SJCintheROK

Superb owl

2012-02-07T20:28:00.001+09:00

...okay, I couldn't think of a snappy title for this post, so I imagined its topic as it would show up on a Korean hoodie, such as this one I saw in a store window:

"UNSTINTED FLAIR

You will step fourward one step to victory. I believe the thing that your happy day.

And we will be able to put a wonderful life in the hand.

CORUSCATE

EAGERLY NECESSITY

You will step fourward one step to victory. I believe the thing that your happy day.

And we will be able to put a wonderful life in the hand.

EVERY DAY STYLE"

Korean shirts' "English" text is legendary. It may be full of typos, it may make no sense at all, it may be unintentionally ironic (as in the text "H*A*S*H 4077th.", worn by a girl young enough she certainly never heard of M*A*S*H or knew it was set in the Korean War... and may not have been aware there was a Korean War.)

But I digress, and I haven't even started yet. This post is about the big football game that just happened.

In three and a half years in Korea, I'd never taken a day off except for illness. But my Giants upset their way all the way to the Superb Owl, a mere 48 years after I stood in line-- okay, first in line-- for Y.A. Tittle to sign my program at the Corner Book Store, God rest its soul, in Ithaca, New York.

Yelverton Abraham Tittle.

I hadn't seen any of the Owls since I came here, but I wasn't going to miss this one.

So yesterday, I left home at 7:00 a.m. and caught the bus to the train to the train to Itaewon. I'd posted on the Harriers page on Facebook that I'd love it if anybody could join me at the Rocky Mountain Tavern, the Canadian-owned and -themed restaurant where many of our winter runs end up. To my delight, Choopa, Scared, and WTF made it and we settled in for some slobberknockin' football and camaraderie. (Oh... in proofreading, I notice that the "slobberknockin'" is meant to modify just the football, not the camaraderie. No slobber was knocked during our conversation.)

The game started at 8:30 our time and I'm not going to go into what happened; you either already know it well or don't care-- or both. But my guys beat New England-- again-- in the last minute. Tom Brady is to Elmer as Eli Manning is to Bugs. And there was much rejoicing. Poor Tom had to go home to his solid-platinum house and his wife Gisele Bundchen.

The RMT was perfectly populated, with just enough people to feel like a crowd but no sense of being packed in. (Virtually every bar in Itaewon was showing the game and the GI's at the Yongsan US Army base could watch it there.) The bar inexplicably wasn't serving brunch, as they always do on the weekends, so I missed out on the mushroom omelet and settled a delicious breakfast of coffee and Ore-Ida fries.

I was the only one in the bar in a team shirt, a cheap knockoff Lawrence Taylor jersey I'd bought Saturday, but just about everyone, including my friends because of me, was rooting for the Giants. So it was all very pleasant. It wasn't quite the same as sharing the Giants-Patsies Owl with my buddy Brian, the equally devoted Giants fan, four years ago, but it'll do very nicely.

In four hours, I had about five beers, which is at least three more than I usually have when I teach on Monday mornings. And then I went home for a nap, lamentably smoky and hoarse from the bar, slightly addled, and happy.

Did I mention that the Giants won? Even though Y.A. Tittle did not appear.

The Doctor, Regis, the Girls, and The Boys

2012-02-01T21:41:00.001+09:00

My favorite all-time (snerk) TV show is Doctor Who. The Doctor travels through all of space and time in his TARDIS and, wouldn't you know it, sometimes bits of both time and space get squeezed together in, as the Wizard of Oz put it, "an arduous and technically unexplainable manner".

I feel rather like that now: Letterman last night had on Bill Murray in a New York Giants' uniform. (I've been a fan of the Giants for literally 50 years.) He had on my old Millionaire chum (from 2000), Regis Philbin. And he had Girls' Generation, one of the hottest of the K-pop groups that rule Korea and much of Asia. (I heard Girls' Generation blasting from a couple of storefronts in Taipei, as well.)

(If you don't know K-pop, it's all in this clip: dance in perfect but robotic unison, insipid lyrics, high energy and legs, legs, legs.) You should watch it.

In the context of my life, it's, as the Doctor said, "Pieces of Space and Time that should never have touched... pressed together."

I think I like it.

Feed the kitty

2012-02-01T21:19:00.001+09:00

After his plumbing repairs (and lung repairs, and eye repairs), Tug seems to be all better. I credit his stress-free lifestyle. (If he only knew about the numberless cats just on the other side of that wall trying to stay alive somehow through this icebox of a Korean winter...)

But he needs special urinary-tract-aid food that can only be bought at vets' offices, and we ran out. So after school today I walked to the new subway stop, took the train to nearby Yangjae Station and walked to a nearby vet's where I had bought his scratching post-- only to find the office wasn't there anymore. So I turned and walked straight into the awful north wind for the mile or so to Gangnam Station. (In this country, nothing good blows in from the north.) I figured to find at least one vet on the way.

And, my friends, it was cold. Holy toeloopin' Moses in the Ice Capades, it was cold. You know when you get a horrible pain-- brain freeze from a lime margarita, labor pains if you're a woman, a basketball in the castanets if you're a guy, somebody pulling your lower lip over your head-- and there just are no words that will convey how it feels? Yeah? That's how cold it was, walking straight into the wind and slip-slidin' away on the ice and snow underfoot.

When I finally got to Gangnam Station and hadn't found a vet, I gave in and decided to take the subway over to Tug's actual vet, even though that would mean another nearly-a-mile walk into the wind when I got there. But thankfully, there was another vet within a block of Seollung Station, and they had a puppy the size of my fist that went crazy for a touch and a kind word, and they had the right cat food.

So it just took two of my six waking post-school hours, four bucks for the fares, 20 bucks for three pounds of cat food, and nearly losing my nose and several cheeks to frostbite, but Tug's got his don't-clog-the-pipes food. He didn't show any signs of appreciating my effort.

If the little booger's not careful, I'm going to hollow him out and make a muff.

Front to the Future

2012-01-20T07:42:00.001+09:00

When I was a kid, I thought about living to the year 2000, which seemed impossibly far away. It never occurred to me that 2000 would once be considered the good old days. The actuarial tables of the time said the odds were I'd die in the year 2020, which was impossiblier farther away. Don't seem impossiblier anymore, but at this point I think that by 2020 I'll finally get my act together and start accomplishing stuff.

Me, 2012.

I've been thinking this morning about what my Android smart phone represents. Not many years ago, if you'd told me I could use a device smaller than Tom Cruise to do a thousand things, I'd have told you that you were crazier than Michele Bachmann... if, at that point, I'd ever had the bad luck to have heard of Michele Bachmann. I can Facebook or Twitter (while rationalizing Facebook and Twitter as verbs); take photos and send them around the world; catch up on email; listen to music; read whole books; translate from English to Korean or vice-versa (although I happen to know that"식 당" means "restaurant", not "per equation", as Google thinks); record my deathless thoughts (usually along the lines of "soy milk, bread, bananas"); zoom in on a map of Seoul; plot my subway route; and, most importantly, evaporate little green pigs with exploding irate, though naturally flightless, birds.

I've been told I could even make a phone call if I ever wanted to.

All this on a phone that was free and service that costs me a dollar a day. And I live in what many people say is the most wired city in the world. Here, everybody on the subway is mesmerized by their electronic devices and I'd worry whether the driver is paying attention to his job... but there isn't a driver. On the new subway line, you can look out the front of the computer-driven train and feel like Mr. Sulu as you zip through the tunnel. (I think I'd prefer a human driver, but at least the train is going to be tough to hijack.)

I know what we were all thinking back in the day: flying cars! But I've seen a lot of Koreans drive in two dimensions; I'd say the last thing we need is to add a third.

So, despite the melting polar ice caps and the career of Ke$ha, I've decided to spend the rest of my life in the future.

Engage.

"...and, doggone it, people like me."

2012-01-15T20:27:00.001+09:00

You know that stuff I wrote two entries ago, "I'm not alone"? Yeah, well, never mind. I was only kiddin'.

Seems I'm a ramblin' guy again; Kyung and I are off. I won't pretend I'm not disappointed, but I'm fine. Maybe I am alone, but 2011 was still a success because I learned I don't have to be alone.

Anyway, we're three weeks into our four-and-a-half-week winter break (necessitated by Korea's biggest holiday, Seollal-- Lunar New Year-- coming so soon after our usual two-week break). My colleagues are beginning to trickle back from their excursions to such strange, exotic locations as Vietnam and California, but most won't be back for another week.

I've been keeping busy writing, hiking, milling on the tread at the gym (shut up, I'm an English teacher), going to a movie, soaking in hot tubs, and hashing. During the school year, the Saturday morning Yongsan Kimchi hash is about all I can commit the time to each weekend. Now that I'm on vacation, though, I'm hitting both YK and Southside HHH on Sundays. It's a delicate balance, trying to keep the January cold out without being so bundled up I sweat through all those layers while running. Usually I fail.

Yesterday's YK hash, going all the way up and over three mountains while covering six miles in two hours, was epic, but it was last week's Southside that I'll really remember. We clambered over and between and around boulders all the way to the top of a mountain so high that even the traffic sounds of this metro area of 22 million completely faded away.

Halfway up: Headshot, Burt Reynolds, Mr. Blister, some guy,

Dead Porno Society, Corndog Millionaire.

Top of the World, Ma! (The escalator was out of order.)

The long, long way down was enchanting, with a beautiful little stream frozen solid all the way down through the silent woods. Maybe the best thing about Seoul is that spotted all through this huge city there are the hills and mountains, so natural, so peaceful, so quiet.

But in case one is ever tempted to forget that this is still Korea, near the top of the mountain is a bunker, built after the war, that's used by the army to train their men how to watch out for invaders from the north.

Still, it was a lovely day, and the hash means so much to me in terms of conditioning, friendship, and self-esteem.

And you know, though it seems improper to say it... friends and acquaintances tell me it's impressive that someone my age (58, if you're keeping score at home) has run over 80 hashes, and completed two marathons, in 15 months. And I always go, aw shucks, tweren't nothin'. But you know... it is impressive. I rock. In some ways.

And now for something completely different.

When I was new in Korea, every day brought something funny, or sad, or odd enough to want to blog about. After a couple of years, though, I stopped noticing as much, or caring as much to post it. And there is a lot of funky stuff here. For example:

-The underground shopping malls have so many rotundas and stairs and corridors branching off in all directions that they were apparently built by gophers with architectural degrees.And then there's inexplicable stuff like this:

-One of the moms in the English club I emcee at school gave me a Christmas present: a shocking-pink bow tie with gold filigree. (She knows me so well.)

-There are always so many salespeople standing around in stores that you can't twitch without having someone suggesting stuff you should buy, but for Seollal they're mostly decked out in lovely, traditional hanbok outfits. And you can't find half the stuff in its usual place because of all the gift packs on display, including Korea's favorite holiday delicacy:

-Close your eyes, delicate readers: as written in Korean characters, hope and hof (beer hall) are spelled identically; so are rub and love; so are park and fuck. (It's important to remember the difference in a no-parking zone.)

-There is actually in Korea a "free" cat who cost $1200 at the vet's due to nasty plumbing problems, an eye infection, and fluid in the lungs. Unfortunately, he lives with me.

If he wants legs, too, they're coming out of his allowance.

...and so, as Nick Carraway said, I beat on against the current, and survive the winter, and occasionally remind myself that, though I may be thoroughly single again, doggone it, people like me.

Don't mess with techses?

2012-01-03T20:06:00.005+09:00

Everyone's Gone to the Moon, The Only Living Boy in New York-- choose your favorite old song about being left while everybody else is away-- heck, choose I'm So Ronery, the Kim Jong Il puppet's song from Team America, I don't care. Point is, everybody's away. People from school are all either in the States or lying on some Southeast Asian beach during our 4 1/2-week winter break. I've gone to hashes, but between people's vacations and bone-chilling weather, they've been sparsely attended. Kyung's had house guests and spent the New Year with her daughter, so it's been ten days since I've seen her and it'll be four more before I do again.

Even Tug was back in the shop for observation for a bit. Selfish little creep.

So I've had lots of time to reflect. (However, I have not been refractory.) What I've been reflecting about today is tech, what we've lost and what we've gained.

What happens when we're left to our own devices? So to speak.

A packed Seoul subway car is quite a sight: 40 or so people, none talking to anyone else, 35 of them absorbed in their iPads and iPods and iPhones and Samsung Galaxy S's and Android phones. I'm not making fun; when I'm on the subway, I'm probably listening to a podcast or checking my Facebook or Angry Birding, too. (Did it ever occur to you that maybe the Birds are so Angry because they need a giant slingshot to fly?)

The locals' absorption in their tech dovetails with the facts that-- how should I put it politely?-- Koreans have a much narrower conception of personal space than Americans do and many have no sense whatsoever of who's near them. The result? Many near-hits and the occasional near-miss (that is, collision) as they stroll through subway stations and down streets sending texts, playing games, and watching Korean soap operas. (Costco has a sign prohibiting cell phones on the moving sidewalk.) For that matter, a lot of the cab drivers have GPS's that double as TV sets; you're as likely to ride with a TV watcher as a GPSer.

One example of personal tech making us more separate: I remember when I first started coaching cross country in 1999. We'd rent vans once a year, or twice if we advanced to the regional championships, and head over to Gainesville or Tallahassee, seven kids with me driving and seven with my friend and co-coach Brian. We'd talk and joke and laugh and rag about each other's musical taste as we swapped CD's in and out of the player, and we'd build a real team (it might not be too much to say a real family) atmosphere. But within a couple of years, everybody in the van but me, the driver, would be lost in his or her own earbudded world, and from five minutes out of St. Augustine to five minutes before Gainesville, I would in effect be driving alone.

And of course we could all name lots of other examples of how tech separates us from the people we're near, even as it links us to people far away (...he said, sitting a Pacific away from most of his audience.)

The proximate cause of this perhaps-not-entirely-original musing is the fact that I've finally given in to the e-reading wave. I've been resisting out of loyalty to the idea of The Bookstore-- I love a place where you can go and pick up any book, read the blurbs, open a page at random and skim a paragraph or two, and buy a book (even though said book often doesn't look as appealing sitting on the nightstand as it did the moment I decided to pay for it). I love being around people who love books.

Heck, I've owned a bookstore. And worked in a newsstand shop. And at the public library. And, back in Florida, run my school's textbook sale. And I hate to see the bookstore wither away. But it is, just as the newspaper is. And the record store and the abacus and buggy-whip industries did.

Still, I need to read more books, especially as I'm working on my own fiction, and it's a heck of a hassle to have to travel an hour each way to buy one. Also, I've been reading a blog about self-publishing e-books; the author (admittedly one who is experienced and prolific) earns six figures a year without ever paying a publisher or an agent. And on an e-reader, you can download entire out-of-copyright books and sample virtually any book for free, as well as checking out books from libraries. (Yeah, not sure yet how that works.)

The Mom's English Club, which I emcee on Thursday evenings at school, was reading Because of Winn-Dixie when I took the club over with four hours' notice. There wasn't a spare copy to be had in the Republic of Korea; I downloaded it onto my Android phone for three bucks. A hashing friend, who came back to Seoul to cover Kim Jong Il's death, showed me her Kindle and I was impressed, but she told me it was her second device and she liked her Nook better. On my phone, I read Tom Sawyer and I'm in the middle of Connecticut Yankee and sampling the first chapter of Stephen King's 11/22/63. All for free.

The prices have come way down on the infernal contraptions, and I've finally given in; frankly, reading a novel on a phone is less than ideal-- you have to hold it close to your face and turn the page every five seconds. So I asked my friend and colleague Bob to pick me up the low-end Nook at Barnes and Noble while he's in the States this month. (The import fees and shipping on American goods are prohibitive.)

Why a Nook and not a Kindle? Well, the reviews are slightly better for the Nook; I'd have to have Amazon ship a Kindle to somebody in the States from whom Bob could pick it up; Amazon is evil (it's a terrible employer and is engaging in Walmartian levels of undercutting brick-and-mortar stores); and I'd rather support a real bookstore chain, even one that's driven googols of little stores out of business, than a place whose entire physical presence is the warehouse we last saw at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Apparently the Nook is keeping Barnes and Noble from Bordering on bankruptcy.

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my little darling in two weeks or so. It already has a pet name... I was considering calling it Da Nook of the North, but that's too much of a stretch even for me. So I'm calling it Nookie.

Don't you judge me.

Day 362

2011-12-28T09:10:00.003+09:00

I've always liked the week between Christmas and New Year's. Aside from the thrills of Boxing Day, when we put away the Christmas boxes, or box up our unwanted presents for return, or watch a Rocky marathon on TV, or buy colorful underwear, or browse pictures of brachycephalic dogs with underbites, or some damn thing (I've never quite been sure), it's a quiet time of reflection, catching one's breath, and tranquilly contracting hypothermia. And for more than half of my years on earth, it's meant time off from school.

Looking back at this blog, I see I've posted an ungrand total of six entries in the last 22 weeks. (For comparison, I made 35 posts in my first month in Korea and 14 in my first month in Seoul.) I guess this is because I post about things I find novel or interesting and, after three-plus years here, not much is novel anymore. Maybe I'm a little tired of my own glibness, too. I've thought of dropping this blog entirely, to tell the truth. (I haven't, evidently.)

There was a time not long ago when I would have found so many things ripe for blogging:

Tug went into the shop for plumbing repairs (to the tune of $1000) and is back there now for treatment of a cold and an eye infection, both of which he picked up when he boarded there the first time.
I fell on my head (and chest and wrist), running downhill on hash and tripping on a drunk bump in the street; at our hash Thanksgiving dinner afterward, I bled like a new red hoodie from Wal-Mart and, four weeks later, my wrist is still sore. (In my post about the marathon in November, I wrote that if there had been a string in the street, I would have tripped. At the time, I thought I was joking.) It's the third time in my life I've gashed myself just above my left eye by falling on my head... one is supposed to learn something from experience, and what I've learned is that I turn my head to the right just before I fall on it.
The gang I started working two years ago at school continues to disperse, one by one, around the world: Nick, our counselor, has moved back to the States and Lauren has moved from San Diego to Copenhagen.
My hashing friends leave, too... GI Ho, Spartakicks, and Spread Eagle Scout Master (among many others) are gone, TKO is leaving, and it's only a couple of months until we lose Shitonya and Bootylicious.
Korea continues to impress with its tech. For example, this is one of a dozen panels at a particular subway platform:

...while you're waiting for the next train, you scan the items you want with your handepone (cellphone) and send it to HomePlus. Your groceries are delivered when you get home.

I MC the Moms' English Club at school every Thursday evening, bringing the joys of Fried Green Tomatoes to the land of pickled cabbage.
Kim Jong II died, making way for Kim Jong III, and I'm told nerves are frayed on our side of the border, though I can't see it anywhere.
The stores go crazy for Christmas and, gee, Gangnam is pretty, all lit up with LED trees and gift-wrapped building facades. But the day itself is pretty much like any other; everything's open for business. And what I really miss are Christmas cookies and trees with lights.

In Itaewon: possibly the biggest light display in Korea.

Penguins in parkas are patrolling the park. (It's c-c-cold.)
And so it goes.

The biggest thing worth blogging about is my relationship with Kyung ah, and that's almost too personal to write about. We've been seeing each other once or twice a week, and it has done me-- and I hope, her-- a world of good. We go to dinner or a movie, sing together at a noraebang, play a little pool... one day she drove me out past Incheon Airport to a dock, where we took a ten-minute ferry ride to a little island on the West (that is, Yellow) Sea. I loved every second of it: the salt air, the sea breeze, the hungry gulls, the company.

...you can get a lucky shot, even with a cellphone camera.

Beyond that, we just enjoy each other's company, and it has been a long time since I've had someone in my life.

And, years from now, if I remember one thing about 2011, it will be this: it's when I met Kyung.

That means it's been a good, good year: I'm not alone.

Occupy Earth

2011-11-20T09:55:00.001+09:00

I don't usually write very explicitly about politics here; if you know me, you know where my sympathies lie. But now I'm just sickened. The police at Cal Davis (where, incidentally, I lived for a few months, exactly 50 years ago) have sprayed protesters (who were doing nothing more threatening than sitting on the ground with arms linked) directly in the face with pepper spray. A woman protesting in Portland was sprayed point-blank in the mouth. An 84-year-old woman was sprayed in Seattle.

It's nice to see how far our civilization has advanced since the Civil Rights days; in less than fifty years, we've gone from assaulting peaceful protesters with firehoses, billy clubs, and German shepherds to simply attacking them with something that a US Army study concluded can cause "mutagenic effects, carcinogenic effects, sensitization, cardiovascular and pulmonary toxicity, neurotoxicity, as well as possible human fatalities".

I'm so proud: unlike at Kent State and Jackson State when I was a senior in high school, nobody's been killed. Yet.

Personally, I'm completely behind the Occupy movements around the country and the world. We are systematically being ravaged by corporations, banks, and the politicians-- of both parties-- they own. The right-wing cries of "class warfare" are totally true... except it's not the middle class or the poor who have been waging it for all these years.

Call me a socialist if you like. I can take it. Hell, 75 years ago John Steinbeck was called a communist for standing up for migrant workers and working people against the banks and corporations that profited from their misery.

But suppose I'm totally wrong. Suppose corporations (as the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney have said) are people. Suppose the Occupy protesters really are lazy, dirty, communist hippies. Even so, do governments-- do the police-- have the right to assault and hospitalize peaceful protesters? Arrest them for trespassing, put them in jail. They did it to Dr. King. They did it to Nelson Mandela. They did it to Gandhi.

Here in South Korea, which was a draconian police state until the 1980s, every time there's a whiff of protest we see bus after bus after bus of police officers deployed. But in three-plus years, I've never seen anything like what I've seen recently in Davis and Portland and Seattle,,,

in the Land of the Free.

Eighteen thousand fifty-eight seconds

2011-11-15T23:18:00.004+09:00

All the omens were bad for my Joongang Marathon on Sunday, November 6. I hesitated to enter, to begin with. I overtrained (often running six days a week, including regular training runs, hashes, and the school cross-country club) and hurt my knee, so that I had to take two weeks off from training, including the two longest runs. I made a radical change, from traditional running shoes to "barefoot" shoes, in the middle of the training period. And I lost two of the 17 pounds I'd planned to take off. And put them back on as I carbo-loaded in the last few days before the race.

And on Sunday, Marathon Day, it rained. A lot. Not Monday. Not Tuesday. Not Wednesday or Thursday, Friday or Saturday. Not Monday, Part II, not... well, you know. I didn't want to go and didn't know if I could finish: my best projected time might keep me from being picked up for blocking traffic.

And yet it all worked out. I give myself an "A". Not an "A+", because my goal was to break five hours and it took me five hours and 58 seconds. But my other goal, after having run three minutes/walked one minute for the entirety of the Chuncheon Marathon a year ago, was to run pretty much the whole way. And I did that. And took 39-plus minutes off my PR. So I feel pretty damn good.

I did almost everything right during the race; I fueled well, BodyGlided liberally to prevent chafing of the Personals, carried water till it was obvious I wouldn't need it (and dropped my hydration belt off), had a devoted pit crew on the course, timed myself very carefully... I had my pace down exactly, and kept with it, to finish in 4:58. Except that that didn't account for the fact that a marathon course is measured by the shortest possible distance around curves, which one can't always run with 21,000 other people in the way. And then there were those trips behind the bushes... you've heard of answering the call of nature? Yeah, well, Nature doesn't call me; she stalks me. According to my GPS watch, I ran exactly a quarter-mile farther than the official distance.

I could have foregone the food bar I ate while walking, four miles from the end. I could have skipped that one last trip to the little boys' bush. Either one would have saved me a minute... ah, well.

It started to rain as soon as I left home before the race, and kept it up most of the morning, intensifying a half-hour or so into the run, and very soon I just couldn't get any wetter. And being wet, I was absolutely chilled by the cool, breezy day. For five hours. And even once it stopped raining, there was just no way to avoid stepping in cold puddles. When I finally got home, my toes looked like white raisins.

Toward the end, my knees weren't bending real good. If there had been a string in the street, I'd've tripped on it. (I did, however, win the wet t-shirt contest.)

I got really lucky, though... a few miles in, I met a fellow American named Kyle, who was running his first marathon. I coached him a little, we shared energy gels and ibuprofen, and we encouraged each other for the next 20 miles or so, until finally he pulled ahead, finishing ahead of me by a minute. But having company made all the difference in the world to both of us, as neither of us wanted to quit and let the other person down. And then, though the Marathon "scoop up the slowpokes" Bus driver suggested we get on board, we didn't-- we were just too close to the end to even consider stopping.

I owe a debt of thanks to my hashing friends LesBalls (thanks for the photos), Countess, and Choopa for coming into the city to cheer me at the finish, and an enormous debt to our school principal Ron and his wife Jill, for being there, both going out (in the rain) and coming back, with my ditty bag of shoes, socks, shirt, water, energy gels, and food bars. And to Mr. Park, our boss, who kept popping up during the route to take pictures and cheer me on. (And give me a warm, dry ride home afterward.) Practically the best take-away from the whole experience is the knowledge that all these people sacrificed a large chunk of their weekends because they care about me.

My dear friend Shawn (Countess) was proud of me. Me, too.

By the way, I've mentioned it before, but now I'm a total drink-the-Kool-Aid convert to barefoot shoes. Running in my conventional shoes, I got worse knee pain than I've ever had, but after taking a little time off and switching to the Merrell Trail Gloves (which are basically like going barefoot, but with a little protection for the feet), the pain completely disappeared. We evolved to run on the balls of our feet and let our bent legs absorb the shock. It makes all the difference in the world. (I owe more thanks to Debby, my ex, who long ago said that thick running shoes can't be good for people, and my friend Lauren, for introducing me to Born to Run, the bible of the barefoot crowd.)

When I got on the stadium track at the end, it was vastly inspirational-- Carl Lewis and FloJo ran on this track at the Olympics-- and a tremendous letdown, because when Lauren and I ran a 10K here, we came into the stadium 50 yards from the finish line, and I expected the same here, which would have let me break the five-hour mark. Instead, we came in almost a full lap, a quarter mile, from the finish. And all I would have to do to beat my goal was to match the world-record 1500-meter pace. Inexplicably, I did not do so.

