오래간만이에요 (Oraeganman-ieyo - Long time no see)

Sorry for the lack of recent posts. As you might remember, January was an insanely busy month and I didn't have time to do a whole lot or to write about what I did do. Some of you might be astute enough to notice that January is now over, even here in Korea, and will thus demand a second excuse for the past 5 or so days. Well, I've been enjoying my refound freedom by reading books and going to the gym and sleeping late. It's wonderful.

So, what have you missed out on since I last wrote? The saturday before last, I went to the movies with some middle schoolers. We watched "Miss Potter" because it was the only English movie playing at the cinema. It was ok, but not the sort of thing that 14-year-old boys really enjoy. One of them just kept saying "suicide" about every 5 minutes (not because the movie made him feel bad, but because it often seemed like the main character might do herself in. And maybe because he wanted her to). I must say that I'm impressed with his English, if not with his movie-going manners.

After that I bought them all some ice cream at Baskin Robbins. Allmost all the flavors are just transliterations of English, so I had a pretty good idea what I was getting myself into. I tried papaya mango. It wasn't very good. I'd rather eat some dumplings.

Two more days of crazy work followed. On the last day (Tuesday the 30th) I felt pretty sick and drank an entire 2 liter bottle of OJ in an attempt to stave off further throat soreness. It worked, and by Weds I was feeling much better, and the bug had passed from me to the head teacher, Meg, who was still sick last time I saw her, on Friday.

Feeling slightly reborn on Thursday (due to newfound time and vigor), I went to the gym about 6 minutes walking distance from my house. Nobody could really explain to me what to do, so they gave me some clothes and showed me the locker room. Apparently they have a large stock of shirts and shorts there so that you don't have to bother bringing workout clothes and then carrying sweaty stuff around with you for the rest of the day. It's nice, but since I generally like to run to the gym to warm up, I don't think I'll need them.

This gym is not huge, but it's pretty sweet. Some treadmills, stair machines, stationary bikes (no ellipticals), lots of freeweights, a few machines, and best of all, 3 squash courts. And many squash players, all of whom, apparently, can count in English and say things like "good shot." The first day I went, there happened to be some woman there who spoke moderately good English, helped me sign up, and then promptly beat me 2-1 in three pretty even games. I later found out that she is the best woman squash player in the club. Given that I hadn't played since May (at which time I probably gave Adam L Winner a grand spanking), I wasn't too unhappy with my performance.

Saturday, I went downtown to meet some of the students in the "adult" class, which is quickly becoming my least favorite since 1) I feel that I need to teach them the most, since their parents won't force them to come if they don't like it; 2) I feel like they should be able to interact with me at a more intersting level; and 3) since their English is terrible (worse than some 5th graders) and they are very hesitant to talk to me. I don't feel right just babying them through really basic and boring sentences, but they all seem too ashamed to participate or speak up much.

Anyhow, I met one of them downtown at a bookstore and she helped me find a textbook for learning Korean. I also tried to find a lonely planet-type tour guide book, and the store had them for every country imaginable - except Korea. Totally bogus, right?

After that we went to a cafe' sort of place and she gave me a little lesson while we waited for her friend to get off work. Then we went to "Pizza mall," had some relatively lousy (but extremely cheap) spaghetti, and walked around for a while before going home. They also wanted to take some pictures. This is in that 2.28 park that I mentioned in my last post. This is also the only picture that was not terribly blurry do to cold, shaking hands. I don't know any of their names in korean, but the one to my right is Ariel in class and the one to the far left is Grace. The middle one is just a friend of theirs, and isn't a student of mine.

Other than all that stuff, I've been chugging through my anthology of "The Wisdom of India and China," have finished the section on Hinduism (selections from the Upanishads, an abridged Ramayana, and some other stuff) and am working on the Buddhism part right now. Aaaaaand I think I should go get to planning for classes.

왕따

That up there is the korean equivalent of "geek." It's pronounced wahngta. It's an appropriate title for my post because, well, I played starcraft with my middle-schoolers this weekend.

Starcraft, as I've said earlier, is rather huge here. There are starcraft-professionals who earn money to play. There are 2 channels devoted entirely to watching people play. They fill up arenas to watch people play on big TVs. It's crazy. One of the popular pasttimes among middle-schoolers is going to the PC 방, which are large, dark smoky rooms filled with rows of cubicles and computers, all of which are exceedingly fast and which have loads of games installed. One of them, of course, is Starcraft (obviously with the Brood War expansion pack installed). Apparently these kids, who study for about 13 hours a day between elementary and high school, come here on the weekends to play for hours on end. Pretty cheap, too - 50 cents per hour.

So, starcraft comes up in class every so often, either because the books mention it (seroiusly, the textbooks mention it) or because the kids are curious about the english meanings of words like corsair, pylon, photon cannon, seige tank, stim pac. When the kids asked me if I had ever played, I mentioned that there was a period in my youth when I was interested in such foolish things. They promptly challenged me to a cyberduel, and we agreed to meet on Saturday.

