Seoulander

집으로

2007-09-12T19:51:00.000-07:00

August 27, 2007

And at 10.20 in the morning aboard KAL 703 I pressed the off button on my cell phone and it was over. The screen went black, I realized, for the first time all summer. I'd been texting my goodbyes for four hours.

Korea has a different cell phone system, so right away I figured out that despite my best efforts, I was going to have to buy a phone. The summer filled my scratched white Motorola with names, photos, messages, and schedules.

Now I'm back in Narata Airport and, like the rest of the time until I return, my Korean phone remains, well, its own entity. A small group of Korean passengers sits together sharing Japanese snacks. CNN is on for the first time in months, and I come to understand what I've known for weeks: the facets of my daily life -- that my texts, my tv watching, my music listening, my books - have just switched into English again, and I feel like crying.

Walking out of Meeple café after an evening of studying last week, the afternoon had become a strong blue evening, with lightbulbs hanging over tables of shoes and pans of tteokbbokgi. It was the first time in a year that I felt summer -- because of [changma] the particular colors and sounds of that summer night were unique to late August - and joining the crowds out on the street I got to thinking that this had been a suspended reality. Later, walking with Kaila along the warm Yeoido concrete lining the Han, I felt it again.

While I've surely broken someone's back today with my bag jammed with Hanja, Sogang, and children's books (Gil Sun took me to the Hongik Munjeom in Sinchon yesterday and bought me a big print children's story, a small print juvenile book, and a copy of Coffee Prince “for where you are now, will be soon, and will be when we see each other next time - study hard”), have been racking my brain to come up with ways to keep the learning as consistent as possible, have promised and been promised by my friends to write, my life is about to change so much from what it was there. It's already two hours away - a life that even my thumbs lived up until the last minute.

I don't feel like reflecting on it from any particular vantage point. I've been away at the edges of my world and I hope it shows. It was so big, it was.

And now I'm about to get my day back. But it doesn't work like that: I don't even know my address or phone number by heart anymore, not to say anything about my sister's in Massachusetts. Growing up has meant that time bleeds into time. And no cell phone service can stop that.

Some of the Words

2007-09-09T22:15:00.000-07:00

처음에 여행 때문에 신났지만, 어떻게 외국 학생하고 한국 학생들이 한국 전통 문화에 대해서 통할 수 있을 지 걱정했어요. 주최측이 학생들을 7개 조로 나누었는데, 외국 학생하고 한국 학생이 섞여 있었어요. 기행에 나서기 전에 우리 조가 구경할 장소 2곳에 대해서 연구하고 한국어와 영어로 보고하러 여러 번 만나야 했어요. 좋은 생각이었지만 마감 시간이 너무 가까워서 문화 소통이 어려워서 우리 조가 스트레스를 받았어요. 그런데 8월 8일에 경복궁 국립미술관에서 모일 때 걱정들이 없어졌어요. 새롭게 만난 친구랑 구경하는 동안에 서로를 쉽게 설명하고 이해할 수 있었어요. 그 다음에 버스로 전주로 가면서 얘기하는 동안에 우리는 친구가 됐어요. 전주에서는 한옥 마을에서 잤어요. 거기에서 한지 만드는 법을 같이 배울 때 모두 실수를 해서, 우리는 실수에 대한 걱정이 없어졌고 편하게 됐어요.

대학교에서 한국 문학 수업을 들었을 때 <삼대>와 <태평천하>를 읽은 후에 한옥 생활에 대해서 어느 정도 이해하긴 하지만 그때서야 비로소 한옥생활이 얼마나 공동생활인지 알게 됐어요. 염상섭의 조씨 집안이나 채만식의 윤씨 집안과 달리 우리 여행 “가족”에게는 한옥생활이 어울렸어요. 한옥의 마당에서 늦게까지 얘기해서 친한 친구가 됐어요.

전주에 가기 전에 한옥 마을을 보고 싶었는데 무슨 특별한 것을 배우고 싶은 것은 아니었어요. 기행을 시작하기 전부터 밤 세미나 때 외국학생과 한국학생이 우리가 본 것들 중에 무엇이 한국 문화를 반영하는것에대한 토론을 해야 했어요. 그때 제 생각에는 한국 현대 문화가 한국 전통 문화를 반영하고 있다고 했을 때 한국친구들의 의견이 달랐어요. 한국친구들은 대부분 한국학생이 전통 문화에 대해서 잘 모르고 관심도 없다고 했어요. 저는 한국에서는 조선시대에 대한 인기 있는 드라마들이 있고 전통 음식도 먹고 불교의 전통들도 전해줘서 미국보다 한국 전통 문화가 현대 문화하고 공존하고 있다고 했어요. 우리 기행의 목적이 철저하고 올바은 한국 전통 문화에 대한 이해를 반전시키기 위한것 이라서 그런 토론들이 중요해요. 우리는 서로의 의견들을 이해하면서 전주에서 여러 장인들하고 얘기할 때 어떻게 한국 전통 문화가 현대에 계속 존재하는지에 대해서 배웠어요.

예를 들면 전통 방법으로 한지를 만든 다음에 실업가 하고 반기문 국제 연합 사무총장의 사무실를 한지로 꾸미고 한국 정부가 한지로 만든 중요한 서류를 사용하고 한지가 공기를 정화해서 알레르기가 있는 아이들이 한지로 방 벽지를 발라요. 그리고 한지로 만든 옷도 봤어요. 한지를 만드는 방법과 한지를 파는것에 대한 얘기한 다음에 우리 친구들의 의견을 좀 더 이해할 수 있었어요. 문화사업도 중요해요. 한국 전통 문화가 살아서 계속 존재하며 바뀌고 있어요.

살아 있는 한국 전통 문화를 대흥사에서도 경험했어요. 거기에서 한 스님이 불교가 인생이라서 쉬운 개념이라고 했어요. 그리고 거기에서 임진왜란 때 조선 숭유억불책 때문에 약화된 불교를 소생시키러 서산대사는 승군을 조직하여 호국불교를 만들었어요. 신라시대부터 대흥사하고 다른 한국 절들이 계속 여러 민강신앙과 샤머니즘을 교배시키고 있어서 불교가 한국 문화를 정말 잘 반영해요. 거기에서 템플스테이를 했어요. 아침 3시에 일어나서 스님들과 기도를 올렸어요. 아침에 하늘이 어둡고 공기가 시원했어요. 절안에 연초롱에서 분홍색 빛이 나오고 옛날 그림도 있고 향을 피우다가 밝은 색으로 나무용 밑 하고 금 부처 앞에서 스님들과 노래했어요. 분위기가 아름답고 강력했어요. 그 다음에 스님하고 산책하는 동안 대흥사의 녹차에 대한 설명을 들었어요.

스님이 설명했을 때, 저는 한국의 녹차가 한지와 비슷하다고 생각했어요. 조금 전에 우리는 아름다운 보성 녹차밭을 구경했어요. 그 밭이 경치가 아름다워서 거기에서 드라마들을 만들기 때문에 인기가 많고, 진짜 전통 문화 사업이 됐어요. 그런대 조선 시대에 차 문화가 거의 사라졌어요. 대흥사의 초의 스님이 조선 유생을 만나고 나서 같이 사라지는 것을 막았어요. 그렇게 불교가 전통 문화가 현대 문화하고 융합하고 있는 것이 신기했어요. 정말 가 볼 만 했어요.

물론 한국 전통 문화의 어떤 부분들은 변함 없이 계속 아름답고 신기한 것들 이었어요. 예를 들면 월출산의 경치는 항상 아름다워요. 8월 10일에는 다 함께 월출산에 다녀왔어요. 일찍 일어나서 월출산으로 갔어요. 등산했을 때 나무들하고 풀 사이로 시원한 바람이 불어왔어요. 등산로 옆에는 졸졸 흐르는 시내가 있었고, 그 아름다운 소리들 속에서 우리의 목소리가 함께 나온다는 것이 기뻤어요. 옛날 사람들이 거기에서 친구와 작연으로부터 영감을 받았던 것처럼, 우리도 영감을 받을 수 있었어요.

그런 아름다운 곳이 많았어요. 진도에서 우리는 유명한 조선시대 화가인 운림각의 운림산방을 구경했어요. 거기에서 영감을 주는 경치를 본 후에 운림산방의 문인화들을 볼 수 있었어요. 우리 나라의 강진에서 보았던 청자처럼 정말로 진도 경치와 문인화 관련성을 볼 수 있었어요. 책을 동해 그런 특징에 대해서 읽었는데, 직접 봐서 정말 신기했어요.

그리고 제주도의 아름다운 경치와 날씨 때문에 돌아오고 싶지 않았어요. 이 3회 SKT 문화독립기행이 정말 재미있어서 만났던 친구들이나 배웠던 것들, 보았던 곳들을 잊지 못할 것 같아요.

Some Pictures from Hanmunpyo Until I Get Up the Words

2007-08-15T22:05:00.000-07:00

This morning I returned from Jeju Island after a week of exploring Korean traditional culture with the SK Telecom Hanmunpyo trip. As we wound through the southwest, I met and learned from students, monks, dancers, paper-makers, business owners, tour guides, artists, journalists, singers, actors, chefs, potters, and professors.

This was my best week yet in Korea. Unfortunately, my finals are coming up and my words are due elsewhere, but I'll start in slowly in the next few days.

Humility

2007-08-04T21:35:00.001-07:00

The Week of July 30

Monday was back to school and sluggish. We sat around rubbing our heads and eyes and lobbing empty coffee cups into the door or wall, by which we meant trashcan. Our Korean had taken a hit during the vacation, but our teachers had already prepared review lessons to whip us back into shape.

But that made two times for me that day, as I'd "gotten up" at 6 to go to the gym. (I joined just before vacation, so I until Monday I hadn't yet put my morning-workout-to-avoid-wasting-precious-afternoon-time plan for a valuable gym experience into place.) I had been a horrible student in Spanish class through high school because I'd always hesitated to speak, and it wasn't until I took SPAN 130 in my freshman fall that I got over that apprehension and began feeling comfortable in the language. Fortunately, I've been learning Korean in a similar atmosphere, so while my speaking is still terrible, apprehension hasn't really been a problem. But just in case, there's also the experience of chatting without any clothes on every morning to really allay self-consciousness.

In the afternoon, we had our last pronunciation class with 김지은B, as it's 김지은A that teaches us speaking. We'd learned great things throughout the MW afternoon course, including 자음동화 (Consonant Assimilations) and 모음조화 (Vowel Harmony), but when my question about quickly reviewing double consonant pronunciation led to another one about vowel sounds, we ended up reviewing basic letter sounds to all of our disappointment, and I felt responsible.

On Tuesday Sung Ho returned and we all went out for 돈가스 (pork katsu) at our favorite place across the street, 왕돈가스, to catch up with each other. After grammar class, I met up with Yoon Ji in Hongdae, where she attends Hongik. She spent a year in high school as an exchange student in Minnesota, where she learned to bake some of the most delicious things I've ever tried, including the chocolate biscotti she brought with her that day. It was only the second time we'd met, so she told me a bit more about her friends, most notably Turtle, the cute back-pack-toting, glasses-wearing character from Gangnam who is always up for eating and exploring Seoul, and Trash, the perpetually-guest gourmand who hates studying even more than the Turtle and always shows up to join them for food, usually when it means cutting a class to do so. Person, as Yoon Ji is known in her circle for how she is to be treated because of her "untouchable" status when it comes to pranks as a result of her 군대-serving boyfriend, bestowed these names upon them. Most young people acquire an embarrassing nickname at one time or another, and my friend Hye Ji is currently thinking up one for me. She showed me around pretty Hongik and we went to her club's room (at Hongik and Sogang, clubs have their own space inside the student center) where she taught me GOSTOP, a card game her friends play after drinking. I talked with her boyfriend, who is on the school's pistol team, over the phone for a while.

