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!)

My Eyethiopian Caturday

After a bit of a mix-up, on Friday I semi-volunteered to host this month's Seoul Veggie Club get-togethers. Hosting involves scouting restaurants, choosing one, and making arrangements.The problem was two-fold. (Yes, I am aiming at the record for most hyphenated words in an opening paragraph.) Rapid-fire. Camera-ready. Cats-eye. (That'll come up a little later in this entry.) Smoot-Hawley.

First, I know virtually no veg-friendly places other than the ones the Club has introduced me to, and nobody would want to go someplace we've been in the last couple of months. Secondly, we usually have two schmoozefests a month, two weeks apart, and it was already the twelfth of March, so I'd have to either arrange just one or do two on consecutive weekends.

So both before and after my (50-minute! Hooray for me!) run, I spent way too much time online, investigating dozens of places on the veg restaurant map Ken of the SVC had kindly provided through Google Maps. Every option was too far away or too expensive or too hard to find from the nearest subway stop. Finally I stumbled on a really cool blog about being vegan in Seoul. It provided me with a lead on an Ethiopian restaurant, which would at least be a novelty, in Itaewon. Just in case, I also picked out a backup, a Middle- Eastern place in Itaewon called the Dubai.

That seemed right up my alley, as every time I go to a store, a little voice whispers "Do buy this" and "Do buy that".

But before I could go scout in Itaewon, I had to get Tug to the vet. It's a boring story about a boring two-plus hours of my life, so I'll just say he's got conjunctivitis, it cost me 25 bucks for the vet and almost 20 for the cabs, and now I have to drop and oint (shut up, I'm declaring that a word) his eye a cumulative 16 times a day (an oint oint here, an oint oint there, here an oint, there an oint, everywhere an oint oint...)

A vet in St. Augustine once busted my cat JP's eye. (Nuff sed.) Tug is virtually JP's identical twin, so messing with his eye brought back some bad memories... at least so far Tug's been quite cooperative, although the cab rides did get a bit old after his thousandth plaintive cry.

As soon as I got Tug home, I took off for Itaewon, which is a unique area. I've written about it before, but let's just say it's right by the biggest US Army base in Asia and it's chock-a-block with street vendors, restaurants, bars, convenience stores, storefront food stands, and people from Nigeria, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, Kuwait... every place in the world, I guess, but Ithaca, US of A. I stopped, as always, at What the Book and the Foreign Food Market, where you can get Bollywood DVD's, Lebanese spices, and Kraft Mac and Cheese.

Club Zion, which in the daytime allegedly hosts the Ethiopian restaurant, was just a block away from WTB and FFM, but the restaurant was gone; apparently they were only open for a few months. Perhaps the fact that the proprietor and his girlfriend are the only two Ethiopians in the country cut into their business. But the Dubai will work out fine; us vegheads love us some hummus and falafel, though if you eat too many of those, you feelawful.

Some of the SVC members are really strict vegans and they may not want to go to a place that serves lamb, so for the following week, I'll book a vegan buffet. At least the restaurant I picked is, for once, impossible to miss: Itaewon subway, exit 3, walk a block to the corner: it's right over Dunkin Donuts, with a huge red sign in English.

On the way home, an American couple approached me on the subway platform: could I help them get to Express Bus Terminal? I could; my stop, Yangjae, is one stop past EBT. He's in the army and they had taken a four-hour train ride from Busan, and were going to take a four-hour bus ride back, because she wanted to go to the Hard Rock Cafe in Itaewon. The "Hard Rock Cafe" in Itaewon is actually a little t-shirt shop that stole the chain's name and logo:

But he'd never been on a train before, so he was happy with his day. They were almost like little kids; it was kind of sweet. Also cool was that I actually know enough to help somebody over here. I wrote "Seoul Station" in Korean for them in case the bus was full and they had to take a taxi back to the train depot.

Today, Sunday, has been a little more low-key; I had coffee at *bucks with Lauren and bought a basketball and some bananas at E-Mart. (By the way, in a triumph of commercialism and overpackaging, you can now buy a "Starbucks Premium Banana" in a plastic pouch for only a dollar. Starbucks is okay, but Bananabucks? A fruitless expenditure.)

And now I guess I gotta do some dishes and some grading. Or I could sit here all day and try to come up with a clever final line for this post... wait for it... nah. Bye!

Hut one, Hut two...

It's Tuesday in my second (and last) week back in Daegu. Each morning and evening, I've been picking my way through the side streets to go back and forth between the hotel (where, incidentally, I'm in the same room as last week) and the school. This has usually involved scaling one very steep incline.

Today I tried a different route and found that it was all flat. More amazingly, though, I passed a very familiar bright yellow sign: LOVING HUT. This is another outlet of the vegan buffet restaurant I've become familiar with in Seoul. It's so, so hard to eat veg in Korea. For example, yesterday Heeduk ordered pizzas and they failed to bring a plain cheese one and I picked off the bits of sausage. (Back home, that's something I would never do, but we only have 45 minutes' lunch and I've learned I have to compromise to a degree or I won't get to eat much.) I was halfway through my first slice when I discovered innumerable tiny bits of sausage spread about under the layer of cheese. Then I felt sick.

