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.

A Chomnom in Jeomchon

I know, I know. It's been over three weeks since I arrived in Korea and a month since I left Ohio. I should have been blogging all that time, you say, and I agree. The problem is I live on a world wherein time moves inexorably in a linear progression over which I have no control. Confined to merely one body and a sorely limited mind, I can only do around 1.2 tasks at any given time and I am probably doing at least 1.1 of them badly. So while I know my blog output has been woefully lacking, I ask you to be understanding.

Here is a list of the things that have taken up most of my time since leaving, in order from the thing that has taken up most of my time to the thing I have done least:

1. Being uproariously drunk with friends, both old and new

2. Trying and failing to understand any form of Korean

3. Smiling and nodding apprehensively while wondering if this is an appropriate response to the Korean I just failed to understand.

4. Bowing to anyone who might be older, wiser, more accomplished, more respected or just cooler than me. So just about everyone.

5. Trying to decide what the strange new food on my plate is while desperately attempting to grab said food with my chopsticks and simultaneously peering out the corner of my eyes at the native Koreans around the table to see if I'm doing it the right way, which as far as I can tell I am almost certainly not.

6. Sleeping.

These activities have constituted approximately 99.7% of my total time allotment in Korea, which began on the dubious note of an all-nighter followed by a 38-hour day most of which was spent in some sort of excruciatingly uncomfortable airplane or abord the subsequent 3-hour bus ride, after which we all had to wake up at 8 am to go pee in a cup and have blood taken out of our bodies. It was a less than desirable way to start the journey, but adrenaline mixed with the knowledge that things couldn't possibly get any worse from here helped keep me going.

I knew I was tempting fate with such thoughts, but fortunately for me fate turned a blind eye to my arrogant thoughts and things did not get worse. In fact, they got considerably better. Considering the above description was almost certainly an exaggeration, that means things have been pretty damn good. My first week was spent at the orientation for EPIK (English Program in Korea, my program). Although they kept us on a military-like regimen of 13-hour days, we all still managed to squeeze in a good deal of socialization as well, mostly by going to the local bars and experimenting (with mixed results) with soju – cheap Korean liquor made from sweet potatoes. I made many friends, most of my time being spent with T.J. and Amanda, who are pictured below:

A particular highlight was our visit to Hanok Village, where we all went as part of our “field trip” day. T.J. and I tried out the Korean version of teeter-totter, where you basically jump straight up as high as you can and try to catapult your partner into the air using the leverage of the teeter-totter board. It requires precise timing and we failed a couple times, but we experienced some nice jumps too:

I have to give props to Amanda for the pictures above, both of which are hers. I lost my camera sometime during orientation and only got a replacement in the last couple days, otherwise I would have a lot more to show you from orientation, which was a blast.

But all good things must come to an end, and finally we all said our goodbyes and headed off to our destination cities. Mine was Jeomchon, and from the moment I stepped off the bus I knew I had landed something special. I knew because I was greeted by this man:

His name is Shin Soon-Sig, but his unwieldy-but-appropriate nickname is “Best co-teacher in the history of mankind.” No sooner did I get off the bus than Mr. Shin was grasping my hand, greeting me with warm words, embracing me and saying how glad he was that I was here and how proud he would be to have me at his school. Immediately afterward he rushed over to the truck with all our baggage and proceeded to unload it almost unaided. Mind you, there were about 150 people's bags on this truck, most of which were very heavy. After standing around awkwardly for a minute or so I threw my bags on the ground and went up to help him. Later he would tell me he knew I had a big heart because instead of just watching I went up and helped him, just like my predecessor, Joshua, had two years before.

Oh, I didn't mention Joshua? You can see him in the picture above, but here is another for good measure:

Joshua has been the other half of what has made my introduction to little Jeomchon so special. When I first met him he raced up to me, crouched low like some kind of tiger-airplane combo bursting with hospitality. Just like Mr. Shin he wasted no time with formalities, just embraced me with a huge smile and welcomed me into town.

It is rare enough to be preceded by such a caring, vigorous individual who shows so much passion for teaching his students here in Korea. It is surprisingly easy to do this job with a relatively small amount of effort and it pays comparatively well, especially given the current global economic situation, so a lot of people don't put much extra effort into their classes. The vast majority of these people are dynamic, adventurous individuals who just don't want to spend all their time lesson planning, which I can totally understand. But Josh and Mr. Shin's motto is, “Live with passion,” which both exemplify on a daily basis.

It is an infectious lifestyle. For example, Josh tirelessly campaigned for EPIK to allow him to stay an additional month in Jeomchon just so he could train me to take his place. I have never heard of any other Korean English teacher doing that. On top of this help at work, Josh spent many hours the first couple days taking me to meet all the other English-speaking residents of Jeomchon, which has allowed me to settle in exponentially quicker than I would have done on my own.

I have been so lucky to end up with a co-teacher like Mr. Shin and a predecessor like Josh, not only because of their help but because they are great people and priceless friends. I can say with all my heart that one of my greatest wishes is to meet and exceed their hopes as one of the West's few (but ever-increasing) ambassadors to Jeomchon.

The reason for that ambassadorship, of course, is teaching. Soon after my arrival, Mr. Shin took me to my school, Munchong high school or, in Korean, “Munchong godeung hakyo.” Here are some pictures of my workplace:

My desk area complete with my Korean language study materials

My classroom

View from the front of my school. A mountainside view of the entire city and a brand new soccer field – the only non-dirt soccer field in all Jeomchon. Could I be more lucky?!

Last weekend Valerie, an American teacher here in Jeomchon, hosted a get-together for the local foreigners. Like most Korean apartments, room was scarce, but we made do by scrunching side-by-side along all four walls of Valerie's living room around an impressive spread of food.

Laurence, Jurgen and Carla getting cozy with some makguli – Korean rice wine

What started as an innocent but inexplicably-named “brunch” (it started at 2 pm) ended up as a 10-hour soju (including some of the famed Andong variety), makguli, tequila, wine and beer fest. Bluegrass music, trance-like dancing and a dramatic toast to unrequited love were all part of this spontaneous celebration of all things Konglish. A turning point in all our lives was when Carolien discovered that the sound of swishing vodka is among the most transcendental things a person can experience. We were all mesmerized by it.

After we slept off our hangovers on Sunday, we went to Mungyeong Saejae. What's that, you ask? Why, only a historic mountain pass that was used as an escape route from Busan to Seoul many of the approximately 4,887,182,874 times Japan invaded Korea. It's a beautiful climb and there are three very old and very majestic gates, but we stopped at the second and had some food and more makguli.

Candace and I spontaneously decided to dance a sexy dance, which we pulled off with aplomb.

A bombastic middle-aged Korean was delighted we had stopped by and proceeded to launch his entire arsenal of English vocabulary at our table in the guttural drunken roar only middle-aged East Asian men can execute. His belligerence would have been intolerable if it had not been accompanied by a jovial spirit and an ample portion of natural charisma. And more makguli, which he poured in our bowls with great magnanimity.

Over all it's been an excellent first couple weeks. I have had many more adventures, some of which will perhaps make it into this blog at a later date. As for now, though, the stories above will have to serve as your snapshot into my life here in Jeomchon, where the next adventure is just over the next mountain, in the next bar or even on the other side of the doors to the nearest Kosa Mart. I hope you have enjoyed. Further updates will be forthcoming soon.