Superb owl

...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.

Much too young... er, old

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.

DAE-han-min-guk!

My trip to California was, despite its rewards, horribly timed for me in the sports category. First, the only specific thing I wanted as far as sightseeing went was to go to a game at Dodger Stadium, and the Dodgers left town on a road trip while I was in the air to the States and came back the day after I returned to Korea. Also, I'd really been looking forward to joining a big Korean crowd for a World Cup match on a big screen; the first Korean game of the first round happened while I was flying east and the last the day before I flew west.

Fortunately, the Taeguk Warriors (that's the official name of the team, "Taeguk" being the yin/yang symbol on the flag, but everybody just calls them the Reds) made it through to the second round. On Saturday, then (having returned on Thursday evening Korea time), I looked into where to join a frenzied mob of Red Devils (fans) for their second-round game.

The big public viewing spots were at City Hall and Hangang Park by the river (coincidentally the spot where my recent 5K and 10K runs were held). Each of these venues had hosted over 10,000 fans for each of the first-round games, and that's exactly what I was looking for: screaming, singing, partying among a host of crazier-than-usual locals.

But the game would be over about 1 a.m., the forecast was for 90 percent rain, and the prospect of walking home five miles-plus, assuming I didn't get lost (which was a big assumption) in the rain, in the dark, after the subway stopped running...

I settled for the CGV theater in the ritzy shopping area of Gangnam, which set aside three screens for the Korean tv broadcast. The room I was in held about 125 screaming, chanting, red-clad fans. We chanted "Republic of Korea" ("DAE-han-min-guk!" clap-clap-clapclapclap) and shouted at the screen and pounded the inflatable plastic sticks that the theater gave us and just had a wonderful time. The moment when Korea tied the game halfway through the second half was a moment of pure joy that... well, you usually can't get that feeling in public.

But finally the Reds were edged out and we all filed out quietly to join the subdued but orderly Red Devils (many with still-glowing plastic devil horns on their heads), milling about the main drag. There was a large number of cops deployed to keep order, but they weren't needed.

I walked home in an intermittent drizzle. On the way, I passed three young people who responded to my scarlet "Korea Fighting: shirt by chanting "DAE-han-min-guk" and cracked up when I joined them in the rhythmic clap. I got home, oozed into bed, couldn't sleep (damn jet lag), and got up to blearily stare at the US losing their game, going back to bed again at 5:30, about an hour later than I've been waking up each day (damn jet lag). But I'd like to end this post with a couple of more positive thoughts.

First, I was the only non-Korean I saw inside the theater building and I was older than anyone else there by about thirty years. I've gotten used to seeing very few Westerners and, whether walking around downtown Daegu or in Gangnam, I generally stand out in the crowd as much for my white hair as my ashen skin and funny eyes. The positive thought? That's fine. Somewhere along the line, I stopped caring about being different. For a long, long time in my life I never wanted to stick out. Now I just don't care; wherever I am is where I belong. I'll write more about this if I ever get my thoughts together enough to blog about my California trip.

Also, during the game's first half, the two twenty-something women sitting to my left at the theater saw that I didn't have a pair of the plastic cheering sticks. Each of them gave one of theirs to me and spent the rest of the first half holding one each, beating them together awkwardly but endearingly. At halftime I went out to the lobby, got my own sticks, and gave theirs back with thanks. This is a small thing, but it's a reminder to me that, however xenophobic or closed Koreans may seem as a group, individually they often show real kindness and consideration to a waegook far from home.

Or am I far from home? Wherever I am really is where I belong. DAE-han-min-guk.

Just another manic Sunday

Yesterday was a long, exhausting, and fulfilling day.

The lead-in was less than stellar, as a whole bunch of idiots were playing basketball (not horse or just shooting buckets, but an actual game with lots of yelling) outside my window till past 1 a.m. I finally got to sleep about quarter past and got up at 5:45 to get ready for the long trip back to Hangang Park by the river, where last week's 5K race was, for this week's 10K.

The trip there involved my going the wrong way on one subway line (for one stop; I ain't a compleat idjit) and then, when it looked as if I might miss the race, jumping the barrier in a deserted subway station because the turnstile thingy wouldn't recognize my T-Money card though it had lots of credit on it. I kept expecting the K-cops to come bursting out of some booth whence they'd been surreptitiously monitoring the station and grab me, but they didn't. Haven't yet, anyway. I'm not answering my door, though, if somebody rings it.

I was getting frustrated and nervous at the site of the race, a huge grassy square with tents set up on three sides. I went here to pick up my race number, but they sent me over there, where the people sent me back over there, where they sent me back to the original here, where they still couldn't find my name. None of these folks spoke English, of course; last week I had my student Hanbyel with me to negotiate such things, but dot dot dot.

