Photos

...here are some.

Oh frabjous day...

...callooh, cally, he chortled in his joy.

What a great day!

I got paid yesterday for my overtime work on Chosuk weekend, and my friend Ray and I had been talking about going out to Camp Walker, one of the US Army garrisons, to see if some of the stores out there had clothes that would fit us. So this morning we did.

First, we found a little Korean-run restaurant that specializes in real, genuine, honest-to-gosh American brunch! Much as I like Korean food, give me some French toast with syrup, eggs, and coffee once in awhile. Which they did. Heaven on earth! (They also had bagels, croissants, pancakes, orange juice, and that old breakfast favorite, Kool-Aid.)

Then, in a little shop just outside Camp Walker's gate, we hit the mother lode: I got a heavy-duty winter coat, a really nice windbreaker/raincoat, and a t-shirt, all for about a hundred bucks; I know I should have haggled, but somehow it still feels like I'm using Monopoly money, and I've always hated haggling... I have to overcome that! As I expected, a lot of hip-hoppy clothing, definitely not made for a Simon and Garfunkel kind of guy. But the jackets are great.

Then, across the street, I got a bookbag/backpack for thirteen bucks that was comparable to the ones for fifty that I passed up at E-Mart. Come to think of it, the belt I bought last week from a table on the street was seven bucks, compared to E-Mart's seventeen. Hmm...

(I've found that I've had to make some compromises with my ethics about animals... the winter coat has down in it and my belt is leather. I hate that! But the fact is that it would be nearly impossible to find strictly animal-friendly clothes here. I did reject a coat that had fur trim around the collar. We do what we can.)

After that, I found a tiny shoemaker's shop. That is, the shop was tiny; the shoemaker was merely diminutive. I asked him to punch one more buckle-hole in my new belt (to make it tighter, believe it or not; it's not that I'm losing weight-- the belt's just really big) which he did, and he refused to take any money.

Then, when I got home, the guy came and hooked up my Internet! Oh, this is great. It only took a month (exactly) since I got here. I have DSL service, the visit was free and it only costs a little over 30 bucks a month. By the way, remember how I mentioned the service ethic here? The DSL company didn't say the guy would come out between eight and one or one and six... they said between one and two, and he was there by 1:10.

So this, my friends, has been one terrific day.

And yours...?

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.

Slurpin', Shiverin', Shilleh Hamnida

If you take a pair of boxers from the washing machine, suspend them on a hanger on the front of a pedestal fan, and let them blow in the wind like an eccentrically designed flag, they’ll dry in about three minutes. This may come in handy if you’re ever ten thousand miles from home and don’t have a dryer. I’m just sayin’.

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Last week, at the beginning of one of my classes, a girl of about six came up to me and started petting my forearm as if it were a cat. She was enthralled. I pulled away, confused. Then I realized: Korean men have no hair on their arms.

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Ray has been living in Mrs. Kim’s late mother’s house, which is as far above my apartment in size and quality as mine is above the dorm. Now the family is selling the house, and Ray says he’s happy to be moving back into the dorm, because he can save a tremendous amount of money: his Internet and heat are paid with a simple $90 deduction from his pay each month. For all the dorm’s faults, the ugly little rooms will be cozy as Bag End in the winter.

I’ll have to pay my own bills, and the heating bill may be enormous. It’s getting chillier already, and Daegu gets down to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. For that matter, there’s a two-inch gap between the window and the right-hand sill over the tv to allow the cables to come in. I told Heeduk about it, and he’s going to have George and Manager Yeung see if they can find something foamy and insulationesque to stick in there.

I have been bequeathed a heater that resembles a pedestal fan. It makes things nice and toasty for a six-foot radius. Even so, I probably will need to put plastic sheeting over all the windows, keep the heat down, wear lots of layers, and hope my hands don’t shiver too much to shell out all that money.

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When I first got here, I didn’t mind picking up my cup of soup to drink it, but I was careful to not slurp. Don’t want to be the ugly American, after all. But then I noticed that everybody slurps: it’s good manners, as it shows how much you’re enjoying the food. So now I’m learning to slurp. It’s kind of liberating, in a way.

However, an awful lot of men hawk and spit, and I think that’s one habit I don’t think I’ll pick up.

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Korean currency is a funny thing. A thousand Won equals about 88 cents, so I was instantly a millionaire when I exchanged my dollars at Incheon Airport. The largest bill they have is 10,000 Won, so that made for quite a stack, though as I get nearer my first payday, it isn’t nearly as big a lump as it was. If I were paid my monthly salary in cash, I’d have to try to close my wallet on over 200 bills.