Kyle and me, a few minutes after the finish.

If you aren't a slow person who's run a marathon, I can't describe to you the sheer incomprehensible length of the damn thing, I'd say roughly approximately 46,147 steps; the sheer creakiness and achiness of everything below the waist I can mention in public; and the deadly monotony of the training, especially the long, long Sunday runs. All the way through, I kept thinking, "There's no way I'm ever doing this again."

And then, when I crossed the finish line, the relief and the release and the pride... well, maybe there was brief, manly tear, and you know, it wasn't so bad, and... heck, I know I can cut 58 seconds off my time...

Happier

2011-10-30T17:19:00.005+09:00

This is a good book, but I won't mention it again in this post. It's just an illustration.

(If you don't want a detailed self-analysis that's a lot more about the SJC than the ROK, get out now!)

I am happier right now than I have been in many years; in some ways, in general satisfaction with life, this may be my best time ever.

Happiness mostly comes from inside, and I have always been somewhat dysthymic (good vocab word: in a chronic low-level depressive state). Why? I don't know; brain chemistry, I suppose. Some of my students used to give me Eeyore-themed presents, to match my outlook. In fact, I brought a stuffed Tigger-- the real, Milne Tigger, not that Disney schlock-- to Korea with me to remind myself to be more cheerful. I don't know that I'll ever reach true Tiggerhood, but I have at least achieved Poohdom, a general genial confusion.

With age has come a certain equanimity, if not wisdom: I recognize my strengths now and forgive myself (most of the time) my maddening weaknesses. I think I'm closer to being a good person than I was before, and a better teacher, and a better friend. I think.

The last week or so, though, has really changed my outlook completely. Last Saturday, I laid down the trail for my Yongsan Kimchi hashing group on my birthday run. It was also my Junior Trail Master hash-- 50-plus runs and five hares (laying trail), all in a bit under a year. I'd planned for six months to set a run from the brand-new subway stop opening near me; it's right near the neighborhood parks and my beloved Yangjae Cheon stream. Well, the new subway station was a year overdue, and as it turned out, it opened two days ago, six days too late for me to set the trail from there.

But we did run from a station not too far away, and what really made me feel great was how many hashers came because it was my birthday celebration. People who usually run with other groups made a special effort to be there, and that means a lot to me.

The logo for my"Corndog's (Probably Not Last) Birthday" patch.

The actual haring was a perfect example of the kind of thing I've always hated about myself: I am criminally spacy sometimes. I set off to mark the trail, 15 minutes before the pack would follow-- and brilliantly left two of my three pieces of chalk behind. I found that out a mile into my four-mile course, and kept using the chalk I had until it ran out, a mile from the start/finish line.

I called myself some bad names; I shall not sully the pristine surface of the Internet by repeating them here. (This incredible zoned-outness, which I know makes me maddening to live with, is exactly the kind of thing I've dealt with my whole life, and I'm with myself almost constantly. I'm just now coming to accept it in myself.)

All I could do was to run as hard as I could back to the start, grab the chalk, and run as hard as I could back to where I'd left off, knowing that the pack would get there before I did and mill about in frustration, then wrathfully rend me limb from limb when they found me.

But somehow, miraculously, I made it back before they got there and completed marking the trail. Afterward, as part of the festivities, they taught me how to drink beer upside down from a straw:

The beer really went to my head, and very nearly vice-versa.

It's nice to have friends. This warm feeling began my winning streak.

But what really has mattered began the next day. I had just met Kyung ah, a lovely Korean woman of nearly my age, on a dating site. On Sunday, we met in person. And on Wednesday, for my actual birthday. And yesterday. We've been to movies and noraebang (karaoke parlors), gone hiking, shared lunch and dinner and birthday cake and wine... it's been wonderful.

Kyung ah is a writer on Korean history; she lives in the hills above Itaewon, the international neighborhood I go to so often for hashes and the What the Book store. We hit it off immediately; we have so much in common, politically, spiritually, and in our outlook on life. I find her wise and centered, and she makes me happy.

So, you say, it's been a long time for me, and of course having a girlfriend-- if two people with a combined age of 114 can be called girlfriend and boyfriend-- makes a guy feel good. And of course that is a big thing.

But I think my current outlook is more than that-- people who've known me a long time can tell that the clouds have been slowly clearing for me for quite a while. My hashing friends' regard and Kyung ah's high opinion of me, and mine of her, have added to little things, such as winning a teaching award and finishing last year's marathon, that were already making me like and trust myself more than ever before.

In many ways, other than the fact I don't have as many years in front of me as I did, I like being 58; I've gained more than I've lost in getting older.

I hope and intend to make that true for many years to come.

"I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now."

Ever been picked up by the fuzz?

2011-10-15T22:19:00.003+09:00

...That's the setup for a joke from the late '60s; if you want to know the punchline, email me. If you don't know what "fuzz" meant in '60s slang, I can't help you. I guess you could pick it up from context, as I'm always telling my students regarding new vocab words.

Anyway, I had a great plan for setting the trail for today's hash. Shaft (my co-hare) and I were going to set off from Topgol Park, head south a few blocks, turn west along the Chonggyecheon stream, north past the golden stretch of touristy sights: Seoul Plaza, the Admiral Yi and King Sejong statues and Gwanghwamun Gate and Gyeongbokgung Palace, east, and then south through the crowded, artsy pedestrian-friendly neighborhood of Insadong to the starting place.

As Shaft and I are collectively 110 years old (he's a mere sprout of 53), and our pursuers averaged out to their 20s, we decided to pre-lay most of the trail, so we set off at 8 a.m., chalking Xes and circles and other trail markings as we went. All seemed fine till we were running down the sidewalk opposite Seoul Plaza, approaching the monolithic US embassy.

Left, palace. Center, Sejong. Right, embassy.

There were dozens of Korean police officers in yellow jackets along the sidewalk outside the embassy; Shaft was pretty sure we wouldn't get into any trouble; after all, we were just marking trail with chalk, not flour. (Some hashers in California were arrested for suspicion of terrorist activity a couple of years ago for dropping blogs of flour that might have been anthrax [OMG!!!!!!!!!!!] in a Lowe's parking lot.) Still, we abandoned my plan and went a couple of blocks out of our way to avoid the embassy...

...which didn't keep a passel of policemen from stopping us. Two blocks behind the embassy, first two officers stopped us, then (literally) a dozen more walked up in formation, one of them carrying a little red unit flag... it was surreal; I thought they were just out for some sort of training exercise. But they gathered round us and the one who had a smattering of English tried to find out what we were doing.

We made running motions with our arms and said "running club" over and over, and apparently we were really, really convincing, because a cop car came up, they loaded us in, and we were driven to the nearest police substation...

...where we surrendered Shaft's passport and my Alien Registration Card and waited while they investigated us. Maybe we were considered suspicious because Shaft, to the conservative Korean mindset, looks like a pirate or an outlaw biker: balding, ponytail, earrings, bandanna. And I'm overdue for a shave and way overdue for a haircut.

The guy in charge, who had 1.2 smatterings of English, talked to us, made some calls, typed us into the database, and eventually called a translator. I tried to explain over the phone who we were; she had a bit of trouble getting "Hash House Harriers"... "Harriers... H. A. R. R. I..." We turned Shaft around so they could see the map, with all the Korean hash kennels, on the back of his shirt. I called up "Hash House Harriers" on Wikipedia and our kennel's Facebook page. I showed them the Xeroxed map with my planned route.

Perhaps it's just as well that I didn't remember that, under my jeans, I was wearing running shorts with "HASH" written across the butt. I'm not sure what they would have done if I'd had the bright idea to drop trou in the police station.

The whole thing took perhaps 40 minutes, and it's kind of amusing in retrospect, but at the time... I knew we hadn't done anything wrong or illegal, but just recently there have been anti-American currents locally; some soldiers have been accused of rape and the American military people has put our people under curfew. Also, I found out just tonight that the Occupy Wall Street protests spread to Seoul today. The cops here are old hands at dealing with protesters, too... let's just say thoughts that we might actually be charged with something, anything (Ohmigod... I'm gonna get fired! Deported! I'm too pretty to go to jail!) were not far from the surface.

But finally they gave us our documents back and gave us a ride back to the park to start the hash, after which we did not lay a trail back in the direction of the embassy, or the cops, or anyone with a yellow jacket, for that matter.

We ended up laying a "live" trail, meaning that we were out there improvising the route at the same time as the hashers chasing us. Five minutes from the finish, we got snared, which is something no hare ever wants. But, believe me, having a friendly hasher tap you on the shoulder is not the worst way you can get snared.

That Was the Week That Was

2011-10-10T21:23:00.000+09:00

It's been a busy time.

It's Day 11 of the 11-day Nash Hash, the annual event when there's a hash every day. I've been to six of them: Friday night to run, Sunday afternoon to walk, Monday and Tuesday nights to run, Friday night for a social at the VFW bar, and Saturday morning to run. Last Sunday's endeavor was the best hash, heck, the best walk, ever.

The running trail was advertised as long and intimidating, so (having run for 2 1/2 hours the day before) I joined the walkers, who took the subway a few stops to cut off half the trail, then hiked up a mountain and down and up again, witnessing bulldozers clearing away large channels to prevent future mudslides like the ones that killed so many people this summer. The trail came down the mountain to the Seoul Arts Center, home of the opera house and art museum, and on this gorgeous sunny fall day, the expansive plaza was hosting a wine festival.

Seven of us (ToT, Nut n' Bone, TKO, Little Leaguer, Crystal, a Korean newcomer named Gina, and I) came down together into the festival and couldn't resist buying red wine and Ghirardelli raspberry-filled chocolate and the most incredible custard/fruit tarts ever and sitting back to enjoy the sun and the breeze and the mountain at our backs and the culinary delights, and it was so nice. And then Gina somehow got the host to bring us a free bottle of red and Little Leaguer somehow got them to start the dancing fountain show early and it was perfect, one of those moments with a happiness so simple and so complete that I know I'll remember it decades from now.

The previous day, I had set out to do an 18-mile training run and just completely ran out of steam at 12 1/2 miles, a very worrying thing with the marathon five weeks (at that point) away. The knee pain has completely gone away since I've been running in my new "barefoot" shoes, but the two weeks of missed training took a lot from my conditioning. However, I did the 18 miles yesterday and feel pretty confident again. Sore, too.

On that 18-miler, I ran down the Yangjae Cheon four miles to Gwacheon City, and on the way back heard fireworks coming from the soccer park (a full-size soccer field with a few thousand seats) on the banks of the stream. I went up to investigate and found some kind of sports festival. There were several hundred people, all adults, mostly middle-aged, seated in groups on the field, each group in its distinctive brightly colored jackets. A few hundred more people were in the stands, behind banners and balloons and traditional Korean drummers. Rock songs were blasting from huge speakers and there were cheerleaders-- real, American-style cheerleaders, not dancers like the ones at baseball games-- doing their routines.

I went around and around the track as the preliminaries... uh, preliminated, and even got some applause and thumbs-ups from people in the crowd. (That's more than I got for actually finishing my marathon last year.)
It was heady stuff, very Chariots of Fire, and I kept going until somebody told me politely it was time to clear the track. I brought back a couple of silver and gold streamers to remind me of how it was, for a little, to feel I could run forever.

Midweek, The Korea Herald, the country's top English-language paper, had an article about hashing in Seoul. A lot of my friends were mentioned, a few quoted, a couple pictured, and despite a few factual errors it was a fair and complete summation of what we do. It was the best free publicity we could hope for. Here's a link, in case you're interested:

http://www.koreaherald.com/lifestyle/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20111004000577

In the midst of all this, our school had its overnight trip on Thursday and Friday. We rode four buses a couple hours down into the heart of South Korea, way out in the sticks. The venue was a bit of a letdown, as the place we'd booked called at the last minute to say they'd double-booked, but we did manage paintball (yeah, I played), a sports competition, a talent show, a competition field day, and a bonfire with DJ and wild group dances. I know you won't believe me, but I danced in the middle of a circle of students and teachers and was declared the winner of my round. (Apparently they like the miming of a circus bear with his shorts on fire.)

I dreaded bedtime, as we were at a bare-bones youth hostel with no beds. Eighteen months ago, when we took our three-day trip to Jeju Island, I woke up in great pain, as if I'd been racked. And not with guilt, with a rack. But this time we brought grabbed comforter after comforter, and with five (doubled, so in effect ten) under me and two over me, I slept the untroubled sleep of the exhausted and woke up to bluebirds and unicorns.

On Friday morning (a crisp, clear fall morning, perfect for running, I might add), I went for a run down the road, surrounded by mountains (well, hills) that a sign rather hyperbolically called the Chungbuk Alps.

This is me, only lumpier. I swear.

We were in the heart of farm country; every flat square centimeter of Korea that isn't city grows something. I passed acre upon acre of rice...

(This is what it looks like before the -Roni is added.)

, as well as vines bearing dates and hot peppers and greenhouses where they grow little mushrooms on lengths of wood...

...which I am now recording in my travel log. (See what I did there?)

Eventually I came upon a little Buddhist temple. (It's interesting to note that the Buddha may have renounced worldly goods, but the temple had a Mercedes in the garage.)

It was wonderful to get out of this huge, overcrowded city for a short while, seeing stars-- I've never seen more than one in a night in Seoul-- and breathing clean air and listening to the breeze in the woods and the rushing of water.

On my run I saw more chipmunks (four) than people, aside from some of our kids who were being punished for having a party after lights-out the night before; they were helping a local farmer by snapping the stems off hundreds of his hot peppers.

If you're keeping track at home, that's a hash Friday, a long run Saturday, hashes Monday and Tuesday, a school trip Thursday and Friday, a social Friday night, a hash Saturday, and a loooong run Sunday. As that's about as much as I generally do in, oh, a decade, I'll kick back a little this week and get my strength back.

The arduous marathon, after all, lurks just around the corner, like... some arduous lurking thing.

Four weeks to go. I think I can, I think I can.

A Taipei personality

2011-10-02T11:06:00.002+09:00

On Friday last week, my colleague Susan Kim (the science teacher) and I left school at noon and took off for Taiwan. Inexplicably, this was not so much an elopement as a seminar: the College Board was conducting a two-day workshop on teaching Advanced Placement classes. I taught AP for a couple of years in Florida, but nobody ever gave me any training; they just handed me a Cliffs book and told me to teach from it. So I thought I owed it to my kids to learn how to do it right.

We flew out on Thai Air, which was certainly colorful in the white and purple plane with the gold, magenta, and purple seats and the lovely flight attendants in their jewel-toned cheongsams and sashes. The announcements came on in Thai and English, making me wonder if the other 288 passengers, apparently all Korean or Chinese, would know what to do if the plane had an unauthorized plummet. Fortunately, and against my expectation every time I get on a plane, it didn't.

The surroundings, the announcements, and the attendants (and the fact that the first person to broach this trip to me said the workshop was in Thailand, not Taiwan) somehow got it into my head for a few moments that we would be flying on to Bangkok. But I managed to stumble off the plane in Taipei nonetheless.

What can I say about Taipei? If I'd only ever had vanilla ice cream (representing the USA in my subtle, clever analogy), then maple walnut (Taiwan) would seem pretty exotic. But I've been living up to my neck in butter pecan for three years, so the effect was muted. Still nuts, though.

Compared to Seoul, Taipei has bigger dogs (unlike the Fun-Size [tm] little yappers so popular in Korea), fewer beautiful, stylish women, a thousand fewer coffee shops and a million more motor scooters. I'd be walking down the street and hear a tremendous roaring buzz (or it could have been a buzzing roar), and here would come an enormous swarm of scooters, often a guy and his girl on board, sometimes a family of four, once a man, a woman, and a baby who couldn't have been a year old.

The hotel itself, a small affair with perhaps 30 rooms, was nice enough; my room was small but had a great TV that had six channels of American movies, and the shower: Oh. My. God. (By the way, in both Korea and Taiwan, people say "Ohmygod" in English as an expression of surprise.) So that makes three Chinese words I learned: nihao (hello), shehsheh (thank you) and ohmygod (holy crap). But I digress.

Ah, the shower: a stainless steel marvel, with three huge shower heads directly overhead, a puissant spraying wand (yeah, working on my AP vocabulary here), and, on the vertical pipe, three adjustable nozzles at torso level. They all delivered a very hot, very powerful spray; it was heaven; coming home to my apartment, where the shower spray is provided by three arthritic bullfrogs drooling from above, was a bit of a letdown.

The hotel provided a sumptuous breakfast spread each morning: Chinese soups, salads, fruit, eggs, and an unusual French toast/sponge hybrid topped with honey. At the workshop itself, the organizers had arranged a special vegetarian lunch for me each day, and it was incredible. The "meat" was juicy and marbled with "fat"; I don't know why neither Americans nor Koreans can produce something, like this, so convincing: I Can't Believe it's Not Flesh.

The seminar itself, held at the huge Taipei American School, was terrific; Frank, our leader, is a popular teacher in Hawaii, a high muckety-muck in the AP Exam hierarchy, and, I think, the best teacher I've ever seen. He provided us with hundreds of pages of good material to try out in our classes. He and I hit it off, too... I wonder if there are any openings in Honolulu...

The sessions went from 9 to 4 on Saturday and Sunday. I'm not really big on tourist attractions: Hey, it's a palace. Hey, it's a painting. Hey, it's a statue. Generally, I'd rather walk around and just get a feel for a place. So on Saturday evening I walked, using my GPS watch, in a vaguely westerly direction, hoping I might find the Shillin Night Market without much caring if I did. I didn't; after an hour, I turned around and walked back. But I did get an idea of what life is like in Taipei.

The next evening, I headed in the same general direction, hoping to find the subway, which I'd take to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial, then to the aforementioned Shillin Night Market. After an hour and a bit, I hadn't found the subway, but I did find a fancy department store with a men's room. As I came back out to the street, I said the heck with it and got a cab to the Memorial. (Of course, if I'd walked another three minutes, I would have found the subway.)

The Memorial itself, in function and interior layout, is reminiscent of the Lincoln Memorial, but from the first step to the top of the roof, it's 25 stories high:

The plaza itself is massive, with a massive concert hall and a massive theater to complement the massive memorial. (The square is so massive, in fact, that you can't get a feel in the video for the massive massiveness of the massive buildings.)

After strolling around being all Caucasian, I took the subway to the Night Market, where I found a little building chock-a-block with people buying and eating disquieting things, frog legs and chicken feet among them. There seems to be a general "foot" theme going on. Ah, the extremities they go to...

...and then strolled around for several blocks outside among the shops and kiosks and a whole bunch of locals, not buying key chains and t-shirts and, well, anything really except for a bottle of ice-cold, freshly squeezed-- or is it wrung out?-- zhu li (bamboo juice), which is supposed to be good for my heart, stomach, and lung meridians. (I may need to lose some weight; I've looked and looked and I can't find my meridians.)

On Sunday and Monday morning, I got out and ran 40 minutes each day in my new "barefoot" shoes. (I love oxymorons!) I got sharp knee pain from overuse the weekend before and was gingerly trying to get back into training for the marathon on November 6, though I've lost so much conditioning... anyway, my knee didn't hurt. (What's a joint like that doing in a nice guy like me?)

That's about it; we flew back and went to work on Tuesday. It was well worth the trip; I think it will make me a better AP teacher and it was even more interesting than a weekend spent lingering around the Yangjae E-Mart. But it's good to be back home (yeah, I said it) where the women are pretty, the signs are legible-- phonetically, at least-- and the cat cares when I walk in the door. Besides, the shower bullfrogs were getting lonely.

That darn cat

2011-08-04T20:09:00.001+09:00

I've been in my new apartment for a week as of tomorrow (more of that anon). It's been very frustrating to be pretty much without my lifeline, the internet. I've had my Android phone (except for the day I lost it before I got it back; more of that ditto)... but that's no good for any real communication or surfing. The problem is that, in moving in to my ex-colleague Mike Peck's apartment, I inherited his broadband service, which requires a password to sign on. Which I don't have.

It reminds me of my first month in Korea, when I had a few minutes a day of 'net access at my school... not a good situation when you're 8000 miles away from everything you know for the first time. (I thought all the businesses with "PC" signs were for sales and repairs; they're "PC bangs", where you can use a big-screen machine for a couple of bucks an hour. Doy.)

So imagine my pleasure when Jack, the school's new Korean staffer, said he could call my provider to hook me up if I'd only give him some paperwork with my account number. I rooted (and tooted) around in the drawers in my old place; imagine my further pleasure yesterday when I finally found the sheet the installer had left me when I got the service connected. All I had to do was get the paper to Jack today.

Now imagine my utter delight to be awakened at 5:15 this morning to the dulcet tones of Tug, my cat whose activity usually approaches meatloaf levels (as in, he might deign to swat at a shoelace if you literally drag it on his stomach), gleefully ripping my broadband document up with his claws and teeth. Apparently the little booger had found a remnant of the catnip I'd given him the night before. Stoner.

I found most of the fragments, but one large chunk is missing. I guess the cat ate my homework.

But, if I'm reading it correctly (which is dubious at best) the part that's still intact has my account number on it, so Jack should be able to call SK Broadband, and maybe... just maybe... I won't manufacture a small stripey tiger-skin rug after all.

Little bugger still owes me an hour's sleep, though. Dope fiend.

...but that doesn't mean my eyes will soon be turning red

2011-07-28T13:27:00.003+09:00

Hit the arrow... now with color, audio, and amazing 2-D technology!

I'm trying to get my stuff moved to a new apartment a couple hundred yards from my current one, and it's been tough, due to the stupendous amount of rain we've had the last few days. My difficulties, of course, are meaningless compared to the toll the downpour, on top of the huge amount of rain we've already had this monsoon season, has taken. There are something like 40 dead now in South Korea, mostly in a mudslide in Chuncheon, the city to the east where I ran my marathon last fall.

Topography is destiny, it seems, when it comes to disasters. People who live at the base of mountains are in deadly danger; in my neighborhood, we can step around the puddles and be done with it. Meanwhile, the wife of the CEO of one of Korea's biggest companies drowned in her basement yesterday.

Our school closed early yesterday (my friends Billy and Murphy, who came from across town, waded through waist-deep water to get there) and is closed today. But at the moment, as I look out my window (and I'm going to miss the view), it just looks like another gray, drizzly day. Maybe the heavy rains, despite the forecast I gave in the video above, are over for now. Maybe. Maybe.

This is my running path. I think I'll let the kid try it first.

The Cheon at normal level. (The videos above are from the top and bottom of the ramp in front of the mountains at center-top.)

The Cheon is a lot more impressive just a little way downstream; I saw actual rapids at the site of a gently terraced falls. However, as I was on my run, up above on the surface streets, I didn't have my camera. I'm just grateful that, unless the foundations of the LG Electronics building crumble and it falls forward like a domino, I'm in a safe place. I hope no one else dies due to the deluge.

Roaming in the gloaming

2011-07-21T12:42:00.000+09:00

I went to the Bears' ballgame last evening with my friends Bob, Chris, and Vanessa from work. There we met 'Nother Bob, the former principal of my school, who hired me two years ago, and his wife, who are leaving Korea forever in a few days. I hadn't seen 'Nother Bob since my interview. It was good to say hello again.

The game itself was, much like the Hundred Years' War and the TV show According to Jim, prolonged and unfortunate. But it was a truly lovely evening, with the rare, for a Seoul summer, qualities of bearable temperatures, clear air, and a light breeze. We had a good time. I'm less enamored of Korean baseball than I used to be; the atmosphere is always so frenetic, and it's hard to be involved when you don't know the players... though the Bears' pitcher, Fernando Nieve, actually pitched for the Mets last year. (This game reminded me of why he doesn't pitch for the Mets this year.)

All this has probably not been worth posting, but it reminded me of another game I went to with friends a couple of months ago. The fact that what I'm about to describe has stuck with me that long probably means its worth writing about. And, if not, your money will be cheerfully refunded.

That evening, we had one too many people to take a cab together, so I rode my bike five miles along the Yangjae Cheon (the stream that runs from Gwacheon City to the Han River) to the game and met my friends there. I barely remember the game itself; I'm not even sure whether the Bears or Eagles won. Come to think of it, I'm not sure the visiting team was the Eagles. I'm pretty sure it was a baseball game, though.

But what has come back to mind regularly since that evening is my ride home. At 10 p.m. I set off through the gloaming; there was enough ambient light to see people coming into view from, oh, fifty feet ahead. And even at that hour, there were dozens or hundreds of people making their way along the path. It had been a hot, sticky May day, but late in the evening the air was soft and pleasant.

The first thing that struck me wasn't how many children were out at that hour; I'm used to having preschool kids running around the park across from my apartment at 11:00 at night and sometimes later. What really got my attention was the number of women out running on the Cheon; I probably saw a dozen of them, each of them alone, in my half-hour trip. In the daytime, I doubt that I see one woman running in an hour.

First, I think it's wonderful that this city, whose metropolitan area has more people than New York's, is so safe that women aren't afraid to be out alone, even wearing skimpy outfits, late at night. Granted that there were always people around; it was dark, and you know that bad things can happen quickly. But apparently none of the women was apprehensive at all. I wish we Americans could say the same in our cities.

Then, I have two theories as to why so many more women here run at night than in the day. First, there's the Korean desire for pale skin. It's not that they want to look Caucasian, though there's a huge business in "de-Asaining" eyes through plastic surgery; it's that through Korean history it was a sign of status to have a light complexion, because the lower classes worked in the fields. Skin-lightening cream is very common and many women use umbrellas on sunny days. (Remember that the word "umbrella" comes from the Latin for "shade", not "rain".)

Also, although young Korean women are not modest in their dress-- this is the land of the microskirt-- I believe that many of them don't want to be seen in running clothes. Being all sweaty (sorry, I mean glowing) is considered extremely unladylike, and so is being overtly athletic. Several of the girls in school have said that they don't run because running makes women musclebound. Maybe the runners on the Cheon love to do it, but don't want people to know that.