Later, I met Hyeon Ju, and she showed me some of the proverbs she'd written down. One of them was something to the effect of the humble person can only expect a humble life and we talked for a bit about American humble's two meanings, a linguistic "insight" I only partially believe in. The beginning of our dialogue went something like:

"Do you know what this one means?"
"No."
"Humble means both the good quality of being modest and polite about yourself and also the bad quality of being average, meager, modest, or unimportant."
"Oh. In Korea it's only a good thing. 겸손. Being poor or meager is 그롯이 작다."

and continued on into my guesses about the American nation and my generalizations about American culture and values that I managed to cobble together with my citizen's public education, and hers about Korea. Reading over David Silva's reconstructed conversation, his point about cultural differences and language is clear:

Hasuksaeng: How do you say 재수생 (jaesusaeng) in English?
Author: Do you mean “a student who sat for the college entrance examination, failed it, and is now studying at a 학원 (hagw0n 'academic institute’) so he can take the exam the next year”?
Hasuksaeng: Yes! How do you say that in English?
Author: Uhm . . . Well, you have to say “a student who sat for the college entrance examination, failed it, and is now studying at a 학원 so he can take the exam the next year.”
Hasuksaeng: Yes—what’s the English word for that?
Author: There isn’t one.
Hasuksaeng: Really? So how do you talk about 재수생 in English?
Author: You don’t. There’s no such thing as a 재수생 in America.
Hasuksaeng: So what happens when a student fails the college entrance examination?
Author: Nothing, because there’s no way to “fail” the exam. You might earn a low score, but there’s no specific passing grade.
Hasuksaeng: How strange.

[From Silva, David J. "Western Attitudes Toward the Korean Language: An Overview of Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Mission Literature." Korean Studies. 26.2 (2003). Access it here.]

But for us in a Sinchon Starbucks, I'm not sure how much I believed that I was introducing something important or even exclusive. Searching for the lost proverb online, business America in its pushy off-the-rack suit and toting some CEO's biography was telling me to bold, and know myself and act on my abilities, while religious America, in its Sunday oxfords and khakis and holding a monogrammed Bible, told me about God's altar. This is not to get all sappy and drone on about post-nations and globalization with eyes so bright there's nothing behind them, but after so many meeting different kinds of people this summer, or seeing the wry ballet of 지하철 1호선, it's hard to give language this much credit when people are just walking around reconciling themselves with what they've been told they are.

On Wednesday I went to visit Hye Jin in Suwon. I had to write a newspaper article for my writing class, and I'd chosen to fake an interview with Steven Felix about cycling, which I worked on on the ride over. Hye Jin and I walked around the lake that her institute overlooks, which is in the center of a pretty Suwon park. As at Lotte World's Seokchonhosu, we were passed right and left by ajummas outfitted in full mountaineering gear, including matching black nylon sweatpants, bandanas, boots, and workout gloves. We climbed up onto a traditional pavilion and stretched out our legs to watch the sun set. Afterward, we wandered a through a rice field and made it over to a samgyeopsal restaurant for dinner. It was scrumptious. Wrapped in lettuce leaf, seasoned with sesame oil and rock salt and ssamjang, eaten with the kimchi sizzling in the fat collecting at the bottom of the inclined grill, it was a new and gorgeous flavor.

Thursday afternoon I ran over to a panel on education around the world put together by Athena for her teacher training module at Ko Dae. I learned a lot from my eloquent Algerian, Guatemalan, German, Malaysian, and Korean peers during the discussion, including the fact that the weekend in Algeria means Thursday and Friday. I had no idea she was doing this, so I unwittingly blew Athena's surprise by mentioning Jeong Woo by name a few times; she had tucked her son in among the panel as "Jay from Canada." I liked the questions I was asked, didn't like it when the room was so ready to agree with one of the panel members that migration itself was at the core of social and economic problems dismantling the parent-teacher relationship in his country. When I posed back the same question to the packed room with only one male teacher in it about why they thought "there are so many more women than men in primary education," they answered me with: "What [the Algerian panelist said]. Only women are patient enough to put up with the kids." But at other times, the teachers debated with one another, such as when one teacher asked if parents in our countries had lost trust in their educational systems only to be interrupted by another "clarifying" that trust hadn't been lost, just "supplemented."

Over lunch, I talked some more with my peers and learned that political parties run overseas operations as NGOs in Korea, and that my Algerian and Guatemalan peers were studying in Korea as part of economic negotiations between their countries and Korea. Neither spoke much Korean, and both had spent their time in Korea improving their English through their graduate studies at Ko Dae, a fact impressing on me just how strange the English situation here has become.

I saw Ratatouille in Yongsan with Presca and her cousins, which made me feel warm and great.

On Friday, the Deans Farley visited us at Sogang. My class predictably went wild over this 멋있는 pair, and my teacher had Masato do his presentation over again. He'd just finished the brilliant, memorized sum of his travels, study interests, experience in Korea, and world view told through a touching series of vignettes about tomatoes, and we were all eager to show him off.

We went out for boribap, and back for our meeting with Sogang about our travel assignment for next week. Again, Sogang, which got us all into the trip in the first place, prepared a small orientation for us about how we should prepare to ask intelligent questions, keep an 일기, and get the most out of the trip culturally and linguistically. 마음에 들다.

We met our guests for Milky Road and headed over to Daehagno to see 지하철 1호선 (Subway Line 1), a musical about Seoul life that's been playing since 1994 and, like Nanta, changing to fit the times. I loved it -- its Woodcutter and the Angel allusions, its dialects, its hip-hop subway salesmen, its IMF crisis -- because it hurt so much. Most of all, I loved the Ladies of Gangnam number:

The picture comes from here.

It made me happy, sad, and amazed about life. We ate dinner at a nearby ddalk kalbi restaurant.

On Saturday, despite Kaila's call to confirm I was awake, I woke up late and had time enough only to 세수하다. Feeling dumb and worried that my dark jeans would not suffice to meet the dress code at the DMZ, I piled into the cab with the others and headed over to the Hilton, where the Dean and Victoria and a whole tour bus were waiting to leave. Veronica handed me a heavenly almond croissant while the tour guide confirmed that we had our passports.

I didn't.

Feeling ever worse, I called Presca to make sure that at least she'd be able to make it. But in a mix-up, she was waiting at the wrong hotel and had gotten in a cab to make it across Seoul in time. I held off the tour guide to wait out the three more minutes for Presca to arrive only for her to arrive at the wrong Grand Hilton. I sadly waved off the bus and waited for Presca. We had brunch and headed to Sinchon to see a movie.

A few weeks ago, I mistakenly wrote that we waited out a 폭풍우. I meant to say that we waited out a 소나기 (sudden rain shower). Walking around E Dae with Presca, even my earlier admission of the error to her didn't help me as the sky opened up its tanks on us, soaking us both through. We slid into the Migliore a few blocks down, wrung out our clothing in the entrance, and made our way up to the Megabox. I dried my hair in the hand dryer and we killed our waiting time looking in vain for a towel.

We saw 화려한 휴가 (Splendid Holiday/ May 18) about the Gwangju Uprising. Professor Hwang taught us quite a lot about Gwangju and I was eager to see the film. Weeping along with everyone else in the theater, I was staggered to remember how much the people around me remembered. Presca was right when she pointed out that the worst part of the movie wasn't when everyone died; it was when everyone was celebrating in front of the guns that would cut them down.

We went wetly to meet everyone for lunch in Insadong. The Farleys took us to Sanchon, the Buddhist temple cuisine that Kaila discovered, where we ate terrifically.

Dean Farley sniffing the nasty rain smell that Presca
and later Kaila would gang up on me about.

These photos are from Mark's camera and by Kaila's hand.

Afterwards, we watched noodle-making and parted ways. The rest of us made our way back through the alleys to the Old Tea Shop, where as soon as we'd sat down to order, Dean Farley walked in and chided us for wanting a free tea so badly as to intercept them.

Noodle making.

En route.

Sipping on delicious sikhye, ginseng, pear, jujube, and cinnamon teas, we contemplated actually intercepting them later on.

Thanks for showing us such a great time, JE Deans Farley!

School Break

2007-08-04T21:35:00.000-07:00

The Week of July 23

Was my school break. I met Hye Jin on Monday at Lotte World, a magical place in Jamsil in southeastern Seoul. Boxed in by Lotte Group's magnificent department store, buttressed by Lotte's sizzling Lotterias, guarded by Lotte's Castle Apartments, funded largely by purchases on Lotte credit cards (it cost half the price if you used the Lotte Card), the amusement park had indoor and outdoor areas, with Magic Island sitting in the middle of a pretty lake. Spending the day there was a lot of fun -- standing in line makes it easy to talk about anything, so we chatted all day long, which had me improvising like crazy to keep up. My favorite ride was the Gyro Drop, which stopped my heart for a second as I came crashing down on Seoul and which was great to stand in line under because the ride would pull a delayed wind down with it every time, prompting exclamations of 시원해! and 아 너무 좋다! from us all. At night the Seokchon Lake was a great walk -- the whole neighborhood came out to exercise or stroll around the lit-up castle under the trees of the manicured path. Leaving, we ran right into the laser show, which had the constellations come down from the Lotte Dome to talk with us as we left.

At Magic Island.

The Gyro Drop.

The laser show.

A lookout on Lotte World's Seokchonhosu,
known as one of the best views in Seoul.

On Tuesday I met up with my Hanmunpyo group to run over our drafts for the historical sites we were researching -- Soswaewon and Songgwansa. We met at Toz in Sinchon, which on a rainy day became even more of a utilitarian-feeling place than it already was, but our group is full of characters so we had a great time together. It was still raining as we left, so we decided to get dinner at a nearby sujebi place. My friend, who we've stuck with the name Babyface because of his email address containing the singer's name and who studies German, English, and Chinese at 외대, walked me all the way back to the goshiwon because he didn't want me to get wet in the rain.

On Wednesday Yoon Ji and I met each other. Athena and Hugh had introduced us with a phone call last Saturday morning, and after texting her that I was wearing the gray shirt, we met and walked over to the Minto Bakery, a castle in the middle of Sinchon. She studied a year in Minnesota, so finding the moment to break into Korean proved too hard to do when more interesting topics were more accessible.

On Thursday I met Presca at the Seoul Arts Center to see the Musee d' Orsay exhibit, which turned out to be more difficult to characterize than we would have imagined. The Arts Center itself is an amazing fortress tucked into the hills of southeastern Seoul and puts on dramas, concerts, exhibitions, and dance performances. I met Audrey for samgyetang in Sinchon and meet her E Dae friends in Gangnam.

On Friday my sisters arrived in Seoul. Fueled by "the most famous juice in the world" which we procured from a rolling stand in a building lobby, Presca, Kaila, and I had taken the beautiful cable car ride up Namsan and spent some time at the peak. Coming down the mountain, the fog had rolled in, leaving just a gigantic TV screen floating in the sky.

We waited for Anastasia and Ashley for more than an hour, and it turns out that they had been doing the same, a few exits down. Having sent Presca and Kaila home, I met the two little writing tutors and saw Myeongdong for the first time. We headed over to Presca's to introduce them and to meet her cousin, who had just flown in. Presca had these great accupressure slippers that only her aunt was able to procure. I wore them for awhile.

On Saturday, I had lunch with Kaila at a boribap place in Sinchon that I'd spotted a few days before while waiting for Audrey to come out of the samgyetang house. The restaurant, 춘향 보리밥, was airy, colorful, and bright. We sat next to a window, and as we tucked into our food the elevator jazz that the restaurant was playing struck a weird note in me. It was a pretty gloomy day, and 6 floors above Sinchon's shiny storefronts, their dull brick backs just looked glum. Gazing at the burnt-out remains of the once-sparkly Haagen-Dazs I hadn't even noticed disappear, the motion of everything and everyone around me became overwhelming: just then, I'd learned that Jane was moving out and Kaila was moving down to the girls' floor, plus Presca was due to leave shortly and I'd caught Audrey on her way out of the country. The storefronts here just went up and down -- the tower across the street went up in days and the glassy grid on the main road disappeared under Hyundai's creme tiles -- and the young went by two by two. My sisters had come in yesterday from a grape-growing province and before that, months-ago home, only to disappear the next night. I felt seasick for a few hours.