I fully expected to get my butt whooped, since I hadn't played in about 6 years, was never good to begin with, and since I expected these kids to be somehwere around the level of the pros that you see on TV...not that I watch them. Anyway, I paired up with "Tom" (I call them all by their english names, since I don't know the korean ones), and we squared off vs "Jeff" and "Alex." Tom was pretty much a total baller and protected me until I could create a mass of carriers, arbiters, observers, and dragoons with which to bash the crap out of my little protoges. Our communication consisted of him saying "teacher, go" and "teacher, stop." For several hours straight, we continously walloped the others.

After that, they asked me to go to one of their houses with them, so I cancelled my dinner plans with an American dude that I met and followed them home. His apartment was pretty nice (generally, only the relatively wealthy students can afford to come to private academies), very big and well-furnished, with many modern amenities, including a toilet seat the likes of which I had never seen. We played a bit of Korean monopoly, which was incredibly difficult since their basic unit of money is the manwon, or 10000 won. It's equivalent to 10 dollars, so when they talk about buying park place, they say that it costs something like ochonmanwon, which means 5000x10000 won. It didn't take me very long to realize that even with simple math like this, if the counting isn't done quite in your style, it can be quite confusing.

While we were playing, his mother brought us a large platter of dumplings, snacks, and fruit, and insisted that I sit upon numerous cushions. Teachers are apparently pretty revered here. After we had finished playing some other games, they took me to the living room, where the mother brought in some really delicious spicy chicken that she had ordered, and everyone watched as I attempted to eat it with chopsticks. Normally I'm ok, but as this chicken was both bony and covered in slippery sauce (the first necessitating lots of maneuvering and the second making said maneuvering nearly impossible), I am pretty sure that I wound up with some on my face, and am certain that some wound up on my crotch.

Another fruit platter followed, and then, for some reason, we all went out to a soup restaurant, where the mother bought 3 huge bowls of soup - one was sort of porridge, one chicken and rice, one pumpkin. All were pretty good. I don't really remember what we talked about for the whole time, though most of the time the kids were speaking Korean and occasionally trying to let me know what they were saying.

Oh yeah, the other highlight of this weekend was my purchase of a toaster oven. I managed to figure out that a certain sign under the floor model meant "out of stock," but also managed to ask enough times that finally someone went into the back and got one for me regardless.

Lunchtime - I've fallen into the habit of eating "kochukimbap," which is a sushilike dish made by putting rice onto a sheet of seaweed, adding yellow radish, egg, spinachy stuff, something called "fishcake," and several heaping spoonfulls of red pepper sauce, and then rolling it up. It costs $2, is pretty filling, and is probably healthy enough to make up for the delicious fried dumplings that often make their way onto my dinner platter.

Stomach bug, haircut

I had my first stomach trouble of my stay here this week. What did I eat, you ask? Was it 김치? 만두국? 붕오빵? No, it was not Kimchi or Manduguk or pungoppang. The culprit was 피자 and 지긴 텐더 - pizza and chicken tenders. And coke. No peppers, no weird fermented veggies, no unknown substances.

Speaking of unknown substances - I bought a bottle of aloe juice at the store. That stuff is delicious. It's got these little floating particles of aloe, almost like bubble tea, though not so nasty.

And the haircut. I went to the little salon on the 2nd floor, where for 7 bucks they cut my hair, shampooed me, and gave me a bit of "hair essence." There were 2-3 people stationed around me at all times, some of them speaking enough english to say things like "I wish your hair." They may also have been confused with my trogdor shirt, you know, since the dragon has manlegs, puny wings, and a big beefy arm coming out of his back. In any case it was pretty luxurious, but cost nothing due to a little something I like to call the Belassa-Samuelson effect. I learned about that in internationl macro class. pretty sweest stuff - for those of us in developing countries, anyway.

A Day Downtown

Ok, welcome to the most massive post I am likely ever to do. Thanks for reading all the preceding posts - the ones that dealt overall with nothing really new or exciting. To justify my sloth, though, I'd like you to take a look at the sign to the left. That's my bus stop. First of all, I never even knew how to get to the stop until that very morning. Second of all, it's completely incomprehensible, unless you happen to know both the korean language, the various names of all the places in the vicinity, and the word for "downtown." That means 3 immediate strikes for me; it's a miracle I even made it back to school to write about it. I suppose I owe it all to Cindy (I have no idea what her real/Korean name is), the secretary at the school who had to go downtown and who kindly escorted me to the bus stup. We met up at the school and she said to me: "Mike...[points at self] english no." Meaning that we couldn't talk too much on the way to the stop or on the bus, though we managed.

So, she helped me figure out how to take a bus back with the use

of her cell phone dictionary, we hopped on the ch'il-baek-sa (704), and went downtown. She dropped me off at a rather huge bookstore and went to hang out with some friends, leaving me to fend for myself.

(excuse the formatting here - the way you compose the page looks nothing like the way it comes out, and too many editing attempts have already resulted in the deletion of a picture. it showed a man pushing a huge cart of tangerines while surrounded by much more modern tradesmen)

At first I just wandered, formulating a plan so as not to get utterly lost. Eventually I realized that these yellow signs here take you to the underground shopping mall; once you know where your bus stop is in relation to that, you can pretty much wander around all you want without having to worry.

