Han, solo

A word you see an awful lot of in Korea is han. South Koreans call their country Hanguk, the language Hangungmal, and the alphabet Hangeul. The Han River flows through the middle of Seoul; South Korea's astonishing economic rise is called "The Miracle on the Han River". In the Korean-derived number system you use for counting items (as opposed to the Chinese numbers you use for bus numbers, money, and such), hana means "one", but you drop the second syllable when it precedes the item you're counting: han sagwa, for example, means "one apple."

Han generally means "great" or "leader", as in the country's name. But it also is universally used to mean a basic component of the Korean character that is hard to explain clearly in English, a kind of permanent melancholy, a sadness mixed with touches of both resentment and perseverance. Some say it comes from the numerous invasions, forced subservience, and crushing occupations the country's endured over the centuries. Others believe it stems from literally millennia of a strict class structure in which the mass of people lived short lives of hunger and backbreaking toil.

Either way, book after book says that han is a cornerstone of the Korean mind. In general, to my eye Koreans seem rather glum. They may be given to loud bursts of anger or celebration, but the default mood (as much as 50 million people can have a default mood) seems to be a certain stolid resignation. That's certainly an overgeneralization, but that doesn't mean it's not valid. Hanguk, then, could be read as "One Country", "Great Country" or "Melancholy Country".

This blog is called "SJCintheROK", and I realize that the "SJC" part (that's me) has become more and more my topic; I guess that sometimes I write it as much to give myself emotional therapy as I do to tell you what I see here in Hanguk. I know that's self-centered, but, hey, that's nothing new for me. Thanks for reading it and for the kind words I've received about my writing here. (Send more! Will Write for Praise.)

Anyway, when I wrote the recent blog entry about the Sunday in which I went to the veggie lunch and Dongdaemun Market, I forgot to mention that I decided to walk across the Han River in the heart of Seoul. I took the subway to Apgujeong, the last stop on the south side of the river, and walked across one of the many bridges to Oksu Station on the north bank. I had crossed the river many times on the subway, which comes above ground and shares the bridges with a whole lot of automobile traffic, but I wanted a better feel for the river and the city, and I had time before the lunch, so I footed it.

It was a gray, chilly, damp day (darker than in this file photo) with a strong headwind; by the time I got a hundred yards onto the half-mile bridge, I was ready to turn around. I'm a total wimp about heights and I kept wondering how old the bridge was and how much those trains going by weighed. The wind kept trying to blow me backward or, in my mind, over the edge. I was the only pedestrian on the whole span. But I kept going.

Along with my nervousness, though, I felt han on the Han. (On the other han...) I felt small and alone. But, if I understand han correctly, it also entails an odd satisfaction with that sadness, a sort of "it's okay" that's hard to explain. I love Robert Frost's "Acquainted With the Night", about long, lonely, nighttime walks. My favorite word, I guess is "solace"; I love the sound of it, I love Scott Joplin's slow ragtime song, I get solace in some strange way from the solitude that isn't far from isolation.

(Melodramatic, much, Steve?) Sorry... this entry is more for me, I guess, but I need a reader or two for the self-therapy to work; if you've read this far, thanks again.

Anyway, the worst thing that my circumstances sometimes bring out is the feeling of being really alone. Tug isn't enough; for one thing, he's more self-centered than I am, and that's not easy. A couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with dysthymia, chronic (lifelong, I guess) mild depression. Overall, I really am better than I've ever been; I have fewer moments of melancholy, more self-confidence, a more philosophic frame of mind. I'm always okay; I'm usually fine. The han is there, lurking in the background, but it doesn't run my life anymore.


I'm good.

Smoke on the what now?

(above: Seoul Olympic Stadium, next to the Jamsil Baseball Stadium)

The weekend's just about to end, but I've made sure it's a busy one. During the week I confined myself to the school, the apartment, and the stores in the neighborhood, but in the last 52 hours I've made up for it.

On Friday after work (the last day of prep before the little darlings arrive tomorrow morning), ten of our twelve teachers went out to dinner at a traditional Korean restaurant near the school. It was a good time, though there wasn't too much I could eat; I filled up on scrambled egg rolls. That's scrambled eggs rolled up into cylinders, not egg rolls that have been scrambled.

Afterward, most of us went out for too many beers. Tony said that the Beer Factory right nearby was expensive, so we took the bus to Yangjae Station and drank there. If I get a vote next time, I'm not taking two bus rides, one of them packed gluteus to humerus, wasting a half hour, and spending two bucks per person for the privilege, to save a buck on a pitcher of beer. Still, faculty bonding is a good thing. As the country song says, "God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy."