I met Anastasia and Ashley after their tour and took them to tea at a traditional tea shop right on Insadong-gil. We had patbingsu and an assortment of cinnamon, jujube, and 모과 teas, but the service we received was the more noteworthy. The waiter who brought the patbingsu accidentally dipped his finger in it while setting it down -- then did what any of us would do -- licked off the ice cream. While we ate what was left, the hostess picked up a pen and started writing on the wall like all the other customers. Though this is not to say that this was not a delicious, relaxing, and beautiful place. Afterwards, we walked over on Jongno and up Chengyecheon to Seoul Plaza.

The marriage ducks Anastasia received from her counselor.

On Sunday, I met Hye Jin to explore Seoul Forest. But the rain forced us to change our plans, so we went under the sea at COEX's huge aquarium.

Hye Jin wrote her thesis on the plant in the foreground.

There was a large fish-in-household-appliances exhibit, which was a huge hit with the kids.

Later, I met up with Gail in Samcheongdong. We sat down at a roadside stall to play with carmelized sugar candy, trying to poke out the imprinted heart without breaking the rest of the candy. While we chattered on with the vendor, we failed to to keep our hearts intact. After turning away from long lines at the famous ramyeon and sujebi places, Gail told me about going hungry daily during her missionary work in Jamaica. Every morning, they would make and eat their only meal: a meager sujebi. After that, we couldn't think of a good place for dinner, so we walked on until we came across a seasonal flower cuisine restaurant, where we ate, in awkward contrast, exquisitely. We had tea and went for a walk.

뜨거운 바람

2007-07-27T18:02:00.002-07:00

The Week of July 16

Began with my our trip back from the 고속 Bus Terminal. It turns out that my bank had changed my PIN number when replacing my debit card, but somewhere in the conversations among New York, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Singapore, "Your new PIN number is" turned into "Use your existing PIN number to activate your card." So for the past few weeks, I'd been on the phone each midnight trying to figure out the issue. After fending off my landlord for two weeks and eating in Gyeongju on Kaila and Presca's dime, I finally got an answer from my bank: my PIN was different and nobody had any idea how I was going to find out my new one. I'd reached Visa Emergency Cash time.

But just as I was ordering another 700000 won from Singapore, my father called with the letter he found in the mail basket. I celebrated my first experience of purchasing power in weeks with tteokbbokki and mandu at a pojangmacha. It was almost 2 in the morning.

The next day I went with Sung Ho to Meeple to practice for our oral exam. Off exit 4 of Sinchon Station in the direction of E Dae, it's a much more comfortable place than Toz, but still a great place to spread out books and get some work done. Sung Ho wandered off for awhile to find a Russian-Korean dictionary so that he can keep learning both languages at once.

On Wednesday I went out with Hye Ji and her friend to a board game bang, where we played Jenga and Clue, which I had to learn to play in Korean. The large, airy room with couches full of college students was a ton of fun. The loser of each game wears an awful wig and gets his head pounded with an air-filled plastic hammer. And I mean pounded.

On Thursday I joined the Mijee Fitness Center next door to Sogang. After so many attempts to get the jjimjilbang's faulty bikes not to short circuit in the middle of my ride, I decided that this would be the best way to do things. Mijee is clean, uncrowded, launders your workout uniforms, and is well worth the 90000 won/month fee. To thank Presca and Masato for feeding me in earlier weeks, I took them out to boribap in Apgujeong. We found a great place for dessert in an art gallery. At Cafe Space, we tried all manner of lattes and a fantastic waffle.

Masato and I headed off with our arms laden with fruit to Itaewon for our friend's Sogang Level 3 vacation party, where we chatted through the night with a ton of fascinating exchange students and enjoyed food from everyone's countries. The missionary Alberto from Mexico outdid all of us with his hundreds of tacos, but Mayumi came in a close second with her okonomiyaki.

On Saturday night I went out with Hye Ji, her boyfriend, and his friend to a small marina in Incheon to eat 회. It was delicious, "Korean-style" (with a slightly sour gochujang) or "Japanese-style" (with soy sauce and wasabe) as they explained it to me, and as we toured the 어시장, I couldn't believe how nice it was to have met such people. The combination of bright lights, slate sky, vinyl tents, wet asphalt, cardboard picnic blankets, and fish mongering was magical and unlike anything I've ever seen. They had met studying English in Vancouver, so we traded stories about language learning over patbingsu in Samcheongdong.

The neighborhood Hye Ji's boyfriend lives in has low, linoleum-covered tables on the sides of the alleys for kicking up one's feet when the summer evening sky brings only 뜨거운 바람.

Ancient

2007-07-27T18:02:00.001-07:00

The Week of July 9

Monday evening was a hard one to get through when the person I met asked me another favor by first confirming everything I could use to politely decline it and then presenting me with the bill of my own logic and a pretty uncomfortable request. After I sent the email she'd asked me to, we were unable to get a conversation going because she kept pausing to read my student book. By the end of the meeting, she instructed me to prepare topics for next time. She also commented to me that "You're just like me -- reading and writing is good but speaking is bad."

Walking back to Sinchon to study for my midterm, we met her friend, who suggested we go to Kyochon. As much as I wanted to go home and study, the friend was a breath of fresh air and I was hungry, so I agreed. As soon as I'd done so, the person I met started laughing with her friend about the mistakes I'd made in speaking with her and about my name, 재필, which she told me made me sound like a country bumpkin. All of this together just made me wish for the chicken to run out. But she got a phone call and we waited the 30 minutes for her to finish before eating the chicken.

Tuesday was much better. Faith came to say goodbye for real, and for one last Milky Road. Her mother sent me some tasty glutenous rice cakes to get me through my study.

On Wednesday, after finishing my speaking and listening midterms, I headed over to Seoul Dae to meet Presca. We saw Harry Potter, but not before the loud group in front of us turned around when they heard Presca making fun of me to say "I heeeeeaaaaar English," and flash us an obnoxious thumbs up in manufactured solidarity. Harry Potter was a great movie, and I had the melancholy thought about how he started and ended at the poles of my teens. We met Kaila for dinner in Hannam-dong, where we ate a delicious Indian meal at Chakra across from Presca's place. Being in the Indian restaurant was a new and slightly amazing feeling. Everything about it -- the decor, the waiter speaking to us in English, the clientele -- looked just like home, and I lost my bearings a few times remembering that I was in Hannam-dong; that my waiter was switching among Hindi, Korean, and English in taking care of the customers.

On Thursday I visited a fruit and vegetable exhibition at COEX, and then Hye Jin in Suwon. We walked the walls of Hwaseong, where Hye Jin told me more about the design of the fortress and the recent revisionism around the life and character of Crown Prince Sado. He is survived by the writings of his wife, Lady Hyegyeong, and the crown fortress at Suwon built by his son Jeongjo. The sun was setting over Suwon and the valley city was gorgeous: the lake her institute overlooks turned gold, a mountain lighthouse disappeared into the clouds, and lights began to illuminate the fortress walls, weaving up and down the hills of the central city. For dinner, Hye Jin took me to try the famous Suwon kalbi, which was more delicious than I could have imagined.

I turned twenty on the train back from Suwon, and my first action of the decade was to wander around Guro trying to find a bus or cab to take me the rest of the distance to Sinchon on just the 12000 won I had in my pocket.

On Friday I went out for green tea with Gil Sun at O'Sulloc in Daehagno, per Jane's recommendation. While we were trying to find the place, I asked her how she had been. When she told me that she had been back home for three days after her grandmother died, I asked her how to express condolences in Korean. She told me that I should just ask if she's doing alright. She was. Afterwards, our conversation turned to lighter topics, and I got the question about Korean girls again.

Later, I met my Masato, John, Presca, Kaila, and Jane for kalbi at a big, tasty place in an alley west of Grand Mart. We then went to Presca's place, where she had so wonderfully provided fruit, wine, cake, and banana 우유 to float me sweetly into my years of widening frame and general lameness in the eyes of teenagers, thirtysomethings, and everyone else. She also gave me the gift of reading with a copy of 아낌없이 주는 나무 (The Giving Tree). Unlike the boy, I love her back.

Here I am cutting the cake. You can see the rest of the photos at Presca's blog.

We then sang our hearts out at noraebang, where Masato amazed us all, as usual.

On Saturday, Presca, Kaila, and I boarded a bus to Gyeongju. Used to 8-hour bus rides from New Haven to Philadelphia squeezed in among the sneezing and cranky during Thanksgiving, I really liked the large, reclining seats. We got to the ancient Silla capital just as a typhoon poured in from Japan, sideways and all day, as both Kaila and I struggled with our failed umbrellas. After checking in at our beautiful hanok lodging, the Sarang Chae, we headed off to explore.

First view out the bus window.

Gyeongju skyline.

From Kaila's [K] blog. She took pictures of things
I didn't, like this first wet walk to Tumuli,
so I've included them.

We first saw the Tumuli Park and its set of 고분. In the rain, the mounds were electric green and gorgeous. At night, rising up darkly between houses and shops, they were surreal.

Gyeongju is known as the "Musuem without Walls," but in rain like I had never seen before, we decided that it'd be best to head over to the museum with walls. After a watery meal in a neighboring restaurant, we swamped off toward the National Museum, stopping to see the Cheomseongdae. When we got to the Gyerim Woods, the mud and rain were so deep that we couldn't continue along the path, and rounded the corner to the National Museum, where we saw the jewelry, ornamentation, and pottery of Silla's Golden Age, as well as the 23rd transnational "My Expression of Our Cultural Properties" exhibit of children's art from the sister cities of Japan, Korea, and China. The rain was unrelenting, and the museum floor soon became as slick as the ground outside.

Silla Geumgwan. [K]

For dinner, we made our way over to Gyeongju's main street, where we ate naengmyeon at a kalbi place we couldn't afford. Still hungry, we decided to try a pizza, which came "ready in 14 minutes" and wrapped with a red silk bow.

[K]

We woke to the sound of children playing. At six in the morning. But there was no sound of rain, so I opened the door to find the weather blindingly gorgeous. We celebrated for a few minutes, then packed up, bought some 경주 빵, and headed off to Bulguksa. A small garden of piled prayer pebbles was among the beautiful things we saw.

The Sarang Chae in the morning. [K]

Guardians of Sarang Chae. [K]

Guardians of Bulguksa.

Kaila's funky picture of Presca and I. [K]

Kaila (between hordes of slow-climbing newspaper reporters).

After lunch, we headed up to the Seoguram Grotto, where a small hike lead us to the stunning Seoguram Buddha. Past the green valleys below us, we could see the turquoise pool of the East Sea.

It was beautiful. We took The Natural Road back to Bulguksa. Then we went home.

[K]

Kaila's picture of the East Sea. [K -- thanks for sending pictures!]

What I Remember From Ceilings

2007-07-27T18:00:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 8

Faith changed her plans. She would be leaving town earlier than I was expecting, so when her mother flew in from somewhere in Asia (she had a regional ticket and had been hopping around Japan, China, and Singapore) to pack her up, I met up with them to say goodbye.

We were planning to go to the DMZ, so walking out of the goshiwon, I called to explain the situation with my pants. After Faith assured me that I would need neither passport nor dress pants, I hopped the train to Apgujeong, an area famous for its beautiful shops, galleries, cafes, and people. I met Faith and her family friends for lunch at an elegant boribap restaurant just outside of exit 6 of Apgujeong station. Two were a young couple that had graduated from Peninsula High in 1995-6 and remained engaged across the East Sea or Pacific Ocean for about a decade before marrying and moving to the house in UN Village, Hannam-dong where Faith ate fruit and ice cream and relaxed on the weekends.

When I first met up with Faith a few weeks back, I asked about her parents. Her mother had grown up poor in the south and emigrated as a teenager to live with her sister in the US. Her father grew up in the south to become the number one ranked Korean tennis player for two years in the Seventies before emigrating. Over lunch, her mother told us that she'd come to Korea last year with the intention of staying the summer, but that "though the people looked like me...spoke my language," Seoul in 2006 was completely foreign next to the rural southern seventies; that she was overwhelmed, had to leave. She introduced her friends at the table as the people whose kindness had made Korea a place she could now stay.

