Category: Uncategorized

I never really appreciated umbrellas before moving to Gwangju.

I believe there are two reasons for this. For one, while it of course does rain in Missouri, rain is by no means a common event – a couple of days a month, perhaps. Why have an item that I’ll use only a few times per year? Second, and more importantly, at home, I had a car.

It’s amazing how much of a difference being a pedestrian makes. If it’s raining hard, and you’re driving somewhere, well, no matter. You’ll get a little wet on the walk to your car, and a little wet on the walk to your destination, but it’s hardly anything worth bothering about. A couple seconds of mild discomfort? Bah! I kept an umbrella in the car for the worst cases*, but otherwise I had no appreciation for the largely-useless contraptions.

As a pedestrian, though, they’re wonderful. No longer do I have the luxury of a roof over my head as I travel – now the walk to work (which is nothing at all to complain about – just 20 minutes, one mile through the city) is weather-dependent.

And it weathers a lot here. I arrived during Gwangju’s rainy season. Every morning, humid air rolls in from the East China Sea and flows down into Gwangju’s bowl. The mountains around contain the clouds, and they build up, and soon enough it’s steadily drizzling. The clear fall days where I can see the mountains are rare (and precious).

It’s been drizzling steadily here for the last 48 hours or so. I am so, so thankful for my umbrella. I’m sorry for every bad thing I ever said about you.

Sometimes you just have to travel a bit to get perspective on things closer to home.

*Once, a year ago, Lona and I went to First Fridays at the Science Center for Harry Potter trivia.** I met her for dinner after work first, and it was – pardon the cliche – raining cats and dogs. It was as if God had decided that humanity was a wicked creation and resolved to purge the Earth of its corruption, and people really ought to look into what that fellow Noah had been up to the last couple of weeks. More water in the atmosphere than air, that kind of thing. I was grateful for my car umbrella that night.

** We got our butts kicked. I know way less about Harry Potter than I thought I did.

Mountains hold a special place in the Midwestern imagination, I think. *

When all the land around you is, more or less, flat, any variation draws in the mind, and I’ve lived and grown up in the middle of the largest patch of flat this side of the Eurasian steppe. Plains can awe with a sense of scale, like a dry ocean, to be sure, but they don’t have the same hold on the human imagination that mountains do.

See, throughout history, mountains have been special. In Greece, Mount Olympus was the home of the gods. The final resting place of Noah’s great Ark is Mount Ararat. Five thousand years ago, Mount Sinai is where Moses received the Law. Jesus was tempted atop a mountain, and Mohammed’s revelation supposedly happened on a mountain. And in India and China, temples themselves are sculpted in the form of mountains, rearing up towards the heavens and the dwelling places of the divine.

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But I never get to experience any of that. For me, mountains have always existed in the abstract – except for the few times they haven’t. I will never forget my first glimpse of the Rockies – hunched in the back seat of my family’s minivan, 8 wretched hours of Kansas behind me, peering up through the windshield at what looked like a great, dark mass of cloud rearing up in front of our van. And then the slowly-dawning realization that they weren’t clouds.

So you can imagine that it’s with great joy that now I am surrounded by mountains. All Korea is mountainous, and Gwangju sits in a bowl with the great masses on all sides.

Now, last weekend in Korea was Chuseok, a traditional harvest holiday celebrating family ties and togetherness. This 4-day long Korean Thanksgiving festival meant that most business were closed, so my friends and I took advantage of the long weekend to tackle Gwangju’s main mountain: Mudeungsan.

Mudeungsan looms over Gwangju, dominating the eastern horizon with its bulk. It stands 4,000 feet high, which isn’t especially impressive to anyone but a child of the plains like me. I find it plenty impressive enough, of course. The mountain has three peaks, one closed to the public due to its role as a military base, and is dotted with Buddhist temples and Korean shrines.

The ascent and descent are supposed to take three hours apiece, so Tom, Lily, Shanice, Sarah, and myself opted to meet by the reservoir at the base by 9 am, so we could be up and down in decent time.

Naturally, nothing went according to plan. In retrospect, this was Friday, September 13, so I should have realized, but I’ve never been much of one for superstition.

