Chuseok

Chuseok. To the best of my knowledge it is a kind of Korean Thanksgiving. I tried to ask my students what Chuseok really was and what they would be doing but I didn’t get too much out of them. I should start wikipedia-ing this stuff. Perhaps this blog could be more than ramblings, violations of student-teacher confidentiality rules, and uninformed (and largely in factual) observations. But, I didn’t.

The Senecal apartment too early in the

morning

The vast majority of my students, when asked what they would be doing answered one of all of the following:

I will play with my cousins.

I will go to the hometown of my father.

I will eat songpyeon (a kind of rice-cake with sweetish fillings; which I incorrectly imagine as a weird jelly munchkin).

My coworkers tell me that it’s a harvest festival that occurs according to the lunar calendar. Surely, it has some decent history of traditions and customs but the important thing is that it is a time for family: both living and dead. Families make the trip home during Chuseok if at no other time if the year. Kids play with cousins they might not see regularly and adults catch up. Gestures are made towards those who have already passed. Tombs are cleaned and honored and food is left in remembrance.

Another Chuseok tradition is that Korea basically shuts down for a couple of days to the dismay of waygooks trying to take advantage of a significant time off from work.

Want to hear about a trip to what might be the most boring place in Korea and a night in what might be the creepiest motel I have ever stayed in? Keep reading.

In my defense, when I started planning a trip to Gyeongju nobody told me just how “quiet” Korea became. Sure, Han might have mentioned that some places might not be open and that travel via road might become tiresome (Seoul, a 2 hour trip in ordinary circumstances, can take somewhere between 15 - 20 hours). So, I assumed that maybe we would not be able to be so picky when it came time for bbq. Fine. It took some work but I booked train tickets from Daejeon to Gyeongju. There were three of us. Two of my best friends from the ‘bury are now teaching in Daejeon which is a short 50 minute bus ride away. Given that they have really just arrived and I never got around to getting them a wedding present and it was recently their first anniversary (god, one year ago I was trying to function at a wedding after working until 2am for the magazine and then being unable to sleep) I would drag them along. We would have a scenic train ride across the peninsula, see the sights, eat some food, watch TV, and have a grand ole time.

I should have just bought them a plate.

Rick and Lauren in front of a fake

burial mound.

We were out in the deserted streets of Daejeon before 7am. The place was a ghost town, and what’s more it was a dreary ghost town given that the weather had turned gray. Ordinarily at that hour there would be at least a few Koreans stumbling home from the bar but presently we had the city to ourselves.

A quick taxi took us to Daejeon Station where I picked up our tickets. The next day we would return via a train to Daegu and another to Daejeon. Poor Rick wasn’t given Friday off. As for myself, I would continue on to Daegu and spend a couple of nights there doing absolutely nothing productive.

The train to Gyeongju was just short of torture. It lasted somewhere close to three hours and while it went through some very beautiful terrain I was dead tired. Still, my inability to sleep in a vehicle and the occasional peel of thunder that comes as a KTX train passes by at 200mph kept my semi-coherent mind outside the window.

Sometimes life will have me believe that I am still at home. After 5 months I am well into the routine of wake up, go to work, go home, sleep, repeat. What was once exotic about Cheongju is not so any longer. The scenery outside of the cities reminds me that I am somewhere else.

Daejeon fell behind us as we traveled south. Cities became suburbs and those gave way to outpost towns. Then there was nothing but the mountains, rivers and rice patties. Grey weather gives way to deeper greens and high contrast. The mountains are always in the distance and about them clung a mist that stayed for the holiday.

If ever there was a time that Korea earned its name of “the land of the morning calm” it was then.

After a long time we were standing in the rain outside of a train station in Gyeongju.

Soon after we were in a cab as he took us to Bomun Lake Resort in search of a motel in the dreary mist. I was beginning to wonder about the damage to my bank account with a word like “resort,” but Korea proved me wrong.

