Boryeong Mud Festival
On the beach

where we slept
there were eight of us in this room

yes, i did catch a cold
the rain was so bad they wouldn't let us in the ocean, there was little mud, and everyone was walking around in ponchos

the lovely hee il
my gorgeous language exchange partner and amazing friend.  she said it was like she went to America for the weekend.

Off to Jeju-do!
Emily and I at Gimpo airport Saturday morning

View from our Jeju hotel
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most amazing Korean-Chinese food
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kkakdugi
Emily and her favorite kind of kimchi!

the hotel we Weren't staying at
a back entrance to the beach on the south side of the island, behind the Hyatt Hotel.


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the waves had to be five or six feet


nobody likes to get their pants wet


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I am now fascinated with beaches, and soft sand, sea foam and the force of the undercurrent.

Emily and her Book!
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We traded shades so that she could get the most sun :) How d'ya like me now?


the boys who entertained us by throwing one another into the ocean


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Pineapple on a Stick
After this delightful experience, we've decided to start a business in the manner of the good Korean ajumas and set up a


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the Love Park tour guide
this way to more penises and erotic statues

turn crank gently
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uuh
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oh my!
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they'd like us to think so
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the Indian version
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the American version
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the point of the statues was obviously to pose for pictures.

legs in a fountain
I think this one my mother will appreciate.


All the Koreans were watching me. Just act natural...


love the lines in this statue


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Sunday morning
4 am, we have arrived at Sunrise Peak (seongsan ilchulbong), but are expected to wait for a mysterious someone to "turn


this is the bug that was waiting with us.

Sunrise on Seongsan Ilchulbong
And just as the sun would have come up, in rolled the fog.


fog is wet.


a whole group of college kids had already taken their picture with the fog and left by this point.

we wanted to see if the sun would come out later...
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Eomneundae (but it wasn't there)
so our friendly fog-watching friends took our picture with the illusive sun.

what we could see of the volcanic crater
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Emily the self-portrait champ
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nope, no sun here either
should've heard the birds though!


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Man with Watermelon
On the way back down, we passed a man in a suit who was carrying a watermelon. "Good morning!" he greeted us with a lar


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can you see the town?
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see the bird?
That tiny thing, maybe three inches big, had an incredible and incongruous warble.

coast around Seongsan Ilchulbong
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straw hats
All around the island, we saw boys on bikes with these hats around their necks or on their heads. Is it an island thing

Mt. Halla
on the way to see the lava tubes. see the tiny picture on the street sign, as I wasn't able to take pictures within the

Seongsan Ilchulbong (Sunrise Peak)
As it might have been in the sunlight.

farms and Mt. Halla
the farmland was all divided into sections with little walls. the orange groves sprouted on every corner, complete with

Maze!
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Walking Maze and...map?
I think their heads were blocking some of the passages.

Miro
I like that the Korean word for "maze" sounds like the Spanish word for "look." In any case, I was hopelessly lost, and


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Seaside Restaurant
Soju anyone?

Waterfall Ajuma
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Elixir of Life?
Here I am at the waterfall which was declared by its discoverer to hold the elixir of life. No wonder I look so good at

inscription by discoverer
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me and emily
photo shot by the grump of a man who wasn't satisfied with my photo-taking abilities.

for Anna
I love the sea.

Skipping Stones
this is the boy who I asked to teach me to skip stones. "Eoddeokkae?" How?


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Water Sujebee
this is me skipping a stone! Claire told me the term for skipping stones in Korean. It is a reference to a dumpling sou


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ghost ship
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it looked like a heart...

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I don't know what show this is, but the contestants had to come up with things that ended in the same sound as quickly as they could.  Whoever had the lowest score lost, and his big air-bubble belly popped in his face.

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What animal are they supposed to be?  Can anyone determine?  Fat-bellied teddy bears?  Tail-less pollywogs with ears?

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This is a famous comedian.  He is the MC for many comedy shows, including one in which they take famous singers out into the countryside for a weekend of team-building exercises and hilarity.  Most of the shows have something to do with a red team and a blue team, and who can sing and dance and pop balloons better, or what have you.

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Starking.  Possibly my favorite show, a variety act with no-names and bizarre talents, and many, many children. 
I don't necessarily have any idea what they're saying, but I laugh just as hard as they do.  Every time.

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This is Kang Ho Dong (well, his face on the thumbs-up of a little girl who did an impersonation of him).  He is also a famous MC who hosts many shows.  He was formerly a wrestler.  Sumo, I think.

Korean Rose
They wrap their flowers in ribbons that overpower the blossom itself.  This one from my student also had glitter on the petals.  I just want to tell them, roses are already pretty.

real-live, pre-bundeggi
We got silk moth caterpillars for our classrooms.  They started out as white things whose leaf-munching looked amusingly like they were eating corn on the cob.  I didn't feel any strong connection to them until an older student rolled their plastic cage around the room, their near-death experience making me appreciate their pathetic existence.




Haeundae Beach, Busan, South Korea
Haeundae Beach on my surprise, one-night visit to Busan. 

Delicious fish soup by the sea, by the way.  This Colorado girl is a fish-convert.

Haeundae
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salsa friends I was with  (although it was actually a bachata event...)

trouble
Three of the seven boys in my afternoon elementary class (David, who has no front teeth and allergies so bad he rolls his eyes all the time; Daniel whose front teeth are big enough to share with David, and who thinks he knows everything; and Max, smart as a whip and moving to the States soon to be with his father and brother who are already there). 

They put themselves there in the corner before class every day, as if they are already in trouble.

Pedro
"Jordan!" he's saying, as if we're old college buddies, pulling me by the arm to show me something.  Ah, Pedro.

I've taken to yelling "ai yi yi!" in this class full of boys when they're noisy.  They think it's hilarious.

Floating Heads
Pre-open class project to make the board look pretty for the mommys.  I think it makes a great piece of contemporary art.

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Meet Claire
The woman responsible for my Korean education; language, history, and culture.  Everyone please say, "thank you, Claire!"

Open Class is Over--Thank God
Our head supervisor, Rachel, pouring soju for Emily at the celebratory galbi dinner.

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Ashley and Rachel

Meet Jenny
On the Han River Bridge Tour.  We were instructed to talk about how pretty the lights were on all the different bridges straddling the river.

Let me guess, you're wondering if she and I are related?  We may as well be.  Let's leave it at that.

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English Good!
Yeah. 

Martha and Jenny
Martha, friend of Jenny's, friend of mine.  She's the one who knew the producer of the documentary show on which Jenny and I will be appearing with mouths full of spicy rice cake and hotdog-coleslaw-in-a-crepe.

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"best view"
from the building where followers pray for a miracle from the disciples

prayer lanterns
i guess you can buy one and write a prayer on it

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Walker Hill cherry blossom festival
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Walker Hill cherry blossom festival
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Walker Hill cherry blossom festival
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Walker Hill cherry blossom festival
Meet Jungsup ^^

Magnolia
The tree outside Emily's apartment building.

Magnolia
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World Cup Stadium, Seoul, Korea
A Seoul vs. Seoul game, the LG Twins and the...Bears? I could look it up. Anyway, look at them wave all those thunders

Tyler, Jiji, me, Juri
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these are the intimidating sun glasses I need to replace...

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Tyler explaining the rules of baseball. I think he tells things like I do, in outline format.

Emily and Me
We decided that this picture pretty much accurately depicts us and our relationship, hahaha.

shy with beansprout
Juri said I look like I'm being shy with the beansprout. It may look that way, but I'm about to devour it. I love kong

Frank's Feet
"Teacher, whose feet is it?!"

Sharon
She comes to say hello to me every morning. (They call me "zebra teacher" when I wear this shirt.)

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Mario World


The Town Sweetheart


The PermaGrin


The Good Guy and The Ballerina


The Baby


The Princess and The Bumbler


The Negotiator

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ELW Anyang photos002
Emily, Cole, Hee Il, Nancy, Catherine

ELW Anyang photos001
same, plus Angie!

ELW Anyang photos003
Hello Anyang.

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In the summer, this must be an awesome waterfall. Cole was pretty excited about it.

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Popular game in Korea, especially between old men. Not even Hee Il was sure how to play, or what their exclamations wer

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Emily always gets to play

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I think this is how they keep track of the throws.

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"Fall in Love"

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Hee Il, an amazing Korean teacher.

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A telecommunicative garden? A subdivision of paradise? I'm hiring these people to title my books in the future.

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happily trapped in a maze of mirrors. i'd like to say that this is not a reflection of modern society...