Anyway, I hopped on a bus by 7:30 that morning for the hour-long journey to the far side of town. Gwangju was mostly deserted, the streets near my apartment still littered with the assorted detritus from the revelry the night before (I live in an area with lots of nightlife, even during Chuseok!), which made a slightly surreal, post-apocalyptic feeling. I reached a transfer station…then waited. The bus I needed to take was nowhere to be found. It would periodically appear on the electronic notice board, then disappear. 45 minutes later, just as I started to worry (haha, long after I started to worry), it showed up – so I was a solid 30 minutes late.

Naturally, I was the second one there.

Everyone was late, with their own misadventures, but I want to kind of keep this short, so let me sum up: We all arrived at the lake by 10:00, and set off up the mountain. There was no sidewalk, and the narrow road switched back and forth many times on us, as cars whizzed by. Also busses.

Yeah, we could have taken a bus another two miles or so up the mountain. Oops. That mistake would have significant consequences later.

Still, 40 minutes hard marching brought us to a small wall, fronted by a pillar mounted on a turtle:

This, it seems, was a shrine & tomb dedicated to the memory of a general who fell defending his border fortress to the last against an invading Qing army.

We explored his relics, including his armor and weapons, lit some incense in his memory, and naturally took a selfie outside. Pictured: myself, Lily, Sarah, Shanice, Tom.

Then it was on up the mountain. We slogged up the road for another 45 minutes or so, dodging busses, and admiring the scenery.

And here is where our troubles began.

See, we were not the most coordinated bunch. We all assumed someone else would do the research on the proper path to the top of the mountain. SO when the time came…no one had a clue which path to follow.

So we dug out our phones and took our best guess. I took point, and forged into the forest on what I was told was the path to the peak. Which was technically true!

But it was a path in only the most technical sense. Thick undergrowth quickly closed in on both sides of us. The “path” was a narrow track, scarcely visible as a slightly-wider space between plants. It was impossible to clearly see it more than a few feet ahead at a time, and so I had to pick my way slowly and carefully.

The local wildlife didn’t help matters. So narrow was the path that approximately 4,000 spiders opted to build their webs across it, presumably thinking, “Oh, man, if this works, we’ll eat like kings!” With no machete to hand, I grabbed a handy branch and started hacking a path through the tangled webs, trying to not think too hard about Bilbo Baggins getting nearly devoured by spiders in Mirkwood forest.

Trees had fallen to block the path in places – I had to squeeze under one particular fallen giant that helpfully dumped dirt, bugs, and other detritus on my head as I passed. Sometimes the path ran right into fields of boulders, and we had to pick our way as best we could, essentially guessing at the correct exit. Once, we lost the path entirely and spent about 15 minutes debating whether to continue to forge ahead or to give up and go home. Had we not periodically seen signs assuring us we were on the path to the peak, we probably would have given up.

Three hard, sweat-and-spider-filled hours later, we stumbled over one last rise. Panting, out of breath, thirsty, dirty, and bloodied (a bad step in a boulder field), it was still worth it.

The forest was still thick, but a short distance away a broad rock thrust into the sun – and beyond, sparkling in the sunlight: Gwangju like none of us had seen before.

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The mystery, though, was the elderly Korean couple also up there. They were dressed for a picnic and were clearly enjoying sunning themselves on the rocks. They were wearing sandals. They clearly didn’t come up the way we did…so how the heck had they gotten up there?

We spied on them as they left, and learned something very important: There are two paths to the peak. One was the spider-infested obstacle course from hell we took. The other looked like this:

A broad, leafy corridor ran down in gentle switchbacks all the way from the peak to the bus stop (which was beyond where we had turned off the road on our adventure). Benches were spaced along it to provide break areas. Hell, there was even a coffee shop run by Buddhist monks.

Oh,yes, on our way down, we found a Buddhist monastery. It was beautiful, of course, so we all took a bunch of pictures. It was filled with tourists and the monks were doing a banner business in lemonade in their little shop.

I was also able to take some pictures of the interior of some of the shrines, and of the decorations outside the coffee shop.

After recovering our strength there for a few minutes, we at last felt up to the task of descending the last few hundred meters to the bus stop. Overall, the descent only took an hour or so, compared to the three hours we’d taken to climb up – because we had climbed the first and smallest of Mudeungsan’s three peaks. We’d have to come back for the higher one another day.