Motel Sinla. The first warning should have been that the “l” and “a” were blacked out on the sign. Motel Sin. If you go to an abandoned Gyeongju on a grey and rainy day do not stay at Motel Sin. Just don’t. 80,000 won later (not a bad price for two rooms) and the manager was walking us through dark and abandoned corridors to show us our rooms.

Later on Rick and I made comparisons between Motel Sin and The Overlook Hotel from The Shining. The corridors were long and dark. The flip of a switch in my room revealed bizarre spill-stains on the walls. My bathroom door was cut a foot above the floor, and the stains found their way to the rug in the corridor. Our rooms were separated by an empty room. I was suddenly regretting my decision to have recently read Hell House.

What did we do in Gyeongju? We did basically the only thing there IS to do in abandoned Gyeongju on Chuseok in the rain. We walked.

Pagoda building at the Expo park.

Bomun Lake (which, as it turns out, is actually man-made) is a central point for many things that might be fun if they weren’t half staffed or outright closed. Around which are remnants of the World Expo, a place called Millennium Park, an amusement park and a couple of food-oriented folk villages.

Millennium Park was a bust. It was open but the cost of 17,000W a person and the piping church music coming from behind the artificially ancient walls was a bit of a turn-off. Their photos would have you believe that they are something of a themed replica kingdom with trick horse-rider-acrobat guys. The rain made us believe that we would be paying 17,000W for closed attractions and canceled performances.

A roll of crappy Kimbap later and we were staring at a pagoda cut into the middle of a tall building inside of the Expo park, unwilling to pay admission to walk around inside. What was open? There were no signs and there were few people. I try not to cheap out when I am traveling but the place seemed dead.

We decided to walk around Bomum Lake. It didn’t seem too far and further down we would pass through the two folk villages. We had nothing to do but kill time.

My dependence on maps has led to trouble before. I have a tattoo on my forearm of a map that led to one of the most ridiculous and surreal experiences of my life. I should learn my lesson at some point. Point is Bomum Lake is not very small. A long stretch of our walk in the increasing rain was on the side of the road with our umbrellas (Rick didn’t have one and he was too far soaked to use ours- gotta be rational about these things) held out so that the giant black and yellow spiders that are everywhere wouldn’t get us.

Arachnaphobia.

So we walked and walked and we went from damp to freezing and soaked feet until we turned a corner and made the unanimous decision to take a cab before we were hit by a car or killed by spiders.

The folk villages were all closed save for a convenience store.

In the end, the only thing we really did on our vacation was eat and watch TV. It might sound lame but we don’t have TV’s. I haven’t had regular access to one in 5 months now so sometimes it is emotionally satisfying to flip for an hour or ten every now and again.

When we finally found a restaurant that was open we had ourselves a Chuseok feast. On the menu: Donkatsu (fried pork cutlet)

Bibimbap (rice, veggies, spicy sauce, fried egg)

A smaller shabu-shabu (beef that cooks in amazing broth)

Rice

Gamja Jeon (a type of Korean potato-pancake)

Daenjang Jigae (a fermented bean soup - amazing)

Kimchi

Spicy bean sprouts

Cucumber Kimchi

A million other things.

Life was good.

------------------------------

Recently (as in the past 2 years) I have been in a horror kick. At one point in time I was a 5 year old girl in the body of a 20 year old guy in that I was incapable of watching anything scarier than Sleep Hollow. Then I took a horror cinema class at Suffolk and I suddenly realized the girl from The Ring wasn’t actually going to kill me dead at night. At 24 Proctor St. all we watched was horror. The last book I finished (oh how I love you, Kindle) was Hell House. It was a really well written book about a severely haunted house and people who are dumb enough to sleep in separate rooms.

For the first time in a while, I was creeped out. Motel Sin is a fine place but given the weather, it being cut off by a ring of trees in the mist, and the crow that I found sitting on the railing of my balcony; I was a little unnerved. It also seemed as though we were the only people in the motel.

