It's that special time of year again. The one where I actually write in here. You know what, though? I dunk on myself a lot for how little I update this blog, but in fairness I've been keeping it going for over three years now. But you know what also? That's not much of an accomplishment considering I only write about four times a year. So let's call it a draw on how much credit I should receive.
I'm actually at work as I write this. I "teach" an hour long class from 7 to 8pm every Friday, but I'm basically just watching over some students as they do their homework. My only function here is to answer questions whenever I'm asked, so by writing in here it at least seems like I'm doing something productive. At least I'm not watching Star Trek. I wish I was watching Star Trek.
(UPDATE: It is now almost 8pm and I've been asked exactly one question one time. I crushed it though. Go me.)
December is upon us and the weather has been inconsistent at best. It dropped to -5 degrees for about a week and now it's up to around 10. Some are projecting that this could be one of the coldest winters on record for Korea and I'm impatient for those days to arrive. This is the only season in which I'm more comfortable than everyone else and it sure is taking its sweet damn time to get here. I just wanna laugh at all the cold people, is that so much to ask? I have next Tuesday and Wednesday off from work for Christmas, and Chloe and I are gonna spend some of that time moving her out of her apartment. She'll be staying at our place for the most part and spending some time out with her family. We're going out for dinner on the 23rd; our friends booked us at a restaurant in Namsan Tower as a wedding present. I'm pretty excited for that. Gonna definitely try to not steal all her food. No promises though.
Living in Seoul has been pretty great so far. I've been trying to stop and look around more and just enjoy where I am. Living in the moment, you know? I feel like after living here for so long, I've stopped appreciating some of the little things that I love about Korea. Stuff like this: most of the larger grocery stores have a section with specifically proportioned vegetables depending on the dish you plan on cooking. Making some 부대찌개? Well put that recipe book down, idiot, we got you covered.
For everyone who enjoys cooking but is otherwise too lazy or dumb to get the ingredients themselves
Biking to work helped me appreciate this area a lot more. I've never really had to commute in this country before as I was always within walking distance of work. I'm really glad I stopped taking the subway so much and started using the public bikes instead. On my route, I cross a bridge which spans a fairly wide river that separates the wealthier Mokdong area from the, shall we say, ramshackle neighborhood I live in. On more than one occasion I've just stopped and looked for a while before continuing on. The view is quite something.
By day
By night
I've gotten better at noticing little things. It's tough though, because the things I'm trying to appreciate are, by their nature, the sort of things I stopped noticing a long time ago. So I have to constantly ask myself, "Shouldn't you take a photo of this? Isn't this cool? Do you want to remember this thing? Should you maybe stop talking to yourself in public because people are starting to stare?" Some stuff just jumps out at me and I suddenly realize I want to photograph it. Like this sign outside a kimbap restaurant, where they were still steaming dumplings at four in the morning:
Or this crowded underground shopping area:
Or this random side-street, one of probably hundreds throughout the city:
I'm not even sure why these things or why I wanted to remember them. I'm gonna keep adding to this throughout the year though, and just try to take pictures of the sort of things you wouldn't normally photograph. Korea has been such a joy to live in so far, and I think more than anything it's the everyday noise that's responsible.
This update took a lot longer to get out than I originally intended, largely because it's been a busy six weeks since I moved up to Seoul, but also because I didn't really know what I wanted to say. I'll get this out of the way right at the start, because I don't want this to be the whole post: I originally intended this update to be entirely about what happened at the end of my previous job. I had and still have a lot - a lot - to say on that subject, but honestly, what's the point? I could type ten thousand words here about it and nothing will change, so why dwell on the past when there's so much awesome stuff going on in my life right now? Suffice to say it sucked, and it's time to move on. So that's that.
Seoul! I'm living in Seoul now! My address has the word Seoul in it! I look out my window and boom, there's Seoul. Which is to say there are a bunch of buildings and a ton of noise. I've wanted to live up here ever since I moved to Korea and so far it has been pretty great. It's just such a colossal city; you could take the subway in any random direction from my apartment for about an hour without ever leaving. Feel free to test that out if you'd like, doesn't sound like the best way to spend an afternoon but I'm not one to judge.
My new apartment is, uh...well it's...