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ELW Anyang photos004
Emily always suggests that I do the heavy lifting. I think the whole point of this park is for people to take pictures.

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Laughing Buddha baby swing. But the swing seats are training toilets.

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I've never had a piece of art mess with my visual perception as much as this statue.

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ELW Anyang photos005
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The forest of spirits. Reminiscent of Pompeii. I might say Pompeii was eerie and sad, and this was creepy but beautifu

ELW Anyang photos006
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ELW Anyang photos007
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View from the top of a winding structure. Reminded me of a sturdier Bishop's Castle. I missed Danette.

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Yeah...

ELW Anyang photos008
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Tiananmen Square
...on which a poem in Chairman Mao's handwriting is writ in gold.

Tiananmen Square
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Tiananmen Square
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Tiananmen Square
tour guide David in the foreground

Tiananmen Square
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Tiananmen Square
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Tiananmen Square
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Tiananmen Square
David taught Emily to say "I love you" in Chinese--the eighth language in which she can speak these words. It sounds something like "wuh eh-i nee." (As a bonus, he also taught her "I love you to death," which adds a guttural quality to the phrase.)

Forbidden City, first attempt
The Forbidden City was closed for the morning. This was the view from the outside.

Forbidden City
Maybe he thought I was actually trying to take his picture.

Forbidden City
It doesn't get any better than spinning pink flowers and expand-o-balls.

Forbidden City
refreshment? EW

Hutong Tour
Our beloved rickshaw driver, nicknamed Artie in reference to his occupation R.D. Please note the universal Asian "I'm posing for a photo" peace sign.

Hutong Tour
Rickshaw buddies.

Hutong Tour
note the adopted Asian "I'm posing for a photo" peace sign.

Hutong Tour
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Hutong Tour
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Hutong Tour
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Hutong Tour
Our guide, Robin. A puckish fellow, no? EW

Hutong Tour
EW

Hutong Tour
Robin said we could drive the rickshaws. Artie took this photo right before Emily ran into him. I was proud of her anyway--it's a wily contraption, the rickshaw, with some sort of cable for brakes. EW

Hutong Tour
That's better. EW

Hutong Tour
Hutongs are made up of groups of residences, all varying sizes, arranged around courtyards. The toilets are joint ventures out in the alleyways. It used to be a single family around a courtyard, each generation in its own corner, but now many families share a courtyard. EW

Hutong Tour
EW

Hutong Tour
The grandmother of the home we visited, 76 years old. She had put out oranges and tea for all 22 of us, but we couldn't stay.  EW

Hutong Tour
The grandfather of the home. 84 years old. The had been in this home something like fifty years... The government had to step in to preserve some hutongs, as most have been torn down. EW

Hutong Tour
cricket training equipment. EW

Hutong Tour
in a courtyard

Summer Palace
The dragon statue signifying the emperor. Usually, this is placed closest to the entrance. EW

Summer Palace
Phoenix statue, signifying the empress. Usually, this statue is placed to the outside, but at the summer palace, the "Dragon Lady" had the statues' placements switched. EW

Summer Palace
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Summer Palace
no boats necessary

Summer Palace
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Summer Palace
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Summer Palace
apparently the longest corridor in the world. we didn't walk all of it, so i don't know who to believe.

Summer Palace
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Summer Palace
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The Forbidden City
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The Forbidden City
By this point in the trip, I seem to have grown tired of taking photographs of art and architecture, and have begun taking random photos of fellow tourists...and Emily when she got in my way ^~

The Forbidden City
HackMintonBadSack. I later learned from my PK4 students that, in Korea at least, this game is called Jae-gi Cha-gi (??????

The Forbidden City
See it? See it? That's the BadSack. Er, HackMinton...

The Forbidden City
see, not even trying for architecture.

The Forbidden City
One would think I have an obsession with rooftops. Hypotheses on the symbolism welcome. At your leisure.

The Forbidden City
If I'm not mistaken, its knees are bending the wrong way.

The Forbidden City
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The Forbidden City
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The Forbidden City
EW

The Forbidden City
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The Forbidden City
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The Forbidden City
So. Not sure why I only took a picture of this statues rear end, except maybe it was a subconscious nod to the idea that this is a non-defecating monster that eats and retains wealth...

The Forbidden City
Other peoples' children--bundled and red-cheeked and cranky.

The Forbidden City
This is me making an effort to be in some of my photos. Thanks Emily ^^

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The Forbidden City
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The Forbidden City
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The Forbidden City
This is a picture of all the people trying to get a look at one of the halls.

The Forbidden City
This is a picture of all the people trying to get a picture. This might have been the hall where the emperor rested before going to official functions. People carrying him everywhere in his own city really wore him out.

The Forbidden City
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The Forbidden City
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The Forbidden City
These aren't actually random people. They were on our tour.

The Forbidden City
There are thousands of rooms in this place, but these doorways seem to be leading to nowhere.

The Forbidden City
rooftops again.

The Forbidden City
This building was destroyed by fire and never rebuilt.

The Forbidden City
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The Forbidden City
I think I like the last part the most.

Snack Street
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Snack Street
The mustachioed gentleman is trying to sell us flattened sheep testicles.

Snack Street
bug on a stick? anyone?

Snack Street
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Snack Street
candied fruit on a stick.

Snack Street
the most delicious cavity I've ever gotten

Ming Tombs
There's me in the distance, "warming [my] toes" in the sun, as Emily put it. EW

Ming Tombs
And this is me warming my fingers by curling them up inside my mittens... and then holding the empty mittens out like flippers...

Ming Tombs
why is it that guys smile with teeth only after you take a photo? EW

Ming Tombs
This is at the top, some monument with the earthen mound (very large hill) built up around the tombs visible behind it.

Ming Tombs
hat found on a dead emperor. dragons playing with a pearl.

Ming Tombs
money offering at the foot of an emperor statue. at the end of the year, it's the government that collects all of these offerings.

Ming Tombs
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Ming Tombs
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Ming Tombs
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Ming Tombs
the view from the top. look to your right through the archway to see the hill beneath which lies the emperor.

Cloisonne
this woman is creating tiny patterns of copper wire, then gluing them onto pots. i itched with impatience just watching

Cloisonne
this woman is filling the copper designs with colored (clay?) that will then be fired until it takes on a glossy sheen

silk factory
silk cocoon soaked in water then shucked from the dead worm, and finally stretched over these. EW

silk stretching
the silk further stretched for making a quilt. the put dozens of layers down, the number depends on whether it will be a summer or winter weight.

silk stretching
our tour group pulling the silk (much less effectively with these dozen people than with the four women who'd done it before).  EW


I see this building and think crumpled soda can. EW

water bubble (?)
everyone in our bus was taking photos, so i snapped a couple too. then i asked Emily, "why are we taking pictures of this?"  apparently this is the water bubble building built for the olympic pool.

bird's nest
and this is another olympic building. right now they're charging admission just to see where the games were held. in the future, it will be a shopping mall (so says the all-knowing tour guide David).

Room Service
the room service menu at our Days Inn EW


it was a long day
 EW

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how far?
i made it to that second tower...doesn't look that far...but it kinda is...and with my toes' affinity for frostbite, i d

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something about lovers?
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this wasn't even very far up the wall
apparently you're a "true hero" if you've climbed the great wall

bus stop in Bojeong 6am
um...cold

Incheon airport
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airport bathroom stall
do people usually leave them open?

Puppet Palace
This was the place attached to the restaurant where we ate lunch. Please mom, can we go?

Chinese food on spinning glass
Peking duck

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dragons playing with a pearl

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sacrifices

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for sacrifice

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altar

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Emily's favorite door handle

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300 year old scholar tree

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70 year old door. Only people older than 70 can use it. "Can I see some ID?"

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I think I'm going to name the halls in my house too. Oh wait, I live in a cube.

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chrysanthemum. this flower will be good as decoration for 10 days in cold water.

Where's David?
this is us mildly curious about whether we'd just been had by our friendly tour guide and bus driver. but, never fear--

During one of my recent Tuesday morning Korean lessons with the lovely Claire, I learned the word 잠자리 (jam-ja-li) which means both "dragonfly" and "bed."  As such, the phrase, 잠자리를 캍이 하다 (jam-ja-li katchi ha-da) is a phrase that means "to go to bed together."

A short time after learning this, I was walking the river after torrential rains, sidestepping the newly formed sand bars in the middle of the cement walking path, admiring the destructive capabilities of water on islands, and the stoutness of trees, when a column of dragonflies drew my attention upward over the water.  They alternately hovered and zipped past, each set of wings working independently.  It struck me as fitting that the same word used for dragonfly can also hold a sexual connotation. 