Motel Sinla.

I locked the door to the hallway and then closed the door into my room because obviously a serial killer or ghost is incapable of opening two doors. My window was open and I was watching a movie about a tsunami hitting Busan. Korean disaster movies are different in that they are HORRIBLY depressing. Basically, everyone dies in long drawn out scenes of crying and saying goodbye to loved ones.

At some point somebody in the hotel opened a door that let up a draft and a change in pressure.

I heard a click in the door of my room. I was sitting there with a giant beer as another click sounded and the door shot open and banged into the wall.

I wish I could say that I did something proactive as the door bounced back other than swear but I can’t. A few seconds later I mustered the courage to stand up, throw a courtesy punch into the darkness (for good measure) and push the door as hard as I could into the jams so as to avoid soiling the bed in the middle of the night.

That was my Chuseok. I spent 2 nights in Daegu but did nothing but eat fast food and watch TV. I’ll spare you the details except that I watched the following movies:

Sin City (good)

Wanted (OK)

The Bourne Identity (amazing)

The Bourne Supremacy (good)

The Bourne Ultimatum (awesome)

Jurassic Park (obviously awesome)

Busan Gets Tooled by the Ocean (depressing as hell)

Resident Evil 2 (horrible)

And sadly more…



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A New Semester

Well, it seems that the powers that be at my school have settled on having 4 teachers for the foreseeable future and almost certainly until I hit the road.

On paper, having four teachers (Han, Boram, a newer teacher named Hajin, and myself) seems pretty solid. In truth we really only have around 40 to 50 kids. The thing is that being a private academy our classes are based on what kid comes at what time and how many days a week. Most kids come in every day at the same time. Some come in most days and others come in at all different times.

In the past I have had problems with somebody at school dumping a class into my lap with less than a minute before it began and then looking shocked when I appeared to be a little flustered. At times I have to remind my coworkers that I am not a proper teacher and it takes a significant amount of preparation to even function at a marginally competent level in class. In fact, even with preparation there are times when it is embarrassingly obvious that I have lost my train of thought and am writing on the board incessantly just to buy myself time.



Both hands visible.  Working on the most
complicated craft on earth.

There are times when I must confess to being a pretty phenemonenaly bad teacher. Do I feel bad about this? No. This is likely to be the only time in my life I am ever employed as such. I will not be signing on for a second year (which my boss asks me about once a week) and it is nothing I lose sleep to. I do my best and sometimes it works out great. Sometimes not so much.

There are notable editions and missing faces in my school at present. We have a new little boy whom we affectionately call Hands-in-his-pants Boy. There isn’t really much description needed. He is about 6 years old and if his hands aren’t otherwise occupied he usually is using Han’s compact mirror to apply makeup or put his hair in a ponytail. A few kids are gone. One of them being the Angry Girl. I was the last person to have her in class. For a time it was a one on one class but recently a new student was tossed into her class.



How do I describe this kid? He is incredibly skinny with long hair. I would say he was quirky as eccentric implies some significant age but he constantly wears this old-man fly fishing hat so I will go with eccentric. We call him Skinny Boy despite Bat-Shit Crazy Boy being more accurate.

Skinny boy and his class.  He is in the hoodie next to his friend:
The Chair.

He has the attention span of a moth in the void but he is smart enough to keep on everyone’s good side and understands enough English to intentionally make me laugh. In his new class the three of them (Angry Girl had since left) were saying something like “Let’s play computer games.” A second boy would say “OK, after let’s play soccer,” to which Skinny Boy would in theory say “OK. After, let’s play baseball.” Instead he looked at me and stone cold said:

“But I am not OK,” and through a fake temper tantrum.

Another time I was doing “Eanie Meanie Minie Moe.” Thin Boy had run to the back of the class like he does every ten seconds. I pointed to him and he threw up his hands and dropped dead after apparently being shot.