But (despite the long digression) what I will remember, I think, for a long time is the scene under the bridge, halfway home. There was a man, I can't tell how old, as it was pretty dark, who had a boombox playing background instrumentals as he played the Peruvian Pan flute. I think he was wearing a serape, though perhaps that's my imagination.

Under a concrete bridge is a wonderful place for acoustics. (I frequently see musicians practicing in such places, of which there are many on the Cheon.), His melodies, accompanied by the soft sounds of the stream, were haunting. I stopped the bike to listen. There was a soft breeze; it was just a lovely evening, and it was good to hear something gentle and melodic after the incessant noise of the crowd at the ballgame.

What I remember, aside from the music itself, is how many people-- walkers, runners, bicyclists, people with dogs, kids on roller blades-- had stopped to listen. Girls rested their heads on their boyfriends' shoulders. A runner jogged in place to listen. A middle-aged American on a bicycle got his monkey mind to stop chattering for a few minutes and was able to just be.

And then the piper was through with that song, people applauded warmly, and it was time to go home.

Taking the "hi" road

2011-07-19T17:11:00.005+09:00

Today is my first official day of training for the Joongang Ilbo Marathon, coming on November 6. It's 90 degrees Fahrenheit and I'm waiting for the sun to go down so I can run. Meanwhile, I'm thinking...

I was introduced to running in its first boom, just as I was a senior in high school. This was in 1970, when the world was young and I was younger yet.

One of the first things I learned was that, when you pass another runner going the other way, you acknowledge him (or her, of course). A little wave, a nod, a smile, no matter how tired you may be. You are touching the earth together, in time and, if only for a moment, in space. It's simple etiquette.

(Wouldn't you say hi to this friendly fellow?)

I encouraged the same camaraderie on the cross-country teams I coached: when you pass a teammate coming the other way, touch hands in a light high-five. It may defy the laws of physics, but that touch makes both of you stronger. One reason I've always loved cross country is how, toward the end of the race, runners from any team will shout encouragement to members of any other team. In a sense, they're all on the same team. It's what you do.

When I ran my first full marathon in Chuncheon last October, it was a lonely thing; unlike many people in American crowds, Koreans who line the course near the end stand quietly, waiting for their friends to run by, not spending energy cheering for strangers. I pulled into Nazareth, feelin' 'bout half-past dead, as the Band sings, and thank God Shira and Zuleika from the Seoul Flyers were standing a couple of hundred yards from the finish, waiting to cheer me and the other Flyers on. For forty years, I'd pictured dozens or hundreds cheering for me, and I got two. But it was a very good two, and they made the last couple of minutes of the marathon so much more positive for me.

I run almost exclusively, when I'm not hashing, on the Yangjae Cheon now, and among the dogwalkers and plain old walkers and bicyclists and kids and couples there are always runners. I smile or nod or raise my hand in greeting; sometimes they respond and sometimes they don't. I'm just getting over the pettiness of being annoyed when they don't; I suppose they didn't start running forty years ago in Ithaca, New York (although why the hell not?), so probably they're not being rude, just uninformed.

But once in a while, an ajumma (stereotypical flowery-bloused, bevisored, chattering middle-aged lady) who's never run a day in her life will smile at me, or a man old enough to have fought in the war here will shout "USA Number One!" And that makes up for a lot. We're all on the same team, you see.
.
And when I finish the Joongang in November, the first thing I'm going to do is stagger back to the last hundred yards of the course and cheer for the people behind me. It's what you do.

Did your dog pick the color of your car?

2011-07-10T07:50:00.000+09:00

I'm going to mention some stuff in this post that I've thought several times over the last two and a half years, or maybe I actually blogged about them, and maybe if I did you read it, and maybe if you did, you'll remember it and this will be a summer rerun, but maybe I just thought it or maybe inexplicably you haven't read every one of my 327 posts, in which case this will be new to you and doubtlessly fascinating and worth reposting on your Facebook wall or perhaps sending a modest donation to me through PayPal.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.

I noticed long ago the monochromatic palette of cars in Korea. My estimate was that 90 percent of passenger cars on the street are black, white, or silver/gray. It seems I was wrong: according to yesterday's international edition of the Wall Street Journal, it's actually 91%, the highest rate in the world. Seems that executives choose black, women choose white, and anybody can choose gray. Any other color immediately lowers the resale value. And almost universally people drive "sensible" models.

Pretty boring, really.

...though occasionally a sexy model comes along.

The WSJ and I theorize that it's of a piece with the Korean desire for community and uniformity. (Incidentally, the next two countries on the monochromatic car list are Japan and China.)

Another example of Korea's uniformity is, of course, the names. Everybody, and I mean everybody, in this country has a one-syllable family name (and literally more than half of the people are named Geem, I, or Bak... Kim, Lee, or Park to you) followed by a two-syllable personal name. Also, the same generation of children in a family will have the same first syllable in their names; the three branches of the hagwon I worked for in Daegu were headed by three brothers, Geem Heedal, Geem Heedeok, and Geem Heeman.

When I MCed our graduation, I tried really hard to get the correct pronunciation for I Yeunjeung, I Hyunwoo, I Hwayeon, and I Hwajin. It makes my life at school so much easier when kids choose to use Western names, though it makes taking attendance a challenge: Seungkeun is Simon, Dokyun is Leo, Eunhae is Jay, Gina is Gina... okay, that one is easy enough.

The family-name thing has a long a proud history; they're not so much families as clans, and some of them can trace their lineage back a thousand years. I understand that, but it makes things a challenge for Us Dumb Waegookin.

Korea is the opposite of America.

Their values spring from Confucianism: honor your elders (unless one of them is a salt-and-pepper Westerner who needs a subway seat), know your place, obey authority, fit in, fit in, fit in. Our values spring from Clint Eastwood.

When I get rich I'm buying a neon-yellow Lamborghini and changing my name to McBibimbap.

...though I guess "Cornman" ("Oksusu inkan" in Korean) is weird enough.

Golden state (of mind)

2011-07-07T20:17:00.004+09:00

DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Steve (Corndog) Cornman, our intrepid hero; Debby (his ex); Bodhi (their dog); Tim (his stepson); Michelle (Tim's fiancee); Nate, (age 8, Tim's son and thus Steve's grandson); Jake, age 12, Tim's ex's son and, whatever the technicalities may say, Steve's grandson)

Truthfully, I wasn't especially looking forward to my two-week trip to California last month; due to Nate's custody agreement, I'd only be seeing him for five days, and generally just for a few hours each day at that. And I wouldn't be seeing Jake, who lives a couple of hours away, at all. I wasn't sure how I would fill up the days with Debby; how many times can you pick up a few things at the store or take the dog for a walk?

But once I got there, Debby and Nate and Bodhi helped me move my focus onto what we could do, not what we couldn't. And it was fine.

First off, beautiful Bodhi was head-over-heels to see me. She hadn't forgotten me at all in the year since I'd seen her (or the nearly two years before that). When she gets excited, she smiles, baring her top teeth in what you'd swear is a gopher impersonation. Then she sneezes and sneezes. She's one of the lights of my lifetime, and it felt good-- still does-- that she loves me so much.

Bo, 2007. Isn't she lovely?

I've always had a special bond with Nate; I was the first person, other than his parents and the hospital staff, to ever see him when he was born. We've always been close, and it was wonderful to spend some time with him. On my first day in Ventura on this trip, I helped out at the Field Day at his school. I feel I carried out a sacred and arduous duty; it's not just anybody who can supervise children throwing beanbags through a painted-on-plywood clown's facial orifices.

Nate and I went swimming a few times and talked and just hung out a lot. On his penultimate day before going to stay with his mom, Debby took us to Griffith Observatory in LA, which was fascinating. In the Leonard Nimoy Theater (funded by Leonard Nimoy), we watched a film of Leonard Nimoy talking about the building's history (it was spocktacular) and we saw a show in the planetarium. It was a beautiful, sunny day, good for getting a good look around. (At the hills and valley, not at the stars; it was daytime! You're silly.)

Observe Nate.

One of the things that I notice when I'm in the LA area (which, until last year, I hadn't been since 1961) is how it seems I know every name on every sign; we went through or past Malibu and Venice Beach and Mulholland Drive and, oh, all the stuff I've seen on TV my whole life. I almost expected to be pulled over on the 405 by Erik Estrada. And there are just so many landmarks.

No matter how often the aliens, monsters, and quakes destroy the HOLLYWOOD sign,
they always rebuild it.

The next day, Nate's last with his dad while I was there, Tim, Michelle, Nate, and I went to the Universal Studios theme park. It was far and away the best amusement park I've ever been to (better than the Magic Kingdoms in Orlando and Anaheim, Disney's California Adventure, Everland, and Lotte World). We had a blast at Jurassic Park, the Terminator 2 and Shrek shows, the Simpsons ride, and especially the studio tour. (Did you know that Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver lived on the same block as the Desperate Housewives?) The tram went through the brief but absolutely spectacular King Kong 3D ride, survived an earthquake in the subway station set, and was attacked by Norman Bates, who'd just finished stowing a body in his car trunk:

...and on and on, from the crashed airliner in War of the Worlds to the shark attack from Jaws to the stunt cars in The Fast and the I Dunno, Didn't See It...

The best thing of all, though, is that Michelle has a friend who works in the front office at Universal and set us up with super-duper all-access passes, the same ones Stephen Hawking and Basil Rathbone get when they come visit. So we got to be those people you hate when you've been standing in line for 45 minutes and somebody waltzes in and gets right on the ride, no muss, no fuss. We got to talk to the Terminator 2 show's stars, too. It was sweet to be a VIP for one day in my life.

Debby and I went to Meditation Mountain for a full-moon meditation and we saw Larisa Stow and Shakti Tribe, a New Age/world music/spiritual/folk/jazz band, twice at Debby's church. The Saturday night show was amazingly inspiring and spirit-filled and as moving-- literally, as in people dancing in the audience-- as a Southern gospel service or, in another way, a four-hour Bruce Springsteen show. And their performance at Sunday morning's service was just as wonderful.

On a Saturday morning, I ran my first race on US soil in three years, a 5K along the beachfront. The next day, I ran and drank with the Ventura County Hash House Harriers. It's something to see: I'd never met these folks before, quite likely will never see them again, and as fellow hashers we were instantly warm friends. Meeting other hashers is like, I guess, meeting fellow members of the same fraternity; there are no barriers. I had a wonderful time, though the ceremonial chugging of 20 ounces of pale ale made at the nearby brewpub impeared my thougt proceses for a litle wile.

The guy in black had hashed with two of my friends in Seoul (6000 miles west) when they all lived in North Carolina (3000 miles east). Small weird, isn't it!

As for the rest of my stay, just being real friends with Debby, three years after our split, and spending every minute I could with Bodhi made it all-- the endless hours of flying (grinding tedium punctuated by my own suppressed fears), the incredible freeway traffic getting lost in the incredible freeway traffic, even missing my first two Yongsan Kimchi hashes ever-- worthwhile.

And it was good, for a little while, to not be The Foreigner and to just be me.

And now I'm back.

No odds, too many ends

2011-07-03T20:07:00.000+09:00

I know I write about it a lot... I think about it a lot: I keep saying goodbye.

I don't know when I'll see Nate or Bodhi or anyone in California again. Lauren and Mike have gone home permanently from school.

Just in the last two weeks, five people in my Yongsan Kimchi hash have left Korea for good, including people I've been close to: Double Rainho, GI Ho (a Real American Zero), and Spartakicks.

And her dog, the hash's mascot, Cooper.

Coop at the Red Dress Run. Bye, Coop.

People keep going away and I keep planning to be enlightened enough to be cool with it. Maybe tomorrow.

I've got a secret... in a rather odd place

2011-07-03T19:51:00.006+09:00

Apparently it rained in Seoul for practically the whole two weeks I was in California. (More on that anon.) Just so I wouldn't feel left out, the Monsoon Goddess decided to make it rain for practically the whole ten days I've been back. It's been indecently gloomy and wet nearly every single day and the Yangjae Cheon-- the stream that runs near my house-- has risen and risen and risen some more.

For illustrative purposes only... may not actually be in Korea. But it should be.

On a seemingly desultory note, my friend LesBalls flew to Jeju Island to take part in her first Ironman Triathlon. She's the hare-raiser (that is, the person in charge of recruiting people to lay the trails) for the regular Sunday hash group, Southside. She recruited me to fill in the schedule for today, July 3. I'd only ever co-hared once, following Les herself and laying down marks at her direction; I'd certainly never been the lead, or only, hare.

I took my duties seriously, spending two or three hours this week, during breaks in the rain, walking the mountain and backstreets between Yangjae subway station and my neighborhood, also called Yangjae. I filled three pages of my little notebook with block-by-block directions of where to lead them, where to turn, where to lay down a "checkpoint" (where the pack would have to check in all directions for the trail's continuation) and where to mark a "true trail".

(You guys don't have any idea what I'm talking about do you? No, you don't.... you're normals.)

I found an Independence Day doodle through Google Images, with a flag, a hot dog-- it's a veggie dog, though it takes a trained eye to tell-- and an ear of corn. (I'm Corndog, remember?) I came up with a snappy name for today's run (Yangjae Doodle Dandy) and had 25 patches made combining the picture and the name. (Many hashes-- like next week's 1300th weekly session of my home hash, Yongsan Kimchi, garner patches, which can be sewn on our club happi coats or stuck in a drawer, whatever... my happi sports 40 patches I've accumulated in eight months, but this is the first one I've commissioned.)

So.

Yongsan Kimchi avoided the rain yesterday, we had a good hash, and I had some vague hope that it would be fair today.

I woke up at 4:30 to the sound of buckets, 55-gallon drums, Olympic pools of water pounding down. The animals were lined up two-by-two outside, even the ducks, which if you think about it was kind of dumb.

Needless to say, I lay there fretting about whether anyone would show up and how in the world I could make marks that wouldn't wash away. I finally got up and spent the next three or four hours pathetically sipping coffee and muttering imprecations.

After 8, almost three hours before the hash's meeting time, I set out to pre-lay as much of the trail as possible... I'm pretty slow, and if I didn't set a large part of the trail down in advance, the pack would probably snare me very quickly, despite the hare's traditional 15-minute head start.

I rode my bike a mile (wet to the bone within three minutes) to the huge church...

(It's considerably less sunny today; who called it "Sunday"?)

...just over the hill from Yangjae Station, parked it, and started to lay trail.

The three common ways of setting a trail here are with chalk (which washes away), flour (which washes away), and "secret" (paper shredded into plankton-sized pieces by the machines the military uses to destroy classified documents). Oh, that washes away too, a little more slowly.

I hope you read that "secret" bit carefully... otherwise the punchline of this entry will make even less sense than usual.

I found out quickly that the eight pounds of flour I had in my bag was completely useless. So I chalked, as much as I could on vertical surfaces, and laid down clumps of "secret". I quickly found that my meticulously laid-out route wasn't going to work; I'd planned to lead the pack for quite a distance alongside the Yangjae Cheon and through the three parks alongside its south bank. Well, the paths along the Cheon were completely submerged...

...and the miserable conditions demanded that the trail be cut a bit short, so there went my park plan.

And then, halfway through, covered in a paste of chalk, flour, and secret, wetter than a frog's butt, water still pouring from the sky, I ran out of chalk. And secret. And had no way to tell the pack where to go from there.

So I called my friend Booty, Southside's leader, who said she'd bring more chalk and secret from home, and hiked back to the start point by Yangjae Station. Once everyone was there-- despite the liquid atmosphere, we had 20 people, some from as far as 30 miles away-- I took off again, laying the same trail again, half-sliding down the muddy trail over the hill to the church, then re-marking the same spots I'd done before, which had nearly washed away already. Then I had to completely abandon all plans and just zigzag my way back through the side streets.

Somehow I managed to stay ahead of the pack... Fahr, whose name I won't repeat in this family-friendly venue (but it's based on the Volkswagen slogan), missed snaring me by two or three minutes. People said many nice things about my trail as we gathered under the canopy in front of Seocho-gu District Office. (Not surprisingly-- we hashers always say "Things in Korea aren't... quite... right"-- the canopy was a foot too narrow to protect the benches from the rain.)

So, you know, hooray for me.

Everyone had a good time despite the incessant pounding rain; thanks to Booty's rescue package (I ran out of secret just 100 yards from the finish), the trail, improvised and truncated as it was, was a great success, as were my patches. Singin' in the rain, just singin' in the rain...

And, covered again. face to knees, in chalk and secret, I went into the Seocho-gu Office men's room... and found secret in my personal area.

And I'm planning another haring adventure for my birthday, this time with Yongsan Kimchi and without a monsoon. Or anything unexpected in my shorts.

Annyeonghikaseyo

2011-06-10T09:38:00.000+09:00

This is hard, you guys.

I just said goodbye to Lauren five minutes ago. I've gotten better at the Buddhist "all things must pass" thing, at not being caught up in trying to hold on to things. I know that it's wisdom in action. I'm not quite there yet.

We both choked up a bit and made it quick.

I'm off to California in a couple of hours and when I get back in two weeks, she'll be gone. I have no reason to think we'll ever be in the same place again. Sunday mornings will seem so empty and Starbucks may go out of business.

The last two days were hard enough; Wednesday the school went to the Lotte World amusement park and some of our favorite students rode the rides with some of their favorite teachers. Last evening was the graduation ceremony.

I emceed that and did pretty well, other than when I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the 2011 graduating class of Saint Jos... I mean Saint Paul Preparatory School." Hey, eight years at one school...

I'm a ridiculous squishy-soft Muggleheaded goof at goodbyes, but I managed to not get emotional into the mike as I introduced our 20 graduates one by one. I was somewhat stunned when Ron, the principal, announced that the students had voted me Teacher of the Year; I haven't won anything since a volleyball/badminton set in 1964, and the volleyball was punctured at that. This award is a lovely little glass pyramid whose bottom has the school logo and my name and award.

I'd rather have a plastic lamp in the shape of a woman's leg; I could put it in my window. (But that won't stop me from keeping this pyramid with me always.)

There were a lot of hugs and photos and some tears (no, not mine) as the graduates said goodbye after the ceremony.

Later, eight or so of us teachers gathered for beers outside our local mom-n-pop. Looking around the table, I found it all so odd: some of us leaving forever, some for two weeks, some for the summer, some staying through the summer and then leaving forever...

I wonder if I'll end up feeling like my favorite character, the 900-year-old Doctor in Doctor Who, just going on and on (in my case, in Korea) while people come, get close to me, and leave.

Now it's over the ocean to see Nate and Bodhi and the family and wonder when I'll see them again after this.

This is hard, you guys.

School's out for summer

2011-06-08T07:56:00.002+09:00

The final exams are done, the grades are in. All that's left of the school year is today's school trip to Lotte World, the indoor/outdoor amusement park here in the city, and tomorrow's performance day, eighth-grade promotion, graduation, and staff/parent/graduate dinner. I'm a little nervous but very pleased that the seniors want me to MC the commencement ceremony. I'm practicing my insult stand-up act so I'll be ready.

Just kidding. Probably.

For those of you who've been losing sleep over my last blog entry, about the wonderful student-- I'll call her Haesun-- who is one of my favorites and who, after I caught her giving clues on a quiz, told her mother that I don't like her (Haesun), your long international nightmare of sleeplessness (note to self: edit this before posting) is over. Thank God, so is that sentence. It lasted longer than the Gulf War.

We worked it out, thanks largely to that very blog entry. I asked Ryan, our dean of students, for advice, and he suggested that I let Haesun read my last blog entry; that never would have occurred to me. I printed out the entry (minus the pic of me in a red dress, even though her mother had petitioned the school for a reddress of grievances) and gave it to Haesun. It showed her that I really meant what I'd said that I do like her; we talked awhile and everything's fine.

I gave the American Lit class an optional extra-credit assignment on To Kill a Mockingbird; the other students either did nothing or made a drawing, but Haesun spent many hours cutting chopsticks, folding paper, molding and painting figures, and building a diorama of the famous scene in which the people in the courtroom balcony stand to show respect for Atticus as he leaves:

It's another example of the tremendous amount of work she puts in every day; she aced the final, her grade for the semester is 100.01 percent, and everything is beautiful in its own way.

So... I hate reviewing for finals, writing finals, proctoring finals, and grading finals. But it's finally over.

In two days I'll be concentrating hard on keeping my plane over the Pacific rather than in it and then I'll be in Ventura, north of LA, visiting what's left of the family. (I've been a little out of touch... is Blossom still on TV?)

Then it's back to school for the summer, with two two-hour classes a day. (So the title of this post is a little misleading, but Vince Fournier didn't get famous by singing "School's out for two weeks".)

When summer school's over, I will have been in Korea for three years, at St. Paul for two, and I've just signed a new two-year contract.

...yeah, that's not a very snappy ending for a post. Hmm... okay... true story: most of the teachers were at a bar last night celebrating the end of finals and there was a soccer game on the TV. Somebody asked who was playing and I said, "It's Korea against Ghana... hey, it's Ghana-rea!"

Yes, I'm wicked impressed with my wit. Somebody has to be.

"Are you crajy?"

2011-05-19T12:06:00.003+09:00

Well, I'm mystified.

I have a student who is one of my very favorite kids. She works harder than anybody in school, asks a lot of questions (which I encourage), and really wants to do well. I had her in Creative Writing, where I continually praised her work and she earned an "A". I have her in cross country. I have her in English 11, where she responds to more of my questions than anybody else in any class. I've told her I really want her to be in my Advanced Placement class next year.

Yesterday I saw her making gestures in class, hinting at a quiz answer to another student. I went really easy on her, even though it isn't the first time she's done this kind of thing in somebody's class. I gave her a detention and a zero (out of a grand total of seven points). This dragged her semester average all the way down... to 101 percent. I specifically told her, "I'm disappointed, because I think very highly of you."

This morning, I woke to email from our executive secretary that said that the girl's mother had called saying that her daughter was upset because I don't like her and never listen to her in class.

I shouldn't take it too seriously, but I just can't get why one of my favorite students (not that I have any favorites, mind you) thinks I dislike her.

Meanwhile, last Friday was Teacher's Day in Korea. A student I haven't had since last year, and whom I never paid any special attention to, brought me a wallet as a present (the only gift, I think, she brought any teacher) and gave me a lovely card that said I was the nicest teacher she's ever had.

(An apparently total digression that isn't, really: the Korean language has no "z" sound, so the Samsung Lions are the La-ee-own-juh, my ex-colleague Zach was Jack, and kids go see animals in the Jew.)

...when the little kids in my hagwon classes in Daegu asked silly questions, I'd crack them up by crossing my eyes, sticking out my tongue, rotating my finger by my temple, and saying, "Are you crajy?!"

Concerning the current situation, I can come up with three possible explanations:

1) Koreans are crajy.
2) Teenagers are crajy.
3) I'm crajy.

Of course, all three may be true, and though I know I shouldn't put this picture out on the wild, wild Internet, I do have a clue to offer...

...it might be me.

A tale of two countries

2011-05-08T22:29:00.002+09:00

A couple of things happened this weekend that reminded me what a backward, forward country I live in.

Yesterday after the hash I talked with Half an Angry Pirate. Pirate graduated from Cortland State, which is just 25 miles from Ithaca. Small world and all that.

We talked about animal rights and vegetarianism; Pirate sometimes puts on a bandanna and runs through the hideous dog farms nearby, taking photos. He's young and fast and knows the farmers can't catch him. He uses the photos in protests against eating dogs.

The treatment of dogs here, the big breed raised specifically for meat, is beyond barbaric, in their life and in their death.

There's a bosintang (dog meat soup) restaurant down the street from the school. In general, cooked dog is called boyangsik, "vitalizing food"; it's supposed to give you lots of energy on hot summer days and, like so much that decimates animals in this part of the world, to give guys stamina in bed. Always men's top priority, apparently.

I gather that the younger generation of Koreans is turning away from boyangsik, either because they feel it's wrong or out of embarrassment at what most of the world thinks. The dog restaurants aren't legal de jure or illegal de facto, sort of like prostitution.

Do I think what they do to dogs is more horrifying than what they (and we) do to chickens and pigs and cattle and turkeys and everything else that tastes good? I do and I don't. I have a gut feeling that our species made a bargain with the dogs many thousands of years ago: protect us and love us and we'll protect you and love you. But I doubt the other "food" animals are impressed with our bargain, and a pig can suffer fully as much as a dog.

Pirate is far braver and more dedicated than I. I don't want to see the poor dogs jammed into cages like potato chips in a bag and I don't want, as a foreigner, to lecture Koreans on their morality. I'm a wuss, I guess; just trying to live the way I feel is right and explaining the whys to people who ask are about all I can manage.

Insert jarring segue here.

Today I went to E-Mart. The first floor of the building next door is a big showroom full of 3-D TVs and computer tablets and such. there are two signs outside, Samsung Di-gi-tal Pla-ja and LG Best Shyop. In front of the Samsung sign, there was a speaker system blaring K-pop while two young women, dressed in hot pink tops and black hot pants, gyrated to the beat. Fifty feet away, in front of the LG sign, there was another speaker system blaring different K-pop as a young woman all in scarlet danced, along with a ten-foot-tall guy (on stilts, duh) dressed as a Buckingham Palace guard.

The scarlet woman (pardon the expression) and the stilt guy seemed to be having fun. She was smiling and her dance wasn't completely robotic; he was blowing up balloon animals and waving to drivers. The pink girls expressed all the involvement of people watching their clothes in the washer going around and around while the laundromat's fluorescents flicker. Their dance isn't all that different from that of the cheerleaders at all the baseball games (who look as if they're having fun), but on the street they seem so joyless and mechanical. It's depressing.

Be that as it may, my point (and, as Ellen said, I do have one) is how strange it is to occasionally see the juxtaposition of one of the world's most aggressively modern, technological, capitalistic societies and the cruel medieval world that peeks through its cracks.

Jesus, the Buddha, and me

2011-05-01T20:55:00.001+09:00

I love this picture.

I've written before about how appealing Buddhism, as a philosophy, is to me, even as I'm turned off by the ritual and the iconography. The principles of nonjudgment, of compassion, of letting go... they really speak to me; they form a way of looking at the world that makes sense to me. I find it fairly easy to take what I find helpful and leave the rest.

