See you in 4 months, world.

Tomorrow's the last day of my contract and I haven't time to type anything elaborate. It suffices to note that I'm ecstatic to be leaving this job behind me. I'll be back in the USA around Xmas. Here's the plan:

(remainder of) August: Japan
September: Philippines, China, Laos
October: Vietnam, Thailand
November: India
December: England, Spain, Holland

I doubt I'll be updating this blog. I've hit my image storage limit anyway.

Photo Essay: Cultural Differences

Jeju: Hallasan

Hallasan is the center of Jeju Island and, properly speaking, it is Jeju Island, being the highest bits of the volcano.  It's the tallest mountain in Korea and I wasn't going to leave without climbing it.

I rose early and boarded a bus to the park surrounding the mountain.  On board I met a Dutch tourist who was also planning an ascent, so we went together.  We climbed up the Gwaneumsa trail (8.7 km, mostly stairs) and down the Seongpanak trail (9.6 km, mostly uneven chunks of basalt).

The Gwaneumsa trail begins in a forest that looks like this.

Jeju: Seongsan Ilchulbong and Udo

On the east side of Jeju there's this antediluvian volcanic thing called Seongsan Ilchulbong, which name means something like "Holy Mountain Sunrise Peak," so it sounds like kind of a big deal but in practice it just means the village next to it has a lot of overpriced guest houses.  It's customary for tourists to wake real early and heave themselves up the rock to greet the dawn.

Seongsan Ilchulbong:  prepare to be mounted directly on the morrow by yours truly.

More random, weird Korean stuff.

3D Jesus.

Jeju: Loveland (not safe for work)

Jeju is an island south of the Korean peninsula sometimes called the Hawaii of Korea.  Both islands are shield volcanoes (Jeju is dormant) with economies based on tourism and exporting fruits (mostly tangerines and oranges in the case of Jeju).  Jeju has always been sort of independent from mainland Korea.  Locals speak a unique dialect and have historically had a somewhat different culture.

Jeju was on my list of places to see before leaving Korea behind.  It's conveniently only an hour by plane from Seoul, so I flew over and spent 3 days doing the tourist thing.  My first endeavor was a visit to Loveland, an erotic sculpture park outside Jeju City and the most infamous tourist trap in all Korea. 

Funny story:  Loveland is literally right next to the official, classy Jeju Museum of Art.  I took in Loveland first and browsed the Museum of Art afterward.  There's no bus stop to get back to the city and Loveland is the more popular attraction, so I needed a taxi and they were all waiting in Loveland's parking lot.  On my way to the gaggle of cabbies I was hailed from behind in English by a well-dressed young Korean man who turned out to be a Jehovah's Witness who hangs around outside this local monument of sinful prurience and struggles to press copies of the Watchtower into the hirsute, sweaty palms of debauched foreign tourists.

My frolic through Loveland is obviously a story best told in pictures.  Here some of them are, but a warning first:  this is definitely not safe for work and if you find erotic statuary distasteful these definitely are not the pictures for you.

Sokcho and Seoraksan

Seoraksan National Park is home to, and named after, Korea's most popular mountain.  It's on the east coast, 3 bus-bound hours from Seoul, next to Sokcho (a city).  Seoraksan is so dang famous I wanted to climb it before splitting Korea for good.  My lovely companion and I made it so one magical (highly arduous, actually) Saturday.

Yep, still funny.

Korean Food: Ddeok

Let's be frank:  ddeok is weird.  Also hard to pronounce.  The closest you can get in English is "dock."  The favored translation is "rice cake" and, I think, somewhat misleading.  It's not something a typical English-speaker would consider cake-like or recognize as being a rice product.  Still, that's what the locals insist on calling it.  (Can't teach them anything.)

The classic ddeok dish is ddeokbokki, which is what you see here with an added egg and noodles.  Normally there's just the red sauce (often painfully spicy), ddeok sticks (the tubular white things) and odeng (the flat stuff--it's a kind of fish cake).  An ubiquitous street food.

If I had to pick one word to describe ddeok, I'd go with chewy.   Two words?  Chewy, insipid.  All the flavor of ddeokbokki comes from the sauce.  Ddeok itself tastes like nothing. 

It's traditional in Korea for new hires to buy ddeok for everyone after they receive their first paycheck.  I don't know if this occurs outside education but it's definitely the rule at my school.  This semester there were several new teachers and I received a ridiculous amount of first-paycheck ddeok.  Two, three times a week I'd return to my desk after a class and find a little gift-wrapped box of glutinous blandness waiting for me.

Kimchi Field Museum

In one of the COEX mall's sub-basements lies the Pulmuone Kimchi Field Museum.  Pulmuone is a Korean food company that produces, among other things, kimchi.  I don't know why the place is called a "field" museum; perhaps because if you're there, you're in Korea, which constitutes being in the field for a scholar of kimchi studies.

