you have to think totally backwards. There's the small matter that the word order is Subject-Object-Verb, instead of Subject-Verb-Object like in English, so you'd say "The dog the man bit" rather than "The dog bit the man". That's different, but easy to get used to. There are much bigger issues than this at hand. Like this: in English, if you want to say more about the dog in this sentence, you can say something like "The dog that peed on my lawn bit the man." But Korean is aggressively right-headed, which means that the most important part of any phrase (the head) has to come at the end (the right side). The dog is the head here, so you have to say it like this: "The peed-on-my-lawn dog the man bit." This gets really awkward when the sentences get elaborate. "The dog that I bought earlier from the flea market where they have ice cream just bit the man in the expensive-looking suit" becomes "The I-bought-earlier-from-the-they-have-ice-cream-flea-market dog the wearing-an-expensive-looking-suit man bit." Or, "I dreamt that you were a robot" becomes "I a you-were-a-robot dream dreamt." Prepositions are backwards too, which means really they're what you could call postpositions. That "on my lawn" would be "my lawn on".

Korean has all the wrong pronouns. In a chart of pronouns, there are big gaps in some places, but then in other places there are lots of pronouns all crowded in. There are two ways to say "I" (cheo and na), depending on how humble you're being. Same with "we" (cheohui and uri). But there's almost no such thing as "you". You can say neo, but only to little kids and animals. There's also dangsin, but that's only for lovers. If you say either of these to the wrong person (i.e., almost anyone), it's a grave insult. You have to use their name and then their occupation. If you don't know their occupation you can call them a teacher (seonsaengnim). If you know them pretty well you're allowed to forget their occupation and call them ssi, which is more or less "Mr/Mrs/Miss". So, you actually have to go out of your way to obey this grammar—when Koreans meet a new person, they spend a few minutes at the very beginning asking things like, "What's your name? How old are you? What's your job?" If you're homeless, I assume you're made to feel like a failure every time you speak to someone.

Or how about this difficulty? The verbs agglutinate, which means you can keep on adding stuff to the end and conjugate any verb in hundreds of different ways. (Theoretically, at least; in practice, most of them don't come into play, but that still leaves a whole lot of them viable.) There are seven different slots after the stem of your verb, and in each slot you can put nothing at all or any one of dozens of different things. Also, each of those things is liable to squish together with things next to it. So you can outfit the verb ha-da ("to do") with these options: ha-si-eo-yo. But si and eo combine into e. So it's "haseyo". They do this every time they say hello, which is "Annyeong haseyo?" (Is it going peacefully? or literally, Is peace doing?) Or a more formal hello is, "Annyeong hasimnikka?" which breaks down into ha-si-p-ni-kka. What do these little bits mean? Well, si is for politeness. p makes it formal. ni goes with the formal style. kka makes it a question. Three of these four things show politeness, and this phrase doesn't even take the polite yo on the end that you can tack on in most places. The politeness situation is dire.

Numbers? Yep, those are difficult too. There are two counting systems, one of them native Korean, one imported from Chinese. They sound nothing alike. Take a look: from one to ten, with the native Korean one first, they're: 1=hana/il; 2=dul/i; 3=set/sam; 4=net/sa; 5=daseot/o; 6=yeoseot/yuk; 7=ilgop/chil, 8=yeodeol/pal; 9=ahop/gu; 10=yeol/sip. When do you use which one? You just have to memorize the contexts. For telling time, you use the native Korean numbers for the hours and the Chinese numbers for the minutes, meaning that 10:10 is read yeol si sip bun (si is hours and bun is minutes). Your age is in native Korean numbers. Money is in Chinese numbers. When you're counting things in general - well, that's in Korean numbers, but it's worse yet. You need something called counters. All right, so in English, we say "three sheets of paper" or "two bottles of water", but just "five students". The "sheets" or "bottles" there is like a counter in Korean, but they use them with everything. It's as if you were saying "five people of student" or "two machines of car". There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of counters in Korean that you have to memorize. Mercifully, you can get along pretty well with a few basic ones, including gae "thing". (Give me two things of chair, please.)

Even just the sounds are hard. They have, for example, g, kk, and k, and all three sound like an English k. The double and single s seem to be nearly identical (in fact, I hear even some Koreans have stopped trying to keep them from merging). The vowel eo sounds like the vowel o, but you have to be able to tell them apart, because for example there are two neighborhoods, Sinchon and Sincheon, and while the first one is a hip party area, the second one is full of businesses and would be very little fun on a Friday night.

All right, how about something simple, like the word "and". That can't be too bad. But you'd be wrong. In fact, there are at least six totally different ways to say "and" in Korean. First, are you joining together nouns or sentences? If it's nouns, you can use -hago, which you tack onto the end of the first noun. So "coffee and cigarettes" would be keopi-hago dambae. But wait! If you want to sound slightly more colloquial, you can say (i)rang, like so: keopi-rang dambae. Remember to put in that spare (i) if the noun ends in a consonant. Donuts and coffee is doneot-irang keopi. But wait! Are you writing this down? If so, you ought to use (k)wa, which is the kind of and that you use in print: keopi-wa dambae, or doneot-kwa keopi. All of these also mean "with", so don't forget that either. All right, and if you're joining sentences? Oh, well then things get complicated! If you want to sound clunky and totally un-stylish you can put geurigo between the sentences. "I bought coffee and I ate a donut" is Cheo-neun keopi sasseoyo geurigo doneot meogeosseoyo. If you want to do it right, though, you need to conjugate "and" into the verb; in this case "and" is go, as in keopi sago doneot meogeosseoyo. But if you want to say "and so", you can't put "so" (geuraeseo) after your "and"; you have to use the special "and so" ending, which makes your sentence keopi saseo doneot meogeosseoyo (that is, "I bought coffee, and so I ate a donut"). I'm pretty sure there are several more of these, but let's move on.

I'm slowly getting used to these sorts of things, and I can use them in sentences sometimes, although I certainly don't want to give the impression that my sentences aren't lamebrain short ones. (I say "Is there X?" a lot. It's easy: X isseoyo?) And now I can understand, to an extent, why Korean students have so much trouble with English - they have some of the same problems with English, but the other way around. But the real trouble is that I don't know all the difficult bits, and the Koreans do, and they use them in pretty much every sentence they say, it seems. So I can make myself understood, but figuring out what the hell someone is saying is another matter altogether. I got my friend's bike fixed yesterday. It just needed a new chain, that's all. I asked the guy how much, as he was putting on the new chain. 60,000 won, he said - about $50! I told him (in Korean), "That's a little expensive!" - but then he said something in Korean that was short but went completely over my head. I heard the number 12,000 in there, but that was not the new price. I still had to pay W60,000, because at this point the chain was already on, and I was in a hurry to get back to the house in time to start walking around and looking at the fall colors with everyone. I bet a Korean would've paid about W20,000. See if I ever go to his bike shop again, though.

Okay, I promised to write about my trip to Busan. It was for 10/10, you see. 10/10 is Grinnell's premiere party of the fall semester, commemorating the old days when everyone got their first work-study paycheck on October 10th and blew it all immediately on booze. And it turns out there are a number of Grinnellians here this year, besides Jo. It was thus clearly necessary to recreate 10/10 in Busan. The Grinnellians are people who were in my graduating class but who I never really knew very well. There's Pat, a Russian major who sort of organized this party; Hoh, a Korean-American with a mind that stays on a single track that may or may not be everyone else's; Stony, a big guy who loves to party and played sports; Rob, who also is big and loves to party, and additionally loves to dance and be affectionate with strangers; and Erin, whose cat lived at EcoHouse for a semester or so.

I believe I've written before about how long it takes to get around this country despite its size. Well, the trip to Busan was a perfect demonstration of that. I left directly after work. I arrived on the Mugunghwa train into Busan at 4:10 am. But the Night 1 party was still underway, and only just beginning to end. We got drinks from a convenience store and soon ended up in a beef stew place, where we all ate a lot and enjoyed ourselves a great deal. By this time the sun had risen and the subway had started running again, so we rode to our accommodations for the night (the morning, really). It was a jjimjilbang - a bathhouse.

I'd never been to one before. It was a very big, very quiet place, and we all toned our voices down several notches as we got our keys from the front desk. Each of us trying to follow the other's lead in this strange place, we put our shoes in little lockers, then walked into the main locker room, which had lots of lockers and also lots of naked Korean men. Since we were only tired and not even a little interested in bathing or a sauna, we moved quickly through the locker room without even looking into the room full of baths and emerged into the crashing room. I don't know what it's called in Korean, but it was a dark, quiet room full of people sleeping on the floor on little blankets. There was a little snack counter too, and the woman behind it saw us looking puzzled and gave us blankets. I stepped out onto the floor. It was heated, but hard. But at 7:00 in the morning, I didn't care about the hardness. I got a little cubic pillow and slept.

When everyone woke up a few hours later, I didn't have a hangover, because I'd had maybe two drinks before the beef stew, so I decided to try the main part of the jjimjilbang experience. I stowed my clothes in the locker and entered a very hot room with an amazing amount of water flowing. First there was a bank of showers; it's expected that you hose down before getting in the water. Next there were four pools, each one a rectangle big enough for a couple dozen people. The pools were arranged in this order: hot; scalding; cold; warm with jets. At the top there was a frigid pool big enough to swim in. I tried them all. My favorite was the hot one. Then I kind of lost interest, or maybe it was just that I felt weird being the only foreigner in the bathhouse. Anyhow, I got dressed and joined up with everyone else and we left.

Hoh was set on having pufferfish. The rest of us didn't know Busan's specialties, so we didn't have strong convictions about what to eat while we were in Busan, and we ended up following him to a small but extremely busy and classy pufferfish restaurant in Haeundae, just a quick sprint away from the beach. To get there we walked through the fish market. This place had everything from the ocean that you could possibly want to eat, and a great many other things that you wouldn't. Just in the tanks where they kept living things, there were crabs, fish of every description, oysters, eels, sea cucumbers (which looked exactly like disembodied penises), and other things that I've forgotten. I have no idea what the other stuff I saw was, the stuff that wasn't alive. Anyhow, the pufferfish turned out to be unremarkable. The only thing special about pufferfish is that if you prepare it wrong it can be lethal, but as you have deduced, it was prepared right when I ate it, so it was basically just some fish. Not bad, though. It's just that I think the only reason people talk about it is that there's a small but non-zero risk that you'll suddenly die.

Then we hung out on the beach, just talking. I would've swum, but I only had long pants. So I stayed dry and talked for a few hours.

As six o'clock got along, we started feeling that it might be time to start the night. I was introduced to the strawpedo, a very effective method of chugging alcohol. Things progressed in this way for quite a while. We moved at one point to Seomyeon, farther from the beach but with an abundance of bars, and we picked up and lost people in a casual way. One who hung on all night was a non-Grinnell friend of Hoh's, Anthony. We ate and drank and wandered and everything went swimmingly. Rob kissed Korean men and sang popular English songs with them. We ate at a Lotteria - that's a Korean fast food chain, run by the omnicorporation Lotte - and three Korean men that Rob had befriended earlier bought us milkshakes. Later he danced in the street and it was impressive enough that the crowd cleared a big space for him. None of the rest of us can boast achievements that impressive for the night, although I do have one bit of bragging rights - Anthony and I didn't feel like going into the last club, mainly because of its W20,000 cover, so we played pool instead at 3 in the morning, and I won one of our two-out-of-three series plus the tiebreaker match we had. And Hoh led us around most of the night, which was an accomplishment given that he was usually trying to take us somewhere we didn't want to go (most of the night, he was fixed on a sushi restaurant). I had a heck of a time.

We came back to the jjimjilbang and slept. This time there were no blankets left, so I slept on a surreal patch of artificial grass they had on the side of the room. After I woke up, we decided to try and sweat out some alcohol in the sauna, which was a great idea, and then we walked around looking for food. Pizza Hut rose to the call. Then we split up. I went to Busan Station for trains with Stony and Pat. I sat next to Stony on the KTX, Korea's version of the bullet train. It goes from Busan to Seoul in 2½ hours. Unfortunately, I was unable to appreciate either this speed or Stony's company, because I slept the whole way, and then my Busan story was over. So that's all.

설악산 (Seoraksan) — Seorak Mountain

2011-10-03T09:34:00.004-04:00

Korea had Memorial Day today, so we had a three-day weekend. Since it's getting colder, we knew we'd better make the best of it. So we declared this our weekend to go to Sokcho and Seoraksan. (We, this time, were me, Amanda, Sean, and Sean's girlfriend Natalie, who's now here on her two-month visit. During the day while we're working, she mostly reads and studies.)

Sokcho is a beach town in the north of Gangwon. Strictly speaking, here in Sachangni I'm only sixty miles away from the coast. But what I hadn't counted on when I came to this small country, thinking how great it was that everything was so close, was that mountains have a way of magnifying distances. The bus ride that I take most often goes to Chuncheon. To get there the bus skirts around the sides of every mountain between here and there, and sometimes it zigzags up or down one of them. The exception is that occasionally, instead of skirting a mountain, the bus just goes through it. There's a highly developed system of tunnels here in Gangwon, some of them a heck of a lot more ambitious than I'd expect to find out in the country where all they lead to is a few villages full of people whose highest economic ambition is to start up a restaurant. But aside from the tunnels, it's a lot of winding back and forth, and so the sixty miles between here and Sokcho take three hours to cover, and that's if you time your buses just right.

What we wanted to do in Sokcho was go on a zipline that Amanda had read about. When we got to Chuncheon, where we'd be picking up the bus to Sokcho, Sean persuaded Amanda that we should do a little research at one of the computers in the waiting cafe and find out exactly where this zipline was. It turned out it was in Gangneung, not Sokcho, although no one told me this. If they had, I could have told them we should get a ticket directly to Gangneung, because that's a proper city, not a little village that would only have bus service from Sokcho. Oh well, to Sokcho we went. "I'm not bothered, I'm happy to just go," Amanda said. She spends all her time in buses gazing out the window at the landscape passing by. I get the feeling that she could do this for days at a time. The rest of us were a little more focused on having a destination.

We got to Sokcho and took a different bus to Gangneung, a ride of about an hour and fifteen minutes. Now we were on the coast, and occasionally the highway skirted the ocean. An enthusiastic wind was trying to push some of the ocean up onto the highway today, but we were plenty high and safe, so I looked out at the lighthouses and the harbors and the tetrapods. When we got to Gangneung, by chance we found an information booth staffed by a guy with flawless English, and he told us that the zipline was in fact not here in Gangneung, but a bus ride and a taxi ride away near a place called Jumunjin. By now we were all fed up with buses and waiting, so we found a taxi, told the driver where we were going, and got dropped off there, right at the coast, at the bottom of the zipline tower.

The guys running the zipline suited us up in harnesses and led us to the tower. It was made of metal and stood on a rock prominence rising dozens of feet above the ocean. The zipline crossed a small bay and ended at a beach on the other side. We climbed stairs up to the top and looked down at the waves smashing against completely unperturbed rocks, and made fun of Natalie for being nervous. Sean went first to show her it was okay; he flew out into the air very shortly there he was at the bottom. Natalie went next, and then Amanda, and lastly I went. And it was a very good zipline. It wasn't as long as the one at Nami Island, but it was much more exciting to go over the churning ocean than it was to go over a flat river with yutzes in big boats on it. I was pretty happy, and the only complaint I had is one that goes for all ziplines—they don't last long enough. I want to ride a zipline down the whole length of the Amazon River. But I have to settle for ziplines that last less than a minute. Sometimes reality isn't as cool. (Actually, the reality would be canoeing down the Amazon, and that would definitely be cooler, so that's not true in this case.) I bumped to a halt over the beach and the guys helped me out of my harnesses, and then we kind of just left. I thought we were going to hang out at the beach, but it turned out the plan was to go back to Sokcho and hang out on the beach there.

We'd spent so much of the day traveling that by now it was night, and we were all famished. Luckily we found an awesome restaurant. It was the first time any of us had been to a "self" (셀프, selpeu), so we didn't understand it at first, and kept asking the waiter, who wasn't really a waiter, to bring us stuff. After he showed us several times how it was supposed to be done, we caught on that we were meant to go into the front room, take whatever we wanted to eat, and bring it back to our table to cook it on the grill in the center. So we ate a whole lot, and it was all delicious. Also, apparently they wanted to pay us to drink beer. I couldn't figure this one out, but two people both seemed to be telling me that it was W9,000 per person if we didn't drink, and W8,000 if we had some beers. I never did really understand it, because at the end it worked out to W9,000 for two of us and W10,000 for the other two, but that was still a pretty sweet deal.

Everyone but me was pooped, so we found a motel and they went to sleep. I wanted to find the beach, so I struck out walking. It turned out to be difficult. I spent a long time staring at maps along the street wondering where on them I was. In the end I found a nice Korean woman with English that was much better than she believed, and she led me to where she was staying in a jjimjilbang overlooking the harbor. But it was a long way from the harbor to the beach, so I didn't get to lie in the sand. I did, however, see squid boats. Did you know they fish at night using really bright lights? Squids are attracted to them. She explained this to me. It was pretty cool.

She was going to climb Seoraksan the next day, and so were we, but we got up at different times, so I didn't see her. Here's what I wrote for the day in my journal:

We woke up and it was time to get on the bus to Soraksan. So we did. In a harbinger of what we'd see very soon, the bus became packed to the brim as we went further and further toward the park.

It turns out Seoraksan is the answer to the question of what happens when you seclude 50 million people in a tiny country and tell them all that one mountain is the best one. There were people everywhere, throngs of them, clotting up the entire park. Sean said he's never seen so many people all trying to hike at the same time.

After discussing it, we decided we'd all be happiest if the girls took the cable car to the Gwon-geum-seong peak and Sean and I hiked on our own steam up to Ulsan Bawi (Ulsan Rock), a rock Sean had read about. So we parted ways and I started walking mwith him. Because Koreans are, Sean says, the slowest walkers in the world, we spent the entire hike figuring out ways to get around the numberless gaggles of them knotting up the trail. This led to some fun skirting around the trail, especially at the bottom before it got steep and narrow. The trail was pretty flat for quite a ways, all up until we got to the bottom of the rock itself. Ulsan Bawi, I discovered, is a serious rock. We were standing and looking up from the bottom of a congregation of rocks taller than any building we'd seen since last time we were in Seoul, each of them probably heavier than the town of Sachangni. People with foresight and Korean language skills were climbing straight up a crack between two of them using gear that I have to presume they booked months in advance. I desperately wanted to do that, but we both had to resingn to using the stairs.

A red metal staircase was driven into the rock face, going all the way to the top. It was full to capacity with people. Cutting corners and squeezing where we could, we got on and moved slightly faster than average pace. But the views were something that I hope to see in dreams for years to come. From our stairs clinging to this bare rock, we could see the orest blow stretching out to cover all of Seoraksan Park and crowding up to the waists of all the other rock peaks around us. The sun lit it all from an artist's angle and birds flew through the sky in the infinite abyss around us.

We got to the top and it was fenced off, the view blocked on one side, there was a souvenir vendor, and it was packed to the railings with Koreans and other tourists. Sean and I agreed that Korea had, in this case, ruined the experience. So we found our own rock, a mildly perilous climb away over some rocks with deadly consequences for us if we'd slipped. Sean had a hamburger; I had water. We enjoyed ourselves. I watched a butterfly until I couldn't see it anymore.

So then we had to climb back down. It was quicker, at least. We sat where we were scheduled to meet the girls and Sean called them, only to find out that they'd just gotten to the peak on their cable car. We climbed a whole mountain in the time it took them to wait. It transpired that they'd filled that time by fending off weird men and hiking to a nice waterfall with a fence to keep swimmers out. The view from their peak was apparently very nice, though Sean says we were higher up.

I'll put up pictures of this sometime. It was a good one. I don't know what we're doing next weekend, but I almost hope we stick around in town, because I'm having so many adventures and not experiencing the endless stretches of contemplative free time that I expected I'd have here. I was supposed to be sitting at a desk and writing a book by this point, but here I am still climbing mountains. Oh, how rough I have it.

사진 (sajin) — Photos

2011-09-25T11:47:00.014-04:00

Oh hello. The other day a guy from Korea Telecom came over to my apartment and at long last hooked me up with a reliable internet connection. This means that I can finally upload all the photos that I've taken over the last month. Remember, you can click on any one and see it far larger.

Let's start off with a few photos that I took in more or less random directions when I got into Seoul. I thought it'd be a good idea to get pictures of what the general feel of the city is like, since every city looks a little bit different. So here's a flavor of Seoul:

This street is not typical. Most of the time, there's no empty space on the roadway. I think this was an abnormally spacious district.

Some of us just took a walk around our neighborhood to try and find a bookstore, and on our way we happened upon this. It's not the sort of thing one is likely to see in, say, Davenport.

Walking in unplanned directions, we happened by the neighborhood artificial leg shop.

I wanted to take a picture of just this traditional carving, but there was modern stuff all around it, and I realized it would have to be a picture that shows the juxtaposition between the deep old culture of Korea and the streamlined, commercial culture it has in the modern era.
This is a 노래방 (norae-bang, literally "song-room").
It was the first I had seen, but finding them is not a challenge. Here is what you do in a norae-bang. First, you and your friends go out to several bars and get very drunk on bad beer and 소주 (soju), a traditional Korean potato liquor that tastes like vodka cut with acetone. Beer must be a relatively new thing in Korea, because they have definitely not figured out how to do it right yet. There are two main brands in Korea, Hite and Cass, which you drink because anything imported costs eight or nine dollars a glass. They taste mostly like beer, but also unsettlingly of chemicals. Interestingly enough, Ben told me today that he's had North Korean soju, and it tastes miles better—it's the sort of thing that you pour into a wine glass and sip convivially, rather than pounding a shot of it and trying to get the taste to go away as soon as you can. He figures this is because there's probably still some poor old lady making it by hand, as opposed to however Korea has figured out to industrialize it. Anyhow, the second step in the norae-bang process is that you enter the norae-bang, buy more drinks, and then get a small room with a big screen and a couple books of song names like they have for karaoke in America. You all sing your favorite songs really loud and drunkenly, and all your friends applaud you and make fun of you, and around 4 in the morning, you all stumble home and collapse into heaps.