In my most vivid memory of dragonflies, I was fourteen years old, on a trip to the botanic gardens with my parents and younger brother.  It was a warm spring, the air was hot and the grass was green, the labeled wildflowers tall and brown.  I watched the green dragonflies course the park, and was drawn to the extra-thick one that lighted on a plant in front of me.  In course of fact, what I had taken for one startlingly large dragonfly was actually two, one seeming to ride the on the plank-like tail of the other.  I stared, leaning in to look closer.  They were beautifully scaled and shiny, like their namesake. 

My father leaned over, too, over my shoulder, curious to know what I was watching.

“You know what they’re doing, don’t you?” he asked me in his jolly, teasing baritone, the bulk of his 6’2” frame suddenly crowding the air behind me. 

Until that moment, I hadn’t known what they were doing, but my cheeks, already red from summer sun, grew imperceptibly redder.  I knew now, and nodded defensively, scoffing at the idea that I would be that naïve. 

I fidgeted uncomfortably, wishing he would’ve left me that moment for the privacy of my own observation, to remain an innocent appreciation of beauty, unmarred by the guilt of voyeurism.  As it was, it became much too intimate in the open air of the gardens, and I had to step away. 

Some snippets of what I saw at the Seoul Museum of Modern Art, in the 100 Years of Korean Comics exhibit:

Traditional characters, many in the army, many warriors, some students and a few girls.  Eventually, a cowboy, and a swashbuckler, a private-eye and a couple of robots.  Later, the introduction of the anime style.  But no superheroes.  Anywhere.  We looked.

-hand holding red book out of a mountain of broken pen and ink t.v.s, computers, and keyboards

-a vine, with a fat, faceless baby hanging from one umbilical cord-end with the text bubble “…”  The green vine grows thicker as it approaches the middle, a walkway for a an uncertain child figure, faceless head upturned toward the sun, arms out to steady itself, saying “?”  At it’s thickest, in the middle with green leaves a man caught mid-run exclaims, “?!”  As the vine progresses uphill, growing darker, a fat man leans back as he climbs, “;”  Then, down a brown, withering hill, bent over and plodding, his elder sighs, “,”  A twist and a loop, and a frail, skinny body hangs by one hand off the dry, brown twig of the end, the exclamation of his posture resigned to silence “…”

In the political cartoon section, many of them drawn by Korean artists, some of them from foreign newspapers with Korea as the subject, the theme of their constant trampling as a gateway peninsula was overwhelming.  Korea as a man, stretched as a bridge under the feet of a Japanese man who says contentedly, “so obliging.”  Korea, again a man in traditional garb, with the wide brim and petite crown of his hat riding high over bulging eyes, his long robes cinched in at the waist by the rope he is caught up in, the casualty of the loop in Japan and Russia’s tug-of-war.  Korea as a fish in a French cartoon, with a Japanese man and a Chinese man resting their poles on opposite banks, a Russian standing on a bridge in the middle. 


After touring the exhibits, we made our way back outside, past the groaning statue in the garden, the grass so green against the grey sky, and the foliage on the fog-shrouded mountain behind it a dripping canvas of mossy black-greens and rich jade.  The rain misted up at me from under my umbrella.  I was starving. 

Twenty steps from the subway entrance were a set of tin shacks and cube signs advertising their ramen, kimbap, and jjigae.  Brett and I slapped across the saturated sand mats and dropped out umbrellas outside the door.  Inside, we sat by an open window that looked out on an agricultural garden where a grey mutt sauntered past and paused, mid-frame, to look in at me.  Another mutt, the same size but this one brown, padded across the curling linoleum of the restaurant.  An ajuma stood at one table clipping leaves into a silver mixing bowl.  The young man shuffled over in his slippers to take our order.  I felt wet.  Everything felt wet.  I mentioned as much to Brett.

“Yeah, I was just thinking that it’s a good thing my skin is waterproof,” he said.  Yeah.  Good thing. 

Brett is colorblind.  This is occasionally a topic of conversation, if ever he has to refer to something by color in order for me to identify it, and he is unsure of which color I would see it as.  I commented on the vivid colors in the rain, especially the greens.  “So, grass isn’t orange to you?” he asked, although he knew the answer.

“No, it’s green.  Very, very green.” 

“It’s almost red to me.”  This made sense, for the color orange to intensify to red.  “And it’s yellow where a lot of light shines through.” 

“How do you know grass is orange though?”

“Because I can take an orange crayon and lay it down in the grass, and they’ll be the same color.”

“Oh, so it doesn’t change all the colors…”

“And shadows, shadows make the colors change.  People tell me, no it’s still blue, but it changes colors for me.”

“It changes for us, too,” I assured him.  “Have you ever heard of people showing up with one navy shoe and one black, and then somebody’s like, ‘what’d you get dressed in the dark this morning’?” 

“I just thought that meant they couldn’t see.”

“No, it means we can’t tell the difference between blue and black in the dark.”

“Oh.”  He thought a second.  “I understand that saying for the first time in my life.”

He told me about adjusting his drawings on the computer as he colors the inked versions, adjusting them to whatever is pleasing to him. 

“I told you,” he said, “I used to make all my people green.  Everybody hated it, ‘these are all alien people!’” he mimicked them, “But skin is green.”

“Really?”

“Really.  They were like Simpsons people, except green instead of yellow.” 

“Like light green or dark green?” I asked, fascinated.

“Light green.  Like the lightest green you can get.”

I looked down at my own pink arm.  “That makes sense,” I said.  If he saw green as red, then it would be natural for him to see pink as green.  A small piece of me mourned the thought that he couldn’t see the rich, calming, cooling blues and greens of the rainy day, of any rainy day.  I reminded myself that his color experiences could be just as vivid.  Simply different.

I once wrote a high school paper, for one Mr. Blackard, on the idea that everyone sees colors differently.  What one person experiences as blue, the next person sees as the first person’s red, but everyone is trained to recognize certain colors as attached to certain names, so there wouldn’t be any confusion even though everyone’s reality was intensely different.  At the end of my paper, in his thin, red-ink scrawl, Mr. Blackard’s only comment was, “So What?” 
It’s possible that you are now thinking, so what?  Well.  So, nothing, really.  I just thought it was interesting.

I wanted company for viewing the documentary (30분도쿠) on which Jenny and I would share two minutes of fame.  Hee Il was kind enough to let me come to her place, which I’d been dying to see ever since my breakdown about spending my whole life in coffee shops, a most culturally-neutral environment.  She was nervous.  Had canceled on me before when we’d planned a visit.  Her parents seemed reluctant to have any visitors.

I bought them a cake and carried it with me on the subway.

When Hee Il led me up across the congested street, clutching my arm and stepping out in front of taxis, trucks, and buses, and up the block to her apartment, I thought, I cannot believe that I have never been here before.  And by “here,” I mean, anywhere.  Or perhaps I only thought here was anywhere because I felt it was closer to my natural environment? my natural economic station? 

Hee Il’s apartment looked out over two feet of cement before hitting the neighboring building.  So close you could step across into your neighbors’ window if you were so inclined, into their little raised floors and furniture-less living rooms to share the humid heat.  I know that if my family were in Korea, this is undoubtedly how we’d live, and that I am, by some fluke, experiencing the greatest affluence I believe will ever come my way.

Off the living room were three small rooms and an equally small kitchen.  In her bedroom, clothes hung at the foot of her bed, a small desk and a series of shelves set snugly into the opposite corner.  It was just big enough for each of these and a desk chair.  She sat swept up her floor, crouched on flat feet as they are so enviably able here in Asia, and I sat on the bed.  On her wall were school pictures, and high school friends, and a photo from the mid-eighties, of her as a baby with her parents.

“My mom looked like that, too,” I said, truthfully.  The woman holding baby Hee Il had short, curly dark hair, big glasses, and a puffy-shouldered white blouse. 

We ate in the living room at a foot-high table, and watched the documentary show.  I was astonished, and temporarily appalled at how very American I looked and sounded.  Very critical.  But, I reminded myself that I am often complimented here, people find me pretty, pleasant, and open. 

Her mother came home, greeted me awkwardly, a foreigner in her house, a stranger, albeit a smiley one.  She spoke with Hee Il as she changed behind us, and stepped into the bathroom to wash her hair, crouched under a hand-held hose like the one in my bathroom.