So, that was Mudeungsan. On the whole, it was a pretty great adventure. 10/10, would recommend the shrines and temples.

Just, y’know, before you go…look at a map.

*Possibly just mine. Typical Mind Fallacy.

Because I’ve been attempting to be more adventurous lately (did you notice? it’s involved doing things like moving to Korea), I said yes when my coteacher (Park) came to me with a request this weekend: a friend of hers was looking for a native teacher to talk to a class about American history, geography, and culture.

So now tomorrow night I’m off to Jungang Girls’ High School, where from 6-8 I’ll do my best to cram American history and culture into 12 girls’ heads. Note that the girls are of “middling” English ability, and my contact at the high school isn’t so great at the language herself. Well, that’s fine – it’s not like I’m any great shakes at Korean, or indeed, really speak any Korean at all, so it’s just another hill to climb.

No, the real challenge is how the hell am I going to pack this into two hours? The United States is the third largest nation in the world by both population and land area*, with 400 years of white people history alone (more obviously if you throw in the natives before Jamestown & Plymouth Bay colonies). There are over 50 metro areas of more than 1 million souls, over 100 with populations of at least half a million, and nearly 400 individual cities with more than 50,000 people. The nation sprawls across a vast continent with every climate known to man present somewhere within the borders, has an extremely intricate and complex intertwining body of federal, state, and local governments, and has been more or less the global hegemon for the last 70 years.

We’re not going to get all that in two hours. So let me jot down some notes to myself, and organize my thoughts while I try to grapple with how to do this lesson. This will be kind of stream of consciousness and I don’t have time to edit this**, so bear with me.

My approach, instead, is going to be to give the students the tools they need to understand the USA on their own. Let me point out to them some ways to come to grips with the US, a few useful levers that they can use as sticking places in order to do independent exploration. I’ll give them Brad’s Three Keys to Understanding the US.

Key #1: The USA’s founding myth is rebellion against an oppressive government.

We are far, far more skeptical of government power in the USA than just about anywhere else in the world (even former Communist nations!). Not that our government has ever been especially oppressive (despite Woodrow Wilson’s best efforts), nor was the ministry of Lord North under King George III all that wicked and tyrannical. But the myth is there – that is, the idea that we are doughty independent rebels standing up for our rights against a brutal, centralizing, distant imperial force – is woven into our national DNA. Note that calling something a myth does not mean it’s untrue! Myth here instead refers to a story we tell ourselves to explain why the world is the way it is. The Greek myths explain the Greek worldview, Jewish mythology explains Jewish theology, and just so the American foundational myth creates the American worldview.

This explains our strong state governments, and our (comparatively) weak federal government. While the federal government does continually grow and increase its reach and power over our daily lives, it has to fight tooth and nail for every inch of ground – remember the battle over Obamacare? Over whether the Census should ask if you’re an American citizen? Our continued resistance to a national ID card? Americans are skeptical of anything which seems to give a potential tyrant power over us, and it all stems from the original experience with the British. You don’t find this same skepticism in Korea.

Key #2: You cannot understand America without understanding American race relations.

Perhaps it’s because I was raised in the ’90s and ’00s, when this was all the rage in American history writing, but the theme of race is an undercurrent running down all the way through American history to today. Now, you can certainly write American histories without focusing too heavily on the racial divide – Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier hypothesis comes to mind, you have Mahan and his naval power, etc. But those histories can only get you so far, and only in a few places. You can, more or less, get through the 18th century, sort of, without mentioning race (if you do your best not to talk about the Southern colonies – but then how will you talk about the relations between the colonials and the Indians? Stuff that’s almost forgotten today, like King Phillip’s War?

All of American history, especially as an independent nation, has its central domestic tension: the large population of African-Americans living in the plantation South, and the efforts of the planter class to maintain control over that population, beginning with the brutal oppression and violence of slavery and continuing through the legal and social humiliation of Jim Crow, and the perversion of the Constitution in order to maintain that racial caste system.

Much of modern America traces back to the initial racial divide. The blighted inner cities? Goes back to white flight, the Great Migration, etc. Fights over whether or not a bakery has to bake a pro-gay marriage cake or if they have the right to their own conscience? Goes back to Jim Crow and “separate but equal” facilities. No IQ tests for important jobs or for important civic duties like voting? Ultimately because those and more besides were once abused by the Southern planters to maintain their power. The modern arguments about affirmative action – especially the discrimination against Asians by many of our top universities, something of great concern to a lot of students here – trace their root back to this.

