The Return

My last post, in October of last year, immediately preceeded Father’s Night — a sort of comical dog-and-pony show that we prepared the children for for weeks by drilling them on silly 6 year old academic trivia and dances choreographed to within inches of their lives.  It went well; I survived it; and spent another 5 months in Korea, with a brief trip home over Christmas, very happily.  At the end of my contract, my friend Denise and I flew to China and rendezvous’d (how the holy fuck do you spell that word?  Good thing this is not something my babies will ever need to know…) in Shanghai.  We spent about 32 days wandering vaguely northward through the Shanghai near-burbs and then to Nanjing and Xi-an before ending with a week in Beijing.  I could spend many hours and gigabytes of pictures talking about China [2.3 gigs, to be precise] so I’m going to skip it for now but if anyone is curious, leave me a comment; I’ll happily reminisce some other time!

I then flew back to the States, by way of 5 days in Seoul for a friend’s 30th birthday party, and toured the states for the better part of a long and lovely summer.  When my brother and I started looking for jobs teaching abroad, Seoul seemed rather low on the list simply because I’d done it before, but after thinking over the offers we’d received in China and Indonesia, and getting no hooks bitten in Vietnam, we decided to come back to what I knew and loved.  So here we are, back in downtown Seoul, teaching English to adorable babies and busily avoiding any thoughts of our future!

Arrival

We landed at Incheon Airport on October 5th at about 5:30pm.  Clearing immigration and customs in a preposterous 17 minutes and getting our bags not long after, I called the new assistant manager at our school to tell him that we were on our way — evidently, as I’d been at PSA before, the principal had no inclination to send a car to pick us up and instead had someone meet us at Hamilton Hotel, not far from the school.  Kris met us at the Hamilton and took us straight to the apartment, a fairly sweet two bedroom in Haebangchon with a big living room, a decent kitchenette [nothing like my washing-machine obstructed monstrosity of last year!] and several rooms whose purposes were obscure.  More on that later.  We looked around, said ‘Thanks,” and bid Kris adieu; before being informed that rather than the five days swine flu quarantine we’d been hoping for, or at least the one day vacation for Chuseok we’d been expecting, school actually began the next morning.  So it was bedtime!  And at 9am the next day, I met my new students — Dolphin Class!

[quick left to right: top row, Clara, Bio, Cho Young, Sean L, Michell, Sean B, June

bottom row, Angela, Yuna, Dash, Justin, Eric, Jenny]

Dolphin Class and Father’s Night

My students this year are level 7-3, which means that they are in their third and final year of English language pre/kindergarten.  They will be starting elementary school in only five months, and are as near to fluent as it could possibly be reasonable to expect from six year old students whose English exposure has come only at school.  I knew all but one of them last year in Orion and Mercury classes, and was super-excited to meet them, although a bit disappointed not to have my own students from Koala Class last year.  They are spectacular!  Not, perhaps, as incandescently cute as last years’ bunch, but fun to talk to, fun to play with, fun to teach, and finally I can understand what they say to each other!

I was excited as hell to begin, but from the beginning there were two notable obstacles to both easy incorporation into the classroom and my general sanity.  The first was the history of the 2009 Dolphin Class; from March to October, the class had six consecutive foreign teachers and three assistants.  One of the departing foreign teachers even pulled a Midnight Run, meaning that she departed with zero warning and left the class without even a planned substitute to help fill in the holes.  Basically what this meant were that the students were disciplinarily mindfucked and their mothers were pissed as hell.  To add to this was the fact that, as you might have surmised from the timing of my last post last year and this renewed attempt, Fathers’ Night was scheduled for 19 days from my arrival; exactly 15 days of class time to get to know the Dolphins, develop a level of personal and disciplinary comfort between us that would allow us to prepare for this huge presentation without friction, and do it all in such a way as to satisfy already furious, crazy Korean mothers whose expectations in the best of times rivaled those of Broadway musicals.

A tall order!

This is Dash.  He is a baller, and an unholy hunk of muscle in a tiny baby body.  He also seems more than slightly skeptical of me at this particular moment; bonding with six year olds while maniacally forcing them to memorize mountains of random speeches is unsurprisingly difficult.

The basic outline of the Fathers’ Night program was this;

-Introductory Message [memorized, of course] followed by a Dolphins are #1 Chant

-Song, Sunday Afternoon by Mecco.  No need to abuse yourself figuring out what this is, but suffice it to say that you should not, in fact, forget the green umbrella.

-Theme Presentations — each Dolphin talked about one of the overarching themes we’ve discussed this year, including food and health, animals, earth and conservation and transportation

-Two games, one a sort of theme trivia game with a sticky velcro dart and a huge dart board and the other a game of ‘Memory’ matching world countries to their capitals and then having the students put flags onto a huge map of the world [that I made out of felt!]

[you know you like that articulation around the Chesapeake!  i miiight have done a radical Canada-ectomy because there were way too many northern islands.  sorry guys.]

-Song, A Whole New World obvi from Aladdin.  This was a good song and it went over well but dear god getting the boys and girls’ overlapping entrances synchronized was a job for someone who doesn’t hate Disney songs…

-Poems for Dads written by the kids, and finally we’re done!