The norae-bang is staffed, improbably, by a middle-aged lady, who apparently earns her living by staying up all night and selling alcohol and renting out rooms here. You'd think the economic demand for these would support maybe one per neighborhood in a big city like Seoul, and if you were from a small town, why, you'd just have to go to Seoul if you felt like some norae-banging. However, the reality is that in Sachangni, population about 5,000, there are at least three norae-bangs. Korean economics will probably always remain a mystery to me.

Here's a view of a small part of metropolitan Seoul across the Han River.

And here's a view of North Korea across the Han. There's a bit of a difference. To be completely fair we should be comparing the view of Seoul with a view of Pyeongyang, rather than a view of a rural area, but of course it'd still be no contest.

Rice paddy on Ganghwa island.

Next to the rice paddy was this house with a very nice garden out front—they were growing hot peppers, but I don't think those show in this picture—and I thought, "I'd better take a picture of this traditional house with its garden." Because we were about to do traditional sedge mat making, I figured we were in a traditional village sort of thing. Later I found out that, besides the cool roof, most of the houses in Sachangni seem to look a lot like this. Everyone has a garden. I don't think I've seen a yard, in the American sense, since I got in the country.

These are the spools with which one makes traditional sedge mats. At the top you can see the four stalks they started me out with.

Allegedly if you work at it for a long time, you can make amazing things like this mat, but since we only had about two hours, all of ours were about like the one hanging on its right side.

Here's the dolmen that I mentioned in one of my earlier posts.

Around the authentic dolmen were some recreations of other old things, Korean and not. I think this moai was made in France.

And this, apparently, is what Koreans used to live in about five thousand years ago.

Here are squashes being grown in what I have to assume is the traditional way. But not that traditional, because squash is native to the Americas. They probably didn't start growing it here until the 1900s.

This is a palace grounds we visited, also on Ganghwa Island. The palace isn't there anymore, but its outbuildings are. I think this one was an archive.

This seems to be what went on in this particular outbuilding of the old palace, except in the old days the people weren't made of wax.

Where the palace used to be, they put a wonderful flower garden.

The level of detail in the decoration of this roof floored me. Later I found out that every fancy old building in Korea has a roof like this.

I don't know where they found the time, but then, Koreans have never been afraid to tackle impossibly monumental projects. To name just two: the Tripitaka Koreana and the Hyundai shipyard. The first one is a series of 81,258 engraved woodblocks from the 1200s with the texts of the Buddhist Tripitaka (sacred texts) on them, millions of characters in all. Each woodblock was carved by a master carver over the course of several days, and the entire project took 16 years to complete. No one has yet found an error in them. They're so well made and preserved against the elements by such rigorous treatments that they're still used to print copies of the Buddhist texts today.

They Hyundai shipyard was unlikely, to say the least. The man behind it, Chung Yu-jung, had been working on cars and civil engineering, and had become a fairly successful businessman. Then he decided that shipbuilding should be the way of the future. He had never built a ship before, nor had anyone in Korea really. But he proposed the following idea to several big shipping powers: he would build the largest ship in the world. After getting laughed at for a while, he finally got a yes and a lot of money from one government, but under the condition that he had to build the ship in five years. Unfortunately, he had no shipyard. So he hired lots and lots of men to build the shipyard—and also build the ship at the same time. They worked sixteen hours a day and slept on site. They finished the ship, and the shipyard, two years ahead of schedule.

At the top of Seoul, there is a tower where you can climb up and look out at the whole city.

There was a two-hour wait to go up, but down on the ground I was still at the top of Seoul, just not the manmade tippy-top. So I still saw the whole city.

At the bottom of the tower, there's a boardwalk where you can look out. Of course there's a railing all the way around the boardwalk. When a couple in Seoul decides they're in it for the long haul, they come up to Seoul Tower and make out for a long time on the boardwalk. Then they take a padlock, write their love on it, attach it to the railing, and throw the key over the edge. The result is this: thousands and thousands of padlocks.

Recognizing that the tower was the most romantic place in Seoul, someone created this monument to romance and put it there.

Here I show how adept I am at goofy poses.

But my friends Alex and Cody are even better. Alex (left) wasn't even trying.

After the orientation in Seoul, some of us found ourselves in the town of Sachangni, these people of course being my new friends. Here's what Sachangni looks like from our apartment house.

After we'd gotten to Sachangni and settled in a bit, we took a trip to nearby Chuncheon. This picture shows where I had 닭갈비 (dakgalbi) for the first time. I cannot recommend this food highly enough. It's a simple concept: chicken stir-fried with cabbage, rice logs, some more vegetables that vary by restaurant, and magical sauce. But simple as it is, it's up there among my favorite foods ever. I don't know how they make it taste that good. I also don't know if you can find it in the US—if you can, it must be difficult—but when I come back I'm going to make it all the time. You may have noticed there are a lot of restaurants in this picture, and wondered which one I ate the dakgalbi at. The answer is I don't know, because every one of these is a dakgalbi restaurant. Chuncheon is the home of dakgalbi, and this is its Dakgalbi Street, an entire alley at least a block long that has only one kind of establishment—dakgalbi restaurants. Furthermore, this is only one of at least three dakgalbi streets in Chuncheon, although I believe it is the only one that has exclusively dakgalbi.

P.S. It can be made with tofu, so you can try it too, Dan.

Next a few pictures from our ascent of 창안산 (Chang-an Mountain). This gazebo near the base is likely where I'll hang out a lot after I get a bike that I can use to cross town quickly and before it gets too cold to stay outside all the time.

Russell, working out on some of the exercise inexplicably placed on this mountain hiking trail, where I guess they thought people weren't getting enough exercise.

Look closely and you can see Sean climbing up this rock slope. There was an alternative path up the mountain that didn't make you climb rocks, but that's for sissies.

Russell at the peak.

I want to say this is a panorama of Sachangni from atop Chang-an, but actually I'm pretty sure this is the town on the other side of Chang-an. But you get the general idea.

Near the peak we found a couple of these ramshackle huts, whose purpose we couldn't work out. We figured it probably had something to do with North Korea and our being 12 miles from the DMZ.

Amanda and Russell on the descent.

I thought Deb might be interested to know we have fire-bellied toads here.

Our descent took us around a rice paddy and then to the river at the bottom of town.

A garden of 깻잎 (kkaennip), which is one of the two leaves you can choose to wrap your dakgalbi in (the other is lettuce). (It's also one of the few Korean words that's not spelled phonetically—for some reason it's spelled kkaes-ip.)

Amanda loves a man in uniform, and at Sachangni's military festival, she had plenty of them to choose from.

When Korea puts on a festival, it doesn't mess around. In America no town of 5,000 people could ever muster the energy to put up a stage like this.

Or a fireworks show like this.

Lastly, a few from our trip to Nami Island. Here: please contemplate if the words "Instant Fish Paste" can describe any possible edible thing.

Here we are at the top of the tower that serves as the beginning point of the zipline onto Nami Island.

At last a picture of everyone's faces, instead of all the backs of heads that I usually seem to photograph. This was taken by the zipline operator and it features, from left to right: half of me, Russell, Sean, Amanda, Deanna, and Ben.

When we landed, it turned out that Nami Island is ruled by ostriches. Deanna unwittingly insulted this one and was subject to a stern reprimand.

Sean, however, made friends with them. But ostriches can be aloof, and refused to pose for this photograph.

That's all I have for now. I'll keep taking them, though.

Everyone

2011-09-18T03:01:00.005-04:00

The small mountain or large hill is an apparently unnamed one south of town. Becccccccccc666ffcccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc.yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy,syhp.ysrchrsch

Sorry about that. I had to clean out my keyboard.

Because it's small and unremarkable, it also didn't seem to have an obvious trail to the top, at least not one that Sean and I could see. If there was one, it would have to be across this little bridge ahead of us that goes over the river at the bottom of town. We crossed the bridge and found a T-junction, the right road leading to a building, the left one to a ginseng field, neither one looking much like it led to a mountain climbing path. Sean thought there might be something on the other side of the ginseng field, and I thought there might be something behind the building, but I decided to go along with Sean. The road petered out within a hundred feet. We had to walk along the dirt at the edge of the field. Ginseng is a strange crop to grow. It needs shade, so you can immediately tell a ginseng field by all the black shade cloths each held up by a little wooden structure to shelter the precious plants underneath. When we got closer, I could also see that it apparently has to be grown on bales of hay. I can't see how it'd be possible to harvest it by machine with all those shelters, so they must go through the fields on foot at harvest time and pick out every root by hand. It must take weeks. No wonder ginseng is so expensive.

Behind the field was a rockslide coming down from the mountain. "We could go up the landslide and blaze our own trail," I suggested, half joking, half trying to figure out if Sean would actually be up for such a mad adventure, the kind of thing that I usually suggest just to hear people say, "Yeah, maybe not." But Sean said, "We could do," and we walked across a part of the field where nothing was being grown and came to the rocks.

We started scrambling. The rocks were still loose, and I figure they probably slid at some point in the last ten years. There were trees growing at some points, but the situation was still too volatile for much to have colonized it. Because it was a landslide, it was steep, and we got tired at pretty short intervals. There was also a lot more of it than we thought, because most of it was hidden by the trees when we were at ground level. We thought it only took us a little way up. It turned out to go nearly to the top. So we just kept on scrambling. I was in front, so occasionally I kicked rocks down and nearly hit Sean. He took this in good sport, mostly. After much longer than we had ever expected, we made it up to the top of the slide, where all the original rocks had come loose from. Because it was a place where all the ground had caved in, we were in a moderate hole there, and because the dirt was loose and the rocks were as unstable here as anywhere, it was fairly hard to get out. But with dubious help from dead trees, we managed it, and then we scrambled up the soil—even looser than the rocks, at times, but with trees in helpful places—until we got to a flatter place on the mountain.

We went generally upward, and ran across a sort of a trail, where it looked like maybe a few people had been through a few years ago. We followed that, and when there was any doubt, we looked for garbage to point us in the right direction. All the mountains we've been on so far have had garbage strewn around them. Sometimes it's hard to see, and sometimes, like here, it's all over. I guess Koreans aren't too shy about just tossing wrappers aside. You wouldn't see that in America. There are some pretty carefree Americans when it comes to littering, but I feel like there aren't as many, and there are also people who come to pick up after them all the time and keep the wilderness beautiful. I think Korea is still in a stage where it's just learning the breadth of power over the natural world that can be wielded, and thinks it's pretty neat to be really modern, and in that, respect for the natural world has in some cases just fallen into the gutter. I hope they get over that soon.

The trail of garbage led us through trees and then through shrubs up to an abrupt flat, cleared-off place. On inspection, it turned out to have a big H on it, made out of white rocks, and also three mysterious black-and-yellow metal asterisks. This was a helipad. We thought that was pretty cool, and in order to properly appreciate it, we sat back and ate baked goods. Sean told me about how you can get pasties in just about every shop in England. I'm looking forward to England.

We came back down by way of what we thought was a trail, but ended up being just trackless forest. But we knew down was where we wanted to go, so we just headed that direction. We ended up going down another rockslide, this one old enough to have a bit of a creek flowing in it toward the bottom, and that creek took us to the river. We forded that and went back home, calling that a highly successful little ascent.

As a larger group, we at this house have actually gone to see two waterfalls since I last wrote. The first one, Gugok, is named after the nine (gu) twists and turns (gok) that it makes on its way down. Amanda, Sean, Russell, and I all walked diligently up these twists and turns in order to get to the main waterfall, very much looking forward to having a swim in the pool at the bottom. Each gok was marked with a sign that gave its name, all of which started with a kk. So we had kkum (dream), kkang (heart), and kkoe (wisdom), as well as some more dubious ones like kkeun (networking) and kkon (professional). Finally we reached kkeut (an end). It was at the top of a big wooden staircase, and there was a spectacular view of Gugok's 50-meter drop down to the rocks at our level. I haven't seen a lot of waterfalls, but I can say this was a good one. There was just one problem: there was no pool at the bottom, only rocks. So it turned out we had just come to look, and not to swim. But that was okay, really, because it was, as I said, a very good waterfall.

The second waterfall is the one we visited yesterday, the same group. This one is called Guseong, this time named after the nine different sounds (seong) it makes.* I guess nine is a lucky number or something. Getting to Guseong was a bit more complicated than getting to Gugok. For Gugok, we just took a bus, and it dumped us off at the trailhead. For Guseong, we took a bus, but it dropped us off at the top of Soyang Dam, not at the trailhead. We walked to a spot on the lake behind the dam where the trailhead was, only to find out that the trailhead wasn't there. Instead what was there was a water taxi. Since there was no trail whatsoever, we had to pay 6,000 won ($5.40) to take this boat to a dock. Then we could start walking. And despite how out-of-the-way this place is, there were Koreans everywhere. I guess it's quite the popular thing to do on a Saturday, going to a waterfall. There was also a temple beyond it, which may have been even more popular than the waterfall. The thing about temples here is, though, that they all look exactly the same. So if you don't know the story behind it, it's not special. It's just like every other temple you've already seen. So we were there strictly to swim in the waterfall.

After a kilometer of walking, we found it. It wasn't nearly as tremendous as Gugok, only maybe fifteen feet high. But it dropped into a wonderful little pool and then flowed out among chaotic rocks that could all have been carried there by monks, so old and wise they looked. Koreans were sitting on the rocks, getting pictures of the falls, looking down from the path that continued upward past the falls. It made Sean, Russell, and me hesitate a lot before taking off our shirts and diving in—would we ruin everyone's pictures? would we be profaning a sacred site?—but we said the heck with it and jumped in anyhow. (Except Amanda—she forgot her swimsuit and thought the water was too cold besides.) And it was a really nice swim—especially since I hadn't swum in so long. Sean and Russell agreed it was really refreshing. And while I was bobbing underneath it, I swore I could actually hear most of the nine sounds it makes. There's the sound of one channel of the stream falling the whole distance in one go, and the sound of another channel hitting some rocks on the way down, and the sound of that same channel hitting the pool as a shower of drops broken apart by the rocks, and I could probably name six more if I sat there underneath it for a while.

Now let me try something. I said I was going to try to give you an idea of what my friends here are like, as practice for writing characters in a story. I figure describing people who really exist might be a little like training wheels for describing people made entirely out of imagination. Though it may be trickier, because real people can be pretty subtle, whereas fictional characters can be totally obvious and loud and describable. Also, at least one of them will probably read this. Well, we'll see how this turns out.

At the beginning of anything Amanda sets out to say, you're liable to hear, "When I was in Bali...". She taught for a year in Busan, and shortly after that, flew to Bali to teach English there, where the living is cheap and the parties are great. And so it was. She had found her ideal situation, apparently: teaching from 1 to 9 pm, and then going out to dance with all the friends she met there, some of whom taught English, some of whom were just there for the night life. Each night she would leave into the swirl of lights after school and come back around 4:00 am, in time to sleep and be able to teach the next afternoon.

But after not too long she discovered that going out and partying all night every night, without any breaks, was making her feel more surreal each day. And worse, it was impossible to stay in and not party some nights, because the internet was too slow to download movies, and she can't bear reading, and "the parties were always just there, outside my window, and I just had to go out, do you know what I mean?" The only other option was to sit motionless all night. So she kept on living less and less in the real world and more and more inside her own mind, where things weren't as firmly connected by cause and effect. All this reached a head some eight months into her year, when she started living entirely inside an imagination only suggested by the outside world of senses, and in a bout of clarity, she called her mum and told her the situation. Her mum came to get her, because Amanda believed that if she went alone, and stopped thinking about the airplane for any time at all, it would disappear.

She enjoyed a few restful months in England, during which her mum cleverly kept her from going out partying by coming up with fun things to do at home on weekend nights. Then, in the mood for a lot of quiet time, she signed up to come to some small town in Gangwon, any town really. She ended up here with us. She'd actually already been here for a month when we arrived. She's created a steady routine for herself, where she teaches, then watches a movie and eats a chicken sandwich. Currently she's on chicken sandwiches. In a month or a few, she'll move on to a different food, but for now she's content to eat a chicken sandwich for dinner every day. Sometimes she comes along when we all go traipsing up a mountain or down to the store or something, but a lot of the time she says, "Ah, I can't be bothered to hike up a mountain."

Sean has come to Korea for two reasons: to make money and to climb mountains. Well, also to see Asia. He lent me a book called Vagabonding, which I mentioned before, but I didn't mention that he called it "my personal bible." He's taken a lot of its teachings to heart. Basically, life should always be an adventure, and if it gets boring, you know you need to fix something. The author of the book, Rolf Potts, also came to teach in South Korea, and said it was probably the best time he ever had while making money to travel. And Sean, in what he swears is coincidence and not copycatting, came here, presumably for the same reasons that attracted Rolf: to turn a profit for travel purposes while also experiencing a totally different culture and seeing some of the staggering number of things there are to see in Asia. Not all of his money is just going toward traveling, though. A lot of it is going to the new life that he and his girlfriend Natalie are going to set up once he gets back to England. He left her back home, but she's coming here for a visit very soon, and Sean can't wait, although he'll have to anyhow. They'll hang out together and tell all the dirtiest jokes in existence and use the foulest language at the most unexpected times. This is what I know of their relationship. You would never suspect. He's this calm-looking redheaded guy with the poshest pleasant English accent, which I guess just makes it even more hilarious when he slips nasty language into the most mundane of conversations.

When not oriented toward the future, he focuses on the present by immersing himself in the outdoors, of which there's a great supply in Gangwon. He and I get along great, because we're both up for pretty much anything, as long as it's not stupid, reasonless stuff like going out and blowing a whole month's pay on a night at the bars. Being up for anything, after all, is how to experience this place or any other. The hike up the landslide was one of our finer moments of deciding together to ignore what's supposed to be responsible behavior in favor of just going for something because we feel like it.

Before they go back to England, he and Natalie are going to do a lot of traveling, but I won't be coming with them, because Europe is unexciting to them—the whole place feels like home—so what's left for them is southeast Asia. They're taking the Trans-Siberian Railway back, but not until quite a while after me.

While we were all sitting on the roof discussing how Sean and I are keeping blogs, Amanda asked Russell, "So what are you doing then? Are you keeping a journal or a blog here?" He shook his head. "And you don't take photos—what are you going to do?"

"He's just going to tell tons of stories when he gets back to Scotland," I suggested.

"No, I've got a shoddy memory," he said. "I'll just forget it all."

I don't believe it, although there may be a few nights that slip by him, like the ones where he goes out drinking until superhuman hours, without regard for how little sleep he had the night before or how awful his hangover was. But he does seem to live mainly in the present. What did he do before he came here? Something or other, it never seems to come up. Presumably he had friends and family or something there. He had a mustache. What's he going to do after he's done in Korea? "I don't plan that far ahead." Instead he serves to keep us grounded by quietly, in a very plain and matter-of-fact voice, making sarcastic comments that remind us of reality. This seems to be in keeping with his tattoos. One of them, in anyone's handwriting, says "nothing matters".

"What were you thinking when you got that?" Sean asked him.

"I was thenkin' that—everything matters," he said.

The other one is a reproduction of a Matisse sketch, Nude with Oranges. "What inspired you to get that particular drawing?" Sean asked, shortly after the other question.

"It's semple, so I fegured the tattoo guy wouldn't fuck it up too much."

Ben has been here a long time, 2½ years. He's set himself up pretty cozy. He's got a car now that he can use to commute from here to Hwacheon, where he actually works. He goes to yoga three times a week when he can afford it. He's not sure exactly where all his money goes, but he's not worried about it. "The great thing about Korea is the pension. They just take out a bunch of money from my paycheck and give it to the government, and when I leave, I get it all back! I save without even trying." He's also not worried about pretty much anything else, including but not limited to: North Korea, picking up tabs for us, the presidential elections back in America, the economy, smoking lots of cigarettes, and driving really fast. This makes him a great person to go drinking and playing pool with, because at the end you feel so great, because you know now that everything is going to be okay. Even physically he's comforting, a six-foot-and-some teddy bear with a fuzzy face. Because he's been here so long, he seems like a fixture, hard to imagine in Michigan instead of cruising down the mountain roads of Gangwon Province. He says he'll probably stay here another year. That sounds about right. He's made friends with Koreans—parents of students, shopkeepers, guys who invite him over to drink because in Korea it's weird to see someone drinking alone. He talks with them in broken Korean, but always manages to get his point across pretty well anyhow. And the Koreans seem to love hanging out with him too. It's not hard to see why.

And then there's the matter of Deanna. I don't know Deanna. I'm not sure if anyone, besides maybe Ben, knows Deanna. She came here from Chicago six months ago, and appears sometimes. She hung out with the rest of us at the festival, but only briefly, and then she wandered off to do her own thing. Amanda explained that that's how she does things. She ticks on her own eccentric orbit, and it occasionally intersects with ours. "Deanna is a dark horse," Ben summed up once. (And I said: "You're just saying that because she's black.") Perhaps in the future I'll be able to say more about her. But for now, she could be a serial killer or a secret nun.