Perhaps it's because I kept asking, "Yeodol K?" Silly of them not to understand what I meant; they didn't recognize "K" as short for kilometer (though it is phonetically Korean for "dog") and... um... it may not have helped, as I realized later, that yeodol is actually "eight". (Yeol is ten.) So apparently I was asking them something about eight dogs.

Then I tried to pick up my goodie bag for the race, which included a World Cup-themed Korea running shirt, compression shorts (though I'm not sure I want my giblets compressed) and running tights. So the here people sent me back to the first there, where... ah, heck with it, I finally got the goodies. Then I went over to the Seoul Flyers (running club) tent and met Jae, the Korean-American president of the club, who was wonderfully friendly, with whom I talked till somebody came up and told me that the 10K people were making their way to the starting line, so I had to weave my way through thousands of warming-up runners and ended up with a bunch of fit guys who had no idea what I meant when I asked them if they were lined up for the 10K. No, they were marathoners... anyway, you get the idea.

In Korea, they usually seem to run a 5K, a 10K, a half-marathon and a full marathon together, each race starting a few minutes after the one before. The warmup time is something to see, with some guy screeching exhortations over the PA, some very hot girls in very hot pants (What?! I'm old, not dead) shaking... well, everything... to the latest K-pop hit, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (which actually has nothing to do with Dick Van Dyke and crew), and everyone giving his neighbor, in unison, shoulder rubs and shiatsu massage.

I finally did get to the right starting line, where Jae (stop thinking about the hot girls in hot pants and refer back two paragraphs) remembered my name and insisted on taking my picture:

Yeah, Steve you look confident now...

I hoped to run 10-minute miles, or just a touch better, and finish in an hour or a tick over. For the first half of the race, the road was so crowded it was practically impossible to negotiate around people, but I seemed to be doing okay: where they marked the end of the first kilometer, I was at exactly six minutes. Perfection. Then, at the 2K mark, I was at 10:15. (Wha'? Why, 2K?) That was my first hint that their measurements were fallible. It's also about then that I began to notice that it was getting, as my Grandpa Davis used to say, hot as the hinges.

The race was entirely unshaded and it was over 80 degrees (Fahrenheit... I think) and the air was typical downtown Seoul, thick, rich, and a great complement to a sandwich. But I kept on, feeling pretty good, keeping the pace up, on target (if I could only keep buggering on) for a 55-minute finish. The last few kilometers were rough, hot, and hotter, and my body was telling me to slack off, when I remembered what I'd told Hanbyel the week before when she was trying to finish her first 5K: "Sometimes you have to tell your body to shut up."

Finally, I crossed the line in 53:15, faster per mile than the 5K I ran six weeks ago (which is pretty darn unlikely). I realized that, according to the markers, I'd run the last kilometer ridiculously fast, so the course was obviously a little short, but even at 55 minutes (my best guess of a legit time), I was stunned: just six minutes slower than I last ran a 10K, 30 years and 25 pounds ago. Whew!

I took a little subway detour on the way home to go to my favorite bookstore (and possibly evade the manhunt still going on for me at that other subway stop) and finally made it home to relax and mainline ibuprofen for a little while...

...till it was time to head for the ballpark. I can reach Jamsil Stadium, where the Twins and Bears play their home games, in a half hour by bike, all along the path by the water. I met our principal, Ron, and his son Geoff outside the stadium, where Ron did me the favor of snapping this charming pic of me in my newly-won running shirt:

That's a giant baseball glove covered in grass, by the way. And a giant American covered in a newly-won t-shirt with a typically mangled Konglish phrase... am I fighting Korea? Is Korea fighting something? Is it a geopolitical statement?

And, to make a long, long story microscopically shorter, we had a nice time at the game, though neither team had their cheerleaders, which I believe is against federal law. Then I rode my bike home in the gloaming. Koreans, by the way, stay out of the midday heat, but by Jumpin' Jay Howdy, they come out after dark: kids on bikes and skates, ajummas walking purse dogs off the leash, couples strolling hand-in-hand, bikers, runners, half of everybody wearing black against a black background, all progressing on the left of the path, on the right, in the middle... but as you might guess, I made it home alive eventually, sore, exhausted, and happy... till I remembered I only had eight hours till the Monday morning alarm, barely enough time to marinate in ibuprofen so I could get out of bed in the morning.

Thanks for the memories

I got up today at 3:40 a.m.

Now it's 5 a.m. and halftime, with Cornell leading Wisconsin by 12 points. In my last post, I mentioned that I remember that the first Big Red basketball game my parents took me to, when I was six, was an 84-80 double-overtime loss to Colgate. I just looked it up: exactly right, in the first game of the 1960-61 season. I've kept space for that in my mind (probably crowding out something that would actually be useful) for 49 years and three months.

Great honk, my mind is an odd thing.

