Feed the kitty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, you know, hooray for me.

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

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

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

There will come soft rains

The Yellow Dust has finally been dissipated...

...by the nuclear rainfall.

So, kind of a good news/bad news.

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

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

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

I do know: everybody's fine.

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

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

Dust in the mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is she.

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

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

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

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

When the dust settles.

In the bleak midwinter

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

Fahrenheit 4? 5? 1?

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

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

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

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

Rain/fall

I'll say this for the Koreans; they're punctual. The monster rain of two days ago washed away the incessant summer in a single day; the equinox, the First Day of Fall, was the first day of fall.

My run yesterday revealed to me the ravages of the storm. The Yangjae Cheon had subsided, barely, back into its banks, though parts of the path were hamster-deep in mud. The lower expanse of the wooden railing along the ramp down to the stream had snapped off. A manhole cover on the path had popped out of its hole and was resting five feet away. Farther east, the two arched bridges above the water had their railings festooned (actually, "completely covered" is a more accurate description, but one so seldom has an opportunity to use the word "festooned") with dead weeds and orange floats that had broken loose in the water. The swimming pools alongside the stream were coated with mud that had washed down from the slopes above. Trees were uprooted. And I saw a turtle on the path.

Okay, a turtle, technically, is not so much a ravage as it is a reptile. I didn't want to leave the little guy (he was about the size of my hand) on the path, for fear a bike would run him over or somebody would take him home and eat him. (For once, I'm not being facetious here.) (Actually, using "festooned" and "facetious" in the same post is pretty impressive, don't you think? You may think I'm showing off, but I haven't even used the word "detritus".) (And this is my third consecutive parenthetical remark.) My friend, perhaps shell-shocked from the storm, was pointing along the course of the path as if he were walking toward the Han River, six miles away. I figured, though, that he really wanted to get across and tried to think like a turtle, which is quite different from my usual hare-brained approach. I figured he'd moved away from the flood waters and was now trying to get back to the creek, so I picked him up and put him in the long grass near the stream.

(I don't mean to be sexist by assuming he was a "he"; he was wearing black and dark green, really butch colors, so I guessed he's a boy. [How the hell can turtles tell that when they meet each other, anyway?])

Yesterday was gray and cool, maybe a little depressing due to the whole "dead plants and mud" motif; the area was a ghost town, with half the inhabitants on the road for Chuseok and everything but the convenience stores closed. I put on jeans and two layers of shirts in the evening, and later slept under a blanket, for the first time since spring. This morning has dawned sunny and cool and I might even find the energy to chase halfway across Seoul to the Veggie Group picnic.

I have four days of beautiful, cooler, sunny weather ahead before we all go back to school. I intend to use them.

Happy Chu-soak

It's 9 a.m. on the morning of Chuseok, I've been up for two hours, and I haven't seen a single person walk by on the street or in the park. It's not raining now,

but...

 it...

 

has...

 

 been.

As these captures from local tv demonstrate, we've had a bit of rain. It hasn't been nearly as bad in our neighborhood; I guess all the rain in our area drains right into the Yangjae Cheon. We haven't had flooded streets or anything, but it's been nasty. A low-lying area by the stream was already under water when I went for my run at 10 a.m. yesterday, and then the sky opened up as it does in Florida and it rained for hours and hours as it does in Ithaca and oh, my galoshes, it was wet.

The Korea Times says that parts of Seoul got ten inches of rain yesterday.

I was delighted to get a dinner invitation from Nikki, our art teacher, and her husband Dex, who will be our art teacher for a couple of months while Nikki's out having a baby. As I took the five-minute walk to Costco to get a dessert to take (Boston cream pie!) the rain permeated my umbrella and dripped right through onto my head.

Nikki and Dex were in Zach's old apartment, the big one by the school that I had passed on because two and a half people need the space more than one person and a cat. They had just had their ceiling patched up, but when I got there, they had a bucket on a big tarp to catch the rapid dripping coming through. The stairs all the way up to their fourth-floor flat were soaking wet; water had cascaded down the stairs all the way to the ground.

I lived for over fifty years in, first, the grayest town north of Robert E. Lee's pocket, and then the humidity of the hurricane belt, and I've never seen anything like the soaking, squishy weather we've had here for the last couple of months. We're all really sick of it and we wish to complain to the management.

As for the dinner, it was very nice; Dex had prepared tofu and traditional Korean veggies, and did I mention the Boston cream pie(!)? I'm very proud-- I bought it myself. After dinner, we played a Korean ripoff of Monopoly called, in Korean letters, "Ho-tael Gae-im". Who knew that Dex, who looks as if he just time-warped from Woodstock, was such a ruthless capitalist? Or that the two most valuable cities on Earth (the game's Boardwalk and Park Place) are Seoul and Busan? The fun part was constantly having to figure out with every transaction, that, for example, "150 man Won" is 1.5 million.