Point is, Angry Girl had one class with him and decided that it was not going to happen. So, she left. No goodbye.

The fact that she has called and texted me every day for the past two days is a little reassuring / completely creepy.

My 2:30 class is with a 9 year old we call the Missing Boy because he went missing for a solid 3 hours after getting on the wrong bus and getting out god knows where. The school was in full blown panic mode at this and his mother called up every 5 minutes to scream us out. When asking if it was our bus driver’s fault Han told me that it was all of our faults as we had given him this ridiculously random schedule (actually he comes in at 2 every day but Friday when he comes in at 1). To this I would like to submit that nobody tells me jack about anything and that therefore eliminates any guilt on my part.

He turned up eventually and his mother kept him enrolled. It is very difficult to keep his attention for more than 2 minutes at a time and he frequently pulls out a bouncy ball or Pokemon comic book in the middle of class. His new class mate is rocking some pretty horrible ADD which I do not have the know how to deal with so that class is almost a complete loss as far as learning anything significant.

Older Girls Conversation.  Sorry Kid.

I have an older boy (no nickname) whose class I have forgotten about 3 of the 4 times I have had it which means that he spent too much time staring at me as I went bombing into the class with my book and no lesson plan.

My new favorite class is my Older Girls Conversation Class which is a girl and boy. In the boy’s defense I wrote the name on the folder before he was enrolled in the school. In my defense he acts like a 87 year old woman 95% of the time so I haven’t yet bothered to rewrite the class name. These two kids are 13ish and advanced enough so that by the time I get to their class (they are my last class on my two worst days) I breathe a sigh of relief at not having to put such a huge effort in making myself understood. It’s tiring sometimes to have to put such a continuous effort into being understood. So by the time I see him complaining that he is cold and putting so much effort into his coughing one might mistake him for a chain-smoking old man, and her looking like she wants to deck him, I know the hard part of my day is over.

There is one class that has caught me completely off guard as far as the capabilities of a bunch of little kids driving me nuts.

Little Kid Conversation. It started off well enough. It even had some of my favorite kids. There was Rock Paper Scissors Boy, this really loud girl (I actually know their names but they’re all Kim’s and their full names would take a page, so I’ll call her Loud Girl), this adorable girl that looks like a rabbit, a new quiet kid, and this kid who has a huge problem with pronunciation (I took years of French and I can appreciate this). All at once everything hit went down the tube.

I was too nice. They, particularly the cute little girl, walked all over me. For a few classes it took a lot of work to keep them in their seats and focused. Then I got mad at the cute girl for NEVER paying attention and trying to read comic books while everyone else repeated my every word (oh the power!). Then the boy with the bad pronunciation started to act up. They would routinely get up and try to play games on the computer so I stopped being nice. I started yelling and giving homework, hoping to put an end to the plague.

Didn’t work. My classes with them descended into anarchy. The boy threw a hissy fit after I gave him a slightly torn photocopy. The cute girl wouldn’t participate as she was mad at me for denying her stickers. The Loud Girl just wouldn’t shut up and what is worse RPS Boy turned on me. He shocked me. I’d always pictured him as an ally as he always seemed to yell at kids to shut up for me.

The current bane of my existance.

Monday was what I hope to be rock bottom. I tried to play a game. Somehow RPS Boy and the cute little girl got into a tug of war over a spay bottle. I reached in to try and muscle it from both of them, they ended up ripping off a bunch of skin from my thumb and I sprayed them both in the face and gave them all homework.

Mature? No. Effective? No. Only one kid did the homework.

My current plan is to blindside them with kindness. Today we studied for 20 minutes and then watched 10 minutes of America’s Funniest Home Videos and then gave them all pennies. They now think I am the greatest again.

And that’s my schedule for the foreseeable future for the new semester. This doesn’t actually mean too much as I am averaging one new class a week and generally don’t know what is going on anyway. Tomorrow is my last day of class before the Chuseok holiday for which I am beyond excited. Hello My Name is Earl!