Update: Cornell crushed a supposedly superior team again, this time by 18. (It wasn't that close.) No matter what happens next, this goes on my all-time short list of great sports moments, next to the Giants-Pats Super Bowl, the '69 and '86 World Series (Serieses?), the 1980 US hockey team, and the time I made a home run by kicking the ball all the way to Mrs. Bell's kindergarten classroom in 1959.

Now I just have to survive a school day after the adrenaline and caffeine wear off. Totally, totally worth it.

Seeing Red

This is my fiftieth season as a Cornell basketball fan. I checked today; I remember seeing Ron Ivkovich play, and he graduated in 1961. I don't know how this is possible (since I usually don't remember my phone number), but I remember the score of the first game my parents ever took me to: 84-80, Colgate wins, two overtimes, 1960-61 season. I remember all those years in cavernous Barton Hall when hardly anyone went to see Cornell play basketball; I didn't miss a game for ten years. I remember the Cracker Jack and Cornell orange drink in the little cartons that always tore wrong. I took road trips, two consecutive years, to Penn and Princeton when each year we just had to win once to win the Ivy League and we lost all four games. And all the years when Cornell never came close to winning the title.

So you can see why I wasn't going to miss the first-round NCAA tournament game against Temple. No matter that it started at 1:30 a.m. Korea time today. I went to bed at 11, set the alarm for 1:15, half-woke up when it went off, and drifted back to sleep till 2. By the time I woke up and lumbered to my computer, we were up (!) by seven with seven minutes left in the first half. I didn't miss a second the rest of the way, and Cornell (seeded 12th) dominated Temple (seeded 5th) the rest of the way. We deserved to win by more than the 13-point margin that went in the books.

It was a surreal experience, sitting alone in my apartment in Korea at 2:30 and 3:00 and 3:30, eggbeatering my fists in the air with every three-pointer and layup, not wanting to make any noise because of my sleeping neighbors. The game just got better and better and I loved every second, though I wish I'd had someone to share it with. I was so wound up when the game ended at 3:33 that I couldn't fall asleep till 5:00.

Still so tired. But 50 seasons of happy trumps one day of tired. And we play again Monday my time, when I have planning periods all day except for 90 minutes.

The rest of my day turned out really well, too. This is my month to pick places for the Seoul Veggie Club to eat, and today was the first trial. As I headed out at noon, the weather was very dark, cold and windy, and spitterspattering rain. I was afraid nobody would come to the Dubai restaurant in Itaewon; I had made a reservation for 15 people. But, as it turned out, 16 showed up, most of them newbies, all of them really nice, and it worked out great. Good food (baba ghanoush, falafel, hummus, and yogurt for me), new friends, and I, who have always defined myself as shy, managed to not stammer or wet myself while talking to 13 people I'd never met before.

Then it was off to Insadong to scout out a place for next weekend. Insadong and Itaewon, while both attractions to foreigners, are completely different. Itaewon is all bars and restaurants, US soldiers and Turks and Africans and Arabs, very  busy and pushy. Insadong is full of art galleries and traditional shops, and it's completely devoid of cars. One is a mini Times Square and the other a maxi Ithaca Commons.

Anyway, I arranged for dinner next Sunday at a traditional Korean (but vegan) place in Insadong-- which, in my case, will mean 90 minutes of dining and 30 minutes of getting up off the floor cushion-- and came home.

So... life is good. And the Big Red takes on Wisconsin in two days. (Badgers? We don't need no stinkin' Badgers!)

The Queen and I

 

This country is in love.

Kim Yu-na (whose name, by the way, is actually pronounced "Kim Yawn-ah", as nearly as it can be put into Western characters) has fifty million people in the palm of her hand. Although it's hard to tell with the language barrier and the fact that virtually all  Koreans have three one-syllable names and most of them are Kims, Parks, or Lees, I think she was already, before the Olympics, the best-known and most popular person in the country: Queen Yu-na, indeed.

She is in ads all over the place, for everything. The one they show the most is for Samsung cell phones; at the end she makes that 007 shooting gesture, and one person after another clutches his or her heart, leaning back and smiling ear-to-ear. That's exactly how everyone here feels about her. 

The country practically stopped on Friday while she skated. I scrambled at school to find a way to watch it, and finally found the website of SBS, the channel covering the Olympics. As my classes went on, I glanced every ten minutes or so to see if the competition had reached the leaders. Finally, at 2:30, my American Lit Honors class came in and said she'd already won; for some reason, SBS wasn't running it live online. They'd seen it on some other site.

But of course, since then Korean tv has shown both of her gorgeous performances over and over and over and... heck, they're still showing their speed skaters' races- heats, too, not just finals- from ten days ago. For that matter, sometimes they still show Korea's Olympic baseball games from two years ago.

I went to COEX, the huge mall under the Seoul World Trade Center, on Saturday to buy a couple of books, and saw, on the walkway up from the subway, a couple thousand square feet of murals: Yu-na skating, Yu-na stretching, Yu-na thinking, all for Nike.