A while later her father came home, too, greeting me with a couple of bobs of the head and a big smile.  Hee Il had instructed him not to drink too much, so he called before he came home to ask if it was okay since he’d had a bottle of soju.  He was a sweet, jovial man, whose Korean was so mumbled through barely parted teeth that I couldn’t make out a word of it.  She asked him, wasn’t I pretty, she asked me, how about my dad?  I told her, in Korean, that he was cute and she laughed and laughed.  He puffed up his chest and got the most adorable grin.  He wanted to take us out for food, but I was so full on greasy, delivery chicken that I had to refuse.  He returned to his room to watch television from his mat on the floor.  Her mother sat in the living room between us, also on the floor, watching a separate television.

When Hee Il and I were leaving a short time later, her parents asked her why we were going?  And so early?  They told me I could just stay over.  But I had to work the next day so I thanked them with big smiles and we left her apartment, pulling up the sliding screen that blocked the bugs from the hallway.  She bounded down the stairs and literally skipped into the street.  I think it is the joy and freedom of being in your environment, of no longer being nervous, or hesitant, to share it.  It made me inexpressibly happy to watch her.  Even the volume of her English in a place where foreigners are rare didn’t bother me.  I’m not sure if that speaks more to her, to our relationship, or to the neighborhood and how alive we felt there.  That is life.  It felt raw, and true, vibrant and rough.  (And then, when I say something like that, I mentally apologize to the suburbanites who are clearly also living real life--are they not?  Not everyone can live in tiny old apartments in neighborhoods built up a mountain.)

 “They don’t study,” Hee Il said as we passed a group of teenage boys on a dark, corner stair-step in her neighborhood. 

“Why?”

“Maybe because their parents work until late and so no one is there to make sure they study.”

Then what is it, who is it, that makes her study?

The elementary school, up the mountain, a dirt field akin to the one at my own elementary school, populated at ten p.m. by power-walking pairs of women, children with various balls and ice creams, and the odd young couple, knees and heads touching in a chaste encounter.
“Do you have like this?  It’s not just for the school, but for the whole neighborhood?”  We have school playgrounds, surely, that children avoid as soon as the school bell rings.  If adults hung around, they’d probably be caught up by passing police and accused of dark and disgusting purposes…  We do though, have parks, spacious, green parks with old trees, little corner parks, parks with playgrounds and parks with benches, spread everywhere throughout the city.  These may be more rare here in the unplanned dongenae ((동 네)), where the neighborhood grew because someone lived there, and then someone else, and then they had a market, where there was no city planner plotting streets and open spaces, where the roads leapt straight up the mountains at hazardous inclines and branched akimbo into a million different alleys. 

Ajuma and ajushi cleared tables in their tiny restaurants.  One had a four-foot by four-foot linoleum porch where patrons could dine, sans-table.

We passed a window-fronted kindergarten, yu-chi-won.  Hee Il said, “But it looks something like a pet store.”  I laughed and nodded.  “Keu-ji?” she laughed, right?

 “I am always thinking somewhere special to show you,” she said on our walk back to the subway.

“This is special!” I said, just marveling at the city, at the life, at KOREA.  At what I’d wanted to see and hadn’t had the opportunity for so many months of living here.

“I know that now.  I didn’t know.  Next time, come and sleep over at my house,” she invited.

I can't wait.

Viki and Sadie seated me with a glass of sweet, carbonated wine and a bowl of cold vinegar and cucumber soup.  “I hate Korea,” Viki said, with that same tip of her head that many other Koreans use when confused or frustrated.  “Aish,” she sucked air through her teeth.  “I must care of my mother and my younger brother.  He is thirty and have no job!  I told to him, get a job, but my mother said, no, he is studying!  But even we married, we care of husband, care mother-in-law, father-in-law, sisters…aish--” she said and stabbed a little harder at the dalk galbi in the frying pan. 

“My wish is live not in Korea,” Sadie laughed.

They are 30, and Viki, who lives on her own in a nice studio with a big screen t.v., a puppy, and a shiny, red rice-cooker, will have to move back in with her mother and brother in order to support them. 

“I cannot come anymore,” Sadie said, drawing her matchstick legs up onto her chair.  (How do they sit cross-legged on wood without that bone in their ankles aching?)

“Why?” I asked, “You don’t like her family?”

Sadie shook her head, “They are not comfortable to me.”  So Viki will lose her independence, her space, her time, money, and her friends.  On the other hand, this is not a society so concerned with where to put their old people--in fact, not a society with lonely old people, it would seem.  A side note, Shin has told me that elderly people are given a lot of money when they retire from a company.  They often use it to start up a little restaurant or store, and these often go under.  Judging by what I see around me in a day to day situation here in the suburbs, the elderly people maintain occupations like cleaning buildings and driving school buses, watching grandkids and walking in their coordinated tracksuits and visors. 

Viki asked if the oldest child in the States is expected to care for the parents, too.  I couldn’t give her a straight answer.  In theory, yes, in theory, all of the children are expected to.  In practice, however, our parents and our enterprising ideals have brought us up so thoroughly into the concept of independence that every child begrudges, and many shirk, the responsibility.

A few days later, I was with another friend, my eonni (older sister).  She has an older sister who lives at home and, I would assume, also hates Korea.  After high school, her older sister applied to Hongik University for industrial design, a prestigious art school in Seoul.  When she wasn’t accepted, she had to go to a two-year school, which meant that from then on, she was relegated to lower-status jobs, unconcealed judgment from the general population, and disappointment on the part of her parents.  Not to mention that she would never be able to marry a man who had a four-year degree.  Now, at forty-three years of age, her parents still think she should go back to school.  My friend said that her sister “felt some hurt.”  I should say so.

It led me to think of the encouragements received by high school graduates in America.  Certainly there is some pressure to attend big name liberal arts universities, but there is also a general consensus that any sort of degree will do you some good.  Beyond that, I feel that people are beginning to circle back to the idea that vocational schools are also worthy endeavors, that civilization cannot be supported on the backs of a population that sits and thinks for a living.  As much as I value education (I do, and always have), and as much as I expect to continue mine in the near future, it also saddens me to see people put through such rigors as they are here in Korea.

My oenni related the Korean work ethic to the time she spent in a mixed group of foreigners in Switzerland.  “When we had to do the dishes, we had two hours, and the Korean people only wash the dish.  No talking, no fun, only wash the dish.  The Americans talking and laughing, take a long time, but they finish it.  And they enjoy it.”  Who am I to say which is better, an American who would be pre-conditioned, but I am certainly more attracted to the second option.

Two of my oldest students, eight-year-old girls, stepped just inside the door to the teachers’ office, where we work like ants in a slender glass farm.  Saebee, all innocent headband and tiny, whiny voice, addressed me even though they already had my attention, “Teacheeer!” 

Julie with her wide, braggart’s smile and mischievous eyes under straight black bangs, informed me, “Teacher, Tim say ‘fuck you.’” 

I cocked my head and echoed Julie’s tattletale smirk.  “I think you just accuse people of saying ‘fuck you’ because you want to say ‘fuck you,’” I said.

The whole office looked up from their grading and break time comas.  I stared at my girls, daring them to contradict me, until they backed out of the office, mildly confused and speechless.

They’d barely left before the teachers released their incredulous laughter.  We rose with the bell, replays of my dialogue bubbling up between them.  A couple of claps on the back and high fives and I wiped off my smile before entering my classroom, where I neglected to deal with the supposed offender. 

Somehow, at eight years old, they oppose me with the same intensity of an American twelve or fourteen.  Julie constantly wants to compare passports.  “Teacher, how many countries you’ve been?” 
“I don’t know, a few.” 
“I go to Italia, America, Guam--” 
“I’m sure you did, but do you remember what possessive adjectives are?” 
Saebee likes to contradict me by shouting, “No!” in that way particular to Korean intonation, as though I were forcibly removing ice cream from her clenched fist, but usually she’s insisting that I have mistaken information.  And Tim likes to cover his crotch and make jokes about touching himself.  Ah, me. 

I do feel some sense of victory at having convinced them that I am eighty-seven years old and drank from the Fountain of Youth.

Tonight I went to my friend Viki's officetel (studio apartment) where she met me at the door holding her tiny puppy.  It is of the standard, tiny variety, although at least it isn't white, and a tuft of fur atop its head was caught up in a tiny pink bow.  She let it down and the affectionate little puppy climbed all over my lap.  It reminded me of one of my students, actually, the smallest one with her impossibly petite limbs and her brown hair permed into ringlets, topped today with a pink bow the size of a pound-cake. 