(It's a veghead thing; you wouldn't understand.)

So imagine my delight on stumbling upon a Loving Hut (one of three such storefronts in a city of 2.5 million people) completely by accident. The odds are incalculable.

Still, tomorrow I'm going to make one last trip to my old neighborhood in the absurd hope that poor Tiki, who's been scared, cold and hungry on the streets for seven months (if he's still alive), will inexplicably appear and let me take him home.

I'd rather have saved my Daegu miracle for that.

Cold and warmth

It's been really cold here every day, usually with a high in the low 20s Fahrenheit and a cutting, mean wind. Every night, I think of Tiki, probably half-frozen, half-starved, and always terrified, back in Daegu. And the cold accentuates the sometime loneliness, as Christmas draws nearer and family grows farther away, in distance and in time. I have good friends at work, but they belong more to the expat stay-out-very-late-and-drink culture that's so prevalent for Westerners working in Korea, and they can be hard to get ahold of on weekends. Yesterday I was so flat emotionally that I went out in the freezing night to get a quart of ice cream, then came back and ate it. All. Without a bowl. For that matter, I was considering not dirtying a spoon.

Christmas is hard, you guys. (The only source of amusement is hearing Korean singers trying to enunciate "Feliz Navidad" on the Muzak in every store and coffee shop.) It's not the most wonderful time of the year everywhere; in some places, it's the hardest.

Today was much better, though, as I went across the city to the Veggie Club's luncheon. There is a chain of restaurants, in many countries now, called Loving Hut. They have huge vegan buffet, with all kinds of fake meats, salad, soups, coffee, slushies, cookies. All of it's good... 'ceptin the cookies. Vegan cookies suck; always have, always will.

The Loving Huts are owned or inspired-- not sure which-- by a Vietnamese woman who has her own spiritual-religious community; there's a tv playing her talks silently in the background, with subtitles in literally 20 languages. She's called Supreme Master Ching Hai, but you don't have to pay attention to any dogma to enjoy the meal. It's just in the background.

It's clearly a tactical mistake to let me into any "all-you-can-eat" place. It's nearly eight hours since I stopped eating, and I'm still not hungry. I brought a whole bunch of frozen stuff back, too. (Fortunately, it didn't have a chance to thaw on the way home.) More importantly, I made new friends, American, Canadian, and Swedish. Carley from Florida told me that there was a Loving Hut in downtown Orlando, but all the time she lived there, between the name and the fact that it was in downtown Orlando, she always assumed it was just another sex shop.

It's striking how energized I am after a Veggie Club get-together; more than the food (though it's a great pick-me-up, too, to be able to fix veggie meats at home after all this time), it's being around people who look at the world the way I do. I've been told that there are 10,000 vegetarians in Korea, which isn't many out of a population of 50 million. But I saw a dozen of them today, and the warmth with them is stronger than the cold outside.

So now I know I'm not the Sexiest Vegetarian in Korea. I may, however, have Korea's Only Mustache. And that's something.

Like a vegan

I've been getting so tired of eating the same few things that after school today I took the long trip (a short bus ride and fourteen stops on the subway) to Insadong, the ten-block long area where last weekend's Veggie Society dinner was, to visit the other restaurant I saw, the one with the vegan "meat".

It was a perfect time to visit Insadong, with rain-slicked streets but no rain, unseasonably warm just after dark, and very few people out at dinnertime on a weeknight, so I could stroll around and really look at the courtyards, alleyways, and shops. The latter, hundreds of them, carry an amazing array of traditional Korean clothing and art, and innumerable ticky-tacky items. Insadong is a much higher-class area than Itaewon, which is right by the US Army base, and I only saw one instance of the double barber pole, which is the sign in Korea of an establishment of ladies whose pecuniary motives are strong and whose virtue is negotiable. The Christmas lights were on all around Insadong and it was very pretty.

I bought a half-dozen frozen vegan items, not actually having any idea how to prepare them, but upon arriving home I found the company's website, in English (more or less, like nearly everything translated into English by businesses and the government, and even by our "American" school), for example: "high quality vegetable hamsausage. Once try the favor, then twice will be surprise at the taste" and "soy protein processed to taste chicken... enjoy conveniently it with ketchup or honey mustard in one mouthful". Mostly, I had no idea whether to grill all this stuff, nuke it, or shove a stick in it and lick it like a Popsicle. The website says "warm in microwave or on fryer". So, basically, it just doesn't matter.

It's kind of pricy, about ten bucks a pound, it's a time-eating, often uncomfortable hassle getting to Insadong, and I don't know yet if the food is any good, but I am so ready for "vege soy meat" and "soy chicken ball". Maybe I can cut the eggs and hashbrowns down to three times a week; I've been eating the same stuff ova and ova.