After spending some time at school Saturday, I set off on foot for the bookstore at Kyobo Tower in Gangnam, an upscale shopping area allegedly within long walking distance, but without a good map I ended up walking to Yongjae again and catching the subways to the ballgame. Jamsil Stadium is next to the 1988 Olympic Stadium, was the baseball venue in '88, and makes the ballpark in Daegu look like a shack with a AMC Gremlin up on blocks in the front yard. This is a major-league park; the Lions' is AA, maybe.

The seats were sold out, but as it's the last weekend of the season, I paid a scalper. The visitors were the first-place Kia Tigers, and they brought a lot of people with them; probably only 35 to 40 percent of the crowd was rooting for Our Beloved Doosan Bears. You may recall a post I made not long ago about how Koreans have no sense of others' space; this was more than confirmed as the young guy on my left was continually sticking his Thunder Stick in my face. (Wait... that sounds bad.) Anyway, he like 29,000 of the 30,000 in attendance, was bashing those inflated plastic tubes together, which in his case involved waving one of them in front of my eyes at all times.

After a couple of innings, I moved down to the seat in front of me, in the front row down by the foul pole, and things went much better, even better when I left in the sixth inning with OBDB being mauled and their pickanick baskets stolen by those mean Tigers. I'm not such a fan as to want to catch the subway with 20,000 other people.

On the way back, I got off the subway in Gangnam, but I couldn't tell where the Kyobo Tower was at night, so I came home. Just to top the day off, though, I decided that I needed an office chair, which I did, as I spend too much time at this here computer to sit in a flimsy uncomfortable kitchen chair. So I went to Costco and then spent an interminable time stumbling, sweating, swaying, and saying "frickin' ratzfrazamazz" as I horsed the enormous, heavy, cumbersome box o' chair home. I nearly died when I found out I'd walked two blocks along a dead end and had to go back up. You would have laughed had you seen it, "Ha ha," you would have said. Thank goodness, right after that I found a shopping cart someone had left out on the street; that saved me a few blocks of living death. My arms are still sore, though.

Today, it was back to school for final prep, then I went to the most notorious foreigners' hangout between Tokyo and Baghdad, Itaewon.

And here's what I alluded to in the post I made earlier today: the downside of living where I do is that it's a huge undertaking to go anywhere. To get to Itaewon, which is, I would guess, five miles away as the dragon flies, I had to:

Walk to the bus and wait for it: 10 minutes
Take the bus to Yangjae Station: 10 minutes
Walk down into the subway and wait for the train: 10 minutes
Take the Line Two train nine stops to Yaksu: 20 minutes (Over the river was nice.)
Walk to the other subway line and wait for the train: 10 minutes
Take the Line Six train three stops to Itaewon: 10 minutes
Fight the crowds up the stairs to ground level: 5 minutes

...plus the subway here is pretty grungy, compared to Daegu's, which is quite new; it's kind of like New York's compared to D.C.'s or Montreal's. (Apparently, it's a similar ordeal, where I live, to go anywhere and see anything. It was to get to the stadium, and the nearest subway stop will always be a forty-minute walk away.)

So... one of my new friends had suggested I not go to Itaewon alone at night, and I can see why; it's frequented by US soldiers, who are resented by the locals due to their... umm... extracurricular activities. The neighborhood is packed cheek-by-jowl with hundreds of little businesses: dive bars, restaurants, vendors with booths selling all kinds of bangles, baseball caps, and something or other else that starts with "b", tiny shops selling hip-hop clothing, Middle Eastern groceries, made-to-order-shirt stores... and people from all over the world, ten times as many nationalities in five minutes as I've seen in a year: Africans, Turks, Pakistanis, Americans, Chinese. I think I may have even heard a smattering of Canadian. And...

...I found my goal, What the Book. What the Book delivers books anywhere in Korea with no delivery charge, mostly ordered from the States and then sent on, but they have one physical location, and I found it. It's in a basement, with a few hundred new titles and, they claim, 18,000 used books... all. in. English. Unless you're in Korea, you can have no idea what heaven it was to be surrounded by English speakers and English language books! Oh, it was wonderful, like a mini vacation. It felt so very good. I bought Mad Libs for class use, Lonely Planet Seoul, a book on Korean culture and etiquette, and Stephen King's book on writing, On Writing (ol' Steve is a font of creativity.) But mostly it was just so good to be there, so much so that it was worth the trip.

But it would be nice to be able to just go places without needing provisions, a compass, iron rations, and a Sherpa.