So it's Wetsday, halfway through our week off, and it's cool (temps in the low 60s... maybe blessed fall is here at last. I believe that we're caught up on precipitation till, say, November.

2013.

Let the river run

It's ten weeks to M-Day and my schedule calls for me to run six miles, including one mile at (what is for me a) high speed. The alarm went off at 6:00, I struggled awake, got into my gear, and headed out... and a minute after I got out the door, it started to rain. I'll run in the rain if I have to, but an hour in sopping wet shoes isn't ideal, so I turned around and went in to wait... and wait... and wait... and wait... and wait it out.


Hour after hour, I corrected papers and planned and ate breakfast and surfed the 'net and read, checking every five minutes to see if the downpour had stopped. It hadn't. It was a strong, soft rain, coming straight down without fuss or spectacle.


By 2:30 or so it finally stopped, so I got my gear back on and headed down to Yangjae Cheon (Stream), only to find it flooded, wall to wall, a genuine river, if only for a few hours.


It's funny, metaphorically we know about rivers of blood and the river of time and the river of dreams... what's the metaphor for a river of... water?

Every minute or so, some poor soul or other would come tooling along on a bike, eager to shake off the rust of a day spent looking out at the rain... wait a minute, wouldn't there be rust from being in the rain... ah, never mind... somebody would come along, looking forward to a nice ride along the stream, and come to a skidding halt on the ramp, a big black interrobang forming overhead, and turn around and go back.

I made my way on the streets and sidewalks and through Citizens Forest Park to the rubberized surface above the water a mile from home and put in my time there, around and around, down the path and over the bridges and through the woods, to grandmoth... ah, never mind. I'll fix that in editing.

And finally, six miles and 62 minutes later, with the sun shining for the first time in years, I made it home, got my camera, and headed back down to Yangjae Cheon to take a few pictures... which may have been a tactical mistake after an hour of humid running... disheveled and bedraggled isn't a great look for me. Oh, and craggy... don't forget craggy. You do gotta love the Alfalfa cowlick, though...

Apres le deluge, moi.


(Everything to the right of that strip of grass by my head is usually the running path.)

Well... all right

...in the words of one of my favorite Buddy Holly songs.

 

 (Do you like my new glasses?)

My funk seems to have lifted. (Not the funk from running in ninety-degree heat, just the one in my mood.) The Seoul weather is still hot as the hinges, as they used to say in my family. (Implied: as the hinges. Further implied: on the gates of Hell.) But it's just August hot; that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad skin-crawling humidity has abated. School's back and my classes look good and my schedule, unlike last spring's, is quite tolerable.

I feel back on track with my running, having done six one-mile runs below goal pace this morning wearing my wonderful new sockses and shoeses. I'm counting on the cooler weather 11 weeks from now to help my speed, along with my weighing less (and for the first time in a long, long time, I've actually dropped a few pounds: six in two and a half weeks, or roughly half of what Buddy weighs in the above picture.)

The cross country club is back, though of the eight kids who came out the first day, six were wearing Chuck Taylors (which will rip up the kids' lower extremities if I don't make them buy running shoes). On our first day out, Wednesday, we got a half-mile from school and started running when the skies opened up and we all became drowned rats, even the girls who huddled under the bridge as long as they could. I wonder how many will come out tomorrow and still come out next week after they have to buy new shoes.

Still, the air's better, school's better, and I still have that crazy marathon dream...

Well, all right, so I'm being foolish.
Well, all right, let people know
About the dreams and wishes you wish
In the night when lights are low...
Well, all right, well, all right.

Marathon Day is November 7, which I hope won't be the day that I die.

Snow place to run

You may recall that a few weeks ago I posted a lyrical ode to spring, which I was sure was about to knock on our collective metaphorical door. (If you don't recall, feel free to go look it up; I'll wait here.)

Well, much as I did, Old Man Winter headed to Korea to prove it's not too late to make an impact. I looked out my window late Tuesday evening and gazed in wonder at lovely wet white snow covering the trees and the park across from my apartment. The snow kept falling overnight and we ended up with an inch or two of the stuff.

The forecast on Wednesday called for more snow not quite warm enough to be rain, followed by rain not quite cold enough to be snow. When I got to school, I canceled cross country due to sloppy, icy sidewalks. (That, by the way, was not the usual challenge when I ran with our team in August in St. Augustine.)