That's everyone. Now a bit of something that I realized recently. I've made a miscalculation. Throughout my application process, I've been rounding down. I noted that the contract said I get 2,200,000 won per month, and thought that sounded like a pretty good deal—two thousand bucks a month. Multiply by twelve months, hey, that's pretty close to ten, so, twenty thousand bucks in a year. If I live on a thousand bucks a month, that's half that, so I could save ten thousand this year. Sweet! Right? Well, yesterday I bothered to do the math for real. I'm not actually getting 2,200,000 won a month; I get an extra 100,000 for living in the boonies, so it's actually 2,300,000. Also, twelve months is not the same as ten months, so on the year I'm actually making 27,600,000 won, except that for completing our contract we get an extra month's pay for sticking around, so it's actually 29,900,000, and then you also have to take into account the money they give me for my travel on the way here and back, which is two payments of 1,300,000 won, so now I'm up to 32,500,000, and that's darn near $30,000. Also, I was allowing myself $1000 a month to live on, but I've had a pretty active month this month, and I haven't even quite burned through $590. So if I can live on, say, an average of $650 a month, I can save something like 24,700,000 won, or $22,000. In ideal conditions, I could pretty much make my student loans disappear, and being free of debt is nothing to sneeze at in an economy as toasted as America's is, despite what Dan and Tracy might say about the wisdom of paying it off a bit more slowly. Of course, the conditions won't be ideal, and I'll do some traveling on my vacations, so I might not quite reach that number, but I'll have enough to be a fairly comfortable hobo. And that's a nice thing to think about.

*Gok and seong aren't actually words in Korean on their own. The names come from Chinese. A lot of Korean words come from Chinese, the same way a lot of English words come from Latin and Greek. So Guseong is named after nine (gu) sounds (seong) in the same way that an octopus is named after eight (octo) feet (pus). Although gu actually is a word that means nine in Korean.

Seoul

2011-09-12T09:59:00.007-04:00

One more time I'm going to copy something more or less straight out of my journal. I'll probably write a little bit more of something fresh afterwards, so you aren't always just getting reheated stuff that I really wrote with only myself in mind as an audience. For some context, this is a trip we took because we have a couple days off for what's probably the biggest holiday of all in Korea, Chuseok, a three-day Thanksgiving harvest celebration where everyone goes to visit their families and ancestral hometowns and eat delicious food.

I left my journal behind when we went to Seoul yesterday, so here's what happened over the last two days.

We got on the bus and rode for two hours. When we got off, we were faced with Seoul in the afternoon and had no idea what to do, except for Amanda. Amanda knew she wanted to go to Myeongdong to shop. Russell, Sean, and I said sure and came along fo the ride.

Hilariously, she went to Forever 21. Apparently they don't have that in England, so she didn't get the joke—that she'd come all the way to Seoul in order to partake in something so very Western, in this case American. We guys went in briefly and I've never seen a clothes store that crowded. So instead we checked out a bookstore across the street, but it turned out to be a Christian bookstore, not a place where I could find a Korean-English dictionary. I was so focused on looking at all the books to see if they were dictionaries that my eyes swept completely past the Jesus statues and the crucifixes, and I had no idea it was a Christian bookstore until I asked the attendant upstairs if they had dictionaries, and she told me, "Christian books." Sean and Russell found this quite funny. Eventually Amanda came out with a jacket or something, and we moved on down the street. She stopped again at H&M ("Haitch and Em" if you're English) and I think she got a jacket there too, or maybe something else. For all this she was positively bleeding money, but I guess she enjoys that. She and lots and lots of Koreans, it seems. I don't get it.

We stopped in at a fancy coffee shop and had expensive comestibles and sat and talked. Sean and Russell both figured out how to get in touch with friends, though in Sean's case the friends were Amanda's, and he was a conduit because he has a phone and she doesn't. We wandered a little, and Amanda peeked into more shops, and then we took the subway to Seoul Station.

We got off the train and made our way out of the cavernous building and waited awhile on the steps there, admiring the enormity of this huge round station with a department store inside it, and after a while we found Amanda's friends: Ken (flat cap), Christina (quiet), Kate (hair dyed red), Jason (musician), and Rich (forty years old). At some point, Russell's friend Connor (Tennessee) also joined us. And then we all got taxis to Hongdae to begin the night.

First, burritos, then taking care of our sleeping accommodations, then barhopping. Aimlessly, we looked for good bars, each one trying to be louder and more neon than the rest, and with our walking made a struggle by the tremendous clots of Koreans and Westerners both, all looking to drink. Somehow we found the worst bar around (me and Sean watching the group start to fracture but then follow a herd mentality into this basement bar, saying to each other, "This sucks"). We caught a glimpse of some people from orientation, but didn't have time to say hi before they disappeared and we descended to a place where the music was too loud to exchange more than five words at a time with your neighbor, and those by shouting in his ear. I bought a Pepsi because just the thought of beer was at that point making me queasy for some reason. The can of Pepsi cost 3000 won ($3). I decided not to give any more of my money to Hongdae. I could go broke in a place like this.

Soon we all got the hell out of that bar and looked for a better one. Instead we found a free outdoor music festival, which I thought was awesome. But the crowd around it on the raised pavilion was so massive that people were standing in the bushes at the edge, and the bands were totally invisible, so we all just stood next to a vendor's cart—he wsa selling ridiculous electronic trinkets, like a dancing stuffed monkey—and jabbered. Most people got slowly drunker, though Sean and I stayed about the same. I reluctantly gave up hope of liking some of the people, although I didn't really have the chance to get to know most of them. Kate in particular told me a long, unprompted story about her college's wine-tasting course that she took, and every time she seemed done she'd keep going, about how it was so great, and you'd think it was easy but it was actually so hard, and they got to take a tour of Illinois's wine belt, and the college is such a beautiful place, because there's a forest on campus, and you walk through it on your way to most classes, and she was going to go to a different college but this one was so pretty. I wished I could sit and watch the bands while talking to someone with interests besides drink, but that was all that was on most people's minds here, except Sean and me, and we already knew each other. I guess some parties are like that.

It turned out that the show Jason really wanted to see wasn't the live show outside, but another live show, this one punk rock instead of whatever the pavilion show was (I couldn't hear it), and located in a club nearby with a $15 cover. We split into smaller factions when some people balked at the price. Sean, Amanda, Christina, and I went to a club called Gogo's that a friend of Sean's was at. (We never found the guy.) This place turned out to be much like the first awful bar, except that the music was actually pretty good stuff, and even louder. I had a shot and tried to talk, but gave up eventually. After a while we all emerged. We started heading for another bar, but Sean and I reconsidered and decided now would be an ideal time to just disappear, since neither of us was keen on drinking and being unable to talk even more tonight. We saved on a taxi by just walking back to the motel, and claimed the bed so the other two guys (Russell and Connor) would have to sleep on the floor. They did, when they got in at 6:00 in the morning, but they were also past the point of caring, so it worked out okay.

And today:

Sean and I woke up in a disorganized fashion from 9 until 11. Finally we looked up directions to the English bookstore in Itaewon. We would've left Russell and Connor to sleep, but they arose and wanted to come with us, somehow not incapacitated by their hangovers as I probably would've been, so we all went. Amanda and her friends were less well off and we let them sleep so the maid could deal with them instead of us doing it.

Itaewon isn't too bad a place—it's the Little America, or Americatown, of Seoul. We found the bookstore and before going in satisfied our hunger with some McDonald's (the only restaurant nearby—still gross, but in a reminiscent sort of way now). I found what I was looking for—a Korean-English dictionary at last—and browsed a lot. They have a great selection. Eventually we finished and left to take the subway to Chuncheon, where we could get buses back to our own towns.

This was my idea, but I didn't realize we'd have to stand the whole way—maybe because it's Chuseok and everyone's traveling. Well, three hours later we made it. Connor got a ticket to Inje where he lives, and we got ours, and we waited in E-Mart—the local sort of Walmart thing—until it was time. I was bemused to find an enormous cowd of military men waiting for our bus, all in front of us. Sure enough, they all got on it. I've never been on a bus with standing room only before. It was a special experience, but everyone seemed sad or tired, I couldn't tell which. It was a relief to arrive in Sachangni, especially for Sean, who had to stand the whole time.

That's where my journal entry ended. Lest it sound like I'm just complaining about partying, let me say that certain parts of the whole Seoul experience were pretty nice. For instance, I finally found some indoor shoes that I can actually use. This has been a concern of mine. Korea subscribes to the same apparently pan-Asian custom that Japan does of not wearing outdoor shoes indoors. So in the school I've been wearing the biggest pair of sandals that they had in the little cabinet next to the door. They're tiny, they feel like they're made of cardboard, and also if I walk with any gait other than a worried-looking shuffle, they just fall off. So now I have a pair of rubber sandals that are still too small for me, but not so direly, and they also stay on for gaits all the way up to a cautious jog.

Also, I got to eat a burrito, which was much more comforting than I ever imagined. It's true that I've really taken to Korean food, and it's a good thing I have, because it's hard to find anything else around here. What I didn't realize, however, was that having nothing but Korean food nearly caused me to forget, on some visceral level controlled by my taste buds, that I even used to live in America. A burrito is American food, you had better believe, even if it has a name that is also a word in Spanish (the word means "small burro" and does not sound particularly appetizing to many Spanish speakers, or so I have heard), and when I had that burrito it brought memories of my temporarily abandoned life back to my subconscious.

So, on the whole, I may not have had all that much fun with the clubbing, but it's not like I had zero fun, and despite how much money I spent, I suppose I'm still glad I went. I've just been reading a book that Sean lent me called Vagabonding. It's all about putting yourself in the right sort of mindset for doing serious, long-term traveling that not only gets you to see The Sights but also gets you to really talk to the people, feel the rhythms of life in the place you're visiting, and come away actually feeling like you know the place. One of the things he says, and one that lines up just about perfectly with other aspects of my own life philosophy from before I even knew the book, is that even the stuff you didn't enjoy at the time gives you perspective. Though I wasn't hanging out with Koreans while I did this big expedition, they were all around me, and now I know what it'd be like, as a Korean, to go to Myeongdong and frantically try to get that perfect jacket or those really cute pumps before the rest of the swarm cleans it all out from the American clothes shop. Not to say that I'm going to forbid myself from complaining forevermore, but everything new is interesting, and I'm going to make a point of bearing that in mind.

So that's that story. But there are more. Today I climbed a small mountain or large hill with Sean, and tomorrow we're all going to see a waterfall. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Deungsan—Mountain Climbing

2011-09-03T23:49:00.004-04:00

I've been settling in. I'm not done settling in yet, but I've been working on it. Getting to know everyone here better. We're going to be the tightest group ever at the end of the year. I hate to think how much I'm going to spend on tickets to Britain to go visit most of them in the future, after we're done here. Well, either that or we'll somehow come to hate each other, which would be cheaper but not nearly as enjoyable. And I don't see that happening anyhow, because they're all great people. One of the big things I want to do here is write, so, for some practice, I'll characterize them all later, try and give an idea of what they're like, but for now I'm just going to do some storytelling. This is the tale of the second mountain I climbed here. I could write about the first one, but the story's not nearly as good, and I can just copy this one from my journal because I wrote it there intending to put it here, and anyhow it would probably get boring to read about two mountains in one entry, especially since there are going to be plenty of mountain stories here in the future.

Russell, Sean, and I all gathered. Deanna, Amanda, and Ben decided to skip the mountain. So we three took off down the road along the river, looking for the split in the road where there was a statue of a yellow man. After an unexpectedly long walk, we found it, and we turned right and crossed a bridge to get to the path up the mountain. But there was just a house with an old lady out front. So we turned and walked the only possible direction down the river, even though it seemed like the wrong way.

A gray van came down the road from in front of us. It stopped next to us and inside was a little Korean lady with no hair. She talked to us in Korean, prosumably asking where we were going, so I said, "Deungsan-ro"—having learned the word for "mountain hiking trail". She chattered away excitedly in quick Korean and seemed to gesture us back the way we'd come, and then droe off.

We turned around. "I guess that was where the trail was," Sean said. Then, back at the old lady's house, the bald woman stopped and got out. She talked to the old lady a bit, then took us into the house's garden. "This is a strange path," we all agreed. We followed, and the bald woman led us to a shack, and then seemed to say we couldn't go further from there, and we all turned around. That wasn't the trail.

She gestured us into her van. Though Sean was suspicious that we were going to get murdered by a bald Korean lady, we all got in, and she drove us down back roads, one of which had a boulder on it. She tried to explain where the trail was, and where we had gone astray, or something, but we got nothing from it. She also made a praying gesture, indicated her head, and pointed out her loose, ornate, white vestments, and I figured she was a nun at a temple somewhere nearby. Finall we stopped at a tiny trail with a sign that said, "Du-ryu-san cheongsang [Mount Du-ryu peak] 3000m". She pointed up the trail and through charades told us something about a temple (sa) where you can drink tea (cha), or something to do with temples and tea, somewhere down the trail.. As the person with the most Korean, I thanked her as profusely as I could (which was actually no more than Sean or Russell could've), and she drove off somewhere, and we looked at the trail. "We never would've found this," Russell said. Thoug8h we may have foiund the other trailhead marked on the map online—but then again, that didn't really seem to exist behind the old lady's garden.

We started limbing. It was tougher than Mount Chang-an, because the trail was a lot steeper, and there were no gazebos. We had to stop and rest at non-optimal, steep places. It was rough. But we shook it off as best we could and powered up the mountain— even though we couldn't see the peak or anthing through all the thick forest.

After a long time of hiking through that impenetrable forest, and quite a few breaks, the trail leveled out and we could catch glimpses of the peak here and there. Then we could see it clearly, and then we were right up at it. I heard voices up there. We rounded some bg rocks and found a yellow sign marking the summit—"두류산/993m". Also lots of Koreans with expensive backpacks and hikind sticks. Sean thought of an interpetation for the ribbons we'd been seeing all day on the trail, tied to trees, like the green one that freaked us out because it said DMZ. Some of them said "산악회", and Sean now figured that meant "hiking club". He turned out to be right.

There wasn't a great view because of all the trees, so we sat and had lunch. I had a weird pastry from a bakery in town, one with a hot dog baked in. Also, pizza toast. Sean did too, but Russell only had bread and butter.

After tring to appreciate the peak more, we moved on, sort of to get away from the hiking club. There was a sign we'd seen that pointed toward Mount Chang-an, which promised a trail more fun than hiking back down the road. We made for Chang-an.

And we didn't regret it. A short ways on, there was a lower peak of Du-ryu with a cleared-off area, and no trees blocking it, We could see everything. Both Sachangni and the village on the other side of Chang-an from it—as well as of course Chang-an itself, which from this height was a pitiful little bump. Sean's school's town, Damokri. All the other mountains around—we picked the best ones to climb next. The cars and tricks on the road were midgety inchworms crawling along. It was more or less perfect.

Further on, we descended toward Chang-an with ropes and ladders put into solid rock. Then on a break I decided to tackle the rest of the hike with no shoes, and the ground felt soft and friendly—like fall, though fall isn't quite here yet. Going down was great. We whistled. Well, I whistled.

We came all the way down, finally—after a cut on my foot (toldja so)—to Daeseong Temple. It might have been the temple that the nun told us about. There was a gray van, but none of us could remember if it was hers. And how would we invite ourselves in for tea? Especially smelling like we did? We walked past the giant bell and the temple building and through the gate that looked like it'd been standing there since the 1600s waiting to see us off, and emerged into the town.

Some dinner would be nice. We washed up and felt like we'd stepped fresh out of a sauna, then gathered Amanda (who'd stayed and sunbathed on her balcony all day) and got some pizza. After that the four of us sat on the roof and talked until well into the night. We talked about music a fair amount, but also about the next day's zipline excursion in Chuncheon, and relationships, and how nice it is to be out here where it's calm, you can see the stars, and you don't have to worry about almost anything.

When You Come to the Orient, You Get Orientation

2011-08-28T09:05:00.005-04:00

I played chess. I should explain. Victor, who I've mentioned before, has four basic activities: work, sleep, eating, and chess. The last several weeks that I was at home, he was living there, due to being homeless and unfortunate in various ways. So he wanted to play chess with me all the time. And once I had gotten packed up and was ready to go to Korea, there was nothing else for me to do as I waited for the minutes to tick off but play chess. So that's what I did. I believe I won two of three, but I don't remember exactly. Then Dad woke up and in the psychosomatic chill that comes before sunrise on even hot summer days, he drove me to the airport. We said goodbye and then I walked into the mystery of my next year.

First I had to pass through what may forever be the longest day of my life, at 37 hours. On the flight to Chicago, I heard a guy behind me talking to his neighbor about Korea. "Are you going to Korea?" I said. He nodded. "Teaching?" Nod. "Going with EPIK?" Nod. "See you there." But he was going to Gyeongbuk province, which, I later discovered, has a different orientation, and I never saw him again.

Instead, when I landed in Chicago, I waited in the wrong place for a while, then asked if I was in the right place, and a guy nearby asked me, when he heard I was flying to Seoul, if I was going to EPIK. He was too, and to Gangwon, in fact. We both found the right place together (it was a train ride away in a completely different building), and joined what turned out to be an EPIK party. All the non-Korean people who were waiting for the flight to Seoul were EPIK teachers. I met, for instance, Matt, who has a handlebar mustache, plays accordion, and was headed to Jeju Island. Altogether there were at least thirty of us there. I sat in front of two, and they were bookending a Korean girl who spoke pretty good English and gave us all sort of an idea of what we were heading for. Unfortunately I couldn't talk with them well, so I mainly just slept the entire way.

Customs went by in about thirty seconds, and I got my stuff and headed to the EPIK booth at the airport with all the other non-Koreans who'd just stepped off the plane. We were all assigned a bus that was going to leave in ten minutes, and then I realized I was supposed to find my recruiter, one of the people who'd guided me through the whole application process. She had been trying to find me, and she even had a card with my name printed on it. She handed me an envelope and some home-baked ball-shaped walnut treats, which made me soften a bit from how annoyed I'd been with the lack of communication in the process. Then someone led me in a rush to the bus and I started understanding the bballi bballi (hurry hurry!) culture of Seoul.

I sat with people from Canada and England and the USA, including Sean from England, who would end up in the same village with me later. I hadn't realized how international a crew I'd be with. The bus driver took us with pinpoint accuracy through traffic that never seemed a safe distance away on either side, and we all got nametags and dinner. After dinner we all started getting to know each other. I played a card game called baldrick with a South African guy, an English guy, and the guy I met at the wrong desk in Chicago. Pretty soon everyone collapsed from their long flights.

Right at the beginning of the next day we had a medical exam; a team of Koreans quickly processed all 160-odd teachers, including blood tests and urine samples. They realized what a wonderful welcome this was, and gave us some snacks and drinks afterward. We had the rest of the day free to meet people and make friends, so we all did.

The next three days went by in a stream of lectures on how to teach and evening Korean lessons. Every day we got Korean food for lunch and dinner, and as I was hoping, I really like it, most of the time. I still haven't gotten past the sound of the word "squid" and the sliminess of the animal, so I don't eat that, but maybe by the end of the year I'll be eating it every day. The kimchi there was terrific. In our free time we took walks around Seoul, from which I'll put up pictures sometime. One of the more memorable things was a stone wall that used to surround old Seoul, and goes up a hill that lets you see a good portion of the city from the top. I started hanging out with two people, Alex and Cody, who both studied linguistics in college. I didn't know this about them until I'd been hanging around with them for a while already. I think we came together through some kind of linguists' magnetism. We hung out a lot throughout the week, and a few times I also hung out with Jo, although she turned out to be the instantly popular type, putting her in sort of different circles from a schlub like me. Mainly I just hung out with everyone I could, and had a great time.

On the fourth day we had a field trip to nearby Ganghwa Island. I didn't realize when I got on the bus that I was going to see North Korea that day, but the first thing we went to see was the Peace Observatory, located at the closest point on Ganghwa to North Korea, only 2.8 km from inhabited areas. North Korea has set up a village there to look very healthy and thriving, and you can use binoculars to look at people doing agricultural things and cranes flying around without any regard for how this land might be somehow different from the land across the strait. First there was a lecture (which I barely understood any of) about the history of the Koreas, in a room with a view across the border. Then we made asses of ourselves by taking mid-air jumping pictures in front of the very sober monument to peace, looked around awhile, and got bussed to a big restaurant for bibimbap.

After the rather good bibimbap—and the so-so dotorimuk (acorn jelly), which didn't taste like anything, and isn't as good as what I'm told you can get at other places—it was just a short walk down a street along a rice paddy and we got to a hut where we would be trying out hwamunseok, the traditional way to weave sedge mats. We all sat in a big room on benches with iron spools hanging from boards in front of us. Then we learned how to be proto–sweatshop workers. Each stalk of sedge took at least a couple minutes to add to the mat, and we were only scheduled for about an hour. Given about a year, we could have created something that you could actually have a seat on, and cover your floor with. But with the time we had, we each managed to weave a mat large enough to set a drink on—two if you're careful. Based on invisible criteria, the old ladies running the hwamunseok place declared winners (all of them female as well), and we went on to our next tourist thing.