Viki was mixing brown batter when I arrived.  She poured it into a pan, topped it with slices of almond, and stuck the whole thing in a (large) toaster oven with apologies for being a poor 'cooker.'  Forty-five minutes later, the aparment smelled amazing with her oscillating fans oscillating brownie-smell through the humid air.  She lifted a thick, moist slice from the pan and I swore they smelled just like my mother's brownies at home.  Except, when I bit into one, the hint of chocolate and sugar hardly lived up to their advertising scent.  How can it be that all the cake in Korea tastes like this, like it thought hopping into a pan that once held three chocolate chips and a cube of sugar would qualify it for its brownie exams? 

Sigh.  I know what I should have my mom send me as parting gifts for these friends.  Real.  Chocolate.  Baked goods.

I walked into Turn, my standard Saturday night salsa club, and sighed.  Only fifteen or twenty couples were on the floor where there would normally be fifty and more.  Apparently everyone had gone to some sort of competition/congress.  Well, they have a dozen every year, so I couldn’t really bring myself to be excited. 
Jenny and I debated whether to stick it out or go to a hip hop club, or go back to my place before the buses stopped running.  A few good dancers showed up, but we knew that they would mostly be dancing with each other…and we didn’t want to ask any of those guys in front of their extremely talented partners, but we stayed until the place was mostly cleared out at three. 
With two and a  half hours to waste until the subway started running, we took a stroll across Gangnam’s main drag to cluster of spastically lit bars and hip hop clubs, where the streets were flooded with young, well-dressed club-goers. 
On the benches at the front end of the strip, a man lay sleeping with his head on a Bible.  Next to him sat a girl tending to a bloody knee.  Welcome to Gangnam.  Drinkers sat lazily at convenience store lawn chairs, girls clicked together in short-skirted lines, and here and there the hopelessly drunk twitched against the cold, heads bobbing in upright sleep.  A group of guys tested their strength against punching bag machines that measured the force of their hits.  Across the way was a carnival-style knock-the-blocks game complete with bored teenage operator.
“Carnival games for drunk people, it just isn’t fair,” said Jenny.  “They may as well just throw their money away.” 
The last time I was in Gangnam late at night, I’d needed some food, and made my way back behind the main drag to where lights were still on and people were still out.  I found a kimbap place where the sweet ajuma was impressed with my Korean, and I with her hospitality.  I led Jenny back there and we ordered a vegetable kimbap and a deunjang jjigae to share. 
As we discussed life over the most delicious, squash and onion filled deunjang jjigae I’ve ever had, I glimpsed passing groups of people by the elevators.  The guys gazed at us, some of them catching my eye, and one of them waving.  His group passed again and he did a sort of jumping-jack wave as they walked into the building.  A few minutes later, as they walked back out, I nodded in response to his wave, and he made a big Asian heart with his hands above his head. 
“I just don’t find Asian men attractive,” Jenny said with a little shrug.  The majority of the other female expats I have met feel the same way.  My co-workers just shake their heads at me.  They were told that Korean men would grow on them, but the vines have yet to take hold.
“Not a single one?  Not even a little bit?" I asked.  "There are millions of men here.”
She shook her head.
“Come on,” I said, dragging her away from our little white dishes of kimchi and dried fish, mushroom, and radish in vinegar. 
We cruised the couple of blocks toward NB and Harlem, where cover is 30,000won and the point must be to meet an evening companion before the blisters from your stilettos pop. 
We sat on the filthy wooden steps in front of a fried chicken house and scanned the faces of the passing Korean youth at their finest, or at what had been their finest six hours earlier when they got dressed for the night, before however many pitchers of Cass or bottles of soju. 
“How about him?” I asked, referring to a more muscled, and not too androgynously-pretty, boy in a collared shirt. 
“Which one?” she asked, insisting that she couldn’t tell the difference if they were wearing a button up shirt.
“How about the one in the hat?”  I have a thing for Koreans in hats, the rakishly tipped fedora, the bowler cap over emo bangs, the rasta beanie, whatever.  Of course, I’ve always had a thing for hats…and fence-jumping…
“Neh,” Jenny scrunched up her nose and I laughed at her, directing my smile at the three broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped Korean guys standing across from us, the middle one with his arms draped over the shoulders of his friends, ready for their photo op.
“I just want to pull out my camera and take their picture,” I told Jenny.  “‘Po-to?’”
I quoted the way I would ask it. 
  “Then they’d put up their ‘victory’ signs,” Jenny said.  She was right. 
  I laughed again.  The boys smiled back.  They always do.  So did the guys in the car creeping through the pedestrian-congested alley.
  “You want a ride to the river to watch the sunrise?” I asked Jenny.  “Cuz we could get one.”
  “No!” 
  “It’s only like eight or ten blocks.”  But she wasn’t having it.
  A small, Korean-looking boy approached and leaned casually on the chicken delivery scooter in front of where we sat.  “You guys all fucked up?” he asked.  Smooth pick-up line, dickhead.  I guess he just wanted to know what his chances were from the get-go.  That would be…zero.
  By quarter after five, I was freezing, having dropped my sweater somewhere in Insadong, and the sun was up, inviting us home, to bed. 
  I waited for the subway with the other youths, all of whom I assumed to have been out all night like me, and the older people, all of whom I assumed to be gearing up for a full day of hiking or what have you.  I read until I couldn’t keep my eyes from crossing, and then I slept in the short bursts between my head jerking up off my chest.  At home, I shut the double doors from my patio to block the noise of the construction workers whose Sunday of work had just begun and crawled under my purple polka-dotted (Korean) blanket to sleep.

Open Class.  Fuck me.  My mothers and grandmothers walked in, all over 5’8” in their stilettos and pressed neatly into their Shinsegae outfits and manicured nails.  I had spent the last thirty minutes drilling their children in how to respond to my flash card questions, and I would spend the next forty-five showing off what they’ve “learned” and how they “participate.”  We begin with our standard, How are you feeling today?  Brian slouches backwards in his seat so that he can rest his head on the table, grinning up to me to show off that one silver molar.  He can’t decide how he’s feeling.  On his turn, mousy Daniel raises his hands in a sharp, helpless W, as though he’s never learned an answer, or never considered how to feel.  I thought we had overcome the shy, speechless stage two months ago.  Soo played with her glasses and chewed on the collar of her shirt.  Joanna’s mommy taped the whole thing from her seat in the corner.  My supervisor Rachel whispers without moving her mouth, “Discipline!”  The problem, I come to realize, is that, in my opinion, the children’s behavior is not necessarily discipline worthy, nor do I have a proper sense of how much, or how obvious of, discipline is necessary in the mothers’ minds.  I am of the opinion that four and five year old students should be allowed to study standing up, as movement seems to increase their ability to focus and is certainly beneficial to development.  I am also of the opinion that, although it can be tiring and frustrating, there is a certain amount of noise and distraction to be expected.  Furthermore, I am of the opinion that not all their time in the classroom should be structured time, and I therefore let them do as they wish during scheduled playtime.  Unfortunately, the mothers were highly disappointed in their children's performance.   They were concerned that I don’t have enough control over the class, that I am not disciplining enough.  And, the other comment fielded by Rachel was that the mothers asked that I show their children a lot of love.  What did they want me to do during open class?  Have them all on my lap, sitting nicely one on top of the other, while watching the board and reciting answers and having fun?  Anyway, apparently some of the girls have told their mothers, “Jordan teacher didn’t say anything about my new dress,” and so I am supposed to compliment them on their clothing to show that I love them.  I have compromised by giving hugs and telling them each individually, “I love you.”  I do not feel obligated to comment on Katherine’s new matching Burberry puffy shorts or suspendered skirt set every day.
A week later, things are going much better.  My students have become still more affectionate in response to my efforts.  I am a lot meaner than I ever planned to be in order to get them to sit properly.  I also give about three times as many stickers every day.

Recently, my mother sent me a worried e-mail regarding the state of affairs in Korea.  I had just had a conversation with my coworkers regarding the very situation and had come to the conclusion that no one in Seoul seemed particularly worried.  Claire was of the opinion that after the former president’s suicide, the South Korean government (currently under the power of the opposing party to the recently deceased) came up with some fodder for distraction and piped it through the three major media corporations, which are all connected anyway.  Did I, or any of my American co-workers feel any anxiety off the general population?  Not really.  Of course, we can’t understand any of the news.   Steve said he’d probably have no idea what was happening until he came outside and there was no one on the streets, but North Korea is hardly a topic of conversation between us and any of our Korean friends.
Perhaps it is unwise to live in such a state of uninformed, unconcerned business-as-usual.  Then again, what affect could I have on anything if I were worried about it.  "If she were my daughter, I would want her out of Korea," people are telling my mother.  But, if North Korea were to nuke someone, it would be the United States, not their peninsula-mate.  I feel safer in Seoul than I felt in Denver, and certainly safer than I felt in Berlin, London, and Rome.  There are no guns, except in the hands of their eighteen-year-old policemen.  I can leave my purse and computer unattended at a coffee shop and return to find it unmolested.  Possibly the scariest things in South Korea are motorbikes on sidewalks, ajuma elbows, and elevator doors that close whether there's a person between them or not.  My day-to-day worries are divided equally between these, avoiding bones in the fish at lunch, and ducking peevish mothers.  