I have a little balcony alongside my classroom, and the view Wednesday morning was gorgeous.

(The mountains in winter are so much more beautiful dressed in white than brown.)

Incidentally, right outside my classroom I can see the world headquarters of Hyundai/Kia:

That is not something I anticipated a few years ago when I bought that little Kia Optima.

The best thing about the snow, though, may have been the way it covered the reason I don't spend my free periods, even in nice weather, sunning myself on my balcony...

...the school is kitty-corner from the Seocho-gu recycling center; what you are looking at here is 20,307 full garbage bags. Even they are almost pretty in the snow.

After lunch, I went for a little walk; it turned out that we had The Perfect Snow: completely melted off the sidewalks and streets, ideal for packing, and covering every tree and swath of grass with a... um... snowy-white blanket. Note to self: come up with a fresher metaphor before anybody sees this.

So I canceled the cancellation of cross country. I'm glad I did. It was a beautiful day to run.

It's not exactly really genuinely authentically cross country; it's only on Mondays and Wednesdays, only one of the kids can run a half hour, we don't have anything resembling an actual course, enough people for a team, or any schools to run against, and I keep gaining and losing people from week to week and day to day:

(Deep breath...)

Timmy came out but isn't passing anything so he can't keep doing it, though he showed up dressed to run on the first day he wasn't allowed to and I had to tell him he couldn't..
Booyoung (the girl who's the one real athlete-- see previous paragraph) was failing math last week and this week forgot to get her approval form signed. (All the teachers have to sign that the kids have C's or better or they're disqualified for the next week.)
Jee (boy) had to quit because his mom insists he take TOEFL classes instead.
Ecllid (boy) is the only one who comes out every day.
Laura said she wanted to but now is too busy with study.
Geoff, the principal's son, went out once and decided that screen golf was more his style.
Hanbyel (girl) just joined.
Sheelin (girl), Jenny, and Lanie, BFF's, wanted to join, but only to walk, but Jenny couldn't get her mom to agree anyway, but, oh wait, she did. I insisted they run at least a little, so they do for a few minutes before gossiping and giggling the rest of the way. I'll try, as with all the others, to get them to run a little more each week.

(Whew! Breathe!)

So I think my roster, in the first three weeks, has numbered 4, 3, 4, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. I think. I think I think.

As long as anybody comes out, I can help build up their self-esteem and (ssshh...) get paid overtime for going out running, which I would do anyway. Among the teachers, my friend Chris has been meeting us each day, which leads to giggly "Helllllooo, Mr. Fontanaaaa" from the girls, who think he's a dreamboat; Susan came out with us once; Nikki and Lauren have said they will. It may turn into a nice little community-building thing.

And meanwhile the run yesterday, in the park and along the creek amid great swelling mounds of pure white snowy snowy snow, was just. really. nice. So very pretty.

Okay. NOW I'm ready for spring. Tomorrow, please. Play ball!

Spring in the air

...well, I would, but I'd probably hurt my knee.

Today was the first Saturday when it began to feel as if we might survive the winter after all. I haven't been crazy about the winter; I love snow, but not cold, and there's been far, far more of the latter than the former. This winter has made me reconsider where I really want to retire one day.

But today was sunny, with a high in the mid-40s Fahrenheit, the ballplayers are working out in Florida and Arizona, and it feels like spring is just around the corner and halfway up the next block. The high is supposed to be 50 by midweek. I'm sure the cold weather's not gone completely, but I think I won't renew my health club membership next month; I'll just go back to running outside, which is as God and Abibe Bikila intended.

Speaking of which, that which we laughingly call St. Paul Cross Country chugs along. I lost one of my four ducklings, as the principal's son decided after one outing that he'd prefer screen golf, but I gained one on Friday. There's no telling if the kids will keep at it or not; to tell the truth, I'm not sure why they want to do it at all, with no competition and no "fun". But I'm grateful for each day we go out. There are a surprising number of faculty members who run: Lauren, Nick, Susan, Nikki Puckett (the new art teacher) and maybe Chris, in addition to me; that's half the staff. (And the way I run, half-staff is appropriate. Ba-dum-dum.) Several of them have said they'll come out and run with us sometime.

As for the job, the less said the better... the (A day) Periods 1-2-3-4 and (B day) Period 5 class, followed by 5 1/2 hours of free time, is wearing me down in every way. Only Zach and I have five preps and only I have a day with no free period. Bleeeeeurgh. But June is coming, and with it, a school-paid round trip back to the States. It will have been two years since I've been "home". Now if I only knew where to go...