In many ways, the Civil Rights Era represents a third founding of the United States – after the Revolution and the Civil War/Reconstruction. Many of our founding ideals were at last coded into law at that time, and Martin Luther King has a place in the American pantheon of civic heroes comparable to Abraham Lincoln or George Washington.

As a largely homogeneous society, Koreans haven’t grown up with the same awareness that we have. They’re not steeped in it, the way American students are. But you can’t understand America without understanding race.

Key #3: America is big.

Stop laughing, it matters.

I’ve heard it said that in America, 100 years is a long time, and in Europe, 100 miles is a long way.

People, Americans and non-Americans alike, don’t really appreciate how much larger than most nations the US is, or why that’s a big deal. But it’s a huge deal.

The United States is nearly 10,000,000 square kilometers in area. It runs for 2,680 miles at its widest point and is 1,500 miles from north to south. By comparison, the United Kingdom is about 250,000 square kilometers in land area. France is a little over 500,000. The entire land area of the European Union is 4,500,000 square kilometers (and that figure will soon shrink…maybe)!

Put it this way: the distance from Paris to Moscow is about the same as the difference from Los Angeles to Kansas City. That distance destroyed Napoleon. It’s only halfway across the United States.

Why does it matter?

Think of the troubles the EU has wrangling a continent-wide union, getting British and Greeks and Poles and Portugese all on the same page. Think of China’s struggle to control its own continent-sized empire, with all the necessary repressive measures in Xinjiang, Tibet, and lately Hong Kong. The United States is as large or larger than those polities. And we all have lived under one government, at peace with each other***, for more than 200 years.

But that size has consequences. The population density of the USA is far, far lower than in most of Western Europe. That matters for things like the railroad systems, power infrastructure, and yes, federal spending. It makes things like health care delivery, internet service, hell, even the mail delivery far more complicated for the US than for other nations. It matters for travel – our cities sprawl out into the empty space, and servicing all those suburbs is damned near impossible for mass transit…but we DO have an excellent interstate system. Why do so many Americans own cars? Why are they so large? Well, there you go.

Why do so many Americans only speak one language? Why, a Frenchman might speak French, Dutch, English, German, and Spanish! Perhaps even Italian! But in France, a day or so of driving can carry you from Paris to the border of the Netherlands, of the UK, of Germany, of Spain, or of Italy. In the United States, a day or so of driving can carry you from English-speaking east Texas to…English-speaking west Texas. From Kansas City, in the center of the country, for more than a thousand miles in every direction, there is one language spoken: English. From Berlin, within a thousand miles, there are more than 30 – and that’s me only counting Europe. So yes, many Americans only ever learn English.

Size matters.

It creates a huge diversity of cultures within the US. Florida Man is famous around the country, and Florida has very little in common with its nearest neighbor, Georgia. The Northeast and the Southeast are very different places. East Coast vs. West Coast. The Midwest, the Rust Belt, the Mountain West, the Southwest, New Orleans doing its own thing, the Pacific Northwest, California, Alaska, Hawaii – there’s a hundred different little cultural enclaves in the United States and we all need to get along with each other. Our laws need to be acceptable to the tree-hugging-est hippy in Portland and the rootin’-tootin’-shootin’-est cowboy in Lubbock, Texas. Our political parties need to appease both these people and millions more. That’s why our laws are often a kludgy mess of compromises and we answer so many questions with, “Well, it depends on your state…”

So those are my three keys. If you can grasp those 3 distinctive facts about the United States, you’ll be well on your way to understanding our little idiosyncracies. Is that a decent introduction to American history, geography, and culture? Hell, I dunno.

But it’s what I’m going with, so fingers crossed!

*If we bought Greenland, we’d pass up Canada. I’m just sayin’.
** Full disclosure – I never edit these. Sorry.
*** With one notable exception. More or less.

It missed.

Bummer.

It’s Friday morning and Typhoon Lingling* is roaring up the East China Sea straight for my front door. I’ve never been in a hurricane before, so this promises to be an exciting weekend! Things aren’t scheduled to kick off until around 11, though, so I have a bit of time to nip downtown for a welcome dinner hosted by the metropolitan Office of Education for all the new English teachers in town.