On the other hand, their denominations are different sizes and colors, so in that way they’re a lot smarter than we are.

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Now that I have my alien card and bank account, I should have the ‘net hooked up at home in a few days. It’s been hard without it; I’ve missed chatting with friends, I’ve missed the collapse of both the US economy and the Mets (the two are equally important), and I missed the debate. I can’t believe Obama isn’t up by fifteen percent.

In 1968, my Uncle Frederick sent us a post card from Southeast Asia that said one thing: “Vote for George Wallace.” I thought, and I still think, that telling someone how to vote is the epitome of rudeness. But… please go vote for Obama as many times as you can. I’m Steve Cornman, and I approved this message.

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At the track meet, I sat for awhile with some Americans, Nike executives who came up from Busan to see their wares in action. Sadly, the six-year-olds in China who actually manufactured the gear couldn’t make it. Anyway, the guys gave me a program and a beer and passed on some of their experience of living in Korea.

What one guy said stuck with me: Korea is a land of opposites that are equally true. It’s very, very hot in the summer (Ryoo, a girl I’m helping with her writing, says she saw a tire melting on the street in August) and very, very cold in the summer. The women are very beautiful and very… not. Their voices can be charming and can drive you up the wall.

More to my point, he said that Koreans are the most gracious and the rudest people in the world. He’s right: they can be very warm one-to-one, whether welcoming you to their homes or waiting on you in a store. It feels as if E-Mart has hundreds of salespeople, and they bow and say hello and would break a leg to grind your coffee or bag your vegetables. One doesn’t tip cabbies or waiters, because providing good service is part of being hospitable. But…

One of the first phrases I learned was “shilleh hamnida” (excuse me), but I have no idea why they have it in the language; I don’t believe any Korean has ever actually said it. People will brush by on the bus, bumping you hard, and not acknowledge that you exist. Sometimes I’ll be walking down the sidewalk toward two people talking, and one of them will seem to go out of his way to stand in mine. On Saturday and Sunday evenings, the grocery is mobbed; last night, I had a woman to my left and a kid on my right, and the little booger shoved my cart into her to get by. She never even noticed.

But when some little kid’s face lights up and he says “Hi!” in English, so proud to show an American he knows the word, all that is hard to remember.

Now we're cooking with gas

...actually, I can do that already; I have a two-burner stovetop (no oven) and know how to make everything from fried eggs with hash browns to a grilled egg sandwich.

But some good stuff is happening: I finally got my alien registration card, which will allow me to get the Internet (at long, long last), as well as a cell phone, if I want one. I also opened a bank account, which has a zero balance, but will be bulging with Won on October 10. I authorized a charge of about $4.40 a year, which will get me a Visa check card. (Highway robbery, I know.)

Gale, who lives in the dorm, told me we get CNN here, which would be a big deal for me, as I feel completely cut off from the news at home. I hoped to even get to watch the debates. But apparently central Daegu is on a different cable system from the one I get on the east side; I get the Discovery Channel instead. It's the only purely English-language channel I get; I still want CNN.

It's very chilly and windy today, and I only have the one cardigan and no coat. I was really excited for thirty seconds: I found a lovely jacket that fits me at the outdoor store across the street from the school. It had many zippers. It was GoreTex. It cost four hundred bucks.

I don't really need a jacket.

I met an American soldier at the track meet; he confirmed what I had guessed, that there are stores near the army garrison here that carry larger sizes for the Americans. Failing that, Ray says there's a Russian store by the beach in Busan, a mere three-hour round trip by bullet train. I think I'll check here first.

Despite my whining, though, things are looking up: I am still getting more and more and more high-level students, and I've learned to say "Chaeshik juuija imnida" ("I'm a vegetarian"), which will make me much more confident in going to new restaurants.

Besides, the Mets were on tv, live, this morning, and they won in a dramatic finish. So all is well, for the moment, in the world.

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.)

My house is a very, very, very fine house

...George just told me they've extended the lease on my apartment! I won't have to move to the dorm, or anywhere else. Ray has pointed out that it will be a lot more expensive to live there than in a snug little hole in the warren... I mean dorm. But I think I can wear layers and not burn the oil too much, and cooking for myself I can use the microwave the vast majority of the time.

I have neither two cats nor a yard, but I'm really happy.