Reading an article about Michelle Obama visiting an elementary school to read to a third grade class, I asked my first graders, “Would you want Mrs. Obama to come read to you?”
“No,” Alex said.
“Why not?”
“She’s face strange.”
“Why?” I asked, already slightly disappointed.  I’d had similar discussions with Korean children before.
“Black people,” said another student.
“Dirty,” said Alex, wrinkling his nose.
“Black people have beautiful faces,” I said.
“What!?” Tim’s exclamation received an exaggerated frown from me.
“In America, they think like that,” Raechel clarified for her classmates. 

I went to visit Shin, a friend of mine who very possibly embodies the intense work-ethic of most Korean people.  He had invited me to visit his bar (the bar owned by his father since 1982, which he now operates since his father has found other work).  I arrived around 10:30 and he escorted me with his large umbrella from the subway station that led up into the GS office building.  Out the revolving doors and around a corner was the entrance to Chaplin Bar, an un-assuming door without even a front step or an awning.  Shin unlocked the door.  “I usually close around nine on Saturdays,” he told me.  “This is not a popular area on the weekends, only after work, you know, for GS.”  I followed him down the narrow staircase, which dead ended at a poster of Coltrane.  “You know him?” he asked me, his thick black eyebrows reminiscent of Chaplin’s over the top of his thick-black frames.  His face was so young, long whisps of hair that hardly needed to be shaved lay here or there under his smooth chin.  His big round teeth behind soft lips were just uneven enough to read as authentic, and his brown eyes had the almost-smile of youth.  He wore a sweater over a collared shirt, cuffs caught together with unabashedly shiny links.  I could only think of my deceased grandfather whom I’d never met.  The only true cufflinks I’d ever seen lay in the bottom level of my mother’s tan, seventies jewelry box along with her high school charm bracelet and a pearl necklace.   Well, and now these, on a twenty-one year old Korean boy who served whiskey to middle aged business men and practiced his jazz trumpet four hours a day. 
  “This is my bar,” he said as we pushed through a second door.  It had the atmosphere of a mountain cabin with a pointed ceiling and dark wood accents.  A total of five booths and two tables lined the walls, and the windowless basement was made bearable by the large mirrors on the wall beside each table.  The stereo piped jazz only just soft enough to hear over.  I could see back into the tiny strip of a black and white tiled kitchen where he had popcorn pre-popped to accompany guests’ drinks. 
  Shin got us each a Heineken and we clambered into one of the tiny booths, my thighs barely passing between the edge of the table and the leather loveseat.  We talked about the bar, how it was the first thing in the area, had been there the longest.  “But now my family has some debt because of this bar.  So I am always thinking how to make big money.  I come in here and practice my trumpet, and I think how to make big money, and then I open around seven.” 
  He practices four hours every day and doesn't feel that it is enough because he is beginning late, at twenty-one American years of age.  During his stint in the army, he was in the band.  He auditioned with his guitar.  They gave him a spot, and handed him a clarinet.  These days, it's all about the trumpet.
  During a lull in conversation, he stood and retrieved a baseball from the bar.  “Do you know the Twins?”  The LG Twins, one of Korea’s professional baseball teams.  Yes, I knew them.  I had attended a game between the LG Twins and the Doosan Bears just a few weeks before.  I nodded.  “The Twins’ pitcher was in this bar and he gave me this ball,” Shin shrugged.  “He sign here and give me. But I need not this ball,” he twisted it a little in his fingers, “so I want to give it to you.”
  I smiled a lot because inside I was laughing a little.  I wanted to tell him, I need not this ball either, but I said, “Thank you!”  And I admired it often throughout the evening. 
  I told him about being laughed at whenever I speak Korean, and he said that it is cute when foreigners speak Korean.  “Ten years ago, no one foreigner can speak Korean very well.  These days some can, but it still sounds cute.  Man or woman.”  I shook my head. 
  Later, when I was telling him the story of the man on the bus who, in his drunken stupor, fell asleep across my lap, I quoted the bus driver and myself saying “adjushi!” and shaking the man by the shoulders.  Shin’s face lit with a tiny, suppressed smile and I could feel him laughing about how I sounded cute speaking Korean. 
  His trumpet was at the repair shop, so he played classical guitar for me instead.  “I prefer to play electric guitar, but everyone hate loud music, so I play this.”  And he played it beautifully.  But I felt bad for him always considering how to keep his middle-aged customers happy. 
  About midnight I was falling asleep and we walked to that bus stop in Gangnam where we first met.  Standing in the aisle next to my seat, he pulled a leather-bound book from his bag and handed it to me.  “This is my journal these days,” he said.  “Maybe you can’t read it, so…”  I flipped through it, smiling.  I could read the tiny Hangeul script, blue against the delicate pages of the journal, but I couldn’t understand their meaning.  Until I reached the pages with bits of English.  His to do list was in English:
-practice trumpet
-become a great musician
-make big money
-make big money
-MAKE BIG MONEY
I looked up at him and he smiled sheepishly.  “It is on my mind a lot these days.” 
Sadly, I think that Chaplin's will not be in existence very much longer.  Shin will have to find a new place to practice his trumpet.

I visited Bong Eun Sa Buddhist Temple this weekend, one of two temples within Seoul.  Across the street from the Coex mall and city airport in Samsung, four Devas guard the entrance to the temple.  Women exiting the complex bowed to each in turn before leaving.  Inside, some wedding or something was taking place in the largest hall, women in stiff pink and blue hanboks, and lines of shoes left outside the doors.  I caught a glimpse of the far wall covered in tiny gold statues, 3,300 figures of the Bodhisattva of compassion.  Around the other side, a courtyard is shaded by a hundred lanterns, (연등, I believe they're called in Korean.  The first part means lotus and the second part means light.  The first part also means kite, but Jungsup insists that they never get confused between the flower and the toy.  I tested him.  "What if I said, 'yeon!' and pointed?"  "If you pointed up, it would be a kite."  Well.  I guess it would.)

Farther up the hill are several small buildings for prayer, all decorated with traditional paintings and outfitted with altars and cushions.  Bald monks in loose grey garments chant or bow in some, kicking off untied hiking boots before they enter.  Elderly women rock forward to touch the ground, and then back onto their toes and up onto their feet before kneeling again.  The movement resembles a rolling wave, just as steady, just as determined and weary as a calm sea.  Is it physically possible for them to do this all day?  Will 1,000 prostrations bring clarity?  Peace?

Behind a string of lanterns, foreign children (children who looked like me) ducked into the brush, carrying small stones and other commonplace treasures.  I missed the secrecy and the fantasy of childhood.  I don't know what exactly the place for it is, but I want to mention that this day I felt particulalry out of place.  That morning, doing my grocery shopping in my three aisle mart, I had passed the two teenage girls taking up the whole row with a barely breathed "chamshimanyo," a word I had heard used for "excuse me."  A few steps down the aisle, I heard one of them repeat what I had said and both of them giggle.  I got home and cried.  It is incredibly frustrating that, even though I use the right words, I am literally laughed at every time I speak Korean.  By my supervisors, by my friends, by the high schoolers in the grocery store.  As I told Jungsup in a text before I met him, I was mad at Korea.  So, anyway, then I was in a place of worship for a religion I know very little about, and, regardless of the fact that it was a tourist spot complete with brochures, I felt...out of place.  I envied the children their unconcern, and their ability to duck under wires and into their own world full of giant ants and smooth stones.

Before the path up the next steps was a rock holding a selection of more stones, piled one on top of the other.  I know they have some significance, but mostly I just thought they were beautiful.  As were the intricate and traditional Korean paintings, the guardian dragons, and the depictions of famous monks in old Korea.

Spring in Korea is the most beautiful experience.  The weather was perfect for temple touring, and later sitting outside and eating ddukboki and sundae, and drinking berry smoothies.  By the end of the afternoon, and thanks to Jungsup's patience, Korea had turned me around again.  I am very happy to be where I am.

