A Place Somebody Calls Home

Still jet lagged, I found myself surreally surrounded by dark, viscous puddles and the disassembled brains of machines. My friend C___ balanced a clove cigarette in the corner of his mouth as he simultaneously grinded the inside of a power head and talked at me simultaneously about a new performance engine idea and the evils of socialism. He is, by both trade and interest, a mechanic. He runs a boat repair shop with his father that bears his family’s surname, which has always been both a point of pride and responsibility for him in the nine or so years since I have known him. In fact, I would say that this particular point of pride is what defines him most as an individual. He spends 15 hours a day on an oil-stained concrete floor surrounded by aluminum walls in meditative examination of boat motors. Is he happy doing it? I’m not sure, but he has already accepted this as his fate and he doesn’t seem too upset about it. He may be attached to the security it provides financially for him, or he might actually like the work. Whatever his motives are for doing what he does, seeing him for the first time in a year made the fact that I was in a town that has defined the way I think and who I am to a significant extent.

I intend to talk more about this friend in a later post, but I would like to use this post as a sort of introduction to a series of posts about North Webster, Indiana—a place that is both magnificent and monotonous, and of utmost importance to my development as a human being. I hope the writings to follow are of more interest than this one is.

Good God Sauce

Well, I've finally crossed another culinary experience off my stay in Korea, aside from eating live octopus and several other more minor meals in which I've partaken, but this was certainly the most humbling and painful one to-date.
A friend and I meet up during the week occasionally in Cheonho to eat out. Last time, we agreed to have sample some of the street fare that is on most streets throughout Seoul. I had commented to him previously that I had been unimpressed with the spicyness of the food in this country, as I had heard a lot about it before I arrived. It seems as though everything is slightly spicy, but nothing incapacitating, nothing mouth-blistering, nothing caustic. Tonight, I have gained a new respect for the Korean ability to create gut-dissolving food.
My God! It's been over two hours and I still can't think properly. The pain on my lips and in my mouth is gone, but the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is just beginning.
My friend had been to this stand that sells chicken on wooden skewers before, saying that they have some extremely hot food. I believed him, but I was not prepared for the undertaking properly. He pointed up to a sign and says, "There it is. 'The King of the King.' You want to try to order it?"
I agreed since ordering food is one of the only things I know how to do semi-properly in Korean, and I wanted to get a bit of practice. The woman looked at me and began saying something in Korean trying to discourage two obviously ridiculous foreigners from making a mistake. My overconfidence was just that-- overconfident. The ladies were right. They made them up for us and dipped it in the napalm, which had a separate area on the counter that was quite a distance from the rest of the more mild sauces.
As she handed them to us, her and the other ladies kept their eyes on us while we took a bite. The first bite was pretty hot but tolerable. As you may know, super hot food takes a few seconds to really reveal its whole effect. After the second bite, my mouth had little feeling, my lips hurt every time I spoke, and every other system in my body was beginning to shut down. My nose was running, my forehead was covered in sweat, and I was crying. The ladies did their best, handing me a cup of water to quell whatever pain was left that my damaged nerve endings could muster, but it didn't work. I was permanently damaged from the experience.
We walked around Cheonho for a while sweating it off, and the rest of the planned street food banquet came pretty much to a halt after the next stop, which was good by itself.
I was going to go out a little more this evening, but I think I'll pass. I'm going to stay at home with my milk
King of the King is a good name for that death chicken. I would have called it Almighty Murderous Despot of Hades, if I had my way.

Learning Korean

Korean is an extremely difficult language to learn, at least for me. I have no prior experience with any Asian languages, and for that matter Korean is much different than, say, Mandarin Chinese or Japanese. Some of the vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese, while some of the grammatical structure is apparently similar to that of Japanese. I've had a long-standing goal of trying to pick up the native tongue of my students and the people that I see on the streets on a daily basis, but it has been less fruitful than I have hoped. It is nearly impossible for me to take formal classes as a result of my work schedule, and as a result of my lack of formal classes, my ability to learn Korean has been thwarted by a lack of pragmatic usage of the language.
I have a textbook and a dictionary, so I can learn particular words and phrases by reading it (my reading ability is existent, but still quite insufficient), but I when I try to use the phrases I butcher the pronunciation. Nevertheless, I still haven't given up on figuring out how to communicate with the vast majority of people around me that speak little or no English.
I did come across something today that might be promising for increasing my ability to contextually use the language. This company called Pimsleur makes language tapes for several different languages, including Korean. I know, learning languages through tapes is certainly not ideal, but I did the first lesson and it actually seems like it might be a way to increase my unpleasantly-low level speaking skills. I'm going to try to ride out the ten lessons that I have until I have exhausted them, and then maybe I'll have some type of framework for learning more of the language. I hope this is the case because it's really bothering me that I cannot understand people that are trying to speak to me, and that my usable vocabulary is limited to a few phrases that I find myself repeating constantly.