This is an amazingly tenuous and tangential leap, but my personal gold medal came on that same visit: when I went into the pharmacy at COEX and said in Korean, "Hello... ibupropen, please... thank you," the pharmacist said my Korean pronunciation was perfect. (Little did he know that I had just used most of my vocabulary.)

I guess all of the times I tried to brighten a local's day by saying his or her English was excellent paid off; I practically glowed at the compliment. It's not really a gold medal, but then I didn't have to shave my legs to get it.

P.S. I've got the tv on silently in the background; they just showed Yu-na's Samsung ad and now they're showing her long program again.

Lions and Tigers and beers, oh my

I went to work with beer on my breath last night. Wait! Let me explain...

I went to the ballgame last evening with my buddy Justin (that is not he in the photo, and I'm grinning like a moron not because I've been drinking-- this was when we'd just arrived-- but because... well, I'm a moron.) The visiting team was actually the Seoul Heroes, not the Kia Tigers, but how could I not use the headline I chose? Besides, Justin is a Princeton Tiger.

In the spirit of epicurian exploration, I ended up having one beer each of the three major Korean brands: Hite, Max, and Cass. My verdict? I'd rather have beer advertised by Clydesdales than three brands actually manufactured by Clydesdales.

I believe it may be the first time I've had three beers in a day since May 12, 1979. That was my friend George's and my bachelor party. No, no... we weren't marrying each other. (This was thirty years ago.) We were getting married three weeks apart. I'd like to point out, by the way, that I'm winning... I'm already through two marriages and George hasn't even finished his first! Anyway, we started with a keg of beer by the lake, adjourned for some evening/late night/early morning libations (I hadn't known that "two fingers" of Jack Daniels meant sticking your fingers into a glass and pouring whiskey till it reached the join of your fingers and your palm), the hangover wore off in 1983, and I haven't been drunk since.

Nor was I at the ballgame, not remotely. Three beers in over four hours doesn't have much effect. Anyway, I've conscientiously put on a few pounds since coming to Korea just to reduce my susceptibility to alcohol. I did have enough, though, that I ate a piece of meat accidentally. There isn't much food that I, as a veghead, can eat at the ballpark, basically Bugles and Nutty Buddies. Some guy walked by with a Costco pizza, famous for being huge, greasy, fatty, and glorious-- the pizza, not the guy-- and I was ready to cause an international incident to get it (and, if I'd taken it and eaten the whole thing, an internal incident as well.) I settled for walking all the way around to the third-base side to get some tteokbokki, which is very popular fast food, a cylindrical, solid, chewy "pasta" made from rice flour, served in a little bowl , drowned in a hellish hot pepper sauce. It really hit the spot-- actually, the sauce nuked the spot-- but the beer made me just careless enough that I assumed one of the rice pellets had somehow unfolded into a square. It was, as I realized the second I'd eaten it, not so much an unfolded rice pellet as a thinly sliced rectangle of chicken. Or possibly some mild fish. Or could be pork. It absolutely wasn't vegetative in origin.

I don't know if I can describe to omnivores, without being offensive, how horrifying it is to a long-term vegetarian to realize you've ingested a piece of animal. The nicest way to put it is with two words: Soylent Green. Lord, I felt sick.

Anyway, it was an exciting game; Justin had to leave after eight innings and missed an exciting ninth, when the Lions got a walk, a steal, an intentional walk, a fly ball that backed the left fielder up against the fence, and a single to set off this:



...and as I came out of the yagujang (ballpark), I saw that Heeduk had tried to call my cell five times, and I ended up taking a cab to work to help Chae-lin, one of my former students, prepare for a debate contest in Seoul on Sunday. Fortunately, it only took fifteen minutes, but it was odd going in to work after drinking. I mean, gee, I'm not a congressman.

Everyone's got toothpaste down their demons

...is not a line from "Jumper" by Third Eye Blind. It's "Everyone's got to face down their demons," and if you heard it as "toothpaste", you're either dumb, crazy, deaf, or me.

Actually, that has nothing to do with the topic of this post, but I've been waiting to work it in as a blog title.

The championship game of the World Baseball Classic was a classic, with Korea coming from two runs down with a run in the eighth and another with two outs in the ninth to tie the game. Sadly, Japan got two in the tenth to win.

The sports-fan segment of the Korean population is terribly let down, of course. The two countries, who have the strongest baseball teams in the hemisphere, are fierce rivals on the field (and in the East Sea [Sea of Japan], where they are disputing ownership of a few tiny worthless islands that the Koreans call Dokdo; "Dokdo is Korean!", the posters say.) The Japanese, as a rule, look down on Koreans, and Koreans must feel about Japan as Poles would about Germany if the German government had never really apologized for what they did in both World Wars.

Think of Korean baseball fans as Yankee fans when the Bosox came from 3-0 down in the playoffs, or Bosox fans when the Yankees made up a 15 1/2 game deficit and won the pennant. There is no joy in Koreatown.