The weekend of April 12th was the height of the cherry blossom season.  Instead of venturing into Yeouido, where I was warned I would remember not the blossoms but only the suffocating crowds, I headed up to Walker Hill with Jungsup.

The hill is home to two expensive hotels, Walker Hill, and the W.  In the swanky lobby/bar of W Hotel, there were couches, space-age egg chairs, and t.v.s on spring-like stands that came up out of the floor.  The bathrooms were lit pink for girls and blue for guys, each sink on its own stair-step level with a sink whose handle is slightly complicated to figure out.  I guess only the rich and sophisticated can work them.  Whatever.

But!  The blossoms were gorgeous, particularly in contrast to the rest of the foliage.  The trees that had dropped petals looked as though they had dusted the ground in the softest snow.

The hotels had set up concessions, and our 5,000won lemonades were soda water with a slice of lemon in them.

Actually, my favorite flower is, as of three weeks ago when I first saw them, the magnolia.  They almost seem an impossibility, the extravagant, heavy white flowers preceding even leaves, too exquisite to be marred by excess foliage.  Cherry blossoms and all their festivals hold nothing on these.

My coworkers and I attended a baseball game at Seoul's World Cup Stadium.  The place was packed with Koreans waving their thundersticks in choreographed chants.  It was two Korean teams playing each other, the LG Twins (with a strikingly similar logo to that of the American team), and the something or other...bears maybe?  I obviously wasn't that concerned about the game, just having fun.  It was warm and I was surrounded by friends.

After the game, we headed out for galbi in celebration of Tyler's birthday.  Being a loud crowd of wayguks like we are, we sang happy birthday to him twice in the course of the evening, each time cheered on by the Koreans at surrounding tables, some of them sitting on wooden stools like us, some of them sitting on the raised floor.  The grills were tipped to drain the juices from the meat, mushrooms, beansprouts, and kimchi.  To initiate the cooking, our ajuma doused the meat in a shot of soju and lit it on fire, the flames of which proceeded to flare directly into my face.  Had I been two inches closer, my eyebrows would've been singed quite neatly off.  As it was, we all had a good laugh.

Please see the matching album for a clarifying photo.

One of my favorite students, Frank, was in play gym a couple of weeks ago and he stood in a corner of the netted section with his hands over his eyes and shouted to me, "Teacher!  Teacher, whose feet is it?"

Given that I could see not only his feet, but also his whole body, I said, "Um...Frank's?"  He broke into giddy laughter, "F-ranku!" he confirmed.  I smiled the rest of the day.

February marked the end of the school year for Korean students.  My class graduated from kindergarten and I now see them in the afternoons and marvel at how tall they are and how many teeth they have.

The class I inherited to follow them were last year's babies.  I went from teaching apostrophes and adjectives, to trying desperately to communicate that English is not a third-person language.  "James teacher I love you," is the common form of their sentences.  At least I've retrained most of them to say "please help me" instead of "teacher help you." 

To the left, for your viewing pleasure:
1. My newly re-decorated classroom, in the motif of Super Mario Brothers, including the much requested Wario that I turned into my requisite body-map.
2. My new students who include:
-The Screamer: this is the most delicate little boy I've come across, who likes to pretend he's a kitten and speak without making any sound.  Emily likes to scare him in the hallway because he jumps aside with a shrill squeal, clutching his arms to his chest.  I imagine he will become a prime specimen of Kpop couture in his adolescence.
-The Baby: even his classmates treat him as though he were considerably younger than themselves, coddling him and talking in higher voices.  And yet, he reads better than at least half of them.
-The Princess: the outside shoes that sit atop her shoe bag on the shelf are more often than not of the rhinestoned, satin variety.
-The Bumbler: well meaning, and oblivious.  Clumsy and tender hearted.  He trips over his own big feet at least three times a day but just pops back up, undeterred.
-The Ballerina: sweetest thing who comes in to my desk every day to tell me the color of things on my desk and laugh her throaty little laugh.  The days she will go to ballet, she whispers it in my ear like some delicious secret.  Hopelessly in love with The Good Guy, for whom she drew a card that said "I love you brother."  (In Korea, girls call older boys "brother").
-The Good Guy: cute as all hec, with an infectious grin and the smarts to beat out the class.  His enthusiasm to tell me things often outpaces his ability to do so, so he will stand there, mouth open in a grin, but he seems just as happy even if I don't get it.  Hopelessly in love with The Town Sweetheart, so much so that his mother requested through our weekly reports that he have a seat by her.
-The Negotiator: tiny and powerfully dramatic.  The first two weeks he asked to go to the bathroom two minutes after we'd returned from there, grimacing horribly and holding his crotch.  But, the boy who cried pee suffered the consequences when I stopped falling for the act, and eventually he pissed his pants.  Now he barters with me.  "This page finish and bathroom?" 
-The Bulldozer: it's a girl.  The only one who can make The Bumbler cry...every day.  Her hugs are like walking into hurricane winds.
-The Town Sweetheart: okay, she's cute.  Her mom can also afford to buy her completely coordinated Shinsegae outfits, most of which I've never seen twice.  And not only does every kid in class love her, but even the supervisors and lunch ladies pay her special attention in the hallway, to the exclusion of the entire rest of my class.
-The PermaGrin: okay, he's cute.  And he never stops smiling, even if his eyebrows are crisscrossed in consternation.  He also has a manic and desperate need to be at the front of every line.

...They're growing on me...

I spent Valentine's Day with the girls.  We traveled to the East of Seoul for a visit to a day spa attached to a large hotel.  I've never seen anything like it and, although there are spas in the States, I doubt there are any like this:

Inside the spa, you're given a key to a locker where you put your shoes.  Then you walk upstairs into the girls' locker room and find the corresponding larger locker where you put your stuff and disrobe.  When I say disrobe, I mean disrobe. 

We put on our bathing suits first and headed outside to the joint area where men and women and families can all be together in a number of hot tubs, and the inside pool area with a big slide.  There were bubbling hot tubs, a wood bath, a hot tub stream, an aroma bath with bright green water, and people dashing to and fro in the nippy February chill, wet t-shirts clinging to goosebumped flesh. 

When our bodies were warm and tingling and our faces numbing in the breeze, we headed back in toward the women-only section where we stripped out of our bathing suits and lounged in a yellow-sand tub, a charcoal tub, a fruit tub, an herbal tub (this one also had lime green water), and any number of tubs.  We didn't, however, go into any of the cool tubs (no matter that they had dragons spouting water, or round stones standing beneath "fall showers") because, well, it was cold outside. 

All around us there were women.  There were baby girls with those big round bellies, skinny little girls with long legs, chubby little girls who stuck out their behinds, pre-pubescent girls whose breasts were just starting to gather weighted flesh, teenagers, ingenue sorts, pregnant mothers, mature mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers.  Even amongst a supposedly homogeneous, one-size-fits-all nation, I was fascinated to see every different shape and size; tiny breasts; protruding hipbones; full, pendulous breasts; flat stomachs and ribcages; fleshy pouches; skinny legs and big bodies; skinny bodies and big legs; pocked flesh; flat pink scars; dark, raised scars; circular nipples and oblong, short or protruding; skin drawn taught and skin too tired to cling so hard. 

It was beautiful and natural and, well, all around quite something.  I was just amazed at how wonderfully healthy it would be for little girls to grow up seeing such variety, as well as seeing the stages of life and the care women have for one another.  I saw old women scrubbing each others' backs, mothers bathing their children, girls chatting together...And there were a few old women working behind a curtain in their underwear, giving massages and rubdowns to spa patrons.  They wore colored mitts that were, I assume, oiled, and rubbed the women down everywhere.  "Those ladies spend more time in their underwear than they do dressed," Emily observed.

Eventually, we went back out to the communal area in our bathing suits, and were approached by a few children whose parents wanted them to practice their English.  Nine-year-old Lucy gave us a little concert, standing up in the wood bath and singing a lovely Korean song about a fat bird.  We watched with the teenage brother and sister whose parents sat one tub over and bought us cold bottles of water.  We probably talked to the kids for an hour or more before switching to the aroma bath where families were eating their ramen poolside. 

Finally, exhausted and hungry, we went back in, spun our swimsuits dry, showered, stood in front of heat lamps, and dried our hair and lotioned up with the provided amenities before dressing.  I could hear the toddler behind us asking her mother, "Nugu-ya?"  "Who are these strange naked people?"  And I could hear the smile in her mother's voice as she explained, "wayguk-in" "foreigners."  And still, oddities that we were, observed as we were, I felt no discomfort in the warm but cavernous hall of baths.  I did not dwell on my perceptions of my body, nor on the bodies of others, only noticed, observed, and appreciated. 