I had not seen Faith's mom since I was a sophomore at Peninsula studying trigonometry with Christine over the piles of fruit and hot chocolate she would give us. And now here I was in Seoul talking with her in Korean.

After lunch, the couple headed out, and Faith, her mom, Mrs. Ha, and I headed northeast. It wasn't long until the left side of the road was overgrown with barbed-wire, which stayed wrapped around the pylons and guardrails for the rest of the ride. We reached a small provincial amusement park and rest stop area crawling with parents and sticky children. Machines whirled people through the warm air and other machines spit out puffed rice cakes. We walked to a small garden and over a bridge to nowhere: the end of it was gated and locked and heavy with taegeukgi and and flowers and people's brief messages in marker.

The rice crisper.

The bridge posts had speakers pumping out a song from the late fifties, Mrs. Ha told me, about the pain of division. Through the holes in the fence, the other side looked empty and beautiful, but I couldn't tell which direction I was looking, or where the DMZ actually started. An ROK soldier in the guardhouse on the other side of the fence flipped a lighter on and off. Below, there was a pool shaped like Korea, with just one gate placed in the middle.

We walked back and Mrs. Ha bought some corn from an ajumma. In the car, Faith and I munched on the puffed rice cakes and we all nibbled at the corn, which was unlike any that I've ever tasted. I'd had fresh corn during HARVEST so sweet that I could just tear it off the stalk and start eating, but this corn was sweet and chewy in a way I'd never experienced. I loved it.

We backtracked slightly, past the restaurant shaped like like a huge white galleon perched on a hill, and pulled into Heyri Art Valley, an artist colony masterminded by Kim Eoun Ho, the owner of the art and philosophy publishing house Hangilsa. Ten years ago, Kim bought all the land in the valley and spent the next five years convincing artists to move in. The lots cost nothing, and the houses and studios the artists construct must all pass the planning committee as architectural innovations. As a result, next to the gaudy English Language Village of the neighboring valley, Heyri's hundreds of homes are unique, sleek, sustainable dwellings that people like us come to see.

This house won the prize for most beautiful garden in Gyeonggi-do.

A house lined with books from floor to ceiling.

We toured around a few galleries and bookstores, and had tea in a cafe run by a retired classical music dj. The cafe was stunning. A high-ceilinged, poured-concrete box, it consisted of a large bare room whose attention was focused on a pair of speakers two stories tall.

A children's bookstore.

The speakers, too large for one photo.

Enclaves off to the right included the dj's library and a set of small spaces with flat glass ceilings which during the fall look up into piles of leaves and during the winter look up into piles of snow. Well-dressed young hipsters played with their cameras or notebooks around us, and Faith and I learned about mulberry paper.

Losing My Name/ "No girlfriend in this or any country."

2007-07-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

The Week of July 2

Started with a sleepy Monday and a cash withdrawal. Following Sung Ho to a coffee shop to study, I found out firsthand what Athena meant when she told me about the Starbucks Index that everyone in Seoul seems to know about (and the linked article is 3 years old): the prices here begin where the Ventis in America leave off. I'd been leaving my writing assignments 3/4 finished, so I'd set aside time to get my work done that afternoon. The topic that day turned out to be 첫 사랑 (first love), and I imagined my teacher chortling over my newfound writing resolve and felt like some cheeseball character like Gyeon Woo in My Sassy Girl. Anyway, as I scribbled away diligently at my composition, Sung Ho got a new text-message every thirty seconds, and I understood how he'd gotten so good at Korean.

On Wednesday, I patted my back pocket while walking out of the goshiwon in the morning to discover that there was nothing there. I tore my tiny room apart and retraced my morning route through the place and even looked around in Kaila's room, where I'd been sitting earlier, to no avail. During class, I went over the possibilities in my head, and when I couldn't find my wallet after class, I had to call home. My father and I set about canceling cards and ordering replacements. After a few hours on the phone and a long time spelling out "Changcheon-dong, Seodaemun-gu", I was all set to receive my emergency replacement debit card from Visa when the person I was talking to in Singapore said something like, "Alright, Bank of America, can you confirm?" and an unexpected voice from America piped in, "Yes, thank you." Then the voice told me that this was a one-time-only service, to which I replied that I had no plans to lose my wallet in the future. But it was done, and a new card was to come on Friday.

Presca and I headed off to meet up with Nate, a 2006 alum that Professor Hwang introduced me to. Right before we met him at Anguk Station, I'd convinced Presca to buy a pig like Kaila's, which didn't take much. So when Nate walked up the subway stairs looking for me, "wearing red and Presca's wearing a dress," he found us, fingers still sticky from the delicious hoddeok we had eaten, flinging the gelatinous pig onto the stairs and squeaking with glee. He handled this first impression very diplomatically, and as we walked to Samcheongdong, we struck up a conversation about his life here as a teacher. Over pasta at a cute sidewalk place called Dal 1887, we talked about John Smith and the discovery of the Book of Mormon in Upstate New York, the recent switch in Seoul eating vogue from French to Italian as reflected in our Samcheongdong surroundings, teaching, and life in Korea. Nate puts a mirthful twinkle into his stories, so I really enjoyed chatting. Afterwards, we went looking for dessert.

The phone rang, and another voice from America asked me to confirm my delivery to "Phang-phun-dong, So-da-moon-gu." Crouched in a quiet corner between a parked SUV and the wall of a hanok, away from the noise of the street running along the east wall of Gyeongbokgung, I spelled out my address so that my card company could find me.

We wandered into the area around Gwanghwamun. The gate itself is currently undergoing restoration. With demolition beginning on December 4, 2006, the 613th anniversary of when King Taejo broke ground on the site to build Gyeongbokgung and the 518 year Joseon Dynasty, the restoration is scheduled to be completed by 2009. A huge Gwanghwamun Plaza in the middle of Sejongno will face the new gate, which will be rotated 5.6 degrees clockwise and reassembled at its original site 14.5m to the south and 10.9m to the west, away from its realignment in 1968 with the Japanese Government General Building when Park Chung Hee re-poured the gate, destroyed by the GGK and the Korean War, in concrete. In the fall, I was just reading Chizuko Ueno's point about history as "a continuous recomposition of the past in the present," but now, I'm watching it happen. With Memory so wounded and so powerful, made of ember and cement, is it really possible to stop it and ask it Quo vadis?

Then we heard engines. Around the corner was the American Embassy, its perimeter thick with buses and buses of Korean soldiers and police, smoking, sleeping in bunks, walking from flood light to flood light.

We passed the place and crossed Sejongno, with its huge statue of Admiral Yi, and made it over to a place called The Place for a waffle, which in our case came with two huge scoops of green tea and vanilla ice cream, blueberry syrup, and a cherry tomato on top.

John, Presca, Masato, and I met up on Thursday afternoon in Hannam-dong to meet "Edward," who we had come to know as a quasi-monk, traditional Korean breathing/dancing/meditation practitioner who insisted that we come down to his center in Suwon, where we could fully experience the culture surrounding his art. The dusk drive down to Happy Suwon (working with the Korean National Tourism Organization, most of the towns in Korea have acquired similar names) was gorgeous. We did not learn or even see any live meditation dance, but I liked it very much nevertheless. Edward showed us some of his videos, and he's a fantastic dancer (he even had a meditation dance set to "Canon").

Screenshots from one of Edward's performances.

The institute was a center for well-being, with a clinic and training center and consultation center built in. A number of things seemed to be practiced there, including the traditional Korean breathing exercise and oriental medicine. The center seemed to be a culture-based business: Edward introduced us to his boss on our way out to dinner. This spring, I took an Indonesian meditation martial arts dancing class through Yale Silat, so I was eager to talk about what I had learned in relation to what he practiced. It wasn't so easy. We had dinner at a place nearby -- doenjang boribap -- and Edward explained more about himself.

(When I first walked around Yonsei with Hye Jin, she told me that Ko Dae students are famous for being a bunch of rough-and-tumble farmers drinking makkolli while Yon Dae students are a smoother bunch of beer drinkers. This has proven to be a very useful bit of knowledge when meeting Ko Dae students.)

Since Edward was a young man, he's been preoccupied with the meaning of his existence. This led him to major in French literature at Korea University. But this in turn led him to makkolli. Learning that Masato was a student of Chinese history, he began to tell us that, based on the height of the ground above sea level, Korea could have conquered vast swaths of land in China in ancient times, but that it refrained from doing so. Later, though, he taught us about Korean kimchi pots: their strength and breathability have allowed Koreans to effectively refrigerate their foods for centuries.

On Friday night, I saw Yohangza Company's performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Arko Arts Theatre in Daehagno with Presca. You can see a clip here. I loved it: the characters had all been changed into puns on Korean words or creatures from Korean folktales, the actors wove pansori and samulnori into their parts, and the dancing and pranking were delightful.

The Yohangza Theater Company.
http://perthfestival.com.au/layout/img/eventimgs/theatre_anderson.jpg
owns this photo. But I had to put something up.

Afterward, we met up with Jane and Kaila and Bryan in Gangnam, where Bryan and a gaggle of his classmates from Sogang's Summer Korean Studies Program were holding down a bar. They were beautiful, young, loud, and friendly; together we drank yogurt soju.

The next day, I met up with my Mom's friend from graduate school, Athena, who is now an instructor and administrator at Korea University's English Language Program. On the way over, Kaila texted me to tell me that she'd found my wallet as she stripped her bed for the wash.

It turned out that when I'd visited on Tuesday night, Kaila was sitting in her chair, so I sat on her bed (our 1 pyeong rooms leave no choice.) My wallet fell out of my pocket and made its way between her bed and the wall, then back up under her mattress cover. I have no idea how this happened. But I was glad to know that my name and face and numbers weren't just gone.

Athena showed me around Korea University, which has been renovated beautifully to celebrate its centennial. When I asked her about her students, she responded that they had really changed since she'd gotten to Ko Dae in 1997. No longer the shy farmers' kids she had first met, she told me that her students had become worldly and gregarious since she had gotten back from Indonesia a few years ago to resume her post. I met her fellow instructors, and as I tuned my ears to demodulate a whole English-speaking realm of slang, I could hear Korea changing itself. English-language instruction and the education system itself here might be the flagship mess that the Times on both coasts report on with their harried students and their alien school worlds, but change, wherever it's going, was as hard to ignore on Saturday as difference. It isn't just the instructors; it's the students who bring them here to teach them. Students and teachers at Ko Dae have set up queer film festivals, cooking parties, and trade experiences from the provinces as from Afro-Cuban homes in Chicago, or Canadian and Venezuelan and New Zealand cities. And while I toured Ko Dae's English Program, I feel the same way when my conversation partner puts away her Kanji lessons or Japanese fashion magazines to swap languages with me, or when my Hanmunpyo friend says "goodnight" before heading off to Chinese lessons at his hagwon. I was told a lot of things before I got here, and sometimes clerks at Artbox giggle when I ask them about a gift bag, and most people handing out fliers on the street don't give me one, but in most of my interactions, I am hard-pressed to label Korea a static or closed society.

Athena, her husband, and her son, Jung Woo, who I last remembered falling asleep on our couch in Quartz Hill and crashing into the LEGO fortress that I'd been building for a week, took me to Nanta!

(I remember that one of the greatest feelings in learning Korean was looking at my growing stack of vocabulary cards last September and realizing that only 3 weeks back I couldn't even read the alphabet. But soon after, that feeling was replaced by the know-how-much-you-don't-know plan that most Korean learners start to form after a few TA sessions of jumbling words or pausing for minutes to recall something they've just heard: learning hanja. Sexy like the girl you loved in eighth grade who was learning Latin and going to Italy one day in high school; sexy like graduate students in physics think they are when they use the word to describe anything that's beyond the scope of the conversation at hand; sexy like Chinese characters; sexy like not mixing up 양 (sheep) with 용 (dragon) while responding to a story about the girl-eating snake of Jeju Island with a story of the girl-eating sheep/dragon of Krakow, hanja is what we always reply when they ask us what extra classes we'd like at Sogang; hanja our new books piling up for the day that we start to decode them. Nearly every time something is explained to me, it's "from the hanja.")