...but it's only ten days till the Korean League season starts! Go, Samsung Lions!

Odds and... well, frankly, odds

It's been an interesting few days, at least if you're living it. As you're only reading about it, I make no promises. Actually this is probably going to be pretty dull. I hope I don't lose either of my fans.

It's been a week since I decided to take a really, really close look at the local sidewalks, and I've healed up remarkably well. I had my stitches out yesterday, although it will be a couple more weeks before the doc wants to stop covering it. He told me to not get it wet for a week. I suspect that if I don't shampoo for that time, I'll look like Larry from the Three Stooges, or maybe like our friend in the picture above.

The purple has receded under my eye to the point that it's only visible in a thin line where I have a wrink... a wisdom crease. The doctor says I'll have a small permanent scar, which bothers me, as it may cut my appeal with the local chicks. Maybe if I say it's a dueling scar...

I wore my new glasses for two days, feeling drunk, before I had to conclude that the lenses weren't right. (I have astigmatism, so if they aren't at precisely the correct angles, you might as well be wearing SADD drunk goggles.) I went back to the optical store and, through the saleswoman's extremely circumscribed English, my gestures, and a little diagram I drew showing my pupillary distance (needed to get the focal points right), I hope we got it right. I'm supposed to get them back in three more days.

I expected to go back out to Palgongsan today to show off my not-running-for-the-bus skills, but woke up with my body saying, and I quote, "Who you kiddin'?" My schedule's shifted so I don't have to go to work till dinnertime most days, so there's no rush. Especially for the bus.

As you may know, I can be pretty indecisive. Or maybe not. Anyway, on Sunday I couldn't decide if I wanted to go to the Samsung Lions' playoff game or just take it easy and check out a department/grocery store I hadn't been to, HomePlus (which is a branch of the British Tesco chain). Fortunately, as both destinations were north of downtown, I headed in that direction and waited for serendipity.

I decided that the ballgame was too much hassle, went to HomePlus (well worth the trip: a bottle of pomegranite juice and some English shredded wheat/cranberry cereal!) But when I came out, it was an hour to gametime and there were the ballpark lights RIGHT... THERE...

Tickets were all sold out, and I thought it might be just as well, but then a scalper buttonholed me and sold me a 15,000 Won ticket for... 15,000 Won. (I'm not entirely sure how Korean scalpers make a profit.) When I got inside, every single seat in the park was taken, and I ended up standing the whole time on the concrete walkway separating the lower from the upper seats, over on the visiting side along the first-base line. On my way there, I saw three Americans, one wearing a Phillies cap, who, seeing me wearing the blue and orange, graciously taunted me on the Mets' collapse.

Speaking of Mets vs. Phillies, I've been to games in Philly where a third of the fans would be rooting for the Mets, which led to cursing and the occasional drunken brawl. I once had a cup dropped on my head from an escalator at Veterans' Stadium. In contrast, here the sets of fans just ignored each other; in front of me were a few thousand Doosan Bears fans with their cheerleaders and flags and signs-- I was even given a kind of Karate-Kid-head-sash reading "Let's Go Doosan" in Korean. Behind and all around me were the Lions' fans. I never heard a harsh word between the two groups.

They'd tarted up the place (and the prices) for the playoffs, with two huge Lion statues in the stands, flame- and smoke-emitting nozzles for when the Lions scored, and a huge banner, twenty rows high, that would unfurl down the stands at opportune moments. The Lions won, my back decided that seven innings of standing on concrete were enough, and I went home.

I received my absentee ballot via email and want to mail it back today. However, I have to print out a certificate swearing I filled out my own ballot and so on, and I can't get it to print. That's odd, considering that the ballot printed. I blame Karl Rove. I hope that Manager Park at school, who speaks no English but is an electronics whiz, can fix that... I would truly hate to not get to vote.

Please insert your own snappy ending here.

How I became a Filipino Presbyterian sports star

On Sunday morning, I went with Ray to his church's annual Family Day. (Ray's church has a service in English on Sunday afternoons.) I hoped to meet a few new friends, and I did, sorta. Nothing turned out as I expected, but it was worth it... it might turn out to be a very big deal in my life. Sad to say, if you want to learn more, you'll have to keep reading.

The buses that run to Samduk and downtown were unusually dilatory, and I was a little later than planned getting to the dorm, but still within operational parameters. However, Ray wasn't waiting out front, nor was he in his apartment. I dithered for a moment, then decided to walk to the subway to go back home, and there was Ray at Samduk Junction, waiting to cross the street. He had gone out to the main street near the dorm to wait, I had come in from the side street, and we probably missed each other by a minute when he gave up and decided to go alone. But, because the light was red, he was still on the corner when I got there.