So anyway, three weeks pass absurdly quickly because I hardly teach; it’s just a lot of practicing, a lot of singing, some playing and a little bit of daily writing and oral language practice each day.  Cutting to the chase, the actual night went utterly satisfactorily; apparently the mothers were, though generally furious with PSA, actually quite excited to have me as they knew me last year, and so expectations were not as unreachably high as had been suggested to me when I arrived.  Now, some pictures of the event itself:

Empty, but almost there…

The tension heightens!

Nicole takes a quick break from MAKING MY LIFE INSANE to make a stupid face!

The wall outside our classroom.  Looking good, yes?  Indeed it does.  However, it was also constructed in about 19 frantic insane minutes immediately before the fathers’ arrival when Nicole [see above] decided that the writing samples and artwork that my coteacher, Dominic, and I had put up were insufficient loveliness.

June and Clara looking awesome!

Yuna and Bio looking cute. 

Jenny belting it out during her theme presentation on the Earth and conservation.

Michell, who is absolutely delightful when not on stage and frozen like a popsicle right now… and Sean L, known in better circles as That Demon Who Shall Not Be Named.  If he makes it through the year without a trashcanning a week I’ll be shocked.

And finally, Sean B — smart as hell, and what a know-it-all, but a really good kid, closing things out with sports and the seasons.

Fathers’ Night went off without a hitch, and I’m still alive!  Obstacle #1 is still a concern in my life, but as far as I can tell, the Dolphin parents are quite happy with my presence and style and won’t make too much of a fuss if we keep things on an even keel.  Here’s to hoping…

And the rest of my time here!

As usual in this country, the majority of my time has been spent teaching, reading, or drinking.  It’s been fun introducing Zach to the people and places I remembered the best, but I won’t write about them now, because most of them are debaucherous and I’ll save that for another time.  We have, however, done some really cool things.

Last weekend we walked about 30km over Saturday and Sunday.  On Saturday we started wandering vaguely, quite of our own accord, down towards the Han River, and ended up walking down through Itaewon to the river, around through Ichon along the Han River Park until we found the 63 building, and then back up through Ichon to Yongsan Family park and home before meeting some coworkers for galbi.  Sunday we headed up through the mountain to Jongno and along Insadong, the best market for traditional Korean crafts, to the CheongGyeChong, the renovated stream that runs through downtown Seoul.  We ended up hitting both Changdeokgung and Gyeongbukgung, the two major palace complexes downtown, and taking a lovely nap on some benches…

There are some stunningly beautiful places at both, including this summer residence and contemplative pool in the Secret Garden of Changdeokgung.

Best of all, we caught the changing of the guard at Gyeongbukgung!  Who knew there were enough heavily bearded, 6’2″ Koreans to staff an entire palace guard…?

And this last weekend, we made our way about an hour and twenty minutes north to Bukhansan, the northern Shield Mountain of ancient Korea.  Bukhansan is a huge national park by Korean standards, about 80 sq.kms, and contains three fairly stunning peaks; we climbed Baekundae, the highest of the three at about 890m.

On our way up there!

Looking an awful lot like fall from up here.

A little detour to a small temple and a lovely fortress gate, complete with dragon-bell.

It does not seem possible that that color actually exists!

This is the second-tallest peak in Bukhansan, Insubong. If you look closely, you can see dozens or hundreds of Koreans swarming the top; an impressive feat, as it is a sheer thumb of rock rising over 150m. They get decked out in harnesses and climb set lines like spiders; men, women, kids, and the elderly. It is astonishing. One ceases to question E.Asian longevity after visiting Korean public park areas.

And finally, a sort of anticlimactic shot from the near-top of Baekundae; unfortunately, given how stunningly beautiful the climb was, the air was just hazy enough to make long-shot scenic views pretty much impossible. Take my word, however, for the fact that Bukhansan is one of the more physically beautiful and astonishing places that I have been.

Good climbing, Zachary Teacher!

Much love to family and friends. Hope you’re all doing well!

Hanbok Day – Real Korean Koala Kids

Ethan, Jason, Rusty, Alex B – To my right, the Coalition of the Willing, to my left, the Axis of Evil.

Not really fair how much better Claire gets to look in Hanbok than I do. I didn’t ask to be dressed like a huge pink marshmallow.

The girls learning to bow. “Hana, due, SET!”

Changdeok Palace

Last weekend Lindsay and I decided to be tourists. This is the most attractive of the palaces in downtown Seoul, including a huge “Secret Garden” behind the palace administrative complex.

The “Blue House”. Very apt.

Dusty.

Uhh, myspace?

Look, it’s a Star Destroyer painted by the Koreans!

This garden / pond was constructed to represent the universe, in its entirety. I suspect a slight element of reductionism.

Lot of bad pictures were taken of me that day. This is one I can live with.

Panmunjom – The DMZ Tour

What a bizarre experience. Equal parts Asian Disneyland, bad joke and war zone, the DMZ can’t really be explained in terms larger than the sum of its parts. For instance:

This is a North Korean guard tower. We were firmly instructed not to look at it, gesture at it, or engage in any activity that could possibly be construed as signaling. Apparently, while on the portion of the tour that steps across the border for a moment, N.Korean guards are occasionally prone to making obscene gestures at tour groups to try to provoke a response. Sadly we missed this.