Just lately it's occurred to me that I haven't done that with Christianity. The Universe is, to human minds, essentially infinite in both space and time; I don't believe that we (and only we, not Earth's other creatures) are offered eternal life-- or eternal punishment if we don't believe the right things or behave the right way. I've tried; I went to Baptist religious ed classes in elementary school, attended the Methodist church on Easter, sang in the Catholic folk group, got dragged into a Christian cult (briefly) by my first wife, taught for eight years in Catholic school... it doesn't make sense to me in any kind of literal way.

But I think I've neglected how the culture I come from really is suffused in the moral teachings of Jesus; does a fish notice water? I've been turned off by the hypocrisy of Christians, but the Buddha taught compassion for all living beings and virtually every Buddhist in Korea is a voracious consumer of animals.

There's so much to be gleaned from the Christian worldview, just as there is from the Buddhist. Maybe Buddhism is just more appealing to me because of my nonjudgmental, detached nature or my resentment of authority; Christianity seems to me to be an aggressive, militant pursuit. I'm not saying the Buddha's teachings are right; I'm saying they're right, or more right, for me.

If Facebook had a "relationship with God" status, mine would read "It's complicated". I guess I'm an agnostic/transcendentalist/panentheist/freelance believer-in-something. I know a couple of things have happened in my life that I can't explain in any rational way, things that made me feel as if the wheels of the Universe were aligning and Spirit was opening me, filling me with wonder and peace.

I guess I mostly believe, as Einstein said, "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion."

...and so back to the picture. I think I like it so because Li'l Jesus (must be a fake beard) and Li'l Buddha are gazing together, in an open, candid, childlike way, at something wonder-full. That's how I want to be.

Life goes od

2011-05-01T16:24:00.002+09:00

The last ten days or so have been a slow, somewhat off time for me. After the half marathon two weeks ago, I ran with the cross-country kids on Wednesday, feeling fine, but on Wednesday night I had that ominous tickle in my throat: another cold coming on. I only ever get colds, but they whomp me upside the head pretty good.

My hashing friend Choopa contends that an extreme running effort leads to lowered immunity, and God knows my effort at the half looked extreme...

...though this was just in the last minute of my race, when I was busting a (n ample) gut to try to finish in 2:20.

But really the race wasn't that hard, and the last time I was sick, which was enough to cost me two work days, was under three months ago, three months after my marathon. So I don't think that's it.

The next day, Thursday, our school took a field trip, to a farm a couple of hours outside Seoul. I was feeling pretty cruddy. (As you can see, my hair went mysteriously white overnight.)

We had a good time, though, picking strawberries,

learning how to make tteok (rice cakes), which involved whacking huge mounds of rice with big honking mallets ("Okay, when I nod my head, you hit it with a hammer"), and tofu...

...and riding rail bikes, four-person pedal-carts on a railroad track.

We got rear-ended at one point; somebody's car got derailed, my spine separated slightly, and I said a word I really shouldn't say at a school function.

I got home exhaustipated and each day thereafter I went through more Kleenex, slept less at night and more in the daytime, and blew my nose more frequently but less melodiously than Chuck Mangione on the flugelhorn. (The song I kept playing was "Feels So Bad".) According to my scale, I lost six pounds in a week, and I think it all came out my nose. (Sorry for the lovely mental image!)

I sleepwalked through the height of the cherry-blossom season...

(It's nicer when you can smell them.)

...and tried to focus on my planning and my classes, but I've been just so fuzzy and so snotty. (And not in the usual ways.)

I haven't run in ten days; I attended the Yongsan Kimchi hash each of the last two Saturdays, but could only walk each course, rather slowly last week and with a bit more alacrity yesterday. Every day I wake up thinking I'll be all better and every day I'm not quite right. (Actually, the last six words are always true for me.)

In the realm of longer-term importance, it's only six weeks till Lauren's gone for good and most of our teachers scatter for the summer. The school is going to find me a new, larger apartment. And the noisome recycling center across the street from the school is being demolished to make way for an apartment building.

It's got to be good for the school that we're accredited and the kids will no longer be telling the cab drivers to drop them off at the garbage dump.

So, even working at half-speed with a bad cold...

...life goes od. Bra. La la how da life goes od.

(By the way, it's a sharp picture; it's me that's blurry.)

...-April 19, 2011

2011-04-20T15:19:00.002+09:00

Invariably when I wake up, sixish a.m., I fling Tug against the wall (not really), stumble to the bathroom, and stagger to turn on the computer and then start the coffee.

This morning the very first thing I saw online was "R.I.P. Elisabeth Sladen 1948-2011", which felt like being thumped in the chest.

Lis Sladen played Sarah Jane Smith, the most beloved of all the Doctor's companions in the 48 years of Doctor Who. She was the first companion I ever saw, back in the mid-70s...

...and she was playing the part again, on the main show and The Sarah Jane Adventures, all the way into 2011...

...and it was just such a shock that she'd be gone at a (very youthful) 63. The public never knew she'd been ill and she was still filming just a few months ago.

You already know I'm a nerd and I hereby declare my undying devotion to Doctor Who. And Sarah Jane was the companion for so many fans, young and old; Lis Sladen seemed to still have the 25-year-old Sarah somewhere just below the surface. Everyone who worked with her or met her said she was a delight.

So I was sad.

And then I saw that Grete Waitz died, too.

She was a great, great runner: she won the New York City Marathon an astonishing nine times (and a silver medal in the LA Olympics), back when I was first interested in running, and by all accounts was a gracious and graceful woman.

She was my age, born in the same month, October 1953.

And I was a little sadder.

Now, this isn't going to be some lugubrious meditation on mortality. (Sorry, I'm an English teacher.) There's no "oh my God, if a great marathoner could die at my age, what about me?" Both women died of cancer, and there's not much we can do about that. That's never been among my many anxieties.

But the passing, on the same day, of seminal figures in two of my great loves, Doctor Who and running... well, it makes me think again of the wisdom of letting go, of realizing that things fall apart, and that it's okay. It has to be okay, because it's true.

It's okay.

Walking on mostly sunnyshine

2011-04-13T19:52:00.002+09:00

Today I'm about as close to sunny as I ever get, which I suppose is like saying the drunken bear's triple Salchow is coming along nicely.

I know I'm not Little Gary Sunshine, but it's a good, good day.

The spring is finally, really here, the cherry blossoms are out along the Yangjae Cheon, I'm still on a bit of a high from Sunday's race (enough that I'm thinking that, maybe, yeah, I just might do another full marathon in the fall), and I had a good, fast run after school today.

Most of all, though, our accreditation visit is over and the visitors' report was better than we'd expected or hoped for. To put it briefly, they classify schools on six levels, the top four being accredited. They gave us the second-best rating, which for a third-year school (at which almost the whole faculty is in their second year) is excellent. They look at seven different categories; they rated us higher than we rated ourselves in five of them.

The twelve-hour days are over (for awhile, anyway) and there are no more reports to write. As for me, while the visitors were here, I was on-task, personable, charming, and bright. You know... somebody else.

So... I'm sunny and carefree today.

Take a photo, quick.

Do do run run run do do run run

2011-04-11T20:57:00.002+09:00

It was an epic weekend.

On Friday, I got home from work and almost immediately headed out again, by bus toward Gwacheon City, followed by eight subway stops and a transfer to a train that's part of the Seoul Metro system and another 16 stops to Pyeongtaek, a city so far out of town that another five feet would take you clear into the next province. The trip out took an hour and 45 minutes.

There was a purpose to my odyssey. (Can I call it that? Odysseus was gone from Ithaca for 20 years and it's only been 16 for me so far.) Once a month, the Not Quite Right Hash House Harriers run out there, and this one was for our friend Bootylicious' Birthday Bash. They call themselves Not Quite Right because they're not quite right. (I was told that last month they set up a sobriety check in the middle of the run... if you didn't have a blood-alcohol level of at least .05, you weren't allowed to continue.)

NQR was my seventh hash group in the five months I've been doing it... Yongsan Kimchi, Southside, Osan Bulgogi, PMS (in drag), 38th Parallel, Full Moon, NQR; my heart belongs to Yongsan, but my feet are fickle. Continually getting hazed as a virgin is wearing me out.

This hash was tough, starting in the streets, through the Friday-night traffic, down several blocks lined with brightly lit showrooms full of young, sleek-haired, leggy Korean women in tube tops and what I think were skirts (though they may in fact have been belts), who were calling out to passing cars. (Prostitution is just creepy and unthinkable to me; I believe that what adults do voluntarily isn't the government's business, but... eeuw.) Anyway, the US Army's Camp Humphreys is in Pongtaek, so apparently there's money to be made in the trade.

Then the run left the city and meandered in the dark, under a crescent moon, through farmers' fields past noisy dogs, up and down embankments, through mud and slop. At one point, the hares set us running west, up a slope and north across a long bridge, down an embankment, west again for fifty feet, up an embankment, south across the same bridge, down, and west, fifty feet from where we went up in the first place.

Finally we reached the end point, where they'd set up a bonfire down by the water. There was much singing and many jokes and delicious German lager beer may or may not have been involved.

I barely made it home. Generally the hashes are run A-to-A; that is, they end at the start point. This time, though, it was A-to-B, and the bonfire was a good 3/4 mile from the train station. I tore myself away and hiked back in the dark (very dark), hoping to make the last train back. I dithered over whether to go back the way I came or to take the KTX bullet train back to Yongsan Station on the other side of Seoul and then a subway or cab. Either way, I was risking not making it.

I did the subway bit to the transfer point, where the outdoor station was positively eerie, a dozen people standing around at 12:30 a.m. waiting for a train that... would... not... come. The sign on the wall said the last train comes through at 12:07, but the people weren't going away. I kept thinking of getting a motel room, but the announcements, in Korean, kept coming every few minutes, and I waited... and waited... finally the train came and it was another 16 stops in a car with three other people, two of them asleep, to Gwacheon. I was feeling pretty fuzzy myself, and a bit bleak, the way one does past midnight in a brightly lit train car in a foreign country.

I was worried about having to walk the four miles home from Gwacheon, starting at 1 a.m., but came out of the subway and flagged down a cab within 30 seconds. Thank goodness.

"Tuggy, I'm home!" I called at quarter past one.

"Mrow," Tug said.

Yongsan Kimchi always holds its hashes at 10 a.m., but this one time, due to the previous night's festivities, it was scheduled for noon, thank goodness squared. It also wasn't a run, but a "Hangover Hash", thank goodness cubed. I couldn't have run, in between the NQR run the night before and the half marathon the next day; my calves were twanging like too-tight banjo strings.

We drank and talked and played Danger Jenga (in which each block has an instruction for a humorous stunt) at the Rocky Mountain Tavern in Itaewon, walked (while drinking) to the Bless U Pub, where we talked and drank, and walked (while drinking) to the Wolfhound Pub, from which I made my escape into the world of the Normals.

I'd no sooner gotten home when Lauren called, asking if I wanted to go to dinner. I'd hardly ever turn that down, and certainly not when she's only going to be here two more months. We went to Dos Tacos in Gangnam, where the nachos and burritos are hot and tasty and the lime margaritas cold and... um, tasty. We were both really hungry and had a great time, tempered slightly by the knowledge that we didn't have too many more outings like this to share.

And then it was 5:30 the next morning and I peeled myself out of bed to get ready to go to Hanam City for the MBC Adidas (half, in my case) Marathon. Originally, a half dozen of our teachers were going to run the half or the 10K, but they dropped out one by one (including Lauren, who told me at dinner) and it was just me and 17,999 strangers.

Okay, and the Seoul Flyers.

At 6:15, as I hit the street by E-Mart, I was sore and tired and discouraged; I felt as gray as the sky and I didn't want to go. It took me several minutes to hail a cab and I was about to say the heck with it and go home and back to bed. But a cab came and, before I could not hail it, my hand was out and I was on my way to the Jamsil subway stop, where a fleet of buses was waiting to take the runners on the 20-minute trip east of Seoul to the race site.

The race, on a hilly course, started and ended at a speedboat-racing arena. Blah blah blah cold and windy before the race K-pop dancing girls long lines for the john cut to the chase...

I was happy to see my South African hashing friend Lesley there...

...and we started the race together, well back in the pack. Before long I told her I was dropping back; I was determined to stay at my slow-but-really-slow-but-steady pace of 11 minutes per mile, which would bring me in at my goal of two and a half hours. (Thirteen point one miles times eleven, carry the one, add time for a bathroom break and walking at the water stops... yep, two and a half.)

The bulk of the race went by as the bulk of every race goes by for me, counting the kilometers, counting the miles, looking at the river and the hills, picking other runners to mentally fasten on to so they could pull me along; I was determined to hit my goal time and I learned long ago that going out too fast is a recipe for pain, frustration, and failure. I almost always pass a lot more people than I'm passed by later in a race.

By the halfway point, I was feeling pretty good and figured I could pick up my pace a bit. My legs were sore and my knees ached, but my breathing was good and I was not all that tired. At about the nine-mile mark, it hit me: I can do 2:20. (Not much to do out there but mental computations...) So I picked it up a touch more, found Lesley again and ran with her awhile, and then went for it.

Nobody'd told me about the (pause for dramatic effect)... (pause a little more)... (wait for it)... NOW... switchback ramp that went up three full stories, a mile from the finish. Oy. Oy. But once I was past that, I went as fast as I could, or possibly a little faster, and finally saw the finish line ahead, and hauled it across in two hours, twenty minutes.

...and two seconds. Damn ramp.

But everybody says that counts as 2:20 so... I'll take it.

I was feeling all warm and oogly-moogly inside all the way home on the shuttle bus and the subway and the other bus. I'd run a smart race, just the way I wanted to and better than I'd thought I could. I was kind of smuglish, actually.

And of course life has a way of knocking you off your horse and on your ass; I posted my time on Facebook, and within five minutes DODIC, the hardcore hasher, trying to be encouraging, posted, "That's okay. Think of everybody who didn't finish at all."

Cue the sad Trombone Sound of Deflated Ego-- :: wah wah waaaah. ::

No, I did well. I did all I could. I'm happy. And sorer than Atlas' sacroiliac. But happy.

So, in 36 hours, I took the bus to the subway to the train to the run to the train to the subway to the taxi to the bus to the pub crawl to the subway to the bus to the bus to the bus to the taxi to the bus to the run to the bus to the subway.

And now we're in the school's three most stressful days of the year: the visit by the accreditation committee. I'm not sure what they'll want me to do, but I ain't getting on no damn bus.

There will come soft rains

2011-04-07T18:00:00.001+09:00

The Yellow Dust has finally been dissipated...

...by the nuclear rainfall.

So, kind of a good news/bad news.

There's been a gentle rain all day today; the authorities say that there's no danger of measurable radioactivity in the rainfall. (Let's hope they're not speaking precipitously.) There really isn't much radioactivity in the atmosphere despite the nuclear incident in Japan, and anyway the prevailing wind is from the west, away from Korea.

But Koreans can be kind of paranoid. (The students in cross country told me they don't run in a drizzle because Seoul's acid rain makes people's hair fall out. Also, people believe that sleeping in a closed room with a fan on can kill you, if American beef doesn't. And so on...)

Several of the public schools in Gyeonggi-do, the province that completely surrounds Seoul (and in which I, technically, live) closed today to protect the little nose miners from fallout. Hey, you never know.

I do know: everybody's fine.

This is 80 percent of this spring's cross-country club. As you can see, we haven't mutated.

(On the other hand, this photo was taken yesterday...)

Dust in the mind

2011-04-05T16:24:00.002+09:00

(...all we are is dust in the mind...)

Spring sprung, for real and we hope for good, promptly on April 1. The high temps each day have been near 60 (in the mid-60s today) and it's been generally sunny. It would seem to be, at last, the lovely spring I've been longing for.

But it's Yellow Dust season! Once again, the air is thick with sand and grit blowing from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. This happens every spring. Some days the newspapers have suggested that people stay indoors, and keep their windows closed, as much as possible.

I'm not particularly susceptible to bad air; I haven't gotten sick or tired from it, but it weighs me down emotionally. It's just dismal to have yellow air and invisible mountains that I know are only a half-mile away. My hair feels gritty and my eyelids heavy.

Aside from that, we're back at school. I don't feel cheated by the length of our now-done spring break. I didn't do a lot of what I'd planned; Bob and I didn't want to get up at 6 to get to the USO to go on their DMZ bus trip, and I decided that I didn't want to take five hours out of every Wednesday to go all the way to the City Hall area and take the Culture Center's Korean-language classes (although our school's dean, Ryan, tells me there are also free classes a lot closer...)

I hared (help lay the trail) for my hash group on Saturday. It did not go well. As Forrest Gump said, "That's all I have to say about that."

Probably the best thing that happened on break was making good friends with Vanessa, as I mentioned in my last post.

(That and my new cell phone; I am, after all a Guy, and to a Guy the thought that People are more important than Toys is Crazy Talk.)

I mentioned to Vanessa that I'll miss Lauren when she leaves in June, especially on Sunday mornings when we are wont to go for coffee; Vanessa said simply, "I drink coffee." Of course, people aren't fungible; you can't just plug one in for another. But I have gotten to really like Vanessa, and as much as I will miss Lauren, a new coffee friend isn't a bad thing to have.

This is she.

One of the biggest benefits to living abroad is coming to realize that your home country really isn't the center of the universe. Particularly in the U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! we get used to believing that we're it, as if other people's (and peoples') perspectives don't really count. ("If English is good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for you!")

As I've said, it's been really good to have friends who are Kiwis, Aussies, Scots, South Africans, Ugandans, Koreans... but in particular I've never known a Chinese person before. We (or I) have had an image of the Chinese as a gajillion-strong mass of interchangeable people; I'm a little ashamed of that now.

I wouldn't have thought that Vanessa and I would have anything to talk about; she's literally half my age, loves shopping for clothes and shoes and adores Sex in the City and Michael Jackson. But we do just fine. She taught herself Korean and English and is casting about for another language to learn on her own; she's thinking German or Spanish, but I told her she's getting lazy, taking up a language whose alphabet she already knows. I suggested Russian, Greek, or Arabic.

So, life, as it tends to, goes on. Our long-planned-for accreditation visit is next week and it will be a big load off when that's done. I'm looking forward to settling back into my normal everyday life in Seoul.

When the dust settles.

"Thank you, fermented cabbage!"

2011-03-25T22:42:00.005+09:00

...or, as the famous Korean pop singer Gogi Loaf sang, "I out of sam ain't bad."

We're just now halfway through our two-week spring break. (Actually, if you count the weekends, we'll be precisely halfway through at midnight tomorrow-- Saturday-- night. But I don't know if you count the weekends.)

Yeah, I'm as surprised as you are; I've never been a fifteenth-century king before.

I came into break determined to go places and do things. On Monday, Vanessa, our Chinese teacher from China, and I went to see The King's Speech, which is as good as they say. Then we went to Dos Tacos for dinner and Oktoberfest for beer. (A couple of years ago, if you'd told me I'd be in Korea, going to a British movie, a Mexican restaurant, and a German beer hall with a Chinese woman, I'd'a told you that you should book the padded room next to Glen Beck's.) The Korean waitresses in their Bavarian dirndls were very cute, by the way, and the beer-- brewed on the premises-- was wunderbar.

Vanessa and I had barely talked in the year and a half we've been colleagues; she's shy around people she doesn't know well, and I am too, so of course we hadn't gotten to know each other. But on Monday we never ran out of things to talk and laugh about and had a wonderful time. It's nice to have a new friend.

Other than that, though, until today I hadn't done a dang thing but run, do schoolwork and housework, read, and nap. Untanned, rested, and ready, that's me. Until I ran into Chris and Vanessa this evening in Faina's apartment, where we'd all stopped in to tend her cat, I hadn't spoken to anyone in four days.

I've been reading a book called Predictably Irrational, about the ways in which we all defeat our own best interests by our illogical behavior. (Stick with me; this is relevant.) This morning I reached the chapter about how we get frozen by having too many choices. I realized that is exactly what happened to me this week; each day I couldn't decide whether to go to a movie or a bookstore or a palace or on a hike and ended up talking myself out of all of them.

"Aha!" says I. "Today, by Jove, I shan't be deterred by such irresolution!"

So I set off with three goals in mind: to relax at the jjimjilbang (whirlpool/sauna complex) at the Central City mall; investigate getting a smartphone at the Seoul Global Center office near City Hall; check into free Korean classes at the Korean Foundation Cultural Center, also near City Hall. (My nifty new Seoul guidebook told me about options one and three.)

Central City, like the COEX Mall, seems to have been laid out by moles with architectural degrees. It just winds all over the place, with no maps, no information booths, and inadequate signage. I never did find the jjimjilbang.

But I hit the jackpot at the City Hall stop. I really hadn't expected to sign up for a smartphone; I've been doing okay with my five-buck-a-month prepay on my old phone. But a brand-new Android phone came free and it only costs 30 bucks a month for more talk, texts, and 'net than I can possibly use. I wish I had it to play with tonight, but I'll have to wait till Tuesday. At the end of the signup, I meant to tell the sales rep, "Kamsahamnida, Kim ssi!" ("Thank you, Miss Kim!") Sadly, what I actually said was, "Kamsahamnida, Kim chi!" ("Thank you, fermented cabbage!")

Now about those Korean lessons...

(An aside: the chaebol-- family-run corporations-- here are into everything. LG, for example, has spun off electronics, telecom, chemical, toiletries, and fashion divisions. My new contract is with LG Telecom, but the phone is made by Samsung-- quite an ad for LG phones, I guess.)

It's been a windy and chilly, but sunny, day; spirits high, I set off toward the statues of the great national heroes Admiral Yi, who repelled the Japanese invaders with his turtle boats...

and King Sejong, who ordered the creation of hangeul, the brilliantly designed Korean alphabet...

...and was delighted to find a booth that was, for free, lending out King Sejong robes for photo ops. So cool!

I was in a wonderful mood and wandered about taking more photos. Oh, here's one now...

...and another...

...and used the last of the gift card I got from the PTA on Lunar New Year on a delicious beuloobaeri mawpin and keopi (blueberry muffin and coffee) at the first Starbucks with three floors and an elevator I'd ever been in, and browsed and browsed at the huge Kyobo Bookstore. I would have gone to the Yousuf Karsh photo portrait exhibit...

(He took some purty good pitchers.)

...at the Sejong Museum, but it opens tomorrow. Ah, well, I'll go back.

Then I took the ten-minute walk to the Cultural Center, which has an art museum and performance space as well as free Korean classes. I'd long ago decided it wasn't all that vital for me to know Korean beyond the alphabet and a few stock phrases, but in the spirit of "what the heck, it's free" I registered for 12 weeks of classes. Heck, if I don't get anything out of it, what the heck, it's free. Did I mention that?

I was feeling good, part of the huge city with its deluxe hotels and giant tv screens around the square, and for a split-second, as I headed west to the Cultural Center, I honestly thought that if I just kept walking I'd reach the Hudson River piers. It was the strangest sensation... maybe it's because of the Chevrolet billboards that have been popping up since GM Daewoo decided that all their Daewoos are now Chevys.

So, one week down. Tomorrow will bring my friend Katy's birthday hash. (If you haven't been paying attention for the last four months, that's running and drinking, not a replacement for birthday cake. We're all running in pearls.) Toward the end of next week, my friend and colleague Bob and I are headed for the DMZ. If we wander over the line, I suppose Bill Clinton won't come to get us; we're are not young, pretty, or female. I'm holding out hope for Scarlett Johansson.

Meanwhile, it's been a big day. As a wise expat said long ago, i out of sam ain't bad.

Be it ever so (grumble)

2011-03-24T11:54:00.004+09:00

My balcony view. The park's noisy in the video because there's a kindergarten class over there; 13 seconds in, you can just make out the Pac-Man Music From Hell. At the end you can see the new apartment buildings. (The music's a lot louder and the buildings a lot more obtrusive in person.)

This little apartment has been my home for a year and a half. I got placed here totally at random; the school assigned apartments to the new teachers, and for whatever reason, this is the one they gave me. I have ten other faculty members (out of fifteen or so colleagues in total) literally within a one-minute walk of me, but no colleagues in my building.

I've been over and over the pros and cons of my apartment, since the day I moved in. It's too small, but I have an alcove for the washer and catbox, and a little balcony. The rooms are tiny, but most of my friends have just one bigger room. Kids play basketball late at night, but it's nice to not feel separated from the community. In nice weather, if I keep my window open everyone in the park can see me clear as day, but Tug has something to look at besides the wall and the inside of his eyelids.

Last summer, I had dibs on the apartment vacated by my colleague Zach, who was moving back to the States. That apartment is easily five times the size of mine and has access to a rooftop terrace; it's also 100 feet from the school. But Nikki, our art teacher, was pregnant and she and Dex and the baby clearly needed the space a lot more than I did, and I wasn't sure I wanted to move anyway.

All through the nice weather, I'm assaulted, hour after hour, by the same four lines of inane Pac-Man music (sometimes at 3 a.m.) from the park's stationary bikes. Also, I've accumulated just enough stuff that I don't really have space for silly, extraneous belongings such as a broom or a fan.

One thing I've always loved about this apartment is that I'm the only teacher who has a view out of the city and to the mountains to the north and west. I face toward Gwacheon City, four miles to the west along the Yangjae Cheon, and I've taken a lot of comfort from gazing out my window from the seat I'm sitting in right now at the peaceful mountains. I like to watch the sun go down and see the planes moving in their stately way toward Incheon International. It's been wonderful to be in the city but feel almost pastoral.

But before long my mountain view (the only view I have, from the only seat in the apartment) will be completely gone; they're erecting countless high-rise apartments on the other side of the stream. The buildings in progress sit there like the gray stumps of teeth, and the fence they've put up between the building site and the cheon goes on for a solid mile, meaning that there will be dozens of these buildings before they're through, housing thousands of families. Even my long runs to Gwacheon, which I love for the stream and the herons and ducks, will be in the shade of the buildings.

I hate moving, really hate it, and, assuming I keep teaching at Saint Paul, Mr. Park (our boss) only has a finite number of apartments available; all of them have drawbacks of their own. This still feels like home, mostly.