We walked to the church; I thought we'd have a short service there (in English), then play some games. I also thought there would be many Americans I could schmooze with. When we got there, though, we had to walk a few more blocks and board a tour bus. To my surprise, other than Ray, Jonathan (more on him in a bit), and me, everybody on the packed bus was a Filipino. It turns out Jonathan and Ray are the only Western members of the church; everyone else is a Filipino, mostly farmhands and factory workers who have come to Korea to make some money to send back home. They all speak English to a degree; they go to the English service because there's no service in tagalog.

The greetings at the bus were effusive; there was clearly a lot of agape (love) there, and people welcomed me warmly. I have to say that I really miss having a nurturing spiritual community. But I won't go to church every week unless I can find one that comes close to my own beliefs... and the nearest possibility that I've found is a Unitarian group. That meets once a month. In somebody's living room. In Seoul.

Anyway, we took a pretty long drive east and north out of the city, on the road to Palongsang. We pulled up at a massive, new, expensive Christian school complex, with three schools covering everything up through high school. There were perhaps a thousand people packing the place: 920 Koreans, 40 Chinese (the church also has a Chinese-language service), 37 Filipinos, Ray, Jonathan, and me.

You know, a service can seem interminable when it's in Korean. The choir was excellent, and we had a handout with the highlights in English, but still. But the session was just beginning; after the hour-long service, there was another hour with groups and more groups of kids, and some adult ensembles, singing what I'm sure were Christian songs. Mostly they were about at the level of your nephew Phineas' second-grade assembly. But the penultimate act was a wonderful Chinese teen group with a male and a female lead singer, four backing boys and eight backing girls, and their harmonies were I'd-buy-a-ticket-to-see-a-concert good. The final act was a glee club of Korean church elders, and they were excellent, too.

Then we filed into the massive lunchroom to fill our metal trays with a variety of local food, then went outside to the big sports/playground area. (All of the playgrounds here seem to be hardpacked dirt.) The weather is still fall-gorgeous and there were tables set up with fruit, pizza, munchies and drinks. I was sorry at that point that I had just eaten lunch.

There were three teams organized: the Korean speakers, the Chinese speakers, and the English speakers. The first events were dodgeball for the girls and volleyball for the guys. Jonathan and I volunteered for the Anglophones. Jonathan ripped something in his calf during warmups and was in a great deal of pain. So when the game began, there were nine guys chattering in Chinese vs. eight guys chattering in tagalog and me. (It's quite a burden, being the athletic representative of the world's billion Caucasians.) (Come to think of it, I was also sole representative of the billions of people over 30.) I played till we were up 10-1, making several decent hits with no mistakes, and retired before I humiliated or crippled myself. I loved playing and got out while the getting was good.

I talked with Jonathan for quite a bit; he's a visiting professor at one of the local universities. Like Ray, he is right about my age, and he's a witty, interesting guy. (There were little packets of coffee crystals but no hot water, so he swallowed the coffee try and then drank some water to let it heat up internally.) We hit it off right away and I want to stay in touch with him, maybe go to dinner, that kind of thing. It's gospel (so to speak) in the Anglophone teaching community in Korea that teaching in a hagwon is the least rewarding level, public school is better, but university is the best of all.

Jonathan told me that with my credentials, I would certainly be qualified for a faculty position when the new school year starts in March. The university retirement plan is golden, and I instantly got excited about the prospect of teaching there. (This is where the part in the first paragraph-- if you can remember back that far-- about this outing's possibly being very important in my life-- comes in.) Me, a university instructor: many of my teaching friends have said I should be teaching in college anyway. And with a decent salary and a good retirement plan...

My ardor was cooled somewhat when he told me that the full professors rake in the bucks, but a beginning instructor teaching the younger kids whom the university also trains actually makes less than I do now. I don't know why he mentioned that grade level; that's not where my certification or experience lies. Maybe that's just what he knows. At any rate, my schmoozing skills are a little rusty after 54 years of disuse, and I never got around to asking him about college-level pay. I need to find out, and if it's good, I'm going to go for it full steam. This just might be a life changer for me. I know I came to this odd and fascinating place to be open to possibilities; here's one now.

Later, I got volunteered to be on the Filipino team for a "mystery" game. I knew this might be a mistake when they had everyone squat in lines to count the teams' members and I couldn't get within 18 inches of squatting as low as everyone else. When it turned out that the game was to bend at the waist while a child, supported by two adult helpers, walks across everyone's backs, then to continually scramble to the other end of the line until the rugrat walks all the way across the playground, I demurred.

Eventually, we all got on the bus, except for Jonathan, who got a minivan ride to the orthopedic hospital, and returned to town. Everyone on the bus received a Ziploc bag full of various sweets and munchies and a cute little gummy-bear-colored-and-textured clock with a big suction cup for sticking on the wall. One guy hadn't gotten a ticket, so he didn't get a clock; I gave him mine, as I have two rooms where I spend all my time and two clocks.