...and now it's bedtime, then showtime, and I start earning my money.

(Yes, this is 20,000 Kia Tigers fans singing the guitar lead-in to Smoke on the Water. I told you before: everybody here crazy.)

Boys in the 'hood

(above: my classroom; below: a restroom door at school; think you'd see this logo at a high school in the States?)

Tug and I have been on the edge of Seoul (the school's in the city but the apartment's not) for six days now, and it's a best of times, not-so-best of times situation. The neighborhood is great, but it's a major, major endeavor to go anywhere to say, buy a book, see a movie, or see any sights.

I'll talk about the drawbacks in my next post; for now, here's the good stuff, which on a day-to-day basis far outweighs the bad. Though my apartment's quite small, now that things are tucked away, if they get me that wardrobe they've been promising (I'm still living out of suitcases) it will be pretty homey. Tug's starting to settle in: he's beginning to sleep somewhere other than under the bed; in fact, I woke up this morning with him curled up next to me, for the first time ever.

I have a window over my bed and a sliding door to a tiny balcony, both of them facing west, over a nice little park with basketball and tennis courts, a flower walk, and a lot of lively little kids on bikes and skates. It gets quiet by 10 p.m. or so, though.

Past the park? Mountains at 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock. (No, they're there all the time; I mean that as geographical orientation.)

A few blocks to my left is LG's research-and-development campus, with a 30-story building that faces my street, so it's easy to orient myself from anywhere in the area. Costco, E-Mart, and an upscale collection of shops in two ten-story buildings are near there, about six blocks from home.

On this misty, moisty Sunday morning I just discovered something wonderful: a few blocks to my right is a path that runs for miles along a stream, with banks of wild vegetation on either side topped in many spots by rows of greenhouses. I saw a great blue heron and two egrets this morning. (So much for the old song lyric, "But when it's raining, have no egrets.") Most of the path is rubberized material, so it's one of the best places for running (which I did, in a cool gentle rain) I've seen. It leads into Citizen's Forest Park, which is full of trees, grass, and winding trails, near my school.

Speaking of the school, it's a three-minute walk from my apartment to the main street, and another three minutes to school. I get an hour for lunch each day and will be able to come home to eat if I want.

The school itself practically looks like something from Star Trek: Next Gen. The faculty signs in and out with security cards, the students with a thumb scanner, and all the facilities are spanking-new, which may be unfortunate, as we are one of the few schools in the country that doesn't use corporal punishment.

I got the room I wanted, at the end of the hallway, a kind of trapezoid with windows on the south and east-northeast. (I'm not sure, though; it could be somewhere between east-northeast and east-east-northeast; it's hard to say.)

Orientation for the kids is tomorrow; then come the regular school days, which on the face of it will be enjoyable and have a very easy schedule. I've never done a block schedule before, so I may have to work at filling 90 minutes, but get this: On "A" days I have English 7, English 9, 90 minutes of planning time (150 minutes, really, as it segues with lunch), and American lit honors. On "B" days, I have 90 minutes' planning, Creative Writing, 90 (150) minutes' planning, and an alternating schedule of clubs (in my case, newspaper), study hall, and an informal speech class, which I'm syllabizing (syllabusizing?) for the whole school.

Best of all, we're taking a three-day school trip to Jeju Island, which is known as Korea's Hawaii, at the end of September, as long as fears over H1N1, which have already caused some schools to close for a few days, don't make the administration cancel it. I like my coworkers, too, which is a big thing, of course. So all in all, it's a pretty darn good situation.

(below: the view from my balcony; not what you anticipate when you hear the phrase "second-most populous metro area in the world")

(The management of SJCintheROK is Seoully responsible for its content.)

I'm a Seoul man

...yeah, endless stupid puns are available on the name of this city. Actually, it really isn't "soul"; that's a Westernism. It's "saw-ool". But what fun is that?

This will be quick, sort of a placeholder, till I'm awake, have more to say, and have the Internet at the apartment.

The trip would have been fine, three hours door to door through endless forested mountains on a beautiful day, but the middle-aged Korean driver of the van was plotting the whole way to throw both Tug and me out the door at full speed because Tug wouldn't stop yowling. You have no idea what "nervewracking" means till you've had a three-hour ride with a crying cat and a homicidally upset driver who doesn't speak English, and most Koreans hate cats already. I expect Tug to yowl some more overnight.