Kimchi is a blanket term for vegetables soaked in brine and fermented and/or pickled.  I'm convinced it all began as a food preservation strategy because I can't bring myself to believe they did these things to enhance flavor.  There are something like 200 different kinds of kimchi but the most common sort is made with napa cabbage and red pepper paste.  When someone says 'kimchi' this is usually what they mean.  I end up eating it just about every day and it's probably the only kimchi you can find outside Korea, wherever you are.

Like most waygooks, I don't like kimchi.  Koreans think this is because it's face-meltingly spicy, which shows you how parochial their palates are.  Having eaten food from all over the globe as well as countless kilos of kimchi, I can assure you your first thought after chopsticking a slab of kimchi into your mouth will not be "this is spicy."  An average burrito is spicier than kimchi.  So are many other Korean dishes.  No, the reason waygooks dislike kimchi is that it tastes bad, viz. like fermented cabbage that's been soaked in salt water.

Korea's been trying to talk its way onto the world stage in recent years.  One of its tactics has been the promotion of Korean culture abroad.  See, for example, the humorously inapt Visit Korea Year (2010-2012) and various attempts to convince foreigners that Korea can make unique contributions to world culture.  If you ask a Korean what Korea has to offer the world, they'll probably mention the two products of Korean culture they're most nationalistic about:  Hangeul ("the world's most scientific alphabet") and kimchi ("the food of the future").  Hence the kimchi museum being bilingual.  Let's have some pictures.

Ironically, this ancient kimchi recipe is written with Chinese characters.

Facebook has declared war on prolixity.

Isn't it weird when you're lying in bed learning some Spanish and thinking about how you spent 2 hours of your own personal free time studying arithmetic and are pretty stoked about it, actually, and then you suddenly taste the cheap no-brand Hot Pocket(tm) you ate probably like 16 years ago (with the black olives, left over from when your mother had bought a few on sale and discovered your sister hated them) during that strange, dark period when you watched The Empire Strikes Back every night for several consecutive weeks?  I mean how can you summon such a specific, seemingly insignificant sense impression from so long ago and then recognize it?  And what, if any, connection exists between all these things?  Other than you (me)?  And isn't that the human condition right there.

One Week of School Lunches

Clockwise from rice:  roots and walnuts marinated in soy sauce, apple noodle cabbage thing, kimchi, pork vegetables ddeok, mung bean sprout soup.

Clockwise:  doenjang soup, french toast, toasted seaweed, leafy non-cabbage kimchi, banana, unmixed bibimbap.  The Korean race suffers an ancestral horror of unmixed bibimbap.  If you're at a Korean restaurant and look like you may not mix it, someone will come and do it for you.  Red stuff is gochujang (flavor sauce).

Clockwise from rice:  random greens, fried pumpkin thing, radish kimchi, chicken and potatoes, kimchi jjigae.

Clockwise from rice:  random greens:  the sequel, eggs marinated in soy sauce, kimchi, chunk of fish, pig bone soup.  The soup was pretty good actually but had fist-sized chunks of pig bone in it.

The rice is discolored because it was cooked with black beans.  Proceeding clockwise:  japchae (sweet potato noodles), I don't know but there was apple in it, kimchi, marinated quail eggs + meat + I don't know, soup with random vegetables and sea creatures (some whole, some in parts).

Busan: Incomprehensible T-Shirts

While visiting Busan we came across a collection of superb Engrish.  The pictures caption themselves.

I think the Translator hates me.

Or at least has no confidence in my ability (which I think quite fair).  I haven't written much about her because she hasn't been interesting; until recently she continued to translate nearly everything I say and be predictable and easy to work with.  She did once chastise me for pointing with my index finger but other than that it was smooth sailing.

This semester I teach the school's youngest students with her and she seemed to enjoy it.  She was indulgent and cheerful and real extra pleasant.  Then in April her behavior started to change.  She failed to appear for a few classes and when students asked me where she was I had to go fetch her from her office.

Soon she stopped having a good time and became less involved in our co-educational enterprise.  These changes were remarkable enough that I considered asking her about it.  I assumed she was tired or overworked, two common problems for employed Koreans, and thought maybe she'd appreciate some friendly concern.  But our relationship isn't a talking about personal situations sort of deal so I decided it would be wiser to stay out of it.  I wasn't going to hassle her.

Really, we all look alike to them.

I showed this picture to three classes today:

Remember how my students are hopelessly bad at recognizing diversity in foreigners?  In two of today's classes my first task was to convince everyone this is not a picture of me.  (The third class was a third grade class, which means they were all thinking it was a picture of me but not saying anything about it because contributing a potentially useful utterance to a classroom is devastatingly uncool in Korea when you're 15.)  One girl, upon accepting this as an image of a stranger, shouted "brother!"

Also, they're shallow.  I know, everyone is shallow.  But read this or this.  In the two classes willing to speak there were cries of "HANDSOME!" and "SO HANDSOME!" and "BIG MOUTH!!" which I had to quiet.  Even after I'd explained about how that fool isn't me.  (Students hassle me about being handsome every day, especially when they want something.)  Dang it Korea, you're supposed to laugh at the man's buffoonery not fall in love with him.