All in all, it was nice to be around so many warm, friendly people, to play volleyball (maybe for the last time; who knows?), and make a new, interesting friend. And just maybe it will turn into something very big.

Thank you for taking 90 minutes out of your day to read this. I love sharing my life here with my friends.

Rainy days and Metdays

You know what would make a really gray Monday morning?

If your favorite team, the Mets, whom you'd been following for over 40 years, had lost their last game of the previous season to the Marlins, thus failing to make the playoffs... and you got up on Monday morning Korea time hoping to find out how their finale this year went... and the game that was on in Korea was a totally irrelevant-to-anybody Pittsburgh-San Diego game... and you caught a glimpse on the outfield scoreboard that the Mets had lost their last game, to the Marlins, AGAIN, and failed to make the playoffs, AGAIN, thus making that the final game in the history of Shea Stadium...

...and you had planned a major mountain hike for that morning, but it was raining, so you didn't go...

that, my friends, would make a really gray Monday morning. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Mystery meet

I had the day off yesterday (Thursday), as Heeduk asked me to teach on Sunday instead. My shift to the upper-level classes, SAT- and TOEFL-prep, is accelerating, which is great. It appears I’ll have days with very little to do except some prep and proofreading and days where I’ll be here from noon till midnight.

Anyway, it seemed fortuitous that he gave me the day of the big international track meet off; posters and banners and bus ads all around town have been advertising it since before I got here. The only other time I’d seen a major meet was in 1976 in London, and my girlfriend Alison and I had took the wrong bus, so we missed half of it.

Daegu will host the world championships in 2011, and this was a sort of dry run. The meet was at the ultra-modern stadium—well, maybe just the modern stadium, as it doesn’t have escalators—that was built to host World Cup soccer games in 2002. The stadium is way off on the southeast edge of the city, nestled against a hill, as you can see. Korea in general and Daegu in particular seem starved for international recognition, and admission was free so they could build up a big crowd.

I took the 20-minute walk to the nearest subway station, intending to train it and then walk another 20 minutes to the stadium. However, the platform was mobbed with literally hundreds of high-school and middle-school students, and when the train came, they pushed and shoved and crammed in as if they were trying to get listed in the Guinness book. (By the way, hundreds of Korean students in a subway station sound exactly like two hundred thousand sparrows in a tin can.)

So I got the brilliant idea of taking the next train going the other way, getting off at the first station, and coming back toward the stadium; at least then I’d have a seat in the crush. But when I got to the next station and the train came in, of course it was already bulging with students… apparently every student in this city of 2.5 million was taking time off to go en masse to the meet.

So I found a taxi. (Not actually on the train platform; I had to go upstairs.) The meter counted three bucks getting within a quarter-mile of the stadium and ticked off two more dollars (and me) waiting for the cab to be allowed to turn left into the lot; finally I just said “Yeo-gi” (“here”), paid the cabbie, and got out in the street.

The lead-up to the meet featured fireworks, cheerleaders, guys running around with flags, a unique race among high schools (the coed 8 x 200 meters), and an appearance by a female singer who is apparently very, very big here. It may have been Roberta Flack; I was in the upper deck.

By the time the meet started, there were perhaps 40,000 people there, and 35,000 of them were students, banging those damned inflatable plastic sticks together and occasionally watching the action. Every single one of them was in school uniform, which universally includes a white shirt or blouse, so it’s just as well it was overcast, or I might have gone snow-blind.

The meet itself was okay; it had a few Olympic medalists in it, but it was really rather fragmentary: some events for men, others for women, but it only added up to maybe half a meet. That’s okay; I went for the experience, not for the sport, and in fact, not being an idiot (usually), I left before the final three or four sprint events and walked back to the subway, embarked, rode, disembarked, and went home, too tired to walk to school to use the Internet or even to go to E-Mart(!)

I said some words into the close and holy darkness, and then I slept. (tm Dylan Thomas.)

What a long, strange trip it's been

Photos: in a tragic incident, a lioness devoured a hapless baseball player in Daegu on Sunday evening; even more tragically, the video I took of the Lion Girls didn’t load to the blog.

On Sunday morning, I caught the bus to the Samduk neighborhood, as Heeduk had asked me if I’d like to join his family for Chosuk at their home. I felt truly honored; I was the only teacher invited there this year. I’ve been thinking about it, and it feels as if it would be an invasion of their privacy to post details about their home and their family moments in a semi-public venue, so I won’t.

I’d been awakened that morning at 5:15 by my neighbors, who decided they should talk loudly for quite awhile under my open window as someone was departing in the (running) car. So, when I got back from Samduk, I took a good long nap. As it was both Sunday and a major holiday, it was blessedly quiet.

About 3:00, I headed out and caught a cab for the ballpark. I had hoped to go with my colleague Ray, but I didn’t have his phone number, only his email address, and I’d forgotten to contact him on Saturday. I called my acquaintance Tony, but his phone had been disconnected. So it was just me.