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Going to the @*$&@(@ng beach

So, I'll count the past few weeks as a hiatus.  I was running late anyway but then a week or so ago my Gramma passed away very unexpectedly.  It was one of those things that makes you realize life at home continues even when you are so far away having this crazy experience.  It's sort of hard to deal with that sort of thing when you can't be there so I dropped off the face of the earth.  Without further ado:



Sometimes travel, like the life it represents, is a complete and spectacular disaster. The trip to Dacheon Beach in on the western shores of peninsula was, and I reiterate, a disaster with a high casualty rate.


It started at 9am on a Saturday, an hour few people ever claim to see in Korea. I met my neighbor Amanda R. outside of our lovely apartment building (my provided fridge ceased to function about a month ago, I have cockroaches, and my toilet is emitting a steady spew of water onto my bathroom floor). A short taxi ride took us to the other side of the river in Cheongju where we met up with Tim and learned that the tiny satellite bus terminal did NOT offer a way to the city of Daejeon.

Daejeon, while not being our final destination, serves as a hub of this general neighborhood. From Daejeon, a bus would take us to Boryeong and another would take us to a splendid hot summer day on a sandy beach. Being that the way to Boryeong from Daejeon was made only hourly and we had already lost some time, we took a cab from the little terminal (I want to say it was called Bukbo, but I have been getting the terminal name confused with a Bill Cosby skit recently so who knows) all the way to the grand monstrosity on the other side of the city.

A half hour or so later we were on a bus heading to Daejeon to meet up with Andrew and Amanda C. We would be getting to Dacheon Beach a little later than we all had hoped with a 2 hour ride from Daejeon to Dacheon but there would still be hours and hours of fun and swimming to look forward to.

Things started going south as the bus pulled off the highway and into the main drag of Daejeon. Amanda, who sat in the seat opposite Tim and I had been minding her own business when the sleeping Korean guy behind her exploded. It sounded at first like somebody springing awake after unexpectedly dosing but was followed then by the unmistakable sound of someone shotgun-barfing into their hand and a sick splattering sort of sound. This was followed by the smell of tomatoes and a look of sheer terror on Amanda’s face and shock on those of everybody else’s.

In hindsight, maybe this would have been the appropriate moment to get off of that bus and straight into another that would take us home, but we went on. It seems that if one believes in omens and such that somebody almost hurling on you pre-10am might be a good indication to get on home.

We met up with the others and were soon on a bus headed to Boryeong with a handful of Brits sitting a few rows behind us. In all likelihood, the only place to which any foreigners on that bus were going to was Dacheon Beach and it is always nice to have reassurance that you are at least on the right damned bus.

We drove on for a long time. It seemed clear already that our chosen route to the Beach probably would be taking a bit more than 2 hours. Still, bus rides are always nice in a foreign country with a unique landscape.

After a handful of stops, some eavesdropping and shared information as to where exactly our stop was we exited the bus in a combined wave of two groups of foreigners.

My mother has always said that Brandon (my adventure friend, with whom I have hitchhiked, climbed and generally wandered for many years) and I should sign up for The Amazing Race. Each time I watched the show with her she would say so at least twice.

If we departed the bus at Boryeong or some other god-forsaken city I do not remember. What I do remember is that we found ourselves walking on a dirt surface amongst the pollution of diesel, a sweltering heat and the chaos of a poorly organized bus stop in some out-post town. We walked, trailing the Brit’s a bit until a Korean lady began yelling and gesturing that we were apparently in the area designated to busses picking up passengers as opposed to the human-only area, full of people trying to get the hell out.

We passed through the divider and were soon bouncing around Koreans under a strong-as-hell early afternoon sun trying at once to get out of the crowd and figure out one: where we were, and two: where we were headed.

Bus stations that go anywhere you actually want to go are generally fairly accessible and well labeled, even if it isn’t in English. This place was not. It was dirty and crawling with locals who had been around long enough to know all they needed to and therefore didn’t care much for the placement of signs to help others.