In the meantime, I am here at work with an unexpected two hours, because my morning classes of 3rd graders are busy with university entrance stuff. It’s the start of second semester in the Korean school year, which runs from March to February, as opposed to the autumnal American system.

So, I thought it was high time to give everyone a snapshot of what my school looks like, and what a typical day of work is like for me. I will have pictures once I am home at my own computer.

The Gwangju Science Academy (or the Gwangju Science High School for the Gifted, I see multiple translations) is a modestly sized high-school of about 250 students. The Korean education system is divided 1-6/7-9/10-12, so I have the equivalents of American sophomores through seniors. Each grade is referred to by their grade within the school, so the 10th graders here are referred to as 1st Grade, the 12th graders as 3rd Grade. Took some getting used to, but ultimately not that hard to accommodate myself to. There are 4 Korean English teachers – 1 each for Grades 1 and 3, and 2 for Grade 2, plus myself.

The school focuses on STEM education for gifted students from across Korea. They must be nominated by their teachers and pass an entrance exam to attend. About half are locals from the Gwangju area, and the other half come from across the country. Gender ratio, as one would expect given the STEM focus, is skewed, with 4 boys for every girl. I see 16 different classes, each containing about 16 students. The students room here on campus – there’s a large dorm building attached to the academic halls, and a surprisingly small cafeteria for so many students. Every other weekend they visit home.

The building itself is very nice. It seems to have been newly remodeled, maybe around 2012-2014. Like most Korean schools, the outside has a dirt soccer field (which seems comically underutilized at this science school) fronting a large, multi-story building. The first floor is dedicated to administrative offices, sprinkled with copies of classical paintings and a portrait of Korea’s first astronaut, who was an alumna of the school. The other 3 floors are all given over to each grade. My office is on the 3rd floor and my classroom on the 4th. The office is nice, spacious, and comfortable, shared with 3-4 other teachers at any given time. I have 1:1 planning-teaching time, so all of my lessons at this point are planned out literally until I’m 30!**

As for teaching itself, so far, it’s a dream. My classroom is spacious and all mine, to do with as I please. I have 2 whiteboards and a chalkboard, and a lovely projector/podium set up. More desks than I know what to do with, so most I have shoved into a corner to give me some open space in the back, while the rest are grouped into tables (it is a conversation class, after all).

I arrive at work at 8, where I see between 2-5 classes a day. Each class I only see once a week, and all their names are basically gobbledygook to me, so learning names is a slow process. Usually they will file in during their 10-minute passing period, then I get 50 minutes to teach. The whole school gets 30 minutes for lunch, which usually includes kimchi, some sort of spicy soup (ranging from crab to chicken to seaweed), a rice dish, a spicy meat dish, and some noodles and vegetables, plus a fruit. It’s pretty solid on the whole, but it does take some getting used to. At least my chopstick skills are improving. Then back to class for a few hours, wrapping up the day at 4:40.

And the students? There is a (literal, ahaha) world of difference between a typical American middle school (even one as nice as Wydown!) and a Korean high school for gifted children. Behavior is the first thing you notice. Students bow in greeting when they pass you in the halls. Papers are handed in with two hands, as if they were a defeated enemy surrendering his sword. And while they laugh and chatter and stare at their phones like normal students, all it takes is my shutting the door to the room (my “begin class” signal) for them to instantly cease and give me their attention.

Their English level ranges from so-so to “why are you even in this class”. Some can only more or less follow what I say (I do my best to slooooow my speech waaaaay down, but it’s hard since I’m a naturally quick speaker). But they are enthusiastic and willing in class, and it feels like my biggest challenge going forward will be finding ways to keep them challenged.

It’s, uh, gonna be hard to go back to middle school.

*I read it somewhere that hurricanes with cutesy or even just plain female names tend to have higher death tolls, because people don’t take them as seriously. I have no idea if this is true and haven’t bothered to do the research to find out, because I find the anecdote amusing enough that I don’t want to falsify it. Just remember, grain of salt, since my source at this point is literally “I read it somewhere.”

**that’s far sooner than I would prefer.

Update: It turns out Ahorita doesn’t open up on Mondays at all.

Bummer.