Things picked up a little, because we moved on to a dolmen, which is a giant stone monument to the dead. There are thousands of these scattered across the Korean peninsula, north and south, dating back to prehistory in many cases. We had come to see an especially big one—maybe the biggest, but I don't remember. It was made of two flat stones tipped onto their thin sides and buried in the earth, diagonal but parallel, with another flat stone on top, large enough for several people to dance on and thick enough to shield you from a sizeable bomb if you hid underneath. I think I remember hearing that it weighed fifty tons. Can you think of any way for stone-age people to move that? I guess maybe they buried the supporting stones, then had a huge crew of strongmen with ropes drag it across level ground until they got it to the right place, then uncovered the supporting stones. I'm suitably impressed with whoever they were honoring.

Lastly we had a tour of the place where a palace used to be, back when the capital had been moved to Ganghwa Island for a little while, a few hundred years ago. The Koreans are serious about their ornate architecture. Every one of the hundreds of roof beams was painted with an intricate design in red, yellow, and blue, on bright green. The palace grounds were a very serene place. I could imagine sitting down in any building there for several years of peace and quiet to determine the nature of the universe. But I had a commitment to teaching instead, so I went with everyone else back to the bus into Seoul, so I could listen to the rest of the week of lectures.

I started getting a feel for Korean culture, too. It didn't hurt that a couple of our lecturers explained it to us so we wouldn't have to figure it all out for ourselves. The starting point for Korean culture is Confucianism. Confucius, whose name is known all across even America, though his words aren't, had an idea for how society should be. There were wars and strife going on all around him, and his idea was this: everyone has their place, and let no one try to break out of it, and let the structure of society be sacred. For a long time it was this way all acros Japan, China, and Korea, but now Korea is the only country left that still has Confucianism at the center of its culture. The effect for Koreans today, and for me, is that there's a hierarchy, and everyone has their place somewhere there. You can move up the hierarchy as you get older, but don't try to overturn it with brash young ideas, or you'll get nowhere but ostracized. Old people are given everything here: special elevators to subway stops, seats everywhere. When we were in a bus together once, Cody, who has studied Korean culture a lot harder than I did, told me to get up from the seat I'd taken, and that I should never sit down in an even moderately full bus ever, because I'm a man and I'm under thirty. The principal of my school got to be principal by sticking to schools for a long time, and now he has the privilege of a job where, for much of the day, he can sit in a chair and read the newspaper.

As you can imagine, I chafe a bit with that, because if anyone's a brash young firebrand who wants to upset the political, cultural, and moral order, it's me. It might be a tough year for me, submerging my ego so as not to be made miserable by those who have power over me and would feel wronged by my even considering that I might be right and they wrong. I think I'm starting to understand part of something else I heard about Korean society. One of our lecturers told me that the typical idea in Western places about what Korea must be like is: boring and stuffy. The Koreans, he told us, have a response to this: Korea is actually "exciting hell", while America is "boring heaven". Hell, I suppose, in that until you become a geezer, you have to put your head down, work harder than any human should, and go with the flow. Korean high school students, the youngest people who I suppose are considered aware enough to take part fully in Confucian order, have a saying that was explained to us: "Four, pass; five, fail." At the end of high school, Koreans take an enormous test that, basically, their entire schooling career has been building up to. This test basically determines the course of the rest of their lives. The saying, it turns out, is about hours of sleep. Five hours is considered a reckless luxury. With this in mind, the high suicide rate of Korean high-schoolers is fairly explicable.

But it's an exciting hell, and I've picked up on that as well. Over the course of my getting ready to go to Korea, there have been several small towns that I thought I might end up in. For each one, I went to Wikipedia to find out a little something about it. In America, this would be a most unprofitable endeavor. The article for an American small town gives its population, its demographics, and maybe the name of a park there. But in Korea, every town has something like this, which I'm paraphrasing from the entry for Hwacheon (population around 24,000): "The town is famous for its annual ice fishing festival, which spans most of the month of January. Visitors come from all over Korea to fish for sancheoneo (wild trout). The festival's organizers estimate that up to a million people visit the town each year to take part." Something interesting is never much more than spitting distance away in Korea.

All of us at the orientation had known our provinces since before we landed, and had been sorting ourselves into little groups based on those, but not until the very last day did we actually find out what towns we would be going to. Actually, I didn't find out until I was on my way there. I was one of two people given a confusing placement at the Hwacheon Office of Education. That seemed to mean that I was going to be delegated to whatever school had need of me. But then, on the day when we all said our goodbyes (Jo teared up, and probably wasn't the only one, even though we'd only known each other a week), I got off the bus and into my co-teacher's car in Chuncheon (capital of Gangwon province), and she drove me to Hwacheon, but not to stay. I was only meeting my predecessor, and after considerable confusion, I found out that I would be staying not in Hwacheon but an hour or so away in a little town called Sachangni.*

First thing in, I got a tour of Sanae elementary school, where I'll be teaching. It has a dirt field out front, where a bunch of kids were playing a pick-up soccer game. "Hello!!" they yelled out to me. "How are you??" One ambitious little guy worked up the nerve to try something more complicated—"I'm playing soccer!" I had been warned that my heart would melt, but I was unprepared. They're all so earnest, pure, and rambunctious, or at least so they seem so far. I also got to see the inside of the school, where you're not allowed to wear shoes, and meet the principal, who was in a chair reading the newspaper. The school is basically a long hall with classrooms along it and a couple other buildings at one end.

One of the other buildings is the English classroom, or, as it's styled on the entrance, the Sanae English Experience Center. Here I saw how serious the Korean government is about teaching kids English. The room has two TVs in it with even bigger screens than Grandpa's and Dad's. One of these is also a touchscreen, which allows one to use one's hand as a cursor to do stuff when the screen is displaying the screen of the computer next to it. The other one, as far as I can tell, is never even used. There are English teaching materials everywhere, with scarcely any place to put them all. All the textbooks are the latest edition of 영어 (that's yeong-eo, the Korean word for "English", and even though I know how to sound it out, it still looks more like modern art than language to me). Two laptops are present, both connected to a program that allows the teachers to send messages and files to each other within a little school intranet. It's pretty impressive.

And yet, besides "Hello", "How are you?", and the occasional "I'm playing soccer", the only thing that comes out of the kids' mouths without steady coaching and a clearly visible written example is Korean. It leads me to believe that, becoming suddenly profitable, the Korean government ended up being profligate and buying all sorts of stuff for the schools, on the theory that it must be some good, and it's the right thing to do. This fits in with my view of Korean society. I don't know if this has anything to do with Confucius, but it's a very materialistic place. All through the orientation, the organizers were giving us more gifts than we could handle. That's the polite thing to do, and they felt, I'm sure, that it was expected of them, even though by the end I heard at least one person say quietly at an assembly, "Oh please don't give us anything else." Your decency is measured by your generosity. Also by your sense of style. I don't know if I'll be able to work my way down, fashion-wise, to anything less ostentatious than a button-down shirt and pressed pants this entire year, at least at work. (And so it will be a big relief for me when I become a hobo and get to wear the most casual uniform of any job outside of the Naked News people.) The government spends a lot of money helping teach kids English with the latest technology, which I suppose makes them a good government in the eyes of the South Koreans (or at least so they hope). But it disregards the fact that snazzy technology isn't what makes kids learn a language. What does? I'm not sure yet, and I can hardly claim to be an expert at this point (tomorrow is my third day on the job), but I know that having a five-foot touchscreen to do a fill-in-the-blanks activity on CD isn't the best allocation of money.

After my tour of the school, I moved in to my apartment. It's right next to the school, giving me a walking commute of about two minutes, and kids don't really hang around after school, so I don't have to worry about having constant playground chatter slowly drive me mad. The school and the apartment, while by no means at the top of the town, are at the top of a steep rise above the main bulk of the town, so I can see almost all of Sachangni from the roof (there's a door on the third floor that leads to a roof-level porch with an overlook and a clothesline). Surrounding the town are mountains, mountains everywhere, the highest ones a little under four thousand feet. Pervading the town are Korean military men, seen all the time walking around in their camo, talking in groups or having pizza alone. Because oh yes, did I mention? Sachangni is about twelve miles from the DMZ. When people at home told me, "Don't walk too far north," I chuckled and said something like, "I don't think I could possibly do that without realizing it," but this means that, conceivably, if I were an utter idiot and planned extremely poorly, I might just be able to walk, not all the way into the DMZ, but probably into a line of angry and puzzled South Korean soldiers trained to use big guns.

The best part of this apartment building isn't the great view or the underfloor heating or the nice balcony in my room. It's the fact that five other English teachers live here, all the ones in the town. This includes Sean, the guy from England who I met on the bus away from Incheon Airport. Turns out he came here because he loves to climb mountains and be in the outdoors. We get along great. There are also Russell, a Scottish guy who's a little bit quiet, but still game for mountain climbing; Amanda, an English girl who taught in Busan a couple years before and then went insane in Bali for a little while; Ben, a veteran teacher on his third year who's now working at the Hwacheon Office of Education, and goes to Chuncheon a few times a week, which will be handy; and Deanna, who I've barely met yet, so the only thing I know about her is that she wants to climb stuff and she plays Mortal Kombat with Ben. We're going to have some great times together.

Which is nice, because if these first two days at work have set the tone for the year, it could be a long one. The teaching is going fine, although I'm off to a bit of a rough start due to having never taught before. I'm getting along just fine. The trouble is the office politics. On my first day, my co-teacher sent me and Amanda a message asking if, as a favor, we could come in half an hour early to school every day to open the windows and prepare lessons. I was ready to accept this as a cruel twist of fate, but Amanda thought differently, because she's been here for a month, and asked if we could leave at 4:30 instead of 5:00 if we came in early. This is when difficulties arose. My co-teacher said we certainly couldn't do that, because all teachers come in half an hour early without pay, and that's just the done thing. But we pointed out that our contract says we only have to work eight hours, and more can be required, but we have to be paid overtime. My co-teacher took this as a total refusal of her polite request for a "favor"—Amanda and I later agreed that a favor can be refused with no consequences, and this was definitely an obligation instead—and so she has begun to see us as mannerless jerks, apparently. We questioned the hierarchy. I wouldn't have done that, but Amanda was very confident in her ability to appeal this, and also angry, because last Friday, she asked—as a real favor—if she could leave half an hour early to catch the 4:40 bus, since she wasn't doing anything in the last half-hour anyhow, and they refused her. And I went along with Amanda, swept up in her confidence. It's gotten escalated, first to the vice-principal, then to the Office of Education, then to the EPIK supervisor. And now, apparently, a decent chunk of the school hates both of us. Or maybe just my co-teacher does. We don't know where this will head next, but hopefully it only gets better.

Anyhow, at least the teaching isn't too bad. At first I envisioned Korean students as orderly, military-precise ranks of nearly identical black-haired heads all sitting attentively and ready to learn. But really, kids are the same everywhere, and trying to make military ranks out of them will fail in any country. These kids are rowdy, they hit each other, and they have personalities. They're adorable. Now all I have to do is figure out if I can teach them some real English.

By now this probably ranks among my longest entries here, but that's about all I have for you, so you're free to go take a bike ride or something. I hope everything's going well over there. Keep me posted.

*In Korean it's spelled 사창리, which works out phonetically to "Sachang-ri" (with -ri being, I think, a suffix that means more or less "ville"). But in Korean, if you have an ㅇ (ng) followed by a ㄹ (r/l), the ㄹ becomes an n sound instead. There are loads of little rules like that. Fun, huh?

Doing Chicago

2011-08-12T03:23:00.001-04:00

Last week, to make the most of the little time I have left in the USA, I decided to kind of invite myself over to my friend Ethan's house in Chicago, because I figured he'd be the sort of guy who'd have a good time showing someone around the city. It turned out I was right. He planned out a big bike trip to go see most of the interesting things in the city, and I drove up there one Wednesday to visit him.

Actually, what I did first was go drop off my snake at his new home in Deb's basement. My dad has taken care of snakes before, but I trusted Deb more than him, knowing how Dad is with animals. He has this way of sort of forgetting about animals until he remembers that they need to be fed, then feeding them and forgetting about them again. Snakes don't need to be fed very often, so if Dad gave Tenzing a big enough bowl of water, he could conceivably open the cage only two or three times in the whole time I'll be gone. This is why I figured Deb was the better bet. Unfortunately, Tenzing didn't seem to like her, or maybe he was just in a sour mood from all the bumping on the car ride up to Chicago. He bit her a few times, which is more than he's ever bit anyone before. He took a swipe at me, too, but he missed. Luckily, Deb is intrepid, and said that Tenzing is small enough that his bites didn't even hurt. She told him that she's soften him up over the coming year, and he's just going to have to shove all his hard feelings aside because she won't be putting up with them. He'll do just fine.

After I explained all the tricks and peculiarities of my giant homemade cage, I bade Deb and Tenzing goodbye and zigzagged through Chicago to eventually Ethan's house. It's a nice place. They have a trapeze out back, and a garden on top of their garage. He and his parents and his two little sisters live there. Ethan made some dinner, which he wasn't expecting to do, but his dad told him to, and they fed me, which I certainly wasn't going to expect of them, but I didn't complain. We hung out for the length of the evening, and then they set me up on an air mattress in the basement (which I would be testing out for leaks before the family's big camping trip began tomorrow morning).

I finally hit the tile floor through the air mattress at about 4:00 in the morning, but I managed to blow it back up and feel well rested by 8:00 when it was time to have breakfast and start biking. As far as I know, Ethan has been biking around Chicago since he first learned how to ride a bike, and by now he's got pretty much the whole city memorized. I highly recommend him if you ever go to Chicago, love to bike, and want a tour of the city. We started out in his neighborhood, which he's proud to say is actually within the city limits and isn't one of those awful sprawling suburbs. To start out, we went to the South Side, where he promised we would find good social commentary. By this he meant we could see the way Chicago is segregated. We stopped at a Hispanic grocery store for some discount Gatorades, and looked at all the signs in Spanish. Ethan says a lot of the richer, whiter people he works with don't even really realize this part of the city exists. They're aware that poor, darker-skinned people live somewhere, but not that there are entire neighborhoods where they live with each other and the white people stay away. I was familiar with something like this from Cincinnati, but I basically only knew of neighborhoods there as "good" neighborhoods (that is, rich, white, and safe) and "bad" neighborhoods (mostly black, poor, and the kinds of places where people warn you that you'll get shot if you don't ride through with tinted windows rolled completely up). Here things were much more organized, or, to put it more negatively, much more segregated. There was the Hispanic neighborhood; we also saw a Polish neighborhood and, once we got lunch, a Chinese one. The lunch was a very American one from a place called Maxwell Street—hamburgers and Chicago hot dogs, one of each for us starving cyclists—and we ate it along the Chicago River in a park on the edge of Chinatown, under a willow near a pagoda-looking shelter.

We were, as it happened, right downstream from a pretty awesome structure: a lifting rail bridge. But it doesn't break in half and fold up like most road bridges that let boats through. Instead there's a really tall column on either side of the river, and a section of the bridge gets raised, still horizontal, about eighty feet into the air. Also, to complete the visual, there is a house perched on top of the bridge, suspended about twenty feet above the rail. While we ate our greasy American food, we decided it was unlikely that we'd be lucky enough to see it raise. Then someone drove a pleasure yacht right up to it and started clearly waiting.

But we're dealing with the railroad here; nothing is hurried. So an Amtrak went over the bridge, then stopped partway across and reversed back to its original side of the river. Then it did it again. Then a coal train eased its way leisurely across the bridge. By this time we had long since finished our food. Once the coal train cleared, we decided to give the bridge five more minutes to let the poor pleasure-yachter through, because we had a timetable to keep—Ethan had decided we should take a two-dollar water taxi from this park to downtown, but we needed to get some Chinese pastries first. About five minutes later, an Amtrak came across, so we decided to let it go away and then we'd leave. It got off the bridge. We watched expectantly. Nothing happened. We biked off. We were almost out of earshot when I heard a siren come from the bridge, and I turned around to see it raising up. And it was cool enough to merit the wait and being strung along so long. (It strung us along one last time, when we were waiting for it to lower again—we were through waiting for that and had gotten out of the park once more, and then the siren sounded again.)

The Chinese bakery was interesting. Ethan got some mango pudding, but I decided to go for weirder things, so I got a "bean paste and walnut cake" and a sesame cookie. The first thing looked a lot like a big fig Newton, but instead of fig inside, it was bean paste with walnuts in it. The bean paste behaved slightly magically: first it didn't taste like anything. Then it tasted sweet, almost as if it were a fig Newton after all. Then it tasted like refried beans, and I had to give the other half to Ethan. I had better luck with the sesame cookie. I bit into that once we were on the water taxi (a shiny yellow boat that would take us and our bikes down the Chicago River to downtown). It tasted like sesame, very much like sesame, and not, as I'd expected, like a sugar cookie with sesame seeds added on top. I liked it. I've gained a new appreciation for sesame.

We got off the water taxi and hauled our bikes up a big staircase, then rode to the Bean. Perhaps you have heard of the Bean. It is a giant bean, at least 25 feet tall, that is made entirely of mirror. The reflections are wild. You can stand underneath the bean, because it arches up, and put your hands on the wall, and it looks like you're touching the hands of a duplicate of yourself that is standing on a wall. You can also examine the entire city in most parts of the reflection. The Bean is worth seeing. Most of the people in Chicago appear to have felt the same way, because a whole lot of them were there, the kind of crowd you'd usually see at a concert or a train station. Once, I jumped up to see how high up the bean I could plant a handprint, and a moment later a guy came up to me and said, "Dude, do you have a phone? I got this sweet shot of you jumping up to the Bean." Unfortunately, my phone doesn't get pictures, but I hope he enjoys it.

Not far from the Bean is the Cultural Center, which Ethan had mentioned to me once. It's basically a free art museum and hangout place and hub for interesting things to do. My favorite art was that of Michael Dinges. He takes a white thing—a lawn chair, a boat, a dead Macbook. Then he engraves words and art all over it with a Dremel. The words form anticapitalist, pro-thinking-your-life-through slogans, often in catchy and ingenious quatrains. The art is banners, octopuses, snakes—all really well done in the pointillist style. Michael Dinges is a guy I'd like to be friends with, based just on the ideas he writes about on these Macbooks.

From there it was time to go up the Hancock Tower. The night before, we looked at prices for the Sears I Mean Willis Tower. All the customer reviews online said there was a long wait there, and when you got to the top it was boring, and then several of them recommended the Hancock Tower instead—it's 100 floors high, right up there with Sears Or Rather Willis Tower, and apparently has a better skydeck. So we rode the fastest elevator in North America up to the top and Ethan showed me all the things we'd seen and all the things we had yet to see. Unfortunately I had left my glasses in Ohio, but I could still see most of what he was talking about—though the Bahá’í temple was a smudge for me. He showed me Oak Park Beach, where we'd be swimming shortly, and I got to see where the deep parts are and what people look like from a thousand feet up when they're swimming. It was one of the better views I've had the opportunity to experience in my life (though the view from the cliff above Crowduck and the view from the top of Mt Garfield probably top it).

So we swam. The water was pretty choppy on Lake Michigan that day. Ethan says that's what makes it a great challenge—just getting from one point to the other makes you work good and hard. I, being a river dweller rather than a lake dweller, was a bit more standoffish, but I got in and swam anyhow, and had a good time, just in small doses. I got the feeling that Ethan could have swum a lot longer, but he was accommodating, so we started making our way back to his house.

On the way we passed some more social commentary, and some railyards, and went through a hipster neighborhood. In fact we had dinner there. Somewhat on a whim, we went into a Peruvian place with a not-Peruvian name ("Between"). It was not what we expected inside. It was dark, and the tables were either unusually low or unusually high, and there were partitions all over made out of lots of red strings hanging down from above (like a hippie bead door, but without the beads). But we decided to give it a chance, and we both had a Peruvian pasta-meat dish. It was delicious but there wasn't enough of it. That was our verdict, I think, on Between.

To assuage this disappointment we stopped by a Tastee-Freez and got enormous milkshakes that took at least a half-hour to drink. They probably had an entire normal day's worth of calories in them. But we were biking, so we could handle it. (I barely could.) We drank them while walking around in a nearby park, close to where Ethan grew up, and I climbed on some stuff here and there. It was dark and we looked out over a pond. Ethan said it always seemed nice to him, but I could see lights and hear shouting easily from the other side, so it didn't seem like a real pond to me, more like a field with water on top. I guess living in a city gives you different ideas of what counts as a pond.

Finally we biked back to his house. We had biked, Ethan estimates, 40 to 45 miles. Our bodies gave us just enough time to brush our teeth and get our affairs in order, and then we collapsed. I drove home the next day, sore, but awfully glad I'd gotten to see the city so up-close and personal with such a knowledgeable guide. By the way, Chicago is way better in almost every respect than Cincinnati. (But it doesn't have Cincinnati chili.)

Besides that, other news includes the fact that I allowed my hair to be cut so I could look more presentable in the eyes of the Koreans. This was a big thing for me, because the last time I had any length taken off my hair was in eighth grade. In probably the majority of my memories, I have long hair. And I still think of myself as a longhaired person temporarily disguised as a shorthaired person. But for the time being, I have a short haircut. Victor says it makes me look like Jerry Seinfeld, which I guess can give you a rough idea of it, although other people have disagreed with him. Also, I got my visa, and I got other stuff, and I'm packing up, and it's getting very close to time to leave. Wow. It's crazy.

Sorry

2011-07-26T01:25:00.008-04:00

Okay, okay, yes. I haven't written for a long time. From now on entries will be more frequent. Because I'm soon going to have more to write about. Actually, I kind of already have a lot to write about. Let's dive in, shall we?