I'm biking more now too! That's been great! Seoul has rental bike stations every couple blocks and it only cost about $40 to use them for an entire year, so I've been cycling in to work every day that it hasn't dumped down rain. We're moving in to fall weather now which might be my favourite season in this country. The five month heat wave that is summer is finally over and it's no longer an agonizing experience just walking out my front door.
I'm also studying Korean a lot more now, which I know I've said in the past but I'm actually really committed to this new program. I found workbooks in a bookstore for a website called Talk To Me in Korean and I started doing their grammar lessons. They're program is fantastic and a huge percentage of their curriculum is free (I paid for the workbooks and bought some additional vocabulary / conversation books because I wanted them, but the lessons themselves are completely free to listen to). If you are new to studying Korean and stumbled across this blog by accident and then actually read all the way down to this point on, I don't know, a dare or something? Then I would highly recommend checking that site out. My skill level has actually increased a ton in the last month alone and I'm only on to the second level of nine.
Work has been great as well! Not a lot new to say on that front as it's the same job I've been doing since I moved here, but the staff has all been helpful and my coworkers are very friendly people. I'm teaching a Masters Literature course which I absolutely love as it gives me a lot of freedom to plan out curriculum and projects. I actually started creating my own dice-rolling tabletop style games themed around the novels we're studying for my students to play in class, which has been a lot of fun. Hopefully some more good news forthcoming on the job front, but we will see.
And of course - burying the lead here a lot - Chloe and I got engaged last month!
One thing I love about this picture is you can't hear Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" which was unfortunately playing somewhere in the background at the time
I proposed at the Han River, where we met and had our first date all the way back in March 2016. I had thought about the proposal for a long time and I had this image in my head of how it would go, and as all good plans eventually do, the whole thing kinda fell apart. The river was absolutely packed by the time we got there and it took a while to find a good spot with some relative privacy. I was incredibly giddy the entire time so it was all I could do to not just physically chase some people away from the area. But we eventually found a great place with a view of Namsan Tower across the river, where we went on our first date after we became an official couple.
The tradition at Namsan tower is for couples to buy a lock, write their names on it and attach it somewhere at the top of the tower. This is meant to represent their bond to one another and help their relationship endure forever. I thought it was kinda cute at the time, but never really took the symbolism to heart until the day I asked the woman I love - and profoundly do not deserve - to marry me.
I've been thinking about this for the past few weeks so I wanted to talk about it here before inevitably I just, you know, don't. I will update again in the next month or so to explain about the super awesome really really fun month I've been having so far (ha ha ha), but this post won't be about that. If you're curious, or worried, or even just indifferently skimming this for something interesting to read (you can stop), I will say this: I am doing just fine, and I apologize for the cryptic introduction to this post. Things will make more sense later. But for now, I wanna talk about trust.
I'm not a smart man, but one thing I've learned in my time in Korea - almost three years now, holy crap - is that living in a foreign country where you don't speak the language requires a pretty tremendous degree of trust in your fellow human being. I've never fully appreciated until recently just how much I depend on other people for literally everything. Banking, employment arrangements, housing, taxes, everyday translations, purchasing things, setting up basic household services like phone or WiFi, getting directions, giving directions, and even just the simple task of explaining yourself and your own point of view - you depend on other people not only being patient enough to let you explain yourself but to actually believe you when you do. And that's true no matter where you live, but when you add in the barrier of not even speaking the same language it becomes a never ending circus of nightmares.
You find yourself explaining what you need in your language to a person who perhaps doesn't 100% understand you, and then trusting that person to accurately translate your stupid requests to a third person. Then that third person talks to your helper, who translates back to you, and you repeat the whole process and there is a none percent chance that something doesn't get loss in the cross talk. And you know the whole time that something you're trying to say isn't going through, and you have no idea what but you just accept it anyway. And this goes on and on with everybody acting like you're on temporary loan from a daycare for adult-sized children and you end up signing any piece of paper put in front of you just so you can go home and hide under a table.
Or hey! Maybe you make an actual effort to learn the foreign language and communicate that way? That certainly would save a step, but if you're some kind of idiot, you find yourself living in a country for almost three years and the only thing you can reliably say in Korean is "CAN I HAVE ANOTHER BEER PLEEEEEAAAASE?"