At present, I am sitting in one of the 10,000 MegaCoffees in Gwangju, which is itself one of only about 100,000 coffee shops in the city, looking out a dingy back alley, with a solid walk in the rain and an hour-long bus ride between me and home. Why am I here, you ask? Because there’s a Mexican restaurant down the street, it’s currently closed, and I want a burrito, dammit.

Let’s back up.

One of the hardest parts of coming to Korea, I always knew, would be giving up certain staples of food that I have grown to love over the years. Not to say Korean food is bad – far from it! – but there’s only so much squid and crab soup a man can stomach before he craves a thick, juicy cheeseburger. Or, in my case, a burrito.

To my mind, burritos and their cousins, including tacos and quesadillas,* approach perfection as meals. The warm, soft flour tortilla is far handier than a slice of bread or a bun for corralling ingredients, and those ingredients can include all manner of vegetables and delightfully prepared meats, with a generous slathering of cheese and various other sauces like salsa, guacamole, and sour cream.

But in Korea, they don’t really do that. For one, have you noticed that there’s no cheese? It’s true! No one in this entire damned half of the world eats cheese, it seems. When’s the last time you had cheese in your Chinese, or with your sushi, or on your Pad Thai? Not counting you jokers out there, it’s never.

For another, tortillas! How I took them for granted in the United States! But, while bread is fairly simple to come by (I estimate the bakery:coffee shop ratio in Gwangju at something like 1:1000, which means there are 47 bakeries within a mile radius of my apartment), tortillas are a bit thin on the ground.**

To make matters worse, not only can I not prepare my own burritos, I cannot find any either. I looked for Mexican restaurants – believe me, it was one of the first thing I looked up. But I found only a handful in the city, most more than an hour away, and the reviews were usually “subpar, especially if you like Mexican.” And it’s not like Chipotle or even Taco Bell (I’m desperate) are things here.

So then I got a lead on Ahoritas, a little Mexican place a friend of mine found. She raved about it and said the owner is from Mexico. That’s a double bonus, since not only will the food probably be authentic but I’ll also be able to converse in something besides Korean! It was, of course, a hike (more than an hour), but I resolved to give it a shot my first chance.

Today I had my chance. I needed to be downtown anyway, to get my Alien Registration Card – my Korean ID for the next year. That entailed leaving school early and boarding a bus for only the second time in my life, then rattling down through the city to downtown. I managed without embarrassing myself, then took a walk of a half-mile through some suspiciously twisty back alleys, praising God and Lona’s parents for the umbrella they gifted me last year, and found Immigration.

[Above: The river research is apparently going swimmingly. Note the water being pushed out the door of the institute. ]

The ARC process went smoothly, everyone was very friendly and helpful and more or less spoke English, so I decided to take my shot.

I headed further south from the office, then realized my phone was directing me onto the subway. :O Now, I have never ridden a subway in my life, so it was with a fair bit of trepidation that I descended into the maw of the pavement and wound my way into the labyrinthian dungeon of Gwangju’s metro system.

Actually, it proved to be relatively simple to navigate, especially since there’s only one line and the signs are all in Korean & English. I boarded the bright, clean subway car, packed full of Koreans very carefully not saying a word to each other, and imitated everyone as best I could.

Thirty minutes later, I popped out, promptly got lost in the Asian Culture Center –

-then found my way and set off through more twisty alleys until, at last, I stood before my goal, like Frodo at the base of Mount Doom.

To find that in this case, Mount Doom was closed.

Apparently they don’t open restaurants at weird times like 3:45 pm here.

Well, hell, I thought, I came all this way, I’m not giving up now. So I glanced around a bit and saw this MegaCoffee down the street. I got myself a peach tea, a comfortable bench, and resolved to do a bit of writing until 5:00, when surely dinner will be served. Writing this only seems to have taken 30 minutes, so I still have 45 to go. Well, I only have the entire Internet at my fingertips – I’m sure I’ll find some way to pass the time.

*I may have eaten homemade chicken quesadillas for dinner at home more frequently than I care to admit in a public forum.

** Get it? 😀

I have so much to write about my school and the students! Hard to believe I’ve been there only three days. Hopefully I can knock that out this weekend, though – I am beat every day when I get home and it’s hard to write much in that state. Suffice to say that, if I don’t crash and burn (which is a distinct possibility – I feel a bit like I’m trying to keep my balance on top of a rolling log now), I hit the jackpot in terms of teaching environment.