This is how ROK border soldiers stand. 60% of their body is hidden behind the building to reduce their profile in a shooting scenario, but they must nonethless maintain a rigid modified Taekwondo stance — as a means of intimidation — at all times, sunglasses on, hands balled into tight fists.

This is the scary pose from the front. This guard, and myself, when I took the picture, were both inside N.Korea; his express role is to physically prevent any attempts to pass through the doorway behind him in defection or espionage. Apparently he can punch really hard.

Background; North Korean Hospitality Center.

Welcome to the DMZ.

I’m going to go back to bed. But here’s some of my life lately in pictures.

Heartponies,
Ben

In loving memory

My grandfather died nine days ago. He was a strong, amazing man, and he’d had a very hard year; a lot of health problems after a life, and an old age, of remarkably good health. I’ve written a lot about him in other places, but I probably won’t here. All my love, Baba.

The Koalageddon

I knew it was coming, but I chose to ignore impending doom; both Ethan and Andrea, two of my favorite Koala boys, left the class for good last week. Ethan was finally accepted to international school [though Korean, he was born in New York and is therefore eligible, and his family wants to return to the states in the next few years] and Andrea moved to Jamsil. To make matters worse, Fathers’ Night is in two weeks, and knowing PSA, I’ll probably get two new clueless students dumped in my lap tomorrow. We had a cute going away party for Ethan, and his mom promised to bring him by PSA every once in a while to say hello; he really is one of the cutest, sweetest children I have ever met.

Not only that, my favorite afterschool student, Sue 2 [mmhm, her name is Sue 2] left on Monday; her mom couldn’t afford SuperElite classes. My private student, Andrew, moved with his family to Bundang on Wednesday. Trish had her going away party Monday and left for Australia Wednesday; she’ll be heading to Bali tomorrow to begin a 14 month grand tour of Asia, starting in India and backpacking up through China to Russia and then down the E. Asian coast. It really was a week of endless goodbyes.

Hanbok Day

150 kids in full Korean ceremonial regalia; Benjamin Teacher, in borrowed wedding hanbok, looking like a fluffy pink marshmellow wrapped in a vest [also pink!]; lessons on bowing, tea pouring, tea drinking, and… arrow throwing; this was a day for the ages. I really cannot imagine what possessed the ancient Koreans to invent the single ugliest clothing concept in existence and declare ‘we’ll get married in these!’ The best part, for my money, was watching the kids try to restrain themselves from eating the tea-cookies while learning to pour. The lessons were all in Korean, which activated their deep and powerful Asian Respect complexes; nonetheless, five year olds and cookies go together much like milk and cookies, which is to say that they get mushy and messy and quickly filled with cookie bits.

So tired

I’m going to commit here to writing tomorrow, because I’m falling asleep. Items for future consideration;
- Benjamin Teacher, what have you been doing with yourself for the last six weeks?
- The Panmunjom; Korean Demilitarized Zone tour, and thoughts on how very very bizarre it is.
- This weekend; Seoul Drumming Festival, Itaewon street fights
- Shantaram
- Assorted things?

Love and exhaustion, Ben

John Brown’s Chevy Creeps Me The Fuck Out

The PSA Theme this month is ‘Transportation and Safety’, and it so happens that one of the theme songs on our CD is ‘John Brown’s Chevy.’ It’s a song about John Brown’s Chevy, and you do a sort of B.I.N.G.O thing where you drop words as you sing… okay, so far so good.

To the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic:
John Brown’s Chevy has a puncture in its tire
John Brown’s Chevy has a puncture in its tire
John Brown’s Chevy has a puncture in its tire
And he patched it up with chewing gum.

But begin removing words, and the song becomes… creepier. And thus:
John Brown’s _________ has a ________ in its __________
And he __________ it up with ______________ .

I’m sorry, but that is filthy. Dirty filthy. Get it out of my classroom!

More Picture Whoring

Another awesome Beach Day shot – I promised Benjamin Teacher tossing children in the air, and here he is!

Teaching Terry to use a water gun.

This is completely gratuitous, but I honestly like this picture mostly because it makes me miraculously tall and skinny.

The V-victory fingers are a plague.

And now to find some way to entertain myself for a bit.

Peace.

Today was Beach Day, and yes, it was as glorious as it sounds… although not, in point of fact, in any way reminiscent of a beach with the exception of lots ‘o water. Ryan – with occasional help from me, Andy, Doug, the front desk ladies, and a baby – built a big swimming pool out of PVC piping and plastic on the playground, and throughout the day classes got to go out and get ridiculous. They’ve been excited for this all week; yesterday was particular amusing, as the seven-year-old classes had their Beach Day before ours, and we got to watch them out the window. At the end of the day I reminded them to bring their water guns [god damn it's nice to teach in a country with no respect for modern political correctness] and they got so wide-eyed:

- “Teacher! Water guns? REALLY?!”

*mumble mumble Korean mumble Korean mumble*

- “Hurraaaaay for swimming!”