The point is that I think you need to be a trusting person to get along here. You need to be at least mostly sure that the people helping you have your best interests in mind or at the very least lack some suspicious ulterior motive. The alternative is, what? Just drive yourself mad with worry that every time you pay your bills the friendly lady at the bank is gonna steal your social security number even though you don't even know if you have one? Nah, not for me. I've always tried to be a trusting person, bordering on or full-on crossing into the territory of naivete. I figure if I go through life and only one in a hundred people try to screw me over, it's worth it for the other ninety nine people I might not have known if I suspected them from the outset.
And the surprising thing is that that's how it's worked out for me so far. Maybe I've been lucky, but I talk on this blog a lot about how awesome people have been here to me. People in Korea go way out of their way to help me out when I need it, and other than a few misunderstandings everything has gone stunningly smoothly. One of my biggest fears before moving here was of a general inability to do anything or get things done when I needed to, and thanks to that 99% of people I mentioned that fear has never really come to fruition.
That 1% though? When it happens? It does kick you pretty god damn hard. It kicks you until your entire concept of trust in other people gets knocked right out of you for a while. And it doesn't matter how little it happens, only that it happens once, and you're left with one question: Why?
But you do get to choose: do you become paranoid and suspicious of everyone, afraid it may happen again? Or do you dust yourself off and start over again at person number one? I don't know if there's a good answer for you - curious person, worried person, or indifferent person who actually made it all the way to the end - but I know what I'll pick.
One of the best things about living in Korea is sometimes your building will switch your air conditioner off for no reason and when you ask them why they basically just laugh while you sweat yourself into a coma.
Summer is here! I'm heading into the start of my third full summer in this country and the passage of time does not make it any easier. The humidity gets into and ruins basically every aspect of my life. No window is strong enough to keep it out. My classroom is so muggy the pictures I put up on the wall are already starting to wrinkle in on themselves. My students are all miserable, but at least now it's only partially my fault. Of course, when I do switch the air conditioner on it's only about five minutes before one of them complains that now it's too cold, at which point I either throw them or myself out the window.
This is my first summer in Gwanggyo though, and this area does have its charms. I take a lot of walks along the river which leads to the lake near my apartment and it is very soothing. Cherry blossom season ended about a month ago (the most gorgeous and tragically short lived season in this country) and now the trees are full leafed and the flowers are in bloom. The lake itself is ringed by a series of walking and bicycle pathways which lead to a park just past the southern bank. The pathways lead over some gentle slopes and through some well-maintained and beautiful forested areas. So it's a good time to get out and explore the natural beauty of the country, but if you don't bring at least six liters of water you're basically just a corpse that hasn't stopped moving yet.
The other weekend I actually took a trip on my own out to Yeoju, which ended up being only partially a failure. My goal was to visit the tomb of King Sejong (inventor of the Korean alphabet which I talked about INSERT TEXT TO DISPLAY HERE). Of course, because I'm mostly an idiot, I didn't find out until after I spent an hour and a half on the subway travelling there that King Sejong's tomb was under renovation and closed to the public. Fortunately the park was mostly empty so no one heard my near constant swearing.
The rest of the park was very nice though; I enjoyed a pleasant hour walking around and seeing some of the other tombs housed in that area. I realized this is one of the only times I've been out in a public space in Korea and virtually no one else was around. I stopped near the summit of one particularly tall hill and spent a solid five minutes just looking around at how empty it was. Even when I'm out walking past midnight there are always a few people out on dates or, you know, just being drunk generally.
Just me and my stupid stupid thoughts
Entrance to the burial area
Tomb of King Hyojong. Not the one I wanted to see but interesting nonetheless
My one major takeaway from the trip is how much easier it is to do almost anything when Chloe is there. The fact that she actually looks things up and doesn't make a bunch of idiotic mistakes is a major change of pace for me.
I've been back from Vietnam for a month, but the great thing about having a blog no one reads is that I can update it whenever the hell I want, thank you very much. Some quick updates from the ol' personal life before I dive into the trip: new term started last week and I'm teaching a lot of upper level classes this term. Classes so far have been pretty stable and no major issues, though I do have one kid who makes me super uncomfortable. It's not so much how loudly he laughs at his own jokes as it's the excessively detailed and violent content of those jokes which makes me triple check that my door is locked every night. We have a couple new teachers, one of whom is Canadian, which means soon the students will start to unravel all the lies I've told them about Canada. The days of pretending I rode to school astride a giant polar bear named Trüllbus are over. On to Vietnam then! You know, I don't think I've ever been properly rested during the descent into a new country. No matter what time my flight leaves the next day, I've never able to properly sleep the night before. So as we coasted into Da Nang International, I was fueled by about 90 minutes of the sort of sleep you get on a plane where you're strapped into an upright seated position and someone keeps slamming a drink cart into your god damn knee every fifteen minutes. The first thing I noticed from the plane was the wall-to-wall greenery of the country. There were mountains and some cities dotting the landscape but my first and strongest impression was of a verdant, deep-green country covered in heavy grey clouds.