Nanta, from the hanja for crazy and hitting, was just that: a musical about 3 great-looking chefs and the caterer's nephew preparing a last-minute feast. The musical was a modified samulnori about food and samulnori. The excellent drumming, chopping, mopping, taekwondo, dancing, and singing gave us the appetite we needed to get through the scrumptious samgyetang, and ginseng and raspberry wines we had afterwards. As they drove me back to my place, Hugh advised me to practice Korean with a girlfriend, which reminded me of the question Athena had asked me earlier:

"Do you have a girlfriend?"
"No."
"Well, do you have a girlfriend in America?"

By Which I Meant More Often Than Not

2007-07-16T20:13:00.000-07:00

This is the jelly-filled-self-resurrecting-exploding golden pig. For more, see Kaila's blog.

Constitution Day has finally given me some time to turn out my pockets into real entries.

(Just as I finished that sentence, Jane came running down the hall with the news that she'd won the SK Telecom "Introducing Korean Culture in the Era of Globalization" trip, which takes Korean and foreign students to some of Korea's legendary cultural sites over a week in early August. Jane's teacher from last summer arranged for us all to apply when she found out that Jane was returning -- this kind of love makes me "as proud of Sogang as Sogang is of [me]." She suggested that I check my missed calls, and when the numbers matched, I called back to find out that I'll be going as well. Thank you Sogang and SK Telecom.)

This is the week of June 25.

Monday cemented my attendance at Sogang's afternoon enrichment courses. My entire class, along with the one next door, eats lunch together and attends 발음 수업 on Mondays and Wednesdays and 문법 수업 on Tuesdays. I remember Eun Hye telling me back in February that Sogang's nickname is Sogang 고등학교 -- a jab at how hard the students at Sogang study -- and I began to feel like a part of that, even back at the language institute. After class, I headed over to Coffee Flannel in Sinchon for 복습 and 예습. Unlikely as it may seem, studying in the goshiwon is hard to do: my desk is not big enough to fit my elbows, so I have to sit on my bed with the keyboard tray balanced on my lap, and after lunch on a hot summer day, you can imagine how that ends. Coffee Flannel, on the other hand, is cool place with plenty of room for my books and a terrific name. Topped with a creme brulée, the delicious Caramel Macchiato I ordered got me through a few hours of studying. As the smoke started to get heavy, I headed out. I had also chosen that day as the one to start sticking to budget, which is a challenge, and the coffee and notebook I'd purchased left me less than 2000 won for dinner. I packed my coins into a small plastic envelope and headed to Grand Mart. But I also brought the DVD I'd purchased from a vendor at the Sinchon subway stop, which had turned out to be a Chinese movie with Korean subtitles rather than a Korean movie with English subtitles. It was my first time buying a DVD off the street, so it was also my first time asking for a refund. But I got one easily, and feeling newly rich with 4500 won (about $4.30) lining my pockets, I feasted on fresh bananas and milk.

On Tuesday, I worried that I would not have much to write about for the week, so I thought about some of the articles that Presca had sent me that weekend. Both profiled shocking and interesting individuals as canaries evincing some of South Korean society's more painful features: Norimitsu Onishi's June 23 New York Times Saturday Profile "From Lead Role in a Cage to Freedom and Anomie" about North Korean Lee Chan's maladjustment to Seoul living as a question of South Korean social health, and Donald Macintyre's June 5, 2000 TIMEAsia article "They Dressed Well" about a Nazi-chic bar in Sinchon, as a question of how broadly history is remembered here in my own neighborhood, a seat of South Korean academe. What had me going in circles wasn't so much being shocked and blanketing the whole society with two articles, or even engaging the scraps of conversations with my class friends, who have made a life here teaching in hagwons or universities or businesses or even raising families, in the dialogue that, as always, produces plurality. It was the question that Kelly sent out a few weeks ago about suspending judgment. I've suspended judgment on everything. I'm not claiming not to judge or react, but by extending my deliberation silently indefinitely, my thoughts have only marginal value. While, as a student who has lived in Korea on fellowship money for a mere four weeks, I think that it's really my only option, the growing net of questions and reactions that others' judgment forms in me makes me wonder about when I'm going to have to stop suspending judgment and whether my speaking will be worthwhile. Presca said that photography is harder to pick a fight with than publication. These profiles, with their tangled photographic judgment, wrench the judgments out of me. That's also a good way to do things. That night, Presca, Masato, Matt, and I chatted with alums John and Paul over gravy-cheese fries in an expat bar in Sinchon called Watts on Tap.

On Wednesday, I met up with Faith, my little sister's high school friend and my high school friend's little sister, here for the summer at Yonsei's Korean Language Institute. I'd been unsuccessful in convincing any of my friends to ride a tandem bike with me from Yeouido to Olympic Park, but Faith was braver than the rest, so we set off for the island. Riding a tandem is much harder than it looks, but with some practice, we ran circles around Yeouido Park before discovering the entrance to the beautiful Hangang Citizen's Park, which took us along the river past the National Assembly building. We had pho for dinner and Milky Road for dessert, where we watched Sinchon stroll past two by two.

On Thursday evening I met up with my friend Gil Sun, who I had met last October while walking back to Trumbull from Korean class. She was part of a group handing out fliers on High and Elm, and when I sounded out the flier's Korean portion, we struck up a conversation. She was in the US for a year on the International Youth Fellowship, which sends students to Jamaica and New York for missionary service. Everyone in her group was kind, eager to look around a bit, and shivering, so I gave them a tour of Trumbull -- the dining hall, the library, the common room, the basement, and my suite. I used the vocabulary I had learned for our quiz that morning to point at their notebooks and say 공책, or dining hall and say 학생식당. As I was showing them around our suite's common room, Adam walked in from the shower. Twenty Korean college students in matching pink polo-shirts was not what he had been expecting that morning, and when I introduced him as 방 친구 my awful pronunciation drew some giggles from the crowd, and he looked at me bewildered. Which is how I came to be called bangchingu.

Gil Sun and I kept in touch, and after eight months we met up again in Sinchon for dinner. We had made arrangements via text message, so when we met, Gil Sun observed that my speaking did not quite match my writing. The first few minutes of our conversation were like a placement test before we finally figured out a level of speech at which to communicate with each other. While doing this, we wandered around a bit looking for a place to eat, finally stopping at a sollongtang restaurant. I've recently learned the phrase

둘이 먹다가 하나가 죽아도 모를 만콤 맛있어요.
(It was so delicious that if two people were eating it and one were to die, the other wouldn't notice.)

which serves well to describe the delicious oxtail soup with the kimchi and radish you cut for yourself out of bins built into the table. So though I'd tried sollongtang for the first time at lunch that day, we were both too confused trying to understand one another, and too enamored with the idea of sollongtang, to let that stand in to way. Over bowls of the broth, we finally turned our speech into a language. After dinner, we headed to Insadong for a walk. The street was closing up, so we walked into a warm, spacious teahouse with books stacked to the glass ceiling and windows overlooking Insadong-gil. They brought out a candle in a heavy glass holder whose ring of hearts made me think we'd been taken as a couple until Gil Sun ordered a chamomile tea. The glass pot of water and flowers was placed on the hearts to boil while we shared the delicious 목과 차 I'd ordered. Our two thin, sweet 떡 just made us gladder to be there.

On the last Friday of the month, the clubs in Hongdae host Club Night, where a 15000 won bracelet gets one entrance to a ton of different clubs and one free drink. All of us, along with my friend John from the class next door, headed over to Hongdae for barbecue and to check out Club Night. Hongdae is similar to Sinchon, though as we were looking around for a restaurant, I was impressed by its wide shopping streets lined with cool boutiques, which is a bit more relaxed than the area next to E Dae. We ate a delicious mix of pre- and post- barbecue marinated beef and pork in a place that took its charcoal out to the street in front of the restaurant, left it out there in a can on fire, then brought it back in to the table. Until this happened however, I thought that someone had just set a small fire while I wasn't looking. After dinner, we bounced around clubs, moving whenever one got too hot. Midway through the night, leaving a club so crowded that we couldn't even see the threshold of the dance floor, my shirt was three different shades depending on how much contact it had had with my skin. At that point I thanked my bracelet for mobility. It was the first time I've been old enough to go to a club, and I had a great time hanging out and dancing with our group.

After calling my new home phone number on Saturday morning, I met up with Hye Jin, who had come into Seoul to see her university friends. I had agreed to meet my new conversation partner at 6 that evening, so Hye Jin and I had only enough time to grab a lemonade at Cafe Pascucci before walking over to E Dae where we were both meeting others. When I got to E Dae, it was not my conversation partner but her friend who emerged from Paris Croissant to meet me. After all of us got over our confusion, I said goodbye to Hye Jin and headed off to sight-see with my conversation partner's friend. We went to Seongbukdong, a posh residential area in the Northern foothills, to see her favorite Catholic chapel and Kilsangsa, a Buddhist temple that, as she told me, until twenty years ago had been one of South Korea's last remaining kisaeng houses. I was shocked to find out that that the Joseon tradition had been alive up that recently, and she explained that its clientele had been composed of powerful politicians and businessmen. Twenty years ago, the madam of the house donated the land to a famous 스님 named 법정, whose teachings she had always admired, and the place became a Buddhist temple. I'm still looking for more information. We strolled around the verdant grounds, and I practiced bowing. Afterwards, we headed to Samcheongdong. We walked down the shady, gallery-lined streets at the foot of Samgaksan, passing excellent boutiques and stopping to sniff the pat-juk bubbling in the kitchen of a cottage restaurant, to a pork barbecue restaurant called Maple Tree House. Inside the sleek concrete restaurant with warm wooden seating and wide views of the garden, we ate 되지고기 소금 구이, unmarinated pork that we dipped in a mixture of rock-salt and sesame oil, or wrapped with garlic in thin radish slices or sesame leaves, as it came off the grill. It was scrumptious.

Afterward, we headed to a simple coffee shop nearby where our coffee was ground and freshly brewed for each refill, and upon seeing a quartet entering the place, the waiters hurried to start beautiful classical music coursing through the stereo system. Had music been the only language in the place, it might have been perfect. But we got to talking, and I felt my language fail completely. She would wait for me to say something, but once I started, she would cut short my sentences to tell me that my diction was inadequate or incorrect.

This was uncomfortable but certainly not unwarranted. She is a cafe regular, so at one point, a waiter came over to chat with her, telling her it was his 방학. When I asked about where he went to school, both looked at me blankly before she changed my question to what his major was. It was Industrial Engineering, which is among those I haven't yet learned in school, so I ended up with the blank look on my face. Volunteering that my major was history (역사) he asked back 여자 (women)?

After this finally ended, she told me that asking where someone goes to school is offensive. So in addition to being unintelligible, I was also being uncouth. I felt embarrassed and inept. Language learning can be tough.

On Sunday, Kaila and I headed into Yongsan for the electronic dictionary I hadn't bought the last time and a cell phone for Kaila. Kaila bought a jelly-filled-self-resurrecting-exploding golden pig from a vendor on the bridge heading over to the electronics mart, so while we waited for her phone registration to finish, we splatted the pig all over the glass case we were sitting at, waiting gleefully for it to pull itself back together. For lunch, we had omurice.

Walking back to the train, the sound of Andean pan pipes drew us over to a spot where an Andean music group was playing. Surprised again upon returning to Sinchon, we found out that Choi's Tacos had recently introduced horchata to its menu and discounted all of it. So for dinner, we had burritos and horchata.

Panpipes at Yongsan. Kaila took this photo.

The Tail of the Week

2007-06-24T04:21:00.000-07:00

Riding the escalator down to the train at Itaewon Station on Thursday, Masato, Matt, and I wondered aloud about the verb "to heal". It's 낫다, and my foot feels much better.

(And in California, I hear, so does Anastasia's.)