Drinking on the Heavy

I've almost killed the fire pit that had been living at the back of my throat, so I made an effort to get out today. When I get sick like that, I always tell myself that I'm going to make these drastic life changes so that I don't get sick like that. No more nights without sleep because of staying out, no more smoking, no more not exercising everyday. I might very well be able to do some of those things. I have been, for example, making more of an effort to exercise everyday, and I'm not doing too bad at that.
As far as not staying up, I don't do that very well. When I drink, I feel like life is much shorter than it already is, and that I must press through sleepiness to get the most out of it. This is, of course, an alcohol and dance music induced delusion that I develop. I'll walk down to the Metro convenience store outside of my apartment at 2:30 in the morning to purchase another bottle of soju about an hour after everyone has left and gone to bed because of morning obligations that we all have. I rarely have problems making it to work when I do this, which is once every couple of weeks, but my head feels like someone was throwing kitchen appliances at it while I was sleeping. This makes sense to me, because whenever I have people over, it seems like every dish, kitchen utensil, and food appliance has been scattered around the apartment in a tornadic, ecstatic food consumption adventure. And it's always worse than it seemed to be when I went to bed.
Well, Jasmine, my friend from university, is coming into town this evening, and I cannot wait for it to happen again. On the telephone, she said, "well, I'm wearing a skirt, so we have to really go all out tonight." Alright then, to the bottle! I cannot, for one second, consider being a bad host by not punishing my body for being sick. Immune system, you brought this on the whole family. Not being able to drink for nearly my entire summer break is your charge.

Jirisan

Sam, Ju-Hi, Derek and I went to Jirisan on Tuesday. Daycations like this are the reason that I enjoy being in Korea. Seoul has it's good points, and there are many, but something refreshing occurs in one's self when they leave the soot- and smog-smeared air of the city for the Korea in which the other Koreans live. That's not to say that other Koreans don't live in other cities as well. They do. That's just not how I imagine it. In fact, most Koreans now live in the cities, and about half of them live in Seoul or the surrounding metropolitan area.
The bus ride seemed much longer than it actually was-- just under four hours. My throat was sore from a previously acquired sickness that I had not yet worn off, and that had almost ruined the prospects of me taking any trip further than The Metro, the convenience store outside of my apartment building, for hydrating supplies like water and iced coffee. I came with one adequately packed daypack (see below) that I had gotten from Itaewon several months ago. My inventory included the following: a daypack, multi-purpose Victornox knife, compass, swim trunks, extra shirt, money, desk notebook, pocket notebook, horrible camera, two pens, toothbrush and toothpaste, deodorant, medicines and bandages, Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume, Korean Language Book, cap, sunglasses, and a built in Camelpak for water. I tried to minimize, but this is what I ended up taking. It was just about everything I needed, and it seemed to work out quite well, in the end.
After the bus ride, we got into town and had some delicious pork dish with a bunch of vegetables. I neglected to take any pictures of the food, but it was quite good, and there were, I think, 12 dishes in all. One of the best things about Korean food is the variety of food that one receives with each meal. Jirisan, according to Ju-Hi, is known for is known for people with a culinary prowess. I happen to agree.
When we got to the park, we started hiking almost immediately. We went into the trail, which looked something like a "Charlie in the trees" scene from every movie dramatizing the Vietnam war, not to mention the fact that Derek and Sam had bought these ridiculously large-brimmed straw hats from an outfitter down the road from the restaurant where we ate.
The amount of wildlife in this park was more than I had seen anywhere else in Korea, including the venture to Songnisan. Songnisan, however, had a much better temple. The streams are equipped with miniature waterfalls, and are particularly inviting. The water felt about a few degrees above freezing, but it was still worth it to get in, if not for anything else but the draw of novelty and the need to operate on our lizard brains, as other smaller-minded ancestors of the human race have likely done for a very long time. That's part of the reason I enjoy hiking so much. It synergizes several tasks into one, while making each more enjoyable. It can be exercise, meditation, therapy, sport, concentration, and survival all rolled into one. Once you've walked for a period of time that you deem to be substantial, and then you see something beautiful that you didn't expect to see, you have no questions about whether or not it was worth it to do all of the work that it took to get wherever you have gone. It's not necessarily about reaching the summit (although that is a reward in it's own right), but rather, it is about getting somewhere, and not having gotten somewhere. Oh yeah, and you see how absolutely crazy nature is.
After we decided that it was a good idea to turn around because of the massive thunderstorm that was about to ensue, we saw one of the coolest things I have ever seen an animal do. There was this snake, about 2 feet in length that had just brushed off the trail because it had heard us coming down. In it's mouth was half of a frog with its front legs and head sticking out of the mouth of the snake. Well, needless to say, we knew that this was a good opportunity to get some photos of this fair-weather enemy of humans, the (possibly) death-inducing, venomous snake that had too much to eat. We spent a few minutes trying to get pictures of it while we put peace signs directly above predator and prey. I shall not say anymore about this, suffice it to say that Sam did get video, and with his permission, I will be posting it here at a later time.
It started raining as we were exiting the park and trying to get back to the bus terminal to go back to Seoul. The cab driver took us to the train station instead, telling us that there were no buses to Seoul for the rest of the day, and that we'd have to take trains. I'm glad he did that. having never traveled on a train before. I intend to do so in the future, and frequently. Also, I need to get to the mountains again. I'll work on it.