I don't know what I want to do.

Solitude and solace

2011-03-21T12:20:00.001+09:00

So, here I am, at the cusp of a two-week vacation, and nearly everyone from school is off somewhere exotic doing something exciting... Lauren to Denmark (where she will be moving in three months), Nick and Susan to Taiwan, Faina to India, Chris back home, Bob (for this week) traveling in Korea.

Sometimes I think of my very favorite obscure Simon and Garfunkel song:

I get the news I need on the weather report.
I can gather all the news I need on the weather report.
Hey, I've got nothing to do today but smile...
Do't'n-doe-do't'n-doe-do't'n-doe-doe-doe-doe and
Here I am... the only living boy in New York.

So I'm planning on seeing some new things and spending time with people I haven't before. I'm just getting to know Vanessa, our Chinese Chinese teacher, and we'll be going out to dinner soon. I found a wonderful Seoul guidebook on Saturday and I bookmarked a web page with five good day-trips out of Seoul. And Bob and I are tentatively planning a trip to the DMZ next week. And I'll be hashing more, what with the free time and all.

Meanwhile, there's always the matter of my being alone in general. I've pretty well proven that I'm not the best person to live with, but more than anything else I wish I had someone special in my life. I miss an affectionate touch. I miss having someone to wake up to-- Tug doesn't count-- and eat with and talk to.

I've read dozens of detective novels by Robert B. Parker, all of whose protagonists-- Spenser, Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall-- have someone they don't feel they can live without but can't live with fulltime. Parker himself had a two-story house; he lived on one floor and his wife on another for decades. That's what I need: one person with whom I can be together when we want to be and apart when we need to be. I need space and I need company. Now I'm reminded of my favorite obscure song by Pink:

Go away, come back, go away, come back,
Why can't I just have it both ways?
...Leave me alone, I'm lonely.

Don't get me wrong-- oops! That's a Pretenders song-- I have a pretty good life here. I think I'm wiser and more content than I used to be. But I miss having somebody. And Pepperidge Farm Geneva cookies.

I can't believe it's not Buddha

2011-03-21T11:58:00.000+09:00

At lunchtime on Friday, I made the five-minute walk from our school to the AT Center, which is an eight-story building that hosts exhibitions (such as the funky art show I posted about a couple of weeks ago). The occasion this time was the clearance sale they hold there a few times a year, with a gigantic room chock-full of vendors of every kind of clothing and sports gear.

When I got there, the huge exhibition space was hosting a "Buddhist Festival", not the clearance sale. I was terribly confused; I don't understand Korean, but the posters around the neighborhood had said "AT Center" and "3/18" and had pictures of parkas and shoes and such, and I was pretty sure I understood that.

It turns out that the clearance was in an equally huge space on the second floor-- I spent a half-hour there and bought some gloves(!)-- but meanwhile, I had to see what the Buddhist Festival was.

Turns out, my friends, that our enlightened Eastern brethren (and sistern) can search for a buck just as tackily as we can in the endarkened West. There were some lovely items, such as simple, elegant clothing, crystal lotus flowers, and stylish candles; there were also plastic Buddha key chains and letter openers...

,,,and a big ol' baby-Buddha-riding-an-elephant... uh... thing...

...and a blaring teenaged rock band that I suppose was singing about Nirvana but sounded more like Kurt Cobain with his toe caught in a blender.

It was kinda disillusioning. Next thing you know, somebody will tell me that some televangelists are in it for the money.

Serendipity and solitude

2011-03-21T11:19:00.003+09:00

Our school just started its two-week spring break, and the challenge for me will be to find things to do to fill the time. I mean besides grading, planning, writing, cleaning, and other such exciting gerunds.

I usually only hash one day a week, Saturday mornings with my home kennel, Yongsan Kimchi. But with no appointments for the next 17 days, on Friday night I ventured up to Itaewon for the once-monthly Full Moon Hash. This was my sixth separate hashing group: Yongsan Kimchi, Southside, Osan Bulgogi (down in the city of Songtan, next to the US Air Force base), PMS (on their semiannual coed hash), 38th Parallel, and Full Moon.

Frankly, I should have stayed home, for a couple of reasons. The actual hash was fun, running around the hills and back streets of Itaewon in the dark with a flashlight. Afterward, though, there was no traditional hashing circle-- ceremonies and jokes and risque songs-- just a small number of hashers taking up one corner of a noisy, smoky bar. I left early. And by Sunday, the running on Friday and Saturday would... well, you'll see.

The thing that will amaze those of you who know me too well is that I (wait for it-- you may want to sit down-- ah, you're probably already doing that; you may want to hold on to something) I declined to buy a commemorative t-shirt. Yeah, I said it. I love love love t-shirts and I love, especially after being in Korea for 2 1/2 years without really belonging to anything much, belonging to something. (I also am avid to collect hash patches-- sort of like demerit badges-- for my happi coat.) So of course I had to buy the Full Moon Hash shirt, with its terrific graphic of a rabbit howling at the moon.

...except that the O's in the "Full Moon" lettering were actually a stylized butt (full moon, get it?) and the rest of the lettering was in that faux-Chinese style, which I find vaguely offensive, you see on cheap "Chinee Takee-Outee" restaurant menus. (If it had been faux-Korean I might have reconsidered, but, really, where could I feel comfortable wearing the shirt?) But I moped a little because I missed out on a hash shirt because it didn't suit me to a t.

The next morning, I loaded up the goodies I'd bought from Costco and E-Mart, in my new capacity as "hash chef", and headed via bus and subway and subway to the Noksapyeong area. (It's a little slower going when you're toting bagels, cream cheese, peanut butter, jelly, pretzels, tortilla chips, and cookies.)

This Yongsan Kimchi run was a celebration of both St. Pat's Day and DODIC'S 55th birthday. DODIC is a military guy who's been a hardcore hasher for 30 years, by my estimation between 1500 and 2000 times. He and two other hares led us up and over Namsan Mountain (where, sliding down a long flat rock covered with pebbles, I earned my Red Badge of Carelessness by cutting my thumb, just enough to bleed a bit.) We ended up across the street from Gyeongbokgung, Korea's grandest palace, for an epic circle.

TKO (I don't think I should say what those letters stand for) and GI Ho, a Real American Zero.

...where I got my reward for my fiscal and sartorial restraint of the night before: three patches: 20th Run (all with Yongsan Kimchi, all within 19 weeks; St. Patrick's Day Hash; and the coveted Blood on Trail. Aaaaand a t-shirt: on the front, a SPEED LIMIT 55 sign, with bullet holes in it, altered to read "NO SPEED LIMIT 55 (AND STILL ALIVE)"; on the back, the logos of all of Korea's hashing groups.

The defining quality of Seoul, to me, is its mix of ancient and very modern.

On my way to the subway station and Insadong, Seoul's artsy pedestrian mall, I came upon a little Buddhist gift shop and wandered in. In my first serendipitous event of the weekend, I found a rack of wooden-bead prayer bracelets identical to mine. Last week, I was talking to our new hasher Sin after the run and she greatly admired my bracelet and said she'd love to have one if she could get one etched with her Chinese sign, the Rat. (We disagreed on which of us had us worse in the Zodiacal field, her as a Crab in the Western system and a Rat, or me as a Snake and a Scorpion.)

The ladies in the shop spoke no English and I certainly didn't know the Korean for "Rat", so I was about to give up when it occurred to me to employ my mad Pictionary/Eat Poop You Cat skillz and draw this magnificent picture in my notebook:

...and thus got Sin her bracelet. I also found an English bookstore next door and bought a wonderful guidebook to Seoul's attractions, which I'm going to employ on this vacation.

Insadong had a great number of people, both Korean and waegookin, wearing green in honor of St. Patrick.

Ah... not so much green in this picture. Faith and begorrah. The banner is for St. Pat, at least.

I bumped into GI Ho, Kiwi Weewee, Willing to Pay, and Bootylicious from the hash, and then came my second serendipity: I was wearing my "Ithaca is Gorges" hoodie and a young woman stopped, asked "Are you from Ithaca?" and exclaimed, "I'm from Rochester!" Small world-- Rochester is 90 miles from Ithaca-- but it would get smaller and more serendipitous the next day.

On Sunday afternoon, I went for my "long" training run, supposedly for 90 minutes; my half-marathon is just three weeks away. But I did fine for a measly 20 minutes, down the Yangjae Cheon toward Gwacheon City, and just... ran... out... of... oomph. I told you that hashing on Friday night (leading into hashing on Saturday) was a mistake! I just didn't have anything left on Sunday. I'm worried about the half coming up.

Anyway, I turned around and walked oomphlessly back home along the stream. As I got to the ramp to my street, a Korean guy was walking down it and smiling in a quizzical way at me. I knew I must know him from someplace... a waiter at the Vietnamese cafe? The guy from the sandwich shop?... so I smiled back and said hello.

The guy said, "You are Stephen?" I had to admit that I was, and flailed about mentally to figure out who he was. It was Pil-kon (English name, Ara), a very genial guy who always came to our Daegu Writers' Group meetings! I hadn't seen him in nearly two years, and that in a city nearly at the other end of Korea. It turns out that he was visiting his sister, who lives in my neighborhood, for the week.

Now... what are the odds that in a metropolitan area of 23 million people, Ara-- my only Korean acquaintance from Daegu with whom I didn't work-- would be coming down the ramp at the same moment I reached it? And at that, I was only there then because my run had failed so spectacularly. I wonder how many times we miss by this much running into somebody from our past... or our future.

---

I'd meant for this post to include my thoughts about our spring break and about being alone, but it's gone on for so long even I don't want to read any more. So I'll leave the heading, because I like it, but split the "solitude" part off to stand... um... alone.

I don't know why you say goodbye

2011-03-13T22:44:00.002+09:00

...I say hello.

I wish.

I write about it every so often: one of the worst things about being a teacher in Korea is all the goodbyes. I've hated goodbyes-- the "I don't know if I'll ever see you again" goodbyes-- my whole life. Even though our school faculty is pretty stable... actually, they're not stable at all, but I mean the individuals don't turn over much from year to year... it's part of the deal. And my outside-school friends, hashers and veggie group people, go far too often; it seems like goodbye forever to someone every couple of months. It's only a few months, for example, till a hasher I took to immediately, Katy (see photo on my previous entry), leaves us for good. (That's an odd phrase; there's nothing good about it.)

And now Lauren, probably my best teaching friend, is by her own admission beginning to detach emotionally as she prepares to move to Denmark in three months. I simply won't know what to do with my Sunday mornings anymore and I miss her already.

A goodbye of this sort feels almost like a little death; the person seems to shrink from a living, breathing, literally life-size friend to a collection of pixels. Even if someone is just leaving Korea to go home or to travel, I think of the family members and pets I've lost-- we've all lost-- and feel just a tiny hint of the same sadness. I suppose it's a foreshadowing of when each of us will have to say goodbye to everything we know.

The other half of this equation, which I think I always write about in the same post as the "I hate goodbyes" stuff, is that Buddhist philosophy has really helped me. I find a lot of Buddhist thought to be so valuable because it doesn't try to deny the nature of life; I mean it doesn't say that death isn't real or that we can avoid suffering, but just tells us how to look at it in a way that minimizes suffering and increases compassion.

I've found the art, the music, the ritual, and the dogma to be very off-putting. But after the hash yesterday I walked to Itaewon and enjoyed a feast of book-buying (that's my retail therapy) and among the books I got was one called Buddhism Without Beliefs that crystallizes the philosophy, shorn of its otherworldly trappings, in plain English.

I feel a little wiser when I detach and achieve a quiet mind. But I still wish people didn't have to leave.

As Holden Caulfield said, "Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

Little darling...

2011-03-13T22:23:00.001+09:00

...it's been a long, cold, lonely winter. In fact, it feels like years since it's been clear.

I know spring's not really here, but we've had a gorgeous weekend, sunny and warm. It got up to the mid-60s Fahrenheit today. (And I say it's all right.)

Had a ball at the hash yesterday, though it was a tough one, winding up Namsan, the main mountain within Seoul, where Seoul Tower is. Then coming down we had to scramble down a cement drainage culvert, with three-to-four-foot drops every fifty feet or so. I was lucky to be near the back of the pack with a first timer, a brand-new friend from South Africa named Sin Gwamanda. She's very nice and very cute... clearly whoever coined the phrase "ugly as Sin" never met her.

On the left, Sin; on the right, our vivacious leader, Katy.

Meeting her led me to reflect that one of the best things about hashing is meeting people from all over the world; our hash has members from the US, Canada, Scotland, Ireland, South Africa, Uganda, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, and-- oh, yes-- a Korean or two. All that's needed is an extremely relaxed attitude toward propriety, a thirst for beer, and running shoes.

Today was even more gorgeous, and a good day all the way around. I had coffee with Lauren in the morning, a very satisfying nap, an eight-mile run down the Yangjae Cheon (stream) to Gwacheon City and back-- incidentally, believe it or not, if you go to Google Images and search for "Yangjae Cheon", the very first picture (and thus the world's most prominent photo of the Yangjae Cheon) was taken by... me!

This is it. Ansel Adams, eat your heart out.

--and then it was coffee and gossip with Faina and Vanessa, our Chinese Chinese teacher, in the evening. I've known Vanessa for a year and a half and just now feel as if I'm getting to know her a little bit. She's really nice; I wish I'd known her better sooner. Oh, and we found that Michelle, our school's wonderful receptionist, had her baby today. (Yay!)

According to the forecast, we have more cold gray yuck coming our way starting tomorrow, but it really was wonderful to have a "here comes the sun" weekend. And, if you were worried... we didn't get a hint of the awful devastation that hit Japan; we're a thousand miles away from the site and Japan itself shielded us from the waves. Korea is, thank goodness, not in the Ring of Fire.

However minuscule this wish is compared to the horrible toll in Japan, I wish it were spring for keeps. I want spring more than I want pizza.

The greatest thing since pancakes

2011-03-08T18:53:00.002+09:00

...is my new used bike (which cost $40).

Nice, huh? But wait! It does this...

...which makes it take up roughly as much apartment space as Tug.

It's the greatest thing since blueberry pancakes.

Chin up, nose to the grindstone, head in the clouds

2011-03-07T14:15:00.001+09:00

In the West, we all think that Asian students work immeasurably harder than our kids do. After two and a half years in the Mysterious East, I can say that that's definitely a case of selective perception; we see the ones who've gotten into American universities, who are the best of the best. Very much as in American schools, some kids here work hard and some don't give a rat's clavicle.

Incidentally, so far this year our kids have been admitted to Illinois, Tulane, Michigan State, SUNY Stony Brook, UNLV, Cal Irvine, three Japanese universities, and Yonsei, which is one of the three schools in Korea's "Ivy League". So I guess we're doing okay.

Once, not too long ago, I would have said that it's the Asian parents who care more. That would certainly seem to be borne out here in Korea by the huge number of families who send their kids to hagwons in the evenings for additional study; some kids go to school from 8 a.m. to midnight. Certainly the parents who spend big bucks to have their kids attend our school, and the much pricier international schools, care enough to pay for their daughters and sons to get a valuable introduction to Western education.

But they don't always put their mouths where their money is.

Eww... that wouldn't be good, actually; you never know where your money's been.

Anyway...

We have a ninth-grade student, let's call him Cole, who's a very pleasant guy, popular with the ladies, but just doesn't give a damn about school. If we let him, he'd sleep through every class. He will admit to going to bed around midnight, so it's probably 2 a.m. or so. I suspect video games and handepones-- cell phones-- as the culprits. He has a "C" in my class-- probably because I'm a brilliant teacher, although conceivably not-- and is okay in art and phys ed. He's failing everything else, generally with averages in the 30s.

Last week we had an SST-- Student Success Team-- meeting to talk with his mom and him about how to improve his performance. It was a an hour-long, awkward meeting, with Cathleen Won, our teacher who is Korean, translating back and forth throughout.

About ten minutes in, Cole's mom started crying quietly and kept it up for the next 45 minutes or so. It was positively the most embarrassing meeting I've ever been in, if you don't count my first marriage. She said she knew he was doing badly, but she had no idea just how badly. This is despite the fact that all the parents know that the kids' grades are posted 24/7 on our Gradebook Wizard site.

It was painful for me, and I'm sure for her and all the adults, to sit through her crying. What I'm wondering is whether it was equally painful for Cole. I don't know how he could sit through a long session of watching his mother cry in front of his teachers, knowing that he's the one who caused it, and not feel humiliated and determined to do better.

In his first class with me afterward, he positively did not put his head down on his desk.

He only practically snapped his neck as he sat up with his face pointing straight at the floor.

For about five seconds, till I got to his desk.
---
I'm so happy! I know I have a weakness in my writing style: I use parentheses far too often. But in this entry I didn't use them even once! (Isn't that great?)

Much too young... er, old

2011-03-06T21:24:00.000+09:00

Nearly 20 years ago, Garth Brooks recorded a song called I'm Much Too Young (to Feel This Damn Old). I remember many times between then and now, especially trying to get out of bed in the morning, when the song seemed all too appropriate. But in the weekend just ending...

I'm much too old to feel this damn young.

I really got out and played this weekend. On Saturday, in my new capacity as Hash Chef (actually, this just involves getting munchies for the pack), I horsed an enormous amount of pretzels, tortilla chips, cookies, more cookies, bread, and peanut butter across the river to the beautiful big park next to the National Museum of Korea. Then we had a really nice hash run down along the river and a great circle afterward.

When I got home I had email from my friend Nikki, our school's art teacher, that she and her husband Dex would be in Citizen's Forest Park in our neighborhood if I'd like to play Frisbee. So I rode my brand new used bike (which replaced my late lamented purloined bike) over there to see them and their three-month-old son Loku. I played Frisbee golf with them (well, the two older ones) and even a little hacky sack. I'd never actually played Frisbee golf before and hadn't touch a hacky sack in 30 years. I'm no Nikki with the footbag (she played soccer in college, not very many years ago) but I managed not to humiliate myself.

My South African friend LesBalls (okay... Lesley; the other's her hash name) had cricket gear sent to her and she's trying to start up a cricket club. Her first event was today, Sunday, in the big long park on our side of the river. I took the subway up there and found her along with her friend Jane, who'd just flown in from Johannesburg.

Now, I'd never played cricket before, but felt eminently qualified because I saw a game in England... um, 35 years ago. We took turns batting and bowling (pitching) and fielding, and, frankly, I did okay. I actually made a nice one-handed, knee-high catch and knocked some runs (or however you say it).

Me. (Artist's rendering)

The park was crowded with people playing catch, flying kites, walking dogs, and so on, and most of them (though not the dogs) seemed interested in what we were doing. At one point, a couple of Korean men came over and one said something in Korean in which we could catch the word "cricket". Yes, we said, it's cricket, and one guy threw his hands up and roared in laughter. He told us in halting English that he'd bet his friend what we were doing was cricket and he'd won 100 Won. (That's eight cents American; often Koreans and Westerners get their monetary amounts mixed up-- maybe he meant 1000 or 10000 or 100000 Won.)

And then, as Sunday is long run day in my training for the half-marathon in five weeks, I ran home. Actually, the park was only five miles or so from home, so I had to put in some extra time on the Yangjae Cheon.

So... I ran and partied with the hash, played Frisbee golf and hacky sack, played cricket, and ran; that's a lot of recreation for a :: koff :: mature gentleman such as myself, but I felt young. Aside, of course, from my knees (from pounding on the sidewalk) and my back (from bending over so much playing cricket... I'm not 55 anymore, you know.) But it feels really good.

Till tomorrow morning, when it will take 16 ibuprofen, a winch, and a wizard to get me out of bed. Then I'll be just a tiny bit too young to feel so damn old.

But it was worth it.

It's not funny.

2011-02-27T21:20:00.000+09:00

There's a website called Blackout Korea, run by an American expat, that consists solely of photos of drunken Koreans passed out on sidewalks, in the subway, and in other public places, usually accompanied by grinning young Westerners showing how very funny they think the unconscious locals are.

I can only scratch the surface as to how disgusting an idea I think this is. For one thing, the Chosun Ilbo, one of Korea's premier newspapers, has run an article about the site, which can only inflame anti-American feeling; if the site doesn't reek of racism, it certainly is a case of culturalism.

There are a lot of things in Korea that a Westerner can find curious or backward or (in the case of some of the treatment of animals) repulsive. Sleeping in a closed room with a fan on will not kill you and your blood type does not dictate your personality. A Westerner doesn't have to address, say, his sister's husband's younger brother with a different honorific from our sister's husband's older brother.

...and Korea has the highest per capita consumption of hard liquor in the world. Heavy drinking is very much a part of the male-centric culture and sometimes the locals can get very drunk indeed. But I would have hoped we'd outgrown ridiculing the hopeless and the helpless.

I feel the same way about that "People of Walmart" site; I don't think that the fat, the sloppy, and the toothless people there deserve the ridicule of their "betters". It makes me squirm. How far off is it from making fun of the mentally or physically handicapped? It's no wonder so much of America thinks those of us from the coasts are self-satisfied, pompous jerks. That's the kind of thing that keeps people like Sarah Palin in business, stirring up resentment and suspicion.

And I can only feel that Blackout Korea will stir up resentment and suspicion of Westerners here. It's ugly and I don't like it.

Rainy days and Sundays

2011-02-27T18:33:00.002+09:00

All my life, I've had a bad case of the Sundays. I know a lot of people, from Garfield to the Mamas and the Papas, have it in for Monday, but when Monday morning comes I just get up and go do it to it. But Sunday... Sunday just hangs Monday over my head all day. For most of my life, Black Sunday began after the ritual reading of two newspapers (first the Ithaca Journal and the Syracuse Herald-American, later the St. Augustine Record and the Florida Times-Union, no matter how awful a paper it was... and you can't spell "flatulent" without Fla. T-U.) It had its own ritual, starting with the comics and the sports, all the way through every last opinion column in an effort to forestall the Sundays. Now the Sundays start when Coffee With Lauren ends... I don't know what I'm going to do when she leaves in a few months. (People are always leaving here... but that's another topic.)

This Sunday, today, has been particularly harsh, as it's brought nothing but cold, windy rain-- my least favorite weather condition, behind only tornadoes and locusts-- all day. It's seemed even worse after the sunny, springlike weather that has held for most of February. Just as I discontinue my gym membership (which, between the weather and my head cold, I've used once all month) and hunt for a new used bike, the weather, in the immortal words of Homer J. Simpson, is the "suckiest suck that ever sucked a suck."

I waited most of the day for the rain to stop in order to get in my long, half-marathon-training run, and finally went out anyway and thought, "Hey, this isn't so bad." Then I turned around into the wind, said some naughty words, and came straight back. I ended up running 15 of my planned 70 minutes, came back and took as warm a shower as the building allowed, and did a whole New York Times Sunday crossword.

When I was a kid, I'd watch Lassie at about this time on Sunday night and my mom would inevitably make pancakes or French toast or real waffles and I'd feel better. Well, if Timmy's down the well he's going to damn well stay there, because Korean TV doesn't show Lassie. My mom's not making me my bestest comfort food anymore. And I made myself French toast for lunch and the magic's worn off.

...sigh...

Oh! I just noticed that this is my three hundredth blog entry! :: blowing soggy unfurls-when-you-toot-it noisemaker ::

Me? Preciousssss...

2011-02-23T20:54:00.006+09:00

For dinner this evening, I went to the Loving Hut vegan buffet with five of my friends. When it came time to leave, the lady at the register asked me in very good English if I was a vegan.

Vegetarian, I said.

"How long have you been a vegetarian?"

"Twenty years."

"You are noble and precious," she said.

(!)

...and I guess that's where I should end this story; it's a good punchline. But I can't help noticing that as over-the-top and utterly inaccurate those adjectives are for me... it was an hour ago and I'm still glowing.

Just a little. Nobly.

Necessity is a mother

2011-02-23T20:44:00.001+09:00

Having a small apartment, wanting to save money, and not speaking the language all contribute to the necessity of being creative in acquiring goods. For example, when I first moved in here 18 months ago, the school supplied a wardrobe with a wooden bar you hang clothes from (is there a name for that?) ten inches longer than the wardrobe was wide. Solution? Swiffer Sweeper handle.

Some months ago I found a two-drawer dresser somebody had put on the street. One man's trash is another man's... umm... tacky furniture. And Tug does his part... his two favorite beds are my soft-sided suitcase with a blanket that came free with a box of Frosted Flakes and a New Balance shoe box with a blanket courtesy of Kellogg's Corn Flakes.

Anyway, I spend 90 percent of my waking at-home time in one chair, in front of one little table. This is where I write, surf, correct papers, plan, watch TV, eat, take my pills... the problem is that my laptop and its accoutre... accouter... stuff take up half the table, leaving me with an area about eight inches deep for my paperwork and meals and such.

After school yesterday, I was headed over to the Yangjae Cheon to meet Lauren for a run and found a little computer table, with a slide-out drawer, out on the street for pickup.

(This isn't it.)

I brought it back home and left it, figuring I'd find a space for it somehow. When I came back, I toted it all over-- to the extent that a postage-stamp-sized apartment has an all over-- seeing how it would work in front of the sliding doors to the alcove and balcony, eyeballing moving the TV, seeing if there was somehow space in the little bedroom...

I had just sadly determined that I had no space and was about to take the desklet back down for some other bargain hunter to find when it hit me upside the head like a 25-pound bag of tapioca: it might go under the other table.

And it does, as if designed for that purpose. Now I can just slide it out for 432 glorious square inches of desk space. It has a shelf, too, that's good for a footrest and yet another cat bed and in case I ever buy a book...

In principal, I'm a huge supporter of recycling, Craigslist, Freecycle, and all that good stuff. I won't go as far as the customer we once had at our bookstore who told an old lady she could find really cool magazines if she'd go dumpster diving. (He was the guy with the mustache that was really his nose hair...) However...

Our culture teaches us to chase more and more bigger and bigger stuff. But what we want isn't the stuff; it's the happiness that we imagine the stuff will bring us. I'm just skipping the middleman and trying to learn to be happy.

And telling the stuff to stuff it.

"All right then, I'll go to hell."