So this morning they all came in with swimsuits, and bathing caps [don't ask], and water guns, and spare clothes, and towels, and beach balls, and floaties, and I really wanted to point out to their absent parents that we were climbing into a shallow pool, for thirty minutes, 47 total steps from our classroom, but it was just cute enough to forgive the silliness.

If only Alex B weren’t such a punk, I think he’d be #3 on my kidnapping list.

Cute-euh.

I jumped in with them after about ten minutes, so hopefully in the near future there will be pictures to be found of me tossing babies left and right in my dripping clothes, but they’re not on my camera so who knows.

Benjamin Teacher and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I was too wiped out by this to write about it when it took place, but I want to put it in writing before I forget altogether. Last Monday was a procession of such utter badbadbadness that I kept looking around for video cameras; finding none, I began praying for more disasters, just to get them out of the way on a day that had already gone to shit and far beyond. In timeline form:

8:55am – I arrive at PSA, fresh off a great weekend, well-rested, coffee in hand. Nicole meets me outside my classroom looking a bit nervous, which is never a good sign, and tells me that a new student has just been added to Koala class. This makes twenty students; the theoretical maximum class size, making us the largest class in PSA. But, credit where credit is due, Terry seems like a very sweet boy and is excited to meet his new classmates.
9:05am – New student number two out of three [aka #19] arrives for her second day at PSA. She promptly begins to scream, a sort of rattling wail that waxed and waned but never actually ceased between the time her mom walked out the door and, say, noon.
9:47am – Students #18 and #20 are doing well, happily enjoying their snack of nasty rice cakes, and #19 has settled down a bit when Andrea decides he doesn’t like snack at all. He makes his point emphatic by vomiting said snack over four tables.
9:48-9:50am – Three other students, prompted by an uncertain mezcla of the taste of rice cake, the scent of vomit, and the sight of vomiting, follow Andrea’s example. Emily makes it to the bathroom, Justin some of the way down the hall, and Aileen only as far as her own shoes.
10:10am – Thankfully, our schedule had us in Art class at 10am, so we didn’t have to remain in the puke emporium. So we’d been happily painting away when Andrea [yes, same Andrea... kid had a rough day] talks back to the Korean art teacher in some fashion. She is normally very chill, and somehow lost it this once, taking him out into the hallway to scream for several minutes. When they return, I discover that she has so terrified the kid that he pissed himself!
10:30am – Having taken Andrea downstairs to change his pants, I discover that the classroom still smells exactly as before, and we can’t even open the windows as they’re spraying for bees’ nests outside. Picking up the Koalas from the Art room, they all have big paintings held out carefully in front of them. Elli makes it three steps down the stairs before tripping on herself and proceeds to *thump thump thump* stair by stair, on her face, all the way down to the landing. She leaves perfect prints of her Leo the Lion painting on every step as she bumps by; thank god, she was fine, nothing more than a couple of bruises. But the lions stuck around for days.

It couldn’t get any worse than this! ….close, but no cigar.

9:35pm – Riding the subway back from Beomgye where my private kid lives, I was doing what I do on subways; chilling, head down, book open, headphones in, when a teenager picks me to faint upon. Uh huh. Suddenly there were about 140 pounds of deadweight Korean on my skull.

If I had access to opium, that seriously would have been the night for it.

Adulthood?!

A decision was made the other night that is incontrovertibly correct, mature, and emotionally sound.

And I completely dislike it.

I may elaborate later or not, more likely the latter.

Anyway, ciao, off to get some delicious dinner.

Watch me go.

Temple Trotting Like It Was My Job

Gyeongsanbuk-do, where I spent my vacation, is fairly famous throughout Korea as the heart of its historical legacy, preserved far better here in the form of temples, shrines, and artifacts, than anywhere else in a country that has suffered a really inconsiderate run of invasions, burnings, uprisings and the like. I started in Daegu, where two of the best temple complexes remaining in S.Korea are accessible as day trips. The first, Haeinsa, is astounding primarily for the library it contains; the entire 81000-some woodblock collection of the Tripitaka Koreana, the complete teachings of Korean Buddhism, inscribed in the 12th century and preserved ever since. The structure that contains the Tripitaka was itself constructed some 450 years ago, but was such a miracle of foresight and ventilation-engineering that, two decades ago when the Korean dictator Park…something-or-other spent millions on a high-tech library facility with state of the art antiquities preservation equipment, five of the woodblocks were moved as a test case and immediately began to molder. I wasn’t hugely impressed by Haeinsa itself; it nestles too deeply into the valley, and doesn’t manage quite the feeling of complete harmony that I experienced at several other temple sites. It does, however, offer access to several small hermitages that made my breath catch in my throat.

PICTURE BREAK

Absolutely gorgeous painting hidden deep in the eaves of a shrine. Required some artful balancing to get close enough for this picture.

The Tripitaka Koreana. Appearances to the contrary, you can’t actually walk up and touch them; I had to take this picture squeezing my camera through the bars of an ancient wooden access grate.

A stunning ancillary temple some three kilometers hike above Haeinsa. I got myself lost, as I am wont to do, and found a sort of abandoned-looking footpath, and wandered up and up until suddenly there this temple was protruding from the living rock. Massive heartponies.

