Scarecrows and 'Staches

This weekend was the start of my long-awaited summer vacation.

Ah, summer vacation. An expression indellibly imprinted into the minds of American children from Kindergarten – even earlier for those who attended more ambitious preschool programs. When you're a child, summer vacation chiefly means one thing: no school. Being cramped into a hyperactive, ADD child's body which is subsequently cramped into a classroom that is the antithesis of everything hyperactive and ADD, the absence of school is cause for the greatest jubilation. Never mind that within a week of vacation starting a horrible, unforeseen boredom inevitably creeps in and the same children that couldn't contain their excitement just weeks before find themselves in the doldrums of summer heat-amplified ennui. Never mind that by the end of summer vacation all but the most ardent of vacation lovers find themselves secretly glad that school is restarting.

Never mind all that. By March, seats are worn from squirming bottoms. By April, ends of pencils and pens are chewed to unrecognizable pulps. By May, the tops of even the good kids' desks are covered with scribblings of dogs jumping fences, birds flying free of their cages and cowboys escaping old western prisons in a blaze of glory. If you look closely at these childishly symbolic scenes of freedom from tyrannical oppression, you will notice they all have one thing in common. Somewhere, peaking its head around the corner as the hound leaps its barrier, cheering the cockatoo on as he emerges from confinement, blazing right along with the cowboy's pistol-weilding glory, is the sun.

Summer is coming. And freedom's coming with it.

Of course, as the years go by we all come gradually to realize (though we still refuse to admit it) that summer vacation often turns into boredom more quickly than our spring fevered brains and sun scrawled desks anticipate. This affliction is amplified as we reach our adult years and undergo the troublingly common process of losing our imagination. The grand, branched structures in our back yard that once served as space stations, pinioned fortresses and arbored Amazonian abodes deconstruct into mere trees – a good backdrop for a kitchen window view, occasionally useful for respite from the sun, but climbing them never enters into consideration. Rain, once a puddle-bearing harbinger of adventure just waiting to happen, becomes a nuisance and a depressant, good material for mutual commiseration with similarly weather-inconvenienced friends.

An imagination is not often much good for adult sorts of things these days. Unless you're one of a preternaturally lucky minority, it doesn't help you make money. It's not all that good for “social networking,” (a very adult word) either, since the biggest pool of available friends consists of people your age – who by and large happen to be adults and consequently carry with them disturbingly adultlike personality traits, like not having time for imagination. Grown-ups don't see much use for imagination, on the whole, so they don't often bother with it.

Which is usually quite a fine thing for living the adult life, but it is not so fine when one finds oneself staring down the barrel of two weeks off work with nothing in the world to do except everything that's fun that you can think of. If there is ever a time for imagination, it is summer vacation, which is why children handle it much better than adults, who usually break down in a fit of responsibility and find themselves doing work-esque things like chores and errands just to fill up the time.

At times like these I am even gladder than usual that I am a particularly childish person, which allows me to do things like I did yesterday – shave my beard into an American Civil War replica mustache, set off aimlessly outside of town, and go wandering through a random farmer's field taking pictures of (and with) the eccentrically dressed scarecrows along the way, which you can see below.

So please, take a look and share in my childish little adventure. And if you ever find yourself faced with a vacation, do try and have some fun, will you?

(Oh, and I've gotten a new camera, so hopefully the pictures will be prettier :)

Passing this endearing little scarecrow by the Yeo-cheung-hak-kyo (girls' middle school), I spontaneously decided to photograph it. It would become a theme of my little adventure.

Ambling through a farmer's village and following a little path by the rice fields, the path ended but I found this little passage and decided to see where it led.

An old, abandoned house overgrown by the forest was one of the first things I came upon.

I found what appeared to be a bicycle and a garden hose amidst a pile of junk behind the house.

The journey continued up a rivulet I decided to make my path for the next part of the trek.

My arm literally bounced off this spider's web as I was crashing through the undergrowth. Huge, terrifying, but nonetheless I had to admit it was beautiful.

It must have been a magical forest, because things were abnormally huge and colorful there. I thought this butterfly was a bird from a distance, so lengthy was its wingspan.

A Chon-nom (country boy) scarecrow kept a sleepy watch over this field I found on the other side of the mountain.