Meanwhile, maybe spring hasn't sprung, but the crank on the jack-in-the-box is beginning to move.

Snow day!

The final, official count for yesterday's snow is 10 inches, the most they've ever recorded here.

Today we have, I guess, the first snow day anybody here's ever had. I slopped all the way to Gangnam and finally got a USB cable so I can charge my phone.

Here are a couple of pictures, down my block and up my balcony. (Does that sound vaguely dirty?)

 

...snow looks so much better the next day if it's sunny than if it's overcast.

Serenity now

...you may know it by its abbreviation, S'now.

We were back in school today after a week off for the holidays, and it snowed and snowed and... wait for it... snowed, beginning sometime in the small hours. All the kids said they'd never seen this much snow in their lives. Back in Ithaca, we had a name for this kind of January day... we called it "Monday".

The forecast was for one to three inches, which would be a lot for here, but I think we had the three before I even left the apartment. They're not ready for this kind of thing; rock salt is rare and I haven't seen any plows. What happens here is that the main streets quickly become piles of brown slush and, a couple of days after it snows, the side streets become bumpy sheets of ice until the next snow comes to cover it up. With the gym closed for New Year's, I went running... well, skating... on the path down by the creek twice over the weekend, but just walking on my street is a bit more adventurous than usual. It should take a little longer this time to wear the snow down.

On the walk to work, I saw a single moving car out on the street. At our starting time, perhaps ten percent of our students were present. Rumor had it that one of our buses was stuck in a snowbank and the police had told the other to turn around and go home, but apparently the rumor had all the veracity of a Fox and Friends news segment; 90 minutes after our first bell, all the rest of the kids trooped in.

Just as the administration canceled the Jeju Island trip in the fall before anyone had H1N1, they've announced a snow day for tomorrow. I bet the roads will be okay by then, of course.

After school, I did a long treadmill run at the jamesnasium, followed by a hot shower (so, so good... the water's not getting above tepid at home). Then I slid home, measuring the snow on the way, by a highly scientific method: I found a discarded styrofoam tray, shoved it into the snow on the roof of a parked car, then compared the tray to a sheet of typing paper at the apartment.

It's about ten inches; I measured it myself. (I realize that this may not be the first time in your lives that some of you have heard that.)

Korean tv says it's their heaviest snowfall since they started keeping track in 1904.

As soon as I got home, I took these pictures in the park across the street:

Hey, there's a tennis court open!

 

The bike is just two-tired of winter.

 

Life's Good.

A little later, I stomped my way over to Costco, and that was delightful; on Saturday, the checkout lines stretched literally two-thirds of the way to the back of the store, but this evening, you could have played Rollerball in there without disturbing anybody. On the way, I saw a lady shoveling her driveway with a dustpan, and a couple of guys using thick plastic boards. They're not really equipped for this.

As for me, I love it; there's that serene silence when there are hardly any vehicles moving and the snow muffles all sound. It's not really cold or windy, but it's white. It's lovely and I've missed it since I left Ithaca. I can't wait for 2116, when Seoul's due for another day like this.

Snow place, like home

I had already had my Eggo waffles and pot of coffee this morning when Lauren called; she was back from Christmas in Daegu and wanted to know if I'd like to join her for our traditional Sunday brunch... I would. We stayed in the neighborhood, at CofFine Gurunaru ("CofFine Gurunaru wants to be a tree and a ferry in a river just like a place to rest," as it says on the mug.) Having already eaten, I comported myself in a saintly manner and only had a caramel latte. (A big one; I said saintly, not messiahesque.)

By the time I got back to the apartment, it was snowing; the flakes were small albeit multitudinous and determined. I looked out my balcony window...

...and knew I had to get out in it. I have missed snow so much.

I've come back to the view I had as a kid in Ithaca, that snow is magical, and I felt absolutely exhilarated when I got out. I walked, in something much like one of Thich Nhat Hanh's walking meditations, along my running path down by the stream, escorted by ducks, egrets, and magpies...

...for a half hour, till I got to the AT Center, the convention hall where they were having a huge clearance sale with dozens of clothing and shoe vendors. It was a cold but serene walk.

By the time I emerged with a shell top and a pair of gloves for running, the local drivers were having even a little more trouble than they always do with the concept of merging at an intersection...

...and, by the way, I've been meaning to post for months that 95% or more of passenger cars in Korea are white, silver, or black. This video is Exhibit A. Just be glad that you're not a food-delivery guy on a scooter in Seoul traffic today... or any day, come to think of it.