I got to the park just before 4:00. Citizens Stadium is a little park reminiscent of a AAA or AA park in the US, and I’d say the level of play was around there, too. I know that in the major leagues the visiting team doesn’t get off their bus in full uniform and walk through the crowd, as the evil, nasty, wicked Lotte Giants from Busan did.

Outside the park was a scene not so different from the exterior of the parks in Syracuse or Binghamton before a game: hawkers selling food, drink, and souvenirs. The big seller is those big inflatable plastic things you beat together in a cacophonous racket; to the extent that they’ve caught on in the States, they’re called Thunder Sticks. One pair doesn’t sound like much, but five thousand pairs thunder pretty impressively.

I found a seat a few rows back of the third-base dugout. The stands were filling up quickly and we had an hour to wait. It was fairly hot but the sun was behind us and before long it became very comfortable. The big center-field screen played commercials and highlights, and the four Lions mascots cavorted their… uh, cavortions. Just before gametime, the big screen played highlights of Korea’s winning the Olympic gold medal in baseball, accompanied by some bouncy pop music, which everyone sang along with and beat their plastic sticks to. (The country shed a huge inferiority complex comparing their baseball to Japan’s, and they never, ever get tired of reliving it… the highlights play on tv almost every day.)

The game itself was pretty much like ours on the field, but off it… the Giants had several thousand fans massed along the first-base line, and every time they batted, a guy in full Giants uniform blew a whistle incessantly and led the fans in deafening, disciplined chanting. When our beloved Samsung Lions batted, we had a uniformed guy, too, blowing a whistle and leading cheers, but to my ear, our side didn’t sound nearly as good. I will say that I didn’t mind the noise, except that the horrible, nonstop whistle tooting got to me to the degree that, if I had had the Korean vocabulary, I would have suggested that the tooters might stick their whistles someplace where the shrillness would have been somewhat muffled.

Our side has its own version of the Laker Girls, who danced between innings. There were four of them; collectively, they were exactly my age and my weight. It seems as if so many countries love to imitate American pop culture, but don’t quite have the style down. Still, the game (and, I bet, every game) is a party in the stands, no matter the score. That’s a good thing, as the Giants flattened our beloved Lions, 9-1.

I cut out in the eighth inning, which I never do, hoping to get a taxi home before the crowd left. I was not as successful as one might wish, as there were already a hundred people looking for the two taxis that were for hire. So I…

1. Walked a couple of blocks toward some bright lights, hoping to find a cab, but had no luck. After a half-hour or so, the rest of the crowd emerged, and

2. I considered jumping on a bus, but considering that I had no idea where any of the buses going by were headed, I gave up and

3. Asked a bunch of young people if they spoke English (they didn’t, really) and asked where the subway entrance was. I knew it was several blocks away but had no idea in what direction, so I tried to follow their halting directions and

4. Missed the turn they apparently had told me to take and would still be walking and somewhere around the DMZ by now, except that

5. A Korean man, a high-school engineering teacher, tapped me on the shoulder and said that I should follow him, as he was going to the subway. However, after awhile it became clear he didn’t know exactly where it was, either, and of course

6. Cab after available cab went by, but I didn’t feel I could be so ungrateful as to desert him, so he

7. Asked a passerby, who steered him to the subway entrance, and we

8. Rode to the downtown stop where that subway line meets the one I’d need to take to head home, so I said kamsa hamnida and annyeongi gaseyo (thank you and bye!) and I decided to catch a bus rather than transferring to the other subway line, which would have disgorged me with a 20-minute walk, through an unknown residential neighborhood in the dark, to get home, but

9. When I emerged from the subway, I wasn’t quite where I thought I’d be in the downtown area, and not on the street on which the buses I know run, so I walked around the nearly deserted streets and subterranean mall until I came up and

10. Still didn’t know where the hell I was, so I headed north until I came to the intersection with Route 40, which is south of my familiar Route 50, so I turned left and walked until I saw the sign that Samduk Junction (near the other school location, the Kims’ apartment, the Bell Park, and Route 50) was straight ahead, so I walked there and

11. Saw a huge lighted sign for our school on the side of a 12-story building, thought “Holy cow! They don’t have another, bigger school right near the Samduk school I know, do they?”, followed by “Holier cow! The sign is on the side of their apartment building”, and I walked past the Bell Park and turned right on Route 50 and…

12. Walked a couple of blocks to the bus stop, whose sign didn’t say that buses 508 and 518 stopped there, so I briefly wondered if I’d somehow turned the wrong way, but decided to keep walking, and several blocks later found another bus stop, at which 508 and 518 do stop (apparently, not all buses pull over at all stops on their routes), and I…

13. Waited, caught the bus, walked the four blocks to home, and…

14. Oozed up the stairs.

Take me out to the ballgame. Better yet, take me home.