A respite for lost wanderers? A resting place for weary farmers? Maybe. But I have my heart set on it being a den for smugglers and Gochu (hot pepper) thieves in the wilderness.

Migook saram i-ye-yo! (It's an American!) Yankees fans are everywhere.

The road goes ever on and on...

The continual assault of thousands of spider webs could not wipe the smile from my face as I emerged from the Magic Forest, gruesome mustache still intact.

George and me hanging out in the Kokuma (sweet potato) field.

At the E-Sense Mart

God damn it, it's about time I blogged.

Oh, I've tried to do it four or five times now, but each time I get bogged down in all I have to say, making the classic mistake of trying to include everything rather than just saying one or two things and saying them well. I've never been particularly good at saying just one or two things, but if I'm ever going to blog again (and if you're reading this, there's a good chance I am) I've got to learn.

Recently I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig, which is an outstanding book if you're the kind of introspective, philosophical fellow I am. Which I am. The book is an intense psychological journey across the American West mainly focusing around the relationship between the protagonist and his son, and there's a part where the son decides he wants to write a letter to his mother. He sits down with a pen and paper and stares at it for a while, then says he doesn't know what to write. His father suggests he make a list, which he does and he finally discovers that he actually has too much he wants to write, and that he can't think of where to start. Whereupon his father says, “Well, just write one thing and maybe the rest will come to you” (crude paraphrase). To his son, writing the letter had become not just one task but an amalgamation of many individual tasks culminating to something too big to conceive of all at once. The human mind is really only made to do one thing at a time – two at a stretch – and trying to cram all those things into one letter was stifling him even before he began.

That's what was happening to me recently in life. Blogging was just one manifestation of this problem. However, I am willing to try to change. Or at least try to try to change. So, armed with my new repository of motorcyclian wisdom and brashly determined to do one task at a time, here I am, much to either your delight or your chagrin, but I'll gamely guess delight because, hey, I'm feeling optimistic today.

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“You meeting sometime English speak.”

Pause. Shuffling of feet.

“Un-jay?” When?

“You meeting maht-euh” (mart) “sometime English speak Korean speak. Teaching,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the shop around her and looking meaningfully in a lot of directions that seemed pretty meaningless to me.

I stared at the shop owner's wife in bafflement, mind racing to throw my bank of around 100 Korean words together in a way that would help me make an important clarification. As usual, it failed miserably.

“Un-jay manna-yo oo-ri?” When meet us?

“Sometime,” she replied, followed by a string of unrecognizable Korean syllables I wildly guessed probably meant some more helpful clarification of “sometime.”

Ever so hesitantly, and with a wary half-smile on my face, I nodded slowly, buying time. I didn't know what she was trying to say, but I know what I wanted her not to be saying. I wanted her not to be saying, “Let's meet sometimes. You can teach me English and I can teach you Korean. We'll be pals, chums, get on famously, maybe throw a little soju (the local liquor, useful for getting uproariously drunk as well as cleaning drains or compost bins; seriously, I've seen it used for both) in for good measure, waddya say kid?”

I wanted language exchange partners, sure. But I felt uneasy at the idea of meeting in the middle of a neighborhood convenience store “sometimes” with a middle-aged woman. No doubt this unease was communicated all too clearly by the feral look of panic in my eyes as I stood stupidly at the cash register, other customers filtering in and throwing unsurreptitious looks at barbarously bearded waygook (foreigner) at the counter.

I considered my options. I could rely on the assumption of misunderstanding, smile, nod vigorously and go away, which was my usual course of action, but I thought in this situation that might be rude (you never can tell in Korea) and she was the only friendly shop owner in my neighborhood. The other ones made you feel about as welcome as snail on a freshly mopped floor, and dragging a polite “kam-sa-hab-ni-da” out of them was like getting Henry IV to swear fealty to the Pope. I went to E-Sense Mart a good five times a week and said “An-yang-ha-se-yo” (hello) to the owners every day of the week that ended in “day.” I'd rather not take the chance of committing a faux pas. I could also attempt to speak more Korean/English (affectionately known here as “Konglish”) in an effort to reach a clearer understanding, but over the course of five months you learn how foolish this kind of thinking is. It's like being stuck in quicksand: if you try to break free, you only sink faster. Better to just let the misunderstanding stay at its current level of confusing embarrassment before you go and make it worse.