On the bus ride to Haeinsa, I was peering out the left-hand window, and we suddenly drove by this shrine. The bus didn’t stop there, the maps didn’t mention it, the guide book ignored it completely, but… I mean damn, look at it. So after doing the whole temple complex, I hiked down the access road to find this and relax for a bit. The relaxing wasn’t so much pre-planned but rather a response to realizing that having hiked 4km down a mountain in 80 degree, 85% humidity weather, I then had to climb back up. Ah well.

Jikjisa and the Jikji Family Sculpture Park

If anywhere encompassed the feeling of a Buddhist temple complex, it was Jikjisa. I have never been anywhere that felt so serenely, ideally situated exactly where it was. Unfortunately this feeling is rather fleeting compared to the power I imagine it once carried, as there are so very very many people that I could never escape the sound of cars or the chatter of ajuumas for long. There was a pretty cool museum occupying one of the old hermitages, but unfortunately everything inside was labeled exclusively in faded Korean, so my sense of what artifacts the temple still maintains is pretty slipshod.

The entrance-gateway; one of seven ceremonial gateways leading you up a rolling slope into the bowl of a hidden valley containing the temple proper.

An old stone bridge heading towards what I imagine are the modern-day residences of the monks. Some cool clouds in the background, too!

Convinced a cute little kid to take a picture of me. Yeah Mom, I really went!

The silk-screens of the central shrine at Jikjisa. These would not have survived the Japanese invasion of the 16th century, as the vast majority of the complex was put to the torch, but the three screens were somehow concealed in a cave and lay forgotten for twenty years before being rediscovered sometime in the early 1600s. To be quite frank, any and possibly all parts of this story with the exception of the age of the screens are suspect; the age I got off a plaque, everything else I got from a stooped and 30% incomprehensible old Korean man who accompanied me for a while for no apparent reason.

An amazingly, delightfully happy old woman I saw playing in the stream with her son, daughter-in-law and grandson.

Between the bus station in Gwangyeung and Jikjisa itself is a very cool ‘family park’ completely covered in reading nooks, rock gardens, and interesting sculpture. This entry is already going to be megaoverloaded with pictures so I’m only putting up one that amused me, but if you check my webshots you’ll find many more, all of them fairly cool. Anyway, this is pretty self-explanatory. This sign looks like the Scarecrow in Oz if only the Scarecrow had a little more gay pride…

Gyeongju, Bolguksa and Seokguram

After leaving Daegu, I hopped a bus to the city of Gyeongju. This is now a fairly quiet, semi-touristed town with a lot of rice- and lotus-fields, but it was at one point the center of the Silla dynasty, and has retained a lot of really unique history on that basis.

So they’re not as impressive as, say, the Pyramids, but the old Silla leaders had a certain style of their own burying themselves. They basically just hugely magnified the basic ‘burial mound’ idea, filling them with treasures and then covering them with stones and trees; what makes it impressive is the sheer number of these mounds, tumulis, that just litter the entire countryside. This is the largest within the city of Gyeongju proper, and there is a freaking delicious dakgalbi place that has a patio right on the foot of the mound. When they light it up at night it’s a surprisingly moving place to sit and watch the stars.

Bolguksa Temple is about twenty minutes south of Gyeongju, on the inner slope of a mountain whose front face overlooks the Sea of Japan and the primary route of attack that Japanese pirates followed through the sea-mounts. Like Jikjisa, it is simply too crowded to feel entirely at ease, but the architecture was stunning.

A reflecting pool just inside the entrance.

A shot of the ascent to the Middle Land; the whole temple is constructed around zones of Ascension, where one proceeds by stages closer to the land of Buddha and the central shrine. It took me a good five minutes standing frustrated to get enough clearspace to take this shot. Totally worth it though.

What can I say? This is maybe one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken. Definitely worth checking out at full resolution.

On the side of the mountain facing the sea is a little grotto called Seokguram. I think it’s the most-visited tourist site in Korea; certainly, by people : square footage ratio it shouldn’t even be a contest, as the entire grotto is about the size of an outhouse. I don’t know quite how to describe it, and I was too enthralled to take pictures, so I’m just gonna steal one off the internet to give you all a sense of the interior. It’s a shrine built into a cave on the mountainside, and apparently watching the sunrise over the sea is fucking glorious. Missed that part though.

I did some other things, too

I went to see two movies [the fantastic Wanted, the hardly watchable Mummy 3], ate a lot of good food, including some very strange regional kimchis, made friends with a cute monk who may or may not have been between the ages of 14 and 95, rode the KTX supertrain at 304kph, and read a lot of good books. But I think that’s about all I have to say about it for now, unless I seem to be missing anything blatantly obvious.

Vacation: The Remix

So this last Friday was Korean Independence Day, and Lindsay and Denise and I decided to take the three day weekend and go check out the north-eastern coast, on the Sea of Japan, as we’d heard that it was fun and the water was beautiful. In classic foreigners-living-abroad style, the three of us soon ballooned to fourteen of us, and it was only by the grace of her mighty Invisible Pink Unicorn that there were only two hotel rooms to be had for love or money and we were able to cut it down to nine.