My little trip to Korea has been steadily coming closer. Boy, is there a lot of paperwork. I've told you about this before, but it's still true. The latest things I've had to send out for were my visa and a residency certificate from the IRS that certifies that I've resided in the USA, and thus I don't need to pay Korean income tax on what I earn there. I thought I was going to have to go to Chicago to interview for my visa, but they do this by mail now, so that was convenient… comparatively.

Aside from all the paperwork, though, there is other news to tell. I know when I'm leaving—the morning of August 17. I also know where I'm going. I got a letter a while ago saying that I probably wouldn't get placed in my preferred city of Gwangju, because I was a little bit later on the uptake than some people, and cities always get taken first. They gave me a list of provinces and unpopular cities to decide among. So I did a little research, with the help of a really handy website that I discovered called Wikitravel. It turned out there was a fairly clear best. If I wanted to, I could go to a province near a big city, or that contained a big city—like Gyeongnam, the province that surrounds Busan—but then there was Gangwon. Wikitravel had this to say:

Geographically elongated north and south, Gangwon-do is in the Korean peninsula's central eastern region. About 82% of the land is mountainous. … The variegated beauty of Gangwondo's four seasons radiates even more against the rich natural environment here. … The Seoraksan Mountains have multiple hiking courses, valleys, and cultural artifacts hidden in each valley, and are internationally renowned as a habitat for rare plants and animals.

It kind of goes on like that. Apparently Gangwon is where Koreans go to see nature, which made it a particularly good place for me. The downside to it is that it's not very heavily populated, so I may not have a whole lot of people to talk English with, but then again, the isolation might cause the Gangwon teachers to have a sense of solidarity that you might not find in Seoul or Busan, where English speakers are like mice. So I told EPIK that's where I wanted to go. And I got it. It looks like it's going to be a good year, full of mountain climbing and kimchi and learning a language while teaching another one. To get an idea of what it'll be like, just look at Mt. Seoraksan:

Not that scenery is going to guarantee that I'll have no problems, but still, it certainly can't hurt.

By the way, I've been wanting to write a little about this for your benefits: Pronouncing Korean words. This is so you'll actually be able to say out loud all the things I'll be mentioning over the coming year.

Korean has a writing system of its very own, and it's phonetic, unlike Japanese and Chinese. Up until the 1600s, they were getting along using the Chinese characters that the Chinese had foisted on them in the old days when China ruled basically the whole continent. But then, King Sejong started feeling a little more independent and realized that it made no sense for Korean to use Chinese characters, because the Korean language works nothing like Chinese. Briefly, Chinese is an isolating language, which means that words don't get anything connected onto them—there are no conjugations or plurals; by and large every word stands on its own. That makes it pretty easy (well, somewhat easy—well, easier than in other cases) to use a picture for each word. You don't have to have separate pictures for "horse" and "horses", because there's no such thing as "horses". But Korean has lots and lots of conjugations and tenses and particles and possessives and stuff. So the Chinese system didn't work so well. So King Sejong commissioned some scholars to create a writing system that was phonetic.

They invented Hangeul, which is widely touted as one of the most logical writing systems in the world. In Hangeul, each syllable is represented by a square built of two to five phonetic characters. If you want to see what they look like, go to any website in Korean, like, say, Wikipedia. But I'm not going to teach you how to build them, or what character has what sound, because this is supposed to be about how to pronounce stuff, and I've already detoured enough by telling you all that stuff about King Sejong that had nothing to do with pronunciation.

Korean has eight vowels, but really only seven, because only old people somewhere in Seoul still reliably distinguish e and ae. These are the vowels:

a—as in spa
ae and e—as in pet, more or less
i—as in ski
eo—as in cup, more or less. It's kind of counterintuitive, but that's how that vowel is spelled.
o—as in go, but do it with a Canadian accent. It might help to imagine a Wisconsinite saying, "Don'tcha know?"
eu—the e in sic ’em. It's kind of colorless. Not too far off from the oo in book.
u—as in boot
There are also some vowel combinations that are a little tricky. The main weird one is oe, which is pronounced we as in wet. Another tricky one is ui, which is sort of like in buoy. Oh yeah, and there's wo, which is apparently just a common shorthand for weo—so it's pronounced "wuh", not "whoa". The Korean currency, the won, is pronounced "one" there, as far as I know.

It has a bunch of consonants, too, but the thing is that no one can agree on how to transliterate them from Hangeul. I'll stick to one system, the most up-to-date one, but be aware that other people could be misleading you by using older systems.

These ones are pretty straightforward: h, m, n, y, w, ng (as in singer, not finger). The r is like in Japanese, mostly—that is to say, a trill sort of thing halfway between l and r but not really either. Don't worry if you can't get it; l or r is probably close enough. (Pronounce it as written—it sounds more like one or the other depending on what's around it, but that's accounted for in transcribing.)

The tricky bit is the other ones. Korean has three series of consonants. English only has two: voiced consonants (for example b, d, g) and unvoiced (p, t, k). All three of Korean's consonant series are unvoiced, all in different weird ways, so it's really tricky for us to tell the difference between, say, d, t, and dd. And for your pronouncing purposes, it probably doesn't matter, either. But if you want to try it, this is what the series are like. They correspond to each other: the p-t-k-ch from the first series is related to pp-tt-kk-jj from the third series, and likewise related to the b-d-g-j from the second one.

The aspirated series is like our unvoiced series: p, t, k, and ch are just like you'd say them in English, basically. That one's simple. (Except: for ch, flatten your tongue more against the roof of your mouth than you would in English.)

The (plain) unvoiced series is like the aspirated series, but without the little puff of air that we always say afterwards. Try it: say "pit" in English with your hand in front of your mouth, and there's a little puff after the p. But you can say it without the puff: say "spit", and it isn't there. That's what b, d, g, and j are like: b is like the p in spit; d is like the t in stitch, and so on. EXCEPT: when they come between vowels, they actually do sound like our b, d, g, and j—they become voiced.

The tense ones are really tricky. The only good way to explain them is that they're like the plain unvoiced ones, but your muscles are tenser when you say them. These are pp, tt, kk, and jj, but the first ones also get spelled bb, dd, and gg a lot. Don't worry if you can't say them, but if you can, hey, cool party trick. And yes, you can start a word with them (and it looks funny), as you know if you've ever tried jjigae or tteok.

The last thing is the difference between s and ss. Koreans will tell you, inexplicably, that s is as in slow and ss is as in sun. This makes no sense to English speakers, because we don't say those esses differently. The real answer is that regular s has a little puff of air after it, just a little one, and it's more delicate. The double ss has no puff and is said a little longer. You can start words with ss too. In fact the word for a double consonant starts with one: ssang.

This has been a very long guide to pronouncing Korean, but hopefully it'll be useful for you later.

All right, on to other stuff. Crowduck is another thing that happened. It's almost a tautology to say that this year was another wonderful year of fishing. I, personally, didn't catch all that many fish, and I didn't catch an enormous one either, like certain parties did (ahem, Tracy, Grandma, Uncle Howard). But I did catch some, and in so doing I spent a lot of time out on the lake, and that's what matters. There were an awful lot of kids up there this year: Cory, Cammy, Sierra, Sierra, and Hayden. That tended to turn things into kind of a hurricane a lot of the time, but it was a manageable sort of hurricane. Apparently I was integral in keeping things together, although it didn't usually feel like I was doing much work. I was just amusing the Sierras, or keeping an eye on Cory or Cammy, and that was easy. Heck, Cammy was a joy to be around—she's just learning how to talk, so she's in the phase where it's really cute watching her put two or three words together to say what she wants to say, but she can't be very bossy or whiny yet because she can't put together whole sentences. Also, she loved it up there, and that added to the cuteness. The other kids were cute too, don't get me wrong. But Sierra Grace has certainly figured out how to be bossy, and also her diet consists of sugar mixed with sugar and sprinkled with sugar, so she has lots of energy to do it. Sierra Gwyneth is mercifully calmer, but she always wants me to flip her upside-down. All the time—really. I don't see what she gets from it, but hey, to each her own. Cory and Hayden don't say much, so there's not a whole lot to say about them, except that they seemed to be having a pretty good time.

Once the kids went to bed, there was poker. I started out pretty miserably by losing about ten bucks in two days, but I came right back for the rest of the week and smoked everyone with my superior hands, expert skills at reading people, and radiant charisma. Dan, Grandpa, and I were responsible for lightening the monetary loads of Dave, Beth, Tracy, and Uncle Howard. This year we also invented the best poker game ever: Follow the Queen to the Liquor Sto'. I could explain it to you, but it would be much more efficient to tell you that it's insanity embodied in a game, and also (it bears repeating) it's the best poker game ever. After ten hands we were still discovering new wrinkles and complexities, and busting our guts. Grandpa thought it was a bunch of Mickey-Mouse, though. There's no way to calculate odds on these wild-card games.

That about sums up Crowduck. I guess there's the small issue of the nanny, which I thought might become a bigger issue. She's 22 years old, same as me, and enjoys Scrabble enough to have gotten Scrabble tattoos, so I thought we might enjoy some interesting conversations. But basically she barely seemed to register my existence, so I kind of just forgot about her most of the time. Though it was pretty funny at the end of the week when she partied hard with a dockhand who's about 15 years her senior. Apparently she's not into guys her age—they have to be better seasoned, I guess. We little boys are invisible.

On the way back from Crowduck there was a little get-together in Chicago at the reptile house. I wasn't aware of it, but the cousins a generation above me try to get together with each other at least once a year or so, so they can drink and tell funny stories and play croquet. The reptile house is Deb's. It's overrun by everything cold-blooded. She showed them to us, and I got to hold the fattest snake I've ever seen, and also a Vietnamese mossy tree frog, whose call sounds like a sonar ping. She has an axolotl, which would be cool just for the spelling alone, but is also an interesting creature. With all the turtles we eventually had a turtle race. (It was a kid thing, so I ended up the oldest participant. Oh well.) Later on, there were hilarious firework shenanigans, and lots of sitting around talking about cars. I got Deb on board to take care of Tenzing while I'm gone. I relaxed with the family.

So now there's the small matter of the disbanding of my household. Everyone is going to go their own separate way, it seems, and soon it will be very rare for all of us to be together. Dad's staying at the house, Mom is moving out to an apartment, Micah is moving to some disreputable friend's house, and I'm going to Korea. It's a whole messed-up situation. But the thing is, I've seen it coming down the pike from a long way off, and I've had time to prepare.

I don't know if it's the best way to solve all our problems. Dad think that it would have been good for Micah if he and Mom had stayed together and kicked Micah out; then he would quickly find out that his infinitely surly and entitled-feeling attitude has no place in the real world, and he'd have to come back home to sort out his problems. Mom and Dad would welcome him in, but under rules, and, having run in with reality, he'd realize he actually needed to follow those rules. Maybe that's how it would have panned out, but maybe not. Doesn't matter now, because Dad has decided that he's had enough of trying with Micah. Also with Mom. I don't know, he had a few beers last night and basically disowned everyone but me, and said I stand to "make out like a bandit" as his sole heir in a few decades or so.

That's Dad's current attitude. Micah's attitude is what his attitude has been for a long time: I deserve everything because the world has been so cruel to me, so you'd better hand it to me. He knows he'll have to find a job, but he's done practically nothing to actually find one. The disreputable friend he's moving in with is going to insist that he find a job to pay rent, so my prediction is that he'll end up moved in with Mom for a while. To this I say: Mom, it is the most important thing in Micah's life that you make him go out and find a job. That will force him to stop smoking pot, or at least smoke less. It will also make him appreciate that he has to work for stuff, rather than getting it handed to him. Do not, do not under any circumstances, give him a free ride at your apartment. He will never learn a single thing as long as you do that. If you do that to try to prevent problems, like the possibility of him running away, you will be going about it all backwards, because the more he learns about how to fit into the real world, the more likely he'll be to settle down in one place and be responsible. Housing him in your apartment to keep him from running away would be like breaking a horse's leg to keep it in the stable. Maybe it stays for a while, but when it gets out, it's gone for good, and it has to make it out there with a broken leg.

How do I feel about the whole thing? Let's just say I'm glad I'm putting a hemisphere between myself and these issues. When I come back, maybe everything will be better, or maybe it will be even worse. In either case, I won't be obligated to deal with the problems any longer. So I won't.

Let's finish this off on a better note. At Crowduck, Tracy told me about the time she spent a bunch of months traveling around Europe. People had told me before that I should spend some time there seeing all the culture, and I knew it was a good idea, but I never thought about it all that much. I guess maybe Tracy told me at the right mental moment for me, or maybe she was the only one who described the continent evocatively enough, but I was inspired to think of a potential alteration to the Year of Adventure plan. Once I'm done in Korea, instead of going straight back to the States, what I think would be terrific is if I took a ferry to China and got on the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way to Europe. Then I could do the classical thing and hitchhike around Europe for months. I've heard that this can be done very cheaply, which stands to reason, since it's hitchhiking. And really, there's a lot I should see. In the story that I've been trying on and off to write, a big theme is how humans have very little species-wide memory, where that memory is basically akin to cultural history. America has a few hundred years of memory at best, unless you count the few remaining fragments of Native American cultures that the memoryless white culture has done its damnedest to eradicate. But Europe and Asia both remember thousands of years, and I want to experience a place with that much history. So perhaps a voyage across Siberia is in my future.

A kid again

2011-06-14T15:42:00.004-04:00

By now some of you have heard that I went to a little get-together. I've had to concede that the Rainbow Gathering is too far away and too close to Crowduck time. So instead I've been looking for similar things to do closer to home. I learned about the Burn from Victor, who started out as a friend of Micah's, but now is about equal friends with me, Micah, and our refrigerator. He bought me a ticket to make sure I'd come, because I was balking at the price ($40). The Burn is known more formally as Scorched Nuts, but that's a terrible name that I prefer not to think about. It's a small, regional version of the countrywide Burning Man gathering that happens every year in Nevada—it's for people who can't get to Nevada, or who aren't satisfied with burning just once a summer. I've never been to Burning Man, so I can't tell you what that's like, but I can tell you all about this little Burn. Well, not all.

It's held as close to the middle of nowhere as I've ever been. You turn off the state highway and onto a little county highway. Then onto a smaller county highway. Then onto a long, winding road with no lane lines. Then onto a one-lane road. Lastly onto a gravel driveway about a mile long. At the end of the driveway you are in a big, grassy area enclosed by trees on all sides except the side you came from. This is where the Burn is: where no one can see it.

Victor and I filled out a weird form with lots of intentionally misspelled words, then entered this strange new zone of the world. Not much was happening yet, because we got there early and during the full heat of the day. A few people had put up tents along the edges of the clearing. I parked the car in some shade, though I knew it wouldn't be shade in the morning when it counted, when we wanted to sleep in. Lacking anything better to do, we wandered around.

A woman was sitting on an air mattress smoking and reading a book. We said hi and then stayed and chatted. I told her I had forgotten the tarps we were going to use to make a makeshift tent of sticks. She told me she knew someone who had an extra, so we took off behind her as she showed us around, looking for this person. This worked out great, because she also introduced us to the spirit of the gathering and quite a few of the people as well. Whenever we walked by someone who was setting up a structure, we stopped to help them. That's the way it's done—you help everyone. We met people who looked like they were having a pretty good time, and eventually we even found the person with the tent. It was just about the most confusing tent ever, hailing from the year 1983, before anyone believed in self-explanatory design, and we had no directions. But a guy near us had one just like it, so he helped us set it up. This helping-everyone thing was starting to grow on us.

It was kind of awkward, that first day and night. I knew no one, and hadn't gotten a handle on the spirit of the gathering. Someone was explaining to me that all the PVC pipe on the ground at one corner was going to be the Saloon, and I was so gauche as to ask if they charged for drinks. "Nah. Burnerville, man." No money is exchanged once you get into the bubble. Don't even try—no one will take it. Just give whatever you can give to the community. Time, food, water, liquor—that sort of thing. And it all comes together somehow.

Eventually. We woke up on Friday and found most people being lazy and lollygagging around, not building a whole lot. This may have had something to do with the night before. Thursday night there was a martini bar under a tent shelter, and that was lots of fun, and I met some interesting people, including one girl who's walking across the United States picking up hundreds of pounds of litter a day and telling people about the problem. (I'm invited to that.) But then it got rained out by a storm that everyone later referred to as the Apocalypse. Everyone had to stop what they were doing and keep their dwellings from blowing off into the flashing sky. Nothing was left unsoaked unless it was in a vehicle. The martini bar shelter was destroyed. People defiantly streaked into the teeth of the thunder and then, once the rain subsided, went to sleep in such tents as still remained after the gales that ripped through.

So, either because of that or, as I suspect, just because it's the way things run at a Burn, Friday morning dawned lazy. One guy was working on the effigy, a little hut sort of thing to be burned in the culminating celebration on Saturday night. He was becoming rather bemused that none of the parts lined up right. We were a day and a half into a four-day festival and it still didn't feel like it had really started. Victor and I learned from someone that there was a pond nearby that you could walk to, and we immediately wanted to go. Some other people at a tent a few spots down from ours wanted to go too. But some of them wanted to wait until after they ate, which would be in a little while. I'd seen this happen before. This is what happens when a bunch of people kind of want to do something, but everyone wants all the people to be there when it happens, and it has to happen at the ideal time. It never happens. I was excited for the pond, but I kind of gave up hope for it around Friday morning.

Fortunately, not all the things that had to happen hinged on several people doing them at the same time. So buildings got built. A naked couple set up a collapsible yurt, and a bunch of people banded together to get the PVC saloon set up: it was shaped like a hangar, and had a back room roofed by an American flag with stars the size of your hand (suspended on a twenty-foot pole and three ten-foot poles, making it very lopsided). But it still felt like it was only luck that got each new achievement done, like if people were feeling a little lazier we might all have just ended up in tents drinking unmixed drinks right from the bottle.

I did end up going to the pond. I took some vague directions from someone, gathered up Victor and one other interested person, a girl who's going to Korea come July, and we walked. We had been told it was a long walk, and while I didn't really believe it, it did kind of take a while. The strange part was going past a house obviously lived in by a real person. But we put that in our pasts and found a tiny pond set unnaturally at the top of a hill, with a manmade gravel beach. The water wasn't very refreshing because it was pretty warm, and there were lots of fish that mistakenly believed we might be a strange new food. All in all our encounter with the pond was brief, but at least we got around to doing it. We came back and no one had even realized we were doing something interesting.

It turns out night is when stuff happens at a Burn. During the day it's too hot and the activities are too unspeakable to be done in the respectable light of the sun. Also it's no fun to watch someone juggle balls of flame, or crack a burning whip, or dance with fire held in their palms, when it's daytime. But let's be truthful: a bar where the price of a drink, in the absence of any form of monetary system, is the removal of one article of clothing, cannot occur during the daytime. This bar is where I spent most of Friday night, that and just outside it watching orbs of fire swirl through the air. It was a strangely great place to talk to people, because everything was so odd and unlike anything else in our lives that we felt comfortable to talk about long-held secrets as if they were normal topics, the stuff you'd say to your neighbor if you both went to get your mail at the same time. For this reason I will not be relating what I talked about. Also because I don't remember what it all was. But because you will not give up the topic, and I know you won't: yes, I got naked. Can we leave it at that? The last time I wrote about being naked in the presence of other people, the time when Joe and I went to a hot spring, it was all anyone talked about for a month afterward. Come on, everyone. Find better punch lines. I have been naked around other naked people. It's not that interesting. It's not like I'm carrying around songbirds in my mouth. That would be weird enough to make jokes about. This naked thing? You make it a bigger deal than it is. Okay, that's all.

I have thought various thoughts about the Burn, not many of them very fully fleshed out. For one, it's a very special place. You can do anything there, and no one will judge you, and nothing will happen to you. I don't know if there could be a place where it's like that all the time, but it's nice to know that it happens every so often, that there's a time and place where you can act on all those weird thoughts that we must all normally keep tucked away.

But there's something else. I started noticing this when I was at college, and I noticed it a lot at the Burn too. In both of these places, I saw people who seemed to be trying with all their strength to be children again, but going about it all wrong. There is a problem in their approach. At college people tried to become children again by drinking: drinking a lot every weekend, which let them forget all the things they were required to know during the week and become stupid, not knowing anything, as children don't. Sometimes they would make it a bit more manifest by drinking to a children's movie like The Little Mermaid or Fern Gully. In spring there is a party called Alice, devoted to hallucinogens and the pursuit of feeling like the totally bewildered Alice in Alice in Wonderland (which of course Lewis Carroll wrote while trashed on opium). Here at the Burn, I saw the drinking again, but I also saw the matter approached through the buying of toys, like fire fans,

contact staffs,

poi,

and light-up martini cups, geodesic spheres, and collapsible yurts. These are fun things to have, fair enough. But I think it's dangerous to use them to get back to your inner child, which is what I suspect people were doing here. Because the big, wonderful thing about childhood isn't the toys or the lack of knowledge or the watching regrettable movies. It's the sense of wonder at the world, where you're still noticing new things every day, where the world hasn't become boring yet. That's what to seek out. I manage to feel like that whenever I'm out in the woods. I notice everything I can notice, and explore as far as I can explore. Whereas it's hard to get people at the Burn to go exploring as far as a pond that's maybe a mile away. I don't know, maybe I'm misreading the whole situation. But I think this thing, where people try to become children but have forgotten how to do it, is happening all over the place, and probably leading to lots of unsatisfied people. Someday I'll write a story about it, or something.

