week of exploration

Let's see if I can remember everything I did in the past week.

After three weeks of doing nothing, last week was the Cheusok holiday, and I was off all week. Shameful negligence in blogging followed. I like to think it was because I was too busy doing stuff, but really I was just lazy.

Thursday: karaoke insanity! Our pub on campus is closing soon, so the owner is getting as much mileage as possible out of her karaoke machine. She advertised another night of singing, but almost no one showed up, so Erin and I just shrugged and jumped in. We were joined shortly by a huge group of Korean navy men who were on campus for English classes, all of whom had an incredible enthusiasm for karaoke! They asked us very politely if they could sing Korean songs, and we conceded the machine, eager to see what they'd do. Immediately a high energy performance ensued, with one petite man in bright pink dancing most lewdly! Others sang with great expression and passion, and Mr Pink just kept on wiggling his butt and pelvic thrusting throughout the night. He even tried to show me how to do his dance in pantomime: grab the front of your pants, and the back of your pants, and yank your pelvis back and forth piston-style. ....it worked for him...
Friday: I taught my first lesson, albeit to the rest of the staff, and on the last period of the last day before vacation. It was a farce. How am I supposed to teach 25 English teachers how to tell a doctor they have a headache or stomachache? We finished in maybe 20 minutes and dismissed. After work I went to a little bar about a mile away with Erin and Laura, we got strawberry soju. It's a frozen slushie style drink of blended fruit, ice, and soju (Korean equivalent of vodka). We got a pitcher but it's served in little shot glasses, so it's kind of hard to keep track of how much you're drinking, and it creeps up on you! Very tasty though. We had the sense to stop after pitcher #2. Walked home through interesting little backstreets; we live in such a quiet area!

Saturday: I met up with some people from an online community I joined, for Westerners working in Korea. Only had talked with the one girl by email previously, but she said it was a good group of people. The weirdest thing was that over half the people there had lived in Philly, and one guy's sisters had actually gone to Phil-Mont!!!! (For those who don't know, it's my teeeeeeny Christian high school. There were maybe 55 people in my graduating class. This same person, Johnny, also works quite near EV, coaching soccer. We definitely are going to hang out more and swap more stories about our bizarre shared backgrounds. We all ended up at a bar called Beer O'Clock for beer and pizza, tucked back in the Hongdae/Sinchon area of Seoul. Great to meet so many cool Westerners!
Sunday: Meg was meeting up with a friend she'd only met once before, and was worried it might be awkward, so I went along for moral support. While we waited, we got approached TWICE by men who apparently thought we were prostitutes, since we were perched on the street corner, and Meg looks sort of Russian, with her short blond hair. (Russian=hooker here.) The one pair were Nigerian, I think, and spoke fairly good English, but the Korean guys could barely communicate with us, besides to ask if we were Russian and to ask us to get a drink with them. We declined, so they went into the corner store and brought beers out to us! I think Meg needs to cultivate a better city demeanor and not make eye contact and/or smile at strangers. We finally found her friend and went out for barbeque, which I'm enjoying more and more. I need to practice ordering my favorite kinds of meat...
Monday was a dead day: sleeping in, cleaning my apartment, doing laundry, watching Harry Potter. I always think I want a vacation full of lazy days, and I always hate myself at the end of them for having done nothing interesting. Vowed not to let it happen again.
Tuesday: Meg, Erin, Laura, and I had lunch and tried to plan our week. Didn't come up with much concrete. We were thinking of arranging a trip to Busan, which is on the coast and is a decent sized city of it's own right, but no one's finances or pet-sitting responsibilities quite allowed it. We seemed ready to part ways without doing anything further, so I announced I was going into Seoul to do WHATEVER, and Laura decided to join me. We settled on going to COEX, a huge mall complex that also has an aquarium. It took a pretty long time to get there, but it was worth it. The aquarium was fascinating: so much of it seemed to be dedicated to the weirdest fish tanks you could imagine, and not so much about the fish themselves. I'll upload pictures shortly of fish in phone booths, traffic lights, fire extinguishers, and much more! Finally we did move through to the more interesting aquatic life. There was a tank of huge moray eels, along with cleaner fish who eat the dead flesh off the eels' skin and teeth. Seeing that sort of symbiotic relationship is kind of staggering, even though you read about it all the time! There were also some adorable otters, a two-headed turtle (!) some seals who were being lazy, and a penguin tank. Two of them were watching penguin cartoons on TV while snuggling quite amorously! The coolest part, though, was the shark tank with a glass walkway through it, with the Jaws theme music piped in! Ever had a live shark swim directly at your face while shark attack music plays?? It's an experience, to be sure. After the aquarium, we shopped around the COEX Mall for a bit, it is incredibly huge. Had a comfort dinner of KFC (did you know Koreans love fried chicken?) and headed home.