My throat's on fire, my lungs are at about half-capacity, and I want to stay in bed, but instead I'm going on a pretty long day hike in 지리산 (Jirisan).
This should be pretty, pretty, pretty. I'll post some pictures later.

Arriving in Korea

The elderly country lady at the Wal-Mart checkout lane asked me what the jar of fermented cabbage that I had in my hand was.

“It’s gim-chi,” I said, “It’s something that they eat with every meal in Korea. I’ll be moving there in about a month.”

“Why on earth would you want to do that?” she asked, completely ignorant of any information of the aforementioned nation. Her eyes bugged out and she expressed a kind of disdain that showed no knowledge of what Korea was actually like. For that matter, I had no idea what it was like at the time, other than what I had read about it on the internet.

I trolled the internet for any information whatsoever that I could sponge about this place before I got there, so as to have some understanding about the place before I stepped off the plane. I found a decent amount. In fact, when I actually arrived at the school, I experienced an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu that was aided not only by 72 hours with virtually no sleep (I cannot sleep on planes.) and the fact that I had seen actual pictures of the school before.

After waiting far too long for my luggage, I changed the last of my American dollars into Korean won and walked out of the international terminal into the main lobby of Incheon Airport. There were dozens of people waiting with signs for other people. I spotted my man pretty easily. He was wearing a chauffer’s hat and was holding a large, white sign that said “Mr. Cox.” I met him in the visitor’s area, letting him know that I was his man. He asked me, “Do you need lestaloom?” I asked him to repeat himself, “Do you need lestaloom?”

Ah, yes! Restroom.

“No, I don’t but do you mind if I smoke a cigarette before we get in the car?” It had been over 16 hours since I had smoked a cigarette, and that was the first thing on my mind. After that, we were on the highway into Seoul.

It was dusk, and the cars on the freeway were going about 120kph, in a 100, I think. I'm don't remember exactly, other than the fact that he was flooring it. All of the cars, with the exception of some Mercedes and Audi imports, were Korean, and everything was uniform. Everyone was in a limousine bus, a silver or black taxi, or taxi vans, just like myself.

The closer I got to the city, more signs for the big companies, like LG, Samsung, and Hyundai were posted on the sides of large buildings. The Han River was on the left of the highway, covered in fog, on both sides of the river was endless cityscape. It looks like different cities pieced together in an infinite mosaic metropolis, which is what Seoul essentially is. Once we got closer to the buildings off of the freeway, the buildings’ corporate signs were intertwined with that of high fashion advertisements, for Armani, Deisel, Burberry, and countless other brands.

The ride was over about an hour and a half in. I pulled into an alleyway and met a man named Mr. Kwan that had been waiting in a yellow school van. I get out, try to grab my luggage, and greet the person I assume to be my superior at the school. He knew enough English to say, “I do not speak English.” I knew, at this point, that I was in for something.

He took me upstairs to a motel room, which I mistakenly assumed was my apartment until I spoke to the director of the school on Kwan’s cell phone. I later found out that it was actually a motel where businessmen would meet prostitutes on the lowdown, which was pretty disgusting considering I had to stay there. Some pleasant exceptions presented themselves like fact that I had a new toothbrush, two bottles of water, a coffee and a juice waiting for me every morning when I arrived back until I got my apartment.

I was hungry after traveling too, and I knew I was going to need breakfast. I asked Kwan for food. He did not understand. I said p’ang and motioned to my mouth, and he kind of understood. P’ang is the word for bread in Korean, and bread is what I got. I went to sleep for a couple of hours, and then I went to school. That was the moment I became a resident of Korea.