No, the harder challenge has been feeding myself.

See, you may not know this about me, but I get a bit anxious at social situations. I hate looking like an idiot, so when I’m confronted with a situation I don’t really understand, I tend to avoid and put it off until I’m “better prepared” or I have no choice. Now, in Korea, ANY situation I wander into I’m going to look like an idiot. I can read a menu, but I don’t know what any of the words mean. I don’t know numbers. I don’t know how payment works – do I do it at the counter, or at the table, or…?

So, I will wander the streets around my apartment in the evenings, where I am reminded that I am NOT a city boy at heart. It’s a pulsating, throbbing mass of people and flashing lights, looking like Las Vegas:

Within 1 square kilometer of my apartment, there are approximately 1,496 restaurants. Naturally, I can find no place to eat. Some places have live eels outside – bit of a turnoff to my delicate stomach. Others are full of crowds of Korean businessmen drinking together on the floor – well, I don’t wanna be the only person there without a group. This one, too expensive, that one, too sketchy looking. And so I wander as my hunger gradually grows. Eventually it will outweigh my anxiety and I’ll pick a place, go in, and eat.

Last night, it was sushi. I screwed my courage to the sticking place, went inside, and told the staff to find a table for 1.* I stumbled through “I am an American and speak no Korean other than this speech,” which the staff took graciously, and actually the sushi was really delicious! The wasabi was so hot it still stings my nostrils. I had wonderfully soothing tea and a salad, too, all for a very reasonable price (which is good since I haven’t gotten a paycheck since May 31st).

Today, as I was wandering a convenience store searching for laundry detergent, I also stumbled upon a treasure: Spaghetti and tomato sauce, right next to each other! what joy!

So I happily broke in my apartment’s stove (no ovens in Korea) and made a lovely spaghetti dinner for myself. There’s something wonderfully comforting about that. It was my first time eating inside the apartment (“flat,” a treacherous part of my brain that clearly spent too much time around the UK teachers keeps whispering). I think that the act of eating a meal in a place is part of what transforms a place to live into a home. Now I sit here, snuggled up in bed,** next to my glorious picture window with a view of the city, and feel – well, sort of like I have a home here.

*I’m so lonely. 😦
**It’s 7:45. :I

I woke up today almost jittery with nervousness for my start at the new job. The night before, while out exploring my neighborhood, I passed a tank full of live eels ready for service at one of the many restaurants. The eels coiled and wound around one another into a tangled knot of seething, writhing flesh. That pretty much sums up the state of my stomach when I contemplated the first day.

Not so much the kids. Kids, I can handle. I figured worst case scenario they’d sleep through my lesson, and, well, I can handle that. But I was worried about the staff. I still had visions of the frightening Korean principal dancing my head.

I hadn’t met any of my coworkers, and I was coming into the middle of the school year. It’s a hard and scary thing to place yourself in that situation! What if they hated my lesson plan? They thought I wasn’t pulling my weight? Basically, I was feeling the twin pressures of being both the new guy and a stranger in a strange land.

Nevertheless, no way around it, so I put on my big boy britches, grabbed my umbrella, and set off into the gray rain of Gwangju’s morning. I slogged up the main path, dodging puddles and the occasional car, for about 20 minutes, until I reached the school. A bit of probing found the main vehicle gate, then I followed another teacher in and just sort of wandered around until my coteacher came to get me.

Now, I’m not going to go into a blow-by-blow of the day. But, apart from the projector sparking and exploding in my last class, I think the day went well! At one point I flashed up a map of South Korea overlaid on Missouri, when one precocious little brat decided to point out that Dakdo was missing.

Now, obviously I don’t care about a tiny stupid island in the Sea of Japan, nor do I care whether it’s the East Sea or the Sea of Japan. But! I remembered my training. I had been warned to expect two things:

1)To be asked, “Do you like kimchi?” The correct answer is “Of course!” And to be fair, I do.

2)”Dakdo Korean territory!” The sharp-eyed among you may notice that this is not actually a question. Nevertheless, I knew the correct answer expected of me: “Dakdo Korean territory!”