On Wednesday afternoon, I met up with Presca at Anguk Station to explore Changdeokgung Palace. I got to the station much faster than I anticipated, so I began walking the area around exit 6, stopping every once in awhile to shake my foot around. A block east of the exit, a small, quiet street running north to an odd castle and Bukhansan beyond it is lined with small restaurants and teahouses; clogged by vending trucks rhyming out advertisements for god, fruit, or eggs -- I'm not sure which. I had wanted to reach the castle -- which looked like a transplant from Princeton or Yonsei -- but I was already late in meeting Presca.

We made our way over to Changdeokgung to buy tickets. After turning away both Presca's Seoul Dae and Yale IDs, the ticket salesperson shocked us both when she pointed to a sign for the International Student ID Card and asked us if we had those. After traveling Italy two years ago and failing to get even one discount out of that useless piece of plastic, I was more than a little skeptical about how useful it would be on this trip. But at Changdeokgung, where self-guided tours run $15 on Thursdays (never go on Thursday), Presca's ISIC (I'd left mine at the goshitel) got us two tickets for about $3.

The Injeongjeon, with walks and minister's place-stones.

Changdeokgung was handsome. Designed as a royal villa in 1405, the palace was constructed over time, resulting in an asymmetric set of buildings facing in different directions -- in harmony with nature. After touring the Injeongjeon --whose three walks were flanked by the ministers' place-stones, and the Queen's quarters -- Daejojeon, or something like the "Hall to Make Great Things Happen" -- we made it over to Biwon, the secret garden. The Juhamnu overlooks an elegant pond, the Buyongji, and a small pavilion, the Yeonghwadang, was placed at what was determined to be the most aesthetic part of the garden. From the Yeonghwadong, the King would administer the final stage of the Confucian state examination, the Jeonsi, to the scholars assembled on the lawn below. A scene in Im Kwon Taek's 2000 Chunhyang shows Yi Mongryoung writing what I think is the second part of the Gwageo, the hoesi, and describes how he even chose a calligraphy style delicate enough to carry his answer to the ethical question posed. While I sweat over a few words of thanks for the ciders Presca and I bought from the garden's vendor, I thought about the thousands who had sat here trying to enter the civil service, dipping their buckets in foreign seas of characters and frantically painting their poetry on the lawn, and it was hard to shake Confucianism's ever-widening distance between me and the venerable past.

The entrance to the Daejojeon.

At Buyongji.

But Changdeokgung is a palace of mixed-up time. After visiting the royal garage -- which housed a Daimler and a Cadillac next to the convertible palanquin -- and the Western-furnished King's quarters, I wondered about what kind of meeting it must have been when the King ordered electric lighting for the Daejojeon, or a pagoda to house his Cadillac. Presca stopped to take a picture of the exquisite rose-glass lamp hanging over the exit of the Daejojeon -- the electric glass inside the palace inside the electric glass city. Yet like the many of restorations to Changdeokgung of the past century, my wondering dresses up history for the occasion.

After Changdeokgung, Presca and I headed over to Seoul's huge COEX underground mall. We wandered around the stores a bit -- including Artbox, a store graffitied with so many positive messages that it was hard for my foot to remember to limp out. We were surprised to find only a small wall of Korean music at the music store, but there was enough there for me nearly to buy one of Jang Sa Ik's albums. We caught a showing of Ocean's Thirteen, which left me in a funny place as the lights came on at the end of the film and I found myself remembering that I was in Seoul, South Korea. For dinner, I tried bokkeumbap for the first time.

A tree on COEX's Forest Walk.

On Thursday, I headed into Itaewon for the Yale Club of Korea summer get-together. Meeting the Class of 2011 was a lot of fun -- the alumni were really excited to show them a good time, and the whole night ended up having a friendly feeling to it.

On Friday, I attended the famous Chavy and Sung Ho's Chicken Day at Neh Neh Chicken. Since Monday, my class had been tittering about chicken -- it became a verb in its own right as we explained our plans for the weekend or greeted one another:

A: 안녕?
B: 안녕. 이번...금요일에... 치켄?
A: 물론! 같이 치켄하자!

After class, an army of some 30 of us assembled in the courtyard outside Arupe Hall and marched over to Neh Neh, making sure to leave at least one person behind at each turn to guide the rest, and arrived near E Dae around 1.30 to find the restaurant dark and closed. After Sung Ho assured us that he had made arrangements for the restaurant to accommodate us yesterday, we milled around for 20 minutes until the owner swooped in with bleary eyes and bed hair to let us in. We created a table the length of the restaurant and sat down to feast. After almost 3 hours of chicken (which was American-style at Neh Neh's, but still pretty tasty) and beer and laughter, a group of us stood up to head back to school to meet our conversation partners. (Sogang is really a fantastic place.)

My conversation partner is a junior at Sogang named Hye Ji. She studies Asia Pacific History, and she was there to meet me on her last day of exams. We had coffee and chatted for awhile at one of Sinchon's Pause Cafes -- and despite being truly confused for half an hour as I misunderstood one of her answers, I had a great time hanging out with her. I worry sometimes about what kind of image I must be creating with my jabber about anything I can articulate, but then in class I had to chuckle when students from all over the world took only three or four days to start teasing Masato and I about the same things we're teased about at home.

From there, I walked over to Sinchon Station and hopped on the train to Hyehwa, which lets off at Daehagno, the home of Seoul Dae before it was moved in 1975 as a way to suppress student protests. There, I met Presca in Seoul's experimental theater district, and we wandered around a bit until we found a jazz club. Inside, what appeared to be a mediocre band was jamming out some American tunes led by their main singer, a flashy guy pumping his fists and playing air guitar. The place was filled with happy looking people, and I really enjoyed myself. We took in the lively atmosphere for awhile, but then the lead singer got off the stage and the guitarist took over. He was fantastic. After that, two of the backup singers took turns singing "Train, Train, Train" and "I Can't Live (If Living is Without You)," and they were stunning. The pianists continued looking dour, but everyone else was blown away. The rest of the performance was the lead singer teasing us by quieting down every now and again to let us experience the extraordinary talent that he was otherwise drowning out, and after a string of great guitar solos, we took our happy -- and slightly bewildered -- leave.

On Saturday, I invented a laundry line for rainy days by looping my dental floss around the towel bar and back to the coat-hook. With Kaila at Hyundai Baekhwajeom, I found the banana milk I'd been looking for.

My cell phone number here is 010 8693 0721. If you're in Seoul, give me a call sometime. All pictures except the laundry are Presca's.

Since Arriving/ From Now, More Often

2007-06-19T02:38:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

The sun was beating down this afternoon on SD Vamos, the Sogang Dae Korean Language Education Center (KLEC) soccer club, and the wheaty dust of the undongjang had already given our team, the dark shirts, spots and stripes on its way up from our kicks. After chasing a player chasing a ball out of bounds, I began to shuffle backwards on my toes when a small crunch slowed everything down for me.

Resting my swollen foot against the side of my minifridge as I set about to net just the butterflies of my past twelve days with this sudden gift of slowness, I see now in more ways than one that shuffling too far backwards is a dangerous thing.

Seoul saenghwal is awesome. If I've been bad about turning my receipts and vocabulary-graffitied paper gum boxes into daily reflection, it's because life here has kept me wholly engaged.

(Whenever I talk to someone about my good friend Bryan, I start with his labels -- child actor, commercial star, world-class hula dancer, state champion Greco-Roman wrestler, judo, freestyle, and folkstyle wrestling champion, Eagle Scout, filmmaker -- and move on to his equally brilliant personality, centered around a rare and unrelenting curiousness. As my recent stories about him are usually an explanation of how I've gotten some new injury while exploring coasts and caves and rooftops with him, I lead in to my sunburn or sprained ankle with: "Do you remember when we used to read in children's books about great scientists? About how as children they were always coming home late and with pockets stuffed with salamanders and rocks and chunks of amber? Well, I'll be walking on the beach with Bryan mulling over some Hawaiian ghost story he's told me, or some quirk in Japanese literature he's discovered, when I notice he's no longer around. When I turn to find him, he's a hundred yards back, squatting over a tidepool and ready to tell me stories about the various anemones he's found."
I hope that the people unloading each night their pockets jammed with paper scraps have a similar canon.)

But I'll begin at the beginning with history; cobble my emails and expenses together.

Tokyo's Narata was the first I saw of Asia. Not much, I wrote to my friend Alexandra, was novel about the airport, but I did manage to note a few differences, those truths we imagine for the very sake of seeing:

"About Narata – it’s funny how airports are all the same. Aside from some cigarette-brands I’ve never seen (not that I’m a connoisseur), the Duty-Free store here looks exactly the same as the one in Los Angeles, or in Rome, or London. And it’s just as packed with travelers buying alcohol and cologne. But, there are some differences. I get two hours in “Japan”, so I’m trying to make the most of them. (Which is why I’m writing to you.) The store across from me sells the ordinary tourist stuff, but the cashier is wearing a beautiful kimono. There is a playroom for children. In the bathroom, one can choose between Western style and “Japanese style” toilets, with the Japanese style stall’s bowl on the floor. There are a million ways to recycle, but no apparent way to get rid of trash. I felt like a real criminal throwing away the leftovers of my box lunch in the “other” bin. That’s about it for my observations of Narata. Maybe I’ll find some other stuff when I close my computer."

So... not much there. On my flight from Tokyo to Incheon, I discovered that Orbitz had gotten me a first class seat. I had to check twice before sitting down and felt gaudy in my seat as others passed by. But, acting on the same worries about preparation I'd felt writing hours before, I pulled out my notebook and jotted down a script for my call to Kim Mun Nam -- just so I didn't find myself on the phone fumbling verb endings late at night. As I set the script aside and picked up my Sogang textbooks to review, an older woman sitting next to me leaned over and stared at what I was doing. I suspected she was Korean from her copy of Chosun Ilbo, but I was shy about striking up a conversation just because I thought she was Korean. (Incidentally, the first dialogue I listened to and practiced in Sogang 3A last Tuesday was about this exact situation):

비행기에서 처음 만난 사람과 이야기합니다.

마이클: 저.....한국 분이세요?
진호: 네.
마이클: 캐나다에 여행 다녀오세요?
진호: 아니요. 출장 갔다 와요. 캐나다 분이세요?
마이클: 네. 토론토가 제 거향이에요.
진호: 아, 네. 그런데 한국어 찰 하세요.
마이클: 아니에요. 학교에서 배우고 있는데 나직 잘 못해요.
진호: 언제부터 학교에서 배우셨어요?
마이클: 학교에서 배운 지 6개월쯤 됐어요.

Two people are having a conversation during a plane ride [from Canada].

Michael: Um/Excuse me...are you Korean?
Jin Ho: Yes.
Michael: Are you coming back from vacationing in Canada?
Jin Ho: No, I went there on a business trip. Are you Canadian?
Michael: Yes. I'm from Toronto.
Jin Ho: I see. But you speak Korean very well.
Michael: No...even though I've been learning in school, I can't yet speak Korean well.
Jin Ho: How long have you been learning Korean?
Michael: It's been about 6 months.

When she leaned over to look at my books, I took my chances and said Annyeonghasimnikka?
Though I quickly dropped the formal polite endings for lack of practice, I hit most of the above points and she seemed fine with the informal polite -yo form. We talked for the rest of the flight about her kids, who she had been visiting in California, and places I should go in Korea. She was patient and kind, and I haven't had such an opportunity for sustained practice since, so kudos to Sogang for such a useful dialogue.

All in all, the travel turned out to be a language exchange, as at Incheon, another fellow traveler smiled at me and practiced her English with me while we waited for our baggage to arrive. After our brief conversation -- mostly choppy phrases back and forth about the long wait -- I headed out to catch a bus. Incheon has a great English-language information center right in the ground transport center, so I had no trouble getting directions and a schedule for the buses, which were, contrary to what some pretty aggressive taxi drivers told me, still running. My cell phone does not work in Korea (even with a global SIM card -- Korea uses a different system so don't bother), so I purchased domestic and international phone cards from a FamilyMart and called Kim Mun Nam. My chat with him went according to script, and I got on the airport bus to Sinchon.