Speaking of writing stories. Well, this is a really tenuous segue, but I'll do it anyhow. I was planning on writing a story this summer, and still am. That's one big interesting thing. There are a bunch of other big interesting things I want to do. But the thing is, I should be working. I have some money stashed away, but it's all from graduation gifts and such, nothing I actually earned. I'm living off others' labors, especially since I'm still in Mom & Dad's house. If I were out on my own, I would obviously have to be working harder, bringing in some income so I could live. Instead I'm kind of being dead weight, not doing anything. I've tried to find work for the summer. But there's Crowduck in the middle, which I'm not keen to sacrifice, and which would make a full-time employer look askance. And there's also the fact that I've been invited to walk along with that girl and pick up litter. And I'm also probably going to go to Little Rock to visit my friend in July. So all in all it looks like I'm kind of unemployable, that or I'll have to give up trips that I really want to take. Or, I could do freelance work, like proofreading, but that just isn't panning out so far, no matter how hard I try. I don't know how to become employed, but I want to, but I also don't want to, because my first summer back from Korea was going to be the beginning of the Year of Adventure, and because that US summer got moved from after Korea to before it, it's like I'm already in the Year of Adventure and time's a-wasting. I don't know what to do. I don't know where I could work. I've already tried to find a job teaching English, proofreading, and even working at the post office (no openings) or the railyard (career positions only). The problem may end up getting solved for me by the terrible job market. But I still feel like a burden.

I'll let you know how my story-writing goes. I've got the idea kicking around, but I can't seem to get it fully figured out. I'll get it soon. I'll start writing tomorrow. It'll come together, like Imaginary Week did this year. I've just got to start writing.

Changes

2011-05-27T02:04:00.004-04:00

Inexorably, things happened. I gave my MAP presentation, and it went well. I wrote lots and lots of final papers, sometimes more than one for a class. The end of my last semester was piled high with work. I had at least a dozen books out from the library, maybe twenty. I wrote and wrote. But I also hung out with people, especially on top of buildings. One of my friends has a photo album online called "A Bang, Not a Whimper". That's how I like to think I ended college.

Here are some things that have happened in the past month-and-change.

I got accepted, provisionally I suppose, into the Korea program. The provision was that, because of my acceptance, I now needed to send my documents, and then, since the program runs first come first served, I would get my school assignment and contract and stuff once that got to Korea. So I spent considerable time and effort getting all that set up. From previous posts, you'll recall that I had to get my FBI background check and also a letter saying that I'd graduate barring weird circumstances. Well, then I had to get those both apostilled. That meant sending them off to the State Department with money orders, and then waiting. I guess I wasn't doing much about Korea during the month or so that I waited. Once I got both my apostilled things back, I sent everything off to Korea by FedEx at a cost of over $50. This makes me really wonder about the cost of sending over useful stuff that I might want to have in my apartment. I'll try to pack as much stuff as I can into my carry-on and my checked bag, and weigh myself down pretty heavily with stuff to carry on my person. A year is a long time. But it does appear that it's an amount of time I will in fact be spending in Korea, unless I've misunderstood someone, which I suppose is possible, because their English isn't the greatest sometimes. Oh, and everyone asks me when I'm leaving for that. The answer is that I have to be there August 18. I lose 14 hours—the better part of a day, imagine that—just for going to Korea's time zone. I also have to allow quite a long time for the flight. And I might decide that, instead of flying from the Seoul airport where I'll probably land to whatever city I'm going to, maybe I'll just want to take a bus, so I can see what the country looks like before I start teaching in it. So maybe August 15, maybe the 16th. Not really sure. I'll have to figure that out, but that'll be once I get the job.

All the Press books came out. I wasn't as involved with Press this year, though I was still graciously counted as an editor-in-chief. I was always too busy, it seemed. I probably could've done a lot more for the group. But at any rate, the books came out looking great. There's one that's poetry, one that's poetry and short stories, one that's a comic book, and one that's a collection of postcards. Cool stuff.

Remember that guy I cooked rabbit with? We did a project together with mapping software, creating a map of the area around the college that showed how much pull small towns have around there. It was most laborious project. We pulled an all-nighter one night, then met the next day at 5:30 in the morning to figure out how to present it.

I went to some parties, drank some alcohol, hung out with some friends. Walked around with people. All people I'll miss.

I ate milkweed shoots for the first time. They grew in front of EcoHouse, so I harvested them. Just snap the stem when it's at the stage of life where it can be snapped. Then boil the shoots for about 20 minutes. They're sort of like green beans or asparagus. But unlike a lot of the green beans or asparagus you're likely to get, they're guaranteed to be one hundred percent fresh. This is just the start of a lot of wild foods I'm going to eat. I'm going to need to find a good woods that I can go search for food in.

But other than all that, the last month hasn't had all that much in it, or at least not all that much that would be interesting to write about—a lot of writing papers, and a lot of talking to friends you probably don't know.

So how about the future? That's something I write about all the time, isn't it?

I really don't know about this summer. I don't know what's going to happen during it. I do still plan on going to the Rainbow Gathering. Transportation is the big question. I'm not allowed to hop trains there without generally bad consequences, so that's out. The common-sense next choice is to just drive there, since I have a car of my own. But gas is expensive, you know? It cost me eighty bucks to get from college back home, and that's less than a quarter of the distance between home and Washington State. If I went to Washington by car—and back, too—by the end I'd probably be six hundred dollars poorer, and that's not a little bit of money. Amtrak wants $400 each way, and Greyhound claims there isn't even any such thing as a route between here and Washington. For all of these reasons, my preferred option is hitchhiking. The thing is, I've never hitchhiked before, so I have no idea how long I should expect it to take, or if it's even reasonable to expect I can get across the country that way. Can I do it in three days? Or should I allow four or five? Where do I start hitchhiking to get out of Cincinnati? Will people even pick up hitchhikers with the gas prices this high? Ordinarily I wouldn't worry about these things, since the point of the trip to the Rainbow Gathering is for it to be freeform and unworried. But on the way back, I have a timeline that I have to adhere to, if I want to go to Crowduck. The main part of the Rainbow Gathering is from July 1–7. For Crowduck, I have to be in Kenora on the 7th, or Minnesota on the 6th, or something like that. That means that, even in a best case scenario, I'll have to leave the Gathering a few days early and start hitching for all I'm worth, then get picked up by someone headed to Crowduck, when I get to somewhere on that route. I'm optimistic, though, because hitchhiking is a big mode of transportation around the Gathering, and I think I'll be able to find someone there who'll be able to take me a good ways eastward. Also, by the time I get there, I'll know about how many days I need to allow to get back. So I think I can make it work. Tell me what you know about scheduling, though. And give me any tips you might think of.

The Rainbow Gathering is obviously quite an unprofitable endeavor. With the rest of the summer, I hope to make at least some money. The post office has been calling me, but I sincerely wish to never set foot in the post office sorting building again, whether it's the one in the middle of nowhere outside of town, or the one downtown, which I've been offered, apparently. What I'd really like to do is teach some English and do some proofreading and work on my fonts. Unfortunately, the only one I know for sure I can do is work on my fonts, and that's the one that has the least potential to be profitable. I've called and emailed two different language teaching schools only to find out that there's not really much call for me to teach English. And I have yet to hear back from Soft Skull, who I want to proofread for. (I'd proofread for anyone else too, but Soft Skull knows I can proofread well.) I'll call them, since email's been ineffective. If none of those things work out... well, what? The post office? I'm going to start looking for proofreading work on Craigslist and wherever... I don't know. This summer has the potential to be very aimless. I need to do some awesome things with it.

I have a few such things. Like, I want to become a master calligrapher, so I can write pretty letters, not just draw them laboriously by outlining them. And, start learning to play guitar, which is something I plan to keep on learning in my free time in Korea. And, learn a lot of wild edibles. I wish I were near a national forest or something for that last one, though. Cincinnati is pretty crappy as far as nature goes. Well, I guess I do have a book that I got as a gift about nature in the Cincinnati area. I'll consult that to figure out places to go that won't be disappointing.

Well, that's it for now. Now that I'm out of college, I ought to be able to update more often. Unless I succeed at having lots of awesome things to do.

On beating the machine

2011-04-16T01:42:00.007-04:00

A couple months ago, this strip came out on xkcd, a webcomic that I read:

(www.xkcd.com/862)

What really made me stop and pay attention wasn't the punch line, which is kind of inscrutable really, but the alt-text, which is a thing this guy does where some words pop up when you hover your mouse over the picture when you're reading it on the site. The alt-text, unusually long, goes like this: "After years of trying, I broke this habit in a day by decoupling the action and the neurological reward. I set up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected."

I don't know if I've talked about it much, but for a long time I've had the same exact problem that Luke here had. I became addicted to the internet—I'm convinced that that's the best way to explain what happened. Most nights, if I had a computer (which I usually did) and nothing in particular to do, I would stay up until about 3:00 reading things I didn't really have a compelling reason to read. Mainly it was webcomics and funny things. I enjoyed the stuff I was reading, but the problem with funny stuff on the internet is that even though you enjoy it, there's just so much funny stuff on the internet. Everyone knows the internet is first and foremost full of porn, but underneath that, there's another thriving layer of funny stuff. It's impossible to read and watch it all. But for a long time I tried my darnedest. It was really a problem. It cut into my sleep schedule, and it cut out my interactions with real people. I knew it was a problem, too, and I wrote about it in my journal night after night. Each night I would say something like: "Then I spent too much time on the internet and then went to sleep." At first this would be accompanied with, "No more of this. I will improve." Later on it became, "All right, that was ridiculous. No more internet for the rest of the week, outside essential stuff like emails." And then there were variations like, "I went way over the one hour I allotted myself for internet today. I'll take it out of tomorrow's allowance." But I always slipped back into the same old patterns.

Then that xkcd comic came out, with an alt-text that talked about a solution that sounded downright workable. I had no idea how to implement a 30-second delay like the one he talked about, but I found an add-on that I could install on my browser that does something similar. It's called StayFocusd. It only works on Chrome, but there are things like it for other browsers, like Firefox. The basic principle is that you give it a list of sites where you waste a lot of your time, and it allows you a certain amount of time per day to spend looking at those sites. There are all sorts of customizations you can do, depending on how much self-control you have and how high your standards are for yourself. You can allow yourself certain unproductive hours each day, when you're free to visit whatever sites you want, if you're not too concerned about that. Or on the other hand, you can set it so that to change any settings (like to give yourself more time, or to take some sites off the list), you first have to type a paragraph about procrastination, letter for letter, with no typos and no backspacing. I've tried it. It's pretty much impossible.

It's sort of a booster for self-control. I have it set to allow me 15 minutes a day. By now I've gotten pretty used to not going to all the sites I used to go to for screwing around. In fact, I feel like I may even have managed to get myself to lose the taste for them—although I haven't tried taking turning off the add-on yet. I might do that sometime in the future, but for now it's too useful, and my life is too stressful—I always want to blow off some steam by watching stupid YouTube videos or something. What I'm getting at, though is that I feel like I've finally succeeded at kicking my years-long internet addiction, and, well, it feels really good.

Speaking of a stressful life! The past couple weeks have been possibly the busiest ones I've ever had here. In the last nights, I've pulled an all-nighter, then slept for five hours, then slept for 3½ hours. I've also slept partway through two classes while napping off my sleepless nights. It's because my due dates for all of my classes all coalesced in these two weeks. On the all-nighter, I was writing up the results of my analysis of the data from my MAP. It took forever, but in the end, it was cool, because it confirmed my hypothesis, or at least one of them. On the five-hour night I had to write a methods section for an imaginary research proposal, like the MAP proposal I wrote, except that I'm not actually going to do this project. Last night was the 3½-hour night, which was when I was writing a literature review for my class about mapping stuff. All very time-consuming stuff. Before that was more, different, time-consuming stuff. I've been pretty much unable to breathe for two weeks. This weekend I can catch up on sleep, and then do things, things that I want to do.

I could write about how I interviewed with Flying Cloud today, or about how I sent off my documents to the government to get apostilles for them, which are basically super-notarizations, so the South Korean government will accept them, or about how I went to the bank because I left my checkbook at Ohio but instead of checks I got $2 bills and then went and bought money orders (but not with the $2 bills). But I'm tired, so I'll just give a rundown of how cool today was. I went and saw True Grit for free on campus, and it was excellent; then on my way back to my room there were people selling frybread from a window, and one of them was even a Native American (Tlingit, from southern Alaska—I mentioned Smoke Signals and we agreed it was good that I was finally getting an authentic Indian frybread experience); then there was a bunch of standup comedy and stuff. I'm feeling more content than I have in a while. But less eloquent, more rambly. So I'm going to quit writing before this gets any more incoherent. Someday, my blog entries will stop being boring and aimless. But that day is not today.

Heights

2011-04-03T03:18:00.003-04:00

Spring break is basically over. It's been nice. It wasn't long enough. There are still more buildings to climb, more paper to write, and above all more forms to fill out. Two weeks with no obligations and it seems I've still barely even made a dent in what I need to do. I did get a good amount of work done on my MAP, which is nice. But the "everything else" part of my life remains a problem.

Here are the good things. I got to climb a lot of stuff over break. For example, I celebrated my birthday by getting together with a mildly crazy friend of mine and climbing buildings around town. We nailed a pretty broad variety of them, including the high school, some anonymous buildings downtown, the town library, and a fancy church that doesn't look like it could possibly be climbed if you look at it from the usual angle. It was a night of stupendous views and inventive climbing. We added these four buildings to our already respectable tally of other buildings we'd climbed, which included three major ones and a few minor ones on campus, and two others downtown. Later on during break, we conquered another major campus building, and I have ideas for two more—possibly the last two, as the rest seem impossible without grappling hooks or really tall ladders or something.

I've mentioned climbing buildings before, but how about a little flavor of what it's like? Well, first off, the guy I climb with—I'll call him "6", for obscure reasons—is kind of a ninja. He's sneaky, he does lots of swordfighting, and whenever we climb, he wears all black. On my birthday expedition, we started out by going to the high school, and though it was a very good climb, I'm going to tell about the row of anonymous buildings that we conquered next, because I think it's a better story. So we came downtown around 11 at night, which was really a bit early for this sort of thing, but it didn't seem to matter. 6 had been casually scouting out possible climbs in this area lately, and this row of buildings was one he'd considered a possibility. The starting point was a concave corner in the alley in the back, where two buildings' corners didn't quite align and there was a small piece of metal sticking out of the wall. The flat roof we needed to grab was about nine feet up, probably. That meant it was too high to jump in a straight shot, but the wall was basically smooth, so we couldn't climb it well either. So we would need to count on the piece of metal in the wall—something that looked like it used to have a bolt of some sort screwed into it. But then even that was too small to get a good foothold on. "If we had a box," 6 said, "this would be much simpler."

"Or a pallet," I said, and pointed to one leaning against a wall a little ways away.

I brought it over and set it up like a rickety ladder. Standing partway up it allowed me just the height I needed to grab onto the roof. Once I had my hands on the roof I scrambled and muscled my way up until I was entirely on the roof.

"Well, how is it?" 6 asked.

"Pretty standard." It was sturdy enough to walk on, and covered in a black sort of rubbery, plasticky sheet that most flat roofs have. I stood out of the way a bit, but offered 6 a hand as he came up, in case he needed it. He's admitted that, despite being a ninja, he can't yet do a pull-up. But for a guy who can't do a pull-up, he sure does a pretty good job of pulling himself up. He managed this one without any trouble, and we stood and looked around.

We couldn't really tell what we were on top of, but that wasn't important. What was important was finding the summit. In this case, there were two ways to go higher: in either direction, roofs stair-stepped in height, each step a very easy clamber. We went to the west first. The highest roof was much the same as the low one, except with a white sheet instead, and a special feature: a wrought iron fence around the top, with a concrete ornament. At such a visible point, we made sure to keep stooped low so no one on the ground would see us, but really, there was no one, and anyhow nobody looks at the tops of buildings. We looked out at the town, afforded a better view by our height. We weren't at the highest point in town, so there were still some buildings in our way, but a lot of stuff around here is about equal in height, so nothing's going to offer a particularly commanding view. Whatever the case, we still felt pretty masterly. After a while we went to the other summit, which was just as good, except without the wrought iron. And then we came down. And that was that.

I think I wrote that mainly because I don't feel like thinking about all the other stuff I have to deal with very soon. I'm so entangled in so many webs. These are the sorts of things that drive me to want to be a primitive or a hobo.

First, the classes I'm in all involve long-term projects that are going to really start gearing up once classes start again. In one, I'm going to have to call about 50 random people from around here and survey them. In another, I'm going to have to put frog eggs in water that has varying concentrations of motor oil. In another, I have to basically write another MAP application, but for a project that's imaginary and that I'll never do. And the last is my MAP itself. All the due dates are coming up with some really alarming speed, the kind you might feel while cliff-diving. And then there's also Press, which has to send all its books to the printers within the next two weeks.

Then, there's the Korea stuff. It's ironic that I wanted to go to Korea because of the lack of bureaucracy. Theirs is just as bad as Japan's, it's just that it's not as easy to see in the beginning, because what you see are recruiters' sites, and those are all staffed by friendly people (sometimes)—who are there to help guide you through all the massive amounts of bureaucracy. The JET program is the kind that might reject you if your forms aren't in the right order in the envelope you send. The Korean programs seem to be like that too, but there are also more of them, with different standards, and none of the deadlines are public, and they can change their mind whenever they feel like it, and also my time for applying is becoming awfully slim. My next hurdle to overcome is getting two reference letters from a former employer and a professor, letters that, the internet tells me, will quite possibly never get read, but still must be printed on professional letterhead and signed in blue ink. (If it's black ink, they'll think it's a photocopy and maybe disqualify it.) I also have to figure out whether I'm applying through EPIK (English Program In Korea), or through GEPIK (Gyeonggi-do " " " " , where Gyeonggi-do is the province that encompasses a lot of the perimeter of Seoul and contains its satellite cities), or just independently. Meanwhile I'm in touch with two recruiters who both don't know about the other one yet, and I have to write a 500-word personal essay about why I want to teach on Korea and what's my teaching philosophy.

It's enough to make a man want to put all his stuff in a bindle and walk down to the railyard. But—I realized this the other day—because of my student loans, I can't do that, because if I don't pay those consistently, every one of the numerous institutions I now owe money to will begin making my life miserable. This is to say: I am too poor to be a hobo.

Kind of puts college education in perspective. In order to achieve even an absolutely free-of-cost life, I must now pack up my belongings and move to a strange country and eat kimchi every day, and even once that's done I'll still be only temporarily financially comfortable enough to be a hobo.

But I'll soldier on, and eventually, I'll live a free man. There's a light at the end of the tunnel—it's the Year of Adventure—but it's an awfully long tunnel, and it's hard to see the exit from here.

Taking a break

2011-03-19T23:21:00.003-04:00

For the first time in weeks, I've gone a day without making any serious effort to do anything academic. Not coincidentally, I'm feeling pretty content right now.

Not that I'm going to be able to lounge like this all through spring break. Mainly I'm going to be catching up to deal with how behind I am with my MAP. Taking a MAP and a seminar at the same time, I knew I was going to end up being behind about halfway through the semester, so I had planned from the beginning on staying at college for break to have a nice, relaxing time spent catching up and probably drinking a lot of tea and going outside. Tomorrow I'll start doing such things as work, but today has been my day for not doing much of anything. For example, the remaining dwellers of EcoHouse had a cuddle session where we put two couches together and lay there relaxing and talking and eating pancakes with powdered sugar on them. This is something that doesn't really happen when classes are in session. Everyone has to go to the library or something.

Besides work, there are other things I'll be doing in the coming couple of weeks. Finding a school in Korea to apply to, for instance. This is the way the Korea system works: Schools that need English teachers post a job posting somewhere or other. Recruiters—who are based in Korea and staffed by either former teachers or Koreans who maybe know something about the process, or maybe not—collect these job postings from wherever they are, and wait for English-speaking college students to write to them. Then they work with the college student to find the school he/she wants to apply to. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. I've only written to one recruiter so far (I'll explain in a moment why this isn't cause for alarm), one whose name I got from the guy I mentioned in the last post, B. I wrote to them because if I get a job through them, B. gets $100. But they seem pretty lackluster, in most respects. They sent me a list of about a hundred job postings, obviously not filtered in any way or annotated as to which ones I might like more, and they didn't respond to any of the questions I asked in my email. So I'm thinking I'll go with another recruiter. Sorry, B.

Another thing I'll be applying for is a camp that Willie told me about, called Flying Cloud. He went there when he was a kid, and still raves about the place today. It's apparently the awesomest camp in the country, or at least that's what I gather from everything I've read and been told about it. They teach kids primitive living and wilderness skills, mainly. There's no closed-toed-shoe rule, nor really any rule about most clothing. At the end of camp, the kids all get new names, but they're not allowed to say those names themselves, because they're descriptions of the kids' most awesome characteristics. Willie, and also another person who knows FC, Julia, tell me that I'm exactly the kind of person who should work there and that it's definitely what I should do this summer.

Originally I was planning to be in Korea in the summer, so I could come back after one year and it would be summer when I got back, and I'd be able to start my Year of Adventure on the high note of the Rainbow Gathering and stuff. But I had also been told that most programs start in August, so I figured I might have to adapt the plan. Now I know that there are openings popping up all the time, but FC sounds great enough that I should do that. Also, there's a chance that I wouldn't be able to start in Korea in the beginning of June anyhow, because of the FBI background check.