I told the child more or less the same thing, in simpler words*. This was deemed acceptable by the natives and I was not driven out of school on a rail (Is that a Korean thing? That’s not a Korean thing). It turned out that there IS no principal at the moment, because a new one is coming, which means when he arrives in a week or two HE’LL be the new guy, not me. And my coteachers are all very kind people! Two studied in the UK and America and speak excellent English, and one kindly shepherded me through the lunch line and coached me on how to eat Korean lunch (kimchi, seaweed soup with mushrooms, rice and beef, a literal fruit salad, and a delicious spicy fruit punch). And they thought the lesson was great.

So, phew. Day One down. Yet another hurdle in the rearview mirror, joining a long line that stretch back clear to January at this point. Some days I’m pretty sure I was insane to do this. But then I glance out my big picture window at a totally alien land and I remember why I came. I can see myself being happy here.

Now, if I can just figure out how to order at a Korean restaurant…

*Can I just say that simplifying and slowing my language is a job and a half? I speak at a mile a minute and I love to use a huge variety of words. I delight in choosing exactly the proper sound and nuance of meaning for the effect I want. Here I’m reduced to speaking like a 5th grader. I’m wasted in this country.

After a week of orientation, it finally came time to leave Chungju this morning and start our ‘real’ lives as teachers in Korea. Finally, I’ll find out if the Gwangju Science Academy is real or only a mirage conjured by my fevered imagination.

There’s a lot I want to say, a lot of adventures I want to describe, people I want to talk about, but I’m pretty beat after today and I’ve still got to pull together a “getting to know you” powerpoint for tomorrow. SO I’ll just throw up a few pictures and give you a tour of my apartment, yeah?

We met in the lobby this morning and loaded our bus, those of us headed for Gwangju. Starting from the pair of eyes and going clockwise, we have David, our Korean guide at orientation. Flashing the peace sign is Lily, from Maine via California. Next to her, also flashing the peace sign, is Sadia, from Oklahoma, then Seoirse, from Ireland if you couldn’t tell from the name, then Emma, from Wales. Behind Emma in the distant background is Tom, in blue, from Minnesota, then Erica, Ottawa, and Maria – uh, I don’t actually know. We never actually talked. <_< The redhead behind me is Shelby, from somewhere in the US, and then there’s me. Not pictured are a few others, but by and large these will be the only folk I know in the city.

The drive was three hours south and west from Chungju, down towards the tip of the peninsula. Korean rest stops are nice:

The drive was good. Everyone was quiet at first, but the second half saw a lively discussion of literature, religion, and politics with no one’s feelings getting hurt (because I wisely learned long ago never to talk about my political beliefs, and it’s impossible for anyone else’s politics to hurt my feelings).

Finally, after a few hours, we came around a mountain* and my new home came into sight:

I’ll do a proper tour later, but Gwangju is a very beautiful city at first sight. The streets are wide, with long, leafy boulevards everywhere. Sidewalks are universal and accessible, and wind through hundreds of little alleyways with distinctive little shops blaring K-Pop into the street. I met my coteacher, Bak, and she (after taking me to lunch) whisked me off to my apartment.

It’s very spacious, with a nice wooden floor and a large bed and couch left by the previous owner. I have a little kitchenette with a good many dishes.

The picture window (which is just to my right as I sit here on the bed, writing this) is glorious and gives a nice view of the neighborhood.

AND, most exciting –

The bathroom has a real shower! 😮 Whaaaat! I kind of had grown used to the Korean-style wetroom, but this is most welcome, too.

Now, downsides – mainly, the previous owners BOTH left a lot of stuff which I need to sort through. Korean garbage disposal is quite complex and I’m feeling a bit wary about attempting it, but at some point all this stuff has to go. I’ve got someone’s old razor blade. I’ve got soaps and shampoos. I’ve got like 47 umbrellas for some reason:

And a big ol’ futon that I shoved in the closet (despite wanting that space) because I could find no better solution at the moment. But, after a lot of work, I got the place more or less domestic. Here’s home for the next year:

Finally, after all that, I headed out into the world. I braved a Lotte Mart, wandered in circles for a few minutes until I found home goods, then a kindly clerk helped me stumble through the check out process. Then, about a 20 minute walk north of my apartment, I made it:

*I stopped being impressed by mountains after about the 400th one I saw. The first 399, though? Blew me away. Mountains are AWESOME.