I was not able to figure out the international phone card, however, and could not call my parents. I got to Sinchon, figured out after one or two of the twelve or so street crossings required to traverse the mammoth Sinchon Rotary what Jane had meant by head toward Exit 3 of the subway stop, walked down the stairs to the station, and crossed underground. From there, the Shereville Livingtel was a three minute walk in the most vibrant neighborhoods I've ever seen. Sinchon is home to three of Korea's most famous universities: Yonsei Dae, Ewha Womans Dae, and my own Sogang Dae. All day and all night, the streets here are jammed with beautiful young people walking hand in hand through bright clothing, cosmetics, cellular phone, and stationery stores, eating and drinking in the thousands of cheap, delicious restaurants and street carts, enjoying juices, ice creams, patbingsu, coffees, and pastries in hundreds of big, comfy, stylish cafes, drinking soju in noraebangs and streetside barbeque restaurants and makkoli in earthy wooden bars and sweet beer in fried chicken restaurants and generally living loud and laughing and together and young. Plus, nearby Hongdae is forms a parallel universe. Kim Mun Nam is a quiet and pleasant young guy who runs a safe, comfortable, and spotless goshiwon full of diligent, bleary-eyed, and preoccupied students cramming for finals, plus us. I checked in, figured out how to send text messages via email to let my parents know I had arrived, and crashed. (For the sake of continuity, I have not yet purchased bedding and sleep on the small mattress cover that came with the room. The problem is, Matt paid $100 for his set, but I think that he hurried into things. I am not sleeping on the floor as I expected I would, so bedding has become a minor concern. In the meantime, I wear my water polo hoodie backwards as a blanket, so anybody coming into my room while I am sleeping would find a weird blue body with a hood over its face and a large white Y on the chest.)

I spent my first few days of school in Level 2, where I had been placed after that phone interview I mentioned last time. The class was challenging, as the other students had all come up from Level 1 last term and were much more comfortable with speaking and vocabulary than I was. After reading some of last year's Light posts, I expected my class to be jammed with Japanese students inspired by Hallyu, but this was not the case at all. My class had Chinese students studying to enter Sogang's international trade studies graduate program (and to think that all last year I thought Sogang 1B's strange insistence on muyeok hwesa as a vocabulary word and reading subject was strangely arbitrary), Vietnamese, Chinese, and Mexican women studying to become nuns (though I did not recognize their uniforms as such and dumbly wondered for two days what link these identically dressed women of all ages might have), a Singaporean from Cornell, an Australian woman married to a Korean man, an older Japanese woman, and two young Japanese women. Presca at Seoul Dae commented the other day about one of her teacher's first actions: grouping the class into nationalities. We spent our first days doing the same. When you get people together from all over the world together just to communicate, anything has to be a topic of conversation. Last year, I always enjoyed Spanish Thursdays with Adam because it was one time each week we had no choice but to be simple and bright. But I go in circles: while language learning's basic communication is a magical and unlikely triumph, language is big and precise and powerful and has expectations of you. It's like growing up, I guess. I might as well enjoy it all.

While I certainly wasn't a superstar in Level 2, running into Masato, who had been placed into Level 3, cemented my lingering doubts about spending time on grammar and half a book I already knew. I wrote to my parents that first afternoon that:

"I'm tired from today. I slept pretty well last night and got to class this morning, where I'd been placed into level 2. Because the people in my class have all been living in Korea for some time, and have done level one here, it's pretty challenging -- the speaking and listening, and tough when everything has to be explained in Korean.
However, I am trying to move up a level because, although I need the practice, I did most of Sogang 2A back at school, and Sogang 2B is mostly vocabulary, not grammar. After running into a grad student from my class at Yale, Masato, and finding out he'd been placed into 3A, I went to the office to ask about placement. I met with my speaking teacher at 2pm to discuss this, and she suggested I take the final for level 2 and see about placement. It's tough to make my case, though, when everything I say in my terrible Korean seems to contradict my assertions about being so familiar with level 2 that I should move up. So though I'm going to give it a shot, if it doesn't work out and I end up in level 2, it won't be the end of the world: I've only completed about 1/3 of the curriculum, and it's not like I'm the best speaker in class.
So after exploring Sinchon a bit with Matt, the other Light fellow here (Kaila and Jane arrive tonight), I lay down to rest my eyes a bit and ended up napping for a couple of hours. Now I am going to study over level 2 -- vocab and grammar -- for tomorrow. I'm taking the test after school.
As you can tell, my first day has been mostly logistics. Seoul is huge -- it's a similar feeling to being in New York -- with restaurants, shops, and signs everywhere. Walking around this afternoon with no idea about what I was doing or where I wanted to be was a bit tough, but I expect that after I get placement and equipment (phone, extension cable for this poorly-placed plug so I can fit my computer charger in -- right now I charge in Matt's room and come down here to email until my battery runs out) sorted out, I'm going to have plenty of time to read my guidebook and find places to explore."

That day I also tried to get a plug adapter from Grand Mart (the fact that I've placed so much faith in Grand Mart is testament to how well the Light SAC Korea guide was written), but I ended up reporting to my friend Ailya that

"I made it to the second floor before being helped by a host of sales ladies (so far, the Korean department stores I've seen have functioned like confederations of sales ladies and their wares -- this is not unlike US department stores if you think about it, but since I run into these ladies more frequently and much less successfully (thanks to my awful Korean), I'm inclined to notice) with each. Unable to tell them what I needed when asked, I was directed to the best of their knowledge to the subway and some district. So not wanting to ignore them, but having no idea what they were saying, I could not keep looking through the store and had to leave...

Like I was telling Naveen, I really need to get over to Yongsan for a cell phone and a dictionary. Then, I can function outside my little closet of a room. As it is now, I have no way to look up words unless I'm with Jane or Kaila and can ask them, and have no way of getting in touch with people here aside from borrowing or sitting in phone booths with one hand jammed over my ear. Adam and I may have been singing the tune of cyber-liberation in our most desperate moments, but in a place like this, technology is the easiest way to get free."

I eventually did get my plugs at a dollar store near the rotary. And in the past days, I've become more comfortable with dealing in Korean. The first few days were tough because I had a placement debacle to keep me busy, and going out with the other fellows usually means that only one of us has to speak, so it's nice that all my watching is turning into learning -- I have more occasion to deal with Kimbab Cheonguk when I buy a $1 kimbab roll that Kaila and I split for breakfast, or with the ajummas at Rotary Sikdang, a great place for a $3 lunch, in my own words. But I still find it hard to practice my speaking. With the fellows and Hye Jin, my English conversation partner from Yale, I'm inclined to speak in English, as we would very soon become very bored of each other if I were always telling them about the kind of person I'd like to meet, or the things I intend to do, or how my weekend was. Getting a conversation partner and some consistent extracurricular practice is something I'm still trying to do.

About breakfast, last week we went to Paris Baguette for breakfast quite often. In fact, Matt goes every morning. Buying a roll or a delicious green-tea hoddeok with cream-cheese there, or seeing the advertisements for Red Bean Frappuccino at Sinchon Starbucks or Misutkaru Shake at Macdonalds, reminds me of "The West Remade," a chapter of Ken Ito's Visions of Desire: Tanizaki's Fictional Worlds that I read for Literary Modernization in Japan and Korea last semester. Ito discusses how the Japanese in the Meiji and Taisho periods completely refashioned Western culture as they consumed it -- everything from appliances to opera -- to fit Japanese desires and ideas. If I remember correctly, Ito's argument is that the Japanese versions are not "untrue," however unlikely some of their "bunka" products might have been. With everyone talking about the Macdonaldization of the world, it's nice to be reminded of the Koreanization of Macdonalds. No Form, culture answers to nous.

On our first weekend here, we got together for barbeque and ate some delicious bulgogi and kalbi with soju, and chatted while we waited out a sudden rainstorm (the word is pokpungu 폭풍우, I think, but the important thing is that Presca had learned the word just that day). The next day, I went to Grand Mart with Jane and Kaila. Real, relentless customer service seems to be a pretty important part of retail in Korea, and Kaila suspects that its part of the strategy for dealing with unemployment. Every aisle had two or three women extolling the merits of some particular toilet paper or soap or juice. Near the cash register, beautiful young women were dressed in bright colors and thigh-high white boots, speaking quickly into microphone headsets. I asked one of the detergent ajummas for help and was shown to a nice Spring Water soap set. I also pretty inexplicably bought a package of banana milk and a bottle of regular milk. Jane had an armful of these cute little banana milk bottles, and all I could think to say was "I want some." Go here to see what I mean. Since that day, I've truly fallen for banana milk.

I had ddalk kalbi with Kaila, which was amazing enough that I'd take Sogang 2B up on its reading passage and head to Chuncheon to taste some of its legendary variety. On Sunday I met up with Hye Jin for the first time in months and we strolled around Sinchon and Yondae together, hand in hand like everyone else on the street. I had my first bingsu at Red Mango, and it was a scrumptious mountain of shaved ice, frozen yogurt, kiwi, pat (red bean), watermelon, and peach. Cafes here are fantastic -- the drinks, running about 4-6 dollars each, can be a little expensive, but it's easier to think of it as a cover charge for a great spot to hang out. The cafes in Sinchon are bright, tasty, look out over busy intersections, and are jammed with comfortable seating. The seating is the trick -- and most are fine places to spend a few hours chatting.

Last Monday, I finally tried Korean Fried Chicken. Since watching Donggabnaegi Gwawoehagi over winter break, I've been dying to try some. At Kyochon Chicken, we had to wait 20 minutes while our order was made from scratch, and when it came out, it was unlike any chicken I've ever had. The seasoning was hot and sweet and the crunch was fantastic. When I told Hye Jin about it, she told me that Kyochon was a huge food craze a few years ago, but that in her institute, the craze continues with frequent deliveries.

Kaila, sad that the chicken is gone.

Matt and I.

Jane, with chicken.

On Tuesday, we went to go see Hwang Jin Yi, which was a topic of conversation at our delicious dinner with Choi Seonsaengnim (Thanks!) on Friday at Korea House. While I was missing almost all of the dialogue, I worked on interpreting the film visually, which, apart from certain key dialogues about why Hwang has to become a kisaeng or how she decides to start exerting power over a number of powerful male scholars, officials, and monks, was not hard to do. Choi Seonsaengnim told us that the North Korean version of the story, which was the basis for this film, put more of an emphasis on the class aspects of the tale, while the South Korean versions behind earlier films and TV dramas concentrated more on Hwang's rise to power.

On Wednesday I got out of Sinchon for the first time to meet up with Presca. We walked from Jongno 3-ga up the Buddhist cultural street, filled with calligraphy shops selling rich writing fabrics and artisan brushes as large as mops or as thin as reeds, and both of us wished we knew enough to patronize such places. Reaching Anguk Station, we turned South to explore the beautiful black-stone streets of Insadong, sprouting at their edges bright papers and textures and electric-green water flowers floating in the middle of benches, winding through the galleries and antique shops and boutiques, coming across a synchronized-swaying, synthetic-sound-playing quartet giving a concert in a back lot to celebrate the start of Insadong's June Arts Festival. We then made it over to Unhyeongung, the house of the Taewongun and a site for late nineteenth century governmental reforms.

From there we headed back down to Jongo-gil in the direction of Tapgol Park, which I had been thinking about ever since I started studying about the Korean Independence Movement last year. While I wrote my paper in the fall for Food and Power, I kept imagining the what the day must have felt like, what those words must have sounded like, what thrill and what anger and what sadness and what hope this Pagoda Park (as it what known then) saw when student Chung Jae Yong read Choe Namson's Proclamation of Korean Independence to the thousands of demonstrators gathered there at 2pm on March 1, 1919, exactly as other thousands heard it at other parks all over the country. A 600 year old Buddhist pagoda rises up over all of it, and among the drizzle and dozens of old men gathered with their newspaper seats and their pant sleeves rolled all over the park, the huge tangled rubber-band ball of all I've been learning in college about the living beasts of history and coloniality -- monsters I've known since I was a little kid singing in Polish -- quaked and snapped to take it all in, so recent that my version has to look no farther than the men smoking on the steps of the pavilion to see how alive -- and how mixed up -- it is. Outside the glass case on the pagoda, we came across a young man clutching his chest and muttering to us incoherently, but writing him off as drunk or crazy or sick seemed impossible -- all of us in the park were mulling around trying to make sense of our minds. Back in Hannam, whose kitchen light spilling out of brick buildings made the place seem lived-in and homey in comparison with Sinchon's shiny "lively", talking about feminism tangled up my understanding of what I'd been seeing even further. As a way of overcoming my deafness to the meaning of most sound, just as with Hwang Jin Yi I'd been training my sight on the speakers during the dramas and variety shows I've been watching before going to sleep, or on the brass reliefs in Tapgol as a way of deciphering the stone words below them. To wonder about the women working at Grand Mart is to wonder about the Ledbetter v. Goodyear and Gonzalez v. Carhart rulings of this spring in the US Supreme Court, and the situation of women in Tapgol's brass reliefs has me remembering Delacroix. And then I just think and think.