TOURISM
   China.  Beijing.  It was more a study in tourists and attractions.  More a history lesson than a current culture observation.  Perhaps this is the best one can hope for in a four day excursion.  See all the magnificent things a culture has produced.  Hear about all of the grand, wealthy people and their extravagance, their excess.  Climb a few uneven stone steps, wander a few painted rooms, traverse an open, paved block of city, then reduce the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and Tiananmen Square to a keychain, a panda hat, and a communist flag.  By the time we hit day three, I felt like a well-meaning middle schooler on the last field trip of eighth grade.  I was more interested in taking photos of other tourists than in snapping shots of more palaces, more rulers, more…places that everyone sees in the travelogues of every tourist.  I wanted to meet individual people. 

PEOPLE
  The only Chinese people I even met were the tour guide, and the girl who gave me a massage on the final night of my trip.  She had a voice like the dark haired friend in Bridget Jones’ Diary, black bangs and wisps of black hair that hung in a fringe around them.  A middle front tooth had gone grey, but her smile was as youthful as she.  She wore child-sized sneakers, and the brass buttons on her jeans formed a bridge from one side seam to another.  She spoke only enough English to tell me that I was beautiful and discover that we were the same age.  A round of fireworks went off in celebration of the new year and she smiled and said, “Beijing loud, boom--boom!” she used her hands to make fireworks.  I nodded emphatically, “everywhere.”  She tried to tell me more, repeating one word several times, until I repeated it after her.  She nodded, but I still didn’t understand.  The joy of it was her simple enthusiasm, her intense desire to communicate with me even though we don’t speak the same language.  I wished that I had been able to meet more people.  More people like her.  I wished I could’ve tagged along to her house and seen what she and her family eat for the new year, and how they pray to their ancestors, and where she goes out with her friends.  I wanted to communicate with eager smiles and see the normal day-to-day reality of a girl in Beijing.  Instead, she massaged my feet, I paid her, and she left, not quite slamming our crooked hotel door hard enough on her way out.

   The other Chinese person I met was David, our tour guide, who said he didn’t know the significance of the name “David,” but the sounds in Chinese translated to “leader,” or “chief.”  The second son of a farmer, a farmer who lacked an education thanks to Chairman Mao, David ventured to Beijing in the mid-nineties.  He would love to go to the US, but it is a financial impossibility given the weight of the dollar against the yuan.  When Emily took a photo with him, he told her to take it to America, then send him an e-mail.  I assume that was so he would somehow make it abroad, if only in a two-dimensional, unconscious form. 
   “Usually, I say Americans drive big cars because they are fat,” he said to me and Emily, and I nodded.  “But you and you are beautiful.” 
   “We just have big mouths,” said Emily.
  “And big egos,” I added. 
  The blonde and pixie-haired South African girl in our group scratched the air by her shoulder and asked, “Does that feel good?” 
  I tipped my head, “A little more to the left, huh?” 
  I would have to say that Americans certainly have a need for space.  We know this.  We like our huge cars, our trucks, our SUVs, especially in the middle of the country where they kick up satisfying wings of dust.  We also like our elbow room, standing a comfortable three feet from an acquaintance, and still half that from a friend.  In Korea, the girl you just met will lean in to ask how old you are.  Once you and she are friends, she will hold onto your arm as you walk down the street.  In the middle of a huge public square, someone will pass by not an inch from your arm.  Why?  There is just not the same sensibility of space. 

SIMPLY SEEING  
   It occurred to me as I stood at a break in the steps at the Great Wall, watching a blonde, middle-aged tourist pose in a corner with brilliantly lit mountains as a backdrop, that we do not simply look anymore.  Everything is a photo opportunity.  Nothing is appreciated as it is in the moment, as it is panoramic and ephemeral and overwhelming in a use-five-senses-at-once sort of way.  I was tempted to take a photo of the woman, too, to begin collecting other people’s moments in my own scrapbook.  And it really was gorgeous.  But, imagine how much quieter and more contemplative tourism was a hundred years ago.  Each person comes, perhaps bringing a sketchbook, perhaps a notebook, perhaps nothing at all.  They knew then that travel was for the experience, and not the photographs.  I think we have become worthless storytellers because we have become lazy.  We pull out photographs instead of relying on our powers of description.  Eventually, the photographs take the place of our memories, or at least become their centering point. 

  A fellow traveler from my tour group (a group of twenty-two unrelated English teachers in South Korea) styled her hair every morning and coordinated her scarf, boots, jacket and bag.  Her darling husband carried the camera and they were constantly in my way.  Here’s a photo of her in front of the Temple of Heaven.  And here looking across the lake at the Summer Palace.  And here in the alley of the Hutong.  And here by a bicycle.  And here in a doorway.  And here through a window.  And here in front of a trash heap.  And here and here and here. 

  I also wondered at the tourists with small children.  I know that one does not have to suspend life activities upon the addition of tiny people to the family, but what good is it to buy the plane ticket and have the hassle of a cold, tired, cranky toddler bopping around China with you?  He won’t remember this in a couple of years.  Oh.  I forgot.  Traveling isn’t about experiences and memories.  It’s about photos.  And here’s a picture of Timmy sitting on the steps I had to carry him up at the Great Wall.  Unfortunately, Timmy will have to visit the Great Wall twice in his life in order to have truly seen it, working within the assumption that to see is to remember.

SPEAKING ENGLISH
  I am vaguely ashamed to be a native English speaker.  And a white American at that.  I am not expected to learn any other language, where as my counterparts in Europe and Asia must learn approximately two beyond their own.  I am not expected to, and then I am held in dichotomous regard as both enviably master of English, and scorned monoglot.  What am I to do with this, when people are happily amazed at my desire to speak another language, and yet insistent upon speaking only English so that they may improve their skill.  I have begun to feel a bit used, as a cat might use a scratching post.  Or as a knife might use a sharpening rod.  The rod serves its one purpose quite well, and once the knife is sufficiently sharp, it goes about its multi-purposeful way.  My one purpose seems to have become teaching the world English.  And it seems to be my only valuable skill.  Is it still admirable in any of these countries to become a master of their own language?  Are there Germans getting college degrees in German and aspiring to write in German?  I almost think not.
 
 

There is something to be said for broad travel, in which one experiences little pieces of each place.  Usually these little pieces include historically or religiously significant sites, pretty scenery, popular shopping areas, and good food.  Of course, this isn't even a cross-section of the culture, but a tourist's destination, a highly concentrated presentation that cannot help but foster stereotypes.  I think back on the tour destinations on my tour of Beijing, and of how the tourist shops created their own microcosm of everything I'd just experienced--the jade, silk, cloisonne, cow paraphernalia, all piled like toppling stones under English price tags. 

I wonder how long it takes to get a good feeling for a place, for a people, for a way of life and a mode of thought.  As I meet new friends, and observe people on the street, I try to, not draw conclusions, but come upon greater understanding.  As I learn grammar and conversation from my half a dozen Korean friends, I take just as many notes on societal structure and popular thought as I do on sentence structure and vocabulary. 

I realized that I spent the first few months of my Korean life developing a routine.  As far as I knew, there were only a few main streets through Seoul--the ones my red 1005-1 bus followed.  I went to work, went to Gangnam and Apgujeong to dance, and went to the same local coffee shop to write.  While keeping such a routine earned me a couple free cups of coffee, my Korean experience stagnated.

And so!  When Emily suggested a visit to Anyang to see its Art Park, I enthusiastically agreed. 

Anyang (not the same as "annyeong" which means "hello") is a couple of hours from where I live by public transportation.  Disembarking at the subway station, Anyang looks like every other city; grey, bustling, artificially lit.  But, after a brief busride, we arrived in a little mountain town that reminded me of the artsy mountain towns in Colorado.  The main street cut through the hills, boasting pricey restaurants and an art gallery.  A bridge over a small river led to a playground area and the beginning of an extravagant outdoor art exhibit.

Please enjoy the photos.  Any with ELW in the description were taken by the lovely Emily Lucille.

2/1/2009 4:11:26 PM - 002055389004
Thank you for sharing these pics! It looks like you are having a blast! No wonder you want to spend another term there! :)

1/30/2009 1:38:11 PM - 002055627827
Thanks!  I'm liking it, too.  Super easy to manage.

1/29/2009 12:17:18 PM - 002055828291
I really like the site Jo! It looks friggin awesome!