So, I scoped out the underground mall (see later pictures). At first I couldn't tell if it was a line, a circle, or a labyrinth, mostly because it seemed to have the same stores repeating over and over again. Camera shops, watch shops, clothes, cameras, watches, clothes, etc, etc. I eventually caught on to the esoteric numbering system (the gates are in a straight line, numbered 1-16) and understood that the whole setup is not unlike a little subway tunnel that runs directly under the streed. So when it's -8 celsius and lightly snowing (as it was), you can just walk underground and come back up when you need to. Quite nice.

After doing a few laps in the mall, I surfaced to roam the streets. Note that there are lots of cars all jammed into each other. The driving here is pretty rough - not quite as terrifying as sicily, but unappealing nonetheless. Lots of u-turns (in korea, "yu-teon") in the street, cars parked halfway on the sidewalk, etc. I haven't seen an accident yet though. Unless you count a drunk man falling off his motorcylce last night, and then being too woozy to lift it back up. I silently helped him out, only to see him almost get creamed by a car when he decided to resume his trip.

Alright, this here is a gigantic department store with an italian name rendered in Korean characters. In principle it's not any different than the same thing with american words (see burger king below), but let's just say it blew my mind. The store was closed though, so my mind was blown only by grammar, and not by, I don't know, the real world.

I discovered this little park by reading signs underground. It's called 2.28 memorial park, and 2.28 has something to do with chinese new year. I had actually seen picture of this place - when it's warm enough, this little globe is the centerpiece for a nice fountain. There is also a little stream running around the whole place that eventually leads to center here.

A picture of one of the main raods.

A picture of one of the many alleys in which people sell toys and clothes and blankets and foods and hats and etc for, I assume, pretty good prices. If you go into the dingier sort of alleys, you find much smaller and dirtier stalls, weirder foods (especially types of seafood), and little shops with 10 women sitting on the floor knitting.

This is one of the in-between allies; not surrounded by high fashion shops, but not quite reaching the rustic peasant depths discussed above.

This is inside the underground mall. It's Santa.

The benches people sit on are these shiny metal rods about 7 inches in diameter that stick into two little bricks in the ground. very uncomfortable. You'd think that if you can build a fancy mall underground, you could build a bench too.

Another picture of the mall. Notice that it is clean, bright, and shiny. You can't notice the following, but take my word for it: very warm.

By the way, these pictures are in chronological order, so you can tell that I went back and forth over the same ground a few times. I went into the mall whenever I needed to warm up, and them came back out somewhere else to explore again. This is a big TV which I saw from very far away, and which pulled me toward itself by means of a powerful and irresistable glow. It's on top of a 15 story building.

Ok, here's a bugerking. The korean letters say "Beo geo keeng"

The McDonald's across the street is "Maek do nal du su."

Really, though, they pronounce more like we do than the transliteration lets on.

Don't know how this picture got taken, but if you wanted a picture of the new pumas I got (for $22.50) before leaving the states, well, here's one of them.

Also, some new/used jeans from the bargain box for $3.00. You can't see the $2.00 purplish messenger back that I'm carrying, unfortunately.

This is the 2.28 park again, this time at night, conclusively proving that I braved several hours of cold to bring you all of these pictures.

Ok, now the scary part of the day. I felt pretty secure downtown once I had figured out how to get to my bus stop. But (remember the first picture), once I was on the bus, I was pretty terrified, since I had no clue where to get off. I kept listening for a certain phrase (ch'ilgok same kuchin, or something close), but never heard it, nor did I ever recognize any landmarks. Nonetheless, the bus came to the last stop, and when I tried to tell the driver that I didn't speak Korean, he just grabbed his stomach, made a pained face, and indicated to me that he really needed to head to the bus station to take care of some urgent business. Then he said goodbye, kicked me out, and drove off.

I paced for a few minutes, and got a vague feeling that I was in the right place. My real salvation (HA!) came when I noticed the little cross on the top of the building in the picture to your upper-left. If you are a real sleuth, you will remember me discussing a "jesus loves you sign" near my school. I put two and two together and started walking home.

On the way, I figured I'd take some other pictures of my area, with the night lights and what not. This last one goes out to a certain person who is self-admittely "like a racoon for the shiny."


Phew, time to go eat some beanfishbread stuff. It seems that I've been ending all of my recent posts that way. Maybe that's the next picture you'll get.

The Lost Posts

Thanks to the efforts of mom and grandma, you can now re-read those pages that you feared had been lost for all time. Actually, I'm not sure if all of them were recovered, in particular the tale of my encounter with the two ladies who claimed not to be Christians but who had me read to them about The Blessed Mother, Virgin Mary. Nonetheless shall all be able to fondly recall those first days when Mike coudln't speak Korean and could hardly order a hot dog. (I have now progressed to being able to sit down in a restaurant, alone, and then order various types of dumplings.)

I went downtown this weekend. I'll write about it on Thursday, probably, since I don't have the pictures with me now and since I don't have any time on Weds to do it.