This, but kinda everywhere
The original plan Chloe and I had for this vacation was to find a few nice places to settle down and just relax for a week, which I think we pretty much achieved. I don't have much to say about sightseeing for the first few days because we simply didn't do that much. We did visit the beach, checked out Hoi An Ancient Town and did a bit of exploring in the area though. We also did some shopping and I may have gotten taken for a ride by a disingenuous t-shirt vendor but that's a story for another...well, I just don't wanna talk about it.
Not pictured: t-shirt vendor. She's dead to me
But mostly we relaxed. Our first resort had a fantastic spa so we spent the first part of our second day getting some pretty amazing massages and lounging by the pool. A lot of our excursions away from the resort involved finding some amazing food to try, and oh god the food we ate, you wouldn't even believe it. Everything was amazing and delicious and cheap. We would sit down, try four or five dishes, have a few drinks and all told the meal would be less than $30. We ended up bringing a lot more money than we actually needed so we kept looking for different ways to spend it, which is how I ended up coming home with a strange bottle of Vietnamese SomethingOrOther which I am excited to actually drink. Best food was probably Banh Mi, which was a Vietnamese meat sandwich with different vegetables, spicy sauces and pâté. I would fly back just to fill a suitcase with these things.
And that was most of the trip really, which was awesome. I was pretty stressed out at the time about some things at work, and nothing helps you forget about workplace stress than putting several thousand kilometers between you and your workplace. After the first couple days we went to a different resort in Da Nang and spent a few days there as well, which was also really nice. We spent the second half of the trip exploring the city, trying more delicious food and visiting a huge market downtown. Han Market had hundreds of different stalls with a variety of different clothing options, but all employing the same fashion of sales technique; namely, they would yell at you until you either bought something or ran away.
In Da Nang we also did our only real day of sight seeing when we visited the Marble Mountains, which is a collection of temples, pagodas and old statue work on top of series of mountainous plateaus located just outside of the city. We spent the day checking out these really gorgeous caverns, carvings of the Buddha and some beautiful old temples. We also got to enjoy a spectacular view of the countryside when we started climbing a narrow, dangerous flight of steps on a whim and accidentally wound up on top of the mountain.
Yeah, oops
My favourite thing though was Am Phu Cave, also known as the "Hell Cave," which was underneath Marble Mountains. Exploring through it was meant to represent one's journey through the afterlife. When you enter the cave you see statues of bodies sinking below the water, symbolizing the beginning of one's descent. The main entrance chamber shows where your good deeds are weighed against your bad, and you have to stand before a series of judges who decide your ultimate fate.
As soon as I stepped up they all said "HELL!" like pretty much right away
If you are judged evil, you have to descend ever further under the mountain, where you pass by statues of hideous demons and monsters inflicting pretty graphically rendered tortures on all the unfortunates who were similarly judged. The further you go, the harder it becomes to progress forward, as the walls become narrower and more cramped. When you finally make it to the very bottom chamber, there is an alter where you can ask for redemption, at which point you can try to ascend back up to the main chamber.
The ascent to heaven was probably my favourite part of the day. After exploring the depths of hell, I was pretty exhausted, but decided to make the arduous climb up the Stairway to Heaven (which, come to think of it, would be a pretty cool song title). The stairway is surrounded by statues of angels and revered religious figures who are meant to guide you out of the cave and back into the sunlight. It was a tough climb; the stairs were narrow, there wasn't much to hold on to and there were a ton of assholes who just actively refused to get out of my way.
I eventually made it out and got to look down in contempt on everyone still trapped in hell. Including my girlfriend, who elected not to make the climb.
And that was Vietnam! This turned out to be a longer post than I originally intended, so I will omit the fact that I attempted to go swimming in untenable weather and ended up getting a fever as a result. I mean, nothing! Bye now!