The bus back from Hannam was a gorgeous ride -- something like going from East LA through Downtown and Mid-City into Westwood, something I have never done -- that took me through hills and over bridges and into City Hall Plaza and past lit-up Namdaemun. On Thursday, Sogang KLEC took us on a picnic to Anseong, the "City of Masters" in Gyeonggi-do, where we saw a Namsadang performance and toured and ate at an artisan tofu, doengjang, and gochujang farm. Namsadang was the first Korean performance troupe, founded in late Joseon, and it practiced pungmul-nori (watch some here), salpan (tumbling and acrobatics performed by a jester), beona-nori (story-telling with dish-spinning), tightrope walking, and sangmo-nori (spinning streamer hat performance). Sogang is a really fantastic place to study -- the teachers are engaging and enthusiastic, the students are friendly, and the program sets up trips and movie nights and conversation partners for us. On Thursday night, we went out to Choi's Tacos in Sinchon, which was an unlikely but delicious partner for the traditional Korean cuisine we had eaten just hours earlier. On Friday, after Choi Seonsaengnim took us out to Korea House, all of the Light Fellows got together for patbingsu at Milky Road in Sinchon. Afterwards, we went to noraebang, where I sounded out the only Korean song I know, Jjillekkot by Jang Sa Ik, which I had learned on NPR a few weeks ago. Presca made fun of me and told me that I was a 60 year old man. Then she stunned all of us when she sang in Japanese.

Masato is being patient with my questions about Japanese
history while we waited at Korea house. Look out the window:
Seoul, Joseon rooftiles, and glass.

Our group of Summer 2007 Light Fellows with a court dancer.

Choi Seonsaengnim helping me with the Korean
knot of a hanbok. At New Year's, I'd made the mistake
of just making a bow, and came out looking like a plump
peach present.

Kaila and I in hanbok.

Borrowing Presca's kid at Milky Road.

Anastasia turned 18 on Tuesday and graduated on Thursday. I hadn't felt far away until then.

On Saturday, I went to jjimjilbang in the morning. The one right around the corner from us is amazing -- from the outside, it looks like a run-down, innocuous establishment, but inside, the place is palatial. It took me a few conversations to get directions from the changing room to the exercise room, but after going upstairs to the men's sauna and downstairs to the unisex common room, I finally figured out where to go. For just $5, I enjoyed hours of exercise, sauna, and napping -- jjimjilbangs are open 24 hours. After that, I met up with Hye Jin in Insadong, and she showed me around more of the area. In the evening, we ate Hanjeongsik, and the some 150 different banchan that graced our table that night left us stuffed. At one point in the stunning meal, Hye Jin screwed up her face after a bite of fish -- I thought that maybe it had been too spicy. A few minutes later, when I took a bite, I told her it was delicious. As soon as she asked me, "really?" my throat and mouth filled with poison. I felt as if I had swallowed Pine Sol -- and as it turns out, I had. This dish, a fermented skate called Hongeojjim, is a Jeolla province specialty, and the more ammonia the fish has, the more expensive it is. Though I was shocked, I didn't change my mind -- it was delectable. We saw a few street shows -- including dragon's beard candy making (the video is Jane's from last year), an expat brass band, a Turkish ice-cream trickster, and a whole slew of teenage boys with amazing voices singing love songs in a mini amphitheater at the South end of the street. Hye Jin, a plant scientist, told me that Turkish ice-cream makers use plant resins from an orchid and an evergreen plant to thicken the ice cream so that they can do things like this. We then made our way over to Cheonggyecheon, the public works project that made Seoul Mayor Lee Myung Bak a contender for the presidency. It seemed that night that everyone in Seoul was on this stylish riverbank: families, lovers, and friends were walking hand in hand along the stream, reaching out their hands to brush the reeds, waiting for the crossing guard to wave them across the stones, and looking up at the sparkling downtown Seoul. Naveen asked me, "Conformist or romantic?" and I answered that I had a soft spot for people enjoying civic life and public works. Going North along Cheonggyecheon lead us right to
Seoul Plaza, where just as many people were out on the huge lawn just savoring the night. When I asked Hye Jin about Sicheong, she told me that while she had always loved its elegant clock, the building itself -- a 1926 addition by the Japanese -- had always made her feel a little sad.

On Monday I finally got over to Yongsan for electronics. Unfortunately, the huge E-Mart was closed on a yearly holiday, so Kaila and I walked over to another electronics mart. I got a card phone, but was unable to find a dictionary. Thanks to Kaila, getting service for the phone was easy -- we learned the right vocabulary from a vendor downstairs and headed up to SK telecom's friendly office to register my number. While we walked around the Yongsan Station area, we talked about how it felt to live in Korea. I feel really comfortable here. Certainly, I'm frustrated by my inability to read signs fully or to function in all the situations that I need to, but the living here (thanks Light) is great. Mary Jane told me that this is a city for young people, and it certainly seems that way from what I've experienced. For now, Seoul feels big and exciting and possible like New York, and also vast like Los Angeles. My life here is active -- I'm always moving from school to restaurant to exploration and back -- and I feel like I have only more things to gain (including my mobility). So far, I feel like I could just keep living here, and I think that I would have done well to have applied for the year. Afterwards, we got some drinks and ice cream at Cafe Pascucci, and I continued feeling good about Sinchon cafes.

Moving up to Level 3 has helped. After studying over the weekend, I took the check-up on the grammar that my Level 2 speaking teacher had noticed I'd had trouble with on the placement test she gave me, and she moved me into Level 3. It is also very difficult in Level 3, but I have been lucky to meet a great group of people in Level 3 who do a lot together -- in Korean. One of my good friends here is Sung Ho, a zainichi studying so that he can move to Korea. Life in Japan can be extremely difficult for foreigners and minorities, and Sung Ho, a 3rd generation zainichi whose parents run a golf shop, is not considered a citizen and pays egregious taxes on his earnings. Sung Ho studied Russian in Moscow for awhile, so we can also scratch out a conversation between my Polish and his Russian. He's an organizer -- pulling together huge crews from all different levels of our program for crazy events like Chicken Day this Friday -- and he's eager to relate anyone he can in any language he can.

I've come to understand that being a student is something separate from just age or location -- we are a miscellaneous crew at KLEC, but with the exception of a few strange old men, everyone here -- young or old, Mongolian or Spanish -- runs from floor to floor at breaks to chat with old friends from previous levels, grab yogurt and rice balls at the convenience store, joke around, hurriedly exchange numbers and emails for coordinating huge groups in lunchtime restaurant takeovers or SD Vamos soccer or weekend drinking or farewell parties for graduating friends. As we call out for more kamja at Rotary or yell out Jalhanda! when somebody makes a sweet shot, there's something really hopeful and wonderful about just being a student.

So here I am.

On the Way Over

2007-06-07T02:07:00.000-07:00

June 5, 2007
6.24p PST
Northern Pacific Ocean --- Over the Aleutian Islands

This is a hasty and doughy (I haven’t written anything in awhile), but I wanted to have a portrait – any portrait – of myself before I start my trip. And before anything else, thank you to the Richard U. Light Fellowship at Yale and the Richard U. Light Foundation in Kalamazoo, as well as my wonderful teachers and advisers in Yale’s East Asian Languages and Literatures, East Asian Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies departments, for giving me this fantastic opportunity. Thanks to the Light Fellowship at Yale for putting together such a well thought-out program, especially the SAC, forums, emails, orientations, and reviews. Before starting at Yale, I never would have dreamed that I would end up in Korea, studying the language and culture that I discovered I couldn’t stop thinking about, but these people are in the business of dreams. As importantly, thank you to my family and friends for being as thrilled about this trip as I am.

It started last May. I had some five days between my Spanish and Korean history finals, and trying to read over what my notes, a terrible need to get to Korea washed over me. I spent hours looking for funded trips, my mind suspended on the parallel train of living that procrastination builds, somewhere between what I’d learned all semester and my urge for homecoming.

So while my parents prepared to come down from Providence to meet me and head west, while I struggled to coax Oberdorfer, Chunhyang, Shin & Robinson et. al., the YMCA Baseball team, Kang, Clark, and even Hwang into a story I’d tell, a singular tender suspended fact took root in me: plan among endless plans since Yale that would stick.

I’m sure that no matter what I had done, I’d be unprepared for this trip. (Still, had I been able to make time for study among the endless sunny errands of home, I may not have felt this anxious about dialing Kim Mun Nam’s number from Incheon and hoping that he knows what I’m talking about when I tell him that I expect to see him shortly to begin my three month stay at Shereville Livingtel, provided that I can make it through the bus rides and the walk.) Since last May, I’ve simply known to go to Korea by hook or crook, so when the Light Fellowship offer came, I was overjoyed, and spent plenty of time thinking about how different the world was going to be. Looking at pictures of the KLEC building (I hope!) on Sogang Dae’s site, it hit me that for the first time, I was going to a place where my familiarity with the language of the signs was something short of a kindergartener’s. (My mother teaches kindergarten, so I thought it was a useful comparison.) Yet, it’s only in recent days that my thinking has reached this crazy pitch, and everything – continuing West over the ocean from LAX for the first time, printing out trip emails, listening to my Sogang dialogues to mute the crying baby down the aisle – turns my previously general thoughts of “Wow, this BCD House dining room bubbling with Korean at all different speeds – that’s what my summer is going to sound like,” or “Jane, I couldn’t remember which way the international date line pushed time,” into “I’m about to lose my day. I’m about to put a larger security deposit of time than ever down on my mind, eyes, and tongue working in conjunction.”

There’s no need to get carried away – but all of this – heading West beyond the shore, losing a whole day, the expectation on how I deal with sound and everything that builds it – is new, so I’ll allow myself some thinking about how to think about it. I told Ailya in the car this morning that I was nervous about my phone call to Mr. Kim and my trip out to Shinchon not because I doubt that I’ll be able to do it (I don’t), but because there’s something a little more at stake than just making it out there. It’s how well I use Korean to do so. I expect that how I look at my interactions, likely rife at first with inopportune han beon dos and bluffed yeses, will be something I bring up a lot this summer.

I’m not sure that I would have or could have done anything about it had I not read this in the SAC guide last night, but I will have to find Grand Mart for some bedding and a thin robe when I get to Shinchon tonight. I’ve heard that Seoul runs around the clock, and I hope that this is not an exception. I also hope to change money at the airport to pay for all this, and for rent so I have a place to sleep tonight. In the morning I hope to find my way to Sogang unscathed, and that placement goes well. Being here without experts like Kaila or Jane will be a bit tricky, but I’m glad that I’m getting started by myself, as bumbling as I might turn out. I hope I can get my bearings quickly, and find some suitable exercise and volunteering opportunities for the summer. I hope I can make new friends, though I’m not sure how my life is going to work, much less how I’m going to meet Korean friends.

During my phone interview, the teacher from Sogang asked me what I would like to do once I got to Korea. “Thinking” on my feet, I told her that I couldn’t wait to try samgyetang. She laughed at my odd choice with a “Keurae?” Ne. Afterward, I thought it must be a fun job to call people all over the world who knew only enough to be simple, earnest, and hungry.

I think I’m about to lose my day now.

Please keep in touch.

8.04p PST
Bering Sea, Southeast of the Gulf of Shelekhova and the Sea of Othosk