Actual conversation from yesterday apropos of nothing:
STUDENT:  Teacher... tall?
ME: How tall am I?
STUDENT:  [nodding]
ME:  187 centimeters.
STUDENT:  Oh! So handsome!

Busan: Temple with Ocean View

I've little interest in temples and this one is nothing special.  Great location though. 

This picture of the stone marking the turnoff for the temple was taken from the nearest bus stop, where it's like 20 torturous minutes between buses and you know if you hail a cab you'll see the bus in the rear-view mirror pulling up as you ride off.

Busan: Haeundae Beach

Behold:  mainland Korea's best beach.

The 2011 English Pop Song Competition

Seems the middle schools in the district hold English pop song competitions every year.  Being a local celebrity famous for my coziness with the English language, I was chosen to judge both auditions and final performances.  Auditions were weird.  At 0830 hopefuls came to my classroom and sang one unaccompanied minute of their songs to myself, Chortle, and a roomful of mixed-grade students.  You can imagine the horror of being 12 years old and singing a foreign-language song first thing in the morning in front of 2 teachers and two dozen strangers.

Singers scrupulously observed rests, including instrumental breaks, which makes for a real awkward a capella performance, let me tell you.  When their minute was up Chortle barked at them in Korean and they shuffled to their seats trying to hide their pantloads of terrorshit.  Some students sang in groups of 2-3, in which cases harmony was attempted.  This usually worked but is the only reason I can now say I've heard "Lemon Tree" sung in parallel tritones.  Well, technically it is harmony and the girls were so consistent that I have to think maybe they were just being avant garde.

For the final performances the school's English Day! banner--evidently unfurled for every extracurricular English event--was hung in the auditorium.  The festivities began with technical difficulties.  The auditorium's PA didn't work despite having been thoroughly tested.  Plan B was to broadcast the music over the entire school's PA at 78 rpm quality, which gets the sausage made, but at what cost?  Someone working the technology accidentally started "Dancing Queen" 3 or 4 times, which was cool because hey, ABBA!, but it turned into a huge tease when the girls who were slated to perform it no-showed.

Then there were the microphones.  They all had dirty/loose XLRs or something and crackled when jostled.  I started hating the very idea of the microphone after the first student stabbed "You Raise Me Up" into my eardrums singing straight out his nose.  I got a headache from the kid who wrapped his hand around the windscreen, held it to his lips and shouted into it.  I could see his carotid artery swelling with exertion.  He doubled over when he wanted to be louder still, like he was trying to use his pelvis for leverage against his diaphragm in a perverse quest for mechanical advantage.  And he did a wordless caterwauling thing I cannot adequately describe; it was simultaneously painful to hear and hilarious.  The applause he received was thunderous.  I couldn't tell whether it was ironic or if the crowd prized his total commitment.

Singers provided printed lyrics for the judges.  This was helpful because most of the time listening alone was incapable of determining which words were intended.  (No one was this much fun though.)  One song was performed twice and the two transcriptions didn't agree.  Is the line "sense of elation" or "since ovulation"?  The difference is huge, guys.  I also learned you can safely drop the f-bomb on your Korean middle school's principal and 5 of its English teachers because none of them will catch it.

All told, I'm glad this was my last English Pop Song Competition.  Being the Paula was hard work.

A boring story from someone else's job.

I laughed though, because it's my story and my job.  You may remember that I call one of my co-teachers Rose because she's about as quick as the dumb one from the Golden Girls (pictured).  Most of my co-teachers bring nothing to my classes but Rose likes to contribute in her own clumsy way.  Here's how our classes together have worked for the last 10 months:

1. Rose provides a cloze (fill-in-the-blanks) worksheet covering the textbook's dialogs.
2. I lead students through the textbook up to the first dialog.
3. I coerce students to listen and fill in the blanks.
4. I coerce students to say the missing words as I reveal them via PowerPoint.
5. Once the complete script is on screen Rose talks about it in Korean for 2-6 minutes.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 for the second dialog.
7. I coerce students to perform speaking exercises.

Busan: Haeundae Beach Love Motels

Went to Busan last month, took a lot of pictures, didn't even tell you about it.  Allow me to right this wrong starting with an expose of Busan love motels.  Your first question is undoubtedly "What's a love motel?" and I'm glad you asked!  A love motel is where Koreans/Japanese take their lovers for assignations.  Hourly pricing is often available and staying more than one night is discouraged.  Love motels are awesome because they're often cheap, typically clean, and frequently wacky.  

Korean Food: Jjigae

Jjigae means "stew," more or less, and it's served literally boiling hot in a special earthenware bowl.  I like most kinds of jjigae, especially after I've shoveled in a heap of rice to eliminate the soupiness.  All jjigaes, with the exception of doenjang jjigae, are made with gochu (red pepper) in either paste or flake form.  (They're spicy.)  They often share other ingredients, e.g. you're likely to find dubu and cabbage in other jjigaes, not just the sundubu and kimchi varieties.  Kimbap Paradise will serve you a bowl of jjigae with a side of rice for 4-5,000 won (like $4.50 tops).  You can do a lot worse.