The school is ultramodern, brand new except for the just past summer school. It's on three floors, albeit with a small space on each. My classroom has a big flat-screen tv hooked to the computer. I also have a computer workstation in the faculty room... no more lugging my laptop back and forth every day! And the classes, my goodness gracious gosh: English 7, composition, American lit honors, speech... and (yes!) creative writing! Too bad I have to build them all from scratch in the next six days.

Apartment is TINY. It might do when I get organized, but it's half or less the size of the one I woke up in today. It would also be nice if they had remembered to give me a closet, for Buddha's sake... supposedly I'll be given some kind of wardrobe tomorrow. I also have no furniture but the bed, two kitchen chairs, and one tiny table. I feel horribly cut off with no Internet and no television... yet. (I'm typing this in a coffee shop; I should be sleeping or screaming at Tug to shut up that yowling.)

It's a ten-minute or less walk to work and only five blocks to both Costco and E-Mart. I have a teeny balcony facing a nice little park, which has basketball and tennis courts, a paved path, a flower walk, and an outdoor workout setup. It's a very quiet and I would say upscale neighborhood. If I can adjust to the postage-stamp-sized apartment, I'll say I'm in a very good spot.

And now I want to go to bed. I'll talk at you soon.

Well, I'm back

I doubt that I'll be as entertaining here as the Wonder Girls were in my last post. (For one thing, I ain't shavin' my legs). K-pop is mostly about all the namjas trying to be N'Sync and all the yeojas trying to be the Spice Girls (aside from the Korean teens trying to be gangsta rappers-- don't try to imagine it), and the undisputed monarchs of the genre are Big Bang and Wonder Girls. If you think the Nobody clip was silly, yeah, it kinda is, but the official video includes several minutes of lead-in in which the guy for whom the girls are supposed to be background singers is stuck in the bathroom stall with no toilet paper, which necessitates the Girls' rise to fame. (I prefer the clip I posted.) And you hear that song a thousand times and not get it stuck in your head. I dare you. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Anyway, the important part of my trip to Seoul went very well, I think, and I have high hopes for the future. Everything else was a pain in the duff. I forgot my iPod, so the time went very slowly. I lugged my heavy laptop the whole way, hoping to get a return email from my student who teaches in Seoul (not having written down her phone number, and not having considered that after she gave it to me in Facebook chat, I wouldn't be able to retrieve it if she wasn't online). We had tentatively planned to meet at Seoul Station once I called her to set a time. I never reached her, but left her an email saying I'd be at Dunkin' Donuts at the station from 7 to 7:30 p.m. if she could make it. The shop was SRO, so I stood outside it, a million travelers brushing by me, for a half hour, in vain, and then another two hours waiting for the train home, with not a thing to read.

It was 100 minutes to Seoul, at 190 mph, and another 75 minutes by subway to the suburb where the school is. And it was freakin' cold, dude! On Saturday I'd gone hiking with Luke at the Daegu Arboretum; it was 65 degrees and I wore a t-shirt and jeans. The wind chill in Seoul on Sunday was in the high teens. (Winter's made a Favresque comeback here, too... it's 2 p.m., temp 32, winds gusting to 23 mph.) I'm trying to find a tunnel to work.

However... I met Tony, the social studies teacher at the school who'd been my contact, and Bob, the principal, at the Yatap subway stop and took a short bus ride to the school. It's about the size of the Manchon LIKE school, but ultramodern. I had an hour-long interview with Bob, which I think went very well. Then we all went to lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant and swapped jokes and whatever they call those Vietnamese taco-looking wrapper things that look like Rubbermaid raw material till you soak them in hot water and fill them with comestibles.

There's an good chance they'll have an opening in the fall and I think I will quite likely be offered it. (Chickens? Hatch? What?) They pay 600,000-800,00 Won ($470-$620) more a month than I'm making now, and the teachers live in nice, modern apartments (with lofts!) There is some uncertainty, as they have outgrown their floorspace in six months and the company has bought a big campus five miles south of Seoul, in a city of 200,000 that is not on the Seoul mass transit system. Who will be at which location? Where will they live? And what about Naomi?

It would be a very great deal more work than I'm doing now if I got it, lesson plans and clubs and tons of homework to grade. And, frankly, I've come at last to really like Daegu. And Heeduk is my friend (though all my other friends will be leaving over the course of the next year). But... I would be doing something more worthwhile, more of a challenge, with a bigger upside, at a place where I could see myself having a (rest of a) career, for ten years perhaps. But I might not get it, if there's an it to get, and it's possible I might not take it if I did. (I doubt that, though.) (Am I using too many parentheses? [Yes.])

We shall see. For now... to quote Samwise Gamgee in the last line of The Lord of the Rings: "Well, I'm back."