2011-02-18T21:47:00.000+09:00

There are so many times as a teacher, just as there are so many times in any job, that involve going through the motions. There are just so many subject-predicate-complete thought sessions and so many Gift of the Magi readings one can do before it becomes pretty much rote. (If you're wondering, the numbers are four and two, respectively.)

But occasionally I'm reminded of what I love about being an English teacher This always happens when I teach Huck Finn. (My late uncle Charles, perhaps incidentally, was one of the world's great Twain collectors; his widow sold his stash to a Japanese collector for $3 million.) I learned to love Twain at a young age; all the Cornman men in my dad's generation strove for that dry, ironic wit and more than anything else when I was a kid I wanted to make people laugh like my dad did. (Yeah, I'm still trying.) (A sidebar: Uncle Charles had a tabby cat named Tearalong the Dotted Lion.)

More than that, I agree with Hemingway that "all American literature begins" with Huck Finn. Huck is the American literary hero, I think, plucky and rebellious and with a great, great heart. It's a shame that so many people can't see past the fact that Huck (the boy) is a racist (since that's all he's ever learned) to see that Huck (the book) is a powerful statement against racism. I've taught American lit in English 11 for a dozen years, and I always, always teach Huck; one student's mother in St. Augustine initially didn't want her son to read the book because of that word, but I explained how I would approach it and the background work I wold do in my introduction, and he read it and it was fine.

More than any other literary scene I love the part we got to today, where Huck's written a letter to Miss Watson to turn Jim in and believes he has to mail it or he'll be punished forever for the "evil" of helping Jim escape. He takes a deep breath and says, "All right then, I'll go to hell" and the reader knows in that moment that Huck's heart is much wiser and stronger than his head.

...and I teach my butt off on this chapter, better, I think, than on anything else I do, making it come alive, explaining the stakes and the significance and why Huck is such a terrific kid, and hoping my enthusiasm is catching.

Here in Korea, as at the vocational high school in Florida, and even with the "bright" kids at the Catholic school, I have to wonder if the kids are getting it. They're attentive, but are they going, "Yeah, yeah... what's the old man on about this time?"

But all you can do as a teacher is to try to connect with the students and lay out the information as clearly and interestingly as you can.

And hope.

A snowy mountainside

2011-02-05T18:25:00.002+09:00

Yesterday's 38th Parallel hash run was in Uijeongbu, just north of Seoul, erstwhile (albeit fictional) home of the 4077th MASH. Though Hawkeye and BJ never set foot there, plenty of real doctors and nurses (and soldiers, American and Korean and Chinese) did. These days, Uijeongbu is full of high-rise apartments and convenience stores, but just north of the town, where the hash led, is all farmers' fields guarded by shivering chained-up dogs, and mountains covered in bare trees and wet snow.

The hash itself was arduous, 75 minutes of (for me) hard running followed by a long hike over a very high, very snowy, hill. Halfway up, already hundreds of feet above the valley, I turned around and it hit me, as it never has before: this was a horrible place. I looked down at the river and the little houses below and the big hill facing us across the valley and realized that real young men were hunkered down on this mountainside, perhaps readying to fire artillery down on other real young men on the flat below. And both sides (the American kids just out of high school up above and the Chinese farmers' sons below, or vice versa; it doesn't matter now) were shivering through the vicious winter, hoping or praying to live to see spring.

Seoul, just to the south, changed hands four times in twelve months. This place has seen much too much.

Yesterday, like today, was very foggy, so the forty-story apartment houses in the distance faded almost into nothingness and the valley below was silent. It felt like a dream, so that those poor guys on both sides, stuck here just before I was born, seemed almost more real than the twenty-first century waiting at the bottom of the mountain.

And the bunker sitting beside the trail (built by which side? Who knows?) testified that it was all real and, in the scheme of things, not that long ago.

And then it was time to go over the mountain and back into my world of Starbucks and 7-Elevens.

Strange day indeed

2011-02-03T14:30:00.001+09:00

It's an odd day.

Almost everything is closed for Seollal, though Lauren and I did manage to get together for coffee, as two of the four coffeehouses in the neighborhood are, surprisingly, open. But E-Mart, Costco, and every restaurant-- everything but the convenience stores-- is closed. The streets are nearly deserted. It's 41 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 30 degrees higher than the recent norm, but nobody's out enjoying it.

Meanwhile I'm watching remarkable live coverage of the Cairo uprising on Al Jazeera's English web site. It's objective and comprehensive, much better than you could find on an American cable-news channel; I've been listening to gunfire and seeing Molotov cocktails being thrown by thugs and undercover cops, thinking of my friend Joelle, who lives in Cairo just a few blocks from the square where all the protests have been taking place. The US government said to get out now. She sent out detailed live-history emails six hours ago, but I hope she's on her way to the airport. If she's not scared, I am.

Funny how a couple of months ago people were worried about my safety.

Meanwhile, I made my very own improvises ddeokboggi, the spicy red rice-cake-and-sauce dish so popular at the ubiquitous street vendors' stands, like this one.

The big letters say "Gongju Ddeokboggi".

My improvised recipe: boil the ddeok for a minute, drown it in store-bought pasta sauce, throw in tomato chunks, sprinkle in Tabasco sauce, nuke, eat. The whole process took five minutes and the meal cost maybe fifty cents. Ddeok dishes are to Korea on Lunar New Year what hoppin' john is to Dixie on Reg'lar New Year... what you eat for good fortune in the coming year. So I'm all set till the dawning of the Year of the Dragon.

...and the Eagles are playing Seoul in six weeks. The flippin' Eagles. I'm going to try to see them, though a foreigner practically needs to submit a retinal scan and a polygraph test to get a ticket to anything.

I'm a-walkin' down the street and I'm not eatin' meat, I got three big hashes on my mind.
One's up in Ouijeongbu, rhymin' like this song do, one's the Sunday morning kind.

ah, heck, songwriting's hard.

My bunny lies over the ocean

2011-02-02T10:47:00.002+09:00

We're have five days off from school this week, counting the weekend, for the biggest holiday on the Korean calendar, Seollal, Lunar New Year. In the States, it's generally called Chinese New Year... and by the way? Those Chinese restaurant place mats that give your Chinese sign? Yeah, well, if you were born in the first three to six weeks of the year, they're wrong... the New Year doesn't begin on January 1, you know. So if you gave birth today (which I imagine would be a big surprise to you), your child would still be a Tiger, not a Rabbit, no matter what the place mats at Ho Lee Chow say. (That's the actual name of a restaurant in Itaewon... it's a lot better than "Chinee Takee Outee" in Gainesville, Florida, at least.)

The Rabbits arrived a little early at Gimpo Airport this year.

Anyway, tomorrow, Thursday, is the actual date of Seoullal, the start of the Year of the Rabbit. I'm going to go to the "38th Parallel Hash" in Uijeongbu (home of the fictional but beloved 4077th MASH) on Friday, and I'm supposed to find a rabbit hat or ears or something before that. (Wearing my handsome tiger hat would be a faux paw, akin to wearing a "Happy Old Year" hat to Times Square for Reg'lar Ol' New Year.)

But what I really want to note is the array of riches showered upon us teachers in the last couple of days...

The father of one of our girls who got early admission to a Japanese university brought in a huge box that held a dozen flat, rectangular boxes; each box had the LG logo on it, so I was rather hoping for a flat-screen tv, but the six soaps, three shampoos, three conditioners, and six tubes of toothpaste will be welcome too. (LG, like all the Korean conglomerates, has its name on every kind of product and service imaginable.)

The mother of one of our kids gave those of us who wrote recommendation letters $50 gift cards to Starbucks.

For Seollal itself, various parents gave us:

an eleven-pound gift box of magnificent Korean apples, each one the size of John Goodman's head.

a big bag of ddeok. (What's up, ddeok?) They're round disks made of rice flour that are usually served with spicy red sauce but can be thrown into soups and such.

a chocolate birthday-style cake made of rice flour.

wicker baskets full of rice candy and tangerines.

A $30 gift certificate to the upscale Shinsegae department store, which fortunately is also good at E-Mart, which Shinsegae owns.

...so I'm set. I'll certainly never have to buy soap or toothpaste again, anyway.

E-Mart and Home Plus and other department stores are always packed and colorful leading into the big holidays, displaying expensive gift boxes full of fruit (as above) or toiletries (as above) or Spam (a great delicacy) or wine or whiskey. Most of the multitudinous female sales associates still wear their jacket-miniskirt-leggings combos that say "Heineken" or "Kelloggs" or whatever, but a lot of them are resplendent in their traditional hanbok like the outfits the kids are wearing in the rabbit photo above.

And tomorrow is the big event itself. As the French say, "C'est une bunny day." (It's a good idea.)

In the bleak midwinter

2011-01-23T20:37:00.003+09:00

...is the title of an apparently traditional English song I'd never heard till Katherine Jenkins, an incredibly beautiful, incredibly Welsh opera singer with an incredible voice, sang it to a CGI shark that was lying on a sidewalk in the Doctor Who Christmas episode.

If you have to ask why a gorgeous opera singer was singing this song to a shark on a sidewalk, you clearly lack the proper appreciation for Doctor Who.

At any rate, this winter has been the coldest in Seoul in thirty years, with wind chills down around 0 Fahrenheit overnight. The winter climate here is much like Upstate New York's, cold and windy, but with a bit more sun and a lot less snow. I've been reduced to, too often, going from nine hours in school to fifteen hours at home (with occasional bouts of tedium on the health club's treadmills), with not nearly enough outdoors time.

On days when the wind hasn't been too punishing, I've bundled up a few times and taken walks, and I never skip hashing on Saturdays. There, dressing in enough layers makes the cold bearable, so long as I keep moving. Fortunately, recently the group's gotten smart and sometimes the after-run socials have been held at the Bless U bar in Itaewon rather than having us all shivering outside like the Poor Little Matchgirl. Sometimes.

***

...this entry is going to take a 180-degree turn here, one I hadn't planned when I started (I meant to write pretty words about the snow on my run along the Yangjae Cheon today). But this keeps nudging at me:

***

Seoul, as Daegu did, has a class of beggars called "seal men". They have withered or useless legs (from polio or other causes) and propel themselves, belly-down, on little wooden carts, their faces inches from the sidewalk. Their legs are wrapped in inner-tube-like rubber, so they look like half-man, half-seal creatures. Apparently they get a tiny stipend from the government but have to beg to try to get enough money for food and housing. And times are hard; the economy here is in much better shape than in much of the world, but there is a recession going on, and their income has shrunk.

They invariably have a tinny sound system playing music and little plastic trays like drive-in French-fry containers on their carts. The trays usually have a few coins on them. Meanwhile, their faces are at the level of people's shins and car exhausts, down by the cigarette butts. They really can't look up. I've read, though this could be wrong, that the rubber wrapping is because they can't take bathroom breaks all day.

Two years ago, I read on an expat's blog that the police say that these poor men are generally mentally handicapped and are essentially slaves for organized crime, getting dropped off from a bus that goes all over the city each day, then picked up at night. So I've turned my head, feeling vile, and just walked by, even though I almost always give to beggars at subway stations; I can use my money more than the Korean Mafia can. But I just read a newspaper profile of one of these men, who (it said) may lose his meager apartment because the donations have dried up. It mentioned nothing about crime or human trafficking.

So now I don't know what to do: throw my money away to line the pockets of criminals? Or forget everything I say I believe about compassion and walk away from the lowest, most helpless people I've ever come into contact with?

...in the bleak midwinter, which exists not only due to the weather.

O Seoul mio

2011-01-16T21:14:00.001+09:00

I was coming back from yet another icy hash run yesterday when, just as the train crossed over the Han River, I felt a change in my consciousness. I've been in Korea for 28 months, in Seoul for 16, and I've always felt very much a stranger in a (very) strange land. But somehow at that moment something shifted in my mind.

I think it started when I got my bicycle. I'd had individual routes in my mental atlas... home to Itaewon, home to the COEX Mall, home to the ballpark... but biking from place to place started these imaginary dotted lines to coalesce into something resembling a map. Then again, doing the marathon training, even though it was almost all along the Yangjae Cheon (the stream), opened up the world from Gwacheon City in the southwest all the way to the Han and along the waterfront.

But it was the hashing that really did it, taking buses and subways to areas I'd never have otherwise gone to and then running the streets and alleyways, the mountains and bridges, seeing the people far from my neighborhood and far from the tourist areas, taking in the sights and sounds and smells of so many different parts of this huge city.

In that moment in the train on the bridge over the river, I realized something: though I'll never belong to Seoul, it belongs to me, in some totally illogical way that St. Augustine, in my 13 years there, never quite did. I've biked it and run it and bused it and trained it.

Now it's mine. And I'll have it with me always.

"There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."

2011-01-09T20:23:00.001+09:00

I woke this morning, the last of my vacation, intent on nothing more than getting the coffee going and finding the Seahawks-Saints game on my computer. The first thing I saw online was the headline about Representative Giffords' shooting.

My first impulse was to wonder what's happened to my country since I left it. Then I remembered the Kennedys, and King, and Wallace, and Reagan, and Lennon. The mad impulse to murder is nothing new.

But politicians and pundits didn't use to talk about "Second Amendment remedies" and tell their followers, "Don't retreat; reload" and post gun sights over the districts of their political opponents.

I'm scared for my country, and today, though I know it's insane, somehow almost feel more secure to be here-- fifty miles from a wicked dictator's missiles pointed at my apartment-- than there.

The little girl killed in the Tucson assault was born on September 11, 2001.

Happi New Year

2011-01-07T20:09:00.001+09:00

Our vacation's over; my friends and coworkers who've fled to more clement climes haven't returned yet, as school doesn't start back for another 60 hours, but it's Friday night and all that's left is the same weekend we always have.

But for once I don't feel as if the break went by too fast or that it didn't hold anything of value. I'm untanned, rested, and ready; the vacation has done me a world of good.

It's been just too darn cold (temperatures in the single digits Fahrenheit in the mornings, with a nice breeze to keep everything good and brisk) for me to want to sight-see at the palaces or tombs, and the thought of the DMZ right now isn't very appealing. (I should point out, though, that the US Embassy's monthly mailing-- unlike last month's-- didn't say a word about contingency plans for bugging out.)

It's not the heat, it's the humidity.

But I've kept busy, with hashing and having dinners with Bob and beverages with LesBalls and prepping my new journalism class and doing weight work and treadmill runs at the gym and stopping in to tend Faina's cat and taking long walks, bundled like an Inuit ("I can't put my arms down!") and reading the amazing Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins and making visits for routine medical tests and trips to Itaewon to drop off my happi coat for embroidery and sewing and to pick it up.

Traditional apres-hash attire: the Japanese happi, a short kimono with one's hash name and patches, done up in the colors and logo of one's home kennel. Some of the hashers are emblazoned like NASCAR vehicles and have had to put extensions on their happis to hold all the patches.

Today, on my last nonworking "work" day, I made my way to St. Mary's Catholic Hospital next to the Express Bus Terminal. This is an astoundingly confusing subway station, actually three stations on three lines laid out like a giant block U. In addition to the largest terminal in Korea, there's the hospital, the giant Shinsigae department store, and a big upscale underground mall called Central City.

This is all confuzzling enough that, if one were to go out the wrong exit from the subway (:: koff ::), one might nearly lose one's nose to frostbite before reaching the hospital, hypothetically hypothermically. Though, on the brighter side, what better place than a hospital to reach while holding the tip of one's nose in one's coat pocket?

I've been going to see Dr. Choi at the hospital every three months for a renewal of my blood-pressure meds. This time she insisted I get an EKG, urine and blood tests, and chest x-ray first. I'd already had all but the EKG done last week at the clinic by Yangjae Station, and the EKG today was quick and easy. Once I got there.

First I went to the International Health office, as that's the only place in the hospital guaranteed to have staffers who speak English. Then I had to figure out whether their records spelled my name (in Korean characters) as Conemain Seuteeben Jone or Coremain Seuteeben Jone, wait for them to find me in the system, and then wait for a volunteer to conduct me to the correct office.

My volunteer was a very sweet Anglophone middle-aged lady who was positively the smallest person I have ever seen and, shockingly, possibly the first little person I've ever actually talked to. Hard to believe, but there it is. The top of her head literally came up to my elbow. We rode the escalators up to the third floor; I stood a couple of stairs below her so we could talk easily. I told her I was from New York, as I've found it much too tough to explain to Koreans where Ithaca is, and we chatted about her visits to the Metropolitan Museum and Soho. She was a very nice lady whom I liked a lot.

So now I have to go back in ten days for the actual prescription; meanwhile there's more prep to be done, hashes to run, tales to be spun, and maybe some fun. (Is "Happi New Year" a pun?)

Not looking back or forward, just around

2011-01-02T22:18:00.001+09:00

In the spirit of curbing my procrastination, I'm doing my New Year's Eve Looking Backward post on January 2. I've never believed much in resolutions, but I've come to the point in my life where I'm thinking about this point in my life.

Something new has happened lately; I've been thinking about my mortality. I don't mean than in a lugubrious way; actually, I feel pretty good about it. But just recently I haven't felt as if I'm an ageless kid in a mysteriously graying, wrinkling shell; I feel like I'm the age I am. Does that mean I'm going to start acting "mature"? God, no.

Paradoxically, hanging around all my running friends makes me feel older while the activity keeps me younger. But both the Flyers and the hashers are welcoming and inclusive and I feel right at home. The same is true with my work friends, who are almost all 25 to 35 years younger, though sometimes I don't get out with them because they like going to red-in-tooth-and-claw meat restaurants and staying out late-- till the subways run again at 6 a.m. late-- at clubs.

But I've gone on too long about age, and now I'm older yet than when I started. This entry really isn't about age; it's about life, or my life at least.

Am I better today than I was a year ago? A decade ago? Financially, not really. I've got a little apartment with a big cat in a strange, strange land. I don't know when I'll ever move back home, or where that is.

But I honestly think I've attained some wisdom and some perspective. It took a while for me to realize that the cosmos doesn't revolve around the United States, or Ithaca, or me. It amazes me that I never wanted to live in a town bigger than 20 thousand and I'm comfortable in a town of 20 million.

Today it was about 15 degrees Fahrenheit and halfway down into the subway was a man sitting on the landing, his head down, with his cap upside-down in front of his crossed legs. I know people think that beggars are bums, or faking it, but nobody sits there on a day like today by choice. I put money in his cap, but it doesn't make me feel better.

I think about people like him. I think about my cat Tiki, spending his second horrible winter on the streets of Daegu (if he's still alive). I think about the people I've hurt, but not the people who've hurt me. I know this all may sound sanctimonious, but it's true.

I've been a vegetarian for 19 years and talked the good talk, but I guess it's only recently that I've really internalized how compassion is all we have.

I wish us all a hopeful and healing 2011.

Score!

2011-01-02T18:17:00.002+09:00

I'm halfway through our school's winter break, and so far it's been the best staycation I've had in Korea. I usually sit around and mope about how everyone else is off on a Southeast Asian beach...

This is a Northeast Asian beach, along the Han River in downtown Seoul.

...or in Europe or back home in the US of A while I freeze my Niblets off in the Land of the Morning C-c-c-calm. But I've watched good movies on the computer, read an extraordinary YA book (The Hunger Games) and am about to start reading the sequel, gotten about town, spent time with Hasher friends, and done some great retail therapy.

Usually just spending money doesn't make me happy (unless it's on books; my shameful English-teacher secret is that buying books elates me a lot more than reading them.) But a couple of days ago I bought a terrific tiger-head winter hat. I was only going to wear it on the hash, to fit in with the silly hats and socks and such that are popular among the hashnoscenti, but it makes me happy, so I'm wearing it around the 'hood (in lieu of a hood) too. And the locals don't seem to be laughing at me any more than usual.

It looks something like this.

New Year's Eve was a party in Itaewon with "my" Yongsan Kimchi group and the Osan Bulgogi group; New Year's Day was a walking-trail hash in the same place, where I also bought my "happy coat": a satiny short kimono-like robe with one's home hash group's logo on the back, on which one sews all the patches (which serve as sort of demerit badges) from the various runs. Yongsan Kimchi's happy coat is my favorite color combo, the Michigan Wolverines' midnight blue with maize trim. I'll go back to Itaewon in the next couple of days to get the ajumma (middle-aged lady) who embroiders them to embroider "Corndog Millionaire" on the lapels and sew on my patches. Psyched for that.

And then today, Sunday, the Southside hashers hosted a great run through the streets and over a snowy, slippery mountain...

It looked something like this.

, and then, since the hash was on the right subway line anyway, I went to Home Plus. Home Plus is much like E-Mart, but better, with a wider selection of groceries and some clothing that actually fits me. I don't go there often, as it's a bit of a journey, but today I hit the mother lode.

It's so hard for a veghead to find a variety of food here; 'most everything has meat or fish in it and you can't be sure what doesn't, because those dang Koreans insist on listing the ingredients in Korean. I end up eating the same few things, and not necessarily healthful things, over and over. And a lot of eggs, ova and ova.

But at Home Plus today I found vegetarian ramen (I bought a dozen packets), Italian-style diced tomatoes, vegetarian chili, and cheap but delicious pomegranite juice. I'm trying hard to eat better and more varied food. I had veggie burgers at both hash events in Itaewon this weekend, too!

Unless you're a vegetarian in a non-Western-alphabetted land (hint: you're not), you can't imagine how rare these items are and how stoked I am to have this cornucopia of good eats.

To paraphrase the mortal words of the Ohio Express, "Yummy yummy yummy, I got grub in my tummy."

Oh, and I registered for my first half-marathon, in April. And I expect to do another full marathon in the fall.

So, as the young'uns say, it's all good.

A running total

2010-12-31T17:27:00.001+09:00

I made a point to run 33 minutes on the treadmill today, to round off my theoretical mileage for the year at a nice, even 900. This is based on the fiction that I run a mile in 10 minutes; the 33 brought my total for 2010 to precisely 9000 minutes, or 150 hours.

But this is a fiction, the type that should be shelved in the "fantasy" section. All of those long runs in training for the marathon were at 12- to 13-minute pace, and I can only guess what percentage of a hash run is actual running, though I try to not credit myself with the walking and standing-around time. For that matter, my regular running pace is 10:30 or so per.

So.

I can say that this year I ran 150 hours, more or less, maybe 800 miles. I completed two 5K's, four 10K's, and one marathon (which, twenty years from now, may be my most prominent memory of the year). I mentored cross country and did ten hashes (all in the last eight weeks)...

and lost five pounds and then gained eight (for a net of plus three), to equal my highest weight ever. This seems impossible, but recently every fatty or sweet food has been as addictive to me as crack to a crackhead or cigarettes to a... um... butthead. I seem to have no control at all; I've never been simultaneously so proud and so ashamed as I am of my physical condition. I'm very healthy in a cardiovascular sense, better than some runners 25 years younger and 50 pounds lighter. But still.

Last week I carried a 30-pound jug of cat litter upstairs for Faina and it hit me that that is exactly the extra weight I carry every day. Maybe that has something to do with my knees' hurting.

But I won't run myself down, so to speak. I ran a flippin' marathon; have I mentioned that? I'm running every weekend with people half my age. And I'm proud of that.

And I'll curb my addiction and run farther in 2011. I'm looking at a half-marathon in the spring and a full one in the fall. But I'll conclude this now; I seem to be running on.

Woof

2010-12-31T17:15:00.000+09:00

As so often happens, I thought of something apropos to say just a bit too late. My most recent post, about the physical exam and my lack of Korean-language skills was missing something, but I couldn't figure out what. Here it is:

My Korean ability (or lack thereof) leaves me at the level of a fairly intelligent dog. That is, I catch some words that people say-- I prick up my ears at i man Won and yeogi, ajeosshi the way an Aussie shepherd does to ball and walkies-- but I'm mostly dependent on tone and gestures and instinct. And I get by.

Speaking of dogs, Corndog Millionaire is heading out in a few minutes, through the ice and wind, to a bar in Itaewon, to spend New Year's Eve at a party with my hasher friends. I have no idea how I'm going to get home past midnight, but it's better to celebrate with the pack-- and that is what it's called-- than alone. We dogs are, after all, social animals.

Innuendo?

2010-12-30T20:47:00.003+09:00

No, in YOU endo!

A couple of months ago, a bunch of us at SPPA got notices that we were required by law to have physical checkups by the end of the year. It came with a little chart: Lauren- general. Chris- general. Steve- general, stomach, large intestine. Apparently my age makes them want to shove a large tube into my innards and take a look.

I was relieved to find that an endoscope goes in the top endo, not the bottom endo. But still. I am not going to be ordered by some faceless bureaucrat to have an uncomfortable, invasive procedure to check out hypothetical diseases that, if I had them, would affect nobody but me. I have zero family history of cancer (we like to go in for strokes and Alzheimer's) and am not up for a procedure for which proper sedation would involve a handful of Valium, a fifth of Jack, and a large mallet.

So I went to Mr. Park, the boss, and he told me I didn't have to have the endoscope. I have no documentation for that, but I'm happy to take his word for it. I'm offended that the government believes it can demand such a procedure, especially from a waegook (foreigner). In a silent protest, I waited till the third-to-last day of the year to go in for the checkup. (Also, I am a champion procrastinator; none of that amateurcrastinating for me.)

The Pren Dawktaw (their phonetic attempt at "Friend Doctor") clinic is on the fifth floor of an office building by Yangjae Station. It's filled with dozens of patients, mostly in green jammies and all of them Korean, and a handful of staffers, none of whom speaks but a word or two of English. (The first form they gave me to fill out said "DENTAL HISTORY" at the top; I bared my choppers, pointed, and said "Dentaw meanf teef.")

It was stressful with all the waiting and misunderstanding and trying to call the school (nobody there) and my fellow teacher Billy, who speaks excellent Korean (no answer). I wanted somebody to insist to them that they weren't sticking anything in either endo and, after my blood pressure reading was 30 points higher than normal, to explain that it was the stress of the moment.

But, with long intervals between each pair of tests, I struggled through with the chest x-ray, height and weight, another hypertension check, and blood and urine tests, for which I'd been up cramming the night before. (Incidentally, I'd never had a urine test before that involved sticking a little paper stick into the cup and turning in the stick. The good news is that I'm not pregnant.)