This thing is a problem. Not in the sense that it's hampering me, but in the sense that it just shouldn't be a thing that needs to happen. I finally applied for it a couple weeks ago, on a Friday. The first step is to get fingerprinted. So, go to a police department, any one will do, you'd think. But the one in town was charging $20 for a fingerprinting. They recommended I go to the next town over, where they were charging just $5. I jumped at that, and drove to the Jasper County Jail. It's several miles south of the town, and recently built, so that on Google Maps it still shows as a cornfield among many other cornfields. They've got it set up so that you don't see any inmates unless you're visiting them, so all I saw was the dead, clean geometry of the inside of the attendants' office. One of the attendants—both were women who seemed jovial but probably a little haunted underneath—told me that I needed an ORI number. They had no way for me to look it up online, so I had to drive to the library in town. There was nothing about an ORI number for the FBI, no matter where I looked, so I told the attendant this. She called the FBI and they told her they don't need an ORI number. Thanks for wasting my time. They fingerprinted me with a very expensive-looking machine the size of a podium. The prints they took didn't look so hot, which left me a little concerned, because I've heard the FBI rejects unclear prints sometimes. I don't know yet if they were good enough.

So once I got my fingerprint cards, I sent them with $18 and a form to the FBI's fingerprinting place. It's in Clarksburg, WV: go figure. Now I wait for about a month. Once I get it back, I have to get it apostilled, which is a fancier, more hot-shot version of notarized. It can only be done at a few places in the country, and they take a long time to turn the forms around too, apparently. Once it's apostilled, I send it to the South Korean government and they give me a visa, assuming they're okay with my criminal record, and they don't think my passport photo is too yellow. I've put the Post Office behind me in life, and once I put the process of applying for this visa behind me too, I hope I won't have to deal with the federal government's bureaucracy anymore. Although there's the chance that I'll work as a park ranger in a National Forest at some point, so I may be disappointed. Things like these—another is the BMV—are parts of a highly stratified, mechanized, blocken*, industrialized society that frustrate everyone. They frustrate me perhaps even more. I wish people would get irritated by the more important frustrations, like the way you can't get through even the most important environmental legislation because of all the businesses that don't like them. But I digress.

That application is one thing I did last month. I guess there were some other things. Mostly they were academics. This semester has been busier for me than I ever realized a semester could be. I'm having fun, but I'm also doing an awful lot of studying and not very much other interesting stuff. I went to an a cappella group's concert the other day, and all I could think was, "I wish I were in an a cappella group. I could have so much fun at this. And I'm way better than that guy who has the solo in 'Never There'." I'm going to FTP (Free The Planet), the campus environmental group, but I'm not contributing much because I don't have much time to give and I also don't feel invested because I won't be here to see the effects of most things. It's a shame. But I'm doing interesting things where I can.

For example, yesterday I went foraging for wild edibles with my friend Jordan, who graduated last year but decided to live in town for a few years. He's writing a guide about wild edibles in this area, and he borrowed my Samuel Thayer books and said they were even better than the guy he thought was the real top of the line, Steve Brill. We went to a restored prairie south of town and walked through it to see what was sprouting. It's still pretty early in the season, though, so there was precious little green, mostly the brown of the dead grass. Jordan spotted some tiny sprouts in a bare area under a bush, though. We bent down. They looked like parsnip sprouts, which we'd been expecting to find. We pulled out the guide books. Then they didn't look so much like parsnip sprouts. They looked a lot more like poison hemlock sprouts. So that was disappointing. But now we know that poison hemlock is the earliest sprouter here, and that we have to wait a little longer for cool things like parsnips and wild carrot to show themselves. We also phound some pheasant pheathers and some old corn that I might try to make hominy with. It was a nice way to get rid of a little stress at the beginning of a break.

Another thing I did was Imaginary Week in my journal. It was a much more complicated story than I've ever really done before. It started out with protests in DC that happened as a me-too reaction to the Mideast unrest. Then some agents protecting the White House made the mistake of shooting someone who was going to throw rocks at it. That made the protests really take on a new vigor, and she was an environmentalist, so it took on an environmental tone. Meanwhile I had been kicked out of the college because I didn't make a payment and didn't get their warnings because of my spam filter, so I decided I'd hitchhike to DC and join in the protest. A guy who gave me a ride told me his daughter had some friends who were really into the protest, so I met them, and we hung a banner from a government building. But then the last guy coming down from the building got arrested, and the banner got taken down, so we decided to get the crowd that was protesting at the White House to go somewhere where their energy could be more effective. This was the headquarters of what we saw as the do-nothing EPA, although if I were to write it again I'd probably go with the Chamber of Commerce or something. We ended up storming a press conference and telling the camera what was going to happen now that we were really speaking for the people. It was kind of an unrealistic plot, and my choice of venue was a little inexplicable, but it was fun to write.

And for my MAP, I got people to respond to my test-survey thing. I had kind of a small turnout, but decent, except that it was mostly college students. Hopefully I can get a few more responses from non-students. It's difficult to convince people to take the survey if they're not the type of people who are interested in language and words, which is a type of people that tends to be a lot more prevalent on the college campus. I need data. I guess I can make do with what I've got, but I'm going to be on the lookout for more people who'll do my study. ...Anyone you know? I'm looking mostly for adults who haven't gone to college. I figured out a way for people to do it on their own time.

That's about all in the way of interesting things, and I probably had to stretch the definition of "interesting" even for that. Hopefully the next time I write it won't have been a whole month. I'll probably be 22, though. I know I'm not allowed to feel old among a readership that's probably made of only people older than me, but I still do, a little. Anyhow, this fogey will write more another time.

*Yes, I made this word up. It's "made out of blocks", like "wooden" is "made out of wood".

Birthday

2011-03-15T00:43:00.003-04:00

Hi guys,

I don't have a lot of time to write right now, but I realized, when Dad called me to get my address to give to certain of my forebears, that people would probably like to know what I want for my birthday, and it's coming soon enough that I should write this now. I have better ideas now than I did at Christmas, but not too many.

1. Tea is still good. My friends Dan and Ben here are in agreement that looseleaf tea is vastly better than the kind you get in teabags. I think it also gets you more tea for your buck.

2. A pumice stone for my feet. I sit cross-legged a lot, so I get these weird calluses on the sides of feet where they rub on the ground or the chair. Then I absentmindedly pick at the calluses and usually cause them to look alarming enough that people say, "What happened to your feet?!" A pumice stone might solve that problem or at least lighten it a little.

3. Shoes. Yeah, yeah. But I lost mine, somehow. I haven't seen them since last Saturday, and I have no idea where they might have gone. I'm guessing I'll never see them again, though I'm still on the lookout. Anyhow, I figure this is a good time to find some shoes I like better. I want to try something with a soft sole. Like leather-sole moccasins—that would be cool. Maybe something with, like, a couple thicknesses in the sole, or a sole that I can replace once it wears through. Or there are a few more modern shoes out there with soles that are supposed to let you feel the ground, like the Vivo Barefoot, but I would guess those are more expensive. Whatever looks good. To the best of my knowledge, I'm a size 12.

Once spring break starts, I'll write about what happened this month. I just never find the time to blog anymore. I think after I graduate that will change.

Places

2011-02-15T03:12:00.003-05:00

So what's the deal with Korea? you might ask. When I last left the topic off, I was planning to come to college and talk with someone Korean about the idea of coming over to teach English. I suppose I still haven't talked to anyone Korean about it, but I have talked to a couple people who went to teach there. What I found out was that going to Korea isn't as unequivocally awesome in every way as I was led to believe by my initial research—but that doesn't mean it's terrible.

I guess any country would have a hard time living up to the rosy picture of Korea that I got from some of the recruiting websites. Their Korea is a place where you never even have to learn Korean, because there's always an English-speaker nearby; where you'll be participating in all the things Koreans have been doing over the several millennia of their history; where you'll come off of a light day of teaching pleasant, eager kids with plenty of time to go hike one of the country's many mountains. But now I've spoken with a guy—B.—who went there for two years, and he says it's a little different. For one thing, it's a country that can make you feel isolated pretty effectively. It's tough to make Korean friends without actually speaking Korean, so most people will end up having to hang around with other English teachers for their companionship. The problem with that is not only that you then become detached from the culture of the country, but also that the foreigners there are often not nearly as cool as the people from this college, in B.'s opinion. For example, instead of deeply interesting, weighty topics of conversation, they tend to talk about how Koreans look funny but the women are totally hot. Of course, that can't be true for all of the foreigners, but it's true that once I graduate, I'm going to have to get used to the fact that friendships aren't just amazingly easy to come by like they are here in college. That's a huge thing that I'm going to miss once I graduate. But I guess I'll have to deal with that whether I go to Korea or stay here. Unless I move to someplace that's totally full of hippies, like Eugene or Portland or an intentional community somewhere.

Another thing is that Korea, B. says, "is a monoculture." Everyone is the same, because that's the way their culture works. The nice part is that I won't be expected to live up to that sameness, because I'll already be weird by virtue of not being Korean, but I'd still like to have lots of interesting, diverse people to talk with and spend time with. Something else that seems to be a lot of foreigners' impression is that Korea has a surface layer of culture where everything is bars and hard work and the hustle and bustle of city life—and then there's no deeper layer. In New York, there were freegans and anarchists and people of every possible persuasion to talk to. In Korea, apparently, I can expect few people to be really strange, and that's a terrible loss, because strangeness is basically the same thing as interestingness.

But I was talking with Ethan the other day, and we concluded that there has to be some amount of counterculture in Korea, somewhere. B. confirmed this hunch, to an extent. And he told me some other advice that I needed to hear, which is this: if I'm thinking of going, I'm not going to get an idea of what it's like by reading stuff about it on a message board that's frequented by disgruntled English teachers who are annoyed about Korea, or even by some mythical unbiased message board or other source. I just have to go there, and make it my own. And that's something I'd been thinking would probably end up being true all through my process of considering Korea. If nothing else, my boredom there will give me lots of time to look for the best way to make some money once I get back to pay off my student loans, and to design my fonts, and to write a book: a year of seclusion. But I suspect it won't amount to that. I'm pretty good at languages, so hopefully I'll be able to make some Korean friends who are interesting people. And I'll aim to seek out whoever are the least "Damn, she's a hot Asian" foreigners to hang around with. And if I can muster the will, I'll teach English through the strategy of actually caring about it.

So how is it being back? I love it. I wish I had a few more years to look forward to here. Recently I've been coming to the conclusion that I definitely should have taken a gap year after I finished Secondary Compound. I didn't know at the time what would have been good things to do, but if I had known then what I know now, I would have gotten a deferment and gone WWOOFing and done some volunteering and hiked the Appalachian Trail and maybe even applied for something like AmeriCorps. When I graduated high school I had no idea who I was. I remember feeling like that, actually, although I never put it into so many words, because I wanted to feel like I was sure of myself. But I arrived in college having no idea what I wanted to major in. "English, maybe?" I would tell everyone. That's probably how I ended up in anthropology. If I had given it a year of thought, I might have thought of something that I really wanted to study. Recently I'm thinking that biology would have made me feel great. I'm finally taking my first lab science here, not counting calculus. It's intro to bio, and I'm enjoying it tremendously. But I guess all of that is water under the bridge, or maybe it's neither here nor there. It makes me think, though, that my Year of Adventure after I get back from Korea will probably be good for me in more ways than I now imagine. I'm becoming yet more determined to make it happen.

EcoHouse is all kinds of fun this year. For one thing, I'm the only guy in it, among eight girls. So I get to hear all the gossip that happens in groups of girls when guys are a minimal intrusion. I guess they consider me harmless. Another thing is that we all love this place, and we get together and bake things all the time.

My classes are kind of a random mishmash, although not as badly as they were before I managed to transfer into biology. My MAP is going well, if perhaps a little behind schedule. I'm working on the literature review now, and it's giving me a chance to learn lots of stuff about linguistics that I never learned because of the diffuseness of the linguistics program here. We never get a thorough grounding in the major components of linguistics: morphology/syntax, phonology, and semantics. I've just picked up a textbook on morphology and been reading the entire thing, thinking sometimes, "Ah, here's what I've been missing!" I'm nowhere near being able to write a grammar of an undocumented language, but I'm becoming much better at languages nonetheless. Another way I've learned stuff about languages was through the talks that resulted from the college's decision to hire a linguist next year. (Another reason I should've taken a gap year: I'll never be able to take a class with this linguist. But I couldn't have predicted that one, obviously.) The college brought in four candidates, and each one gave a talk on something they'd been studying, to show their teaching skills and such. I learned something at each one of them. I wish I knew everything about linguistics, but I guess for now I'll have to be satisfied with just a lot of things. Perhaps someday I'll go to grad school, but I can't do it straightaway, I just can't. Even were it not for the money matters, I want to go out and experience the world. Also, those four candidates for the linguistics professorship here? They were drawn from a pool of 150. If I got a graduate degree in linguistics I have no idea what I would do with it. I could teach linguistics, and that's about all I could see. It's true, I guess, that that would give me an opportunity to do some cool research. Doing this MAP has made me appreciate how gratifying it can actually be to do new research into something no one has studied before, and linguistics is still a really wide-open field, what with so many endangered languages needing to be described and, if possible, rejuvenated, and so much analysis that needs to be done of those languages and even of the languages we know tons of stuff about. Languages are essentially mysterious in a whole lot of ways. But, despite how awesome it could be to do research, I just don't believe I could really handle doing it as a career, tied to a professorship and a whole bunch of deadlines and guidelines and requirements. I need to live my life a little more freeform than that. I can still write things about language if I feel like it. Not being a professor and not having any graduate degree in linguistics that I'm aware of didn't stop Bill Bryson from writing two or three books on language. (That said, those books contained lots of mistakes, but still.) It's just that instead of filling my otherwise inactive time with grading papers, I'll be, say, fishing, or gathering a bushel of wild parsnips. That's how things look to me from here. But after a year in Korea and a year on the road, who really knows?

All right. For those of you who are wondering: the building-free diet is going great. I've only bought food from a building twice: once at Bob's I bought a few M&Ms on my ice cream for a quarter so I could enter a raffle that I never won, and the other time, I had to cook EcoHouse's weekly house meal and I was too busy that week to dig up enough dumpster stuff to cook the meal for them, so I bought some chickpeas from the store to make falafel (also bought pitas). But the onions and peppers that I stir-fried for eating with the falafels—straight out of the trash. Here are some of the things I've found: Six frozen pizzas; three sacks of potatoes; innumerable bags of lettuce or other green leafy salady things; lots of bread; onions; green peppers; artichokes (they went bad before I figured out how to cook them); broccoli; pastries; prepared sandwiches and wraps; pork chops. (Grandma: send me your recipe for those pork chops with cream of mushroom soup. I know where a free can of it is, so I've got to make those.) I've also been eating at Vegan Co-op, which is a traveling meal cooked by different people in a different house each night, the one consistent thing being that it's always vegan. (But there are very few actual vegans who come. Most are vegetarian or meat-eating.) I'm even cooking one night a week for it, though I have yet to actually do that, because of various complications.

It's getting really late, so the last thing I'm going to write about is the job that I may be doing for some money on the side: online eikaiwa. That's Japanese: ei = English; kai = together/meeting; wa = talking. So I'll be tutoring Japanese people who are learning English, by Skype. It's a pretty cool thing that I heard about from a professor. I don't know much yet about what it'll be like and whether I'll be able to get an appreciable number of hours from it, but I do know that it pays $12 an hour, which is not shabby at all. So I guess (whenever the Japanese person can't think of how to say something in English) I'll have the opportunity to hone the Japanese skills that I've let rust for a little over a year now.

I could just keep on writing forever, but it's getting pretty tired in here.

The Building-Free Diet

2011-01-29T03:35:00.003-05:00

So here's something I came up with, more or less on the spur of the moment a few days ago. I'm going to go this whole semester without buying any food from buildings.

The obvious question is: Why? Well, toward the end of break I read three rather good books: The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, both by Michael Pollan, and—in the crunched hours before bedtime on the eve of my departure for Iowa—No Impact Man by Colin Beavan. They got me thinking, as I hadn't before, about how food is so tightly tied with the environment.

For one thing, it's the only daily interaction many of us have every day with organisms that aren't humans—not counting all the invisible ones that live in our bodies and on our skin. The food we get came from the ground, or from a living animal. And I really like the fact of that connection. But buildings obscure the whole chain that leads back to the sun's energy. When you ask most people where their food came from, they're apt to respond, "From the store." If I cut out the store, the connections will start being more visible for me. And that'll make me feel more like a part of the environment. Which is great for me, sure, since I'm all environmental and such. It's important in a far broader sense too, though: I believe that people feeling like they're not part of the environment is one of the big things that makes possible so much of the absolute, horrifying destruction of the environment that we see around us. Consciously or unconsciously, people seem to have the idea that humans are categorically different from all the other life on the planet, presumably by dint solely of our ability to say words and build cities and burn things for fuel. But humans are animals just like any other; on the whole, we're more destructive than any other species, sure, but we still have to get our food from the sun and soil (whether or not concentrated first in the body of another animal), and we still breathe the air. If people went about their lives with this awareness, I think it'd lead to more humility and, if someone did go about destroying nature, there would be considerably more outrage, presumably enough to get the destruction to stop.

And another reason I'm not buying food from buildings is that I'm pretty sure it's just not necessary. I've covered dumpster diving in a previous post, and lately I've found that New York is by no means the exception in the fertility of its trash. (Though it does have a leg up on most places in the trash's accessibility—it's all in bags right out on the sidewalk.) So just gleaning dumpster trash alone is a way to cut a meaningful amount off my food spending bill. Then there are the other sources of food that I'm planning on using. When spring starts rolling around, I'll be using lots of wild plants, which are all free. I've already earned a large amount of deer meat by helping a friend carve up a deer that a professor gave him (apparently because the professor had a surplus). This is the same friend I butchered a rabbit with last year. The deer is a bit more substantial. Another free source of food is the language tables in the dining hall, which will grant me access to the dining hall at the price of conversation in a foreign tongue. I ought to practice my Spanish (Russian, Japanese) anyhow. A few sources cost money, which is a bummer I suppose, but until we get into a barter economy I'm okay with shelling out a few sheqels to these causes. One is the local foods buying co-op here, which is made up of students who band together and buy foods in large quantities from local farmers to make it economical, then dole it out to whoever was in. There's a grain farm nearby that will keep me set for wheat and some other stuff, and there are vegetables that I'll get. A few butter pats snuck out of the dining hall and I've already got everything I need for venison pasties. There will also, possibly, be the farmers' market at some point in the future, though when I tried just now to find the date when it opens, I found an answer of May 20, three days before I graduate and far too late to do me any good. There's also the Korean woman who works in the laundromat and sells homemade kimchi. Though she works in a building, this is really buying from a person, not a building. She's not like the cashier at the grocery store. She makes the stuff and jars it herself. I haven't met her yet, though, only heard about her—and I still haven't tried kimchi, though there may be a lot of it in my future.

A few of these food sources, like the language tables, are peculiar to being in college, but most of it is stuff that everyone could adopt, and if they did, before long we'd be a nation where everyone could see the other end of their food chain and small farmers started taking over the land being despoiled and sent to sea by the agricultural megacorporations (Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Syngenta, and so on).

So how's it going so far? Well, I haven't bought any food yet this year. Mostly this has worked for me because I've been on the weekday-lunches meal plan, and it's easy to steal enough stuff from the dining hall to make dinner. But today was the last day to cancel my meal plan, so I did, and now I won't have that easy option to fall (fail) back to. Fortunately, I've found that dumpster diving here is rather good. A couple nights ago I went to take a survey of the town's dumpsters. It was a bit of a slow night, but I found a taco salad behind a pizza place, and then I hit a mother lode outside the grocery store. Tubs of chunked cantaloupe, heads of green and red leaf lettuce, bags of salad mix, broccoli, apples, oranges, peppers, tomatoes. Too much for just me! I got back to the house and put most of it on the communal fridge shelf. This is the cool part: the people here at EcoHouse are completely on board with dumpster diving! Without my coaxing, they've voluntarily eaten of the stuff that I got, and told me that it's awesome that I got it, and that it's completely unspoiled and they agree with me that it's absurd to waste it. In fact, we've even decided that once I've got a better handle on what's productive here (and once the weather warms up enough that people saner than me can go outside at night), we should have a big dumpster-diving night where I show everyone what it's like and give them the tricks of the trade. It makes me feel good that one of the weird things I like to do is getting such a warm embrace.

I was going to write a longer post that would cover what I think about being back and the shocking new amount of debt this college has caused the family and my latest findings on the possibility of going to Korea. But it's late and I need to pick up a friend from Iowa City tomorrow, so instead I'm going to go to bed and leave those for my next entry, which, I hope, should be a little more timely than this one. Since I was originally planning to be only a third done by this point, I don't have a good ending for this blog post, just this lame one.

Nathanael Do Byself

2011-01-07T15:22:00.006-05:00

I like making stuff from scratch. A lot of the time we think of stuff as coming from the store, and the store is as much as we need to know. But I like to think about how the stuff is made, and then make it myself. So here are three things:

#1: A hat. When Grandma & Grandpa went to Russia, they brought me back one of those Russian hats with the ear flaps. I used to think it was called a shapka, but I think that's actually just the Russian word for "hat", and the word Russians use for it is ushanka. (The ush part means "ear".) At some point, I lost it at college. I couldn't find it anywhere, and I missed it, especially when winter started looming and I was expecting to go on a cross-country bike trip in January. I could've asked for one for Christmas, but I decided I'd rather make one on my own. I didn't have any fur, but luckily, when I was contemplating making this hat, I was around Aunt Tami (this was Thanksgiving), and she happened to have a bunch of extra fur scraps lying around. As far as I've gathered, the story is that she went to Alaska and she found someplace that makes fur garments, and convinced them to give her a bag full of little bits and pieces. After Thanksgiving, she mailed them to me, and I got to work.