We stood for a while; our group of Americans here and the Brits off about 20 feet. There was some talk between the two of us as they too seemed to be a little dumbfounded. Passively, they followed us for a little and we them but ultimately it was decided that this place probably wasn’t going to be getting us anywhere we wanted to go.

We wished eachother luck as they hopped in a cab.

We saw them again, 20 minutes later as we waited in another bus station down the way and past a fortress wall perched atop a green hill. This station, thankfully, was labeled enough so that we were soon on a third bus, headed finally to the beach.

On the face of our plans, we anticipated a 2 hour ride from Daejeon that would give us time to relax and then a day at the beach before we made the return journey. Somewhere along hour 4 of our trip to Daecheon Beach, between Tim rocking a hard Texan accent talking about deep-fried butter with Amanda, and a couple of kids who had developed a 2 hour long obsession with Andrew and Amanda C; Amanda C had either the good humor or pleasant sense of sarcasm to say that “hey, at least we’re all together!”

That final bus dragged on forever. We whipped around on the sides of small mountains, on the edges of a lake and through village after village. We passed through town side streets and over highways that divided only one rice-patty from another. We passed even the point at which it was utter denial to think we were going to be spending the same amount of time as we had spent traveling to the beach actually AT the beach.

At some point the bus pulled into a sandy parking lot that housed couple of trailers that served as bathrooms, a convenience store that didn’t sell water, and a ticket counter.

Anyone looking to read about fun at Dacheon Beach will be disappointed to find out that here the bulk of the story ends. All told, we spent around 5 hours trying to get to the place and had now only a few hours to spend beachside before we had to pack on another bus that would take us direct to Daejeon and then home to Cheongju.

The first thing we did was buy beer, water, and snacks. We then proved to be a beach vendor’s good fortune by immediately renting a platform and an umbrella to enjoy what time we had there. We drank our beers and talked and I wandered back and forth looking for some place to change into my bathing suit.

I walked for what seemed like a long time in bare feet towards various buildings I hoped to be a bathroom but had no luck until Andrew and Tim came running up with my heinous flip flops and I found a bathroom in which to change.

Tim and Andrew came back some 45 minutes later (probably a good third of out time at the beach) with a full pizza box and a bottle of Coke (or Pepsi). I have gone on at length here, there, and elsewhere as to the properties of Korean pizza. Never is there real cheese, often there are odd and funky toppings, and always there is corn. This pizza, though, was something special. It proved at once to be one of the brighter points of my day and also the bane of my existence.

It was a cheese pizza. It was topped with sauce and a dump-truck load of cheese. Real cheese. At the time, the amount of cheese on this thing seemed absurd. You could feel its give and snap as you tore off a bite. If I were at home, the thing would probably be lackluster at best; but I was not. As it was, that pizza was the best pizza I have yet to have in Korea.

The water was freakishly warm, something that was quickly blamed on our proximity to China. We were bathing in the luke warm Yellow Sea and I will maintain that it is better to believe that one is swimming in toxic pollution than urine.

Two things happened on the way home. Tim’s wallet never got out of a taxi cab in Daejeon and by the time he noticed (about half a second after he closed the door) the guy was gone. I think things turned out ok, but I don’t imagine it is a good feeling to lose that amount of important objects (money, bank card, Alien Registration Card) all at one go.

The other thing that happened is I all but confirmed my inkling that I might be the slightest bit lactose intolerant by spending an hour trying with all of my might not to crap my pants. The cheese, glorious as it was, turned into napalm somewhere inside of me. I will spare the details but suffice it to say that the pain was excruciating, the sweats were cold, the tremors fierce and at one point my mind had accepted that there was a pretty good chance that I was going to have a worse story to tell than the tomato-barfer.

Beach photo courtesy of Amanda.

What did I eat today? A peanut-butter sandwich and kimchi-fried rice.

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