Finally I got to talk for a moment with a doctor who had decent English. He told me I should take hypertension medication (I do) and that they'd call me in two weeks to let me know if I'm alive. The subject of the long nasty tube never arose.

The big take-away for me was the frustration of being unable to communicate. It surprised me that every technician and attendant was of an age to have taken several years of English in school but nobody could talk to me. (I don't want to be the ugly American here; I know it's their country and my job to learn their language.) It almost made me want to really study Korean. Almost.

The fact is, it's an enormous amount of work to learn a language so very, very foreign to ours, and it's seldom all that much of an inconvenience to only have a rudimentary knowledge. I can read the letters, I know possibly as many as two hundred words (if you count fust-baseuman, left-fielduh, and the like), ten or twenty phrases such as Gogi baegu (without meat) and Wajongshil audieh isseoyo? (Where's the toilet?) And you know what? That's chuweoyo (OK) with me.

Kamsahamnida. Annyeongikeseyo! (Thanks. Bye!)

Do I know it's Christmas?

2010-12-27T10:00:00.002+09:00

or "Hashing through the snow".

A few years ago, if you'd suggested I'd be sitting in an unheated bus station (at 15 degrees Fahrenheit) in a city I'd never heard of before-- in Korea-- at 9 p.m. on Christmas night, I'd have thought you delusional. Nor did I, oddly enough, envision running across a horserace track-- in my boxers-- at an equivalent temperature the next day.

But, in fact, I did both.

Actually, I guess that would have been an odd opening paragraph if I hadn't.

Christmas is hard far from home, with just a cat-- who speaks only Korean-- as company. So I jumped at the chance to join the Yongsan Kimchi (my group) hashers down in the city of Songtan, 45 minutes south of Seoul, on Christmas. I took the bus down and shivered my way to the Osan Bulgogi hashers' home bar, just around the corner from the US's Osan Air Force base.

After a long time of milling and mingling and chilling and jingling, the hash started. It was soooo cold, but the hares laid a great trail, through the city and up and down a trail on the mountain as the lightest of flurries started, and we all got back safely and happily.

Not actually me, but close.

Then the festivities began, amid the twinkling lights and Christmas music. We had the usual postrun circle, though people tried to clean up their comments and song lyrics because one of the hashers had brought his son and daughter. And finally it was time for the pot luck, with draft beer and turkey and ham (though not for me) and fresh fruit salad (I cut it myself!) and cookies and apple pie and pumpkin pie and pecan pie. It felt like being rushed by the august fraternities, Eata Bita Pi and Tappa Kegga Brew.

Sorry.

Apparently the festivities went on long into the night, starting with beer pong and ending with people sleeping on other people's floors, but at about 8:00 I made the cold walk back to the bus station and waited for the penultimate bus back to Seoul.

The next day was Boxing Day, so the Southside hashers sent directions to wear boxer shorts on their run. So we did, over our tights and sweatpants. We met at the deserted Seoul Racecourse Park, just a few miles from my apartment. The windchill, I think, must have been in the single digits. That's actually plenty warm enough when you're running, but the gathering time and the circle afterward, in the light flurries... well, we took turns sitting in somebody's heated car.

Southside has the reputation of being more hardcore than my home group, Yongsan. And this trail was laid by Mr. Blister and Soju Sonata, who are a) active-duty military and b) insane. Their trail led us through a lot of shiggy (hash talk for hills, brambles, thorns, fences, some with wire of the barbed variety) and across both sides of the actual racetrack, which I had never known consists of thick soft sand... I really would have hated to be arrested in my underwear, by the way.) Then it was up the mountain and over, sliding down parts of the slope on my boxer-clad butt on a carpet of dead leaves...

For the second half of the trail, I kept company, far behind the pack, with LesBalls (a female South African friend) and Cooper.

Cooper. Lab plus beagle equals... Leagle?

Finally we lost the trail... I blame Cooper. Fortunately, I'd learned to always wear my GPS watch to hashes and to mark our starting point, so we went to the road and ran the half-mile back to our compatriots, who were frozen in place like people who'd seen a basilisk.

It was the shortest on-after ever. I decided to take the subway to the COEX Mall and almost forgot that I was wearing my boxers on the outside. So, for the first time ever, I dropped my boxers in public and took off into the nice warm underground.

The thing about Christmas is that you don't want to be alone; a few days ago, the Huffington Post showed what the said was "the saddest Christmas card ever": "Merry Christmas to you and your cat." It was very good to be among friends, however loosely tethered to normality they may be, and to have something fun to do. I topped off Boxing Day by watching the Doctor Who Christmas episode, which was a treat.

And now to do useful stuff during my two-week break. Almost all of my school friends have flown out of here. But I've got places to go, classes to plan, an apartment to clean, and treadmill running to do (I need 13 miles in five days to reach 900 for the year.) And an intraKorean peace to keep.

Happy holidays, everybody.

Fahrenheit 4? 5? 1?

2010-12-24T17:12:00.001+09:00

The sun is just now setting over the mountains on Christmas Eve. It's c-c-cold; at the moment, the wind chill is 3 above zero Fahrenheit. It was well below zero this morning.

On the brighter side, though, there's always the threat of war. It's nice to know that Wolf Blitzer, in North Korea this week, called the Koreas "the most dangerous place on earth". I don't understand why the South, which for the last seven years has refused permission for a local church to erect a giant Christmas tree right by the DMZ, let them put it up this year. Why intentionally provoke the crazy guy in the attic? South Korea is two-thirds the size of Florida; they probably could have found another spot for the tree.

It's strange to be here right now. It's Christmas; my friends are in Ithaca or St. Augustine, the family's in California, and almost all of my coworkers taking off for Thailand or Indonesia or home during our two-week break. Nicki and Dex Puckett and their amazing month-old son Loku have asked me over for dinner this evening, so that's really nice. And tomorrow I'm taking the bus down to the city of Songtan for a hash (20 Fahrenheit with 25-mph winds forecast) and a little Christmas cheer at the pot luck afterward. But it's not quite how it used to be at Christmas.

There's only one present I want this year...

I got a name. And a medal.

2010-12-12T08:47:00.003+09:00

Yesterday, Saturday, December 11, 2010, a date that will live in inf... ah, heck. I'll start again.

Yesterday, Saturday, December 11, 2010 was a long, full, good day. Cold, though.

On any normal hashing day, any normal hasher my age... if there are any normal hashers my age... if there are any normal hashers at all... would have stayed home. First, it was bright and clear but colder than Lindsay Lohan's career, with a wind chill in the teens. Secondly, it was advertised as a "Danger Hash"; that usually means climbing and jumping, two things I wasn't any good at 40 years ago and mysteriously haven't gotten any better at as I've gained weight and gotten creaky. But it was my naming day with the Yongsan Kimchi Hash House Harriers and I wasn't going to miss it.

About two dozen insane hashers took off eagerly to follow the hares, only to find, ten seconds later, an eight-foot iron gate we were supposed to go over. One guy, the infamous Mr. Blister, did; the rest of us found our way around. The rest of the course was up and down steep rocky stairs (with a magnificent view from on high of the sundrenched, windswept Han River and all of central Seoul), through prickers and weeds and up muddy slopes, in the first floor and out the fourth floor of buildings, over (and under!) fences, and around the backs of houses.

(The YKH3 on Red Dress Day earlier in the year. Something's Not. Quite. Right with them.)

Somehow I finally made it all the way back. (My fellow hashers' climbing-and-jumping help... um... helped.) I had had to carry a toilet plunger-- symbol of some trifling behavior from last week that the pack found humorously objectionable-- the whole way, too. As everyone had cookies and sandwiches and beer (no cooler necessary) and shifted their weight and jumped up and down to keep warm, our pack leader took turns interviewing two other sixth-timers and me. The questionnaire was all about the great moments and humiliating moments and... ahem... highly personal moments of our lives. Then we were sent around the corner to shiver while she gave the info to the pack and they called out prospective names and voted.

Finally, when we namees had almost run out of shivers, we got called back. The pack was huddled together like raisins and constantly shuffled to left and right to stay in the sun. I have to say that I'm delighted with my name; someone took my tv appearance with Regis and a certain story about a trip I took to Iowa and the name of a recent movie and came up with my now-and-forever hash name:

CORNDOG MILLIONAIRE.

Oh, that is so clever! But the amazing thing is that nobody here knew that, ever since my stint playing fantasy baseball 20 years ago, Corn Dog has been my nickname. Let's just say that I feel at home with my new name, which will replace that boring old "Steve" at all hashes for however many decades I'm still capable of hashing. (It's ironic that a longtime veghead such as I will be using the name of a meat dish at an event named after a meat dish, but hey...)

I made it home to thaw for an hour or so before heading out again to our school's Performance Night. We had an evening of our students' singing, dancing, playing instruments (Western and Korean), and four minutes devoted to my class' Six-Word Memoir project. (If you haven't seen it, please go back to my previous post and watch it, would you? It's really good, I think. And free.)

When the performances were over, I headed out on the subway again; the Seoul Flyers were holding their annual banquet at a pub in Itaewon. It was just bad luck that the one night they do that was the same date as the school's biennial show. I made it to the Dickens Lounge long after dinner was over, just in time for the last award of the night. But I did get to talk to friends and finally pick up my medal for running the Chuncheon Marathon seven weeks ago. (I ran a marathon... did I happen to mention that on my blog at some point?) The medal bears the name of the guy whose entry I assumed and my gastropod-like finishing time, but I've hung the medal with that side facing the wall.

In my long and picaresque running career, Saturday's prizes are the two awards I'm most proud of. And in the Flyers and the Hashers I've gained two running families-- one sane, one in-. It's nice, so far from home, to belong.

Happy Holidays to all,
Corndog Millionaire

The joy of six

2010-12-09T08:53:00.002+09:00

It's late and I'm tired; I just got in from a night of four very nice things in Itaewon: veggie burgers, onion rings, carrot cake, and my friend Shawn. Wet snow is dropping determinedly down and I want to go to bed.

But I had to take a moment to post this: In a Six-Word Memoir, you have exactly that many words to sum up your life. (Please hook up your speakers or headphones and press "play"!)

This is the Six-Word Memoir project by my creative writing class. I just provided minor grammatical and typographical fixes. I'm very happy with it and proud of them.

What a longish, strangish trip it's been

2010-12-01T12:24:00.001+09:00

I've had a certain sense of unreality lately.

The most important factor, of course, has been the threat of war. (Unh! What is it good for?) The saber-rattling from both sides is enough to make even a cool character such as I (::koff::), in the words of Jeff Bridges as Starman, "little bit jumpy". If the US Embassy ever tells us to bug out, I'm going to pack up the still from the Swamp, velcro Tug to my coat and call him a fur collar, hop on the chopper, and look for "GOODBYE" spelled out on the ground with stones. But as I've said before, I really don't think there's much chance of a conflagration. Still...

The feeling of surreality deepened on Sunday: I'd been on three hash runs with the Yongsan Kimchi group; this time I went to a joint hash.

Huh huh huh... he said "joint" and "hash".

Anyway, the Southside Harriers were having their hash along with Yongsan, and I decided to join in, if only to decide which group I was more suited to.

Well, it was c-c-cold; the hashers run all year 'round. The run started inside the fish market, a warehouse a hundred yards long and twenty yards wide, filled with vendors selling every single thing on earth, as long as it a) came from the ocean and b) was dead. I saw (and smelled!) fish, squid, octopus, clams, crabs, and, I think, Aquaman.

After amusing the Koreans by running through the market, we ran and ran and ran with very few checkpoints where I might catch up with the pack. It was then that I realized that I didn't have my keys, wallet, transit card, or phone with me, so if I lost the trail I'd have to walk eight miles home in the frigid air and sit in my hallway because I couldn't get into my apartment.

...aaaand then we had to scale a six-foot fence by the river, which I can't. But did. ...aaaand then we had to climb the rusty iron rungs set into a frickin' frackin'forty-foot cement wall. I kept thinking, what happens if one of the people above me sneezes and lets go? And how very odd it would be if missiles started hitting as I was two-thirds of the way up. I may have muttered a rude word or two; I know that seems farfetched, but...

...aaaand then we had to climb another six-foot fence and run the bridge across the river. The trail led us, at one point, through a fringed cloth hanging and down Hooker Alley, which is lined with little glass rooms like display cases where, apparently, ladies of negoitable affection often sit and wait for nice young men to talk to. I half-expected little cards saying "4.49 per pound" in each area On this Sunday morning, one middle-aged lady of dubious charms was in one of the spots, but the rest were vacant. (Did I mention my sense of unreality lately?) I'm trying to be light and amusing here, but the whole thing made me feel very sad and a little dirty. (And me without my wallet...)

And the trail went on and on and on for miles, past the US Army base to the VFW. I didn't stay for the Thanksgiving buffet (I'd had a feast on Saturday with the Seoul Flyers). I did make up my mind that I'm going to run with the Yongsan hashers, not the Southsiders; Mr. Blister and UFO and Bootylicious and the Yongsan people are crazy, but they're not frickin' nuts.

(Two more runs and I get my hash name! I hope Kim Jong Il doesn't do anything till after that!)

To add to the oddity, winter has fallen like a lead Steinway and I rejoined the gym and went in to run today at 6:30 in the a. of m... meanwhile keeping one eye and one ear toward our Northern neighbors and waiting for my "normal" life to resume.

Coach Dog says thanks, kids

2010-11-24T20:44:00.003+09:00

The Mighty Mighty St. Paul Cross-Country Club.

It's Thanksgiving Eve. (Is that even a Thing?) I'm thinking about how Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday, with lots of food and relaxation but without all the pressure of Christmas. (Yes, I'm a twentieth-century-never-learned-how-to-cook slob; at least on Thanksgiving, unlike on Chuseok in Korea, the women, after fixing all the food, can eat with the men.)

The holidays are the hardest time to be away from your family and country.

Today, I called a halt to Cross-Country Club till spring. I'll be running all winter, but it's getting pretty cold and pretty dark pretty early and I wanted to stop before the kids get run over on the way back to school or, worse, quit. I loved actual cross-country coaching more than anything else I've ever been paid for; I lived for those fall days and mourned when each season was over. (This is a shout-out to all those Flashes and Jackets I helped coach... I love you guys!) :: sniff ::

This has hardly been the same; we've just gone out twice a week to the park and the stream and all but a couple of the kids have run a few minutes and walked and talked for a half-hour each day. Korean girls seem to think that running makes women muscle-bound. (Koreans also widely believe that your blood type determines your personality, getting rained on makes your hair fall out, and sleeping in a closed room with a fan on will kill you.)

I'll miss it, though... they're good kids and I like to think I (or the experience) helped them somehow. Maybe in the spring more of them will see how running can enrich their lives. If not, that's okay, too.

Meanwhile, I'm thankful for Monica, Stephanie, Susie, Ecllid, Leo the Swift, Yuri, and little Christina and Kelly (who hold hands everywhere they go-- sometimes while running), and for peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Here we go again

2010-11-24T15:18:00.003+09:00

I suppose that once in awhile I should write about something besides running. So I will. (Though I did have a fun hash on Saturday and a good 10K race with my friend Lauren on Sunday. It was... oh, right, right. Back on topic.)

As you know if you've been able to tear yourself away from Dancing With the Stars, the North dropped a bucketload of missiles on South Korea's Yeonpyeong Island (two miles from North Korea and 70 or so from me) yesterday. The best guess I've seen online is that some generals did it to demonstrate their discontent with their loss of influence with the upcoming succession of Kim Young Jerk to replace his dad Kim Ug Ly. Two RoK marines were killed. I think about them and their families and about the fact that all of the boys we teach will be in the military in just a few years.

My friends abroad (I mean, back home) want to know how people are reacting and what it feels like to be here. I think it's like the Cuban Missile Crisis or the aftermath of a minor tremblor: will the other shoe drop? People go about their business and keep their ears open for further developments. Arirang, the English-language channel, devoted 15 minutes of the news to the attack, but didn't break into their regular shows.

I'm not scared, and absolutely everything spooks me: tall buildings, roller coasters, Snooki. The reason I'm not scared is that I don't think that the North's leaders are so bullgoose loony that they're suicidal. I know enough history to know that sometimes things just go much further than any sensible person anticipated, like the Civil War, World War I, and Sarah Palin. (Same joke twice: too much?) And the current RoK government is much more hard-line than its predecessors.

The US embassy sent us registered Yanks email that basically said they'll let us know if we need to bug out. I don't know how I could take flying out of here and leaving our kids behind. But I don't think that the bigwigs on either side of the border want to die; The North Korean leaders are capital-E Evil, so they wouldn't care, but the South Korean guys don't want hundreds of thousands of casualties. So I think it's going to be okay.

All the same, maybe I won't go tour the DMZ on our day off this Friday.

Harrier? Than what?

2010-11-18T15:58:00.003+09:00

I realize that I've hardly been writing about anything but my running for awhile. Hell, I realize that I've been writing that I've hardly been writing about anything but my running for awhile. Why? Well, aside from school, which isn't always an entertaining topic, running is basically what I've been doing, and so much of my attention and time were devoted to marathon training. (Incidentally, that rescued Chilean miner who ran the New York City Marathon? He finished his race in the same time-- to the minute-- that I did mine. I didn't hold him back... I'm innocent of contributing to the delinquency of a miner.)

Aside from that, I have a tendency to go home in the gathering dusk after school and sit there, doing some work, shoveling a bucket of carbs down my gaping maw, and counting (nonexistent) flowers on the wall. That don't bother me at all.

Well, maybe a little... it's getting darker. And colder. And earlier.

On Saturday, at the invitation of my friend Shawn-- she's the one whose shoulder my head is on in the bus photo in my marathon post-- I attended the Yongsan Kimchi Hash House Harriers' (YKH3) hash.

Hashing, to put in very briefly and somewhat inadequately, is a recreation of hares and hounds, wherein beastly British pursue British beasts. A couple of runners (the "hares") take off from the starting point and fifteen minutes later the other runners (the "pack") head out in pursuit. The hares have marked the course with chalk and/or flour and/or shredded paper: turn this way; go straight ahead; STOP... the trail could go in any direction; go back three markings and try again... it's brilliantly laid out so that the fastest runners go ahead and check possible leads, than double back so the slower ones (NO, I'M NOT THE SLOWEST) can catch up and catch their breath.

So, picture this... a ritzy shopping area of Seoul, thousands of Koreans out in their fall/winter fashions, totally bewildered by forty or fifty Westerners. some wearing cat ears or carrying bedpans or rubber bricks around their necks (don't ask), running down the street blowing whistles and yelling "ON-ON" and and "ON ONE" and "TRUE TRAIL" loudly enough to be heard a block away.

We went down alleyways and by posh department stores, around a soccer field and through a traditional Korean village, through a busy subway station and on the trail up Namsan Mountain, down by the creek past the incredibly elaborate lantern festival...

(As it was daytime, the lanterns weren't lit up, but by the end of the after-run social, a lot of the runners were.)

Oh. My. God, you guys, it was...

So. Much. Fun.

I hadn't realized how long it had been since I had actually played at anything. No basketball, no tennis, no softball... and I wouldn't even count those games as pure play in the way I mean here. I'm thinking Frisbee, Hacky Sack, New Games... you do know what New Games were, don't you, you old hippie? Something that's just fun, with no score, no losers, no competition... prepping for a road race is rewarding, but it's work, constantly checking how far you've gone and how fast you've done it. This is pure fun, like dogs tussling over a stick or kids playing tag or Victoria's Secret Angels having a pillow... ah, never mind.

To tell the truth, I didn't love everything about the club. There's a constant raunchiness involved that seems very forced, very frat-boy, to me. Regulars use "hash names", generally very dirty ones, in lieu of their real names, and there are all kinds of rituals before and after the hash. I was hazed (noninvasively) because I was a Virgin. (Umm... that means a first-time hasher, not what you're thinking. I swear I'm not a lower-case-v virgin, though I suppose it's possible that it's grown back by now.)

As I may have young (under 40) impressionable readers, I'll forgo repeating the names or the jokes or the details of the rituals. I will say that there's a lot of beer involved and, in this particular hash club, a plastic dinosaur named Dick. After the hash, I completed a ceremony that theoretically involves draining a can of Bud Light and pouring the remnant over my head, so I've lost my Virginity, though I'm still No-Name Steve until I earn a hash name.

There are a couple of thousand H3 clubs all around the world, including several in Seoul. I think I'm going back to the YKH3 hash this Saturday, though this week's theme is Naughty Schoolgirl and I left my plaid skirt back in Florida. Sometime soon I'll also check out the Southside H3 and maybe the Seoul H3, which is all male. (I hear that there's a 75-year-old guy who goes out with them every week.)

On-on!

I'd better watch out, I'd better not cry

2010-11-08T20:58:00.001+09:00

...I'd better not pout, I'm telling you why:

Obama is coming to town.

...and Merkel and Putin and, oh hell, Thatcher, right, she's still in charge, isn't she? And DeGaulle and Bismarck...

Well, anyway, the bigwigs are coming to my neighborhood next weekend; the G20 Summit is at the Seoul World Trade Center, which is just four miles or so from my apartment.

The US embassy sent out this warning:
---
The Department of State alerts U.S. citizens traveling to or residing in South Korea to safety and security issues related to expected public demonstrations around venues for the G20 Summit scheduled to be held in Seoul, November 11-12, 2010. The expected demonstrations will disrupt travel and have the possibility of becoming violent. The U.S. Embassy in Seoul recommends that if you are not directly involved with the G20 Summit, you should avoid host sites, including the Coex Center in Samseong-dong, Gangnam-gu, in south Seoul. You should avoid areas near the Summit sites or areas where there are large gatherings or increased police presence. This Travel Alert expires on November 13, 2010.
---

I think every blog post is more interesting when it has a picture, don't you?

...so they're closing off all streets within two kilometers and the traffic and buses are going to be FUBAR all week and I doubt I'll be going very far at all. I was at the COEX Mall, beneath the World Trade Center, yesterday, and they'd already installed metal detectors and were searching people trying to go up from the basement mall. We've also been cautioned to carry our ID with us at all times.

This is the closest brush with fame I've had since I shook hands with Teddy Roosevelt on my 18th birthday.

Laugh about it, shout about it, when you've got to choose

2010-11-08T20:46:00.003+09:00

...any way you look at this, you're shoes:

...too much running may cause hallucinations.

My regular readers (both of you) may be getting tired of reading about my running, so I thought I'd give you a change of pace. (See what I did there?)

So I thought I'd write about other people's running.

Yesterday was the Joongang Marathon, the one I'd originally registered for before switching to the Chuncheon because of its more relaxed time limit. Of course, the Chuncheon had perfect, warm weather for watching and I ran that; the Joongang had perfect weather for running (cool, foggy, windy) and I watched that.

I went to the Olympic Stadium to hand off my bib to another Seoul Flyer, as someone's Chuncheon bib had been handed off to me. We Flyers (I say "we" though what I do can hardly be called flying) found each other in the mob of 30,000 people...

Here are a few of the 35 or so Flyers who attended, just outside the Olympic Stadium before the race.

...and then some went to the 10K, some to the marathon, and three lucky ducks (including me) to go find coffee.

...a pre-race fanfare you won't get in Boston.

One of the drawbacks to running a race in Korea is that the few spectators along the course are as stolid as cows unless a friend or family member runs past. The three on the right of the group picture, Shira, Zuleika, and I (and I swear most of the hair that's covered by the cap is brown) stood a hundred yards outside the stadium and screamed and yelled ("Chuweyo!", "Assa assa!", "Fighteeeeng!") and pounded our thunder sticks (umm... you do know I'm referring to those plastic inflatable noisemakers, yeah?) for everyone who came by. Runners just lit up, gave us thumbs up, high-fived us... they were so clearly thrilled to be appreciated for once, while the other Koreans on the sidelines stared at the crazy waegookin and took our pictures.

Then we went into the stadium to await the end of the marathon, which I'd have to say was a pretty damn good one:

I will say that there are few places emptier than an 80,000 seat stadium with 500 people in it. Still, Shira's urging me to run the Seoul International Marathon full course in March, and I have to say that the prospect of finishing in the stadium, on the track where Carl Lewis and FloJo and so many others ran, seeing myself on the JumboTron as I approach the finish line... hmm...

Yeah, they call it the JumboTron for the skinny runners, too.

---
OH! I almost forgot... I lightly rewrote my blog post called The Forty-Year Promise for local consumption and the Chosun Ilbo newspaper is going to print it (and pay me... something) in the booklet they're publishing about this year's Chuncheon Marathon. Hooray for me!

The forty-year promise

2010-11-01T21:37:00.004+09:00

...aka The Long and Winding Road.

When I promised myself in 1969 that I'd run a marathon someday, it was a nebulous idea, a statement that I simultaneously meant and didn't take seriously. Finally, this last spring, when I bumped into a Korean runner my age who said he was a marathoner and asked if I was, too ("Anniyo... Five K"), it occurred to me to ask myself why not, why in the eleven years since I started running regularly again, it had been so easy to force my one-time promise into the back of my mind, where it got neglected on the shelf somewhere between "Mrs. Peel, we're needed" and Cleon Jones' .340 batting average for the Miracle Mets.

(Yes, I can do simple math, but "The forty-one-year promise" just didn't have the same ring to it.)

And so I got serious at last. I bought items I'd previously scorned as affectations, like a GPS watch and a hydration belt. I got up predawn on summer Sundays and ran till I'd lost ten percent of my toenails. I forced myself into a corner, telling my friends at school and on this blog what I was going to do, making it so I couldn't bear to not complete the run.

And so (drumroll) to the (pregnant pause) big day.

On Sunday the 24th, I got up at 4:00, determined above all to not miss the Seoul Flyers' bus to Chuncheon. Friends at work had told me I'd have no trouble finding a cab in our neighborhood even at that hour, but I didn't want to take any chances. In fact, it took nearly 30 seconds for a taxi to come by. I got to the rendezvous point by Ichon Station, north of the river, so early that neither the bus nor anyone else was there yet.

But the bus got there and the Flyers got there and we all got to Chuncheon together.