I can’t go into depth regarding the events of the weekend, as I have reputations — mine own included — to think about, but here’s a semi-sanitized summary followed by some comedy in the form of my beast of a hairstyle.

- Only one person was brought to the hotel by the cops!
- But another was brought home aback a bicycle propelled by a Korean man well on the far side of 70.
- Nobody is quite sure what prompted either of these modes of transportation.
- A tiny Korean lifeguard assaulted a solid 6ft+ Aussie with an umbrella pole… not once, but twice.
- A giant inflatable hot dog, towed at high speed by JetSki, was capsized not once; not thrice, but at least six times, to the evident and comical frustration of the operator. But he charged way too much for a 5 minute ride and we had no choice but to make it a 10 minute ride instead.
- A massive Korean transvestite beach rave emcee was befriended, antagonized, refriended, and then eventually fled from.
- A fried-chicken restaurant was made the site of a food [mostly liquor] fight par extraordinaire, which really seemed like the last straw as far as our behavior was concerned, except that the owner and other patrons loved it and insisted on pushing free soju on us.
- Swimming with swimwear on is overrated.

Enough.

Hahaha.

Enjoying the hotel patio for hours.

Little reading party – all fully dressed, as the sun refused to come out all day Friday. It was still a lovely beach, though, and the water was the sort of perfect temperature that feels so close to body warmth that you’re just floating in nothingness.

I am the master of beasts.

Doing what I do best!

As promised, some new pictures of babies

Assuming anyone has made it this far, other than my future self, checking back for metaposterity, here are my Koalas lookin’ lovely as usual.

I can’t imagine anyone spending a day with these two and not wishing to kidnap them forever.

My newest Koala – Lisa.

Ahhhh, little rockstars!

We got new floormats to replace our foul old carpet. It has a penguin in a hot-air balloon on it, but I guess other than that I can forgive it. And look at Jiee run!

The two quietest, sweetest boys in the class. If only they’d lighten up a bit!

Dance dance dance!

And I have to stop now, before I break this page forever. Assuming I haven’t already.

Love,
-Ben

Contrary to the itinerary I posted in my last entry, there will be no cross-country jaunt to Mokpo.  There turned out to be simply too much to do in Gyeongsanbuk-do, and I just… well, I like taking my time as a traveler.  I’ve never been one for lightning ‘see everything everywhere TODAY’ trips, they simultaneously exhaust and bore me.  So after planning something along those lines for myself, I took a step back and said ‘fuck it.’ 

I stayed in a fairly famous little hostel last night — the sort of place that people come to Seoul and recommend completely on its own merits, before even talking about the town in which it sits — and I packed my bags this morning and moved to a sterile, anonymous motel down the road.  I guess I’m looking for something different than your average backpacker on this trip, but I paid W30’000 for last night, sleeping on a crappy rice mattress on the floor with a broken fan and a communal shower, and I’ll pay W30’000 for tonight while sleeping on a real mattress with a functioning fan, AC, a television, and an en suite bathroom.  The only difference between the two is that at the hostel I’d be likely to meet other foreigners; but please, I live by Itaewon, my goal on this trip was pretty much explicitly to escape from foreigners for a while.

I just finished The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Eco and am about 3/4 of the way through Seeing, the [sort of] sequel to Saramago’s Blindness; and both are stunning.  I admit to a certain… obsessive fondness for Eco, but I think anyone would enjoy Queen Loana, as it captures the amazing prose and the depth of his literary fascination you find in Foucault’s Pendulum while being much less liable to make you want to rip off your brain and stuff it in a nearby deep-fryer.

Trip itself, thus far: excellent.  I don’t have any pictures at the moment, and won’t until I return to my camera cable; I can’t even tell you if I possess good pictures, as the LCD screen on my digital shattered somewhere in Brazil.  But I’ve been clicking away like mad, so I’m hoping some few will turn out well.  I’ve been to more temples than I can count, including two of the primary examples of Korean Buddhism — Jikjisa and Haeinsa — and am going to another, Bolguksa, tomorrow morning.  I think in some ways I prefer the settings of the temples to the temples themselves, as the old monks really had an amazing eye for proportional placement on the mountainsides, while the actual structures vary in age from 400 years to less than 20, and it’s weird to be unable to tell the difference.  Korean ceremonial architecture has changed so little in 1100 years that the traditional carpenters and painters working today don’t really have to ‘replicate’ anything when they rebuild old structures; they just do what they always do, on a building site that dates back millenia.  It’s a strange feeling.

I have to admit, after mocking for the better part of my life the stereotype in the West of Asian tourists taking pictures instead of experiencing, I think I may be guilty of a bit of the same.  That’s not to say that I haven’t been experiencing as well, but as anyone who has traveled with me is well aware, I’m fanatic about plaques, and there just aren’t any here.  Even if I could understand Korean, there would be only slightly more information available to your average tourist.  I think that a lot of the temple sites, though wide open for visiting and intended for tourism, are used most often for religious tourism; and so I end up looking at ten buildings, all of them nearly identical, with the same brackets and paint-whorls and Sino-Korean writing and gold-gilt Buddhas, and I end up taking pictures of everything  in hopes of perhaps, at home, with Claire’s help or a dictionary or wikipedia, evolving a better understanding of what I’d been looking at.  It’s a bit ass-backwards, but it’s how it goes.