I walked back to E-Mart, bumping into our principal Ron's wife and son along the way. (It's a small town after all.) Outside High Brand, the five-story gallery of little shops above E-Mart, I found proof that neither snow nor cold nor wind nor... um, more snow... will stop those poor girls who have jobs trying to draw attention to stores by wriggling about to K-pop music. They're pretty ubiquitous, both here and in Daegu (I posted about it back in April), but in this case, I think they went above and beyond...

...and, just as always, absolutely nobody passing by paid any attention to them whatsoever. Ah well, there's no business like snow business.

Then I stopped down at E-Mart (for horseradish sauce, ketchup, soy milk, pancake syrup, and cocoa mix... I have one hell of a recipe.)

And there, despite all the lovely, peaceful, blessed snow, I found the true high point of my day, a remarkably large kiwi, which, considering also its acquisition of a primitive sort of self-awareness, I suspect has been genetically modified...

...thus completing a truly fruitful journey. I returned home...

...to a whiter place than I'd left.

I love me some snow.

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.

This is NOT good

...this is scary, and I feel so helpless about it:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iiDlfwqOC5I71KgFjzSBuany-hrAD94E73500

(Now I know why it's horribly smoggy even out in the countryside.)

See that tiny dash of white cloud running east to west, toward the southeast of Korea? I'm right on the right-hand tip of it.

No wonder I see a dozen people or more every day wearing face masks.

--

There's nothing amusing about that, but I've been meaning to post the number one song in Korea this year, so you can get an idea of K-pop and how so much popular culture throws in a few words of English.

So, to distract myself from the killer air, ladies and gentlemen, the Wonder Girls:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eptHTEnapH4&NR=1

...you can't go a block downtown without hearing this song blasting from a store.

--
I'm listless and achy with a cold, so a couple of links is all you get today. Sorry! At least I hope it's a cold...

The rain, the park, and other things

(You have just gained a pound by looking at these photos.)

After class on Saturday, which I’d taken on for overtime pay on the three-day holiday weekend, Heeduk asked me what plans I had for the day. I told him I was just going to head downtown and visit Kyobo Books, people-watch, maybe see a movie. He said he was going to Kyobo anyway, and I should go with him. He drove me and two women who were his relatives, and speak no English, downtown.

After the trip to the bookstore, where I bought nothing and he spent a couple hundred dollars on books and CDs, he asked if I’d like to go with them to the Waffle House. With visions of grits and maple syrup dancing in my head, I naturally agreed. The waffle house turned out to be a 30-by-30 foot, three-story restaurant with a view of the main pedestrian drag, and the waffle turned out to be the base for a huge mound of whipped cream, scoops of vanilla and green-tea-flavored ice cream, chocolate sauce, grapes, and a tomato wedge.

Afterward, I took my leave and went back to Kyobo; It’s customary to take a small gift when you visit someone’s house, and I’d been invited to the Kims’ for Cheosuh (sorta kinda Korean Thanksgiving) on Sunday morning. After much hawing and a bit of hemming, I settled on an English-language copy of Fahrenheit 451; I figured, what better for someone who'd been teaching English for 40 years than a classic about the value of books?

Upon emerging from the bookstore to the lobby, I found it was a) dark and b) raining like a son of a... well, it was Florida rain; the sky had just opened up and was letting all its water out at once. After a bit of vain (weather vain, ha ha! Sometimes I crack myself up) waiting, largely because I was clutching a paperback book in a paper bag, I made a mad dash outside for the stairs to the underground shopping area.

The subterranean mall must be a half-mile long, with hundreds of tiny shops, entrances to department stores, and an IMAX theater. It has dozens of stairways up to the surface and down to the subway. At the bottom of these stairs, a store had set out a table with dozens of umbrellas for sale. I bought a manly black one, and found out later that it was scalloped around the edges. That may not be quite so macho, but then there are people who might say I’m a little scalloped around the edges myself, so whatever.

I wandered among the shops, hoping the precipitation would abate, and came upon a Krispy Kreme outlet. The nice young lady behind the counter offered me a free sample; she had obviously deduced from my build that I’d never had a doughnut before. It was hot, it was good, and I didn’t think a bit about how I’d just watched a Niagara of sugary, calorific glazing pour down on the doughnuts. It did keep my sugar buzz from the waffle going very nicely.

I kept perambulating subterraneously until the rain slowed to a drizzle, stepped over the little sandbags somebody had arrayed at the bottom of the stairs, and squished back up to the surface. Then I walked to the Bell Park and took a bus home; I figured I should get there before it poured again. And I did, barely.

Oh, and kids: always close your windows before you leave home, or buy a Samsung tv; they hold up nicely when they get rained on.