A very cool Saturday

I was running on the treadmill at the hael-seu cleob yesterday morning when it started to snow (outside, fortunately). The treadmills face the windows and the street, and I was on the machine on the far left, so I could open the side windows and let some cool air into the overheated room. So I had windows two feet to my left and two feet in front of me.

The snow started tentatively, one big wet flake drifting aimlessly around, then another, and another, and soon I was running in a snow globe, the air just full of thousands of swirling flakes. It was magical.

It was possibly marginally less magical as I took the short walk home, all sweaty and virtuous, and the wind started blowing the heavy snow at 20 miles per hour into my face. Still, I felt invigorated and alive. By the time I got out of the shower, the air was still thick with enormous flakes, the little park across the street had a thin blanket of white, and the mountains were ready for yodelers.

 I was reminded of a 3 a.m. walk around the Addams Family house and Six-Mile Creek in Ithaca, nineteen years ago, and a Christmas Day cross-country skiing down Linn Street, ten years before that. Now we know exactly how long it takes, after four decades in the sub-Arctic, to find snow enchanting again. Fourteen years, nine months, twelve days. And three hours.

But it melted.

I had a long a rewarding Skype talk with an old friend from St. Augustine, which continued my cool day. (If any Sarah Palin fans are reading this entry, I'd be glad to explain my sophisticated use of the word "cool" in both the metaphorical and literal senses to describe my day.)

In the early afternoon, I met my friend and fellow member of the Most Righteously Marvelous Department at St. Paul Prep (tm) Zach at his apartment. He had a four-foot-high bookshelf he wanted to get rid of, and we carried it a third of a mile to my place. Of course, Zach is the only teacher who doesn't live within two minutes' walk of my place, but as frickin' frigid as the walk was (the snow had stopped, but the wind hadn't), as cumbersome as the bookcase was, and as parlous as it was dodging the traffic on the tiny sidewalk-bereft streets, it was worth it. I barely have room for another coffee mug in my apartment, but the shelves in effect increase my space. I can get a few things off my little table and finally unpack the last box I brought from Daegu.

The best part of the day, though, came when I took the long subway ride to Insadong for my first dinner with the Seoul Veggie Club. I got to the area early, so I had a little time to explore. I had walked through Insadong (a blocks-long pedestrian mall with alleys and courtyards, lined with restaurants and tiny shops) once before, with Zach and Chris, to get to Gyeongmokgung Palace. But that was on a lovely Saturday in fall, and the sheer mass of people made it impossible to actually see anything.

True trivial fact: Insadong has the only Starbucks in the world with a sign that reads "Starbucks" in the local language's writing system. By law, Insadong shop signs must be in Hangeul.


Now it was very very cold, very very windy, and just about to get dark. (Just reg'lar dark, not very very.) There was all the space in the world to look around at the art galleries and shops selling traditional Korean goods, wall hangings and Buddha statues and shamanist totems, ranging from the almost lovely to the truly tacky, caricature artists (one of whom I think drew my picture at the New York State Fair in 1982) and street carts, some protected from the winter by heavy plastic sheets, selling roasted chestnuts and little doughy custard-filled "walnuts".

And then it was time for the elite to meet, greet, and eat. I met a bunch of folks at a subway exit and we walked to a vegan restaurant a few blocks away. The place is like a church basement meeting room, just a big space with several rows of long, tables covered with white tablecloths, with more long tables laden with aluminum containers full of food. The get-together was a joint effort between the SVC and the Korean Vegan Society, and the room filled up with fifteen or twenty Westerners from the former and twice that many Koreans from the latter.

Please don't tell PETA, but vegan food doesn't thrill me; just not enough fat and sugar for my sophisticated palate. But the buffet was good, lots of greenery and brownery, identifiable and un. My favorite dishes were the pumpkin tempura and the Chinese noodles with... mushroom stroganoff?

It wasn't the food that was the best thing, though. It was meeting people in this tremendously carnivorous country who think like me; I had almost given up the thought that there were any. Our table looked like Ithaca, scruffy beards and flannel shirts on the men, adorable knit hats with tassels and long straight hair on the women, and I made some new friends, the first I've found in Seoul whom I don't work with. In particular, I had a really nice conversation with a couple of friendly guys named Zenas and Ray about Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckhart Tolle, and football. One of these things is not like the others...

I don't know if you can understand the "up" I get from all this unless you're a veghead living in a nation full to the brim with meatheads. (Note to self: edit this before posting.) But it's so good to be around people who exude positive energy and kindness.

What's almost as good is that they told me about other veg restaurants: two more in Insadong (one of which carries frozen prepared veggie "meat"-- oh frabjous day!) and a chain of vegan places called Loving Hut, one of which isn't too far from my neighborhood. I Facebook-friended Zenas and talked with Ray about meeting for lunch at Loving Hut sometime soon. And the next Veggie Group dinner, at a different location, is only two weeks away.

And my late Sunday morning is blindingly bright, and there's still a light confectioner's-sugar dusting of snow on the highest mountain outside my window.

Very cool.