First I looked at Micah's hat and determined how it had been put together, and then I drew up patterns for each of the pieces I would need to put my own together. They were surprisingly big. And the fur I'd been sent was in surprisingly small pieces. So I spent a long time—several evenings' worth of work—just putting the little pieces together into the shape of the big pieces. I stitched it all by hand, figuring that a sewing machine would probably wreck all these little fur pieces. Then I had the big pieces done, and I stitched those together, and finally I had a hat.

More or less. It's still way too big, so I'm going to need to take it apart a little and sew some parallel stitches in a little ways from the original ones. Then maybe I'll be able to wear it and see at the same time. That will make the hat a little more practical. And once I've got it smaller, it might not look like I killed an entire forest's worth of cute woodland creatures to get the fur.

But damn me if it's not the warmest hat on the face of the planet.

#2: A stamp. A couple weeks ago it struck me that it'd be pretty cool to have an ex libris (Latin for "from the books [of]") stamp with my name on it, so I could stamp my many books that I have. Ex libris stamps (or woodblocks or glue-in inserts) have a long but not widely known history. People have been marking their books with them for hundreds of years.

I couldn't have bought this particular rubber stamp at a store, but I expect there's some company out there that you can send designs to and then they'll machine it into a stamp for you and send it to you. That sounded like rather a hassle to me, but I wanted to make this stamp, so I got the supplies and got to work. All I really needed was a slab of rubber (from the craft store), an X-Acto knife, and some tissue paper to draw the design on. First I drew out the design. It was nothing all that elaborate, because I hadn't really thought of any elaborate drawing. Just a couple trees and a big flourish and the words. Maybe I'll make another one sometime and have a bigger image full of lots of symbolism and fancy artwork. But for now this one is more than good enough for me.

I glued the design upside-down to my piece of rubber, and then set about carving it out. I hadn't read anything about how to do it, but it seemed pretty straightforward, and I'd done one simple practice stamp to get the hang of it. It took a long time of carving—I'd say at least three hours, though I didn't really time it—but I came out in the end with this:

Here's what my practice stamp looks like when it's stamped on paper. Wait a moment and there'll be a picture of the ex libris. The stamping job is a bit untidy because I didn't have an inkpad, so I had to use Chinese calligraphy ink on a few thicknesses of paper towel.

#3: A journal. I'm almost out of room in my current journal. When I got it a year ago, I was looking for a change of pace from the ones I'd been using since 2003. They were made by Miquel Rius, 600 pages long, bound in leatherish foam rubber. All pretty much perfect, except for one thing: they only come with one kind of pages—gridded. I wanted a journal with blank pages, so I could do everything freeform, write at whatever size I wanted to. But just about every company that makes journals expects you're just too incompetent to write in a straight line on your own, so it's really hard to find journals that have no lines. There are unlined blank books, but they're mostly geared toward artists, so they tend to have thicker paper, which means a lot fewer sheets per book. And a lot of them are hardcover. Or spiral-bound—I can't use a spiral-bound journal; it's not permanent enough for me when you can easily rip out a page and no one can tell. I looked through all sorts of stores last year when I was on this quest, but I couldn't find any blank books with more than 300 pages, and most of them were more like 200 (or 192, which is a multiple of 32, convenient for bookbinders). I ended up buying the only 300-page one I found, a crappy little green one bound in cardstock paper (instead of foam rubber) and bearing an unattractive little "Flexi-Sketch" logo on the spine. I've dealt with it, but when I noticed I was down to 30 pages left, I started going on a search for a better one. What I really wanted was a Miquel Rius with no grid. But such a thing doesn't exist; I couldn't find any evidence of it anywhere on the internet. There was nothing else good that I could find, either, from any company. I was going to disheartenedly buy a gridded Miquel Rius, or maybe an expensive-as-hell Moleskine with just 192 pages, but then I realized with a jolt that I could bind my own journal.

As soon as I had the idea, there was no stopping it. I found some instructions online by a guy named Michael Shannon, here, and they showed what I would need. I went out and found the right kind of paper, cream-colored, legal size. I got some foam rubber from the Sunshine Foam Rubber Company. I had biked by this place in October and been tremendously amused by its name, but I never imagined I would actually patronize it. (Actually, I still kind of didn't. They had some unsellable scrap and the woman at the counter told me to just take it.) For the endpapers, I was going to find a couple sheets of fancy thicker paper, but at the paper store, they didn't have anything of the right size available by the sheet, only by the ream. So I was looking around for ideas in the store, and I saw some paper that was packaged inside some industrial-type brown paper, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could use a grocery bag! I had thread and needle already, and I got some glue at the craft store. I even made a little book press out of some wood Dad had lying around and some carriage bolts from the hardware store.

Regrettably, I didn't take any pictures while I was making it, but you can read through the instructions on the link I posted, and imagine me doing them. I did the endpapers a little differently. Michael Shannon says to put glue all over the face of your topmost and bottommost normal pages, and then glue the endpaper completely to their surfaces. I looked at a bunch of books I had, and none of them did that. Instead, the binders had put a little line of glue along the spine edge of the top and bottom pages, and then just glued the endpaper along the edge, and that way the beginning and ending pages of the book stayed viable. I didn't have a guillotine or anything for making the edges neat, so I used Dad's table saw. I could have found a printer somewhere and asked to use their edge trimmer, and it would've looked a lot nicer, but the table saw was right there in the garage.

Here's what it looks like.

Front grocery bag endpaper, with my ex libris stamp on it!
Inside.
Back endpaper.
What the edges look like. Pretty ragged, really. But when Micah saw them, he said, "Whoa, how'd you do that?" He thought it looked really cool.
I love this, because I can completely customize the journals to my journal-writing wants and needs. For example, this one has a nice cream-colored paper that the Miquel Rius ones don't, and it's beautiful. Also, it has the right number of pages, which, in this case, is 500. I got this number by looking ahead and noting that my life will probably have a good dividing point in sixteen or seventeen months, assuming I go to Korea, which is still the plan. (There'll be an even bigger dividing point in about four months, but that's too soon.) And that's about 500 days. By the way, on the topic of Korea, I haven't gotten in touch with the Teach ESL Korea people yet, because I decided I'm first going to talk to a Korean about whether they think it's a good idea to go there, and what are the chances of war, and whether they think it'll be a rewarding experience. If the answer comes out no, I'll have to figure out a new plan. It might involve teaching English in some other country. I think I've read that there are lots of countries that like to bring in English-speakers to help them teach English, especially in Asia, so hopefully I'll find something in that regard if Korea's not a good option.

All this about making stuff also serves as a rebuttal to those (ekhhmDANugh-ugh-ugh) who think I'll get nothing done if I try doing a year of traveling and adventure. I'm just sayin': I get stuff done. Even if I'm currently tied down to this house and the weather around here doesn't really lend itself to long bike trips and there are TVs on all the time trying to distract me, I still put my time to good use doing cool stuff that's fun and rewarding. If I take a year to go out and experience the country after college, I humbly believe that I'm the kind of person who won't end up sitting in front of the TV and complaining about how I can't do anything. If I want to do something, and it's possible for me to do it, I go and do it. It's just that my Semester of Adventure turned out to be impossible as I had imagined it. You're right, I should've reimagined sooner, but I was in denial of its impossibility for a long time. I'll keep that lesson in 2012, but hopefully I won't have to use it, because there won't be much stopping me from doing anything that year. No looming school projects, nowhere I need to be in a few months that will keep me in one place waiting for that time. I may take the step of moving my belongings into a self-storage place, in whatever place I think I might end up after the year of exploration is over. Time will tell.

Why Your Package Was Late and Damaged

2010-12-30T01:50:00.004-05:00

A lot of different stuff has happened, and I've failed to blog about it. The main reason for this is that I got a job. It's a temporary job, but a job nonetheless, and it has made me money, as jobs do. Well, let's talk about that. The job is at the USPS's Cincinnati Network Distribution Center, formerly known as the Bulk Mail Center. There are I think sixteen of these things around the country: big warehouses where very large numbers of packages and letters get sorted and sent to the right place most of the time. There are others in Des Moines, Pittsburgh, and Seattle: kind of random locations, only important for being in the right place, not for being crucial American cities. I got into it thanks to Grandpa, who mentioned he'd done some work for the post office when he was about my age. I didn't know if there was a possibility of such an opportunity for me in the here and now, but I had been thinking of taking on a temporary job, and this one sounded not too bad. I didn't know until I went in for the interview what I'd be doing, and I didn't really get it until I started working the first day. I'm not delivering letters, as I thought I might be; that goes to people with far more training and career prospects than my lowly self. Instead, I'm hanging out in the warehouse on the night shift, 12:30 to 9:00 (with an unpaid half-hour for lunch, 6:30–7:00), moving around boxes and carts that are full of boxes. There are a few different variations on this. Sometimes I move boxes out of carts into bigger boxes, sorting them by the first three digits of their ZIP code. (The three-digit beginning of each ZIP code corresponds to a regional sorting building, I think, or at least the situation is something like that.) Sometimes I move boxes out of carts onto a conveyor belt, which takes the boxes to a machine that can read barcodes, those square barcode things, printed information, and even (impressively) handwriting, and uses this to sort packages very quickly into very big boxes full of mail all going to the same ZIP code. The boxes that are first to fall into each empty box fall about seven feet into the empty box, and then probably at least a hundred other boxes fall on top of them before the big box gets dispatched. Keep this in mind the next time you're deciding how thoroughly to package something you're sending through the mail, or when you pick up a package from your porch and it's been crushed. Since working for the Post Office, my new guideline for packaging things is, "Pack your box as though it were going to be thrown off a building and then have a dictionary thrown on it from that height." Sometimes I move carts full of boxes off of trucks, and then stage them in the appropriate area of the loading dock until someone else puts them onto another truck, or sorts them using the conveyor belt. That's a word I've newly learned from this job: "to stage" means to put something in a place for a little while. More vocabulary: apparently "destinate" is the opposite of "originate". There are two kinds of carts: the little APCs, All-Purpose Containers; and Over-the-Roads, which are about twice as big. That's a flavor.

The NDC is full of people who look to be at the bottom of their barrel. There are people who've been there for forty, fifty years, longer than the building has existed; they used to work downtown. Ted, who's only been there six years or so, told me there used to be an old-timer who had worked there since the days when they would sort mail into bags and then take it on a train and leave it on hooks by the track in each city. Some people aren't ruined yet. Ted and Martha have witty repartee and play lots of rummy during the fifteen-minute breaks. Then there are the other seasonal workers like me. Jim used to work for a Ford plant until it closed down; now he's working here, but he doesn't mind it too much. Zac is the son of a guy who works there, and is also the lead singer of a Christian deathcore metal band. He has one-inch gauged ear piercings, and seems to have an interesting rest of his life to keep him going. Aletha knows this is a temporary thing, and looks forward to devoting full attention to the numerous other things she's doing: college night classes; her own barbershop; a vegetable farm; hunting; mothering. I'm wiped out after a day at the NDC, and can't do much outside of the house, just sleep. But she finds time to go to college, be a mom, and cut hair, and sometimes sleep a little. I don't know how she does it. She seems to have a superhuman work ethic. She says if she stops working, she's out cold and doesn't want to wake up, and that's why she keeps looking for somthing to do even when there doesn't seem to be any, like if the conveyor belt stops.

This is where I've been spending eight hours a night, or ten or twelve just before Christmas when they had us all do overtime. When I get home, I sleep, then I wake up and maybe do something interesting, or maybe read a book, or maybe just do stuff on the internet. I've been too exhausted most days to do the really fun stuff, like building a snow sculpture. Micah and I were going to build a ziggurat in the front yard, but we had to stop when it was just a few big balls of snow. We plan to come back to it and finish it, but for now, it's just a pile of stuff in the front yard. Three of the balls form a rudimentary, faceless snowman, but it's still nothing interesting. Since the job started, I've gone dumpster-diving with Micah only scarcely. Dumsptering is something Micah really loves. He's gotten totally into it. Even at an unpromising dumpster, he'll jump right in and dig around until he finds something—preposterous amounts of candy, or shampoo, or electronics. He's made is room a storehouse of dumpstered goods. He has half a Ping-Pong table nearly covered with cans of tea and energy drinks, and drawers full of candy. He tells me whenever we go dumpstering that it's basically the funnest thing he does, and he's going to keep doing it the rest of his life. But I've only gone once or twice since I started working at the NDC, because I have to leave at 12:05, which is too early to do real dumpstering, so I can only do it on my days off, and even those have a tendency to get rescinded. I'm basically selling all of my life-force to the Post Office, and I've been unable to have the kind of interesting life I want lately because I just don't have the time or energy. Work is eating my life and destroying my soul. But I'm getting paid, and you can't argue with money, right? Can't you?

If giving away my entire life to the government or a company is what's entailed in work, I have no interest in it. Of course, there exist much better jobs than the one at the NDC. But if I'm working for a company, chances are I'll be spending the majority of my time doing something I'd rather not be doing, for decades. Decades! My only reprieves will be weekends and vacations. Those are the times I'll have for going outside and enjoying the wilderness and foraging and hunting and exploring, and, less selfishly, for spending with my family, raising kids, taking them to do something they'll have fun doing. I'll have to try to concentrate the part of my life that matters—the part that I'll lie on my deathbed wishing I'd done more of—into the evenings, the Saturdays and Sundays, and the two weeks or so afforded me by whatever overlords I choose.

But that's the way things go. People go to work, because they need money to pay the bills. That's life. Better accept it and find the job that will make you the least miserable.

People go to work, because they need money to pay the bills. What about the bills? The bills finance the American Dream. A nice car, a big house, a good-looking lawn, a wife to argue with daily like the sitcom characters all do, a big TV to come home to and stare at until you fall asleep so you can avoid thinking about what could be different. I have no interest in the American Dream. I want a house with just enough room to sleep and cook in. "What is a house but a sedes, a seat?" Outside, a garden, and what good a riding lawnmower there? My thoughts about TV aren't secret, and as for the wife, family should be what makes life great, not something that's tolerated. "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." In giving up all the trappings of the storied good life of the American Dream, I'll have fewer bills to pay. If there were no such thing as ownership of property, my expenses would be limited to seeds and whatever foods my neighbors grew that I didn't grow. But until industrial civilization finally gasps and collapses, I'll need to make do with minimalism, craftiness, and caginess. Of course, living below one's means isn't a new invention, and I'm not the discoverer. It does seem that when people do it these days, it's often to atone for a previous life of living recklessly far above their means, but that's not always true. But what a lot of people don't consider is that if you live below your means and get really good at it, you don't, by any means, need to have such high means. A little bit of money that most people would describe as earned "on the side" should be plenty enough for the wise person. Why sell away more of your life than you have to? Life is for the living.

But then that leaves you in a troubling position in our society. Because most people accept nine to five to sixty-five as a foregone conclusion—even though nothing like it had ever been seen on the face of the Earth until the 1900s—anyone who doesn't submit to this lifestyle is shiftless, a bum, not making an Honest Living. The Protestant Work Ethic assimilates everyone around it, extracting the highest conceivable cost—their lives. Not so long ago, America was full of farmers who spent their days outside, doing hard work, it's true, but doing it with their families, and having a sheaf of wheat or a bushel of corn to show for it at the end of the season. Longer ago, what we now call America was full of the people we stole it from, and they were all foraging and hunting and yes, even farming—the Mexicans invented corn nine thousand years ago—and they did it with their families and they had plenty of time left over for dances and powwows and storytelling. This continent, before it was platted and sliced into countries, states, and townships, grew its own greenery and provided everything its inhabitants needed. (The same goes for the rest of the continents, but I know more about this one.) And it can still give us what we need; we just don't look for it anymore, because we decided that it's a better strategy to take what we need forcibly instead. And anyone who tries it a different way finds a hard road to stay on, and a lonely one. That's why I still don't know what relationship I'll have with work in the future. All I can say for sure right now is that I'm not going to go about it unthinkingly, like a lot of people do, like the wrecked souls in the NDC have been doing for impossible, irreplaceable amounts of their lives.

You may recall that, at last writing, I was planning to ride from Chicago to Georgia with my friend Ethan. Ethan was spearheading that plan, and let me know from the beginning that it hinged on whether he was going to have a job lined up for him after graduation, because he was doing an early graduation, finishing college in the winter. A couple weeks before it was time to go, he called me to let me know he was canceling it. As it happened, it wasn't so much because of job worries, though those were a contributing factor, as it was because his family was worried about his sanity and safety if he went on a three-week-long bike ride in the grip of winter. He and I were both pretty confident we could conquer all the problems that would crop up, but his family got about as worried as mine did when I was planning to go trainhopping, and he decided not to worry them. It's understandable, but he knew I'd be disappointed, and I told him I couldn't pretend I wasn't. This means that, of my Semester of Adventure, about seven days of a potential 145 were actually spent adventuring. Ten if you count the hunting. All of it due to circumstances I couldn't control. As we've seen, when I finally got the opportunity to adventure, I hit the road pretty hard, and kept going despite the cold and the obstacles thrown at me (broken tire pump, occasionally terrible directions). But then I kept having to do other stuff—usually that damn MAP application, which I've finally been able to forget about for a while (but not entirely, because I still have to do a fair amount of work on it before I get back to school so I can hit the ground running and immediately start giving everyone surveys).

Some of the other stuff I did was a little interesting. For example, I made a hat. It's one of those Russian ones with the ear flaps, an ushanka, because I lost mine somewhere in Grinnell last year (to my eternal shame). I made it out of real animal fur, supplied by Aunt Tami. She got it when she went to Alaska. There was some sort of place that made stuff out of furs, and she persuaded them to give her their odds and ends, which I had to stitch into big enough pieces to make a hat. I ended up being too liberal with the seams and causing the hat to be enormous, but I'll fix it soon enough, once I'm done at the NDC and I have a little time on my hands. I could have done some of it today, but I'm sick and I needed the whole day to sleep. Once I'm done with this blog I'll sleep a lot more. Sleep is great medicine.

But all in all, my wanderlust hasn't been even close to quenched. Today, while I was lying in bed trying but failing to sleep, I came up with my new big plan. First, I'll go to Korea, presuming still that it's not at war and not looking too dangerously like a powderkeg. That's a year. That year will feature something that looks suspiciously like a job with a forty-hour workweek, but I'll be teaching English, which is something I've always wanted to do, so hopefully it won't feel like grinding myself into oblivion. I've heard that a fair amount of the eight hours per day is spent with nothing in particular to do, so I suspect I'll get a lot of books read, and if I come up with the right idea, perhaps I'll even write one. This part of the plan is nothing new. The new part comes afterward.

I've known for a while that I want to spend a long time getting much better acquainted with the outdoors. I was born and raised in suburbs, and I've spent a little time in the wilderness, but for all my naturalism, the forests and the deserts are still almost a foreign land to me. I only know a few plants, I don't have a good sense for day-to-day changes, and I've never really lived off the land—its water, plants, and game. These are all things that I want to do, and I need to learn them by experience. So I'm going to spend a year or so being nomadic. After I get back from Korea I'll have about $10,000 saved up, which will go mainly toward defraying college bills that pile up while I'm out. I say a year or so because if I go to Korea right after I graduate, I'll be back at the beginning of the next summer, and after a year it'll be the beginning of summer again, and I suspect I'll find that I don't want to stop traveling just before summer gets into swing. And I say the money will mainly go to paying for college because this year will be an exercise in low-cost living. I'll buy food I suppose, when I can't find any in the dumpsters. And I'll keep a few bucks on hand to give to people who give me rides. But I won't pay for places to sleep. To me that's ridiculous. Paying to sleep? Instead I'll camp out wherever I am, maybe stay on top of buildings, or make use of Couchsurfing, a network of people who offer their couches to travelers in exchange for chores or good conversation. In the winter I'll go south, maybe help build houses in Galveston or New Orleans; for that I might even get paid and sheltered for the season. And besides food and shelter, what else do I need? The outdoors, and people, that's all. I need to get down to the essentials.

I don't have many specific destinations set up, but they'll present themselves to me. A lot happens in a year, and I want to see all of it happen. I do know of a few things I want to do. I want to go to the Rainbow Gathering, maybe twice. It's an annual gathering, always on National Forest Service land from July 1 to 7, where tens of thousands of hippies get together and spend a week hanging out and teaching each other what they know about how to be even better hippies. This has been going on since 1972. I've never been to one, but from what I've read, it looks like one of the most beautiful things ever. No leadership, no official anything, no money exchanged, just a spontaneous gathering of people who want to love each other and the Earth. Another thing I think I'll probably do is the house-building thing; I'd like to know how to build a house, and I might as well help out hurricane victims and learn at the same time. I'll also probably do some in-country WWOOFing, for several weeks I imagine, and maybe at an array of different farms, because I'm lately very interested in gardening and farming. What else? A wild food gathering somewhere in there. Maybe a visit to Grinnell, to see whoever's still there that I know, including all my GOOP kids. I could go to the Annual Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa, in August. And of course I'll spend a lot of time on my own, out in the woods, or out in the desert, or wherever, getting to know the land. On my own, or with a friend. I'm sure I'll meet someone along the line, perhaps at the Rainbow Gathering, perhaps even in Korea—lots of Americans go there, and they all want to speak English to someone, so they get to know each other. So much to do. Trying to satisfy my urge to do it all during a month-long train trip this fall, I now realize, would never have done it; I need the full year, and maybe more. And this time I won't have a MAP interfering with me. Or anything else, for that matter. This is the year I need.