In my latest defense of how infrequently I update this blog: I actually did write a whole long reflection on my adjustment to working at my new branch here in Gwanggyo and the process of letting go of a lot of the anger I had about my previous job. It ended up being, well...very angry, and really specifically critical of select individuals, and also went on for just a stupidly long time, so I elected not to post it. Then I just sorta forgot.
Winter is chugging along slowly, sometimes cold, but most of the time tolerable enough that I get to laugh at all of my American friends and coworkers who aren't as well adjusted to the season. It's a good season to spend time indoors, so a couple weeks ago, Chloe and I went to the National Museum of Korea!
Hell yeah, learning 'bout stuff!
Korean history goes back thousands of years and is immensely complicated yet fascinating. The National Museum has artifacts dating back thousands of years and covers every period of human settlement on the peninsula since the Paleolithic era. I'm not going to dive into all of that here because a) I will lose whatever readership I have maintained up to this point and b) I am perhaps the least qualified expert on Korean history perhaps on the planet Earth. I highly recommend the National Museum, but the surprise highlight of our trip was an impromptu stop at the Hangul Museum located in the same area.
This book represents, in my view, one of the most inspiring innovations in history
In the past few months I've greatly increased my effort to learn Korean and have been studying regularly for an hour or so a day. I was motivated to learn primarily so I could converse with my girlfriend, as well as her family, in their own language, but ever since my first day in Korea I've been fascinated with the history of the Korean alphabet, also known as 한글 (pronounced Hangul).
In the beginning, there was the Word - Dan Simmons
In the 15th century, the Korean language was primarily written using characters from the classical Chinese alphabet. This caused a few difficulties, mainly because the Korean language is fundamentally very different from Chinese, so many of the characters were inadequate for transcribing the words. In addition, classical Chinese is very complicated to learn, so only the wealthy could afford the time and education to master it. This left a huge portion of lower-class citizens illiterate, causing a great deal of hardship; for example, warnings about the spread of disease often went unheeded as the poor were unable to read the notices.
King Sejong (also known as Sejong the Great) was dissatisfied with this injustice and, together with the Hall of Worthies (the royal research institute at the time) decided to create an entirely new alphabet which would be simple for the common man to learn in a very short time. Hangul, the new writing system, was able to perfectly reflect the consonant and vowel sounds of the Korean language. It was designed for simplicity, and was indeed so easy to learn that a saying at the time translates thus: "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days."
The consonants of Hangul are modeled after the shape your mouth and throat make when you pronounce them because, I'm not kidding, this alphabet makes almost too much sense
I know this is kinda fact-heavy and I'm not making much of an effort to be funny in this post, but there is something in this story that feels very familiar. It feels like the sort of thing that only happens in fiction - the wise ruler who spends his life doing something that specifically benefits the common people. And if that did happen in fiction, who would be the villains? Probably the rich upper-class who didn't want their position marginalized by allowing the common folk to read the way they could? Maybe the next act of the book is when they oppose the promulgation of the language, maybe even banning it outright, so as not to lose grasp on something that gives them an exclusive power?
Because historically speaking, that is exactly what happened next. Hangul was opposed by the elite who saw it as a threat to their status and the study of it was eventually banned in the early 16th century. But it stayed strong among the undereducated, finding particular popularity with women and writers of popular fiction. There was eventually a revival and Hangul was adopted as the official alphabet. Today, King Sejong is revered as one of the most beloved rulers and popular folk heroes in Korea's long and varied history.
The museum was full of Hangul instructional texts which heralded a scientific and educational revolution for the common people. Included among them were this pamphlet on martial arts techniques...
...and these instructions for making booze!
I think my visit to the Hangul Museum helped me realize something that I tried really hard to articulate in my Mysteriously Unpublished Rage-draft of Hate. I realized how important it is to invest in people - all people - and make them feel valued. There is so much more I could say about it, but at the core, the benefits of not only letting people know that they matter but actually showing them they do are unfathomably massive. I've always been fortunate and I've always known privilege, but there are so many people out there who have the deck stacked against them to an unbelievable degree and all those in power want to tell them is Work harder! Do more! Be better! And if they can't, they get a kick in the ass. King Sejong showed real leadership because no one made him see things from the perspective of the low, but he did. And he made it better.