Los Volantes del Seoul, antes de la carrera. The guys wearing beige in the back left are actually US Army MP's, who sneaked into our picture. I got even, though... I beat at least four of them in the race.

It seemed a long, long wait for the race to begin, long enough for many trips to the men's, where I passed one of the East African guys who always take all the top spots in these things. (He was like an Italian greyhound, about 3'2" and 17 pounds.) There was more than enough time to take multitudinous pictures, as well.

...in this one, a few of my girlfriends.

But finally it was time to get started. The 21,000 runners were sorted into ten groups, A-J, depending on their previous times. Naturally, I was in Group J. The "A" group took off at 10:00, but it was 10:20 before the "J" team moved from the holding field to the street...

...are you sure that this is the line for ABBA tickets?

...and fully 10:35 before we got to start. And, of course, all of 10:37 before the sun came out and it got hot.

Actually, it was the most gorgeous Indian-summer day imaginable, very soon in the low-to-mid 70s with not a cloud in the sky. Unfortunately, ideal marathon weather is 50 degrees and overcast. (The next day it was 50 degrees and overcast.) The race only provided water stops once every five kilometers, with tables with cold, wet sponges halfway between each pair of water stops. It wasn't enough. Fortunately, Kerri of the Flyers had told me there were gas stations on the way where I could buy water and lent me a couple of bucks to do just that. I'm not sure I could have finished without that help.

The hard part for the first few miles was holding back, running three minutes fairly slowly, walking one minute, ad infinitum. Judging from my performance toward the end of the race, maybe I could have held back a little better. But the early run went well as we made our way out of the city of Chuncheon (population 250,000), past the soccer stadium, and up in among the mountains.

At the first water stop (and all the ones after), dozens of high-school-aged girls behind the tables were shouting, "Hi Steve! Hi Steve!" I couldn't figure out how they knew my name or why they were rooting for me; then it hit me: they were yelling "Fighteeeeng! Fighteeeeng!" That's the generic Korean word for "Let's go" or "You can do it" or "Kick ass" at such events. (At my first 5K in Seoul, the gift was a "KOREA FIGHTING" running shirt.) Like the English phrase "well-being", which in Korea is an adjective attached to any product that can remotely be claimed to be healthful, "fighting" has been pilfered from our language to mean something sorta kinda like it to the locals.

From roughly mile five to mile fifteen, the course was gorgeous, with the muted fall colors all over the looming mountains and the serpentine lake glittering below. It reminded me, almost, of home, or the Adirondacks. It. Was. Lovely. I didn't put on my iPod for a couple of hours because I didn't want to distract myself from the view and the feel of the course.

Here's a hint of the sun, the mountains, and a water stop after 18,000 or so runners had been through.

As I've written, though, rather warm, very sunny, and punishingly hilly are not the ideal conditions for distance running. In all of my training, I'd avoided hills as much as possible to save wear and tear on my legs and because I thought I was training for the (flat) Joongang Marathon two weeks later. I had my two 10-ounce bottles of water, but they weren't nearly enough.

Aside from the inadequate water supply and the utter lack of port-a-potties (thank goodness for --ahem-- being male), the race was very well run, with excellent markings and a course even I couldn't get lost on. Several times along the way, bands serenaded the runners, a traditional Korean drum-and-gong group in colorful outfits here, a Joan Jettish band of teens, inexplicably pounding away to All I Want for Christmas is You in Korean, there.

Then we hit the roads through the farmlands, and I might have thought I was in Burdett, New York, or Hastings, Florida. The locals, human, bovine, and canine-- though, fortunately, not ursine-- all looked at us runners as if we were crazy; clearly rural folks are pretty sharp. Aaaand we plodded on and on in the sun. I kept passing, then being passed, by the same people, mile after mile, as we were taking our walk breaks (planned, in my case) at different intervals.

After 16 miles or so, we reached the blessed shade as a mountain, wearing a huge net to protect passersby from falling boulders, loomed at our shoulders.The shade made all the difference in the world, but after a couple of miles it was time to get back in the sun, cross a long bridge, and start the long descent to the city. By this point, of course, we were all ticking off the kilometers (of the total 42.2) to the finish... twelve, eleven, ten, nine point eight, nine point six...) And it was getting harder and harder to keep running for the three minutes and harder and harder and harder to start again after the minute-long walk breaks.

The last four or five miles to the finish are sort of a blur. I remember that Chuncheon itself has all the charm of downtown Syracuse (hint: not much), that I was dying for water and found a gas station that sold me some, and that my calf tightened up so much that I had to walk-- hobble-- for a mile, which spoiled my hope of finishing in five and a half hours. (It was the horrible pounding of 26-plus miles on hard surfaces that nearly did me in.) But finally I was almost there...

I ran the last half mile. Frankly, I'd pictured it in my mind over and over: my friends (who were going to be at the Joongang race here in Seoul) lining the final stretch and calling my name, the utter joyful elation as I crossed the line, preferably collapsing in a heap of virtuous sweat and glory, Vangelis playing on the PA system... yeah, well. The only people I saw who knew me were Kerri and Shira of the Flyers, and they cheered their hearts out for five seconds, but another Flyer was fifty yards ahead of me and they almost didn't see me at all, so... no photo. (I swear I actually did the race, though.)

I do confess to getting a tiny bit teary-eyed as I neared the finish line, just, I guess, at the realization I had done something important to me, if to nobody else. But it felt too matter-of-fact, and I was too tired, to be ecstatic. I still haven't felt ecstatic. Why? Well, I never had a doubt that, barring a serious injury, I would make it. That just wasn't a possibility. But I did, and do, feel a quiet but deep satisfaction, and I think I always will; it only took 41 years, but I did it.

On the bus home: a beautiful smile from Shawn, left; quiet satisfaction, right.

What have I learned? Well, to train longer, for one thing; what with starting a little late and moving my race up two weeks, I missed about a month of training and one humongously long prep run. My split times for each five-kilometer stretch (38 minutes, 38, 38, 38, 39, 42, 43, 43) show that I may have been mentally and emotionally ready, but the body could have been a little more so. I've learned that all the training in the world can't account for outside influences such as mountains, heat, and lack of water... some runners boiled over like Studebakers in Arizona in July. I've learned that I-- and so, all of us-- can do more than expected if the will is only there. Five hours, forty minutes, forty-three seconds isn't quite Olympic-caliber, but... well, you know.

I ran a 10-K race yesterday, a week after the marathon, and did well. I'm running another 10-K in three weeks, and, I'm pretty sure, another marathon next year (maybe in five hours flat).

I've learned that I'm a runner.

The final countdown

2010-10-23T17:42:00.001+09:00

So here I am, a little less than twelve hours before I have to leave the apartment and head to Chuncheon for the five-to-six-hour Moment of Truth. (I'm counting on my friends' advice that at 5 a.m., even in my neighborhood, I'll be able to find a taxi to take me to the Seoul Flyers' bus. I'd hate to train for six months and not be able to get out to the race.)

I'm pretty much as ready as I'm likely to be; I've trained well (albeit for a few weeks short of the full term due to switching races), I've got my stuff stacked by the door (wonder which indispensable item I'll forget), and there's not much left to do but fret.

This will come as a huge shock to you-- if you've never met me-- but I'm a worrier and, some less charitable souls would say, a whiner. There are several things to be concerned with:

-The ideal marathon weather is 50 degrees and cloudy; the forecast is for 72 degrees and sunny. Ordinarily that's what I would call a perfect Indian summer day, but there are no Indians in this country and my running a full marathon deserves a lot of adjectives, but "ordinary" isn't one of them. (Of course, a day later it's supposed to be in the 50s.)

-The Chuncheon course is very hilly, albeit (running as it does entirely around a long lake) beautiful...

Last year's Chuncheon... note the gorgeous scenery. I'll be noting the enormous hill.

-I'm used to having lots of water on a long run-- dehydration is a bad, bad thing in running-- and all they have is a water stop once every five kilometers (three-plus miles). (Did I mention it's going to be warm?) On the brighter side, the dearth of water may be a blessing in disguise, as there aren't any toilets on the course.

-There will be about 21,000 runners; I'll be starting somewhere around 20,900th; I hope the other Seoul Flyers don't get sick of waiting for me at the finish.

Still, I had a massage a few days ago so I'm a little less sore than I have been and my iPod and watch are fully charged. I hope I am.

I have a self-imposed code: I will never wear a shirt from a race I don't actually finish. I have the official Chuncheon Marathon fleece and two Flyers/Chuncheon long-sleeve t's and I'll be hornswoggled if I have to throw them out.

I can't let myself not finish.

My six-word memoir

2010-10-17T21:50:00.003+09:00

Came to Korea to orient myself.

A sunlightful weekend

2010-10-17T21:40:00.004+09:00

One of my students, in his effort to write vivid English, accidentally created the word sunlightful.It's a beautiful word, no less so for its absence from any and all dictionaries. I like it. A lot. I'm using it from now on.

And it has indeed been a sunlightful weekend, with crisp fall weather and an abundance of sunshine. I've used my time.

I started the weekend as grumpy as Lewis Black in Hell. But, like the guy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who got turned into a newt, "I got better."

It started when I got a glorious Butterfinger Pancakes brunch date canceled out from under me on Saturday morning. My friends, if Heaven has a Denny's, it's Butterfinger Pancakes in Gangnam. :: sigh ::

I moped about the apartment awhile, spectral pancakes dancing syruptitiously about my head, and finally decided I needed to go somewhere. My somewheres tend to be the same few places: Gangnam, the COEX Mall and Itaewon for books, E-Mart and Costco for everything else. This time I was hoping for a little exercise and something different; I've been dying for a good hike but haven't wanted to interfere with my marathon training (or, for that matter, turn an ankle or fall off a mountain or anything before the big race.) (Afterward would be fine.)

I poked around online and found a listing for Umyeonsan ("Sleeping Cow Mountain"), just one subway stop from our nearest station, Yangjae. So I went there.

This city is full of surprises... just a few minutes' walk from the Nambu Bus Terminal, I started up a steep dirt trail on Umyeonsan. Trails separate, rejoin, and wind around all over the mountain, with few signs, even in Korean. I had a vague idea of heading to Daesongsa, the mountain's Buddhist temple, but no idea how to get there. So I just headed up and up, the noise of the massive city all around receding and the sound of magpies and breeze growing stronger, winding around amidst the pine trees.

After a half hour or so, I came upon a signpost that said "Daesongsa" in hangeul. (Being able to read the writing, even though I don't usually know what the words mean, has proven time and again to be invaluable.)

Daesongsa is the smallest temple I've been to, a single building for worship, surrounded by a fountain, a one-story office suite, and a gift shop: a tiny outbuilding, with bracelets, incense, books, and tapes, that operates, unstaffed, on the honor system.

Click on the above photo twice-- not a double-click-- for a detailed closeup.

(This is not me.)

(Nor is this Tug.)

For a Saturday, there were remarkably few people around, on the mountain or on the temple grounds, which added to the serenity I get hiking in the woods and at Buddhist sites. After strolling around for a bit, I looked upward at the lovely Umyeonsan woods with their endless (steep) trails, thought about the badly-needed peace I might find there, thought about the (steep) trails... and headed down the paved road to the city below.

And that was my next surprise... like some cartoon of a shipwrecked man on a supposedly deserted shore who one day discovers a Club Med on the other side of the island, after a short downhill walk I found myself on the grounds of the Seoul Arts Center, with its opera and symphony halls, art museum, and plaza with coffee shops, restaurants, and dancing fountains. It was like stepping forward a thousand years in five minutes. This, for example...

...is a pedestrian bridge just down the block from the Arts Center; it's just a tad more modern than the temple grounds so close by.

---

Today is one week to the marathon (my five-plus-hour moment of truth), and the Seoul Flyers held their monthly social get-together on the Yongsan Army base, the US military's premier outpost in Korea. I'd never been on an army base before; Yongsan is huge, determinedly American, and mostly rundown (some of the buildings were erected by the Imperial Japanese occupiers 90 years ago.)

Our host Jim led ten or so of us on a "history hash", running around the steep roads and stairs of the base and stopping while he explained its buildings and its history. Our army has put every last building, even the stockade (the tiny prison building the Japanese put up, still with iron bars on the windows) to use and some of the soldiers live in little quonset huts.

The rest of the afternoon brought me:

-veggie dogs (my contribution)
-Frisbee
-Boca Burgers (my first in two-plus years!)
-the race kit for Chuncheon-- booklet, timing chip, race bib (I'm Joseph Burchmeier now, as I could only enter the race by buying the number of a Flyer who had to withdraw), and a Chuncheon fleece jacket, which sadly is lavender in color but is otherwise lovely
-beer
-my official Seoul Flyers running shirt
-deviled eggs
-apple crumble
-cherry pie
-nice people
-new friends
-an invitation from my brand-new good friend Shawn to join the Southside Hashers running group, which conducts running-and-beer sessions on my side of the river every weekend.

If you know anything about me, you know that very few things in life are worth more to me than new friends... fortunately, free shirts and pie are among those few things.

(Mostly joking here. Mostly.)

So... one week to Chuncheon, confident and a tad nervous... and it's been a very sunlightful weekend indeed.

(Did I mention the pie?)

...but words can never hurt me

2010-10-12T21:19:00.001+09:00

...yeah, right.

The recent news about bullied gay teens killing themselves reminded me of a recent incident on Facebook.

A month or two ago, a girl I taught six or eight years ago in St. Augustine posted an angry status update about a guy who cut her off in traffic. She called him a "faggot". She didn't mean she could tell he was gay; it was just a term of scorn, the same way teens say something's "gay" when they mean it's weak or stupid.

I posted in response that I wished she'd picked a different word. A Friend of hers (unknown to me) responded that I should lighten up, that it's only a word and words don't matter.

Well, I've spent the last twelve years of my work life telling people that words do matter. The language of Shakespeare and Mark Twain and Tug McGraw ("Ninety percent of my salary I'll spend on Irish whiskey and women; the rest, I'll probably waste") matters.

Don't tell the families of the dead kids that words can never hurt them.

Here in Korea, men have a completely different outlook from American men when it comes to expressing affection and to masculinity. Boys in school pat each other's hair and sit with their arms around each other. I saw a ballplayer sitting on his teammate's lap in the dugout. (Highly unlikely with, say, Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter.) Heck, men wear pink shirts. (To use a common expression among the kids, "OMG!") Some of the boys wear earrings and, I think, a little makeup and spend longer in front of the mirror than I do at an all-you-can- eat brunch bar.

But gayness per se (that is not pronounced "Percy") is an utter taboo. Some older people believe that it didn't exist here till Americans brought it over. I know some gay expats, mostly women, but the gay Koreans keep themselves pretty well hidden (though I hear there are a few gay bars in Seoul for people who know where to look). In a culturally and ethnically monolithic society, being different in any way is frowned on. This particular challenge to tradition is several steps beyond.

For myself, frankly, it took a while to move from snickering about "homos" when I was a kid to realizing that sexual preferences have nothing to do with morality, that everyone deserves happiness, and that it's none of my damn business who you want to sleep with.

What's in our hearts is more important than who's in our beds.

The undiscovered country

2010-10-12T19:53:00.004+09:00

Today is October 12, which used to be Columbus Day when I was in high school. (Columbus landed on Hispaniola when I was in elementary school.) But perhaps the less said, the better about how he didn't find the Mysterious East, he wasn't the first European in the place he did find, and what he did to the people there. Let's just say I'm glad the Big Ten school I attended wasn't in a city named after him. (The city was named after two women and a bunch of trees. I like women and trees.)

At any rate, I myself found the Mysterious East two years ago. And, like Columbus, I have an undiscovered country of my own. In my case, the undiscovered country is me... my nerve, my guts, my determination. And I'll be setting foot in this country in twelve days. (Assuming I can get to the Seoul Flyers' charter bus by 6 a.m., before the buses and subways run and before cabs are cruising the neighborhood.)

I'm pretty confident about the marathon, even though I cut the training short by a few weeks. I think I can finish in 5:20 to 5:30; I guess I'll find out soon enough. My lower back's been killing me lately (and yesterday I missed my first day in fourteen months at St. Paul) but that doesn't seem to hurt, or be hurt by, my running.

Reading these brief paragraphs, they seem rather melodramatic, but in the words of Doc Brown in Back to the Future, "Then I figured, what the hell." So I'll let them stand. It does occur to me that, though you'd never know it from the Star Trek movie by this title, according to Hamlet, the undiscovered country is :: ulp :: death.

But I think I'm gonna be fine.

Twenty-six-plus

2010-09-30T19:38:00.001+09:00

My longest training runs hadn't been going to plan; I could only do 17 miles when I was supposed to do 20 and 20 when I was supposed to do 23. So it was with some trepidation that I set out on a planned 26-mile run/walk (three minutes running, one walking) on at 6:30 a.m. Sunday. But immediately I felt as if this time I was going to make it; the heat and humidity were way down and I felt strong.

I made my way back and forth and forth and back again along the Yangjae Cheon path between home and Gwacheon City, four miles to the southwest. I spent some time navigating the track at the Gwacheon soccer stadium, watching the local club teams play; I saw the Blue forward and the Yellow goalie crunch together in a (possibly rib-cracking, definitely game-ending) collision.

I was about 16 miles into the challenge when my good friend Chris called; he'd promised to come out on his bike and keep me company. He'd actually told me he'd ride with me the whole way, but as nearly six hours of biking at 13 minutes per mile isn't exactly a fun way to spend Sunday, I'd told him I only needed a boost near the end of the run.

And so Chris came out, bless him, on his bike and rode along, encouraging me from Gwacheon almost to the Han River in central Seoul and back again to our neighborhood...

And. I. Did. It. I made it the whole marathon distance, 26 miles on my GPS watch in 5 hours, 50 minutes 51 seconds, plus an extra quarter-to-half mile through tunnels and under bridges, where the GPS freezes up.

It was the greatest athletic triumph of my life, at least since I made a home run in kickball (all the way to Mrs. Bell's classroom, you guys!) in :: koff :: 1959. I guess I'm allowed one athletic triumph every fifty years or so. I guess I should have been ecstatic when I finished, but I was so exhausted that a quiet glow of satisfaction was all I could muster. And I still feel it; it's outlasted the soreness.

...and the real marathon approaches, step by step, inch by inch... still moving faster than I do, however.

I can't believe it's not Buddha

2010-09-30T14:28:00.051+09:00

After our monstrous rain on the first day of autumn, the weather miraculously stayed beautiful for the rest of our Chuseok vacation week. It was sunny and crisp, just the kind of gorgeousness we've learned to relish but not expect. Fall truly is beautiful here (although the leaves don't get spectacular), and all the more so because it's all too brief.

On Thursday, I discovered the correct bus number to go from our neighborhood to the COEX Mall. (The city government has a website that allegedly tells you how to get from anywhere to anywhere by bus, but it works about as frequently as Kim Jong Il hosts a pie-eating contest.) My destination was Bandi and Luni's Bookstore, my purpose to get the third book in Steig Larsson's oddly compelling The Girl Who... mystery series.

I still had the excellent Seoul map we used on our school photo scavenger hunt and I was amazed to see that Bongeunsa, a Buddhist temple, was right across the street from the COEX Mall/Seoul World Trade Center, which I had visited often. It had been so long since my happy trips to Donghwasa, on the outskirts of Daegu, that I just had to visit Bongeunsa.

The first amazing thing about Bongeunsa is simply that there is a serene, bucolic temple compound right in the middle of one of the most upscale shopping areas in this huge, materialism-mad city. Down the street, you find Jaguar and Porsche dealers, ritzy department stores, the city's poshest hotels, and off in the distance, the huge Olympic Stadium. It's hard to imagine a less likely place for renouncing material goods.

The second amazing thing is that, as I entered the temple, the middle-aged Korean woman at the information desk noticed my "Ithaca is Gorges" t-shirt and asked if I was from Ithaca. I was startled, but (suave devil that I am) recovered and cleverly said, "Yes, I am." She said, "My son is at Cornell!" It's a small weird, after all.

She also told me about the temple's outreach program, in which foreign visitors take part in a tea ceremony, talk with a monk, and meditate. It sounds interesting and it only takes two hours... unfortunately, they hold it every Wednesday and I was there on Thursday; my next Wednesday off isn't until after Christmas. As usual, my timing was peccable.

Although Bongeunsa can't match Donghwasa's grandeur (as the latter is set among the birdsong and little waterfalls of the mountains), the Seoul temple grounds have their own charms. There's a tremendous sense of serenity on the property, with only the traffic noise outside the walls disturbing the crunch of gravel underfoot and the aura of peace that comes from so many hundreds of years of meditation.

I've written in passing before of my affinity for the philosophy of Buddhism: detachment, a peaceful mind, acceptance, living in the moment, and (above all) compassion. I fail at these goals often, but at least I know what I would like to be.

The trappings of the actual religion (the inevitable golden statues and incense, the bowing to a man who instructed his disciples not to worship him, the often-grotesque art, the extremely unlikely cosmology) repel me as much as the philosophy appeals to me. I think that ritual-- of any kind-- just turns me off.

...Tug likes this painting, though.

So I guess I'll never be a capital-B Buddhist, but the Dalai Lama and, especially, the wonderful Thich Nhat Hanh speak to me in a way that probably no other spiritual leaders do. And I love that Buddhism instructs us to renounce our egos and accept our place in the universe, rather than to place ourselves at its center.

Hey, look at me! Look at me! I'm renouncing my ego!

After my visit, I crossed the street to the dazzling neon-LED-jewelry-fashion-go-go-go underground world that is the COEX Mall and got my Larsson book (as well as a book called Buddha or Bust). I went placidly among the noise and haste and remembered what peace there may be in silence.

Rain/fall

2010-09-23T08:07:00.000+09:00

I'll say this for the Koreans; they're punctual. The monster rain of two days ago washed away the incessant summer in a single day; the equinox, the First Day of Fall, was the first day of fall.

My run yesterday revealed to me the ravages of the storm. The Yangjae Cheon had subsided, barely, back into its banks, though parts of the path were hamster-deep in mud. The lower expanse of the wooden railing along the ramp down to the stream had snapped off. A manhole cover on the path had popped out of its hole and was resting five feet away. Farther east, the two arched bridges above the water had their railings festooned (actually, "completely covered" is a more accurate description, but one so seldom has an opportunity to use the word "festooned") with dead weeds and orange floats that had broken loose in the water. The swimming pools alongside the stream were coated with mud that had washed down from the slopes above. Trees were uprooted. And I saw a turtle on the path.

Okay, a turtle, technically, is not so much a ravage as it is a reptile. I didn't want to leave the little guy (he was about the size of my hand) on the path, for fear a bike would run him over or somebody would take him home and eat him. (For once, I'm not being facetious here.) (Actually, using "festooned" and "facetious" in the same post is pretty impressive, don't you think? You may think I'm showing off, but I haven't even used the word "detritus".) (And this is my third consecutive parenthetical remark.) My friend, perhaps shell-shocked from the storm, was pointing along the course of the path as if he were walking toward the Han River, six miles away. I figured, though, that he really wanted to get across and tried to think like a turtle, which is quite different from my usual hare-brained approach. I figured he'd moved away from the flood waters and was now trying to get back to the creek, so I picked him up and put him in the long grass near the stream.

(I don't mean to be sexist by assuming he was a "he"; he was wearing black and dark green, really butch colors, so I guessed he's a boy. [How the hell can turtles tell that when they meet each other, anyway?])

Yesterday was gray and cool, maybe a little depressing due to the whole "dead plants and mud" motif; the area was a ghost town, with half the inhabitants on the road for Chuseok and everything but the convenience stores closed. I put on jeans and two layers of shirts in the evening, and later slept under a blanket, for the first time since spring. This morning has dawned sunny and cool and I might even find the energy to chase halfway across Seoul to the Veggie Group picnic.

I have four days of beautiful, cooler, sunny weather ahead before we all go back to school. I intend to use them.

Happy Chu-soak

2010-09-22T09:29:00.002+09:00

It's 9 a.m. on the morning of Chuseok, I've been up for two hours, and I haven't seen a single person walk by on the street or in the park. It's not raining now,

but...

it...

has...

been.

As these captures from local tv demonstrate, we've had a bit of rain. It hasn't been nearly as bad in our neighborhood; I guess all the rain in our area drains right into the Yangjae Cheon. We haven't had flooded streets or anything, but it's been nasty. A low-lying area by the stream was already under water when I went for my run at 10 a.m. yesterday, and then the sky opened up as it does in Florida and it rained for hours and hours as it does in Ithaca and oh, my galoshes, it was wet.

The Korea Times says that parts of Seoul got ten inches of rain yesterday.

I was delighted to get a dinner invitation from Nikki, our art teacher, and her husband Dex, who will be our art teacher for a couple of months while Nikki's out having a baby. As I took the five-minute walk to Costco to get a dessert to take (Boston cream pie!) the rain permeated my umbrella and dripped right through onto my head.

Nikki and Dex were in Zach's old apartment, the big one by the school that I had passed on because two and a half people need the space more than one person and a cat. They had just had their ceiling patched up, but when I got there, they had a bucket on a big tarp to catch the rapid dripping coming through. The stairs all the way up to their fourth-floor flat were soaking wet; water had cascaded down the stairs all the way to the ground.

I lived for over fifty years in, first, the grayest town north of Robert E. Lee's pocket, and then the humidity of the hurricane belt, and I've never seen anything like the soaking, squishy weather we've had here for the last couple of months. We're all really sick of it and we wish to complain to the management.

As for the dinner, it was very nice; Dex had prepared tofu and traditional Korean veggies, and did I mention the Boston cream pie(!)? I'm very proud-- I bought it myself. After dinner, we played a Korean ripoff of Monopoly called, in Korean letters, "Ho-tael Gae-im". Who knew that Dex, who looks as if he just time-warped from Woodstock, was such a ruthless capitalist? Or that the two most valuable cities on Earth (the game's Boardwalk and Park Place) are Seoul and Busan? The fun part was constantly having to figure out with every transaction, that, for example, "150 man Won" is 1.5 million.

So it's Wetsday, halfway through our week off, and it's cool (temps in the low 60s... maybe blessed fall is here at last. I believe that we're caught up on precipitation till, say, November.

2013.