Wednesday I planned ahead a little more, and decided to do something interesting and historical. Settled on Jogyesa Shrine, the largest Buddhist shrine in Seoul. Laura came along again...I love how I defaulted to tourguide because I'm comfortable on the subways. We got off at Insadong and were promptly bewildered, because there's LOTS of stuff going on there, and its not clearly marked from the subway station. Eventually got pointed in the right direction, and found the shrine. Right away we were a little taken aback: the shrine did NOT look like a tourist destination, it seemed like an actual place of worship...which it is. Laura was especially neurotic because she's an atheist, but I'm curious enough to not feel disrespectful. We checked in the "Foreign Information Center" and they said we could go around, take pictures, etc, and that we should just be respectful and not disrupt the worshipers. Laura was still nervous to actually enter, but I kicked my shoes off and went right on in. There were three enormous gold buddhas at the front, and the room was full of worshippers on mats, either counting rosary beads or doing some sort of bowing ritual. I pulled out a mat, knelt down, and took a few discreet pictures, and got ready to leave, when an older woman pulled up a mat next to me and said "first time?" I said yes, and she told me "stand up. I am your teacher." Nonplused, I followed her instructions and stood. "Now kneel. Hands on floor. Head down. Palms up to honor them. Touch head. Head up. Now stand, palms together. Again." She took me through the entire ritual 3 times, and then wanted to know who I had lost. I realized then that it was close to a holiday that honors dead ancestors, although I believe that the same bowing ritual can be used at any time. I mumbled something polite about wanting to learn and made my exit. Laura was waiting curiously outside, and I spent the next few hours feeling strangely exalted. I really do need to find out more about religions in other countries, especially the kind that you can explore without the "all or nothing" mindset. After the Temple, we wandered the car-less streets of Insadong, got some tea, found the Knife Gallery (mentioned in my guidebook, it was a little basement room full of strange swords and blades) and went on a quest for a place for lunch. The last few times she and I have had bad luck with just picking a place at random, so we found a restaurant in the guidebook that sounded good: it serves mandu soup with huge oversize dumplings. The weird thing about Insadong, though, is that it's full of -gil, teeny little sidestreets. They're numbered, but there were TWO "Insadong-gil 5" so it took us a while to find the place. It can be a challenge to read the restaurant names in Korean, too. We eventually found it, and the servings were massive. We didn't come close to finishing, especially since we ordered a house specialty at the waitress's suggestion (some sort of Korean pancake) which was tasty, but also massive! We called it a day after that meal and staggered home.

Thursday was Tamara's birthday, and Meg and Erin had been craving ice skating, so we all went out to Lotteworld, an amusement park in Seoul with an indoor skating rink. Laura and I opted out of ice skating, and checked out the various rides instead, while Meg, Erin, and Tamara skated. The park was pretty cool; lots of the rides and displays were indoors, although there was an outside island-style part reminiscent of Disneyland. Unfortunately, we picked a day when all the schools had a half day, so the park was swarming with school kids by the afternoon. We waited an hour to ride the indoor roller coaster, which was pretty awesome! But it was also quite a long subway ride back to our bus stop, so we left after that....because Thursday is also PUNK NIGHT in Ilsan! We got home in time to eat, rest a bit, and change. Only Meg and I went to Punk Night, but it turned out to be a very entertaining evening. There were a lot of people out for one guy's goodbye party, and Dave, the DJ, was taking requests. Met lots of interesting people, saw some that I'd met the last time I was at that bar. Good times! Somewhere around 3 or 4, we stumbled home.

Friday I pried myself out of bed to meet up with a couple I'd met the previous weekend. We had sushi for lunch (conveyor belt style!) then went to Suwon, a small city outside Seoul that is walled from when it was a fortress town. We explored some of the historical buildings and did some shopping, and walked along the path at the top of the wall. Lovely view from up there! We were going to do some hiking, but the paths we meant to take were gated off for some reason, so we headed back to their apartment in Songtan instead. There's an air force base there, so there's lots of Western shops and culture. We had dinner at an authentic Mexican restaurant, complete with live music, then hung out at their apartment for a while, chatting and drinking wine. Even after only knowing them a week, it felt like we'd been friends forever. It would have taken me about 3 hours to get home, so I stayed in their spare room, and the next morning some friends of theirs joined us for lunch at a Brazilian churrascaria (all you can eat meat!)...it felt like a very multi-cultural weekend! I went home not long after that, and it did in fact take me 3 hours to get home. I'm definitely already irritated that I live in the suburbs.

Sunday I spent completely solo, which was kind of a relief. Sitting alone in my room is boring, but too much time spent around people is exhausting! I went back to Itaewon to get some clothes, and I found some cool Halloweeny decorations as well. The one store I like had some cute jeans, but they were too long, so she offered to hem them for me, for free. I said I'd come back Tuesday, but when she heard where I lived she was aghast and said "no, no! Too far! I send! Address?" I love this woman, she is so sweet and helpful! I headed back *almost* ready to go back to work on Monday...

All in all, I could have seen more of Korea if I'd tried, but at least I'm pretty comfortable with Seoul in general now. It feels a little more like 'home' or at least more familiar. It's good to be confident in where I'm going, even though the language will always be a barrier. I definitely meant to study Korean a lot more during this week off!

lazy time

I just had an entire week off. I did lots and lots of interesting things, and of course the thought of writing all of them down is exhausting. So instead, here's a few little things that make me smile about Korea.

-There's coffee machines everywhere. For anywhere between 10-70 cents, you can push a button and get a little cup of hot coffee, cappuccino, cocoa, or tea. This entertains me greatly!
-Ordinary cheddar cheese is in the 'gourmet' section of the supermarket.
-Spam is eaten frequently, and it comes in gift boxes for holidays. I know I'd be staggering with joy if I were presented with a gift-wrapped, elegantly displayed box of assorted Spam...
-Water fountains are practically nonexistent. Instead, there's water coolers with little paper envelopes that you drink from.
-There are gas masks in the subway stations. Just in case.
-Koreans hate the idea of drinking on an empty stomach, so every bar will have a little dish of pretzels, popcorn, or some munchy thing, free of charge.
-Also in the subway stations, reasonably clean public bathrooms. They are carefully marked with little male/female figures on signs that tell you which way to go, and exactly how many meters further you have.
-Men and women frequently wear matching t-shirts!

Ok, so many of my delights are public-transit based, but that's the most of everyday Korean culture i've experienced. Now off to help Erin walk a very tiny dog!