This entry is utterly directionless!  But because I will forget, and throw away the receipt upon which this is written, I need to transcribe something.  These are the rules that were enscribed on an ancient 14-sided die found in an excavation of the tumuli burial sites in Gyeongju, estimated to be some 1200 years old.  One presumes that the rules were much like any modern drinking game… follow the instructions, if you fail you drink?  Read and enjoy.

- Never abandon your unpleasant partner.

- Drink three straight shots of liquor.

- Drink silently.

- Sing Goeraeman.

- Let them strike your nose.

- Recite a poem.

- Drink your cup with both arms bent.

- Disregard an assault while remaining calm and passive.

- Remain immobile while someone tickles your face.

- If you have two cups of liquor, give them away.

- Drink up and laugh loudly.

- Ask anybody to sing.

- Sing and drink.

- Sing Wolgyeong.

I think I’m going to go watch the new Mummy tonight, oddly enough.  Love to all.

So, the tentative itinerary!

I’ll be starting in Daegu, the capital of Gyeongsangbuk province. Depending on how early I arrive — I’m catching a bus from the Express Terminal in the morning — I’ll either spend the afternoon doing museums and get an early start on Monday, or head straight for Haeinsa Temple. It’s supposed to be one of the more spectacular Buddhist temples in Korea, surrounded by stunning foothills and ancient stone monuments that miraculously survived the endless succession of invasions and torchings that have plagued the rest of the country’s historical sites. My hope is to spend the night at the temple itself, as I’ve heard great things about temple stays, but the templestaykorea website is down, so if there’s no room I’ll just find a place in town or something.

I’m then planning on spending two to three days in Gyeongju, a town about 75km east of Daegu. It has amazing national parks in every direction, and the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in Korea, a library containing what are supposed to be the oldest surviving woodblock carvings of the original Korean Buddhist teachings.

Then I’ll be heading west — possibly back through Daegu for an afternoon, to see Jikjisa Temple — to the Gwangju province, in the southwest corner of the country. The town of Mokpo is the gateway to a huge group of little fishing islands just off the coast, so I’m hoping to hop around by ferry for a day or two before making my way back up to Seoul.

It’s been a very long time since I traveled completely alone, and I’m really looking forward to it. Seoul was weird tonight. Everybody is either gone or packing, and it feels very… filled with potential. I can’t wait to hear about everyone else’s trips, they’ve gone to some sweet places: Jen, Trish and Kate went to Vietnam, flying into Hanoi and out of Ho Chi Minh City; Doug went to Busan [might run into him down south, speaking of which]; Christina went to Bali, taking a ferry to Lombok [which is actually a really cool place; the fairly short ferry ride between the two islands marks the biogeological line between the very different Indomalayan and Australiasian ecozones]; Linds and Denise are leaving early tomorrow for Jejudo (“The Hawaii of Korea”, they call it… I’m skeptical); Cat is leaving for Daejon on Monday; Andy and his girlfriend are off to Shanghai on Tuesday; Elgiz is already in Turkey, has been there for almost two weeks, but will be back at the end of vacation. It’s pretty cool how convenient the lifestyle here is for massive diaspora come vacation time.

Anyway, I’m all packed and ready to go, so wish me luck!

Comment on my damn blog, fuckers! [to the 'family' portion of that tirade, I intend fuckers in only the most loving and respectful fashion...] I moved it here from diaryland specifically because of the comment option, and with identifiably infrequent exceptions my mother is the only participant in this pseudo-dialogue. If I wanted a private journal I’d write on paper, so come on, say hello.

To soften the blow of my profanity, here are some funny pictures from more and less recently.

Mud Festival pictures!

This is maybe a “Why the hell am I not muddy?” face.

Surrounded by mountains of meat on sticks. Side-note, this is what night pictures look like on a disposable camera.

Made odd Korean school-girl friends on the train ride home. They made me listen to something on their ipod, which was greatly appreciated, as Trish had stolen mine and was screaming at a fair approximation of the top of her lungs about how young people just don’t understand Major Tom.

And going way back in time, pictures from the Pig Roast!

It would be beyond me to explain what I’m doing here. Lecturing someone, probably, but what it looks like is “Nuh uhhh, girlfriend.”

Buses are more fun on the soju.

That’s all, now I’m off to Itaewon.

The achronological saga of my repressed fetish for risky foreign dentistry

Last Wednesday, the morning after I began antibiotic treatment for an ear infection, my left front incisor began to hurt. I’ve never had a real toothache before, and so assumed that like most other forms of pain it would ebb, and flow, and eventually go away with the judicious application of Tylenol. This, it turns out, is markedly untrue.

Thursday morning I woke up to the tune of a rhythmic throbbing in my face. It wasn’t actually that painful, merely bizarre to feel my heartbeat pulsing through my mouth; I swished some warm water, and the sensation went away, and I figured that all was well. Continued my antibiotics course.