I settled for a middle ground, a faked light of recognition coming to my eyes. “Ah, ok ok ok” (they say things many times here for emphasis: same-same, okay-okay-okay, mistake-mistake, sorry-sorry). “Sometime we meet here and study together.” 'Sometime' was not a particularly committal word, well-suited to provide both of us with a convenient excuse for not fulfilling our oral agreement at all.

She looked at me dubiously, not fully understanding but probably just as interested as I was in finding a way out of what was becoming a mutually arduous conversation. She smiled – it looked a bit forced – nodded, said “Bye bye!” in that overly enthusiastic was characteristic of Koreans speaking English to confused waygookin, and waved as I walked out the door with what I hoped was an inaudible sigh of relief.

Interactions like these are commonplace in Korea. The only kind of communication is miscommunication. I once read a postcard from a guy who was teaching English in Japan. It said, “Every day is awkward, difficult, embarrassing and perfect.” I couldn't agree more. From the awkward bows (does that guy look older than me? I'll give him a half-bow and avoid eye contact, and maybe throw in a wave for good measure...) to the quizzical looks that accompany any attempt to speak hangook-mal (Korean) to never knowing where lines start or end (they don't seem to matter anyway) to accidentally saying, “Let's go to the bathroom together” instead of “I'm going to go to the bathroom” to your female co-teacher, it's all confusion, all the time.

Here's an archetypical example of a conversation in Korean:

Walk into store. Smile and bow.

“An-yang-ha-say-yo.”

“An-yang-ha-say-yo.”

Muster up courage. Brace for embarrassment. “Dubu ee-seo-yo?” Do you have tofu?

Uncomprehending stare.

Try again. It always takes two times before they realize you're speaking Korean, not English. “Dubu ee-seo-yo?”

Radiant recognition and a smile like God when he first saw Eve naked and realized what a wonderful thing he'd created. “Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeh, dubu ee-seo-yo! Hangook mal jal hey-yo!” Yeeeeeeeeeeees, we have tofu! You speak Korean very well!

All great, all encouraging, all patented and predictable. Then the inevitable happens. Heartened by your exercise of a Korean vocabulary beyond “Hello” and “Thank you,” they unleash an unbroken chain of full-speed hangook-mal that fills you with the sickening surety that you will never, ever speak this language fluently.

After waiting for the onslaught to stop, I give a forlorn look and simply say, “Molayo.” I don't understand, accompanied by an innocent shrug of the shoulders and a not-even-slightly-faked look of helplessness.

They repeat themselves, again at full speed (but even half-speed wouldn't make an appreciable difference). And again. Before finally giving up with a warm smile and a small look of disappointment.

It's the little things in life, you know. You learn to settle for the little things. If, in the midst of this incomprehensible gibberish being thrown full-speed in my direction, I understand a few nouns or, God forbid, an actual verb, I consider it a stunning victory.

And I walk away with a smile on my face and a light-hearted chuckle, because fuck it, life is hilarious, and never more hilarious than for a man with the Western nose in Korea.

I'm reminded of it every day.

Now, some completely unrelated pictures spanning the past four months of bloglessness.

2 am homemade pancakes with Min Yeong. Realized halfway through making them that I didn't have syrup, so I remembered mom telling a friend her simple syrup recipe from when I was about 10 and whipped some up on the fly. You'd be proud, ma.

Ah, the traditional Korean cutlery...scissors.

Jurgs getting spring water from a kickass fountain just outside Bul-guk-sa temple in Gyeongju.

Dan, Joo-Yeon and Kiwi at Kiwi's coffee shop in Gangleung. I'm coming to visit you again this fall, Kiwi!

Kevin, Marize and I being cool.

Skye and I made a paper replica reenactment of Moby Dick's grizzly attack on Captain Ahab, except apparently it got mixed up with American settlement folklore as the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria all seem to have been involved...

Sean and I playing guitar as the sun goes down in Yecheon.

(Above and below) Sean and I made the most amazing omelettes ever, then ate them on the roof of my apartment building in the spring sunshine. We were also pretending to be the traditional American rednecks who sit on their porches and look mean at everyone who walks by, which explains Sean's look of extreme disgruntlement.

Bong-ham-sa temple on Buddha's birthday. Pictures don't do it justice. One of my favorite memories to date.

Jurgen's brother Sean sharing tea with me the last day of our visit. Looking classy as always.