Friday was the day of our Parent Teacher Conferences. Sidenote – it was weird to be on the teachery side of the table. It was incredibly boring, and the moms would only speak Korean [they don't want me to see them speaking less than perfect English; so of course they resort to speaking none at all] so I spent another full day swishing water, trying not to fall asleep, and morbidly fixating on the splinter of ICE AND PAIN piercing my face.

Saturday I woke up to the sound of my own shocked gasp. I made an immediate appointment at a dentist I’d heard good things about — good things, in this case, largely consisting of “He uses rubber gloves!” and “He’s pretty good with an English / Korean dictionary!” — and then reviewed what I knew about tooth pain, which was, to all intents and purposes, nothing.

Rewind

Fairly early in our trip to Brazil, Britt and I were wandering our merry way around the island of Ilhabela, near Sao Paolo, a sort of ‘Island of the Rich and Famous’ for Brazilians. Because the richies don’t want dirty tourists invading their villas or private beaches, the island has been kept intentionally impenetrable; the only maintained road runs along the western coast of the island, top to bottom, and 4x4s are required to cross eastward. A very helpful Information booth lady had told us about an awesome beach, Jabaquarra, to be found some 8kms hike east across the top of the island from the last bus stop, and we were totally sold.

Jabaquarra was incredible. It was probably a good kilometer of open sand, a little bay framed by rocky cliff-walls on either side, with one antique-looking fishing boat floating out in the bay and exactly six other people in sight.

Jabaquarra from the trail — beach is hiding behind trees.

And there we go!

An amazing crab:

And some big, scary, fun rocks upon which we eventually decided to climb.

Caught bridge-fashion between two large boulders, unable to go forward or back and getting damper from sea-spray by the moment, I threw myself backwards, lost my grip, and fell about eight feet, bouncing face-first off of several rocks along the way. I remember hearing Britt screaming, and I remember panicking that I might have damaged my glasses; I found them, in the sand, I came up grinning at the close call. Then Britt said “Oh, dear” and I tried to touch my front teeth with my tongue.

Sadly, large pieces of them had departed into the ocean.

After being helped by the most awesome family ever all the way back to civilization — dear God, did I not want to hike five miles poking my tongue through my missing teeth — we were able to find a Brazilian dentist to perform miracles. 45 minutes later, as I expected him to say ‘come back tomorrow, we’ll put on a bridge’ or something, the man held up a mirror and said ‘how do they look?’ And I had teeth again.

Fast-forward

So the pain was in the tooth that had been most notably decapitated by the rock, and I figured that in some fashion it had to be related. It hurt to think about, however, so I put in my headphones and listened to Droppin’ Plates by Disturbed at a volume that would kill kittens.

The Dentist

Okay, so here’s the thing. I love love love South Korean medical care. Once I found the office [which took far too long; in my pained delusional confused state I got off at the wrong Seoul National University stop and wandered aimlessly for almost 30 minutes before getting a real-estate agent to find the address for me] I was taken straight from the door to a dentist’s chair. I was seen by the doctor within three minutes; he spoke English… barely; he took X-rays; he showed me the lesion on the root; he explained what was going to happen, surgically; and charged me nothing, all in 25 minutes. Conclusion – Benjamin Teacher needs a root canal.

What happened:

This is the dentist’s theory. When I broke the meaty part of the tooth, I also caused a tiny microfracture that extended back into the root. The gum swelled around it and, functionally encysting the fracture, prevented it from infecting. However, taking antibiotics for my ear infection had the odd side-effect of reducing the gum-inflammation, allowing the fracture to become exposed to new microorganisms for the first time since it had occurred. Hence, pulp infection.

The Root Canal

For various reasons, I was quite nervous about this procedure. One reason was the wikipedia article, which used words like ‘dental pulp’, with which I find myself deeply uncomfortable. To quote my little sister, “ewwwwwww the word “pulp” should never be used in reference to anything other than orange juice.” Good point, Bibs. Another is, of course, the broad usage of expressions like “I’d rather have a root canal than…” And finally, there were my loving co-workers sharing their tales of woe, misery and painkiller addiction. Long story short, it was the smoothest, easiest procedure ever. I was given a funny topical anaesthetic that numbed my upper lip all the way to the middle of my nose, and then some things happened for a while to which I paid very little attention. Eventually Dr. Kim [the endontologist, whose English was much superior to the normal clinic dentist] said “Your canal is clean! This was an easy one” to which I gave a thumbs up. And I was done.

The final note is monetary. According to both wikipedia and several friends who’ve been through this recently, root canal therapy is ungodly expensive in the States. It can cost upwards of $1000, and is often largely uncovered by insurance. I paid $9.70.

No wonder medical tourism is a growth industry here; the cost of simply having the procedure in the States is not incomparable to the cost of purchasing a round trip plane ticket to Seoul, flying here, crashing on a friend’s couch, borrowing their SK Insurance card, spending two weeks here eating kimchi and generally being a tourist, having the root canal plus follow-up appointments, and flying home. Insanity.

And now I don’t want pizza any more, I think I want bibimbap.

Heartponies and huggles and the like, folks.